The Shaming of Julia Mazur Was a Bit Much

By Zach Kessel

Tuesday, September 05, 2023

 

Over the weekend, a new main character emerged on X (formerly Twitter). For the uninitiated — or for those who have more important things to do with their time than spend hours on a social-media app — every day, the Musk-owned website has someone who, for reasons deserved and not, catches seemingly every user’s attention. According to the X user who coined the term, “the goal is to never be it.”

 

The most recent main character is Julia Mazur, an ex-Tinder employee who hosts the Pretty Much Done podcast, which addresses relationships with a focus on “the most important one we’ll ever have: our relationship with ourself.” On her show, according to a self-described friend of hers from college, Mazur “talks about breakups, relationships, and trying to love yourself at any stage you are in.”

 

Mazur became X’s main character after a video she posted on TikTok — in which she describes her Saturday as a single, childless woman in her late 20s as consisting of such activities as sleeping in, binge-watching television shows on Netflix, and teaching herself how to make shakshuka — went viral. She closed out the video with a paean to freedom, saying her ability to do essentially whatever she wants makes up for however upset she might be by her not having a husband and children:

 

I say all this to say, whenever I’m hard on myself about why I’m not married and I don’t have kids and I should be further along at 29 (almost 30), I wouldn’t wanna do anything else this Saturday. I know that you can do all these things when you have kids and you’re married, and I understand, but the effortlessness and ease of my life — just kind of focusing on myself and the shakshuka I wanna make or the Beyoncé concert I wanna go to — really pays off when I’m hard on myself for not being where society tells me I should be in life.

 

Everything Mazur talks about should seem relatively mundane. She does not have a husband or children, so she doesn’t have the responsibilities that would come with them. It’s a silver lining in a situation she seems to understand might not be ideal. You might think such a video describes pretty basic stuff that is not worth getting worked up about. You’d be wrong. 

 

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh posted the TikTok on X on Sunday, writing that Mazur’s “life doesn’t revolve around her family and kids so instead it revolves around TV shows and pop stars. Worst of all she’s too stupid to realize how depressing this is.”

 

There’s plenty that could be said about the experience of a single, childless woman in her late 20s. I obviously have very little practice being one, so I’ll address something else: the sheer nastiness in Walsh’s post. His attack on a woman who’s simply trying to appreciate what she has in life is emblematic of a broader problem on the right: the conflation of “conservative” with “jerk.” Walsh is by no means the only offender, with many other right-wing influencers solely focusing on “owning the libs.” The “owning” often stoops to bullying.

 

This is a real problem for conservatism. Over the past decade or so, many elements of what once constituted the movement have crumbled, especially within much of the right-wing media ecosystem. Small government? That’s old-fashioned. Clear, universal ideas of morality? So archaic. A globally engaged United States? That’s “not where the voters are,” and even if it was, America isn’t necessarily the good guy. 

 

Simply owning the libs is not a good way for us to win. The saying “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” may be cliché, but it’s cliché for a reason. One only needs to look to national politics to see the impact the Right’s approach could be having on voters. Young women have only become more liberal in recent years, and it’s not far-fetched to say the “trolling” streak in some corners of the Right is a turnoff. More broadly, according to the RealClearPolitics average, only 38.5 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Donald Trump, still the GOP-primary front-runner by a mile and the candidate who is arguably the people’s champion of “owning the libs.” To expand past the base, the American Right needs to ensure “conservative” means more than “jerk.”