We must bring young women back from the brink

“It only takes one voice to start going down a rabbit hole.”

That’s Kate Salerno, a 27-year-old attendee at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, explaining how watching healthy food videos led her to the conservative conference. Put on by Turning Point USA, the summit drew 3,000 young women to Dallas recently to hear speakers tell them to abandon careers and have babies instead; that “We’re done pretending that a cubicle is more empowering than a countertop.” 

From the New York Times:

“The weekend was peppered with derisive comments about sad, lonely ‘boss babes.’ There was a Burn Book, in the style of “Mean Girls,” placed on a Turning Point recruitment table with photos of Democratic politicians and captions like: “Make AOC bar tend again.”

And for The Cut, E.J. Dickson wrote:

“I could understand why younger women who may have watched their mothers become burnt out, angry, and depressed would rebel against pursuing the same path for themselves, opting instead for a seemingly softer, more traditional approach toward femininity. “The left is always like, ‘You can just girlboss through anything,’ and it’s like, but what if you can’t? What if you don’t have any help?” Solia Mechling, a 17-year-old from Nashville, said. “I think that’s one of the biggest things for Gen-Z girls: They’re looking for someone to say, ‘You know what, you can’t have it all, so here are your options and do what you feel is right.’”

There is, and always has been, a portion of the American population that believe the genders are not equal; that the god they believe in mandates that women must bear children and submit to their husbands. Feminists have wrestled with this faction for decades to varying degrees. Sometimes we win (Roe vs Wade 1973). Sometimes they do (Roe vs Wade 2022).

The current wave of anti-feminism, with its dedicated publications and focus on tradwives, is part of the broader Republican intent of taking the country back to 1955. They are correct in that women can’t have it all. But there are plenty of alternatives besides disappearing into the shadow of a man. We’ve already lost a whole swath of young men to this toxicity. Can we right this ship before we lose young women too? 

When I was in college 2,000 years ago, I got into an argument with a philosophy major about cults and whether I could be sucked into one. He was adamant that it could happen to anyone; that under the right circumstances, in the right mindset, all humans are vulnerable to succumbing to a smooth talker who promises to solve all your problems. I was adamant that it would never happen to me. I’m too skeptical, too slow to trust. 

In hindsight, we were arguing the wrong point. Life is a series of cults; the only difference being the degree of loyalty required. Groups that demand an intense level of devotion — MAGA, Swifties, Southern Baptists - tend to have equally intense beliefs and therefore attract more attention. Humans love a spectacle, and observing the fervent is its own particular form of entertainment. Which would you rather watch: a snake handler speaking in tongues as he writhes on the floor or a Quaker sitting in silence? The Quaker is the more reasonable person in this scenario but who the hell likes to listen to reason? It’s boring. Change the channel please.

The tech bros tapped into this hunger for spectacle very effectively and on the seventh day gave us social media. For close to 20 years now, we’ve scrolled and tapped and liked our way into a new form of human, and now a new version of America. The algorithm is no longer solely in our phones. It’s in our interaction patterns, our senses of self, our elected officials. 

This is one of the reasons Democrats are now the equivalent of inanimate objects. While President Miller Trump builds concentration camps in the Everglades, Democrats insist on operating like it’s 1978 and Carter is in charge. If, they reason, we can just find the magic sentence to unlock the doors of the manosphere, the tradwives, the anti-vaxxers, then we can be one big happy democracy again. They can’t comprehend that there is no password. That the rules of engagement have changed irrevocably. The days of following opinion are over; now you must shape it. 

While Republicans have passion and fervor about issues that favor only one small group - rich white Christian men - they cloak it well enough to convince millions of voters that the resulting punishments won’t affect them. The young women daydreaming of homesteads and raw milk don’t fully grasp what they’re signing up for. And, as both of those articles above point out, there is a deep irony to successful women leaders telling the next generation to opt out of the very thing that built them up. Dana Loesch, one of the summit’s keynote speakers, was once one of the most powerful executives at the NRA. Did she run it from her kitchen table? I’m guessing not.

A couple of years ago, Hamilton Nolan wrote a piece about how the media’s kid-glove handling of Christianity led to our current status of teetering into theocracy. You should read the whole thing, as it makes several points I’d never considered—primarily because society has been so hesitant to question the faith of its leaders. 

“If you want to address the root cause of the bubbling right wing extremism that is distressing the political establishment so much, you need to stop obsessing about tactics and decorum and focus on the ideas.”

While I’d like to embroider that on a pillow and mail it to every Democrat in Congress, I also want to remind ourselves of this fact. We are at war with a religious cult that is currently winning because they’ve slapped a new coat of paint on some very old, very bad ideas. We can’t keep quiet because we’re weary and frustrated. We must tell our stories, our experiences for young women to learn from and aspire to. Let’s lead them down more productive rabbit holes.