10. What's Good for Women is Rarely "The Zeitgeist" and it's Definitely Not Endorsed by Billionaire Men

Feminism has changed the world because feminists are relentless and refuse to conform to male supremacist identities, roles, and relationships of power.

Photo by Leonardo Basso on Unsplash

This past two weeks, it's been even harder to focus enough to write here. Like so many, and despite positive signs and news, my anxieties are in overdrive. Social media, which I rely on for work, is a serious double-edged sword. On weekends, I try to minimize screen time and spend some time reading longer-form articles I’ve set aside. As a result, this past weekend, I happened to accidentally see two stories separated by roughly a month, side-by-side. The first was titled, “In Trump’s Washington, MAGA fashionistas lay claim to American hotness,” and the second, "MAGA and the Single Girl: What do the young women of the modern right want? It's complicated.”

Is it really tho? I imagine young conservative women want what most people do: belonging, validation, power, financial security, status, safety, not to be shamed for their beliefs. Some may also want some version of social justice, more likely than not, religiously informed. What they want is less complicated than what they have to do to go about getting it.

How about, for instance, wanting healthcare and deciding, a pivot point for many, to be a stay-at-home mother? Yesterday, The Supreme Court ruled against Planned Parenthood in a decision that allows South Carolina to cut off Medicaid funding for the nation’s largest provider of women’s healthcare. Patients on Medicaid will not be able to seek care, for any reason, at SC Planned Parenthood clinics. The ruling also has consequences for people in other states given that defunding Planned Parenthood, for all services, has been a long-time right-wing goal.

The second of the stories above is about an annual event, the Young Women's Leadership Summit, hosted by the influential right-wing youth group Turning Point USA. Three thousand plus teen age girls and young women attended this year, a tenth anniversary. The conference’s purpose is to promote a new, healthier, and more genuine womanhood that can only result from renewed commitment to traditional Christian beliefs, patriarchal family roles and ideals, Make America Great Again "wellness" culture, and a “new” vision of feminine modernity.

"Harness your tongue in a way that's biblical," explained Mrs. Erika Kirk, wife of Turning Point Founder Charlie Kirk, going on to advise attendees on sexual purity, and how to be godly, obedient, and tempered in their ambitions and life goals. Kirk himself was available to answer questions, which included explaining that college for women is a scam but a good place to pursue their "MRS degrees." This is unsurprising from a person who professionally explains that today’s feminism is "irreconcilable with any decent society and much more about hating men than respecting women."

The "MRS degree" joke was purposefully ironically sexist(still-sexist), but Kirk reeks of authenticity and is good at stripping away pretense. When he tells smart and ambitious young women that the easiest path for them is to embrace male-centered, patriarchal family-first dependence he means it from the heart. In exchange for pursuing independence and autonomy, they should feel no shame about a “softer” life and opt out of feminism’s “toxic” and exhausting ideals. That being a stay-at-home wife is stressful, exhausting, and generates disparate demonstrable risks for women, that men are happier and healthier married rarely becomes a viral moment here.

The argument is premised on the assertion that we live in post-feminist world, which, in this context doesn’t mean tied up in neoliberal logics, but that the objectives of feminism have been achieved. After all, while girls and women should go to school and want to work this equality bullshit has gone too far. Sure, there are women CEOs, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and women are doing better than men educationally. But they’re not happier, just angry and bitter and exhausted. Plus, feminism is actively discriminating against boys and men.

This rhetoric simultaneously uses feminism’s successes as proof of its excesses, and refocuses attention on individual choices and away from systemic solutions. Masculinity, social policy, political resources, and men’s roles in reducing women’s exhaustion aren’t typically featured in these discussions. In fact, there are few alternatives offered to women making sacrifices that men aren’t being asked to make. Instead, what people get is self-care, anti-feminist scaremongering, and pro-natalist fertility panic. When a writer for The Cut, a mother with a young child who reasonably admitted that “doing it all” is impossible for women, asked a Youth Leadership Summit attendee about “instituting paid family leave, state-subsidized daycare, and universal basic income for mothers” a 30-year-old mom of two, replied, “I think that sounds a little crazy. That sounds a little communist to me.”

Women are exhausted and stressed and men are struggling to adapting to a world in which women are educated, free, and have choices, but the remedies offered by the right continue to just double down on the causes of these problems, not strive to find innovative systemic solutions or build new ways of living that are egalitarian, pluralistic, and sustainable for the planet.

More sexy and cool, less substance and care!

The Youth Summit and other similar gatherings feature two particular themes: one, target audience's’ ideas are no longer embarrassing and problematic to express, and, two, conservatives have won and in the popular mainstream again. Being "the cool kids" seems really important to this crowd, as is correcting a “sick” culture led astray by feminists and progressives. The women at the Summit, for instance, are "girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together," unlike "TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light."

Similar sentiments surfaced in an earlier New York Times article about Evie, a magazine opposed to “modern feminism” that claims to garner 100m views per month. In its pages, feminism is a self-loathing anti-family, anti-male movement dedicated to contempt for women who decide on conventional gender roles. This “conservative Cosmo” validates those women and is designed to be the go-to source for all things feminine and maternal. The article highlights MAGA enthusiasm for publication, citing and quoting the founders’ backers and biggest fans, who include Peter Theil and Steve.

Asking these men about women’s well-being and freedom is like asking a hedge fund manager advice on building mutual aid societies. Even on the most surface level, it feels as though if your biggest supporters are savvy iniquitous reprobates who debate women’s right to vote, trade in grotesque racism and misogyny, hang with people who think feminists need rape, and believe that “depressed, suicidal, anxious, and lonely” single women are one of civilization’s biggest issues, you might want to reevaluate your ideas of what’s good for women. But no. Prairie party on."Less Prozac, more protein!" "Less burnout, more babies! Less feminism, more femininity!" is the path to their future.

At April's "America Is Hot Again" festivities the editor-in-chief of another right-wing lifestyle mag, the Conservateur, (this one described as "Vogue meets National Review,") celebrated the cruelty-is-our-vibe movement’s “objectively beautiful lifestyle” and “objectively superior worldview.” It’s difficult not to see these celebrations of femininity as same old pick-me-cool-girlism — "I'm not like those other girls!" "I'm not high-maintenance and unhinged." "Men like me because I'm pretty and chill," — turned into political advantage. A lot of symbolism, energy, and money is going into the aesthetics and promotion of the idea that MAGA is saving women from feminist oppression (an actual oxymoron), making them triumphant it girl underdogs.

"People used to look at us as outcasts, but now we're leading the culture moment," said Janiyah Thomas, 27, who served as Trump's Black media director during the 2024 campaign. "It's cool to be MAGA now." “It’s never been hotter to be a conservative,” explained another.

"We are,” as one person put it, “the zeitgeist now!" And she’s right. They are.

Owning “the zeitgeist” isn’t the mic-drop conservatives think it is

Zeitgeists, dominant cultural climates, can be progressive or regressive. Being “of the moment” isn’t the same, however, as being personally, intellectually, or ethically correct. Being zeitgeisty doesn't make a movement or a person inherently right, good, or just. It imparts no inherent moral value or ethical validation, despite strong suggestions in today’s right-wing claims.

Zeitgeists are mirrors, not moral compasses. Slavery, segregation, colonialism, Nazism, eugenics, witch-burning, witch trials, Christian nationalism, and patriarchal backlash, for instance, were all zeitgeists. Nor are zeitgeists necessarily organic. In this case, corporate power, media algorithms, billionaire-funded think tanks, and techno political ecosystems were all powerfully leveraged to engineer this moment.

The real zeitgeist today isn’t women’s empowerment through momming, fashion-forward, clean living self-care, and the love of a good man. It’s the deeply necropolitical, anti-feminist excess of consolidating authoritarian power and right-wing women are the pretty face of this very hard power grab. Anti-feminism is exponentially increasing in popularity among Gen Z and Millennials, especially among men. Today, more than 50% of Gen Z and Millennial men, whose ideas are growing more gender restrictive and self-harming, agree with this assessment. Their economic anxieties, loneliness, dating woes and emotional dysfunctions are not due to technical acceleration, capitalism, oligarchs, billionaire economics, unhinged libertarian beliefs, toxic individualism, depleting masculine ideals, wealth inequality or neoliberal excesses. They’re due to women’s growing equality.

Women at the conference are more likely than liberal women to feel the same way, but they are also clearly thinking about the inherent conflicts tied to being told they should prioritize baby making and nesting and cede decision making power to their husbands. “I think it’s interesting that a bunch of highly educated career women are going up onstage telling other women to stay at home to raise children,” shared one 24-year-old Youth Summit attendee. “You will fall somewhere between those two poles, of stay-at-home motherhood and pursuing a career, you can build a life that is uniquely yours,” explained a popular You Tuber, describing…feminism.

Conservatives can’t entirely ignore past efforts to address gender inequality, however, and so instead of rejecting feminism outright, they engage in selective disparagements. They might say, as Kirk does, that Waves 1 and 2 were just and necessary, Wave 3 was “complete garbage,” which he identifies as today’s feminism is bad for American women and menacing to men and society, a justification for mobilizing men via “self-defense,” aka the Manosphere.

Contrary to media’s unbalanced coverage, most young women are progressive and pissed off for good reason

Most genuinely transformative movements—abolition, suffrage, civil rights, feminist liberation, LGBTQ rights—rarely are and rarely become dominant. Instead, they work through dedicated, diverse minorities and, often, intergenerational and transnational support sustained despite backlash, criminalization, violence, and…zeitgeists. Justice, in fact, almost always precedes zeitgeists, not the other way around.

A conservative zeitgeist led by young women is a zeitgeist only insofar as older men dominate your understanding of the culture and the world, exhibit A:

Source: The Financial Times

Mainstream media’s coverage of the prairie dress to putsch party pipeline might suggest otherwise, but women’s leftward turn continues to steadily grow. I have yet, however, to see, for instance, long-form articles about Feminist Generation, an under-35 intersectional feminist movement dedicated to shutting down MAGA. Worldwide, progressive women are the first bulwark against strong men authoritarian rule. They are far more likely to be fighting for their own and others’ rights, the climate and environment, LGBTQ rights, reproductive health and bodily autonomy, and democracy. These young women are also honing their skills, becoming leaders, pursuing their professional ambitions, dressing as they please, loving who they want, and, even if justifiably anxious and angry about the state of the world, laughing as loudly as they want. The fact that Trump made gains among Gen Z women in 2024 doesn’t negate this reality; it highlights the stakes, a persistent discomfort with women as executive leaders, backlash, and the powerful defensive machinery working to suppress the influence of the demographic most capable of dismantling it.

The perpetual paradox: feminism always enables anti-feminism

Of course, the absurdity of right-wing women’s movements, more than ever, is that educated, independent thinking anti-feminists are paradoxes made possible by feminism.

Today, as was the case in the past, the women questioning women’s liberation do so as a lever of white supremacy, using conventional white femininity to promote racist, anti-feminist agendas. But, they have to organize, raise money, hold conferences, speak in public, start new media, run national campaigns, lobby politicians, be politicians, and influence culture and law—all possible thanks to the groundwork laid by radical feminists, womanists, lesbians, trans and queer activists, and civil rights organizers, most of whom they would, today, mock, criminalize, and silence. The women's sports they desperately defend against trans women? The result of Title IX, a revolutionary law stemming from broad-based feminist activism, is now under threat from its own party. Choices related to work, marital, and sexual autonomy are all possible because ugly, cackling, loud feminists decentered men and refused oppressive social orders.

"Does she look oppressed?“ holds a special rhetorical place in the heart of today’s conservatives, mainly men who proudly wear women – typically smart, self-confident, well-educated, and, ideally, hot — like human shields. This approach only works, however, if you work within the parameters of separate sphere ideology, which limits women and their power to private and domestic spaces while promoting and reserving public life and power for men. This assumption means the right can legitimize women’s leadership, mobilize grassroots efforts, and shape national policy all while reinforcing the very identities, beliefs, and ideology that contains women’s primary power in the home.

Celebrating the Destruction of Safety Nets

"Motherhood is my resistance” swag doesn’t change the fact that this movement is dedicated to policies that ensure people and their families and communities are and will suffer and die unnecessarily, particularly women and families. Top gal status goes hand-in-hand with the current administration’s dismantling of the already minimal infrastructure helping and protecting women who are working class, pregnant, immigrants, disabled, or caring for people with disabilities.

The administration promoting traditional femininity is eliminating the programs that make traditional gender arrangements possible and survivable. From the perspective of women prioritizing men’s wage-earning, which most cannot do today, the math is simple. By definition, the events and marital ideals described above are heavily calibrated to the upper-middle-class, which also means primarily white families. Working-class and middle-class families need two incomes to support themselves, and single mothers can't choose financial dependence, even if they want it.

Death, disability, divorce, or spousal abandonment quickly put women in precarious and vulnerable positions. Most women, but particularly working-class mothers, are one accident, one medical emergency, one economic downturn, or one bad marriage away from needing exactly the programs their anti-feminist "personal choice" movement is destroying with malice. A short and not remotely comprehensive list:

Opposition to paid family leave policies. Rollbacks on Title IX protections affecting women in education. Cuts to education funding impacting programs for children and families. Reduction in support for childcare programs. Anti-immigrant policies affecting immigrant women and families. Elimination of DEI programs that provide opportunities and workplace protections. Reduction in funding for disability services and protections. Cuts to social services that support low-income families. Policies promoting traditional gender roles without supporting infrastructure. Restrictions on abortion access and reproductive rights. Reductions in research funding on women's health issues. Reductions in funding for Planned Parenthood and reproductive health services. Eliminations or reductions of protections for pregnant workers. Cuts to tribal healthcare funding and sovereignty protections. Elimination of language access services. Rollbacks of fair housing protections. Reduction in mental health funding. Cuts to food assistance programs (SNAP, WIC). Elimination of transgender healthcare protections. Reduction in domestic violence and rape crisis shelter funding. Cuts to elder care services. Rollbacks of criminal justice reforms. Elimination of environmental justice protections. Cuts to rural healthcare infrastructure. All of this before the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the millions of people who will become uninsured if proposed changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care are passed.

This right-wing agenda created the reality in which Adriana Smith was turned into an incubator by the state, where women are bleeding out in parking lots and bathrooms, being surveilled by the government, and criminalized for the outcomes of their pregnancies. Where children are raped and doctors are punished for providing them with care, where America’s already deplorably high rates of racialized maternal mortality are increasing, transpeople are being denied the right to exist, and families and communities are being terrorized by ICE. It has created a Supreme Court intent on giving states the right to dismantle civil rights and retrench “local decision-making” about how women and minorities should live.

When conservative girls and young women are encouraged to prioritize marriage and motherhood, they're essentially being told to gamble, placing a high-risk bet their marriages will last, their families won't include people with disabilities, their husbands won't become unemployed or incapacitated, that they won't be abused, have to take care of sick children or aging parents, or themselves need support later in life. Today, they’re celebrating their imposing these risks on us all.

The good news is that backlash always levels up

Backlash is always demoralizing, feels awful, and can be genuinely frightening and destructive, but it also almost always levels up. Conservatives even have to speak feminism to attack feminism. They have to acknowledge systemic racism to deny its relevance. They have to concede queerness and transness exist to create laws to say they don't. To be culturally relevant and politically effective, reactionary movements are forced to adopt the language, symbols, framing, and even some superficial values of the very movements oppose and hope to end. "As a woman," "as a mother," "as a Black person," or "as a Hispanic person..." feels like a conservative mic-drop, but even this use of authentic lived experience was developed by feminists, womanists, and queer theorists to reveal and challenge power.

Feminist imaginations are our strength

What’s good for women rarely garners mainstream support in supremacist patriarchal societies. Feminism revolutionizes the world not because it is popular but because feminists are relentless and have a high sensitivity to social injustice. Marginality is our strength

Our movements are defined by radical visions and stubborn refusals. By refusal, I don't mean negative retreats but strategically and consciously ignoring persistent demands that we invest in identities, roles, relationships, values, and ideals that enable supremacists and supremacy to thrive. This refusal operates on many levels: material (refusing unpaid emotional labor, motherhood as destiny, compulsory femininity, gendered violence); epistemic (refusing patriarchal knowledge systems that render women, queer, trans, disabled, and racialized people invisible or irrational); and temporal (refusing speed, limitlessness, growth, and efficiency as necessary, superior, moral imperatives, especially when they destroy care, bodies, and ecosystems). Refusal is how we move the center without ever becoming it. It's how we strive to change the nature of power without acceding to power's terms. Is it exhausting? Completely exhausting. Is it vital? Nonnegotiably.

We work in perpetual resistance to mainstream norms and compromises and we know that striving for justice involves living on cultural borderlands, centering the margins, and weathering discomfort, conflict, and complexity. It takes being the perpetual glitch. This means constantly redefining ourselves and being deeply suspicious of people who seek power over others.

This doesn't mean we don't celebrate victories or that our goals never become mainstream, because they do. Women vote (a right now openly debated on the right) and go to school (where their success has always been viewed as damaging to boys and men). Intimate violence has a name, and rape is a crime (although our justice system is practically an incentive to abusers and rapists rather than a deterrent). We work for pay (even though women's work remains stigmatized and wage gaps are growing) and run for office (even if we're turned into objects of pornographic violence as a cost). None of the obstacles we still face mean failure, but rather, are evidence of how threatening having a feminist imagination can be.

Backlash galvanizes progressive movements, even as it seeks to undo and deplete them. It sharpens our thinking, our language, our bridge-building, our intentions, and our desires. We may experience grief, exhaustion, and setbacks, but we rebound, radicalize, and adapt. When we do, we destabilize politics by altering the terms of debate and driving change. This is how thoroughly unpopular, politically marginalized movements led by feminists continue to shape modern life, from how families are formed and cared for, to laws, language, media, labor norms, free speech, technology, education, religious life, and how our culture has to think and talk about freedom, autonomy, love, care, and power.

Mainstream media will keep treating these right wing women’s events, essentially death cult recruitment drives, with kid gloves, providing superficial coverage of vapid celebrations of willing submission. However, “neutral” depictions of feminine dependence as "empowerment", domesticity as "liberation," and intimate inequality as “edgy” just serve to mask the powerful ideological foundations of white male supremacy at their core.

I'm fairly certain, and probably too smug about the fact, that the only way conservatives will come to understand what intersectional feminism means is when they personally suffer. No one will be left untouched by the devastation of what typically reviled social justice activists made possible for everyone today. I find no joy in the suffering to come. For my own purposes and energy preservation, I've decided that the most effective way to further people’s liberation and to build life-affirming worldviews is to keep working steadily, build solidarity, and protect and invest in relationships that reflect feminist values. I can do this in a cute dress, although, I admit, I do cut my own hair, with seriously dubious results.

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The ideas I’ve written about here part of my upcoming book, All We Want is Everything, out in November. If your found them useful and of further interest, please check it out. Preorders really help authors and are much appreciated!