The Psychoanalytic of Bimbo Bryon Noem and His Wife's Performative Cruelty
So Bryon Noem—erstwhile husband of Kristi Noem, the woman who spent years banning transgender athletes, signing religious-exemption bills to let businesses refuse service to gay people, and generally performing the hardest of hard lines on gender and sexuality—has apparently been spending his evenings stuffing balloons under a flesh-colored suit, sending selfies to women in the "bimbofication" scene, and wiring them $25,000 via Cash App. His reported line to one model: "You turn me into a girl. Should I put on leggings?"
You could file this under "irony" and move on. But then we'd be leaving the most interesting part on the table. And yes, the most interesting part is the theoretical/philosophical part, not the salacious gossipy part. This isn't TMZ, this is the Hipcrime Vocab, and we stan psychoanalysis and continental philosophy here.
Because this isn't an anomaly. The list of right-wing culture warriors whose private lives turned out to be elaborate inversions of their public ones has grown long enough to constitute a genre: Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Josh Duggar, the parade of family-values congressmen caught in airport bathrooms and massage parlors. What psychoanalysis can tell us (id est, what Freud intuited and Lacan formalized) is that the repression and the kink aren't contradictory. I would call it two sides of the same coin, but that cliché is pretty trite. Let's schizoanalyze it up and call them opposite flows in the same structure.
Reaction Formation and the Return
Freud's concept of reaction formation is the blunt instrument we can employ. The psyche defends against an unacceptable desire not merely by suppressing it but by building, over it, a monument to its opposite. The more elaborate the monument, the more energetically one campaigns against the thing, the more you can infer about the pressure underneath. This is why, as a pure empirical matter, you should always pay attention when a politician seems really, really worked up about something. The intensity is a tell. Those who genuinely have no interest in a thing may show disregard; those for whom something holds a libidinal fascination will always imbue it with strong emotion, and hate is the close cousin of love and desire.
But the Freudian account stays at the level of individual psychology: repression, defense, symptom. Lacan gets at something structural.
The Split Subject and Jouissance
In Lacanian terms, the subject is always already split (written as $) divided between the face it presents in the Symbolic order (the network of law, language, social role) and its relation to jouissance, the real enjoyment that exceeds and undermines social identity. The Symbolic order is the domain of the Father's law, the chain of prohibition and demand that constitutes social existence. And what the Father's law prohibits, fundamentally, is that enjoyment, the satisfaction that would dissolve the subject into the Real.
The right-wing authoritarian is precisely the subject who has made an extraordinarily heavy investment in the paternal function. Kristi Noem's brand—boots, guns, hardness, the Sioux Falls version of sovereign power—is the Symbolic order at near-maximum cathexis. Masculine authority performed until it becomes a kind of aesthetic. The law, and nothing but the law. In this way, we often see the right fetishize and extoll the virtue of its concept of masculinity: hard, domineering, prone to the exercise of violence both as desire and means.
Which is exactly why the bimbofication fantasy is the appropriate secret for this psychic configuration. "Bimbofication" (for those blessedly unaware) is a kink organized around the fantasy of becoming the hypersexualized feminine object: enormous synthetic breasts, submission, the abandonment of interiority. It is, to use the technical term, a fantasy of ego dissolution. The subject who has spent all day being the Law gets to, in the off hours, imagine becoming the object that law exists to regulate. The "bimbo" is the thing the paternal function is for—excessive, obscene, disruptive of decorum—and the fantasy is of "collapsing" into it. In less-pathological settings, you see this in the high-powered businessman who goes to a dominatrix in his off-time. He has achieved the typical fantasy of power; for him, the sublimated desire and its resolution is found in the opposite, in the renunciation of power (if temporarily and with his consent) to another to allow him to experience what he does not have. I don't personally get it, but hey, I don't like to yuck people's yum unless they're married to horrific monsters destroying civil liberties and trying to turn the United States into a fascist state where they head up the secret police. In that case, fuck them and everything they stand for.
Lacan would note that jouissance always works like this: it is the enjoyment on the other side of the prohibition, the pleasure inseparable from the transgression. The kink is not incidental to Bryon Noem's world but is, in a precise sense, produced by it. The harder the law, the sweeter the transgression. Remove the prohibition and the enjoyment collapses.
The Bimbo as l'Objet Petit a
There is also something to be said about the specific object here. Lacan's l'objet petit a is the impossible, phantasmatic object that desire circles without ever reaching, not a real thing but the cause of desire, the lure that keeps the subject moving. The "bimbo" in bimbofication is not any actual woman. It is a construction (balloons, leggings, caricature) a confection assembled from pure signifiers of excess femininity as conceived by someone with a particularly hard-gendered view of the feminine. It is, in other words, a fantasy object in the most precise sense, something that does not exist except as a site for projected desire.
The fact that it's assembled from fake prosthetics is not incidental but essential. Even given the cosplay element of it, merely dressing en femme would not be sufficient; real women, as pointed out earlier, have way too much agency, even within the context of a submissive kink, even within the context of a highly degrading submissive kink (which, incidentally, is not something about which anyone should be ashamed and is natural and way more common than you'd think).
But you cannot mistake the imago of the bimbo kink for reality. That is the point. The objet petit a only functions at a distance from the real, which is why it can only be glimpsed in these theatrical, staged, inherently artificial arrangements. Real women (wives, daughters, constituents) are by definition outside this structure. They are people, which means they cannot serve as pure objects of phantasmatic enjoyment, even if they were to consent to submission as it is understood by kinksters.
A Note on Topology
None of this is an argument that Bryon Noem is a bad person for having unusual private kinks, or that crossdressing is anything other than a minority sexual interest that harms nobody. The model who eventually googled "Noem Insurance" got it right on the relevant point: his wife could lose everything for which she had worked. The problem, therefore is not the kink; it's the hypocrisy it represnts, specifically the hypocrisy involved in building an entire political career on enforcing sexual and gender normativity while secretly paying women to watch you put on fake boobs and a wig and act like Malibu Stacey.
The structure is the scandal, not the content. You cannot spend decades passing laws that harm queer folk on the grounds that their identities are transgressive, deviant, and a threat to the social fabric and then have your private life consist of elaborate theatrical transgression. The law you enforced was not a law you believed in. You stalled at a stage of psychosexual development, condemning yourself to eternal juvenalia and not letting yourself mature. Your supposed obedience to the Law (in the psychoanalytic sense) was a stage prop in a performance of respectability that your own libidinal life was organized to undermine.
Lacan has a phrase for this: the subject supposes to know. The Symbolic order functions because everyone acts as if the law were believed in, the father authoritative, the prohibition real. What Bryon Noem's Cash App receipts reveal is not that one man had a secret (everyone has secrets) but that the performance of authoritarian respectability is always already a performance. The law-giver and the bimbo are not opposites. They are the same subject, viewed from opposite ends of the same structure, in Lacanian terms.
In other, more salient words about our current milieu, the fake boobs were always in there. The border wall was the balloon. ICE and their manifold crimes against the people are the blonde wigs and leggings. The psychosexual performance of cruelty and violence is the same flow, interrupted and reversed.