The Male Feminism Con Job

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

In an early 2017 Saturday Night Live short video, cast member Cecily Strong takes a seat by herself at a busy bar. A man, played by Beck Bennett, sidles up next to Strong and promises her he’s not a creep trying to hit on her. In fact, he’s a male feminist. He proves his progressive bona fides by calling Donald Trump a “skeezy guy” and showing her his “The Future is Female” T-shirt.

 

But the interaction takes a turn when Strong rejects Bennett’s offer to go on a date. When it is clear his liberal peacocking doesn’t work, he gets angry and calls her a “bitch.” He is then removed by another man who tries more feminist pickup lines, with the same result. Then comes another. And another. (In the spirit of escalation, the final suitor is wearing a knitted pink hat.)

 

In the pre–Me Too era, women had already coined a term for this behavior: “macktivism.” (Mercifully, it never caught on.) That is, men playing up their feminist “allyship” only as a prelude to making advances, welcome or otherwise.

 

Enter Democratic California Congressman Eric Swalwell, who in the last week has been accused by numerous women, including a former staffer, of sexual assault. For a decade, Swalwell has been a pompous windbag willing to shout his feminism wide and far, using hashtags like #BelieveSurvivors and proclaiming that “every sexual assault victim” deserves equal “respect.” (National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke compiled some of Swalwell’s greatest hits, including his contention that then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh simply had to be guilty because there were numerous accusers.)

 

Initially, Swalwell claimed that the tornado of accusations was “absolutely false,” and his attorneys sent at least two cease-and-desist letters to the alleged victims. But earlier this week, he pulled out of the California governor’s race, then resigned from Congress, saying he was “deeply sorry to my family, staff, and constituents for mistakes in judgement [sic] I’ve made in my past.”

 

Of course, some men genuinely consider themselves feminists and behave appropriately. But there are also Democratic men who theatrically proclaim their deep understanding of Simone de Beauvoir because it actually works.

 

Famously, after President Bill Clinton’s Oval Office sex scandal, Clinton’s team mercilessly attacked Monica Lewinsky. Yet Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women offered fulsome praise for Clinton because he was on the correct side of her preferred issues.

 

“On balance women have had an ally in the White House,” Ireland said in 1998, claiming that if the campaign to impeach Clinton succeeded, “the unfinished agenda of women on equality, in Social Security, pay equity, child care, anti-poverty remedies, minimum wage, Medicare, real campaign finance reform . . . will continue to languish in Congress.”

 

This is why even society’s most loathsome cretins have attempted to play the progressive card when they are caught. In October 2017, Harvey Weinstein tried to wriggle out of sexual assault allegations by vowing to redouble his efforts against the National Rifle Association and to work to remove Donald Trump from office. Weinstein noted that he had established a $5 million foundation to award scholarships to female directors at USC. (Missing from his statement was any apology to potted plants.)

 

But even the most ardent feminists are fed up with the allyship act. In one 2025 song (the name of which cannot be relayed on a family website), British feminist punk rockers Lambrini Girls mock men who repost articles about women in music, then expect ladies to have sex with them in return. “Mate, that white knight act is getting pretty f***ing irritating, considering it’s nothing but performative,” growls lead singer Phoebe Lunny.

 

There’s a plainly obvious reason why famous men like Clinton and Trump survive plausible allegations of sexual misconduct: they never claimed to be anything but inveterate horndogs. In 1994, for instance, the public had been flooded with news about Clinton’s sexual adventurism and still handed him the presidency over a once-popular incumbent.

 

And, of course, what more can be said about Trump’s predilections? The guy didn’t troll beauty pageants because he was looking for teeth-whitening tips.

 

Yet in sexual matters, Trump wasn’t a hypocrite — no one would ever accuse him of being a feminist ally. And the public, it turns out, would rather their candidates be genuinely awful than performatively noble.

 

And this is why, before Trump, Republicans never had the luxury of surviving sex scandals: for years, its members had pitched it as the party of family values and the religious right. When a Republican got caught cheating or worse, the humiliation of his double life took over. There is a chasm between public moralizing and Bryon Noem’s chat room.

 

But in the post–Me Too era, Democrats like Swalwell are no longer granted a progressive carapace. That’s because the betrayal from a self-described feminist ally stings just as much as the hypocrisy of a religious conservative who lives his life in the shadows.

 

In fact, Trump’s rebrand of the Republican Party in his image has made the GOP a safe landing spot for former liberals looking to shed their unsavory pasts. For instance, at the Republican convention in 2024, I happened to walk by British comedian Russell Brand, who at that point had become MAGA-adjacent after having been accused of sexual assault by numerous women.

 

Brand, of course, rose to fame with a reputation of being a bad boy — between 2006 and 2012, he won the U.K. Sun newspaper’s “shagger of the year” award three times. But in 2014, he claimed to have shed his scandalous ways, declaring himself a full-blown feminist because he had found the “love of a good woman.”

 

In 2025, Brand was charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault that allegedly took place between 1999 and 2005, which explains his move to the right, where he could lend a famous name to the cause in exchange for leniency. In the words of the Republican Party’s leader, “When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

 

Of course, part of the reason Democrats are so willing to suddenly pass Swalwell like an electoral kidney stone is because they have other options in the California governor’s race. Democrats can read polls, too, and they are less likely to defenestrate candidates who are the only game in town.

 

That is how Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren ends up endorsing Nazi tattoo-bearer Graham Platner in his race for U.S. Senate in Maine. Polls say Platner has the most realistic chance of beating Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But Platner has a past in which he has, for instance, suggested that women worried about being raped should “not get so f***ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”

 

These past comments have not swayed Warren, who continues to endorse him. (Of course, if Warren were to give her endorsement, then take it away, we all know what that would make her.)

 

There are plenty of men who respect women, treat them as equals, and even watch the WNBA without performatively beating their chests. They do these things not because they expect sex in return but because it wouldn’t occur to them not to.

 

But some Democratic men have convinced themselves that their progressivism gives them a sort of cloak of invisibility, as if the sheer force of their wokeness can hide any amount of sin underneath. At the same time, weirdos in the right-wing manosphere have convinced themselves that the best way to attract a mate is to hit themselves in the face with hammers. It is not a golden age for the timeless rituals of courtship.

 

So, in the end, Swalwell doesn’t end well at all. The man who built his career on shouting about believing women is now the one the women can’t believe. The universe has a sense of irony, after all.