Does The Viral Howard Stern Buttaface Contest Prove We Needed Feminism In The Early 2000s?

Allow me to set the stage for you: a real, televised reverse-beauty contest, operating as a segment from The Howard Stern Radio Show, was hosted in Las Vegas in 2004, called “Miss Buttaface.”

“Buttaface” was a play on the insult “butterface,” a neologism referring to a woman who had an attractive body, but her face was ugly. Airing in May of 2004, Stern’s radio show hosted a panel of judges, including Artie Lange, Robin Quivers, Rob Schneider, Ralph Cirella, Fred Norris, and Gary Dell’Abate, who accompanied Stern in evaluating which woman would be certified Miss Buttaface, the ultimate contradiction in attractiveness. 

The prize for such a feat? $25,000, courtesy of Hitman: Contracts, a video game available on PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC. Yes, this monstrosity was being bankrolled by a mainstream video game, and even aired on E! Television. I came across a forum discussing its airing at the time on a site called DVD Talk. Truly a relic of its time. The comments will send your head for a spin.

The initial thread starter gushed, “Saw this last year and was AMAZED at the results. Gorgeous bodies, but then they remove the face covering, and you want to gag. Watched it with my then-girlfriend and she dismissed it at first as sexist, but was hooked after 5 minutes as she was fascinated by the 'reveal' of the face every time too.” What were they putting in the water? 

Stern, one of the most famous radio hosts of the time, was known for his shock jock personality, though he could hardly be considered mainstream. He was always part of the grittier counterculture, whose edgy radio banter and bravado were comparable to a less political Nick Fuentes. Popular, but subversive. A contest where women were invited to put paper bags over their heads so they could be judged for their bodily hotness, only to remove the paper bag to a crowd of shrieking laughter, mimed puking gestures, and other similarly oafish emotes, was par for the course for Stern. 

But even if modern audiences aren’t familiar with his late-90s and early-2000s brand of crass spectacle, before he ironically rebranded himself under the tent of woke politics and anti-MAGA, the internet was still shocked to discover that, circa 2004, women were voluntarily signing up for a contest that would subject them to such public ridicule and objectification.

The clip that went viral featured an ethnically ambiguous, bare-faced woman with striking green eyes, olive-toned skin, and tousled blonde curly locks. She donned a black bikini that boasted a fit body, but once she pulled the bag off her head, the hysterics began: the judges, the audience, men and women alike, falling over themselves with laughter and disgust at the ogre standing before them. 

At least, that was the cartoonish reaction they all played up for the cameras. This left modern viewers, twenty years removed from early 2000s beauty standards, perplexed. What was so funny and revolting about her face? She was undeniably striking; much more attractive than just about anybody else in that room, laughing at her. 

Even her name was ironic, ‘Stacy,’ now a memetic shorthand online for the archetypal hot, popular girl with lots of simps—the female counterpart to a Chad. Even more sinister is the backstory behind how she got there, as she tells the audience that her friend is the one who signed her up. Yikes. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

The video, posted with the tongue-in-cheek caption: “I wish I was an adult in the 2000s :(” / “the 2000s:” was posted by a ragebait account on X going by the name “Wild Content” and quickly amplified by other large accounts, causing it to rack up 75.8 million views at the time of writing this article. You can catch the entire special on YouTube if you want to psychically damage yourself. It’s way worse than you could imagine.

It feels like one long SNL skit about early 2000s culture: the female contestants as punching bags, the women behind the bar as sexual props, and even a woman judge, Stern’s radio co-host, Robin, partakes in the grotesquerie in a move that today would certainly be regarded as “internalized misogyny.” They give the women two ratings out of ten; the first rating is for their body, with ten being a knockout, and the second is for their face, with ten being haggard. 

One by one, this gaggle of goons picks apart the bodies of some of the fittest, most slender women I’ve ever seen. Cirella maxes out the douchebaggery by continually repeating, “Aren’t they supposed to have hot bodies?” Each of the men underplays how fit the women are while embellishing how ugly they are, transparently trying to out-quip each other by comparing the women’s faces to John Kerry if he had a sex change operation or other ludicrous remarks to exaggerate how disgusting they look. The compliments read more like sexual harassment. 

Schneider, judging Stacy’s body, said, “I gotta say, I know that she shaves her private region. I’m for that,” adding that he likes her ass tattoo, “gives you something to look at.” Another judge asked her to take her top off, which Stern shut down, noting Las Vegas doesn’t allow it. Another contestant’s intro included a detail about losing her virginity “unwillingly” at the age of 11 and that she “doesn’t like to talk about it.” The judges then made jokes about the implied sexual assault. Other women were compared to jack-o-lanterns for having “scary looking” teeth and faces, one compared to a witch, saying, “When she took her bag off, my watch stopped.”

Robin ludicrously sits there picking apart women much slimmer and more attractive than her, commenting, “Is that a speed bump?” when Stacy removes the bag from her head. Most of these women’s biggest opps are (besides their own low self-esteem and lack of dignity) their best friends and husbands, who they claim convinced them to join the contest with shocking frequency. The discourse these clips sparked online was first one of disbelief about the beauty standards of the early aughts. How could a woman so objectively attractive end up in a Miss Buttaface contest? 

Though she was the only woman most of the judges considered to be too attractive to be a true contender in the contest, the entire episode feels like a ludicrous caricature of frat-boy sexism, and one of the judges even voted for her to win. It spoke to how much times have changed. In this respect, for the better. Commentary on the contest went viral, pointing to this behavior as proof that we needed feminism in the 2000s. 

“The millennial woman’s obsession with ‘body image’ and ‘beauty standards’ sounds goofy, but this is what we saw on TV in middle school,” tweeted Cartoons Hate Her. The sentiment was echoed by many. Another viral tweet, “Watch like 5 seconds of a 2000s reality TV show and you will instantly understand why 2016 feminism was the way it was,” received 243k likes. This talking point, alongside the obvious acknowledgment that the most viral clip of Stacy being far more attractive than all of the people fake vomiting, laughing, and jeering at her, dominated social media. 

But what stood out to me were a few important observations. P8stie questioned the narrative that our current culture isn’t cut from the same cloth. “It’s the same culture, haven’t u ever seen the roast me subreddit?” she tweeted. Hanania disputed that the two were comparable. “Things that used to be mainstream pop culture that you could draw real-life audiences to participate in still exist only in corners of the internet. This proves the point,” he said, mockingly. Herein lies the debate: Were Stern’s antics really mainstream or subversive?

If we’re being honest, Stern had a reputation as a shock jock for a reason. His entire brand was built on pushing boundaries and making the transgressive comments you weren’t supposed to make, but he didn’t exist outside the mainstream entertainment ecosystem the way a dissident right-wing commentator might today. This was transgressive content amplified by mainstream companies: video game sponsors bankrolling the contest and a major television network, E! Entertainment Television, broadcasting this filth into ordinary homes. 

They even roped in a celebrity with real name recognition at the time, Rob Schneider, though he’s always been one of those right-leaning actors on the outs with Hollywood. The most intellectually honest read is that it borrowed a countercultural aesthetic, but in the climate of commercialized sleaze and sex-positive third-wave feminism, this kind of frat-boy humor was well within the social optics of the era.

One user pointed out that this was a perfect example of mob mentality, possibly explaining why everyone’s reaction was so disconnected from reality. The premise of the show gave them the plausible reason to act repulsed, as if that was the desired social optics, much like how people play into hyperbolic insults on the r/roastme subreddit.

Undeniably, the behavior in this contest wouldn’t fly today. Casual sexual objectification (if not outright harassment), sadistic beauty standards enforced through cruelty, the ‘grab her by the pussy’ boys’ club energy combined with Robin’s ‘not like the other girls’ complicity—all of it has long since crossed into taboo. We’re now so far removed from this as socially acceptable that it’s hard to even recall a time when it passed as normal. I remember the early 2000s as brutal, but I was still a child, spared the full extent of its depravity. 

Social norms, though, can shift at breakneck speed. This special and the brand of woke feminism overtaking universities were separated by barely a decade. Just twenty years earlier, Brooke Shields was writhing on the floor in Calvin Klein ads, sexualizing a minor, teasing that nothing came between her and her Calvins. Controversial then, sure, but the fact it aired at all shows how different the Overton window was.

This behavior didn’t really prove that the answer was feminism, especially since the wave ascendant in the early 2000s was third-wave feminism, a particularly sex-positive, choice-feminism strain that taught women they could be empowered through sexualization and personal choice. I’m not denying that fourth-wave feminism later helped make this kind of debauchery untenable in mainstream culture. And while I understand that this sort of toxicity being normalized in the early 2000s is partially responsible for the overcorrection that followed, that isn’t a very good justification. 

It doesn’t vindicate wokeism or the looney 2010s Jezebel strain of feminism, because everything in culture is always a counter-reaction to what came before. The culture is basically an endless string of bad things happening, followed by some group of dissidents overcorrecting in the opposite direction, and the cycle goes on forever.

Our mistake is treating ‘bad thing used to happen’ as retroactive proof that whichever ideology overcorrected for it must therefore be the right one, while ignoring the new harms that overcorrection creates. Toxic branches of the manosphere like the red pill community are “just a response to out of hand 2010s feminism.” And yet, because I don’t base my opinions of political and social legitimacy entirely on vengeance and retribution, I’m able to oppose it, all the same.

For me, that’s why “antifeminist” is still the right word even though I’m explicitly grateful and supportive of the strides that feminism has historically won for women. The right to vote, own property, legal rights, the ability to earn a living, and to open a bank account. This might seem hypocritical, but feminism didn’t freeze in its first or second wave; it evolved into a living ideology that now carries dogma, culture, and political baggage I reject. Ideological tenets so inextricably linked to the ism that they’re practically definitional. 

They inform modern identification with the word, its advocacy, legislation, and understanding. For example, the modern feminist package often includes ideas like gender being entirely socially constructed, the erasure of biological sex distinctions in law and language, and treating women as an oppressed political class even when they hold more institutional power than men in many areas. 

Its objective in achieving equality is based on the farcical idea that we’re entitled to equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Supporting the gains from its early history doesn’t obligate me to embrace what it’s become, and at some point, it can’t plead No True Scotsman as a defense. 

I understand that I have much more in common with the Dworkinist radical feminists than I do with a lot of my other political and social adversaries. Sometimes, we even arrive at the same conclusions. But quipping “so you don’t believe in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes?” is no more insightful than a red piller quipping “so you don’t believe in the truth?” 

And just as exhausting as it is when red-pill defenders insist that whatever bad actor or toxic idea is being criticized isn’t ‘real’ red-pill, it’s just as exhausting when feminism refuses to answer for the very ideas it actively espouses. Maybe the whole thing is just a convoluted semantic soup—people I respect deeply, even on the right, identify as feminists. I’m far more interested in what they actually mean by that than in the label itself. 

If the fact that this behavior once passed as normal ‘proves’ we needed feminism, then by the same logic, it also proves we needed Christian conservatism, since they opposed it too. Or we can call a spade a spade: trash behavior is trash behavior. Times and standards change fast. But the overcorrections are seldom any better.