Among many women of the right-o-sphere, the dissonance between stated beliefs about feminism — and their revealed preferences — is deafening.
The “F” word. The word-which-shall-not-be-named. The gasoline to every progressive engine. The destroyer of birth rates. The wrecker of homes. Why the West fell. And, why you can’t get a date.
Ah, feminism. We love to hate it.
While the left views racism as our nation’s original sin, the (new) right traces all societal ills back to a different (and no less poorly understood) ism.
Women who went to selective colleges and hold intelligentsia jobs write that feminism has trapped us in a “civilizational suicide pact” and “created the monster that is now eating us.” Congressional staffers in pencil skirts argue that everything went downhill when women were granted the right to vote. “Trad-wife” influencers, who evangelize the superiority of a life dedicated to the domestic arts, spend countless hours behind a laptop boosting their content online. (Some rake in six figures or more from their digital empires.) MAGA spokeswomen, who decry transgender feminization procedures, dabble in transhumanism of their own: lip fillers, boob jobs, lash extensions, buccal fat removal, etc.
Among many women of the right-o-sphere, the dissonance between stated beliefs about feminism — and their revealed preferences — is deafening.
Of course, this dissonance depends on how one defines “feminism” — a gnarly task that most understandably avoid. However, an oversimplification of the intellectual and political history of feminism makes the ground fertile for blatant enmity toward women, especially when any idea or policy that supports women’s equality is denounced in the name of anti-feminism. (The darker corners of X are a cesspool of sexism, and I promise I don’t use that word lightly.)
An excellent article from Fairer Disputations analyzes this phenomenon:
Here’s what hasn’t changed: the gap between [anti-feminist] influencers’ performative traditionalism and their very contemporary pursuit of influence, between their prescribed ideals and their lived reality. In that gap lies the truth about this endless cycle of anti-feminist influencers. They’re not actually selling a return to tradition. They’re selling entertainment, dressed up as enlightenment, to an audience grappling with rapid social change and eager to believe that women’s success is to blame for their discontent.
To say that feminism is the cause of our civilizational decline is, at best, a convenient simplification of the harms of the sexual revolution, or, at worst, an intellectually dishonest analysis for the sake of political gain.
Feminism cannot simply be equated to, say, the thought of Judith Butler (which deserves rivers of criticism, to which I have contributed a drop). It must be remembered that feminism — of some variety — enabled women to pursue advanced degrees, open a bank account, get published, play sports, conduct critical research, receive legal protection from abusive husbands, cast a vote, etc.
In the not-so-distant past, it would have been radical — feminist, even! — to say that women and men share equally in their intellectual capacity, personal dignity, and humanity. This is the kind of feminism I would like to see both substantiated and conserved. Motherhood is a beautiful vocation — and a 168-hours-a-week job. However, respect for motherhood should not be used as a rhetorical tool to advocate the banishment of women from the public sphere and their return to “the kitchen.”
A fundamentally flawed understanding of human nature — not the 19th Amendment — has caused our social politics to spiral. The physical separation of sex from childbearing, made possible through different forms of birth control, has cheapened the sacred union between husband and wife. The ideological separation of gender from sex — a move that would have been anathema to the first “feminists” — laid the groundwork for the transgender movement. A Marxist interpretation of male and female relationships — which morphs everything into a power dynamic of oppressor vs. oppressed — has seeded suspicion and distrust between the sexes. The rising costs of child-rearing — enmeshed with the belief that children are not a gift to be received but a choice to be made — have led to a notable decline in the fertility rate.
The answer to these bad ideas is not a reversion to an imagined golden age of gender norms. Rather, these bad ideas must be challenged at their very foundations. Thankfully, several authors wiser than I have nobly set about this task. They have taken up the hard work of parsing out the bad apples from the good with regard to 20th-century developments in social norms. We need more scholars, authors, and teachers like Erika Bachiochi, Mary Harrington, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and Abigail Favale to present visions of a faithful feminism for the 21st century.
In order to heal young imaginations warped by the current chaos around gender, conservatives must present a positive vision of womanhood (and manhood!) that does not rely on the inflammatory rejection of liberal excesses.