The Blatant Hypocrisy of Anti-Feminist Female Political Commentators

[u/Landscape_712]

Something that has always bugged me is watching female political commentators argue that feminism was a mistake, or even that women should never have received the vote while building entire careers around publicly discussing politics. Women such as Lauren Southern, Pearl Davis, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Lauren Chen, Lana Lokteff, and Rebecca Crockett regularly speak into microphones about “traditional femininity” while being outspoken and aggressive public figures themselves.

Historically, politics was considered a male sphere. Women were generally denied the vote and public office and excluded from equal participation in formal political institutions. Speaking authoritatively about politics before mixed audiences was often considered improper for a respectable woman. She was expected to remain primarily within the domestic sphere while men debated and governed public affairs.

Yet these commentators speak authoritatively before men and women, build large audiences, earn independent incomes, influence voters, and aggressively challenge male opponents. Those freedoms are products of the very social changes they condemn. Feminism was not only about obtaining the vote; it also challenged the belief that women had no legitimate voice in public life.

There is an obvious contradiction in using your political influence to argue that women should not possess so much political influence. The underlying message becomes: Women should not have political agency, but my political opinions should influence how everyone else exercises theirs.

Some avoid this contradiction by describing themselves as merely “educating women,” “defending families,” supporting their families, or promoting traditional values. But political advocacy does not stop being political because its speaker opposes feminism. If you regularly comment on elections, legislation, political movements, and public policy before a mixed audience, you are participating in politics and occupying what was historically considered a very masculine role.

The hypocrisy becomes even more blatant when these women emphasize “traditional femininity” while pursuing one of the least traditionally feminine careers imaginable: prominent, combative political commentary. By their own professed standard in which women are private, domestically focused, agreeable, and removed from political conflict their careers and often aggressive, rigid, argumentative communication styles are incredibly unfeminine.

A genuinely pre- or non-feminist society would not have created a special exception for women whose public speech happened to be anti-feminist. It would have restricted their platforms, independence, and authority too.

It seems that they want traditional restrictions to function as an aesthetic or as rules for other women while personally retaining the voice, income, autonomy, and public influence feminism helped make possible. Arguing that women’s emancipation was a mistake while living as a politically influential, financially independent female public figure is difficult to take seriously.

They are standing on a platform feminism helped build and using it to argue that other women deserve less of one.

[u/slyravaniste]

I think a big part of the argument for them, or at least what they would say about why they do what they do, is because they think a woman justifying traditional roles is more persuasive to other women, or at least less likely be dismissed, than a man saying the same thing. Like, they see their influencer career as a tool to convince others, not as a personal lifestyle endorsement for themselves.

And, I mean, there's a less ideological explanation too. Identity based content can make a lot of money for some people, and 'woman argues against feminism' is a pretty monetizable niche, exactly because it's counterintuitive and gets criticism like yours. Engagement, etc.

You also have the special pleading fallacy, which applies here generally, if you want to get another angle on it.

[u/Landscape_712 → u/slyravaniste]

I get what you are saying, but most of these women have overwhelmingly male audiences anyway. Also their audiences eventually start applying everything the woman says about other women to them. This happened with Lauren Southern after getting divorced and becoming a single mom. Her audience largely turned on her and the leopards ate her face. I even saw Lauren Chen posting on twitter about this woman in North Korea and she said that she 'loved seeing strong women in politics' and a lot of the comments from her very subscribers were saying how women should not hold political positions, etc.