The Women Joining The New Right
We have to start asking why
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…
This is an excerpt from my latest piece in First Things. You can read the rest here!
Congratulations Freya on First Things and another very well-written essay. Living in New York City as I do, I'm all too familiar with the biased slop that New York magazine calls "editorial." Thank you for again taking up the cause of balance and reason.
This one was a miss for me. The problem is "New Right" /= "Conservative." I absolutely believe that many women are finding a home in some sort of "conservatism." I've seen it just in the publishing world and I'm delighted by it. Your work on this stuff in particular has been excellent, as has Louise Perry's. But the "new right" is a very different beast from "conservatism." The new right is in many ways antithetical to any traditional understanding of "conservatism," I think, and is probably better understood as "progressive right wing."
The right wing progressives / new right are far more likely to be into techno transhumanist stuff (which is often tacitly deeply demeaning to human bodies and to most human persons) and also tend to be very into domination politics, which plays out in very predictable ways when it comes to gender.