Madison Cawthorn Taught Me What a Negligee Is

“A woman at a coffee shop I’m at (she was clearly unwell…wearing a negligee with tags on it and no shoes) just said to me, ‘Excuse me, sir, in the shorts, I have a question for you: how can you be so beautiful and so damn ugly at the same time?’”, was what I texted my friend Eric from West Asheville a couple of weeks ago. 

This happened exactly as described in the text as I was sitting on the porch doing some work at Battlecat Coffee Shop. 

“We know you’re beautiful on the outside, so maybe you’re ugly on the inside,” he kindly texted back a couple of minutes later.  “I had to Google the word negligee because I had no idea what that meant,” he added.

A year earlier, I probably would’ve been in the same boat. I mean, I knew it was some sort of lingerie, but I don’t know that I would’ve been able to pick out, say, the difference between a negligee, babydoll, and corset. However, just last fall, I got a crash course on the various types of women’s lingerie when I wrote a piece about Madison Cawthorn’s public foray into female undergarments (and the subsequent public downfall it caused). 

The fact that it’s Madison Cawthorn—he who presented himself as the manliest man who’s ever eaten a steak—that gave me this crash course in female undergarments, well…it sparks joy because of, sure, the general hypocrisy it highlights, but also because he would hate it so much. 

Cawthorn, if you need a refresher, was a one-term congressman and habitual liar whose political career went up in flames when:

1. He said several congressional members he looked up invited him to cocaine-fueled orgies. 
2. A video surfaced of Cawthorn’s assistant—who he later claimed with his cousin (since that makes this better?)—placing his hand on Cawthorn’s groin, as the then-congressman said, “I feel the passion and desire, and would like to see a naked body beneath my hands.”
3. A photo of Cawthorn baring his nipples for the camera in a sheer women’s negligee—with very dilated eyes—also made the rounds. 

Madison Cawthorn—according to Madison Cawthorn—would never behave in a way that didn’t represent the traditional American family, and despite the aforementioned video of him naked in bed humping his “cousin,” isn’t into crossdressing or any other gay shit. I know this because this past June, when Pride ended, Madison Cawthorn felt the need to post a meme to his Instagram stories showcasing an American-flag-filled human outline kicking a rainbow human outline with the caption, “It’s finally July.” It reminded me of gogo-boots enthusiast Ron DeSantis, who made a point of celebrating the ending of Pride with an anti-LGBTQ ad that was just as homoerotic as Tucker Carlson’s “End of Men” special—which itself, was up there on the high-end of the homoerotic scale alongside mid-aughts Abercrombie and Fitch shopping bags. THESE MEN ARE NOT GAY OR FEMININE IN THE SLIGHTEST. #BelieveMen

For those new to this lovely blog, I’m still following Cawthorn’s social media accounts because Cawthorn was my congressional rep here in NC-11, and I made something of a side hustle, essentially covering the Madison-Cawthorn-is-a-hypocritical-piece-of-shit beat for the local Asheville Citizen-Times as a contributing op-ed writer, so much so that I was interviewed by Buzzfeed when his “gay” pictures emerged.

I know what a negligee is because when writing about this little cross-dressing oopsie, I wanted to ensure readers who didn’t see it got an accurate picture. 

A tweet made the rounds around that time by user @wfkfars, which read, “Do not make jokes about Madison Cawthorn being gay. Do not make jokes about Lindsey Graham being gay. Justifiably detesting someone for their wretched politics does not render your homophobic jokes somehow acceptable. It is exhausting to have to keep saying this.” 

I always remember this tweet because I so wholeheartedly disagree with it. 
While I agree that too many homophobes gleefully jumped on Cawthorn, I tend to think that the metaphorical ladies—DeSantis, Carlson, and Cawthorn, in this case—doth protest too much and think it’s a conversation that these days is too often sidelined in the hopes of being the wokest ally that’s ever allied. So I’ll keep bringing up Cawthorn’s insistence that he’s the manliest man in the world, juxtaposed with the photo of him crossdressing anytime anything negligee-forward happens to me.