Who is Ethel Cain?

And why is he showing his junk on Instagram?

A few days ago (April 1) an Instagram account with the handle @mothercain and a following of 1.2M posted nude photos. There was discussion on X so I went to check out what was going on. Because why not!?

What I found was a series of photos — they were blurry ala vintage style Playboy images infused with nostalgia meant to seem classier (?) than today’s explicit and sometimes/often violent pornography. Maybe? They were set in a weird grandma style bedroom with a floral bedspread (another vintage-y touch), featuring a man in a corset with his junk hanging out at the bottom of the corset. Said junk was all squished up and looking like some sort of fleshy bloom. So much for the innocent nudes of yore! This was a modern fetish concoction, without a doubt.

I’m not showing the photos here because if you want to see them you can go find them yourself like I did. Unfortunately.

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Cain has 1.2M followers! The photos and the account aren’t banned for this porn?! I’m not a prude but this is a social media platform frequented by young people and this is clearly porn (IMO). The butt in the air, “come hither” kneeling pic (photo 5 in the carousel) drives that point home.

Meta has strict policies against pornography, defined under its Community Standards as “Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity.” These policies prohibit the sharing of explicit sexual content, including images of genitalia, fully exposed buttocks, and, in many cases, female nipples.

There is no doubt that Cain’s images include fully exposed — however squished —genitalia though the package was not like anything I’d seen before such was the distortion and disfigurement caused by wrong sex hormones, I’m guessing. I saw it and I can’t unsee it. And while the photos remain up, after push back they’ve been given a sensitive content warning, presumably driven by the dust up.

But if you just click on “see post” — well, you can see the mashed up trifecta.

I dug in. I googled. I Grok-ed. I want to know who this person is and why Meta doesn’t seem to care that he is violating their clearly stated policies. And of course, I was propelled by the fact that XX-XY Athletics was suspended for no apparent reason other than a mass reporting that triggered a shut down of our ad account for a few days.

I should note, I’m no longer up on all the pop culture personalities and this person in particular escaped my notice. But he is a notable figure in the music world.

Here’s Why Cain Is Notable:

Ethel Cain is the stage name and artistic persona of Hayden Silas Anhedönia, an American singer-songwriter and record producer, and sometimes model born in 1998 in Florida. He is known for Southern Gothic-style music that includes dark themes like religious trauma, incest, abuse and substance abuse. He identifies as “trans” and his music has been compared to Lana Del Rey’s due to their shared focus on melancholic themes and American gothic aesthetics as well as the brooding overall sound. Cain doesn’t like the comparison. (More on that later — a dislike that turned into a feud, of sorts.)

Cain’s 2022 debut album Preacher's Daughter made the Billboard charts in April 2025, debuting at number 10 on the US Billboard 200. This achievement, driven by a vinyl release, made Cain the first “trans” artist to secure a top 10 album on the Billboard 200, with the album also reaching #1 on the Top Album Sales chart.

Cain grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist family — his father was a deacon and truck driver and Cain sang in the church choir. He left the church around age 16 and has spoken about his struggles with sexuality and “gender identity.” He began making music as a teenager under various aliases (like Atlas or White Silas) before adopting the Ethel Cain handle around 2019.

Feud with Lana Del Rey

It started in 2025. It’s such a dumb internet fight. You can read all the details here if you are so inclined.

The net net: Ethel was a Lana fan at one time. But then grew annoyed with the constant comparisons. Why? Who knows — one might think it would be flattering to be compared to an artist who had achieved success. But not for a raging narcissist, I’m thinking.

Then last August, Lana posted a video of herself in a car listening to a track (hers) where she name-drops Ethel in the first few lyrics. And I guess not in a nice way. It’s what’s known as a “diss track.” One artist publicly criticizes another artist in what passes for a song these days (I’m so old). Fans were confused and then Lana said that Ethel had called her fat in the past, or something. It’s middle school mean girl drama if you ask me. But one that gets headlines in Forbes and Cosmo. We truly live in the stupidest times but here I am writing about it, so there you have it.

Of note, Lana’s politics are somewhat unknown. While she has backed progressive causes in the past like BLM and the women’s march, she married someone (Jeremy Dufrene) who is religious and thought to be a Trump supporter. Del Rey is now seen as a someone who is leaning into conservative somewhat “trad wife” aesthetics and possibly even maybe likes Trump. No bueno in music land. And, in my opinion, what likely underscores the feud. She even once name dropped Morgan Wallen, a country singer who ranked 3rd in the U.S. on Spotify last year and has over 1 billion downloads. Wallen has his own share of controversies: a 2021 video showed him using a racial slur and he was dropped from an SNL appearance for not adhering to covid protocols. He’s also against cancel culture. Say it isn’t so! Safe to say Wallen is a conservative and any association with him — which Lana has apparently courted, sort of — would get you on the outs in the music industry, despite his top ranking status. His use of a racial slur is unforgivable unlike Cain’s (more on that next) because Wallen isn’t trans. I guess.

Other Cain Controversies

Also last summer, some old posts from Cain’s teenage years generated controversies. He used the N-word, seemed to endorse incest/pedophilia and used a real flyer of a missing child, which he edited and adapted to promote his album and sell as merch.

He also wrote this, which is beyond gross and offensive (please scroll past the image if you prefer to avoid obscenity and violent imagery this Easter or ever).

Good luck making sense of it but you’ll see the misogyny coursing throughout, which is what seems to be at the heart of any autogynephile’s obsessions — a total disregard for and dehumanization of women that presents as an obsessive fetishistic desire to assume the aesthetics of submission, which is what they seem to believe is what it means to be a woman.

So that’s what Cain thinks of 12-year-old girls.

Of course, Cain protested when his old posts were outed. He called it an anti-trans smear campaign. His own words were held against him? Yes. How dare we!

But somehow even The New York Times saw fit to excuse his racist rants. The cancellers of all cancellers excused this because trans. Perhaps if Dilbert creator Scott Adams had declared himself a woman at the end of his life, his past comments would have been excused as well.

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So all of this led me to the Instagram post in question which clearly displays Cain’s manhood, however shriveled and unmanly it may be.

My take:

He put his fetish on full display.

It worked. The fawning comments range from “Iconic!” to “Beautiful!” to “Most beautiful woman alive!” to “My darling!” to “Her penis!”

Women don’t do this. Even women who call themselves men. I’ve yet to see a post by a “transman” with her genitals hanging out.

The in your face-ness is the point. And is very male, I might add (the toxic kind of man). I have male genitalia. I am wearing a corset and I’m submissive. You must accept it. If you don’t you’re a bigot. Normalize my fetish or else.

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One final point which is more of a funny anecdote and only tangentially related to above.

Apparently in my curiosity to view the post from Cain that everyone was talking about, my old lady fingers accidentally reposted it. I’m so social media illiterate I didn’t even know there was a repost button on IG though it looks just like the repost buttons on every other social media platform.

Yesterday while I was at the butcher, my friends Riley Gaines and Kaitlynn Wheeler called me laughing.

“Um . . . Jen, did you mean to share that naked pic of Ethel Cain? I don’t think you meant to share that.”

What? Share?! No. How do I undo it? Then sweet and patient Kaitlynn had to walk me through how to un-share.

Someone needs to take my phone away. I’m too old.

I’m like a monkey with a machine gun. I have no business waving this thing around.

Happy Easter! Sorry to traumatize you with this Ethel Cain tale but just be grateful I didn’t post the pics or even link to them.