one for the ladies

When I joke about the sitcom Friends being responsible for the collapse of the West, I'm only half joking. It's a programme that normalised casual use of pornography, coerced women into finding it socially acceptable, normalised divorce, and promoted casual hook-up culture. In their universe it had no moral consequences. In the real world, this liberalism left a generation psychologically damaged and emotionally scarred.

There's been a broad realisation on the right that socially permissive liberalism has been a catastrophic mistake. The pendulum is swinging back to socially conservative views and a rejection of liberalism. This also extends to feminism.

I have no problem with social conservatism. It basically upholds the natural order of things, seeing the traditional family unit as the fundamental basis of community and society. Things went awry when we sought to replace the family with a welfare state which underwrites poor life choices, where nobody is held accountable. This is why we've seen a rise in single-motherhood.

Yet somehow, the right is still losing. It rejects liberalism, but has failed to persuade women that they're better off for it. We see this in America where the right threatens women's bodily autonomy - to the extent where women could be forced to carry a fetus to term even if it's life threatening, or have to endure the trauma of carrying a non-viable fetus to term.    

Conservative men are the worst advocates for conservative values being that they have immature ideas of a woman's role is supposed to be. They're demanding women give up their hard-won liberties to become little more than house servants and breeding cows.

There are some women who've bought into this warped notion of conservatism. We see it in the TikTok "tradwife" movement in which women advertise their willingness to be servile, in the belief that being the dutiful housewife and staying at home is more rewarding and spiritually fulfilling. This is as much a luxury belief as wokery. For working class women, motherhood is often lonely, unrewarding, thankless, and isolating. Not forgetting the opportunity cost and not realising their potential.

The fact is that we have progressed socially and feminism is part of that - and there is no going back. Emancipation of women is a good thing and it's one of the values by which we view our own culture as superior. Ours is a culture in which women have the right to vote, the right to have a bank account in their name, the right to own property, the right to say no to their husbands, the right to inherit, the right to drive, and the right to an education. The right to be free individuals as opposed to the property of men.

When men blame feminism for all of society's ills, you're usually talking to someone who couldn't even define the word. Women want to be more than sex objects in the way they are portrayed. Women want to be respected in all the same ways men want to be respected. That's the equality they demand. The basic right to go out in public without being groped or harassed. The right to public safety. The right to autonomy and equal opportunity in the workplace.

Having achieved much of this, there is nothing more of a turn off than conservative men who believe that conservatism means winding the clock back to 1950, with the notion that women, when they're not being babysitters, exist to please men (in what they do, how they behave, and how they look). It's true that we have to find our way back to a society that values family, marriage and stability, but if the champions of conservative values are sexist frat boys and incels, conservatism will continue to lose.

This is borne out in the statistics where we see the new wave of conservatism being largely the domain of young men, while women maintain their allegiance to progressive parties. Whatever conservatism might offer in the greater good, if it's a raw deal for women, they won't stand with us. Conservatism has to accept that not all social progress is bad. Telling women they've got to give up their basic liberties is never going to win.