7. From Prairie Dress to Putsch: Traditional Femininity is Right-Wing Infrastructure

Young women's beliefs and ideologies aren't merely the next cultural battleground—they are the stakes themselves. They are our political terrain.

Photo by Laura Ohlman on Unsplash

While media is finally fully parsing the Manosphere's radicalization of young men, we remain dangerously resistant to thinking proactively about the ways girls and women are being lured into regressive ideologies through seemingly benign content. In both instances, gendered content is a vulnerability that we need to understand and address.

A sparkly and confident woman on your feed telling you or your mother, daughter, sister, or friend to rest, bake, and develop a healthy lifestyle might not look like a political operative spouting fascist rhetoric, but content like this – beauty, health, self-care, relationships improvement focused – is increasing a Trojan Horse, effectively being used to recruit women, especially girls and young women, into right-wing beliefs and communities.

The algorithmic journey is seamless: an innocent video about organic skincare leads to a "soft life" reel, which leads to content promoting traditional femininity as the solution to modern exhaustion. The message intensifies subtly: modesty equals safety, a man equals security, and submission equals rest and virtue. Beauty is power, a responsibility, and a reward. Traditional gender norms and femininity are not only nothing to be ashamed of but good for you. This content turns obedience into relief and equality into depleting and unnecessary work. "Aren't you tired?" Worse still, what might, for example, like a fun contouring reel is coded with Christian purity culture ideals, a default ideological bridge to more extreme conservative ideologies. Ideologies that frequently resonate with people’s desires to be authentic, to find their true selves.

Mapping the "Womansphere" or “Femosphere”

First, here’s a smattering of some of the diverse networks that make up the “Womansphere” and/or “Femosphere”:

• Tradwife Culture: Aestheticized imagery rebranding women's submission as peaceful, loving, and spiritually enriching. Prairie dresses and pinafores are here illiberal and anti-feminist symbols disguised as fashion and lifestyle choices. Restrictive gender norms and relationships for women are as retrograde as you can get, but tradwifery as a product has been taken to new heights social media influencers using social media and marketing to produce social clout and economic profits.

• Tradwife Adjacent Modesty/Purity Content: From hijabi influencers to Mormon momfluencers to cutechick NYC tradcaths, all converge on notions of purity and submission as moral goods and also about love.

• Clean Girl/Healthy Living/Wellness Culture: Dewy skincare and wellness trends that slide effortlessly into European feminine superiority ideals, purity fixations, and unattainable physical standards. These communities are, however, can also often be first stop on an increasingly extremist crunchy to alt right path, or what some call granola Nazism.

• Soft Life Movement: What began as legitimate resistance to capitalist exploitation among Nigerian women has been co-opted into infantilizing "baby girl" culture, far removed from, for instance, Audre Lorde’s elaboration of liberatory self-care.

• Dark Femme Energy: Often framed in the language of new-age spirituality, Dark Femme spaces posit “women’s energy” as a source of power. In this arena, women are encouraged to seek out aspects of femininity that have been reviled, including sexual desire, independence, assertiveness. This is the gothy, witchy, slightly rapacious, and often humorous mirror image of pink, pouty tradwife life.

• Sugar Babies: Sugar baby cultures and sites that promote transactional intimacy. Student seeking to pay tuition, for instance, are a large portion of people in these communities. Sugar baby narratives, even those focused on mutual benefits, often reconfigure structural inequalities as individual empowerment. This includes gendered financial precarity, power differentials that come with age disparities, and the self-commodification that comes with neoliberalism.

• Female Dating Strategy (FDS): Women adopting transactional approaches to relationships, using terms like “low value” and "high-value” men and women to vet men and select the most desirable. “Ruthlessly evaluate men”, “make him invest before sex” and “don’t split the bill” are some suggested guidelines. Like red-pillers of the Manosphere, this community work within a pretty strict framework of binary biological determinism.

• Pink Pillers: FDS women are sometimes aligned with pink-pillers, women who acknowledge systemic inequalities and approach dating and relationships based on this understanding. This community is less likely to internalize critiques and more likely to identify men (and liberal feminism) as sources of harm. They understand patriarchal norms and encourage women to actively strategize to protect themselves and personally gain from relationships with men. Optimizing looks and treating beauty standards as strategic tools are ways to gain advantages in romantic and social hierarchies.

• Femcels: communities of involuntarily celibate women. They struggle with sexual frustration and tend to discuss gender power dynamics. Unlike men incels, women don’t coalesce around hatred of men but rather tend to direct women’s sadness and despair inward. Actual factual fact: Incel was never meant to mean "involuntarily celebrate angry men who hate women." The term was coined by a Canadian woman in the 1990s to describe people of all genders, including herself, as a way to talk about loneliness and involuntary celibacy. She didn’t call it “femcel” because she was a woman. That is male supremacist cultural hijacking, turning a neutral term into one that excludes women, but whatever. Women involuntary celibates believe they won’t find romantic or sexual partners because they fail to meet conventional beauty standards. Like Manosphere incel groups these spaces are characterized by pessimism, depression, fatalism, and heteronihilism.

• Sleek, smart, trendy conservative women’s media. A rapidly growing group (of, needless to say, impeccably groomed and traditionally attractive and young) women are making names for themselves in a heavily male-dominated right-wing media universe. They’re launching high visibility, well-funded, and well-trafficked podcasts, magazines, and lifestyle and ‘wellness’ platforms. Some of this media is geared towards "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) agendas fueled by mothers. Many, however, supported by strategic incubators, are increasing about reclaiming cool for conservatives. Part of this reclaiming is touting “conservative feminism,” (aka white feminism, an oxymoron) that isolates gender oppression from other forms of oppression, obscuring the complex interactions between forms of oppression. I feel as though it should be enough to say that Steve Bannon being a massive fan and Peter Thiel funding these efforts to not only Make America Healthy but Hot Again are red flags the size of Texas.

(The good news is that, despite all of this and despite the overall and frankly startling dominance of right-wing media in general, left-leaning content appears to be growing, at least on some platforms, at a faster pace than right-leaning. A first step.)

Divergent Expressions, Shared Foundations

Even though these sprawling groups diverge wildly in their expression and content, they share certain grounding beliefs and practices:

1. Using the aesthetics and the language of feminist choice to describe personal decisions being made within patriarchal structures and their economic constraints.

2. Assuming binary, oppositional, zero-sum gender norms and biological essentialism as the basis for identity, relationships, behaviors, and worldview. This is true even when expressed in ways that are “modern” but manage to confirm traditional and transactional ideals.

4. Promoting racialized beauty standards that, in Western contexts, privilege European standards that often then serve as disciplinary mechanisms and ableist propaganda.

5. Advancing reproductive politics aligned with pro-natalist white nationalist agendas that, online, commodify patriarchal social orders, anti-globalism, xenophobia, and racial and ethnic supremacy.

Women’s seemingly apolitical acceptance of gender essentialism or pursuit of traditional beauty and womanhood serve an essential political function: normalizing gender hierarchies that underpin broader systems of conformity, discipline, and authoritarian control.

By assuming the “naturalness” of gender, much of the content outlined above exists as “neutral,” meaning that it isn’t explicitly associated with today’s right wing “anti-gender” movements. It is hard to see, for example, how trying to feed your family healthy foods can be related to opposing women’s autonomy, LGBTQ rights, trans existence, racial justice, and diversity and inclusion.

However, in beliefs and behaviors, many of these communities are engaged in language, behaviors, and structures of thought that tacitly affirm the foundational assumptions and objectives, for instance, of Project 2025, the comprehensive policy blueprint for today’s reshaping of American governance. This reshaping is squarely based on reinstating traditional gender identities and family structures, limiting reproductive rights, and promoting a white male supremacist vision of society. Significant subsets of the groups and communities listed above, for instance, exist within overlapping and expansive circles of Evangelical Christian and Catholic cultures that are, today, backed by a powerful cohort of (confused,) reactionary, Silicon Valley billionaires.

Across domains, well-lit, polished, charismatic influencers are able to blend personal charm, specific aesthetics, and compelling parasocial bonds to build communities and trust and to introduce right-wing ideas subtly. To sell merch proclaiming that you, too, can and should be too pretty for a job. In consuming slippery slope content without a critical media lens, audiences are easily primed by a whole host of reactionary and anti-progressive beliefs.

The prairie dress to putsch pipeline doesn’t offer anyone liberation just conformity and submission.

There are compelling reasons why women and girls are drawn to anti-feminist, patriarchal frameworks and reactionary thinking, says feminist theorist Dr Sophie Lewis, whose recent excellent book, Enemy Feminisms, explores historical intra-feminist frictions, conflicts, and unlikely alliances. “There’s an actual offer, an actual promise that should not be sniffed at,” she explains. Namely, liberal feminism’s promise of women having it all has resulted in women being “saddled with both productive and reproductive labor,” a situation, ask virtually any woman, that is both exhausting and unsustainable.

The traditional femininity and gender essentialism at the heart of these cultures is not only a matter of personal belief or choice. They are essential right-wing infrastructure.

A Seductive Transfer of Blame

As a whole, a feminized Manosphere universe is easily used to transfer blame and accountability away from the supremacist systems, ideology, and violence causing harm and chaos and onto women’s failures, anger, and dangerous ambition, onto feminism’s failures. Just as the Manosphere tells boys and men, "You're victims of feminism," these communities tell women, "Feminism lied to you; you’re victims too.”

The messaging is potent: You were promised power but got dating apps, exploitation, and exhaustion instead. You were told to go to work and are depleted beyond understanding; whose fault is that? "What you're experiencing isn't because of capitalist excess, patriarchal institutions, or white supremacist beauty norms. It’s feminism and woke bullshit.

"There's an actual promise that shouldn't be sniffed at,” says Lewis. Liberal feminism promised women could "have it all" but left them "saddled with both productive and reproductive labor,"—an unsustainable burden.

Radicalization works because reactionary actors acknowledge pain, provide community, and misdiagnose sources of and solutions to that pain. Just like the Manosphere and a willing media have turned a male loneliness crisis into a profit center for misogyny, the Femosphere/Womansphere can be maliciously leveraged to turn girls and women’s anxieties, anger, and alienation into a political funnel for pouty, pink, baby-dolled fascists.

Economic Stakes Here Dwarf those of Manosphere Recruitment

One of the more concerning aspects of all of this is that the economic stakes of women's radicalization dwarf men’s. Unlike an initially bootstrapped Manosphere, the so “womanosphere” operates within a vastly more profitable economic system. Multi-billion-dollar industries (from the $646 billion beauty market to the $900 billion wedding industry to the $45 billion fertility sector and $532 billion self-care industry) have direct financial stakes in reinforcing traditional femininity and gender norms. This convergence of capitalism and reactionary politics means that this particular form of femininity is a tried-and-true product that has, still, immense profit opportunities. This is a facilitating context that was not as relevant to the development of the Manosphere as a right-wing engine.

Unlike the Manosphere, Women’s Radicalism Can be Highly Positive

Lastly, unlike boys and men’s seduction into anti-feminist, anti-progressive Manosphere, much of the online content targeting women leverages positive feelings, making it much harder to recognize and confront. Many of the spaces above build community through affirmation and rewards that validate and strengthen women’s identities and relationships, that encourage genuinely healthier habits and living. Girls and women who embrace conventional ideas about gender and femininity get immediate rewards through likes, shares, comments, and community acceptance but, in many cases, also through feeling better.

Feminine aesthetics — hygge, softer colors, beautiful images and sentiments, heathy foods, harmonious design — generate full, sensory experiences that feel good, safe, and comforting, reinforcing the idea that traditional roles offer sisterhood, security, and peacefulness in a chaotic world. Because women’s participation is often framed as self-care and improvement, conservative ideological foundations feel personally empowering and individually enriching, not divisive and destructive.

By comparison, the Manosphere has worked largely through fear, anger, resentment, competition, grievance frameworks. Boys and men are more likely to be recruited by way of anxiety, loneliness, loss, and displacement. Rather than receiving affirmation for existing masculine traits, they're told their natural masculinity has been suppressed by feminism and progressive politics. Their emotional starting point is isolation and rejection ("no one understands what men face today"), progresses through anger ("feminism has destroyed your rights and birthright to dominance"), and culminates in a promise of restored control, not belonging.

The Manopshere is propelled by fear of emasculation whereas in English we don’t even have a word for women that correlates to emasculation. (If you know one, please share it in comments.) Emasculation looms so large because masculinity is precarious, an earned status that can be denied, lost, or taken away. Femininity on the other hand isn’t thought of as earned but perpetually inherent, treated more as an intrinsic quality that can be either enhanced or inadequately performed, but never "lost" or “gained” in the same way. Within these parameters, women strive to improve themselves, endlessly.

"Be your best self" = "Stay in your lane."

These fundamental differences make the right-wing potential for women particularly insidious. Girls and women aren't being recruited into hate—they're being recruited into loving, "natural," and traditional roles that reinforce hierarchical structures in systems that are oppressive in multi-dimensional ways. While the Manosphere's dehumanizing language raises red flags, the Womansphere's relational norms and aesthetic pleasures—its seemingly apolitical self-improvement content—fly under most radars.

Across these spaces, "be your best self" subtly shifts into "stay in your lane.” Stop trying so hard, step back, nest, baby-make. This lane—with its rigid borders and rules—serves anti-democratic supremacist movements everywhere, not in the least by specifically excluding genuine feminism, which teaches girls not to comply by default, to value themselves highly, to love freely, and to recognize and reject, even mock, disciplinary tactics.

The persistent rejection in many of these spaces of intersectional, anti-racist, ant-colonial feminism becomes a gateway for other anti-progressive forces.

What's Really at Stake

Reactionary, fascist movements need women who will not only dedicate themselves to men and biological reproduction but to cultural reproduction. Supremacist regimes don't just need women as quiet baby-makers but as active enforcers transmitting their values across generations.

Gender essentialism and traditional femininity are not only matters of personal choice. They are right-wing infrastructure. Without them, racial, sexual, and caste hierarchies are very hard, in fact, impossible to sustain. Christian dominionism can’t exist if women reject male headship as divinely ordained. White supremacy crumbles if women don’t embrace purity culture, white supremacist beauty ideals, and patriarchal gender frameworks. Ethnonationalist movements can’t succeed if women stop prioritizing traditional patriarchal families over solidarity across differences.

This infrastructure, first and foremost, requires girls and young women to embody specific beliefs and ideals. Today, however, young white, educated American women, for example, are radically progressive compared to their grandparents, parents, and brothers. Their much greater, compared to male peers, rejection of traditional femininity and heterosexually represents a potential structural rupture in how patriarchal power perpetuates itself. Their independent political identities put the intergenerational transfer of white male patriarchal power at risk.

I realize that trusting white women to break with white patriarchy has never been a good idea, but, in fact, we have never had a society where so many are educated, financially independent, and personally, political motivated, so I will cling naively, at the very least, to curiosity about what this means.

Women who reject the male gaze, refuse marriage, keep their names, or forgo motherhood threaten supremacist power at every level. If you’ve ever wondered why conservative men seem singularly obsessed with “mouthy” women who are “disobedient,” “damaged” “girls,” children of privilege who should be disciplined and “spanked” look no further. The only “daddy issues" worth talking about are the feelings patriarchal men have because they’re unable to acknowledge women's autonomy outside of prescribed familial roles; are completely incapable of accepting that they don't, in fact, have authority over all women.

When men's control within families weakens, their public and political control also weakens. Reactionaries know this. It’s why they talk about Motherhood and Babies, why they are obsessed with controlling reproduction. Tradwives, “beautiful conservative women,” and other signs of compliance to gender hierarchies reflect women’s role in “the reproduction of tradition.” This role, feminine but not feminist, is the “lynchpin of Western Society.” This is why traditional femininity is being conscripted into authoritarian, anti-democratic projects globally. Reactionaries, ranging from truly weird techno-natalist to anti-diluvian religious movements, all agree that without it their movements cannot succeed.

Media Is About to Fuck Things Up Again

Media will inevitably frame what is going today online as some kind of organic and symmetrical gender warfare. "Womanosphere" will be positioned as the equal of "Manosphere," "femcels" as female equivalents of violent incels. We'll see think pieces suggesting both sides are equally toxic, leaving the underlying manipulation of attention and a male supremacist status quo untouched.

We will all be subjected to “war of the sexes” punditry that casually suggests an equivalence between these groups, forcing us to pretend that they are two structurally equivalent and opposed categories. Probs, we will get some Terribly Serious think pieces about how we live in a gender-balanced hellscape of equal and opposite power and grievance: girls vs. boys, anxiety versus loneliness, misandry vs. misogyny, women radicalized by hatred of men like women radicalized by hatred of women.

This is not just lazy journalism. It’s an ideological and political disaster. In other words, par for the media course.

What Can We Do?

There is no way, unless you stop using the internet entirely, to avoid exposure to these dynamics. Conversations about recognizing recruitment into reactionary spheres can seem futile or even silly, especially since these spaces often have genuine appeal and offer helpful and insightful information. Personally, I’ve concluded that the best approach is framing discussions broadly around media literacy:

• ·Talk about how stereotypes of all sorts facilitate political mis- and dis-information.

• Discuss the financial incentives and economic systems behind seemingly innocent content.

• Arm children with critical questions: "Who profits from this content? Who profits when I feel anxious or angry or inadequate?" "Does this content address the systemic reasons I have my problem or does just offer superficial and temporary relief?" "Does it expand or shrink my possibilities and understanding of the world?"

• Openly discuss what soap to supremacy actually means and looks like. Contemporary white nationalist movements embed eugenicist ideas into wellness practices in ways that seem harmless or even desirable to casual observers.

• Show how algorithms generate engaging, dopamine-producing rabbit holes that follow predictable radicalization patterns.

• Develop skills that help people understand what radicalization looks like in everyday life.

• Know exactly where you are investing your money and attention.

In the case of girls specifically, I think it’s additionally useful to stress that traditional femininity isn't inherently bad but that it is hugely limiting and problematic when presented as the only legitimate option. As a framework for understanding identity and relationships it institutionalizes a punishing, narrow ideal of “womanhood,” used to harm women, LGTBQ people, and people with disabilities.

Adolescent girls already understand the importance of women’s beauty in patriarchal culture, so rather than dismissing beauty and self-care as frivolous and silly, which they definitely aren’t, it helps to contextualize practices, and even reframe them, as complex potential sources of genuine health and pleasure if they are disconnected from approval-seeking, shame, and punishing self-discipline.

Most importantly, girls and women, armed with a critical intersectional lens, can actively seek out alternatives and liberatory feminist communities that recognize desire, anxieties, needs, and grievances while also providing progressive ways of thinking about and addressing them.

Neo-coverture under the guise of glass skin and organic oats will never provide what we need, which is people and places that reject and defend us from having to submit to retrograde, supremacist, corrupt, and cruel patriarchal people, systems, and institutions.