Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - White Women Are MAGA Internet's Newest Enemy

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

White women have long been a core voting bloc for conservatives, so why are right wing media figures suddenly obsessed with attacking them?Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz   🗞️ Substack: https://www.usermag.co   In this episode, Crooked Media Hysteria's Erin Ryan joins me to break down the growing hatred towards white women in MAGA spaces and conservative media. From the massive hate campaigns against Amber Heard and Blake Lively, to smearing women like Renee Good during today's ICE protests in Minneapolis, to so-called "Karens" and accusations of hysteria, to the idea of "toxic empathy," we unpack why white women who step outside their assigned role have become such a powerful political target.We discuss the demonization of "Wine Moms" and "Childless Cat Ladies" in relation to the rise of the trad-wife fantasy. We explore why conservative media is obsessed with controlling white women and why this demographic is trending away from the Republican party. We also examine how these narratives are used to justify regressive policies around reproduction, education, marriage, and bodily autonomy.We discuss why scapegoating white women in particular works, why it’s so effective, and what it reveals about a movement that needs the most privileged women to be silent and compliant.Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz      https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0     https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz https://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social  https://twitter.com/taylorlorenz  We cover: ➤ The origins of "white woman" as an insult—from both the left and right ➤ Why MAGA is strategically attacking their own voting base ➤ The "toxic empathy" narrative and why caring is now considered dangerous ➤ How this keeps conservative women in line through fear ➤ The connection to attacks on IVF, surrogacy, and reproductive freedom ➤ Why passport bros and the manosphere hate white women specifically ➤ What this reveals about the MAGA vision for women in America

Like, you know, if you were trying to work on a script and a character acted like how they want white women to act, you'd be like, this doesn't make any sense. This isn't how a person acts. Lately, major figures in the MAGA movement have all become obsessed with one common enemy, white women. Fox News has declared that white women protesting in Minnesota are deranged wine moms. Right-wing pundits have been running nonstop segments and publishing news articles about cringe Karens like Renee Good. They've declared these white women protesting ICE as awful. a.k.a. affluent white female urban liberals and their public enemy number one in the MAGA world right now. But why is the right so obsessed with demonizing white women, a group that notoriously favors Republicans in every presidential election,

a group that is increasingly trending away from them in a way that will make the party's electoral survival difficult without them in the future? Aaron Ryan is the host of Cricket Media's hysteria podcast. Today she's joining me to break down how and why this war on white women started, what it's ultimately about, and why attacking white women specifically is so insidious and effective. Hi, Aaron. Welcome to power user. Thank you so much for having me.

Okay. So to start off, I kind of want to zoom back and talk about where this hatred of white women kind of came from or like when it started. I mean, you wrote this in your piece, but white women have actually been kind of a consistent pro maga demographic. When did things change and when did you start to see this kind of. rhetoric emerge. Well, I mean, hating women is a tale as old as time.

I feel like there is a very strong strain of hating women in as much as they are not serving whatever purpose those people want us to serve or want women to serve. So for example, in American history, white women needing protecting from some bad other has been the justification for all manner of state violence against black and brown people, women and men, but primarily men. And so, you know, this is just a new iteration. White women are now out there visibly agitating against the structures that are supposed to benefit them, but actually are harmful to pretty much everybody who isn't a white man. And I think it's very, like, irksome for the people that need us to play a role, that we're not playing that role anymore. Now, when you said

like white women are kind of a MAGA demographic, white women are a very large demographic in the United States at all, you know, as a whole. But if you're not, you know, If you take a look at different segments of white women, you'll find a lot of division. So like a white woman who went to college, for example, are much less likely to be MAGA than people with lower levels of education. White women under a certain age are much less likely to be MAGA. And so I think what we're seeing is women are refusing to play a role that they've been expected to play, and that has made people really mad.

I think the white women as an insult thing, I kind of noticed it, start. I remember the Bo Burnham comedy special where he was like shut in. I liked the special. This is not me criticizing him, but his song, A White Woman's Instagram in the comedy special, it was like a very funny way to poke fun at the way that a lot of women use Instagram, but you can't sing a straight woman's Instagram or a woman's Instagram, so putting white in front of women made that song feel like not mean-spirited,

or it took away some of the awkwardness that putting it in a different way would have. Yeah, no, that to me is the beginning. I think of 2020 as very much like an origin point of this. I mean, there was a lot of backlash around like the women's march and like the sort of resistance type like that era of Trump 1.0. I think women were villainized. Liberal women were villainized by MAGA obviously throughout that time. But to me in 2020, that's when you started started to see it really hit harder. And I think that's because people started to get a lot more understanding, I guess, about like racial divisions. And there were all these conversations. about systemic injustices. There's that tweet that was like super viral from the time of just like

a leftist man putting white in front of like the most misogynistic statement about women, you know, that you've ever heard and thinking it's okay because it's white. And I'm not saying that's what Bo Burnham was doing. But it did feel like that's sort of when I think a lot of people sort of really started to villainize a particular type of white women. And I think the right recognized very quickly that like they could get a lot of left-leaning men specifically on board with misogyny by like villainy. white women sort of specifically. Well, if you want to even take it back before 2020,

you bringing that up reminded me a lot of like how people talked about white women after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. And then even back in 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were running against each other in a pretty contentious Democratic primary. There was a sort of anger at women who supported Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons. But I think the like prevailing assumption by people who didn't like Hillary Clinton supporters was that they were supporting her, because they just wanted a woman. They just wanted to vote for a woman, who are somebody who reminded them of themselves. I don't want to paint with too broad of strokes here,

because I'm not saying that people who didn't like Hillary Clinton in 2008 were misogynist at all. But there is misogyny that is like wrapped up and kind of hard to completely tease out of some of the ways that people criticized Hillary voters, especially right after 2016. And I think there was a lot of like hurt feelings that were legitimate too, like, you know,

the way that Bernie Sanders was treated in the 2016 Democratic primary. The way that it seemed like the fix was in and how the more we learned about it, the more we're seeing just how unfair it was and how there was like an organization basically behind promoting her at his expense. That's totally legitimate. But I also think some of the anger about that unfairness has been channeled into like a kind of disdain for white women.

I also think that Lena Dunham weirdly. Yeah, I was going to say like the backlash to Lena Dunham and like the villainization of Lena Dunham. she represents a particular type of white woman. And a lot of these liberal women, like, I get it, like the resistance, lib like caricature and that sort of vibe of the 2010s. Like, I understand, like, Lena Dunham can be a ridiculous person.

She's a celebrity, you know. But at the same time, that doesn't make the misogyny that is constantly levied against her okay. But it seemed to kind of like open the door for it, I felt like. It feels like whenever there's a white woman who is acting like a white woman, whenever the door cracks to critique for her, legitimate critique goes in and then misogyny like barrels through also.

And that's kind of what we saw with her. Like I remember in those days with the web, the critique of white women often came from leftist guys or people on the left or like a sort of almost like pick me thing. I don't know, where it was like I'm a cool white woman so I'm picking on other white women because I'm cooler than them. And now it's really interesting to see it coming out of like conservatives. One other thing that I think was interesting that I've been following

and covering a lot too is just these very high profile harassment and abuse campaigns against women. Obviously, Blake lively most recently, but Amber Heard. And what you hear a lot in those campaigns, especially the Amber Heard campaign, which was this blueprint for, I think, so many misogynistic campaigns that have come after it is like, well, she's just a rich white woman. She's a white woman. Like, no sympathy for white women. Like da-da-da-da.

And I think it's so insidious because there's a lot of people, I think, that understand, like, that white women are privileged. And that was sort of like the lesson that they learned from 2020 was like, oh, like white people are privileged. White women are bad. And we can say all of this horrible stuff and have no sympathy because this is a rich white woman. And it's like, yeah, she's a rich white woman that did a lot of bad stuff or, you know, Blake lively is a rich white woman that got married out of plantation. That doesn't mean that the misogyny or that a misogynistic hate campaign is like acceptable. Right.

And it doesn't mean that misogyny is a major contributor to the volume of hate that they're getting. I think what you wrote about that was so interesting in this piece, though, is now we're seeing those, which I guess we're sort of more mainstream hate campaigns, hatred, misogyny. There's always been a sort of specific type of misogyny against white women specifically, especially white women that try to conform to society's, like, beauty standards are very, like, villainized. But now we're seeing the right and specifically, like, these MAGA spaces really go after white women and villainize, like, the wine moms. And I guess like Renee Good is the most recent example of this where they just like very quickly kind of attacked her. What are your thoughts on kind of that emergence and that pivot? Why did MAGA suddenly get on board in such an aggressive way? Well, I think that MAGA has always been a little bit about a specific vision of masculinity as like a dominating and destructive force.

And the reason that it's sort of been able to get out ahead of the version of masculinity that we have on the left is because it's easier to just like write down in a few words. like being in charge, being like protector and the one that must be protected from. And like, it's been harder for us to like articulate why on the left, why that is like something that is kind of like an anti-survival attitude for a species to have. And I think that something that we're seeing now is like when people are actually like, I'm actually not okay with this version of masculinity taking over and driving the entire world. I actually don't think it's good. and standing up and using what privilege they have because of their femininity and their whiteness,

it feels like, I think, to the domineering hypermasculine maga crowd, it feels like a betrayal because they're offering like white women a fantasy, a protection and elevated status. And I don't know if you know very much about like Phyllis Schlafly. She was the anti-feminist from the late 60s and 70s and into the 80s, who was basically the public face of the anti-equal rights amendment movement. And that was basically her entire line when she was like, we don't want. We don't want the ERA because women have protected status. We have a privileged status.

And of course, she was only talking about, like, wealthy white housewives at the time. But it's something that we've seen kind of as a through line. And right now, we're at a point where the evidence of our eyes shows us that white women are actually not settling into that. I mean, some white women are totally comfortable with the idea of brown people and black people being brutalized for their benefit, but a lot of them are not.

And I think that's coming up in a really interesting way. Something I found very interesting is that strategically this feels like a loss of emotional control on the part of conservatives because they have worked so hard. I don't know if you read like conservative women's media, but I'm a subscriber to EV magazine. The magazine is, like Peter Thiel like anti. Yeah, well, I mean, they get really mad. If you say that on their social media, technically Peter Thiel's fertility app, which weird that he has a fertility app, the fertility app, the fertility app was the biggest buyer of ads. in the first, like, issues of the magazine, but it's also got the same name as the fertility app, but whatever, it's semantics.

Evie is always, like, it's always hammering on this idea that, like, white women, you shouldn't have to apologize for being a white woman. It's not your fault, like, what white women in the past did to other people. And now it's, like, after, like, trying to rally the troops, trying to, like, put out this whole magazine that's, like, white women, don't be afraid of being, like, skinny and straight and a mother and whatever. Now they're coming out, and, like, they're unable to control themselves when those women are not behaving how they want.

They're unable to hold themselves back and not be like, well, you're fucking bitch. Like now they're just kind of coming out and it's like they can't control themselves. And it feels very like strategically not very smart for them. One thing that I think is interesting and you cited this piece in the telegraph that I saw too that was just ranting about, you know, angry young women and white women specifically. But they talk about toxic empathy. And you know, like you mentioned, they've spent so many years conditioning people to mothers, you know, caretakers. You're the, you're the caretaker of, you know, you're, you're the caretaker of, you know, you're, you're, you're the home, et cetera. But when then these liberal women sort of show empathy for brown people,

it's like, oh, this is toxic. She's hysterical. Like, her mind is not right. I just think they immediately like lean into stereotypes to kind of take away women's agency. And I think that like, they do that to all women, not just white women, but I do think that there's this specific sort of caricature that they lean into of a hysterical white woman. They've done this to push like so many policies as well. They also constantly push this lie that the majority of white women are anxious and depressed. Jonathan Haidt, a reactionary guy. I'm not sure how familiar you are with him, but he's on the board of Barry White's, yeah, fake university and everything. But he's written about, you know, like these neurotic young white women. Why are young liberal white women so neurotic and hysterical?

The right also pushes the lie that everyone with long COVID is young white woman. In fact, it's overwhelmingly black people and people of color because they don't have health care, obviously. But it seems like white women are this like convenient trope that they can kind of use to push whatever their policy agenda is. And with, ice, it's like, oh, these hysterical women are like out in the streets because they can't control their toxic empathy or whatever. Yeah, the toxic empathy thing is so interesting to me because it's like we've completely lost the plot as like organisms living on the earth that are supposed to be a pro-social

species. As human beings, we survive by being pro-social, which requires us to have empathy. And it requires us to look out for each other. It's like they want to design an inner life for white women who I think that you're absolutely right. They can't wrap their heads around the fact that we have agency. And they want to design an inner life for us that completely comports with their worldview, which is actually like emotionally nonsensical. Like they want us to have their babies and eat them too. And it's like to tell us that we need to be maternal nurturing mothers and like, oh, pro life, you should care about other people's

babies that haven't even been born yet. You should care about pregnancies that aren't yours because of the life that that child could have. So they want us to have this like deep, deep imagination and empathy for like these imaginary fetuses in people's private lives that we have no business knowing about and then completely ignore our eyes and ears when it comes to watching a child crying as he's being you know picked up by ice agents who are like gripping his Spider-Man backpack it just it to me reads as like emotional illiteracy trying to overwrite what we are actually like programmed to be as pro-social human beings which is people that look out

for each other. I mean, like talk about neuroses and anxiety. This is something that I realized when I was pregnant with my first daughter. I've got two little kids. During pregnancy, the brain changes. Like your human brain changes. Your amygdala gets huge, so you notice things that are threats everywhere. But it's so that you can look out for your children. The sound of a baby crying just goes from being like, just kind of an annoying background noise to like fingernails in your brain. Your brain changes to accommodate the fact that part of our job as like, you, biological women who are reproductive is to like notice threats and look out for people that are smaller and weaker than we are. That's like something that are that is designed to help our species survive. So I think it's like it's really interesting to read stuff that's like empathy is toxic and it's like then why is it something that happens to us naturally? Why is it like a natural state of being? It just, it feels very like phony and false and I think it comes from a deep lack of understanding of the humanity and agency of women. Well, I think it's also it's just like, this very narrow definition of like who you are allowed to care about.

Like women can be empathetic and caring to their own biological white children in the context of a nuclear family, but they certainly cannot care for like black or brown people that are getting rounded up and deported. And if they do that, they're seen as like race traders basically. I mean, that's kind of how these women are treated. And I do think it like comes back to this idea of race where it's like women that align themselves with like more multiculturalism or feminism, which is like a multilateralism, which is like a multicultural movement, like they're seen as like not part of the broader project,

which is white nationalism. And so I feel like they're kind of racial privilege or whatever is kind of like ignored. And men just, yeah, they just revert directly to misogyny. Yeah. I mean, but let's not ignore the fact that the like white nationalist system, if it were like tomorrow, snap your fingers, here it is, we're living in a white nationalist system. White women who complied and obeyed like under a system that subjugated them would actually have a very high status in that system. And I think part of this is people on the Maga side do not understand that some of these white women out there in Minneapolis who are protesting alongside people of all demographics and races, by the way. It's not just white women. There's tons of white men.

My family is from Minneapolis. Like my dad did one of the marches recently and it's just like videos he sent me. It was just like every type of person you can imagine is out there. But white women are getting a lot of heat. So I just wanted to like put that out there. I think that conservatives that are just puzzled by white women's activism can't wrap their heads around the idea that a person would see injustice and be like, you know what, it's okay if I lose a little bit of status relative to somebody else in order to write the injustice. Like, I'm not just out here for myself. I'm out here because this is unfair and this isn't how society should be treating anybody. And so if that knocks me down a peg, like, that's fine with me. And I think it just doesn't compute for a specific type of person.

Yeah, I also think it's just about keeping other conservative women in line and creating these like villainized caricatures of white women of being like, oh, you know, what are you going to become a white, you know, this liberal wine mom, a childless cat lady, like a blue-haired liberal. Like, you know, like all of these sort of tropes that we have for white women that step out of line that do have solidarity with other people. Like we know these caricatures, even like a Karen, right? Like that is now used by the right against like liberal women. It's also just ensuring that those women who haven't yet, you know, express solidarity with other people don't because they see the villainization and kind of like what happens, you know, when they do. Right. And I think that's an important point, too, that I don't think that these white women, that they, I saw like a tweet by Eric Erickson that was like, Renee Good was an awful. And it's like affluent white female urban liberal as like a slang. It's supposed to be like slur against a white woman who's like protesting in Minneapolis, for example. But I think it's really funny that like I'm. seeing a real divide between what conservatives expect those women to care about and what they actually care about. Because I can't think of anything that those protesters care about less than the opinion of a, like, chubby ginger,

who never ever would have their best interests in mind and would be willing to dehumanize them at the drop of a hat. And he's like far from the only one, but it was like just the most simple example of that trope being used in the wild. It's interesting to see the divide between conservative men thinking that women like that actually care and those women actually not caring at all. And Taylor, you might be right that it's just designed to warn conservative women against stepping out of line. They're not trying in any way to like bring liberal women back to the fold or make some of these awful people learn their lesson and come running back to the kitchen. I think it's also about like male grievance though and also bonding through that male grievance and kind of like creating this thing that men can bonder over, which is villainizing white women. and especially as the MAGA coalition is become slightly more diverse in terms of men,

like they have made inroads with Latino men with black men, you know, like they have sort of gotten slightly, slightly more diverse. They're still not really diverse at all. It is a fundamentally like chauvinistic and misogynistic movement. And I think villainizing these privileged white women is also a way for more maga men to kind of like have this outlet and bond with each other and be like, yes, what an awful woman. Like, right? That's an awful lady. Like she's so terrible.

I mean, we've got so many. sports like be normal and just team up against people who cheer for a sports team you don't like i feel like that's a lot more healthy application of that sort of desire to find a tribe and to engage against another tribe just get really into sports guys they're there there's so many of them they're on tv all the time you could do that instead of just like hating women overall it just feels like a grievance against a system that was they were told their entire lives was set up to benefit them but it really was not set up to benefit them which is also why I think they hate white women because they think that they should be awarded white women.

You know, if they are MAGA enough, if they do the things, if they sort of adhere to these conservative values, they get this beautiful white woman who's just going to be a trad wife and never question them. And you see a lot more MAGA men rejecting white women and talking about how white women are bad and you need to be a passport, bro. You need to go travel and find a non-white woman from a subservient country that hasn't been corrupted by feminist values. Even Pearl Davis has said that, like, feminism itself has made white women specifically, like, unmarriageable. And that's why men should marry these, like, Latino women or whatever, which would seem sort of counterintuitive, again, to this white, like, sort of nationalistic movement. But I think it's about control and subservience.

And when, and villainizing, like, being like, these white women have lost control. Like, we're going to take back that power by essentially going off and, you know, basically sex trafficking some girl from an underprivileged country. It does feel like they've been denounced. the participation trophy that they've been told their entire lives would be awarded to them. They want a life that their father had that was easy for their father to have. And the reason that it was easy for their father to have is because their mother did not have the option to live on her own. And I think we're in a, we're in a world right now where women, especially in America, who are privileged, middle class educated, mostly white women, are able to look around and make a

determination of whether or not involving a man in their life in a typical traditional, heterosexual marriage actually is going to improve their life and in a lot of cases they're like it's actually not men are not the prize marriage is not the prize I'm married I've got two kids like I said you can be totally happy in a marital situation but also if I were married to some guy who like expected me to chase him around wait like work an entire job come home wait on him no what a terrible what a terrible thing to expect and I and I think a lot of women are like we're talking to each other we're seeing with our own

what our mother's lives were like, what our aunt's lives were like, what our grandmother's lives were like, and making a decision that marriage, in order for marriage to happen in our lives, the men that we invite into our lives must meet a certain minimum threshold. And a lot of the men, I think, that are angry, that have glommed on to MAGA, are men that don't meet that threshold. They are not positive additions to the lives of women that they know. And there is like a way forward that would allow them to dispel. some of the loneliness that they're maybe experiencing.

And that is to become more active participants in the life of the family that they think they want and are being denied. That just means doing work that is in the past been very feminized, helping a little bit more with child care, being excited about splitting domestic duties 50-50, especially if you have a situation where you and your partner are both working outside of the home. Like, how are we splitting the tasks of being in a home together? And I think a lot of them are just refusing to in any way learn feminine skills. But I think it's also, it goes back to like the reason white women or the target of that is because they think that white culture, like white feminist culture, would ask them to do the diapers or something. Whereas if they get somebody from maybe a more patriarchal culture or a culture where men are not expected to do those things in somewhere in South America or Asia or something, like they can opt out of that. And so again, it's just like I feel like that like hatred of white women.

is really about hatred of the progress that white women have been able to achieve through feminism in terms of this stuff. I don't know. So much of the white women villainization also just feels like it's just laying the groundwork for really bad policies. And it seems like if they can sort of push these narratives about white women, they can roll out a lot of really regressive policies. Like for instance, again, this idea that they're hysterical shouldn't be trusted to make like policy decisions, easily brainwashed, like, you know, selfishly refusing. motherhood, aka, like, we should regulate their bodies for them, destroying families through divorce. These people also hate divorced, like, white women that is like, and this evil thing. And just this idea that they're like corrupted by education. You see this hatred directed at like young white women as well, where it's like, look at these crazy white girls, you know, on campuses. Like,

I mean, Ben Shapiro would villainize these people all the time and Charlie Kirk. But it was like these silly women like getting these crazy ideas in their head. Yeah, it is. It's interesting to see the push back against women's professional advancement. Like the Trump administration has recategorized some post-undergrad degrees, some like advanced degrees in such a way that would make it very difficult for people to take out student loans enough to pay for those degrees. And most of the degrees that were recategorized are degrees that have a high percentage of women working in those degrees. So basically like this little like paperwork switcheroo thing made it so that women who wanted to go to college who weren't independently wealthy enough to be able to afford

out-of-pocket grad school would be denied the path to go to grad school because the amount of loans they could take would be very limited. We also saw in the Heritage Foundation put out a report recently that characterized women having degrees and focusing on their education. I think they called it like, I don't know if they said useless, but it was something akin to useless. It was like young women need to be encouraged to get married and start having children instead of pursuing useless prestige or something like that. The move right now on the American right is it, they are really trying to intellectualize a push to get women to feel pressured or bullied into getting married and having children before they're 30. And so what we're seeing a lot in the like anti-white woman backlash is like, just picture the white woman that they're mad at.

You know, it's like I'm picturing like a Minneapolis protester. She's wearing a cocoon coat and she's got her mittens on and she's driving a minivan van. And maybe she had kids when she was 35 or 36 years old. and like, so she's not just this like young mom prancing around elementary school drop-off. They really want women, and specifically white women in a proto-fascist Christian nationalist society, to be kind of ushered into this like stay-at-home home life before they're old enough to realize that the life that they can have for themselves is bigger and more complicated than that if they wanted to be. And it's just, it's very insidious.

I think that the like white woman reactionary like stuff that we're seeing on the far right manga is the sort of like the id version of that where it's not very strategic. It feels kind of sloppy. It feels like a bunch of people just got really mad. It doesn't feel that way to me though. It doesn't feel sloppy at all because it's like this is something that they have so consistently built towards for this entire movement. I mean, I just think of like even the earliest kind of iterations of this.

And I think that like white women are so core and essential to the MAGA movement that I do think that they are very focused on kind of like keeping them in line through various ways. I'm not saying that like some of these men yelling about women online are like strategic in any way. I don't think that they're, but groups like the Heritage Foundation are some of these other people like pushing this stuff like Chris Rufo or like these other right wingers. I do think that they think critically about this stuff. And I do think that especially the weird ways that like white women are being really exploited. and attacked to push like these ideas. I don't know. I do think it's about enforcing racial solidarity at the end of the day.

Like I think that that's like kind of what this all is about because the women, the white women that they hate, it is women that support Black Lives Matter, you know, in 2020. It is women that marry across like racial lines, which they view as traders or just any women that sort of shows solidarity. I mean, right now with ICE, right? It's showing solidarity primarily for non-white people. And so it just feels very much like.

I don't know, like they want to define whiteness in these very narrow and authoritarian terms. And I think like when white women don't center their whiteness or they express solidarity with people who aren't white, like that is when they're being villainized the most. Sure, but they're asking white women to be this set of mutually exclusive traits that they can't, they can't all be contained in one person. They're just, they're writing a bad character. Like, you know, if you're in a, you're trying to work on a script and a character acted like how they want white women to act, you'd be like, this doesn't make any sense. This isn't how a person acts.

Well, it's like having like being perfect at sex and having no body count or like there's always these like contradictions, which I think also the red pill like body counting is also insane and related to this. Like they talk about how like white women hit the wall or whatever, AKA like look older than 21 years old like earlier than women of color. And that's why like, you know, they're particularly like they need to get married even younger. That was an argument that I saw even recently. Why do they care so much? That's the thing. like when I think about how white women care about men or talk about men, and maybe this is just my friends, but like, we're not like,

they need to dress like this. So they need to act. It's just like, leave us alone. Leave us alone. Like, if a woman wants to get married to you and that's like her life's ambition and she wants to have children and she wants to do like the traditional nuclear family and she's totally comfortable taking on the bulk of housework and she wants you to go to work and be a paycheck and then come home, sit on an armchair, like whatever.

That is fine. Like, why do you care about all the people that don't want that? Like there are people out there that want that. There are a lot of women out there who want that. I think that like the modern world is crazy and overwhelming and a life with very defined roles. There are people that really think that would be appealing, right? So why do they care so much that not all of us want that? You can't, they can't marry every single white woman.

You know what I mean? I know. I think it's about subjugation and control, right? Like, I mean, this is why Pearl Davis, I believe, is still single. Like, it's like these type of women that buy into their system of patriarchy, like, they don't want that. They always want the ones that don't because they want to be able to subjugate and control them. And also they sort of, I think, like, recognize that like men are not valuable creatures or whatever they're telling themselves, like, whatever that movement is out. Like, I think that they know in their heart that's not true and they don't respect women that do buy into that ideology because they know how flawed that they are.

You know what I mean? And so I think that's part of it. I think there's also something to be said about like, you know, and I don't want to get two in the weeds here with the way the boys and girls are raised. But girls tend to be raised to do a better job forming social connections and building their own networks. And then when they become adults, if they're by themselves and they don't find somebody who's a suitable partner, they don't want to have a suitable partner. They can have a fulfilling life because their entire lives. They have been doing that. You know, they watch their mother and they imitated their mother.

Or like, they just were socialized that way at school. And I don't think there are a lot of boys that are, there are. boys that are socialized to form groups and and be good friends and members of their community. But like, if you go to a PTA meeting, like, who's running it? Like, it's all the, it's the moms. Like, you bring your kid to school. The default is like they're going to call the mom if the kid's sick, even if the mom and dad both work full time.

Like, there's like this default assumption. And I think that because of those things, the one upside of the fact that so much of this is put on girls is that girls can figure out how to have a family and a community without a man. and the reverse is not true. They need women, but women don't need them at this moment in history. Now, if we were in a much more violent society where men were like brigadiering houses and like knocking down doors with pitchforks, like it would be more necessary to have someone physically large and strong that was there to like keep their house safe.

You know what I'm saying? But like, as it is right now, if you are a 22-year-old graduated from college, you're like, you know what? I think I want to have a kid, but I don't want to get made. married, whatever, you can like freeze your eggs, unfreeze them when you're 32, get, you know, get an artificial insemination, have a baby, live with some girlfriends. Like you're probably all like a, you know, you could share that. But that's what's so threatening, right? That's why they're so angry about it. It's like that is what is threatening. Exactly. That's exactly what's threatening

is because I think they know that in order to have families, they need to have a woman who wants to have a family with them. And like women have figured out a way to have something that, is family-like or a literal family without necessarily having a man in their lives. Definitely, which, yes, I think they're very angry about all of that. It's crazy because it's like, I mean, I hate being like not all men, but there seems to be such a divide among men too, where it's like they feel like almost different genders to hang around a man who is like enlightened and smart and like fulfilled with himself and can form social relationships feels totally different than being.

around a dysfunctional violent man. Well, I think also like, I just like back to what you were saying before of like just women having more options and stuff. Like I think it's also important to point out too that white women are the ones that generally do have access to those privileges. Do have access to IVF. Do have access to, you know, all of these issues. It's been interesting too to see the villainization of IVF and surrogacy, which is often

framed against white women. Like I've noticed so much conversation on Twitter lately. I have like a whole screenshot file of just like seemingly like progressive even accounts boosting like MAGA reactionaries on issues like IVF and surrogacy where they're like, oh, you know, these rich white women just think they can buy their babies. Like, why don't you adopt? You know, there's all these, which is crazy. That's not the same thing. Also the numbers aren't there to adopt. No.

And also like adoption is not the same thing as having your own child. It requires you have to be prepared to adopt a baby. And that is something that you should be prepared to do. Like that is a separate thing from going through IVF. Obviously surrogacy and IEDF are not exactly the same. And obviously there can be very exploitative situations with surrogacy, of course. But at a time when more and more women are seeking reproductive freedom and seeking, you know, different family options and seeking like, I mean, surrogacy has become much more normalized because of gay men and because, you know, so many people not just are struggling with infertility,

but there's just a lot more families that don't look like traditional. families where both partners can biologically have children. And these are things that like, instead of having conversations like, amazing, we want to have families however we can. Let's make sure they're ethical. It's like they're trying to paint it as like these white women or like rich white women just want, you know, to buy their babies or they won't have babies early enough. So they want to spend, you know, go through IVF when they're 45 because these. And I think again, it's interesting how like fundamentally that's a discussion about reproductive justice. But the attacks are being filtered through these attacks on white women, which.

seem to be effective with like getting some people that are not MAGA on board because misogyny is so pervasive. Well, I think that that sort of backlash betrays a kind of lack of understanding of how sexist, the idea of the fertility cliff was in the first place. And the way that women's reproductive and sexual health and fertility was painted as women's fault. And now the more, we barely even studied sperm. We barely even studied how like old sperm and low quality.

sperm impacts like reproductive outcomes. Like we now know after like the least possible amount of research that sperm from like a really old guy that is not healthy sperm can lead to a woman having like preeclampsia, which is a deadly condition during pregnancy, and that miscarriages or repeated miscarriages are often due to low quality sperm or that if a couple wants to get pregnant, a man should abstain from marijuana for at least four to six months before trying to get pregnant and elsewhere. during the like attempts to like get so there are like so many things like for our entire lives I was like hit over the head with this idea that like oh she can't get pregnant it's her fault and also there is always a notion given told to women that once you hit 35 it is like over you can't have babies like you're more likely to get hit by a truck than have a baby and that we're finding out was based on like data from the 1700s from the countryside of France like it is

not something that actually like holds it it it doesn't hold out like if you actually like try to figure out whether that's scientifically, scientifically valid. And the sexism behind that was that women were brought up to think, okay, I need to do this, I need to do this, I don't have very much time. If I want to be a mother, I can only do it this way. And then I run out of time and that's it. And it introduced a level of like urgency to marriage and child bearing

that artificially pushed women to make decisions before they actually had to. And so I think that anything that undermines that, So IVF, you can actually get pregnant and successfully carry a pregnancy well into your 40s now, provided you froze embryos and not your eggs. And surrogacy, actually, if for whatever reason, I have friends that had two children via surrogate, she had had cancer and had to have her, like, reproductive organs taken out of her body. But before she had that happen, she froze all of her eggs, and they did IVF and froze the embryos, and they were able to have a surrogate. They were able to have two of their own children via surrogate. Like, that's an amazing advancement that they were able to take advantage of that. I think that anything that undermines the sexist framework that's like, if you can't have babies, it's your fault.

You didn't do it soon enough. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That threatens the structure itself. And that's another reason why I think they're angry. Although, again, Taylor, I don't think they're thinking about it this deeply. I think they're just reacting. Well, I think most people on the internet are just reacting. But I do think that they think about these things.

And I do think that there is some level of, I don't even think it's active coordination, but I do think that these narrative tropes take hold based on whether or not they're effective. and undeniably villainizing white women has become effective for that movement because it's so pervasive. And because I do see these examples as well of like that rhetoric playing really well with a lot of because it's misogyny and because misogyny leveled against white women is viewed as acceptable by so many people on the left or Democrat. Like I do think that it has become very normalized. And I see a lot of like that hatred of like what like that villainization of women like just play very well. I was fighting with somebody about it on Twitter the other day. And it like made me think of this guy that's like, I'm not Maga, but you know, these white women, these white women.

And it's like that is acceptable. And again, not to not to discount the many evil things that white women have done and do. But I hope that people kind of like recognize like what these attacks on white women are feeding into. And fundamentally, it is a very reactionary horrible movement that doesn't just hate white women, but the hates like all minorities and like all women generally. And like, I think white women are a very convenient target. I will say that, like, let's not pretend that there aren't things that white women do that are, like, kind of silly. But I saw a tweet the other day that I was like, this is actually a perfect encapsulation of something that's been bothering me about the discourse around, like, even like boomer liberals or like, you know, these people, you know, with sassy bumper stickers about Elon Musk on their Priuses or whatever, you know, this sort of kind of cringe core liberal. And the tweet was like, I'm paraphrasing here.

It was like, eventually leftists are going to have to understand that politics means. sometimes interacting with people who annoy you and I think that that really gets to the core of something where it's like you know what you might find a group of like hashtag resistance libs to be annoying but that in no way undermines like the moral rightness of what they're trying to do or what they're what they're aiming for and if your values align with the values of somebody who you're like oh this person's a little annoying work with them be annoyed be annoyed with them but like you have to work together we're in a point in history where we can't really like pay our ideal team based on like how cool everyone is or how original all their jokes are or how

fun you know it's we we have to work we have to play with the team that's on the field and this is the team that's on the field and so I think it's like yeah you know fine make fun of me you know in my like kid car that I drive my like signs I don't care I think a lot of people need to kind of recalibrate and understand that like we have to work together with people whose hearts are in the right place even though the pink pussy hats might have aged poorly. Yeah, a hundred percent. No, I totally agree. Also just recognizing that like there's a lot of like complexities with every person and these

tropes of like the wine mom or the whatever. Like I mean, one woman that I think has done a great things for white women is that Jennifer Welch woman from the I've had it podcast. I don't know. Like I've just noticed that a lot more people are like, wait a minute, like maybe the wine moms are based because like she'll say things like, I don't know, people deserve health care or like ICE is evil or she's just sort of like outspoken. And it is nice to see people embrace someone that I think even five years ago would have

been read as like a corny resistance person. But she's like she has a moral compass on things like Israel too. So I don't know. I think just generally making people more aware of misogyny and like what these attacks are really about because I think it might seem harmless to hate on cringe white women, present company included. But like, but it is really insidious and bad. I mean, I think so much of it is ultimately about just pushing this like.

evil agenda that we should all be against. Yeah. And it's about trying to return us to a period of time in American history that never really existed outside of advertisements. And that wasn't even making people happy back then. I said this on another podcast this week, but if they're going to try to like boot us back to the 1950s, they need to at least bring back quailutes. And like single income household. Right. There's a part of me that's like, actually, that would be kind of nice. That would be kind of nice if only me or my husband had to work or we could both work part time and I could be home 50% of the time and he could be home 50% of the time. Like that would be nice, but the moment we're in

right now does not lend itself well to that in any way. Well, Aaron, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I appreciate it so much. Thanks for having me. All right, that's it for the show. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. In my newsletter, I publish a biweekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading online and paying attention to. You can also get my newsletter on my Patreon. Again, linked below. On my Patreon, you can also get bonus episodes of Power User. I do monthly Q&As and more. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.