Tucker Carlson, the Fox News commentator with a primetime show and a history of vitriolic racist rants, is in the news again after the media watchdog group Media Matters unearthed recordings of him from the mid-aughts, in which Carlson calls into a radio shock jock program to make a series of luridly sexist assertions and racist asides, palling around with a host who goes by the moniker “Bubba the Love Sponge”.

In the recordings, Carlson says women are “like dogs”, claiming: “They’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.” He insists that women find misogynist degradation pleasurable and makes sexual, antagonistic comments about women he does and does not like.

He calls Arianna Huffington “a pig”, Justice Elena Kagan “ugly” and “unattractive”, and Martha Stewart’s daughter, TV host Alexis Stewart, “cunty”. He says he “wants to fuck” Sarah Palin and called for the elimination of rape shield laws, provisions that make it illegal for defense attorneys in rape cases to bring up an accuser’s sexual history as a way to discredit her. He laughs at a story about a woman being choked and calls Paris Hilton and Britney Spears “the biggest white whores in America”, a phrase that seems to imply that there are other, bigger “whores” who are not white. In other recordings, he makes repeated racist overtures, saying that white men are responsible for “creating civilization”, calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and creating virtuosic combinations of racism and sexism in attacking Michelle Obama and white women who date black men.

The radio shows aired at a pivotal moment for Carlson’s career, when he was transitioning from a bow tied conservative commentator for CNN and MSNBC with pretensions to seriousness into a full-throated avatar of the Republican party’s sexist and racist id. Revealingly, in the transcripts he returns again and again to a Freudian fear of castration, calling Hillary Clinton “anti-penis”, claiming that Oprah Winfrey “hates the penis” and asserting that if Clinton “could castrate you, she would”. In one paranoid fantasy, Carlson draws a one-to-one causal connection between the rise of a woman to power and the likelihood, in his mind, that he will subsequently lose his penis. He implores the radio hosts to imagine a world in which Clinton was president, asking: “How long do you think it would take before she castrates you?”

It’s clear from the recordings that Carlson’s sexist remarks are part of an effort to ingratiate himself with the radio host. Carlson clearly wants the approval of Bubba the Love Sponge, and is trying to establish a rapport with him by making degrading and lewd attacks on people he perceives as their shared enemies – namely, whichever woman they are talking about at the moment. It is a long-established pattern of male bonding in which misogynist aggression is deployed as a signal of irreverent joy and shared virility, a tactic that Donald Trump, the man Carlson so frequently carries water for on his television show, famously termed “locker room talk”.

It is likely that Carlson’s conservative fanbase – which notably includes a white power group that uses his show for recruitment – will dismiss the recordings as readily as they dismissed Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comments, seeing them not as examples of Carlson’s ugliness and indignity but as evidence of his red-blooded masculine authenticity. Carlson certainly seems to think so. He has already taken to Twitter to parlay the controversy into a bid for ratings.

What might be more revealing about the recordings are Carlson’s frequent, repeated and apparently unsolicited defenses of Warren Jeffs, the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practiced polygamy and ritualized child molestation. “I should make the laws around here,” Carlson says when the conversation turns to Jeffs, who recorded himself raping a 12-year-old girl and telling her to “feel the spirit of God”. “Warren Jeffs would be out on the street.” He also suggests that polygamy should be legal, and calls the then-ongoing criminal charges against Jeffs – who is currently serving a life sentence – “bullshit”. Child marriage is different and less severe than stranger rape, Carlson asserts, because “the rapist made a lifelong commitment” to “take care of the person”. He also exhibits a conspicuously thorough knowledge of state consent law.

In another exchange, Bubba and his cohost chide Carlson for sending his daughter to a boarding school, saying that she will probably be sexually experimenting there with other girls. “Well when she’s in a dormitory-type setting and these little girls start to experiment around,” Bubba begins. “If it weren’t my daughter I would love that scenario,” Carlson replies. In the same interview, he says that his daughter is 14.

This willingness of Carlson to sexualize young girls, and to publicly defend a man accused of raping young girls and of helping and encouraging others to rape them, speaks to a pervasive aspect of heterosexual culture that normalizes sexual predation: the public, shameless and frequently professed attraction of adult straight men to adolescent and teenage girls.

These men will dispatch varied creepy rationalizations to hide the truth: that they are drawn to the unfair and hugely unequal power that they would be able to exert over these girls

This kind of sexualization of small girls by grown men can start before those girls reach puberty, and it has been so thoroughly integrated into polite society that it is rarely noted or remarked upon outside of feminist circles. But it happens all the time.

Part of the reason why this pattern of exploitative and inappropriate behavior by grown men towards teen girls has been insufficiently analyzed is that those men who most enthusiastically partake in it have come up with elaborate justifications for their behavior toward these children. From deploying detailed knowledge of where and how their sexual desire for adolescents is legal, to resorting to bunk evolutionary psychology theories about their “animal” need for a “young mate”, these men will dispatch varied creepy rationalizations to hide the truth: that they are drawn to the unfair and hugely unequal power that they would be able to exert over these girls.

In the worst instances, an everyday predator moves from Carlson-like fantasies about underage girls into actual relationships with them. They will often rationalize their behaviors to these young girls with manipulative paeans to the girl’s talent, intellect or emotional capacity. “You’re not like the other girls,” the everyday predator will tell his target. “You’re very mature for your age.” This rationale is a particularly cruel lie, as it uses the young girl’s emerging talents against her, making the strengths that are budding in her mind into a justification for the ways that he exploits the weaknesses inherent to her age.

Even parents and other authority figures sometimes enable these relationships between teenage girls and significantly older grown men in their 20s, 30s and 40s. These relationships are romanticized in the language of May-December romance and excused in the context of a romantic culture in which heterosexual relationships between adults, too, often feature older men and younger women. Sometimes, the girl escapes relatively unscathed, or with only the sort of humiliations and hurts that are typical of everyone’s early romantic life. In other relationships, the man exploits his exaggerated power over her in dark and destructive ways, and she is not so lucky.

It is not especially surprising to hear Tucker Carlson saying disgusting things in these newly rediscovered recordings. Scandal is quickly becoming not only a frequent part of his career, but a seemingly deliberate one – after all, he is fresh off the heels of a number of his major advertisers withdrawing from his show, following his racist comments that immigrants make America “dirtier”. He has shown us who he is before – he shows us on cable television, every weeknight, for an hour. But he has also shown us something about ourselves, about the things we tolerate men saying to men, and about the ways that we are willing to sacrifice young girls to grown men’s worst impulses. These comments are controversial now, and they were disgusting then, but the Media Matters report does not reveal anything new about Carlson. After all, he made these comments more than 10 years ago. It didn’t hurt him then, either.