Call me jaded, but I thought Bryon Noem's comically large breasts were kind of underwhelming. When photos of the embattled former Secretary of State Kristi Noem’s husband leaked in March, the 56-year-old father of three could be seen in a skintight flesh-colored shirt stuffed with a pair of latex balloons each as big as his head. Security analysts warned that his spending $25,000 on online “bimbofication” fetish models left his high-ranking family vulnerable to extortion while the internet laughed. And sure, the cockeyed nipples were funny—hilarious, even. It's just that, after getting a glimpse of the modern man's psyche over several years a sex worker, I was too haunted by the familiarity of that buxom insurance executive’s joyless expression to take much pleasure in his public humiliation.

When a well-meaning misadventure in 2022 left my life in shambles, a friend suggested I try the phone sex operator platform NiteFlirt. I was already neck-deep in the sex work industry and desperate to climb out of debt from the safety of my bedroom, so I made three lines: an inexpensive chat line, a comparatively expensive role-playing line, and a line for flirty online chess games. This last one was my friend's suggestion; special interests sometimes made for lucrative niches (no one ever called).

As a Flirt (the site's term of art for operators), I had three notable assets: a velvet voice I knew how to weaponize, decades of stroking men's egos as a personal and professional survival skill, and a genuine fascination with people's inner lives. I also played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 in high-school, so I had experience collaborating on other people's fantasies.

Calls were fun so long as we didn't linger in the disconcerting moments. I drew hard lines around things like race- and age-play, initially a struggle to enforce. The seasoned Seekers (what NiteFlirt calls its callers) routinely test new Flirts to see what they can get away with. I preferred the dime-store psychoanalysis of hour-long chat line conversations; regardless, the calls all ended the same way.

Several months in, I created a line for a different special interest: "Talk Politics With The Anarchist Bimbo." Unlike sexy chess, the market for this niche found me immediately.

What Australian Neo-Nazis Really Want

The first call to my "Debate Me, bro" line was a trial by fire. Michael was a white Australian Millennial, worked a white-collar office job, and was a white nationalist. We spoke for two hours at $1.99 per minute (of which I would receive 63 percent). Our conversation was—until the last 20 minutes—exclusively a discussion of personal politics.

Michael the Neo-Nazi was deeply concerned about miscegenation, believing the "white race" was undergoing a deliberate ethnic cleansing à la the Great Replacement. He cited dubious meme-statistics bemoaning falling birth rates in Australia, the United States, and Europe. Though my class-first politics allowed for fleeting moments of common ground like "our generation can't afford to start a family," we never agreed on a cause. Where I blamed rent-seeking capitalist greed, he blamed some all-encompassing Jewish Conspiracy and the inclusion of women and minorities in the workforce. He resented our access to the middle class email jobs he wanted reserved for white male heads of household.

We spoke at length about working women; he felt I had done the right thing by leaving my software engineering career behind in 2021 (so did I, again for different reasons). He believed women went to college and worked for the express purpose of meeting a husband, that office romance was the only justification for keeping us around.

To be fair to Michael (I shouldn't be), back when I briefly studied journalism at a Catholic women's college, my classmates occasionally reheated jokes about getting your MRS degree from a guy at the nearby engineering school. This was in 2006.

Illustration by Chelsea Saunders

 

Like SS Chief Heinrich Himmler before him, this modern Nazi thought women were only ever hired for their looks. Himmler wanted to bar us from state service entirely—"that no one can claim that their selection is based upon ability"—arguing that pretty, incompetent women would always be chosen over ugly, efficient hags, and would take all the investment in their training with them when they married and quit.

Also like Himmler, Michael needed to believe women were shallow and incapable in order to safeguard a fragile masculinity composed of brittle stereotypes. Every historical flavor of fascism has depended on the cult of masculinity to maintain order in the face of changing gender norms, and ours is no exception.

In his 1985 book Nationalism and Sexuality, George L. Mosse examines the centrality of middle-class respectability to nationalist projects of yore. Both Italy's fascists and Germany's National Socialists believed the moral regeneration of their nations depended upon the enforcement of a rigid manly ideal; separating men from women as well as from any groups placed outside the confines of society. Hitler's classical heroes were "tall and lithe" (his favorite phrase to describe the model German) with a clean-cut look reflecting strength, self-control, and sexual restraint. As Mosse explains, "Quiet greatness determined the appearance of the ideal Aryan (in contrast to the nervous Jew or exhausted homosexual)."

In addition to being a regular pervert, Michael was a grade A debate pervert. He delighted in espousing his vile beliefs and in being chastised for them. As our conversation wound down, he lamented his inability to find a marriageable woman to "give him what he needs." While it took some detective work to uncover, his desire was so commonplace I could have guessed it well before I made him spit it out (pun intended).

Seekers often hang up when you ask what they want. As a Flirt armed only with knowledge of niches you've advertised on the line they've called, you must tease out this information or cold-read like a phone psychic. Bad reads beget bad vibes, and incorrect guesses send callers shuffling off to some other listing to experience the mystical unveiling they're paying for.

Michael felt he needed a politically progressive woman like me to dominate him, since most conservative women were conditioned to subservience by the same forces of respectability he depended upon for self-esteem. This admission sparked a new debate which he was less interested in—he was basically ready to finish—but that I refused to concede without having my say. Expecting women to genuflect everywhere except the bedroom is the work of weak men who wish to have their cake and eat it too (again, pun intended).

What this Nazi wanted more than anything was a woman who would defer to him in everything… while also being willing to make him ejaculate into his hand and eat it. Cum eating instructions (or CEI) were just the tip of the homoerotic iceberg for Michael. They were also one of the easiest taboos to orchestrate from afar.

Later I created a CEI line with a "Load Leaderboard" and a rate of $5.99 per minute. This became my most popular service; as you might expect, the calls were brief.

Moments before climax, with the shame-veil at its thinnest, Michael admitted his ultimate fantasy was a cuckolding scenario involving his imaginary wife and another man's sloppy seconds. In this, at least, he was ideologically consistent—unlike many white men with similar tastes, it was essential to Michael that his wife's lover be of Aryan descent.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

The most important lesson I learned as a Flirt was to take notes after each call. Repeat Seekers experience the magic of being memorable months later with just a sentence or two, like "filthy John wants to lick things" or "Chris loves crop tops and belly chains, make him talk about Helen." Once I began taking political calls, the notes read more like resumes:

"Alan, divorced conservative former navy man who can talk about the Federalist papers, ask him about [San Francisco] in the 60s next time."

"Dan, retired at the Pentagon, MMA, trains under chess master, constitutional law PHD?"

Retirees like Alan and Dan talked to me for an hour or two at a time, our conversations vacillating between tense ideological skirmish and steamy confessional. It felt a bit like arguing with my dad—minus the sex stuff, that is.

Very few callers were under 40. Many had been using this service since the mid-aughts, when late night commercials for 1-800-747-GIRL were peppered between ad spots for free art tests and the Bowflex home gym. It's true that younger generations have less money for luxuries like NiteFlirt, but I suspect their absence also stems from a generation-wide discomfort with phone calls. Millennial and Gen Z clients seemed to favor the budget-friendly asynchronicity of voice notes and text chat.

While submissive conservatives were overrepresented on NiteFlirt, I found plenty of progressive men who also enjoyed being told what to do. The tone of these encounters differed wildly. For right-wing men, subtly soliciting permission to do "gay stuff" was a running theme; leftists often spoke openly about real-world experiments in gender expression, and held a more fluid view of sexuality. Many of these same leftists sought degradation—to be a worm beneath the heel of a woman willing to destroy them physically, emotionally, and financially. One client called these figures the Toxic Goddesses, a niche I couldn't cater to. I might have seen greater success had one of my special interests been erotically humiliating men by confirming their worst fears about themselves.

Famed 20th-century physician and sexologist Iwan Bloch preached that modernity encouraged both homosexuality and masturbation (long considered the gateway to moral decline). George L. Mosse writes, "Bloch, who approved of masturbation if practiced in moderation, nevertheless saw it as a potential danger to society. The masturbator, he tells us, becomes lonely and shy and loses the natural enthusiasm of youth; his nervousness is apt to damage his heart." Breaking with the broader Nazi Party on prostitution, Heinrich Himmler suggested visiting a sex worker could save these wastrels from the scourge of homosexuality.

Reminiscent of today's hustle culture, some nationalist attacks on masturbation relied not on concerns for health or spiritual degeneration, but on industrious pragmatism. It served no purpose, they said, with Mosse writing that one French physician "argued wasting one's sperm through masturbation was like throwing money out the window." If this weren't a serious essay about sex and ideology, here I'd include a Venn diagram meme with overlapping circles of hustle culture, the NoFap community, amphetamine abuse, and homoerotic looksmaxxing; Nazism lives at its center.

Anecdotally, young progressive men seem more likely to identify as gooners, an internet subculture centered around transcendental masturbation and losing oneself in a deluge of short-form pornography. They are just as eager as their elders for permission to betray the masculine values society had foisted upon them—albeit in more intoxicating ways. Some begged me to huff poppers (amyl nitrite) until they were drooling too much to even pretend-work from home, while others took back-to-back bong hits and ended up comfortably couch-locked, a prisoner to their porn library. Like their forebears, the gooners' focus is also on surrendering control such that they feel forced to do what they want to do anyway; it's just that what today's young progressives want to do is a lot closer to nothing at all.

Man Suit Off, Pussy Hat On

In a recent interview on YouTube's Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, webcam model Lydia Love talked about what it was like to bimbo-ify Bryon Noem. When the Daily Mail exposé was published, Love immediately recognized Noem as the man she had dubbed her Big Titty Client. "I had never seen tits that big on a man before," she said. "It was burned into my brain."

Whenever Noem paid $25 per minute for one-on-one webcam exchanges, Love would offer to take his mind off his daily stressors. "He wanted to show off for me," she said. "He wanted to wear his little leggings and, like, turn around. He liked being told to put the leggings on."

Love is careful to distinguish between clients experimenting with a cross-dressing kink and trans people. "I have had clients be like, 'Oh, I actually explored this and I realized that I'm trans.' And I'm like, 'Cool, good. You do your thing. Good for you.' But it's not always like that."

I confess, I rarely enjoyed catering to feminization fantasies from users with names like "MakeMeGrowGiantBreasts" and "sissybilly4." Having a number of trans intimates, family and friends, I struggle to view these clients in a vacuum while the United States government works tirelessly to push trans people out of the public sphere. Being playful with one's sexual expression is great therapy; I don't want to diminish that. It was just hard not to feel sad for many of the fantasists, and grating to engage with all these pornographic caricatures depicting femininity as inherently degrading.

Here in the 21st century, we have inherited a 19th and 20th century bourgeois respectability that believes sexual differentiation must be maintained for culture to thrive. Women are less stigmatized for exhibiting the "manly" traits of strength and dominance than men are for embracing softness. The cult of masculinity is flattered when women see its example as seductive and appalled when anyone shirks it. The cult is prepared to punish any outsiders, however, and this boundary is constantly shifting.

Lydia Love put it diplomatically. "I feel like men have a lot of pressure to be like, 'This is what a man is.' Maybe sometimes the most freeing thing to be as a man is not one."

On NiteFlirt, some clients preferred to pay $0.99 per message to chat over text. Soon after I launched the politics line, one chatter caught my eye. "I'm Joe, 48, and in Texas," he wrote. "I'm a mostly conservative attorney. I was raised Jewish, but not practicing. I'd love to be turned into a left-wing Pagan woman."

I told Joe that as an anarchist, I'd turn him so left-wing his pretty head would spin. He wanted to look femme, be called Sarah, and use she/her pronouns. "[Sarah] was the first Jewish woman named in the Bible and I think it would be symbolic for me to return to the Goddess with that name," he said. Trawling Google Image Search, I sent him photos of dark-haired models wearing flowing dresses in forests and fields.

Joe asked how I would turn him leftist. Too sincerely, I said I'd tell him about working with unhoused people, and about care-centered community organizing—hastily adding that if Sarah was a lesbian, I'd use my womanly wiles, too. "I'd have you eating out of the palm of my hand and doing some of the most meaningful work of your career."

"I know exactly how you could honeypot me," Joe said, steering the conversation back to his core interests. "[By] having all of the clothes and accessories to turn Joe into Sarah laid out waiting for me, maybe even doxxing me by live-streaming my makeover." Unusual as the political elements were, the rest of this fantasy was familiar.

Exposure is a common theme, the fantasist dreaming of being outed in a way that irrevocably changes their life and forces their hand. I teased that I'd have a journalist friend write a hit-piece and bring a photographer to document it. Lydia Love wondered if Bryon Noem was gooning to his humiliation in the press, and I wonder what Joe would think if he recognized himself here in Current Affairs.

My role in Joe's fantasy, as with most callers, was to facilitate the outcome he'd dreamed of, forcing him to do what he wanted. I was there to say without saying, "I know you worry what this says about your masculinity; it's okay, we're playing a game that I find just as exciting as you do, and you're really just doing it for me, anyway."

Joe asked what brand of leftist I imagined Sarah as and, forgetting myself, I said the transition from libertarian-leaning conservative to liberty-loving anarchist would be easy.

"Can I say the one liberal look I really get turned on by?" Joe asked, course-correcting. "The type who'd be in a blue evening gown for a Democratic fundraiser gala… there's just something really erotic about the idea of me as a cosmopolitan urban liberal woman."

I thought I'd die of secondhand embarrassment, but Joe was just getting started. He quaked at the thought of a fancy COVID mask matching Sarah's gown, of wearing feminist jewelry. "I love the Democratic fascination with clothing as a form of expression and devotion to the cause," he said.

One could argue Republicans are as prone to signaling allegiances through clothing, citing red MAGA hats and t-shirts reading "My pronouns are kiss/my/ass"—but this was Joe's fantasy, so I sent him pictures of models in sparkly blue dresses instead.

When I threatened to drag him to the Women's March, Joe asked if he would get to wear a pussy hat; I said he'd have to knit one himself, as I had, and this made him tremble. Asked about Sarah's values, he shared a picture of the "In This House We Believe" yard sign (you know the one, they were everywhere in 2017). Mine was stolen weeks after I put it out. For a tattoo, Joe suggested "Feminist as Fuck" across his lower back. I cackled. Among my abandoned sewing projects is an embroidered handkerchief from a decade ago, "Feminist as FU-" wreathed in flowers.

"I want to be considered a Nasty Woman," he said, evoking a sweatshirt I admittedly still wear sometimes. Somehow, his aesthetic turn-ons included every artifact of adorably cringe liberal feminism I had embraced and abandoned during my own political awakening.

Joe loved that his transformation simultaneously involved gender and politics, allowing him to shunt aside the cultural chains that had bound him all his life and defect from the conservative establishment in addition to masculinity. "I get to be another pretty drone for the neoliberal establishment," he said. "The total Yasss Kween vibe for me."

"I could see you adding a blue streak to my hair to show my new party allegiance," he said. I called this idea very Kyrsten Sinema and he admitted to having a total girl crush on her.

I asked what corporate interests he would sell his soul for. "Big tech. I'd love being a shill and apologist for TikTok… the gig economy too, claiming it gives options and flexibility."

"And wounding labor in the process, very sneaky."

"The perfect neoliberal position," he concluded.

It was the first time we were on the same page about the soullessness of establishment Democrats. For him, this was the appeal. He could slip the ideology on like a glittery blue gown and matching mask, believing in nothing as Sarah just as he believed in nothing as Joe.

Joe tried out a new idea. "Could Sarah be taken someplace private to service prominent Democratic woman? To become a stylish sex offering for the Democrat elite?" Soon, we were planning an orgiastic initiation ceremony inspired by “Eyes Wide Shut,” with Sarah obediently counter-honeypotting Krysten Sinema back into the Democratic fold.

Make America Gag Again

It's been approximately one year since I last took calls on NiteFlirt, having quiet-quit sex work in mid-2025. To make ends (nearly) meet, I'm writing essays for the first time since the Obama administration and live-streaming chess on Twitch. I can't quite delete my Flirt account, however; it's comforting to know the website and the clientele will probably always be there if vanilla work fails to pay the bills.

In A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships, computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam use anonymous search histories to study human sexuality. Published in 2012, their findings feel slightly dated in 2026, but consider this observation: "One of the more noticeable differences between male-targeted and female-targeted porn on the Web is the presence of political messages. On men's porn sites—including gay porn sites—there is a complete absence of any kind of explicit politics. The only exception is the rare importation to support free speech." Though there are far fewer female-targeted sites, the authors say the ones that exist contain an abundance of messaging around issues like inclusivity and feminism.

Setting aside the authors' narrow definition of explicit politics (e.g. by their own account, "cuckold porn is the second most popular heterosexual interest on English-language search engines [after youth]," and is a category famously dominated by white men watching their white wives have sex with black men), political messaging in women's pornography of that era makes sense, a signal that the video was ethical and wouldn’t jump scare you with anything untoward. The absence of explicit political messaging in men’s pornography of that era also makes sense, but that was 2012. Since then, nationalism has coiled its choking vines around everything that men hold dear, same as it ever was.

I logged into NiteFlirt in April to survey the landscape. The very first listing was for a 29-year-old Muslim housewife called “Mrs. Muhammed,” who had bid an exorbitant $8.57 per qualified click to secure this premium real estate. The woman in the grainy profile photo wore a niqab, leaving only her eyes visible to smoulder over her shoulder. Under religious play, her listing offered services with names like devout Islamic dominance, hijab worship, and cultural contrast. The race play section highlighted her desire to amass a "harem" of submissive white boys.

Searching for "MAGA" returned mostly innocuous listings, though two ads on page two caught my eye: Trump Girl's "MAGA BRAT MAKES YOU PUMP FOR MAGA" (in the feminization category at $1.14 per click), and Tori for Trump's "YOU OWN THIS MAGA PUSSY." Both featured fit blondes in lingerie and Trump merchandise and used the phrase "libtard snowflake" at least once. As I kept scrolling, Flirt after Flirt with names like Authoritarian Claudia and Right Wing Barbie packaged the aesthetic of Donald Trump's nationalism for erotic consumption.

Until recently, while driving through deep red regions like rural Ohio, you'd expect to encounter at least one modest ranch home emblazoned with psychosexual depictions of a buff Donald Trump. His yard signs once lurked around every corner. These Trump-as-Rambo shrines are harder to find in 2026, but don't let their absence fool you—I think they evolved into a much more private sort of tribute.

For decades Democrats and Republicans have offered voters nothing, just vibes to jack off to (intellectually or otherwise). Attorney Joe's fetish for liberal self-righteousness imagines Sarah sacrificing their Texas handgun license on the cleansing pyre. Neo-Nazi Michael's fetish for conservative cruelty pumps out an endless stream of tradwife Wojack memes. The death throes of the Republic are as grotesque as any J. G. Ballard satire.

"The role nationalism and respectability played in the rise of fascism has often been forgotten," writes George L. Mosse. "It is not easy to confront when such factors have determined so much of our own behavior."

When men tell me their secrets, I listen. What I’ve learned is that we could improve society—and take the wind out of fascism's sails—by broadening the scope of what it is socially acceptable for a man to be. As the late David Graeber said, "the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." As we remake the world into one warmed by collectivism, it should be one where a man knows he's no less a man for struggling financially, wanting to be held, losing his hair, loving his friends, or playing dress-up. In that world, a man will only ever be less a man if he wants to be.