Is Drake Horny for Abby Shapiro?

On April 19, Skylar Spence tweeted a screengrab with the single caption “lmfao.” The image was of the Following list for Drake, aka @champagnepapi on Instagram. According to the screengrab, one of the 2,714 accounts Drake follows is @classicallyabby, aka Abby Shapiro. The sister of the right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro and YouTuber, Shapiro came forward as a conservative influencer in 2020 with a video titled, “Why I Came Out as Conservative: Conservative Women NEED a Community!,” and is perhaps best known for criticizing a 2020 Vogue cover featuring Harry Styles in a dress for failing to adhere to traditional gender norms.

To Drake’s largely left-leaning fan base on Twitter, the revelation that Drizzy follows Abby Shapiro was mindblowing, to say the least. Spence’s tweet racked up nearly 30,000 likes and more than 1,000 retweets, with BuzzFeed writer Kelsey Weekman writing, “I need to know why drake is following Ben Shapiro’s fundie influencer sister on Instagram.”

But in truth, the actual explanation is probably not that complicated. Regardless of her politics, Shapiro has become something of an unlikely, somewhat abashed sex symbol for people on the left side of the political spectrum, as co-hosts Brittany Spanos and Ej Dickson discuss on the latest episode of Rolling Stone’s podcast on internet culture, Don’t Let This Flop.

Just a few months ago, Shapiro went viral for a photo she posted on Instagram of her baby shower that showcased her voluptuous pregnant physique, though many of the particularly horny versions that circulated on social media later turned out to be Photoshopped. This phenomenon is also not specific to Shapiro: as anyone who has spent a modicum of time in right-wing social media circles can attest, conservatives also harbor a weird sexual obsession with AOC, despite demonizing her at every turn. And ironically, the fact that Shapiro also harbors some incredibly noxious cultural and political views also may ironically fuel the cross-aisle horniness. “Men want to fix her,” says one Twitter user. “Men want to believe that you can fuck the bad politics out of a woman, and I am here to tell them: yes, you can.”

On this week’s Don’t Let This Flop, Spanos and Dickson discuss other shocking examples of cross-aisle thirst, setting actual horrific politics aside (a Yale coked-up frat boy era George W. Bush? Mitt Romney? Madison Cawthorn?!?!), as well as the Snickers dick vein hoax, Timothée Chalamet allegedly smooching a model who claims to have invented intersectional feminism at Coachella, and a Himbo of the Week who makes endangered species out of Baby Bell wax.