Of ICE Queens and Handmaidens

Are progressive women really just protesting because they're horny?

Handmaid’s Tale cosplayers at an anti-ICE protest

Is it really true that progressive women are protesting ICE patrols because they secretly want to bang them? Amid escalating rhetoric and violence around ICE immigration patrols, this X post has precipitated the week’s most provocative memes:

The most common response, albeit usually more crudely expressed, was to the effect that the subtext of of this was wayyy horny. The internet promptly got to work, re-imagining the anti-ICE protests as romantic genre fiction. This one, based on a widely-shared video of a woman in Minneapolis obstructing border control officers, is fairly typical:

So are all these women really only obstructing ICE enforcement because they aren’t getting any? Do they, as they say in Britain, just need “a f—- and a hot cup of tea”? This insinuation long precedes Trump’s deportation programme. Previously, its chief vector was the predilection of progressive protesters of a certain demographic and class (ok, bourgeois white women) for attending protests in costumes based on the Handmaid’s Tale TV series. These costumes have also appeared at ICE protests, as attested by the header image. (I couldn’t find the original image credit, sorry.) There are plenty more such images at the Facebook group Handmaids of MN.

Meme-world has long since concluded that this tendency, as well as the TV show on which it is based, is powered not by ideology but by these women’s unacknowledged psychosexual cravings:

But is it true? Several things can be the case at once. The first is that, let’s be honest: in an even slightly less febrile context than Trump’s mass deportations, the AI-generated “Detained by Desire” book design is totally the kind of storyline you might expect to find on the “Erotic Fiction” shelf in a bookshop. The Substack fiction-writer Bones says she’s actually going to write it (working title: “Hot as ICE”). And this is only plausible because, however outrageously the proposition violates political correctness, horny is not a drive that pays much attention to political correctness.

In other words: I think there is something to it. But I also think the protesters really believe in their cause. That there’s no reason protest should not be powered by moral conviction, and also - for some at least - erotically tinged. And this is important, because the whole “Detained by Desire” meme tends to be deployed to suggest that because this erotic energy is present at the edge of some such encounters, we can safely discount any political principles expressed by the women involved.

Whether or not you agree with the women protesting ICE, I don’t think this follows. On the contrary: the internet wags gleefully posting romantic-fiction memes as though this rebuts progressive women’s political worldview have wholly misunderstood the nature of the challenge. And this tells us at least as much about them, as it does about Minnesota ladies in Handmaid outfits.