The Patriot Post® · Leftists Suddenly Know What a Woman Should Be

This arrogant, sneering article in New York Magazine asks what is wrong with Republican women. The author, Rebecca Traister, then goes on to tear down as many Republican women as she can who are in or have held public office.

What is wrong with Republican women, according to Traister? The answer is that they are hypocrites who are simultaneously hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine.

Traister uses the examples of Senator Marsha Blackburn (TN), Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Representative Nancy Mace (SC), Governor Kristi Noem (SD), Representative Lauren Boebert (CO), Senator Katie Britt (AL), and former Governor Sarah Palin (AK). She sets up her whole piece by tearing down Blackburn, who had the audacity to ask then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, “What is a woman?” To which Jackson infamously replied that she didn’t know because she wasn’t a biologist.

Blackburn’s question shouldn’t be controversial. Frankly, it shouldn’t even be a question that needs to be asked, and a decade ago, it wouldn’t have been because most people understood what a woman is.

According to Traister, Republicans’ view of women is “something fixed and narrow.” This is patently untrue. By defining a woman as an adult human female capable of carrying and bearing children, someone with XX chromosomes, Republicans aren’t putting women into a narrow box. They are simply saying they aren’t men.

Traister goes on to criticize the rest of the Republican ladies mentioned above as being hypocrites. They say they believe one thing and yet, in their own lives, do another. MTG says she stands for faith and family and yet is divorced. Mace is pro-life but was raped (how this is hypocritical is baffling). Noem is a fake who would do anything to be simultaneously thought of as beautiful but also tough — i.e., a cold-blooded puppy killer. Boebert opposes the sexualization of children and yet was kicked out of a musical performance for mutually groping with her boyfriend. Even Britt, who is arguably the closest to the traditional female, is charged with being too motherly and feminine while spouting Republican hate. And Palin was the archetype for this new type of Republican woman hypocrite.

Traister admires the Democrat equivalents, however. She writes, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fluent on social media; Elizabeth Warren lets her professorial freak flag fly; Ayanna Pressley is bald and beautiful. They tell stories of abortion, of assault, of pregnancy and childbirth, of their gay and trans offspring, of their disabilities and military service, weaving the facts of their lives into arguments for civil rights, health-care access, and housing.”

Here, it should be noted that MTG is the Republicans’ version of AOC or Pressley. They are performance politicians who don’t actually get much done besides managing to make a lot of headlines. Perhaps this is a cynical take, but most politicians are hypocritical — they say one thing and do another. The difference is that Republicans can admit they have crazies as some of their representatives. Without fail, the Democrats circle the wagons, double down, and even laud their own crazies.

Traister is perhaps most offended that each of the Republican women she dissects seems to be standing on the backs of the feminists who came before them while upholding the patriarchy. According to her, the only reason women hold any political office is because of feminists. While this is true to some extent, the “feminist movement” of today is completely different from when it first started. The original feminists wanted the right to vote. Today’s coopted feminists want the right to murder babies in the name of individual autonomy and believe that women and men are the same (not just equals). They pretend that men and women are interchangeable but also insist that men are the worst humans on the planet. Women would rather be in the woods with a bear than a man. As for being stooges of the patriarchy, the entire transgender agenda, particularly men in women’s sports and private spaces, is a much greater betrayal of the original feminist ideals.

Traister’s coup de grâce is that because these Republican women alternately display hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity, they are just like drag queens, except that drag queens are virtuous and promote the opportunity to “slip from and send up the constricting bounds of gender norms, to encourage empathy and celebrate diverse forms of identity.”

The irony with this particular take is that it gets to the heart of the issue. Traister is putting women in a more confining box than Republican women do. Claiming that these Republican politicians’ extreme swing from tough to feminine is akin to gender fluidity demonstrates how hung up she is on gender stereotypes herself.

Fox News reported that the backlash against this article was definitive. Christina Pushaw, an aide to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, put it perfectly in her response: “Do you know any Republican women? I mean in your family or circles of friends? Because it seems like you are lazy and narrow-minded enough to form strong opinions about all of us based on a few politicians and media personalities.”

Traister, like her other ideological cohorts, is on pretty shaky ground by criticizing women for being unwomanly when leftists pretend that men can be women.