Voting Like Women Will Not Save Us

And Naomi Wolf should know this

In “Vote Like a Woman,” posted just prior to the American midterms, Naomi Wolf urged female voters—who have for many years formed a consistent, if now diminishing, pro-Democrat bloc—to reward Democrats for their Covid authoritarianism by voting against the party.

It has not been my experience that women are particularly well-informed voters or particularly scrupulous about the freedoms and self-determination that form Wolf’s ultimate rallying cry (more on this later).  Research on female voters indicates that women are less likely than men to read a newspaper and less likely to follow current events closely. A 2019 study found that women were 20 percentage points more likely than men to choose a female candidate simply because she was female. These data do not inspire confidence.

Nonetheless, it is intriguing to see a former feminist Democrat urging fellow feminists to reject the Democratic Party—though not, as it turns out, to reject the female chauvinism and Big Daddy statism that got us to where we are.

Over the past year and a half, I have watched with growing interest as Wolf went from feminist media darling to vilified vaccine dissenter, banned from Twitter and Facebook for being, as one source charged, an “unabashed COVID-truther.” I applaud her for breaking ranks at personal cost.

In the cut-throat world of feminist identity politics, any dereliction from orthodoxy is unforgiveable, and public excoriations of Wolf for failing to march in Covid lockstep have been prompt and unsparing. One self-confessed former “fangirl” at The New Republic wrote of “The Madness of Naomi Wolf” after Wolf expressed concern about vaccine harms. Ian Burrell at The Insider reported on “Naomi Wolf’s slide from feminist, Democratic Party icon to the ‘conspiracist whirlpool,’” seeming aghast that that she “rallied against vaccine passports, mandatory masks, and emergency laws.” Feminists who had remained silent for decades about well-documented errors in Wolf’s 1990 The Beauty Myth suddenly felt the need to denounce them. The consensus formed quickly that Wolf was a nut whose nuttiness had been long present in muted form.

The feisty Wolf has not gone quietly or shamefacedly, responding to her now-pariah status with zeal. She has organized against Pfizer, leading a mass team of dissidents, expert and lay, to comb through the pharmaceutical company’s thousands of pages of vaccine trial data (which Pfizer wanted to keep secret for at least the next half century), and has written many reports and conducted innumerable interviews about the disquieting information hidden therein, all with her characteristic passion. In this, she has been genuinely courageous.

Yet a residual feminist blind-spot—and not a small one—is glaringly evident in her call to female voters, most particularly her unfounded belief that women, and not men, will save the world with their much-touted empathy.

 “Vote Like a Woman” trots out most of the usual feminist talking points about female disadvantage, cherry picked in classic men-don’t-matter fashion, and far too numerous to rebut here. We even have the obligatory cliché about Donald Trump as pussy grabber. We hear about the earnings gap, the caring gap, the single-parent gap, and various other injustices allegedly borne by women. We are treated to the howler that women are more affected by violent crime than men. We’re told that the economic downturn has primarily affected women. We never hear about any of men’s burdens, for Wolf seems indifferent to the homicide gap, the work-fatality gap, the suicide gap, the drug overdose gap, the homelessness gap, and the education and employment gap. She tells us that “Women were chattel for centuries” (certainly never in the United States) who only recently could “own their bodies” while seemingly oblivious to the fact that men in the United States never owned their bodies, as was discovered by a generation who didn’t want to kill and die in Vietnam.

To her well-rehearsed list of female grievances are added claims about the particular harms of lockdowns, forced masking, and coerced mRNA injections, which we are told, again, “disproportionately harmed” “women and their children.” (I suppose men don’t have children.) Here, Wolf’s arguments are particularly tendentious, extending even to pretending that lockdowns of small businesses primarily hurt women despite the fact that the majority of small business owners are men. Wolf cites Dr. Robert Chandler, who alleges that “women sustained 72 per cent of [vaccine] adverse events.” Wolf is particularly exercised about the damage the vaccines cause women’s reproductive health, citing disruption of menstrual function, increased miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects as well as a marked decline in fertility overall.

I support Wolf’s raising of these issues. Vaccine harms should be thoroughly investigated rather than glibly dismissed and censored. The vaccines have caused more adverse effects than all other vaccines over the past century. According to the VAERS reporting system, which almost certainly underreports, there have been, as of October 7 of this year, 1,437,273 reports of adverse events following vaccination, including 31,470 deaths and 263,909 serious injuries. The general indifference to these numbers and pooh-poohing of VAERS have been flabbergasting, and whistleblowers like Wolf deserve a hearing.

But there is no excuse for pretending, as Wolf does, that we should care mainly about vaccine harms to women or that Covid policies primarily harmed women. I don’t care if her argument is targeted and strategic: it is still wrong.

It need hardly be said—or perhaps it does—that men were harmed by Covid policies. Men were harmed by the forced shuttering of their business, by the assault on their self-determination, and by restrictions on their right to choose healthcare for their families. I don’t know enough to fully rebut Wolf’s claim that women have been “most hurt by forced mRNA injections.” But given that men became seriously ill and died from Covid at a much higher rate than women, it seems unlikely that men would be significantly less affected by the injections.

The claim Wolf cites by Dr. Chandler about women sustaining 72% of vaccine adverse events seems to be at least partially based on Pfizer’s listing of three pages of diagnoses associated with the uterus compared to half a page related to the testes, which is not evidence that men’s reproductive health has not been significantly harmed, but simply that there are fewer diagnoses associated with the testes. We know that myocarditis and pericarditis pose a particular danger to young men. One recent study of young people diagnosed with post-injection myocarditis found that the cohort was 88% male, and various studies have testified to the seriousness of these conditions.

In focusing only on women’s injuries, Wolf enacts the self-evident contradictions that nearly all feminists promote. On the one hand, she encourages in women, and models in this piece of writing, an exclusive focus on women’s suffering (allegedly caused by an indifferent patriarchy). On the other hand, she assures women that they are the ones who think most about others’ sufferings. She condemns Democrats for the “anti-child” impacts of their Covid policies, as if being anti-child is a new direction for the Dems. It is almost laughable to hear the outrage in Wolf’s statement that “We must now face the fact that the DNC gives not two f---ks […] for your right to have a healthy, living baby.” It has been feminist-impelled Democrat policy for many decades to encourage no-fault divorce, single motherhood, father absence, the criminalization of fathers, state-dependency of families, and the rampant promotion of abortion as a woman’s right. All of these, as Stephen Baskerville has repeatedly shown, and as anyone would know who cared to investigate, are inextricably connected to harms to children. They are not incidental or unfortunate side effects of good policies; they are part of the clearly-stated anti-family goals of feminists themselves, from feminist leader Kate Millett (“The chief contribution of the family in patriarchy is the socialization of the young”) to self-declared family abolitionist Sophie Lewis.

The larger question of whether feminism was ever about caring for women and children is beyond the purview of this essay. Of immediate relevance is that it was feminist politicians who pushed hardest for lockdowns and all the rest, doing so because women—feminist women—said it was what they wanted. And they wanted it in the holy name of safety. From the feminist point of view, Covid mania was the definition of caring. Who screamed the loudest on Twitter about masking, hand-sanitizing, distancing, keeping children out of school, staying in one’s bubble, switching the world to Zoom, keeping out the potentially-contaminated at Christmas, and so on? Who waited in line most patiently for Covid tests and clamored for vaccines to be offered to children? Who was most adamant about the need to shame, isolate, exclude, and penalize the unvaccinated? Feminist women. To expect feminist women to save us now seems rather a stretch.

Women overall, as psychiatrist Mark McDonald has argued in in his recent United States of Fear, are a population conditioned by fear-mongering, with Covid providing a dramatic illustration of the ease with which terrified and self-righteous women could be mobilized through irrational safetyism and scapegoating. Political scientist Jennifer Piscopo reports that women are more likely than men to want a significant role for government in managing “healthcare, housing, education, childcare, and anti-poverty programs.” Many women seem hard-wired to seek a “safe” rather than a free world, to rely on promises from on high rather than their own rational assessments, and to prefer collective rather than individual solutions to problems. All of these contributed to the Covid years.

Wolf praises the allies she has made at Moms For Liberty and the Children’s Health Defense, singling out the women at these organizations as particularly attuned to the needs of children, and calling them the Party of Moms. But these are not women organizing for women’s rights as oppressed victims of patriarchal tyranny; these are women mobilizing to protect their families’ freedom. They don’t want the state co-parenting their children, a classic non-feminist position. Wolf claims that she has no idea of their party affiliations. But that tells you everything you need to know. If they were avowedly feminist Democrat women, Wolf would have known from day one that political dissenters weren’t welcome. The women of Moms For Liberty and the Children’s Health Defense are doing what good women have always done in their communities, organizing with men for common goals (this is made explicit on their websites), and I’ll bet that very few of them identify as feminists.

In the end, the midterm elections offered a mixed message about female voters. According to a recent The Hill report, 53% of women overall voted Democrat, and young women, at 72% support, “broke hard” for the party of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. A majority of young women seem to believe that the right to abort one’s baby is more important than the Nuremberg Code. But The Hill also noted that “Republican House candidates nationwide netted more votes from white women, older women, married women, Southern women, and middle- to upper-income women, those earning between $50,000 and $100,000.” I strongly suspect that at least some of these women, perhaps a majority, voted not as women but as (yes) mothers and also as citizens and patriots as well as the wives, sisters, daughters, and lovers of men. If so, GOOD FOR THEM.

Feminism has for far too long told women to think mainly of themselves, with self-pity for their alleged victimization and self-love for their courage; the result has been an intolerable narcissism evident all around us, especially in women’s arrogant conviction of moral superiority. As I hope Wolf would agree, the last thing we need is more of that.