There Are Many Good Reasons To Criticize Kristi Noem. Her Husband's Sexual Interests Are Not Among Them.
Who cares if Bryon Noem likes pretending to have giant breasts?
There's something unseemly going on with Kristi Noem's husband—and it's not the giant, fake balloon breasts.
Bryon Noem, longtime spouse of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was just outed by the Daily Mail as a kinkster with a fondness for bimbofication (fantasies in which women undergo extreme transformations into cartoonish sex symbols) and perhaps autogynephilia (in which men are turned on by the thought of themselves as women).
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How should we feel about this? Maybe firstly, like someone in the writer's room of this farce we call 2026 has gotten bored.
War? Done that. DoorDash discourse? Done that. Armed federal agents shooting citizens for protesting cruel immigration policies? We've aired that episode at least twice already! But wait—what if the husband of the woman presiding over those extrajudicial killings dressed himself up with comically uneven fake nipples and a duck face pout and sent those photos to sex workers? Now that's sure to get ratings….
I don't mean to sound callous about the killings and other atrocities carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers under his wife's direction. It's precisely those things—the shock and horror of them, the cruelty and unaccountability—that make me extra wary of the Bryon Noem fetish-photos news cycle. There is plenty of legitimate fodder for criticism in Kristi Noem's record. No one needs to go digging into her husband's sex life for fuel.
And, in fact, doing so could actually detract from criticism of Kristi Noem's record, giving her and her supporters room to dismiss political opponents as part of a cruel and personal campaign against her family.
I also feel bad for the Noems' children and grandchildren. And, yes, for Bryon Noem—even if he was reckless, and even if he has other things to answer for. ("At least he did this on his own dime and without shooting protesters in the face," comments Nick Gillespie.)
Being married to a public figure shouldn't automatically make your sex life fair game. And the Mail's attempt to frame this as a national security issue seems like a weak attempt to justify this invasion of privacy.
For those interested in Kristi Noem's husband cross-dressing, I have written deeply about another man's cross-dressing being "discovered." It ended tragically https://t.co/238162wOj5
— Nancy Rommelmann (@NancyRomm) March 31, 2026
Mostly I just think this sort of thing—the Mail's choice to publish this story, the gleeful and mocking way many have been sharing it—is corrosive to us as a society.
Bryon Noem wasn't hurting anyone with his dress-up time and his bimbofication chats. In fact, he was, per the Mail, paying some sex workers thousands of dollars. He's not out there campaigning against sex work and being a hypocrite.
We gain nothing from the knowledge of his antics but a bit of fun at someone else's expense—and at the expense of values like tolerance and respect for privacy.
A lot of people are weirded out by Bryon Noem's proclivities—OK, fine. All kinks are weird to those who aren't engaging in them. I can even sort of stomach social conservatives piling on right now; at least that's consistent. But liberals and progressives and others who generally support a live-and-let-live attitude on matters of adult sexuality and gender can't in good conscience sneer here.
Sexuality is weird. And it doesn't map neatly onto other political categories. Just because someone supports low taxes or mass deportations doesn't mean they might not also like cross-dressing or flogging or whatever. And I think that actually bolsters the case for respect and privacy when it comes to people's sexual habits. Kinks aren't just the province of any one kind of person or any political cohort.
Don't kink shame Bryon Noem sounds like a punchline but…come on, don't kink shame Bryon Noem. And don't delight in this invasion of his privacy. Even if you don't care about him, a standard where it's ok to publicize and mock people's private sexual antics if they're on the "wrong" side means, effectively, you have no standard against these things at all.
How should we respond to Bryon Noem's sexual kinks? A shrug feels appropriate.
The Noems have enough to answer for. Let's not let a pair of balloon tits distract us from that.
I'm generally tolerant of people's private pleasures, but I draw the line at something as perverse as marrying Kristi Noem. https://t.co/Kn0iMcWfW5
— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) March 31, 2026
P.S. This piece about how people in the town where the Noems live are reacting to this news is very good.
Follow-Up: Orgasmic Meditation and Conversion Therapy on Trial
Orgasmic meditation leaders sentenced: Nicole Daedone, founder of the orgasmic meditation company OneTaste, was sentenced on Monday to nine years in prison. Her co-defendant, Rachel Cherwitz, was sentenced to six and a half years. Both women were convicted last summer of conspiracy to commit forced labor, a human trafficking offense.
As this newsletter has mentioned several times before, the case represents a stunning departure from traditional understandings of forced labor or human trafficking. Prosecutors built a case around people—many of whom weren't even employees but volunteers, students, and/or residents in OneTaste housing—saying now that they felt "psychologically entrapped" at OneTaste by fears that going against executives or others in the group would lead to losing friends, losing status in the wider OneTaste community, or losing their grip on spiritual enlightenment and sexual fulfillment.
"That type of fear is not the type of fear that was contemplated by the lawmakers when they passed [forced labor] legislation," Daedone's lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, told the court last June. Physical violence and threats are "the type of coercion that the lawmakers had in mind," she said, not "fear of being kicked out of the group chat."
But a jury found otherwise. Now, Daedone and Cherwitz now face long prison terms and prosecutors have a new playbook for prosecuting people on forced labor charges even when no traditional force or labor was involved.
Supreme Court issues ruling in conversion therapy case: In an 8–1 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court held that applying Colorado's ban on conversion therapy to talk therapy is a viewpoint-based regulation of speech and, therefore, should be subject to what's known as strict scrutiny when weighing whether it passes constitutional muster. This means a lower court will have to rehear the case and apply this new standard, which in turn means a high likelihood that the ban will be found unconstitutional.
Here's a key passage of the opinion, which was penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Under the First Amendment, what matters is not how a government describes its law or whether the law may regulate conduct in other circumstances. What matters is whether, in fact, the law regulates speech in the case at hand.
As applied here, Colorado's law does not just regulate the content of Ms. Chiles's speech. It goes a step further, prescribing what views she may and may not express. For a gay client, Ms. Chiles may express "[a]cceptance, support, and understanding for the facilitation of…identity exploration." For a client "undergoing gender transition," Ms. Chiles may likewise offer words of "[a]ssistance." But if a gay or transgender client seeks her counsel in the hope of changing his sexual orientation or gender identity, Ms. Chiles cannot provide it. The law forbids her from saying anything that "attempts…to change" a client's "sexual orientation or gender identity," including anything that might represent an "effor[t] to change [her client's] behaviors or gender expressions or…romantic attraction[s]." Colorado disputes none of this; neither does the dissent.
[…] She cannot voice certain "perspective[s]" the State disfavors when speaking with consenting clients. And, under our precedents, viewpoint restrictions like that are not subject to mere rational-basis review or intermediate scrutiny. Rather, they represent "an egregious form of content discrimination" where First Amendment concerns are at their most "blatant."
The decision has taken a lot of flak from folks on the left, some of whom have characterized it as the Supreme Court endorsing conversion therapy. But it's best seen as the Supreme Court endorsing the First Amendment—no matter who is speaking.
That makes the ruling important, no matter which side of various culture wars you're on. "In the long run, and especially in the current political environment, I can see this actually being a useful bulwark against efforts to restrict gender-affirming care," points out Julian Sanchez.
In The News
New Orleans ditches strip club regulations. After passing and then reversing restrictions on strip clubs, the New Orleans City Council then asked the planning commission to study the issue. It has now dropped that request. No one's really sure what that means for the future of the regulations, per Verite News. Meanwhile, at the state level:
Dancers are also facing restrictions. Louisiana State Senator Beth Mizell, a Republican who represents Washington, St. Tammany and Tangipahoa parishes, recently introduced a bill that would redefine commercial sex activity to also include "any sexual or lewd or lascivious act" done for payment. The law, which Mizell hopes will reduce sex trafficking, is concerning to some dancers who worry it could be used to limit their work.
Chris Olsen owns multiple small businesses in the French Quarter and has been involved in advocacy against increasing restrictions on clubs and dancers.
"There's been this kind of long history of the [sex work] industry being regulated unlike any other business," Olsen said. "There's all of this moral panic around sex work and around strip clubs in general but it doesn't match with what actually is good for people who are doing sex work."
On Substack
"Dopamine is not why kids love social media," suggests Taylor Lorenz in her UserMag newsletter. The piece digs into the supremely dumb way that many mainstream pundits, politicians, and publications discuss dopamine—a neurotransmitter associated with the brain rewards centers—and social media.
Basically, anything pleasurable can create a hit of dopamine. When people itching to regulate or ban something want to lend an air of scientific credibility to their authoritarian impulses, they'll often reach for dopamine. Because (activity to be banned) activates dopamine in our brains, it's like a drug, and should be treated as such, they'll say.
This is silly—and "not supported by science," as psychologist Chris Ferguson noted in a RealClear Investigations piece last year. "Solid research connecting dopamine spikes to drugs and alcohol – that is, the capacity of one chemical to ignite another – has not been shown to occur in similar ways with other behaviors. Drug use is fundamentally and physiologically different from behaviors that do not rely on pharmaceutical effects."
Read This Thread
Idealized versions of everything look good, the problem is people worry they're not going to get the idealized version. https://t.co/pF6JQ626jk pic.twitter.com/fRd2EXiUvb
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 31, 2026
Matthew Ygelsias rejects the (now weirdly prevalent online) idea that Gen Z men would all be marrying young if it weren't for rejection by their dastardly, girl-bossing female counterparts. The Dilan Esper thread below gives a sort of "yes, and" to Yglesias, suggesting that while he's right about social conservatives overlooking young men's hesitancy to marry, he ignores the transnational picture (data show people are marrying older all over the world) and what that means.
Let's talk about Matt's piece today. His thesis-- that all the discussion about "encouraging women to marry" ignores that men don't want to marry-- is correct as far as it goes. (And he implies, but doesn't quite state, that this has something to do with anti-feminist thought.) https://t.co/0jiTGjAM9J
— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) March 31, 2026
More Sex & Tech News
A big announcement from the British Home Office:
Police time will no longer be wasted investigating legal social media posts, freeing up officers to patrol the streets and tackle real crime.
By scrapping Non‑Crime Hate Incidents, we are balancing the protection of vulnerable communities while respecting free speech.
— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) March 31, 2026
• Are middle-aged moms having the best sex? A survey conducted by the Substacker Cartoons Hate Her found that "as far as women having sex with men went, being married and over 40 seemed to be associated with better sex," as defined by likelihood to orgasm and giving sexual enjoyment at least a four out of five. And "being a married mom over 40 was associated with even better sex," she found:
For married women under 40, being a mother increased their odds of orgasm from 69.8% to 76.4%. For women over 40, the odds of orgasm went from 70.8% to 82.6% if they were mothers. Also, 43% of married mothers over 40 rated their most recent sexual encounter a 5/5, compared with only 33% of married women under 40 without kids.
• In rural Ohio, "the backlash to data centers…is leading some communities to consider adopting zoning for the first time," reports Reason's Christian Britschgi, who recently penned a Reason cover story called "The Joys of Data Centers: Debunking the Backlash Against the $7 Trillion AI Building Boom."
• Google will now let people change the name associated with their Gmail address.
• Proton will now let people make end-to-end encrypted video calls.
• Derek Thompson has published part two of his critique of "the smartphone theory of everything."
