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Lean in (to misogyny), ladies!
Are you a woman? Do you want to rapidly raise your profile and get booked on the speaking circuit? Are you good at mental gymnastics?
If you answered yes to all of the above then gender grifting may be for you! This often-lucrative career path involves explaining to less enlightened women why feminism has gone too far and the world is much better off being run by men. You get extra points if you aren’t white, and can explain to the masses how racism is good, actually.
You can see this hustle in the tradwife content all over social media. As Jameela Jamil recently noted, all the “tradwives” preaching to young women about how they should be submissive little ladies are massive hypocrites. They’re all making money, building their brands and securing their independence while telling other women they shouldn’t be doing the same.
You can also, of course, see gender grifting on the likes of Fox News, where ambitious, albeit identikit, female anchors tut-tut on TV about how #MeToo has gone too far.
And now, because the right has been so successful in rewriting reality, you can see gender grifting splashed all over the homepage of the New York Times. On Thursday, the Times published a transcript of a recent episode of the conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast Interesting Times. This very interesting (in the British sense) piece was originally titled: Did Women Ruin the Workplace? The headline was then changed to the more nuanced: Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?
Douthat generously invites two women into his own workplace: the podcast features two critics of liberal feminism, Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant, in conversation about “what a right-wing politics of gender should look like.” Andrews apparently caught Douthat’s eye because she had just written an essay for Compact called The Great Feminization, which argues feminism has failed because it has driven masculine virtues out of our institutions. The word “woke” or “wokeness” was used unironically 11 times in the piece: a failsafe sign you should not take anything in it seriously.
Andrews continued to just mutter wokeness, wokeness, wokeness in her conversation with Douthat (variants of the word were used 25 times in the conversation), explaining that “the pathology in our institutions known as wokeness is distinctively feminine and feminized … in a very literal sense, our institutions have gone woke because there are more women in them than there used to be.”
The conversation unfurls exactly as you’d expect. Carefully cherrypicking examples, Andrews explained that #MeToo was woke, college campuses are too woke, and “the law is currently lopsided in favor of punishing male vices and allowing feminized vices totally free rein.” In response to a question about what constitutes “feminine vices”, Andrews explains that women like “gossiping” and have an “inability to deal with conflict directly”.
Sargeant, who has some valid critiques of liberal feminism, does her best to push back against some of this nonsense, but Andrews does most of the talking. Hilariously, towards the end of the conversation Douthat asks Andrews: “What do you like about women, Helen?” She seems unable to answer that question.
I know that this is just one man’s podcast rather than, say, a piece by the editorial board, but putting a piece like this on the homepage of the New York Times in 2025 is certainly an interesting decision. Taking the sort of misogynistic nonsense that you see on Fox News and repackaging it as a pseudointellectual debate in a prestigious publication imbues these arguments with a dangerous validity. (If you want a proper intellectual interrogation of gendered inequality and supposedly traditional values, by the way, I suggest you read Angela Saini’s The Patriarchs.)
While the New York Times is busy pondering whether liberal feminism has ruined the workplace, women’s rights are being rolled back around the world. In the very same week that this piece came out, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum was groped by a drunk man as she mingled with citizens on the streets of Mexico City. The leader of a country can’t do her own job without being harassed in public, and the Times wants us to consider whether the workplace has been too feminized.
Over in the US, the gender pay gap has widened for the second year in a row, and the Times wants us to consider the possibility that wokeness has gone too far. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently shrugged off domestic assault allegations leveled against Republican congressman Cory Mills, and we are expected to ponder, with a straight face, the idea that the workplace is now hostile to men. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has been accused of sexual assault. (Mills and Hegseth have denied the allegations.) Two out of the five men on the US supreme court have been accused of sexual misconduct. The president of the US is an adjudicated sexual predator, who associated with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile, and we are supposed to think that our institutions have been feminized. Interesting times indeed.
Mexican president pressing charges after being groped
“This is something I experienced as a woman, but it is something that all women in our country experience,” Sheinbaum said after being groped in the street. “If I do not file a complaint, where does that leave all Mexican women? If they do this to the president, what happens to all the other women in the country?” The incident has felt like a personal affront to many women in Mexico, where violence against women and femicide are major problems. But you have to ask yourself, don’t you: has feminism gone too far?
Nearly half of LGBTQ+ TV characters cancelled
GLAAD’s 2025 report on queer representation on TV shows a small increase from last year’s 468 to 489 LGBTQ+ characters across all platforms. However more than 200 (41%) of those characters won’t return, due to series cancellations, endings or limited series format.
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New York’s new first lady wore a Jordanian-Palestinian fashion label for Mamdani’s acceptance speech
With the genocide in Gaza dropping out of the headlines, it was wonderful to see Rama Duwaji, who is of Syrian descent, wearing a top by Zeid Hijazi. “With so many people being pushed out and silenced by fear, all I can do is use my voice to speak out about what’s happening in the US and Palestine and Syria as much as I can,” Duwaji said in an April interview. Duwaji is a talented artist, whose work often examines women in the Middle East.
Rigid gender roles are prompting women to leave rural Japan
A Japanese government report found 27% of young women want to leave their home towns, compared with 15% of young men, with gender inequality playing a large role.
AI pop star Xania Monet hits Billboard charts
Xania was created by Telisha “Nikki” Jones, a 31-year-old Mississippi woman who is not a singer herself. The AI creation has led to a multimillion dollar recording deal as well as some backlash.
Nancy Pelosi has announced she will retire from Congress
After nearly four decades in politics, the 85-year-old, who was the first woman to serve as speaker of the House, will not seek re-election. Donald Trump commented with his usual grace and charm: “She was evil, corrupt and only focused on bad things for our country,” the president told Fox News. Perhaps it’s time for 92-year-old Chuck Grassley to think about retiring now.
Dr Oz is plotting an army of ‘Trump babies’ by 2026
Sounds like a horror movie.
YouTube erased more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations
“The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank,” reports the Intercept. Meanwhile Google, which owns YouTube, has been given a $45m contract by the Israeli government to amplify its talking points.
The week in pawtriarchy
The Gardaí (Irish police) recently got a call about a “lion-like” animal roaming around a wooded area of County Clare. After some sleuthing, it turned out the animal was actually a Newfoundland dog called Mouse who had been given something of a drastic haircut. The Gardai said Mouse was “delighted with his recent viral video clip”. That’s some un-fur-gettable Mane Character Energy.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
