Victoria’s Secret isn’t in the business of beauty qua beauty. Consider instead that Victoria’s Secret has played a world-historical role in delivering the philosophy of the sexual revolution to the girl next door. Hot girls were just a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The inferences the audience is meant to draw from these images aren’t godly, to put it lightly.

Owens, an extremely effective spokesperson for modern conservative thought, missed the forest for the trees. How could a conservative movement, if we are to believe that word has any meaning, defend a raunchy brand that publicly displays women in the near-nude? One that injected pornographic motifs into the public consciousness through unscrupulously manipulative marketing? Any moral good that the elevation of beauty presents is undone by lasciviousness.

Sure, sex sells. And so sex has been completely commodified, the human body twisted and abused in service of psychological manipulation, glittering images of moral depravity projected into the public square, fully visible to children.

[To be fair, I think Owens was considering the failure of VS’s campaign to impose a woke agenda on attraction as an improvement. She’s right in that respect, and Roy is right in her argument as well. — Ed]