In his new memoir Communion, JD Vance expresses regret over his 2021 claim that “childless cat ladies” were effectively “running our country into the ground.” Though the vice president now calls these remarks “boneheaded,” similar sentiments continue to resonate on the right. Just recently, many right-wingers took to X to complain that Anne Hathaway getting pregnant at forty-three showed the dangers of girlboss feminism, while others alleged that women poisoned by hormonal birth control were bringing society to ruin. Go to any conservative conference and women are conspicuous by their absence. “It’s like a gay bar in here,” a friend once jokingly whispered to me at one such gathering.
“Today’s ruling ideology is a feminized one.”
Standing behind the right’s woman problem is its opposition to a particular type that tends to predominate in contemporary governance: rule-bound, managerial, and anti-family. The right is correct that today’s ruling ideology is a feminized one that legitimates itself through appeals to values like “care” and “compassion,” and that women have become more and more the face of our major institutions. But there is a difference between women and the forms of corporate, academic, medical, political, and bureaucratic rule that have adopted a feminized expression. In recent decades, liberal democratic societies have undergone a shift away from an implicitly and stereotypically masculine ideal of the rational, autonomous subject toward a stereotypically feminine one, one that is health and body conscious, heteronomous, forever seeking rules and authority for the correct conduct of life. The new ideal is not stoical, but emotive and expressive. It is therapeutic, protective, solicitous of feelings, and intolerant of risk.