Meet Instagram's Gun Porn Stars
With flawlessly manicured dark-red fingernails, @Kayotickat’s thumb softly grazes the steel frame of a single-action Browning 1911-22 pistol.
It’s an archaic gun with a tobacco-colored grip, yet it looks vogue in her hand. The close-up photo, posted on Instagram, gets its charge from a traditionally phallic pose (a gripped pistol) feminized by Kayotickat’s dangerous flirtation, like the femme fatale handling a cold piece of twentieth-century engineering.
This juxtaposition is the future of gun advertising for younger Americans raised on the internet—those millions who don’t read gun magazines and never visit a newspaper stand (if they even know where to find one). Instagram is where you’ll also find a photo showing an attractive young woman in a floral-print skirt that she’s lifted to reveal her thigh—and the Sig Sauer P238 holstered tightly to it.
The Sig appears in several photos taken by shooting-range safety officer Lisa Brianne, who executes yoga positions with the pistol, uses the gun as a lingerie prop, and holsters it on over her patriotic leggings—all while using hashtags like #GunPorn. These images are politically provocative. Brianne’s sexualizing her relationship with her firearm. She’s inviting you into her bedroom to play with her gun. And she’s how I’m familiar with the Sig.
Peruse the latest issues of gearhead-focused gun magazines, and you’ll find an austere, industrial, mostly sexless aesthetic. The masculine-feminine power dynamics of gun culture are muted in publications like American Handgunner, which favor centerfolds showing stand-alone firearms and their accessories (though a recent rise in concealed-carry permits secured by women has produced the occasional photo of a midriff-baring woman holstering a Glock).
There have been vivid exceptions to this hardware-centric approach, like the photos of syndicated radio host and Second Amendment activist Dana Loesch in a black dress and goth ankle boots, wielding her AR-15 in the pages of Guns & Ammo in 2015. Loesch was the first woman to appear on the cover in 54 years. But this is not the norm.
Glossy gun magazines cater to their most reliable demographic—traditionalists in flyover country who view guns as self-defense power tools or recreational toys. Loesch, a right-wing vamp wearing Alexander Wang, simultaneously appeals to both Midwestern moms and heavy-metal fanboys. She’s a cultural bump stock in a movement that’s inspired conservative women to transform into gimlet-eyed Bond girls. These dark, icy, and chic spitfire dames are the future of Second Amendment activism.
Trinity Merrill is one of the millennials redefining the “gun gaze” on Instagram. She’s a plucky Second Amendment activist who poses in front of the flag and models for pro-military brands like Warrior Flasks. She frequents shooting ranges in Ozark, Missouri, on “Tactical Tuesdays,” wearing cutoff denim shorts with sponsored safety glasses and earplugs. She’s a gun-rights pinup girl, happy to scandalize those liberals who view guns with prejudice and paranoia.
Defiant women like Merrill, who has 125,000 followers on Instagram, are featured on wildly popular Instagram channels like @bassbucksandbabes, @pretty_girls_with_guns, and @country_bombshells. The bombshells account boasts 273,000 followers, an apparel line, and an endless stream of photographed conservative amazons who lift weights and comfortably handle the dead carcasses of big game.
Joining Merrill in contributing to this increasingly influential universe of girls-with-guns online imagery is the expert archer and outdoor enthusiast Katie Van Slyke, a gun-holster model who can be seen on Freedom Holsters Instagram page with a teal Glock 42 holstered safely near her crotch, an image accompanied by the hashtag “Glock Porn.”
The pose is an act of social rebellion. One like it was widely mocked by liberals in March when Fox News’s Tomi Lahren posted a photo of herself with a 9MM tucked into her leggings. “Not Your Average Gun Girl,” read the hashtag. In the case of Lahren, a blonde conservative woman with a prominent media profile, she would have known how much flak the image would receive—and was ready to revel in the outrage.
Kirsten Joy Weiss commands the most-watched female guns channel on YouTube. While just as physically striking as Tomi Lahren, Weiss is more of a gun gaze’s Ronda Rousey. She’s a gifted trick shooter and multi-title champion whose videos—like a YouTube Annie Oakley—show the sporting side of firearm partisanship. Weiss is a woman able to outshoot most of her male competition. Rather than flirting with gun rights like Lahren, Weiss is demonstrating her prowess as a sharpshooter—the best argument to counter the liberal bias against Americans who engage in shooting sports.
Instagram, the digital playpen of the prized millennial demographic, is the unintentional industry-leader of gun porn. There’s no data on what sort of impact these photos have. The vagaries of gun statistics in the U.S., especially on the internet, make them increasingly irrelevant, but we know that more women are engaging with firearms. We know that more women are frequenting shooting ranges, and acquiring those concealed-carry permits. We also know that more woman are photographing themselves in defiant poses with their firearms.
For the libidinous American male, these images offer a voyeuristic fetish stapled on top of fine-print that’s far more important—the conservative woman’s newly adopted role as defenders of adventurist masculinity.
Social media is where these Second Amendment bodyguards boldly talk back to the anti-gun feminists of millennial media. Social media is where Jackie, who defies feminist homogeneity, has an apparel sponsor and can be seen holding an AK-47 in each hand, wearing a “Right 2A Bears Arms” T-shirt in front of a big fucking truck. Don’t look for the mainstream media to tell her story.
Fierce feminists like Tara, a glamorous and “savage” U.S. Marine who extinguishes the fiction of unattractive female soldiers, are part of a DIY network of women ignored by liberal media outlets because, goes the argument, they are “complicit” in a culture alarmist contend produces mass shootings. This is the same poor logic that blamed first-person-shooter games and Marilyn Manson for Columbine.
While liberal puritans treat masculine, gun-themed pastimes as acts of terror, conservative women run them like credit cards exchanging in cultural currency.
Valerie Serbu, aka @50calval, the self-described “heiress” to the Serbu Firearms fortune, confidently plays with her sensuality behind colossal, magazine-fed, semi-automatic rifles (or homemade flamethrowers) that not only amuse men on YouTube but sell them guns.
Serbu’s ALS ice-bucket challenge video showed her firing a machine gun in a pink bikini. Her @50calval account is as much of a middle-finger to bourgeois liberalism as a satirical YouTube video of teenager Carly LaCroix, a southerner who hilariously mocked a male New York Daily News reporter after he claimed to experience PTSD upon firing an AR-15.
The gun gaze is not exclusive to U.S. gun culture. In Japan, airsoft hobbyists like Isis Osushi take stirring fashion photos at “shooting cafes,” cosplaying as Milla Jovovich and blending gaming culture with toy guns, creating their own, slightly nerdier Nintendo-gun gaze. The Russian Federation uses the gaze as a recruitment tool in the form of cosplaying soldier Elena Deligioz, whose 62,000 Instagram followers are drawn to the glam photos of her in full combat gear, or napping under an arsenal of machine guns. Deligioz is alluring because she’s the ultimate betrayal of everything we believe in—the gun gaze equivalent of infidelity.
In America, where the gun gaze began with cowgirls like Oakley and pistol-packin’ Hollywood molls like Peggy Cummins (Cummins starred in 1949’s Gun Crazy, robbing banks with her boyfriend, always itching to pull the trigger), the gaze now produces the effect of seeing Doris Day wearing an ammo belt, instead of a stitched apron. It slays domesticity with playbacks to images like the character of Sarah Connor from Terminator 2, posing with a cigarette dangling from her lip—the M16 assault rifle acting as an extension of her take-no-shit personality.
Today’s women of the gun are unapologetic, never compromising sex appeal for gender-neutrality or blindfolded misandry. They take something masculine and phallic and rub rouge all over it, pumping it full of roaring estrogen. The new gun gaze isn’t the bikinied, machine-gun babes from the 1980s VHS tapes. It’s a defiant throwback to first-wave feminism, but far more rebellious, where conservative women are taking ownership of the male gaze, instead of being wrecked by it.
