Living Under the Feminist Gaze

Every couple of years, another hit piece surfaces to explain why the Right supposedly hates women and why women on the Right hate themselves. The Left has trafficked in condescending explanations for the alleged paradox of the right-wing female for quite a long time. The latest in this tired genre, “The Young Women Leaving the New Right” in New York Magazine, is more of the same, dressed up for the digital age.

We are supposed to believe that conservative women are “Pick Mes,” seeking to gain male validation by belittling other women. They are afraid of their right-wing husbands, are too dumb to form their own opinions about politics, have “internalized misogyny,” lack dignity, and so on.

Not even the element of poaching a few disgruntled former conservatives and mining them for embarrassing tidbits is a remotely new tactic. There have always been some willing to take the liberal media up on the chance to open their kimono in exchange for the opportunity to fire a shot at their intra-right nemeses.

However, the sources interviewed by the “journalist” Sam Adler-Bell, who also co-hosts a podcast dissecting the Right in much the same way as visitors view monkeys in a zoo, don’t bolster his case. Much of the “evidence” on the charge of misogyny is a series of anonymously told personal stories that amount to one-sided gossip, with the true nature of the described interactions impossible to discern.

Polling or other evidence that these anecdotes are demonstrative of a larger trend is conspicuously absent. Also unconsidered is the less-remarked-upon fact that the sex gap in voting is not so much a matter of Republican men versus Democratic women as it is of single women—who exist in the electorate at the highest rate recorded—voting for the Left to an extent wholly disproportionate not only to men but also to their married sisters.

The anonymous star witness of the piece is “Anna,” a woman who says she was recently a prominent fixture of the New Right conference and podcast circuit. At the outset, she notes that her initial attraction to the Right was a matter of superficial aesthetics as much as considered thought.

At least two of the women mentioned have never identified with any part of the conservative movement, let alone the New Right. One is currently in the process of writing a typical liberal feminist book about the childfree life, while another is a self-identified liberal whose only credential to comment on the Right is as a scene cataloguer similar to the author himself. Yet another, while a conservative influencer for a time, is now a quasi-apolitical jilted paramour of a high-profile right-wing figure.

The most measured and self-aware comments were elicited from Alex Kaschuta (full disclosure: a friend). While indeed disillusioned with the Right, she admits frankly that the milieu she rejects was the worst of weirdos scraped from the bowels of the internet, as a consequence of the specific nature of her podcast.

The conceit here is that these women—and not the long list of highly placed staffers of the Trump Administration, not one of whom was asked for her perspective—have the true picture of MAGA’s relationship to the female sex.

Leaving aside the weak testimony and credibility of most of the supplied witnesses, the rest of the essay is recycled takes conservative women have heard our whole lives. Its predictable conclusion is that we ought to return, surprise, surprise, to liberal feminism as the baseline for any observations about sex relations.

Conserving Radicalism

In an unintentionally revealing line halfway through the essay, Adler-Bell tips his hand. The New Right is “embracing policy ideas that would have scandalized previous generations of conservatives” and “reopening arguments that were settled a half a century ago or more.” The line New York Magazine hopes to redraw is not around Andrew Tate’s loathsome and violent treatment of women since the moral norms condemning those actions depend precisely upon the sex differences the mainstream Left denies.

Instead, the purpose of these attacks is to try to rebuild the firewall around the fundamental premises of second-wave feminism, to which the last generation of conservatives, in their usual progressivism-at-the-previous-decade’s-speed-limit routine, simply acquiesced as a matter of public policy. At most, daring to challenge these premises was, for large swaths of the Washington conservative establishment, a matter for the occasional lament in some harmless symposium. But it has never been treated as a serious enough problem to spend political capital on.

The New Right’s real crime is not misogyny by any reasonable definition, but being unwilling to cabin its thinking about these issues within the walls preferred by the Ms. Magazine feminists of the 1970s. In this sense, the New Right isn’t “new” at all, but merely the first movement in several decades to put up a spirited offense against the shibboleths of the sexual revolution. In short, the danger, and the reason for the renewed accusations of misogyny, is not that the New Right really hates women, but that it might win.

This becomes doubly clear when Adler-Bell’s essay moves from descriptions of vague social situations to actual policy. Which policies are listed as out-of-bounds? It’s not simply the canard of repealing the 19th Amendment, for which no serious movement exists anywhere in the United States, but also any attempt to restore sanity and the rule of law to questions of sex.

Adler-Bell faults state lawmakers for looking to restrict no-fault divorce without once acknowledging the harms it has wrought on at least three generations of Americans. Rescinding extremely radical Biden Administration regulations about workplace harassment that replaced biological sex with “identification,” which made employers beholden to the most easily offended employee with the most vague definition of harassment, is also out of bounds. An executive order eliminating the DEI rule that encouraged employers to hire and promote based on imaginary diversity quotas rather than on merit is apparently “misogynistic” despite being more focused on race than sex.

Even the issue of immigration is thrown into this must-not-be-considered stew for good measure despite having little to do with sexual politics. Apparently, the Right supports enforcing immigration law not because voters have demanded it for three decades, but because of its misogynistic hatred of idiotically suicidal activist Renee Good.

Naturally, in the weaselly sleight of hand so often displayed in the essay, declaring these policy prescriptions off-limits is slipped into a paragraph right before a nasty quotation about women being “wh*res” from self-declared “f***ing incel” Nick Fuentes.

This is the game: broaden the definition of misogyny to encompass sober-minded conservative positions that wouldn’t be out of place in the Moral Majority of the 1980s, throw in a smattering of ill-received jokes and references to some genuinely repugnant people like Tate and Fuentes, mix it all into an undifferentiated mélange, and smear it all over anyone who thinks that liberal feminism might have gotten some important things wrong.

Dishonest Framing

Adler-Bell names a slew of people who have never believed the hateful vulgarities about women he quotes from Tate and Fuentes. Scott Yenor of the Heritage Foundation and Helen Andrews, who wrote a mega-viral descriptive essay about the feminization of various professions for Compact Magazine last year, are singled out as the handmaidens of Romanian pimps. Despite not focusing much on issues of sex and gender, Christopher Rufo is also mentioned as the respectable face of Fuentes-style misogyny, along with The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham. Even Secretary of War Pete Hegseth shows up, his cartoon scowling face looming at the header atop the whole sordid thing. In Adler-Bell’s own deeply dishonest words, “They’re all on the same team.”

There are a few worthwhile observations about real features of the online Right buried in the character assassination, none of them original. For example, Adler-Bell writes of the renewed interest in a kind of masculine pagan vitality online: “MAGA sexism is not the same as the old patriarchy. On the New Right, male licentiousness, violence, and domination are not only acceptable but valorized.”

As any honest documentarian of the Right would know, this is not a remotely new critique, and the call has been coming for quite some time from inside the house. Similar arguments were popularized by both Ross Douthat and Nate Hochman in the New York Times, of all places, noting that the passing of Old-Time Religion and the rise of a more secular Right have had the exact opposite effect as predicted by the New Atheist Left. Human impulses have become less restrained, not more, in the absence of Christian moderation.

The kernel of truth in this—pointing to the real but exaggerated rise of figures like Tate, dishonestly tied to more mainstream figures like Andrews and Rufo—is that the sexual revolution liberated both men and women in ways that are not conducive to the building of families or of civilization. Men find that red pill tactics and unbridled roughness work to get them sexual access, and women find that attracting a man for sex is a different game entirely than keeping him around, both observations your great-grandmother would have found too obvious to repeat.

The sexual revolution, any rollback of which this essay rules unforgivably misogynistic, in hindsight quite clearly has unleashed more Paglian consequences in the sexual realm than the Kumbaya free lovers of the ‘60s imagined. But like most leftists, Adler-Bell will not even acknowledge the tension between his cheerleading for the tenets of the sexual revolution and his rejection of its natural consequences. He wants human sexuality to be free but nice, unrestrained but politically correct, a childish demand that has finally reached the end of the line with the New Right.

Keeping Up Appearances

“Anna,” the piece’s anonymous executioner, makes a decent point about “frivolous politics.” It’s true that LARPing and vicious jokes can easily obscure or even blur into real commitments. And if anything characterizes digital youth politics on both sides of the aisle, it’s a lack of serious skin in the game—enough to make regime collapse or civil war feel like tangible things worth preventing, rather than aesthetic concepts to play with.

Unfortunately, this hit job is just more of the same frivolous politics, as though the only two options before Americans, or women generally, are being henpecked into submission by the HR lady or being assailed by Andrew Tate.

In the end, the goal is always the same, and it’s not to express genuine concern about or provide solutions for our rapidly radicalizing sexual politics due to atomized too-online Zoomers on both sides of the political divide (a subject tackled by some of the very people excoriated in the essay). To have that discussion with fairness, any treatment would necessarily have to include the measurable fact that many more young women have moved to the far-left than young men have to the Right. Instead, the essay’s purpose is to prevent any discussion of controversial truths about sex differences, and to protect the legally propped-up reign of the girlboss, only recently subjected to real public scrutiny.

There may be real dangers for women—or more likely, for all of us—lurking in the Right’s radical chic moment. But this essay, like its parade of clones before, brings much more heat than light to those dangers.