By Elizabeth Grace Matthew
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Why is J.K. Rowling, best-selling author of the Harry
Potter series, a pariah among mainstream American feminists? All she has
done is affirm women’s rights, after all—in this case, the right to privacy
from males in intimate spaces, whether or not said males identify as female.
The Rowling saga makes sense only if you recognize that
mainstream, liberal feminism is a house made of toothpicks. The
foundational notions of that hegemonic creed—that men and women would be
essentially the same but for some body parts, and that differences between the
sexes are mostly constructed via power relationships rather than inborn—are
patently, demonstrably, and even laughably false.
But this set of misassumptions and lies remains
dominant—in part because the popular attempts to counter it reflect a diffuse
set of antifeminist misassumptions and lies every bit as untrue and unhelpful
as what they’re reacting against.
I contend that today’s antifeminism is predicated on
three primary fallacies that have emerged both alongside and in reaction to
prevailing feminist opinions: first, what I’ll call the masculinist fallacy, as
applied to the allegedly “feminized” workplace; second, what I’ll call the
angelic fallacy, as applied to several iterations of purity culture; and third,
what I’ll call the maternlistic fallacy, as applied to idealized motherhood.
Together with the feminist fallacies they’re ostensibly
combating, these antifeminist fallacies give us an inaccurate view of 21st
century womanhood.
The masculinist fallacy.
The aspect of antifeminism that feels most icky and least
complimentary to many women (including those among the elites who do not hold
with mainstream feminism) is the contention that America would be better off if
only men were breadwinning professionals. This masculinist idea wields real
concerns—inefficient, woke workplaces and a lack of cultural investment in
motherhood—to level false blame at working women.
Popularized in a 2025 essay by the right-wing writer Helen Andrews, one
strand of the argument against the prevalence of American “girlbosses” is that
when women constitute a significant percentage of the employees in a given
field, the destruction of that field by over-bureaucratization, misguided
empathy, and speech policing is inevitable.
At the time, I
responded to Andrews’ critique, arguing that infantilization affecting
women and men alike, not feminization per se, is to blame for institutional
capture by virtue-signaling dimwits of both sexes. Women look bad, I conceded,
because female ascent into the professions was permitted and championed
alongside the fall of reason and rigor. But there is no reason in principle why
women could not have succeeded in the more professional workplaces of yore;
indeed, the earliest proto-feminists championed virtue for both women and men
in ways that might have, had theirs become the regnant iteration of feminism,
facilitated exactly that. To be sure, these would have been different women
than those prioritized by the woke legions.
Like most oversimplified arguments predicated on vibes
rather than facts, Andrews’ antifeminist fallacy about the limitations of
working women is best refuted by gesturing toward the reality that women are
different from one another. In other words: not all women.
But another antifeminist argument for keeping the
professions male garners even more widespread concern among self-professed
traditionalists. This, of course, is the notion that women’s paid work
undermines the roles of the home, family, and domesticity in American society,
devaluing stay-at-home mothers. This contention is predicated on nostalgia for
a mythologically universal family structure that never actually existed en
masse. After all, most women—mothers included—have always worked, mostly to contribute to the family’s
economic advancement.
Indeed, Ivana Greco recently skewered, in these
pages, the antifeminist shibboleth that the family, the society, and the
nation would be well-served by an end to working womanhood broadly or to
working motherhood specifically. Absolutely, stay-at-home mothers (and fathers,
for that matter) should be accorded cultural respect because the bearing and
raising of children within marriage should be viewed as an honorable
civic duty, not a morally neutral lifestyle choice. But excising women from
the workplace would protect neither American professions nor American
families—and would, per Greco, imperil both in various ways. Women are and have
long been breadwinners in many families; moreover, many of the fastest growing,
most needed professions are filled predominantly by women.
Even more importantly, we must recognize that the skills
and habits that Andrews identifies as crucial for the maintenance and mission
of historically male professions—presumptive toughness, principled
disagreement, reasoned steadiness, etc.—must really be considered the pillars
of American adulthood for people of both sexes. After all, these skills and
habits are imperative to the personal and familial arenas where women have
tended to reign, both historically and presently. The infantile weakness that
Andrews attributes to women, in other words, is just as antithetical to the
proper rearing and educating of children as it is to, say, the proper
maintenance and policing of a city.
Any woman who cannot be trusted to think and behave as a
strong-minded adult, and thereby embody the refutation of Andrews’ thesis, is
as unfit for the work of historically female spheres as she is for the work of
historically male ones.
Which brings us to the more complicated antifeminist
fallacies—the ones that can, like feminism itself, be positioned as a kind of
alleged empowerment that is actually anything but.
The angelic fallacy.
In May of this year, Alex Cooper, the host of the popular
Call Her Daddy podcast, announced that she and her husband are expecting their
first child. Many voices on the online right reacted less than positively to this news, accusing Cooper of
hypocrisy because, on Call Her Daddy, she crassly and luridly promotes
the hookup culture that has replaced family formation among many in their 20s
and 30s.
Writing for the Institute for Family Studies, Ashley
McGuire offered Cooper her congratulations but also chided her for promulgating
liberal feminist narratives about sex: Namely, that women
can and should be at their happiest and most empowered pursuing commitment-free
hookups (in the infamous parlance of Sex and the City) “like men.” Per
McGuire, “Contrary to the narrative that sexual exploration before marriage is
empowering, having multiple sexual partners prior to marriage is associated
with lower emotional and sexual satisfaction after marriage, as well as a
higher likelihood of divorce. More partners ≠ better marriages.” IFS’ Brad
Wilcox followed up in a similar vein: “Great for Alex Cooper. But
the lifestyle her podcast has sold comes at a real cost.”
It's not that McGuire and Wilcox are wrong, of course.
The question of whether sexual exploration before marriage and increased odds
of divorce is correlative or causal notwithstanding (though I’d frankly bet
quite heavily on the former), so-called sex-positive feminism has indeed set women up for a world of hurt, in all kinds of ways.
The problem is that the alternative on offer doesn’t, in
today’s context, necessarily seem so healthy either.
On the right, there exists an entire sub-genre of regretful laments about purity culture (i.e., the idealization of virginity until
marriage, common in conservative circles) and its expectations (or lack
thereof) for unmarried women. In well-meaning attempts to shield girls and
young women from the evils, harms, and regrets that do indeed haunt many who
participate in hookup culture, conservatives have created a counter-narrative
to sex positivity that can be reasonably construed as sex negativity. That is,
to alienate women from their own adult female bodies and from
men writ large. This is especially true in an era when many conservatives are not exempt from falling rates and rising ages of marriage,
in part because our primary societal enemies are no longer libertinism and
hedonism but isolation and nihilism.
Recently, the up-and-coming magazine Evie (the
conservative woman’s Cosmo, for those not in the know) released a “sex
issue” purporting to be a “visually gorgeous, comprehensive guide to sex
for wives."
Why, one might be forgiven for wondering, do wives need
such a guide? Here’s a guess: The euphemistic sublimation of sexual matters and
topics meant to help 16-year-old girls protect themselves from groping
boyfriends was never updated to address the unique needs of 30-year-old virgin
brides.
To put it another way: Purity culture may never have been
perfect, but when its purpose was to both instruct and empower teenage girls to
“say no” contra the dominant, oversexualized, feminist-inflected culture,
antifeminism with respect to sex was highly defensible. But now, we live in a
culture less likely to encourage premature sexual intimacy than to encourage
the eschewal of intimacy altogether, whether it be familial, friendly, or
romantic. So, conservative twentysomething and thirtysomething women inhabiting
a purity subculture within that anomic reality are essentially expected to
persist in a decades-long adolescence with respect to sexuality.
Now, to be quite clear, I’m not endorsing Call
Her Daddy and its nihilistic (non)morals around sex. What I am saying
is that an antifeminist purity culture meant for marriage-bound 17-year-old
girls in a world rife with human interaction is not meeting the holistic needs
of 27-year-old women hoping for marriage in a world of disembodied atomization.
Mainstream feminism’s skewed and delayed timeline for
marriage and childbearing has, unfortunately, affected us all, many
antifeminists included. The magnitude of the resultant loss of time and
social capital—the decade-plus that the feminist mainstream encourages
young women and men to waste before putting down roots—is immeasurable.
It simply is not clear to me that the profoundly
infantilizing disembodiment of a culture that assumes women to be essentially
angelic, asexual beings until they are in their 30s (if the right guy doesn’t
come along with a wedding ring by then, which today he often doesn’t) is doing
such women writ large any favors. Nor is it clear to me that it’s making such
women any more likely to enter lasting marriages. In fact, the kind of
heightened isolation that often accompanies the prolonged virginity encouraged by
today’s purity culture may be perpetuating quite the opposite, and thereby
militating directly against traditionalists’ pro-family goals.
Of course, the mainstream 30-year-old guy isolated with
his addiction to porn and the conservative 30-year-old woman isolated with her
prolonged virginity are not the same, morally or otherwise. But too often, they
wind up in different versions of the same place: The mores and imperatives that
they’ve internalized are not serving their best interests.
The maternalistic fallacy.
Motherhood today has a public relations problem. In an
era where bearing children is no longer taken for granted, some of today’s more
traditional advocates for marriage and children often put forth a picture of maternal
martyrdom that scares prospective mothers. “You’ll never be able to shower
again, but it’s so worth it because babies love you so much” is an apt paraphrase of this orientation to maternity. It’s a sort of cheerful
self-martyrdom, curated in opposition to a more androgyny-seeking feminist orientation that is perceived to (and often does!)
conceive of motherhood as an inconvenience to be mitigated rather than as a
vocation to be embraced.
The problem, though, is that antifeminist ideas of
maternity (which also boast adherents among “crunchier” feminists)—nursing as
the epitome of maternity and the idealization of stay-at-home motherhood—are not prima facie more pro-motherhood or more pro-family than
feminist ones just because they are “more natural.” In addition to eliding the
fact that alternative feeding and child care methods have been quite common
throughout history and remain common now, this emphasis on the naturalness or
lack thereof of a given aspect of maternity begs the question of why we don’t
similarly idealize solely natural medicine or pre-industrial housing.
The totalizing collapse of womanhood into motherhood—and
vice versa—is today’s most potent iteration of antifeminism and its most
powerful and pernicious fallacy. This “woman as mother” construction draws on
some of what is viscerally appealing and feels uniquely empowering about the
earth-mother, “nature as queen” strand of feminism itself. As such, it
coalesces strength and adherents from outside the typical conservative tent.
This leads to the alienation of women from reason in
relation to motherhood, idealizing an unhelpful model of maternal devotion and undermining women’s capacity to raise their children
optimally.
Often, breast is best for a given family. Other
times, it isn’t. Ditto stay-at-home motherhood. Antifeminists become ideologues
when they fail to admit as much. The decision to use baby formula or daycare is not always one that rejects maternity itself in
favor of me-first liberal feminism. Often, it is a rejection of maximally
embodied, naturalistic maternity in favor of pragmatically
optimal, holistic familial well-being.
If there is an intellectual godmother of the antifeminist
elision of any distinction between “woman” and “mother” it is Carrie Gress. Gress has
written several books lambasting not just today’s mainstream feminism but all
precursors thereof, going back to Mary Wollstonecraft and company.
I think Gress is mostly wrong about what I believe to be
the considerable merits of first-wave feminism, as I wrote in my review of her 2023 book, The End of Woman.
In her response to my review, Gress accused me of having drunk the
feminist Kool-Aid, pointing out that I had referred to myself as my sons’
“primary caregiver” rather than as their “mother.” This struck me as odd.
Clearly, I am my sons’ mother. I had, quite obviously, used the term “primary
caregiver” to indicate that I was to some extent a stay-at-home mother—that is,
that my husband and I split breadwinning and childcare duties in a fairly
traditional, gendered way.
Then I realized: Gress wants to live in a world where
“mother” and “primary caregiver” are synonymous. In the antifeminist ideology
that she has helped to create, mothers who work full-time (full disclosure: I
was one for seven of my 11 years as a mom so far) aren’t really mothers in
some profound sense. From this perspective, nature makes women mothers;
only feminism makes them anything that militates against maximal maternity.
Defining “real motherhood” in such a way that it excludes
most mothers is an old trick, deployed by feminists and antifeminists alike to
various ideological (and often classist) ends. I suppose that my status as
(ahem) a primary caregiver to four children now entitles me to presumptive
inclusion in this rarefied club (though my use of baby formula may cut against
my ultimate membership?)
Regardless, I decline.
As should all women who reject mainstream feminism. The
way to defeat its lies and false idols is to face the messy, nuanced truth—not
to embrace lies and false idols of our own.
The third and better way.
In the end, antifeminists are trying to solve real
problems. But, like their mainstream feminist interlocutors, they are
infantilizing women by exempting us from the self-determination that defines
American adulthood.
We can—and must—do better than to adopt one of these two
hollow, monolithic creeds in defiance of the other. Some call that third and
better way “sex-realist feminism.” Others, “conservative feminism.” Regardless,
we must simply be steadfast in this reality: Rejecting the flimsy falsehoods of
mainstream feminism does not and should not constitute adopting the equally
flimsy fallacies of antifeminism.
Only the truth sets people free. Women, as it turns out,
are people.
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