According to “The Women Leaving the New Right,” a viral piece by Sam Adler-Bell in New York magazine, the movement has “dropped the pretense of protecting women” and gone full mask off, revealing what was always underneath: cruelty, contempt, and, most of all, misogyny.
I find this framing frustrating. It’s familiar to me: I’m often accused of only pretending to care about girls and young women because I have conservative instincts. These are incompatible, apparently; any compassion I have for girls must be a front for an evil political agenda.
My problem with the piece, then, and with this way of thinking generally, is that it never stops to examine why young women are joining the right in the first place. It just has to be irrational, an error of judgement. We can only be conservative if we have been duped, or are desperate for male attention, doing what one source describes as “the typical right-wing female thing where all these men will kind of pat you on your head for saying the edgy thing.” Maybe we like being the “rare self-aware member of the female sex”—a strange quote to include in a piece implying that women who walked away from the right are awake and enlightened, the rest of us still under its spell.
But are young women joining because they have been misled? Are they doing it for male approval, for the “aesthetic”? Some, I’m sure. But I also think there are legitimate reasons for us to be drawn to conservatism, deeper moral reasons.
One is that young women are unhappy. The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham is mentioned in the piece for daring to agree with Scott Yenor that young women are “medicated, miserable, and quarrelsome.” But, well, women aren’t doing well; our dissatisfaction is real. Of course some oversimplify the reasons why, but we are anxious, we are having a hard time. We are missing out on meaningful human experiences, like getting married and having children. We do feel hopeless about the future. Maybe that’s why young women are defecting to the right, away from the excesses of liberalism. Maybe they are searching for something more.
Maybe they even like conservative men. The piece caricatures men on the right, reducing them to two types: “Among young MAGA men, there ceased to be a huge difference between self-understood trads—Christians who tend to (patronizingly) venerate women’s special contributions to family and religious life—and rageful incels, who see women as conspirators in a plot to deprive them of sex and status.” Normal conservative men—“the good husbands and self-understood nice guys”—are mentioned only briefly by one source, before being condemned for refusing to “police the vanguard.” Adler-Bell concludes that the New Right’s “approach to women is a pincer movement: On one side are reactionary traditionalists attempting to reestablish women’s abject dependence on men and marriage; on the other are champions of male sexual license and domination, encouraging young men to see women as subhuman playthings.”
But this has not been my experience. A few years ago, I somehow found myself around young Christians and conservatives, and for the first time in my life felt that I encountered gentlemen, chivalry. One anonymous woman in the article says that these men now see women as “objects you can use at will.” But I always felt this to be true of liberal, secular culture: We are all objects; there is no shared morality. Then I met conservative men who cared about something beyond themselves, who had a framework to follow, who argued so passionately against porn and hookup culture and things that I felt hurt women. Men who believed in commitment, who wanted constraints on themselves. Men who took family seriously, took themselves seriously. Men who were raised as atheists but started going to church and trying to do what’s right, with basically zero encouragement and all the temptation in the world pulling them the other way. I found this impressive, incredible. And I can’t square it with the article’s insistence that “male licentiousness, violence, and domination are not only acceptable but valorized” on the right, when it’s so often the opposite.
Ultimately, I think the problem here is the internet. The confusion is between conservative people and conservative influencers, who are dispositionally very different. There are conservative influencers who say extreme things for clicks, who care only about conserving their subscriber count, whose view of men and women seems entirely formed by X. Some are hostile, absolutely. But the problem is not conservatism; it’s that some people are angry and bitter. They are hurt and unhappy themselves, and are rewarded and indulged online. There are angry men who blame women for everything, just as there are angry women who blame men for everything. I’m very interested in a conversation about how the internet warps the way we think, how online ideologies map badly onto reality, and the perverse incentives of political influencers. But I’m not interested in an argument implying that all conservative women have been misled, and all conservative men are misogynistic. I’m bored by it, and the irony is: If you malign every young woman drawn to conservatism, if you dismiss her as brainwashed or a “pick me” girl, you push her toward the extreme you are afraid of. If the mainstream media won’t take her seriously, if nobody will entertain her thoughts and questions, then she can’t talk openly anywhere but online—where the incentives are warped, where there is so little complexity and so much contempt for the opposite sex.
Cruel men exist, and they will use all kinds of words and ideologies to justify their cruelty. But decent and loving and dignified conservative men exist too—as do thoughtful and intelligent conservative women—and we can’t have worthwhile conversations about any of this unless we acknowledge that. No movement is beyond criticism, but we can’t be honest if we write off every conservative woman as naive and every conservative man as a misogynist. I feel for those women who had bad experiences, but that doesn’t mean what they were looking for wasn’t real, wasn’t worth wanting. If the New Right means a generation holding themselves to higher standards, pulling themselves out of a world of hedonism and nihilism and nothingness, my instinct tells me many more young women will want to join. And we’ll have to start asking why.
