The women of the online right, conservative female influencers if you will, have been expressing some displeasure on Twitter. Namely, what they describe as “hatred” or discrimination against females from the online right has gotten out of hand. Is this the case, or are they trying to inoculate themselves against criticism?
I tend to think the latter, and here’s why: The audience for conservative media skews extremely male. This is my sense having been published in many conservative outlets and working as an editor. So whatever is going on in conservative media or produced by conservative personalities online, women are not generally the audience for that. It’s easily about 90 percent male or more who consumes conservative media. A lot of women work in conservative media, but it’s still all men reading or watching. That’s another issue altogether, frankly. Should the writers match the audience? That’s what we would hear if the roles were reversed.
Now to be specific, let’s look at a tweet from conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair:
“Republicans will lose the election by a landslide if they do not purge all of these red pill lunatics who have severe mommy issues and hate women.” Unfortunately, the person she’s quote-tweeting locked his account, so we don’t even know specifically what she’s responding to. But we get the gist of it. Lauren Southern had a similar tweet but quickly deleted it, perhaps sensing that she was about to face the eye of the storm.
It’s tone policing, supposedly for the good of Republican electoral chances. If people are literally hating women and being crass, I also oppose that. But I likewise oppose the outsized influence of online female conservative personalities, given that they don’t really represent the audience for conservative content, nor to my knowledge do they add to the movement intellectually. Also, they use their looks (which don’t do much for me) to get more attention and followers. I resent that as it seems like bad sportsmanship or something.
Here’s another issue: we don’t seem to criticize feminism anymore in conservative media. Think back to Rush Limbaugh in the late 90s. Feminism was at least one of his number one targets. It wasn’t that Rush was against women. He was against feminism as it sought to replace men in positions of power merely by virtue of the fact that they’re men. Because that’s wrong!
Nowadays, whenever you see an article on one of the big conservative websites–websites which I generally like for the record–whenever you see an article about relationship stuff or dating stuff, it’s usually written by a woman from the perspective of a woman. So the male perspective is literally not represented in conservative media. Isn’t that out of whack?
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