The Left Is Now Shrieking About a Right-Wing "Womanosphere," Even Worse Than the Manosphere, Because It Encourages Young Women to be "Thin, Fertile, and Republican"

The horror.

I mentioned this in last night's Quick Hits, I think.

Left-wing media has identified a dangerous new political archetype: the thin, fertile, Republican woman.

Beware the burgeoning online "womanosphere" urging an audience of young women away from feminism and towards marriage, children, and being attractive, warns The Guardian. The outlet points to prominent conservative commentators such as Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, along with publications like Evie Magazine, as emblematic of this clunkily-named counterpart to the "manosphere."

These women are united by their "desire to return to a gender-essentialist worldview," according to The Guardian, which casts "women as submissive homemakers" and "men as strong providers."

Oh, the horror.

Hey I already said that.

"Gender-essentialism" refers to the outlandish belief that men and women are different. One is free to draw varied conclusions from this fact. The left has taken up a strange quarrel with the concept of biological sex itself, an argument which defeats itself at the outset. How can one analyze why female commentators specifically appeal to females without acknowledging the validity of the category?

The outlet warns of "an organized effort" to create an "alternative rightwing media ecosystem targeting young female US audiences." One discerns the outlet's terror at the prospect -- no great wonder, given the much vaunted "podcast strategy" helped win over young male voters to Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

"Organized" is supposed to be a dirty word. It connotes an insidious masterplan to take women off birth control and put them on quick-slimming diets. But the legacy media, with its extreme left-wing bias, is surely no less organized and strident in its political and cultural prescriptions than the "right-wing media." Notice the asymmetry in terms. The New York Times and Netflix are simply media. They claim neutral ground. It's a powerful rhetorical trick. If they can successfully assert themselves as unbiased observers and artists, they fashion reality itself in their terms.

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"Young women have been hailed as the saving grace of the Democratic party, the force that will deliver us from all those angry young men spending all their time listening to podcasts, but that's not a given," writes The Guardian.

Therein lies a sick admission. The Democratic Party prefers women fat, infertile, single, and unhappy. Why? Because those women make the most fervent ideologues. Leftism inverts natural hierarchies. It lofts the ugly and sick above the beautiful. It punishes any natural inclination towards the latter. This appeals to malcontents who depend on such an infrastructure to confer them status and meaning. Or a green card, as the case may be.

Who profits by a woman being thin and fertile? Why, only the woman herself, the young men interested in dating and marrying them, her future family, and all the rest of society by extension. The left's supposed concern for female "freedom" and "independence" is false. They'd just prefer women be dependent on the state, not a husband.

As I frequently say, the Democrat Party is the Husband of Last Resort for unmarriagable, miserable, mentally-ill women.

Here's a bit more from this deranged screed from The Guardian:

It's not only rightwingers who have gripes with contemporary feminism. Many on the left have been critical of shallow "girlboss feminism" (the bipartisan backlash to the embarrassing Blue Origin flight being a case in point), noting that impossible expectations are placed on women in a crassly capitalist society that offers little support for working mothers. According to a 2023 survey run by the non-profit Catalyst, four in 10 women said they felt they would need to change jobs in order to manage childcare demands, and the US is still the only rich country in the world without a national paid parental leave policy. Yet for this new womanosphere, the response is not advancing policies like paid family leave or affordable childcare, but to return to an idealized, illusory past where being a wife and mother was viewed as a woman's sole purpose.

Young women are particularly vulnerable to these appeals. Like their peers in the manosphere, these commentators are capitalizing on a real crisis of loneliness and economic precarity facing gen Z. "Social media has truly given gen Z a warped sense of reality," said Cooper, who has described dating apps as "treacherous" and a "barren" landscape.

The alternative vision these influencers are proposing is scarily retrograde and would strip women of their freedom and economic independence. "You want to go back and sit in a cubicle when you could have this, like, beautiful amazing child that you've created with the love of your life?" Cooper asked rhetorically on a recent podcast appearance.

Instead of trying to have it all, women, she said, need to change their priorities because "if you aren't going to the gym, if you aren't taking care of yourself, if you don't like children, if you only care about your career, and you hate the patriarchy" then a desirable man is "not going to go for you".

The type of woman these commentators valorize is thin, straight, fertile, traditionally feminine, conventionally attractive to men and white -- though they try to avoid overt racism, instead opting for sentiments like, "as a minority woman, I'm here to say that you'll be happier and more fulfilled if you aren't consumed by thinking about your race." Anyone who falls outside of this narrow mold is subject to relentless mocking and disparagement. Though they have different tactics and tones, like their cohorts in the manosphere, they play with the idea that calling women fat or ugly is fun and transgressive -- framing it as part of a virtuous quest to rid society of woke, feminist ideals.

Young women have been hailed as the saving grace of the Democratic party, the force that will deliver us from all those angry young men spending all their time listening to podcasts, but that's not a given. While young women still went blue in 2024, Joe Biden's 35-point lead in 2020 dwindled to a 24-point lead for Kamala Harris. Other demographics, like Black and Latino men, broke with historical trends to shift to the right this election. Emily Amick, an influencer and political analyst who has been observing the trend on her Substack, said that people might underestimate the womanosphere's impact at their peril. "What we saw in the 2024 presidential election was that the manosphere had a lot more impact than a lot of people expected," Amick said. "I believe that the conservative movement is running the same play with women, and in 2028 we are going to see a massive impact of the messaging machines they have been building."

LOL. If only the left had such a network of propaganda nodes...

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In the past two decades, mainstream women's outlets have made attempts to emphasize overall wellbeing instead of outer beauty and valorizing thinness above all. Evie sees this as wokeness run amok. They want to bring back your mother's -- or your grandmother's -- women's magazine, in which it was OK to celebrate a certain body type over others. "When we encounter a heavily tattooed, blue-haired, obese, gender-neutral individual with a bull-ring, that person is communicating to us that they actively disregard the standards for normality that the majority of people agree on," read a 2021 piece titled Objective Feminine Beauty Is Not A Relic Of The Patriarchy.

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Maggie Bullock, a women's magazine veteran who co-writes the Spread, a newsletter about the industry, said she saw outlets like Evie as trying to be something of a "gateway drug" into more extreme conservative ideologies. "Like, we're nice and we're pretty and we're not that radical, don't worry, we're just telling you the truth," she said. "It feels like a wolf in sheep's clothing."

What would we do without experts.

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Evie's reach shouldn't be overstated -- it has 210,000 followers on Instagram, compared with Cosmopolitan's 4m, and has only put out three print issues in four years -- but they're increasingly finding new ways to garner attention.

The entire premise of this article, that the Womanosphere is a Great and Growing Threat, relies on overstating its reach.

But now, in paragraph 30, they tell you it only has 210,000 subscribers.

From Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s, who helped mobilize young Christian women against the Equal Rights Amendment, to Ann Coulter and Moms for Liberty, women have long played a role in spreading conservative propaganda. But what sets these new voices apart is that they don't all market themselves as political commentators. In this sense, they are cribbing from the success of the manosphere, which won new Maga converts in part because most of its leading figures weren't explicitly partisan.

You mean how "journalists" pretend they're not partisan so that their clear partisanship passes under people's radar undetected?

If only the left had this sort of powerful messaging machine!

Multi-hours-long podcast episodes and Twitch streams from the likes of Rogan, the Nelk Boys or Theo Von are typically much more weighted to cover sports, gambling, drugs and dating than they are to talk about which bill is passing in the Senate.

The leading voices of the womanosphere are using a similar strategy. As Brittany Hugoboom put it in an op--ed for the rightwing outlet Quillette: "Conservatives will never win if they imagine themselves as combatants atop defensive battlements, hurling abuse on the mass media. We need to involve ourselves in the creation of pop culture."

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The coalition drawn to fringe wellness ideas is multifaceted: from the "crunchy" moms frightened of toxic chemicals they believe are in our food and pharmaceuticals, to the chronic illness sufferers frustrated with a medical system they feel has let them down. Yet the savvy voices of the womanosphere have responded by weaponizing genuine anxieties -- which have complex roots and few easy answers -- and serving up far-right propaganda on a platter. "It's sneaky," Clark told the Washington Post. "I want to be seen as: Alex Clark, cool girl, loves health and wellness, happens to be conservative. I'm not trying to beat people over the head with that. I don't think that's persuasive."

You mean how celebrities attempt to leverage their fame and public goodwill into influencing people's political thinking?

If only the left had a network of propagandists such as these!

Oh, and I love how the left, which has for 60 years railed against artificial additives in food, are now positively in favor of adulterating food with as many unsafe chemicals as possible.

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Clark's crusades against topics such as birth control -- that it "accelerates ageing", "induces abortion", causes cancer and fertility issues -- make more sense in light of the Trump administration's pro-natalist policy agenda, which organizations like Turning Point USA and Project 2025 have spent years crafting.

"It's all tied together with the goal of shaming women who have sex and who might get pregnant, and ensuring that they really are forced into the idea of this nuclear family because it preserves current power structures," said Dr Jennifer Lincoln, an OB-GYN in Portland, Oregon. "They come at it from this Maha angle of 'we have to protect women,' and then they legislate away people's choices to use these medicines that are literally life-saving for so many people."

Another expert weighs in.

Here's what the left turned an entire generation of young women into:

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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