The Right Has Forgotten Feeling
Young women need refuge, not ridicule
Most young women I know think of Christianity as controlling and patriarchal, if they think of it at all. They see conservatism as outdated and oppressive. For the first time in history, young women are now less religious than young men, and less likely to attend church. Many are moving far to the political left, much more so than previous generations of women.
I think I know why. The right has forgotten feeling.
When I listen to conservative commentators today—columnists, podcasters, media personalities, some older than I am but many my own age—I notice an overreliance on intellect and argument, on numbers and logic. Charts on pornography use; statistics on loneliness; facts about birth rates. But the young women I’m talking about don’t care about your statistics on divorce. I know I wouldn’t have. They don’t feel anything from your graphs on fertility rates. What they care about is the pain of their own families falling apart. They know how they feel, and they are hurting. I knew nothing about Burkean philosophy or social conservatism, but I knew that feeling of loss, knew it intimately. Dry lectures about social decline do not cut through. Describing feelings of hurt and homesickness might.
When I go to religious and conservative conferences, I find little effort to reach girls and young women or attract anyone on the outside. Speaker after speaker recites ontological arguments and academic jargon, losing anyone without a philosophy Ph.D., caring only about impressing an audience who are already convinced. Often it feels like an attempt to close religion off from outsiders, to seal it off, not to open up hearts. I sat at a conference recently listening to an older man lecture about my generation’s neglect of our “moral duty” to have children. Rows of suited men nodded along. I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give words to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.
Besides forgetting how to speak about feelings, the right has forgotten how to listen. Christians wonder why young women aren’t going to church, and conservatives ask where all the good women have gone, but I don’t see much listening. Not sincerely. Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere. Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it? And the cruelty is that this caricature of the modern woman—this callous, calculated, emotionally detached “girlboss”—seems to me very often a defence mechanism, a heart hardened to cope with how cold the world is.
Listen to young women long enough, you will often hear pain. They might be brave enough to ask you: Do you know how it feels? How it feels to hold on to hopes of love and loyalty in a world of Tinder and hook-ups? How it feels to be reserved and conservative in a world that punishes that, makes you feel pathetic and frigid and childlike? To try to feel beautiful, even just enough, in a world of endless edited Instagram influencers, where hypersexuality feels like the only way to be seen, where humility feels like invisibility? Where if you aren’t sexual straight away you can’t expect him to stay—why would he, with so many other options? The agony of knowing that pretty much every man you fall for has been raised on and is addicted to online porn and watches it behind your back because you can never be enough? The humiliation? How it feels to dream of romance, only to grow up and find it dead? That disappointment?
I can’t begin to tell you…
This is an excerpt from my new essay, published today in First Things. You can read the rest here, or in the upcoming May 2025 magazine issue.
Freya, you say 'The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room.'
This is one of the biggest problems - polarisation and echo-chambering.
Hardly anyone follows people they don't agree with.
The men you are writing about won't read this.
The girls won't hear or read the words of those men.
I haven't yet worked out how to solve this, but I think this is one of the problems we must solve before our world falls apart completely.
It doesn't just affect your audience, the girls.
It affects us all.
A great piece about the sterility of data that is, funnily enough, supported by data.
In 2007, a team of researchers — Deborah Small, Paul Slovic, and George Loewenstein — conducted a series of experiments on what moves people more: stories or statistics. The researchers gave each of the participants money to donate and presented them with two charity campaigns: one based on famine statistics in Africa and one based on the experience of a single starving girl named Rokia. Naturally, the participants donated much more to the girl than to the thousands of abstract entities, even though every one of them would've been suffering just as much.
I’ve known this for years, and yet I still instinctively fire off studies and statistics to convince people (as I did just now…)
This bias toward “facts over feelings” is also true of most male writers I know. When we’re told we should be more in tune with people's feelings, we instinctively retort that feelings can’t be trusted as well as hard data can. And this is often true. But I suspect it’s sometimes just another story we tell ourselves, in order to protect *our* feelings.
See, many of us men are emotionally inarticulate and tone-deaf, particularly with regards to women’s feelings. We find emotions disturbingly murky and mercurial — far beyond our comfort zone — so we take refuge in the calmness and concreteness of data, even when it’s not persuasive (or even rational!) to do so.
I don’t regard myself as a conservative, but I am an Ass-Burger, and ever since the left started cancelling people for not being able to “read the room”, I and many other Ass-Burgers who can’t read the room, most famously Elon, have become more sympathetic to conservatism, making the movement even more culturally autistic than it was before.
But the thing with this new, based, “facts don’t care about your feelings” conservatism is that it’s not actually emotionless; it just caters to emotions that men (and Ass-Burgers) feel comfortable with, like pride and outrage, while eschewing more “feminine” ones like grief and melancholy.
This is why I’m glad you’re offering a fresh approach. If rationality means anything, then it means succeeding, and that requires sympathy — the ability to understand what people are feeling, even if we can’t feel it ourselves. This is something I and many others need to improve at, and I’ll take your eloquent essay as a useful reminder.