Hour 3 - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Stops By

Clay Travis (0:00)

Welcome back in final hour of the program. 14 hours up, we are rolling in to the 15th hour now, and as we often do, given that it's Friday, and I know we have Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent scheduled, so that will be a serious topic. Buck, as I do, so you do not have to do it, and by you, I mean everyone out there across America, I read the New York Times every day.

And on Thursday, in the print edition of the New York Times, they decided they were going to write about the fact that the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show had aired and reflect what that actually meant and what it stood for in society. And Buck, they said, I'm just going to read a couple of quotes to you. The headline is The Return of the Fantasy Bra and a Stereotype of Sexy. Now, before I read a couple of these quotes, Buck, is sexy a stereotype or do you think most humans could, in fact, define what they find sexy, both men and women, and it would be remarkably consistent in general? Like even the premise here that sexy is a stereotype is, to me, very funny and you're going to hear these quotes and you're going to roll your eyes as I do.

Buck Sexton (1:27)

Well, I would just point out that if you were to look at paintings of what were supposed to be or considered beautiful women during the Renaissance in Europe, so 500 years ago, or if you were to even go further back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece, and you look at statues and what was elevated in the Western tradition as ideal male and ideal female beauty, Clay, very little has changed. It's almost like some of this stuff is biologically ingrained in us, even at a very deep subconscious level, and is rooted, in fact, in biology and procreation and not the patriarchy.

Clay Travis (2:13)

Yeah, this is something that I... There's a great book called...

Well, I can't... It's an evolutionary biology book that I would encourage everybody to read. And basically, it asks all of these questions about why are... Why do we find what we find to be attractive? The ideal hourglass shape for women, for instance, Buck, is directly related to women with hourglass figures are more likely to survive childbirth, which was the most dangerous thing that women ever engaged in for most of human history.

Buck Sexton (2:47)

And this also ties directly into things that are like the curvature of a woman's hips and an ample bosom and these things all go to fertility and the proper hormone levels to sustain... By the way, on the male side of things, why is it that muscles and generally relatively low body fat is...

Clay Travis (3:08)

Why do women prefer tall men because you're more likely to survive in a very dangerous environment with stronger, bigger, tougher men? I mean, this is the reality.

Buck Sexton (3:20)

This is in fact rooted in very baseline biology. I mean, at some level, it's like The New York Times is shocked, wow, when people are tired, it feels good when they sleep or when people are hungry, they enjoy eating. How do we change that?

Scott Bessent (3:34)

It's like, who are you not going to?

Clay Travis (3:36)

Here's some quotes from The New York Times upset that the return of the Victoria's Secret fashion show has been an embrace of traditional notions of what is sexy. Listen to this. By reverting to these old gender stereotypes, Victoria's Secret is reverting to a time when sexy was defined by the male gaze and catering to it. The company may have changed its stock market ticker listing to very sexy in June to reflect its new mission, but there's nothing particularly new about this idea.

Maybe what this is about is nostalgia. For a time when we could pretend this way of presenting women was just light hearted fun and didn't contribute directly to a culture that enabled their objectification and depersonalization, even though we know such a time is as much a fantasy as the fantasy bra.

Listen to this sentence, Buck. Watching the Victoria's Secret fashion show after the national conversation prompted by the crisis at Cornell is a bit like entering the Twilight Zone, though it does go with another national conversation, one in which men are men and women are women, and you can tell by the way that they dress. Tying women looking good in lingerie into Cornell, and saying that it was deeply troubling and problematic, as she is saying here, to have this fashion show come in the wake of a woman, who by the way, actually supports women's empowerment, I would guarantee you more by far than the average woman does, and actually said in her text messages, my body, my choice, which is the language of the left in America, until people judged her for what happened, and then she decided, oh, wait a minute, I just got raped. This is ludicrous, even by New York Times standards.