On Saturday, feminist author Jessica Valenti penned a piece for The New York Times explaining why conservative women aren’t allowed into the feminist club.
The piece, titled “The Myth of Conservative Feminism,” reads like the entry rules hammered to a mean girl’s tree house. Valenti explains to women what they can and cannot believe if they want to be considered an asset to the female gender, a feminist. The rest of us engaging in WrongThink are mere beneficiaries of her and other feminists’ hard work, or worse, liabilities.
If we’ve learned anything from feminists, it’s that men cannot tell us how to think. That’s a feminist’s job.
Valenti starts by lamenting conservatives’ insistence that right-wing women like Gina Haspel, the first female CIA director in history, and Suzanne Scott, the newly-named chief executive of Fox News channel, be praised by feminists.
(Of course, conservative women don’t give a rat’s behind about being allowed entry into the toxic feminist club. When we point to successful and empowering conservative women and ask feminists like Valenti why they aren’t praising such women, we are highlighting their double standards and the glaring fallacy that feminists are merely fighting for “gender equality,” as most purport to do.)
Haspel and Scott aren’t worthy of praise nor are they feminists, according to the feminist gatekeeper. Haspel, for example, is not a feminist for overseeing the waterboarding of three al-Qaeda leaders following 9/11, though such enhanced interrogation has been credited with stopping more potential terrorism and securing “actionable intelligence that among other things led to the identification of Osama bin Laden’s hideout.” What this has to do with gender equality is beyond me. And Scott is not a feminist for allegations made against her in lawsuits settled outside of court:
While groundbreaking in the literal sense, there is nothing feminist about a woman who oversaw a site where detainees were tortured, someone who refuses to say whether she believes torture is immoral. In the same way, there is nothing “empowering” about Ms. Scott, a media executive who reportedly enforced a “miniskirt rule” for female on-air talent, and who was cited in two lawsuits for contributing to a toxic work environment and retaliating against a sexual harassment victim. (Ms. Scott has denied these reports and the lawsuits were settled.)
After complaining about conservatives “appropriating” feminist rhetoric, Valenti whines, “Now that feminism is more culturally and politically powerful than it has been in decades, however, conservatives are eager to capitalize on its cachet.”
But we, conservative gals, are not allowed (I write, tears rolling onto my keyboard).
You see, women can’t stand for pro-life legislation (which is wildly mischaracterized by Valenti) if they want to be assets to the female gender and, thus, feminists. Reject open borders? You can’t sit at the cool girls’ table, either, you internalized misogynist.
“[T]aking advantage of feminist wins does not make someone a feminist. This is doubly true if you’re working toward limiting women’s rights, as the Trump administration does,” she writes. “You cannot be a feminist and support an immigration policy of taking children away from undocumented immigrant mothers. You cannot be a feminist and go along with the White House’s newly announced domestic gag rule, a mandate that would withhold funding from any health care center that helps patients find abortion services.”
The new “task” for the feminist movement is “protecting the movement against conservative appropriation,” declares Valenti.
That is an incredible statement. This is an admission that feminism is not about gender equality at all; it’s about the advancement of leftist ideology and, more importantly, the destruction of conservative ideology.
Feminism, as described through Valenti’s lens, is unapologetically exclusionary and hostile to women who refuse to think like women are apparently supposed to think.
We all knew this to be true, but the clarity here from Valenti is appreciated.