Why I am worried about the rise of Neo-Con women

a response to Freya India and others

yes

A developing cohort of female writers with progressive roots have made conservative u-turns. I consume a lot of that writing. I sometimes agree and often enjoy it. Marry Harrington is one, and Louise Perry, also a friend of mine, is another. Freya India, a writer focusing on Gen Z girls, has a substack dedicated to the problems modern girls face, the trappings of liberal feminism and the backlash of the sexual revolution. Freya is a conservative and recently wrote a piece for Konstantin Kisin’s substack on why she’s worried about the rise of liberal young women. I wanted to offer a rebuttal as a left-wing woman who, I believe, does not commit the sins Freya blames on leftists (liberals in the US).

Note: Her piece seems written for a US audience, so she refers to liberalism rather than leftism. She knows the difference and has used the most relevant terms of reference there. In the context I am writing, the UK, I will refer to ‘leftism’ rather than liberalism. To read Freya’s and my essay, you can get the gist of both by seeing the words as interchangeable. Please play along and don’t comment on the definition of liberalism; I have access to Google, too.

Freya’s thesis is that it is wokeism and leftism that are driving (or exacerbating) the loneliness epidemic, the mental health crisis, the destruction of marriage and family and falling birthrates. I agree that people have become afraid of real-world intimacy and commitment and feel more comfortable oversharing online. My thesis is that economic inequality, lack of social trust and civic engagement are to blame.

I admit that left-wing culture harmed the dating market by throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we decided to do away with marriage to get away from despotic husbands and domineering in-laws. There, I agree with the neo-prudes that marriage can work as a safety net for women from low socio-economic status to ensure dads provide for their kids financially. For both sexes, it provides culturally significant emotional safety as a symbol of commitment: ‘I love you and won’t leave you till death do us part’.

Whenever I read writing like Freya’s, I feel a pang of jealousy for the kind of culture many of these women must have been raised in. Liberal, feminist, civil. The type of parents who would say my daughter may have the same or higher aptitude for maths as my son. I remember a journalist in London wondering on Twitter whether anyone is still pressuring women to get married. Personally, while outwardly, and certainly by Greek standards, I am an extremely agentic, self-possessed woman, I have spent the last decade hanging up the phone on my mother warning me that if women don’t get married by the age of 30, they are finished (I am 29, 7 months left till doomsday).

According to Freya, Louise, Marry, and other conservative writers, this is sage motherly advice. Perhaps that’s because they are looking around in the US and the UK, where the band was pulled too far back, and now it looks like it’s slapping women in the face. In Greece, however, where conservatism never fell out of fashion with the same rigour, I do not see a barrage of happy, healthy families because the couple ‘stayed together for the kids’. I know a lot of embittered women. I see women married to men who cheat on them, abuse them, and humiliate them, and stay because they left their jobs to stay at home with the kids. I see women who are bright and talented, who took time away from studying to learn how to apply the perfect winged eyeliner, who managed to get married early and have their first kid before the post-30 fertility dip, who find themselves in the same spot when they wake up one morning and realize that they’ve spent their most productive years going to sleep next to a stranger. They are living a life picked by someone else.

drawing by Liana Finck

Freya echoes what many in this discourse have noted before: that conservatives are happier than liberals because of agency. Conservatives believe they have more control over their destinies. They also have a prescribed view of what those destinies might be. A pig is happy rolling in the mud. It doesn’t know it is a pig. The mud may well be soft and warm and beneficial to the pig. It can also be the sludge on the way to the slaughterhouse.

A lot of internalised misogyny can be bred from seeing marriage and kids as a panacea and the attainment of both as tantamount for any woman. A lot of neo-con women (not Freya, who emphasizes how an obsession with appearances is harmful to young women) harp on about men only wanting women for youth and beauty, so you better keep your BMI low and lock a husband in early. But it is true!! I hear the manosphere sneer. The sooner you women get it, the better off you’ll be. Sure, men like young and beautiful women just as much as women like wealthy and powerful men. Both statements have shades of truth, but ultimately, we fall in love with people. I am young and hot (for 7 more months), but I have indeed fallen in love with men who are poor and weak because I emotionally and intellectually connected with them. The problem is not with their ideology but with the lack of intimacy. A basement-dwelling online troll with a MAGA hat is not more capable of developing a connection than a blue-haired they/them. They are both spending far too much time online, and it is not Uncle Marx who put that iPhone in their palm.

Natalism propaganda we can all get behind. I love ballerina farm.

Another accusation is that young women are increasingly obsessed with everything being socially constructed. I am also not a fan of queer feminism, for their inhumane word salads and intellectual bullying (see: Judith Buttler), but it wasn’t the woke left who came up with the idea that we don’t know who men and women are except for how we see them through their relationship to each other. It was John Stuart Mill - that well-known Marxist - who first said that we don’t know who women are; they do not know that themselves either because from the beginning of their life, they are being taught that they are so different from men, that all they care about is love and affection and marriage. They don’t share the same ambition for achievement. What we call the nature of women is a fantasy conjured up by centuries of brute force and oppression. This was in a book from 1869, not in a tweet from 2023.

It still holds today, for me, at least. I want marriage and kids. Life without a blueprint is chaotic. I won’t do what Rob Henderson accuses some leftists of doing with luxury beliefs. Discouraging people from doing things I’d pick for myself, like settling with a spouse and having a family. But it’s not a panacea. Marriage and kids won’t solve our problems. We will not be alone in a full house, but we may still be lonely.

I wish my mother had a hobby. Or a lover. Or both. Growing up in a big, tight-knit Greek family had a lot of highlights. I loved big family gatherings. The warm glow of the familiar food and people still looms large in my memory but it is punctured by scenes of my mother rushing around like a demon. She was miserable. Always stressed out. Always angry. My grandfather, a Greek Orthodox priest, was a benevolent saint to me but a tyrannical despot to her. She said she got married to her best friend to escape. Her whole life was pleasing her family. I remember seeing her doodle beautifully when on the phone with her clients. She wanted to go to art school but settled on economics. Who would my mother be today if she had rebelled? I will never know.

I am so pleased for my American and British sisters raised in civilized middle-class homes where it was never questioned that a woman should pursue her interests and forge her career. Believe me, though, the rest of us plebs still navigate a world dominated by households where daughters are raised on the fantasy that their best future is one where they get married as soon as possible to the wealthiest man their looks can buy. We’ve already tried that. There aren’t enough Zanax in the world to make that work.

I saw a commenter under Freya’s piece who attacked communism for destroying the family unit, and indeed, it is a line neo-cons often employ. He gives the example of the Bolshevik revolution not tolerating anything that would be a competing loyalty to the cause. The soviet block has long since collapsed, and no one who has taken Politics 101 would ever look at modern China and think ‘lefties the lot of them’. What you are looking at is capitalism. I don’t care to suggest capitalism is the root of all evil; it is far from it. However, capitalism convinced people to leave their families to find better jobs. It is capitalism that told women to delay having kids to have better careers. Because of capitalism, we are hustling multiple jobs, working longer hours and suffering long commutes. As I said, I don’t think it’s all bad, but remember, the original communist dream was living in communes. The modern leftism I espouse promotes equality, community, and solidarity, not individualism. What about identity politics? I hear your protests; I don’t like identity politics either. Neither do many other influential lefties, like Bernie Sanders.

To go back to the battle of the sexes, though, I am tired of hearing all about these women who are prioritizing their careers over men. I don’t think they are. I guess they want men to invest in relationships with them, but they don’t because we have not raised them to value love and marriage as much. We have raised them to value money and status. These, again, are capitalist ideals, not socialist ones. Rather than telling women to be less boss-ass bitches we should be telling men to be more dads than chads. Maybe read your boys more princess fairytales? Your girls can crack on with that Harry Potter.

I agree with Freya’s disparagement of social media and would take her advice to keep your kids away from smartphones. If they are looking at a screen, they can’t look you in the eye, and the ultimate poison is lack of intimacy. But this is not a new phenomenon. In the UK, where I live, there are whole generations of men who can’t look a woman in the eye because they were sent off to boarding school when they were little boys. Dysfunctional homes are as old as time.

So my final suggestion is to read about the problems people identified in previous generations. You will find the malaises are often the same. Read books of earlier centuries. Much of what needs to be said today has been said before. It will help us not chase our tails, and after all, we (neo-cons and this one Lefty) all agree we should respect our elders (though if your parents are genuinely abusive, you have my blessing to cut them off, Instagram therapist style- Jordan Peterson agrees).

I am all for making commitment sexy again, but as John Stuart Mill said, marriage should be based on love and care. It should be entered willingly and honestly. Mom, if you are reading this, stop asking me if I’m getting married. Ask me instead if I’ve fallen in love.