Lean in (to misogyny), ladies!

Are you a woman? Do you want to rapidly raise your profile and get booked on the speaking circuit? Are you good at mental gymnastics?

If you answered yes to all of the above then gender grifting may be for you! This often-lucrative career path involves explaining to less enlightened women why feminism has gone too far and the world is much better off being run by men. You get extra points if you aren’t white, and can explain to the masses how racism is good, actually.

You can see this hustle in the tradwife content all over social media. As Jameela Jamil recently noted, all the “tradwives” preaching to young women about how they should be submissive little ladies are massive hypocrites. They’re all making money, building their brands and securing their independence while telling other women they shouldn’t be doing the same.

You can also, of course, see gender grifting on the likes of Fox News, where ambitious, albeit identikit, female anchors tut-tut on TV about how #MeToo has gone too far.

And now, because the right has been so successful in rewriting reality, you can see gender grifting splashed all over the homepage of the New York Times. On Thursday, the Times published a transcript of a recent episode of the conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast Interesting Times. This very interesting (in the British sense) piece was originally titled: Did Women Ruin the Workplace? The headline was then changed to the more nuanced: Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?

Douthat generously invites two women into his own workplace: the podcast features two critics of liberal feminism, Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant, in conversation about “what a right-wing politics of gender should look like.” Andrews apparently caught Douthat’s eye because she had just written an essay for Compact called The Great Feminization, which argues feminism has failed because it has driven masculine virtues out of our institutions. The word “woke” or “wokeness” was used unironically 11 times in........

© The Guardian