Today I stumbled across a weird corner of Twitter, where a ton of ostensibly conservative Christian women and men were trying to debate incels and RedPill bros using facts and logic, talking about how they shouldn't shame single mothers or promote having extramarital affairs as "high value" men, and how a TikTok trad wife was a larp of a real adoring wife--who may just have a career and have been intimate with someone else before them.

The women were also trying to redefine an "alpha" as a man who could control his sexual urges and stay faithful and kind, and were criticizing guys worshipping that kicker guy for his commencement speech, saying that if they wanted a homemaker wife they needed to be bringing in his kind of salary. Hell, all the worst fears of misogynist chuds, like how a woman won't date you unless you made 6 figures or had a good body, were things these conservative women were unapologetically saying they expected their husband to have, whereas most secular and liberal women I know would never criticize their partner on those grounds.

And then there were the "nice" Christian men who were showing themselves caring for their wives and trying to insist to incels that this was not "beta simping," along with women criticizing pastors who said DV was not grounds for divorce. All the while incel chuds, for as much as we know they hate feminists, were whining that conservative women were actually the "most disobedient" and likely trying to hide their past promiscuity behind their newfound conservativism. Hell they were even arguing to Mike Cernovich of all people that all women who partied in college were irredeemable.

Not to say these anti-redpill women were totally woke or whatever, they were usually transphobic, pro-Israel, anti-abortion, and claiming incel/redpill stuff was "just as bad as feminism," but my takeaways are:

  1. This redpill/incel/trad shit is tearing the conservative Christian community apart and giving their men brainworms too, the educated and family oriented women of the community are actually unhappy with this trend and the potential partners it's yielding, and unhappy with the female incel-pandering grifters facilitating their marginalization. That is not to mention the precipitous decline of conservative male church attendance.

  2. The ideal man as described by a lot of conservative women is actually the "beta soy lib" archetype who isn't dogmatic about gender roles and is unafraid to show kindness, provided he knows how to shoot a gun/do yardwork. A left/lib female-attracted person who made videos unapologetically espousing their belief in respect and equality in partnerships, in their own terms, might draw as many conservative women fans as they do trad/incel men enemies. A lot of the talking points we on the left find trite and self-evident would be eye opening in some places if they were just articulated again.

  3. These anti-misogyny conservative women are fighting a losing battle and they don't admit it to themselves yet, because they keep quoting scripture to justify their entitlement to male fidelity and gentleness, while the scripture was still designed by men to let married men get away with everything from DV to child SA.

  4. These conservative Christian women go at this new wave of misogyny harder than the left does, because the left oftentimes subconsciously steer away from these online spaces for fear of being ratioed and triggered and these women don't have that fear because they are still kind of, psychologically speaking, fighting with their ingroup. It's similar to how the current libertarian presidential candidate was the only guy who appeared on right wing podcasts to unapologetically defend drag queen story hour and trans-friendly bathrooms.

Thoughts? (Also, feel free to repost this anywhere if you like.)

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    6 months ago

    that kicker guy for his commencement speech

    i had to look this up. i cannot wrap my mind around a liberal arts school inviting a late 20s guy, who is lavished with lotto money for sometimes being called in to ritualistically kick a ball on TV, to talk to young people about to start their professional lives / careers. absolutely the least qualified motherfucker on the planet from the jump. the fact that he's a Tier 1 douche bro dipshit should have been spotted from a mile away.

    anyway, more to the general thesis of the post (re: women in conservative affinity groups confronting overt misogyny jerks)... it seems like the problem has been around for a while, but the tensions are heightened, which could be an artifact of seeing these discussions happen online, where people just totally pop off unlike IRL. i say this because i was raised in an evangelical community until i separated from it in the late 90s. it's taken decades to unpack a lot of the values and false self-conceptions i was indoctrinated with, but i remember in the 2000s when i was a single guy, trying to figure myself out and not wanting to be on my own. i wasn't dead set against christianity and values of sacrifice and tolerance etc., so i tried considering "church" as simply a heterodox community that maybe i could exist in and find someone who shared these values.

    my experiences and my friends' reports of casually showing up to a "young" church / event to scope it out was that it was a meat market / matchmaking ritual for young singles with a high ratio of women to men. like a well lit daytime night club, in that there was a cohort that was there to find a man and all they cared about was that the guy wasn't an asshole or a drunk. the vibe was one where it felt like all the messaging being dumped on these young, single women was that the only place to find "a good man" was their church. and even back then, the odds were not good for young single women.

    i can definitely imagine in the last 20 years with overall attendance down and the contradiction of trying to exist as a human in an evangelical community adding more tension that conservative communities would become even more conflicted and contested as spaces for negotiating matches/pair-bonding.

    • TheGyattsMustBeCrazy [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      I do remember in high school a lot of secular girls went to those youth group meetings to meet guys who wouldn't try to sleep with them. Wonder if participation from those girls has shot down too in light of evangelicals' embrace of Trump, and if that has heightened the bitterness.

      • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]
        ·
        6 months ago

        I'd go sometimes, strong preference for the youth events and not the weekly stuff, because I'd have a friend or two who regular'd at whatever various churches, and honestly, it wasn't so bad as a hangout, aside from the mostly light and not-too-aggressive begvitations to the weeklies. There were a lot of times my mom didn't want to pay and drive me to the skating rink, and I wasn't old enough to go to bars, and didn't know the rest of the city that well, as my parents and I were relatively recent residents. A small number of guys had to be fought off, but it was still a safe environment.

        The politics there was mostly anti-abortion and nothing else too divisive. I can't imagine what those places are like now, we everybody ramming "let's go brandon" and "DAE hate poor people???" into literally every convo

        • TheGyattsMustBeCrazy [none/use name]
          hexagon
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          I think some kids of today got way into those "Feminists Owned" videos which turned them into completely sour people whose senses of self are replenished only by othering and degrading outgroups.

    • Omegamint [comrade/them, doe/deer]
      ·
      6 months ago

      If dealing with someone else's religious brain worms weren't just an utter nonstarter for me...

      The bar is super low for these women. I had a friend with severe addiction issues whose life was v much a mess and he found a girl at church who was willing to go all in like nothing (he definitely had some other bad brain worms but was at least a pretty decent person beyond where his addiction would take him). He ended up overdosing and leaving behind a kid. Glad she's got a good career but Jesus, gonna be rough explaining that to the kid.

    • bigboopballs [he/him]
      ·
      6 months ago

      my experiences and my friends' reports of casually showing up to a "young" church / event to scope it out was that it was a meat market / matchmaking ritual for young singles with a high ratio of women to men. like a well lit daytime night club, in that there was a cohort that was there to find a man and all they cared about was that the guy wasn't an asshole or a drunk.

      dude that's crazy. I highly doubt that the churches in my town are anything like that though, or I'd be on it. lol