Over forty years after the publication of Andrea Dworkin’s influential 1983 book Right-Wing Women (just reissued with a new foreword by British journalist Moira Donegan), queer activist Lois Shearing analyzes the same topic in her new book, Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far-Right.
Both Dworkin and Shearing look upon women joining the political right as a tragedy. Where the two authors differ is in their description of the motivations behind women’s support of right-wing and far-right principles. Dworkin not only demonstrates remarkable insight into the shortcomings of the political left; she also sympathizes with right-wing women, arguing that their conservativism is ultimately motivated by their fear of male sexual violence. Shearing, by contrast, shows no such willingness to admit that sex-positive feminism may have hurt women. Instead, she assumes that the only motivation any women could have for embracing conservativism is a desire to exercise power over others.
Though Pink-Pilled does offer a wealth of anecdata about the very online world of the far right, Dworkin’s book is ultimately the much more worthwhile read. Those who critique the sexual revolution while upholding feminism would do well to consider her critiques, as they seek to offer a more hopeful vision of marriage and family life for women today.
Dworkin: Focused on the Threat of Male Violence
Dworkin’s analysis of conservative women’s motivations focused primarily on the threat of male violence. She argued that women have a deep-seated fear “that male violence against women is uncontrollable and unpredictable,” and that “The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women.” Dworkin famously condemned pornography and prostitution as practices which, under the guise of liberation, subject women to widespread exploitation. She similarly criticized the sexual revolution of the 1960s for enabling abuse: “sexual liberation… did not free women. Its purpose—it turned out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois restraints.”
Although not opposed to abortion in principle, she also argued that men only cared about abortion as a political issue in the 60s and 70s because on-demand abortion was necessary for the sexual revolution to work, which in turn allowed men freer access to women’s bodies without the constant fear of pregnancy. She even—quite presciently—critiqued artificial reproductive technologies. She foresaw that “artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization enable women to sell their wombs… Motherhood is becoming a new branch of female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to the womb for experimentation and for power” and that such technologies, which she called “reproductive intrusions,” make “the womb extractable from the woman as a whole person.”
Finally, Dworkin saw marriage as a potential place of violence, preferable to prostitution only insofar as it exposes women to the threat of violence from one instead of many men. She wasn’t unjustified in this assessment. By 1993, all US states had criminalized marital rape, but in 1983, when Right-Wing Women was first published, a man could only be prosecuted for raping his wife in five states.
For all these reasons, she did not see right-wing women as exclusively guilty of promoting female oppression, even as she fiercely disagreed with them. She wrote almost sympathetically of many conservative figures, like anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, whose thinking was anathema to her. Meanwhile, she was often critical of the political left, which she saw as participating in female oppression, in spite of their claims to the contrary. She heard the complaints of right-leaning women and took their plight seriously:
Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation… They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal… They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer… Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression… [They] see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership… they do what they have to survive.
Dworkin was non-partisan in her biting critique of female exploitation. She thought that both the left and the right had hurt women: the left with the elusive promise of freedom of the sexual revolution, the right by turning a blind eye to violence within marriage.
Shearing: Blinded by Sex-Positivity
Shearing’s arguments in Pink-Pilled fall short of Dworkin’s incisiveness. She acknowledges some of the ways in which the left has failed women, but she never seems to push the point to its natural conclusion.
Shearing admits that the “rise in hook-up culture” hasn’t “been coupled with an increase in cis-men’s respect for or sense of responsibility towards cis women’s sexual needs,” but she fails to make any meaningful critique of the sexual revolution which allowed hook-up culture to spread. She denounces “medical misogyny” for the fact that “there have been fewer advances in childbirth than other areas of healthcare” while fiercely defending trans women as “real” women. She admits that there are issues with hormonal birth control being pushed on women, claiming that “the pill sucks” and is “overprescribed.” Yet she attacks women who seek alternatives, blaming especially the popular app Natural Cycles for claiming 99 percent effectiveness when “there have many reports of accidental pregnancies as a result of using this method.” (One wonders whether she has ever heard of condoms breaking.) Unlike Dworkin, Shearing makes no links between the widespread use of hormonal contraception and abortion with the perpetuation of the kind of hook-up culture that hurts women.
Most egregiously, Shearing fails to discuss the reality of sexual violence in any meaningful kind of way. “Is it any wonder some are willing to trade in their liberty for the veneer of protection and domestic bliss?” she asks, speculating that the appeal of anti-feminism may be linked to a reaction against promiscuity and sexual violence in the wake of the #MeToo movement. The argument, unsurprisingly, goes nowhere. Dworkin saw early on that all the sexual revolution had accomplished was to make it harder for women to refuse sex to men. More recently, writers like Mary Eberstadt, Mary Harrington, and Louise Perry, among others—of whom Shearing seems completely unaware—have made similar arguments against the sexual revolution. Shearing simply seems too afraid of being perceived as anything but sex positive to notice what’s right under her nose.
In two of the most indefensible passages of Pink-Pilled, Shearing refers dismissively to the UK Rotherham abuse scandal as “the case of so-called Muslim grooming gangs” and the “alleged Muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham.” Shearing may well be right that abuse cases such as these are “often used in far-right propaganda” against Muslims and immigrants. But questioning—or even denying—the violence that countless girls suffered in Rotherham is an egregious mistake. Dworkin saw right-wing women’s conservatism—which, in its extreme iterations, did genuinely overlap with racism and white nationalism—as an attempt to survive in a world where male violence is too often condoned. By contrast, in the Foucauldian nightmare of Shearing’s imagination, white women are attracted to right-wing views as a means of gaining power over other women, queer people, immigrants, and so on.
Shearing’s insensitivity to other motivations means that she stereotypes all conservative women as being eager collaborators with the patriarchy. Ironically, she ends up dismissing the sexual violence committed against women in Rotherham because she can’t conceive of women adopting conservative viewpoints on issues like sexual promiscuity and unregulated immigration for any other reason than a simple power grab.
The Internet Is Not Real Life
Another major issue with Pink-Pilled is Shearing’s excessive focus on internet culture. She concludes that the only reason for women to “align themselves with a movement [such as the alt-right] that seeks to ultimately restrict their autonomy and reproductive rights” is because the “narrative of pro-natalism” appeals to them. And why does pro-natalism appeal to them, according to Shearing? Because in far-right nationalist movements, women are placed in “positions of power in which they are gatekeepers of the [white] race.” And where, exactly, are women placed in such positions of power? By receiving praise on the internet.
Shearing gathered the research for Pink-Pilled by engaging in eighteen months of online undercover reporting, where she posed as 23-year-old “Ava White” and joined platforms such as far-right Telegram channels and Reddit threads. I don’t doubt that much of what she saw was shocking. I don’t even disagree with Shearing that, amongst certain conservative and right-wing circles, being pro-family and pro-children may have more to do with a wish to return to a “mythic past” to “save Western civilisation” than with a real concern about women’s wellbeing.
But the internet is not real life. In Right-Wing Women, by contrast, Dworkin offers anecdotes of actual encounters she had at rallies, protests, and conventions with her political opponents, many of which were highly unpleasant. She recounts enduring a conversation with a Ku Klux Klan member which very quickly devolved into antisemitism. In fact, she tells of many discussions which simply ended with her being branded a Jew. She experienced and witnessed real problems and real discrimination in real life.
By contrast, Shearing’s online reporting covers commentators that range so widely both in popularity and influence, and in the extremism of their views, as to significantly weaken her overarching argument. One minute she’s attacking relatively niche Christian bloggers for promoting purity culture, the next she’s taking on Jordan Peterson. She oscillates between criticizing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and French politician Le Pen, right-wing women in genuine positions of power, and blaming Mumsnet for turning the UK into TERF island. She spills far too much ink fighting a campaign against largely forgotten alt-right YouTube channels from the 2010s. Milo Yiannopoulos, Lana Lokteff, Brittany Pettibone, Paul Joseph Watson—how many of these figures are still culturally relevant? I have scarcely heard their names since 2017.
All of this is not to deny that what is shared and promoted on the internet has consequences, some of them quite bad. Of course, dangerous ideologies spread through the internet, and they can translate into suffering in real life. But, as Pink-Pilled unintentionally proves, it’s very easy to inflate the importance of what a loud and angry minority of people say online. We may be outraged at Hannah Pearl Davis’ battle-cry of “Repeal the 19th!”, and may wonder at or even fear her apparent popularity. But she and her fellow rage-bait content creators produce just that: rage-bait content. They’re not making policy.
The one right-wing female commentator mentioned by Shearing that has some level of mainstream recognition is “alt-right poster girl” Lauren Southern, who, as Shearing has to admit, has since denounced online trad ideology as being inadequate for navigating the reality of marriage and family life. If Lauren Southern’s story of abuse within marriage proves that online right-wing ideology can cause true harm, the speed at which she recognized its “toxicity”—along with the general decline of her fellow alt-right commentators—also illustrates how brittle that ideology really is. The question is, what happens when we get off the internet?
To be fair to Shearing, her critique of conservatism stems from genuine concerns about racism, oppression, and the mistreatment of women. But her concerns go nowhere. Taking the extremes of right-wing ideology—specifically its online iterations—as representative of the movement as a whole does a grave disservice to the women who may be labelled far-right or even fascist simply because they will no longer endure the damage done to the female sex by the progressive left. I am baffled that a reputable university press has chosen to publish a book possessing neither nuance nor depth of analysis.
A Feminism That Helps Us Live Together
Dworkin’s brand of feminism—detested from the beginning by fellow feminists and by antifeminists alike—is remarkably consistent. She stood her ground, criticizing pornography and prostitution at a time when sex-positive feminism was emerging. She accurately predicted that artificial reproductive technologies would become a means of female exploitation before practices like surrogacy became widespread. She warned against the dangers of such technologies at a time when her only allies in the cause were social conservatives. Even now, her critiques retain their far-ranging insight.
At the end of Right-Wing Woman, Dworkin gestures towards the goal of achieving “a universal standard of human dignity” that would truly liberate women. Nonetheless, her overall tone is fatalistic. She seems to have witnessed so much abuse of women at the hands of men that the possibility of men and women living together peacefully remains distant and undefined. Tragically, she also shares with Shearing the sense that women must escape their biology by suppressing their reproductive capacity. On this view, the way out of this perennial oppression demands leaving motherhood behind.
Forty years ago, Dworkin saw women being exploited across the political spectrum. She viewed women on the right particularly as making a compromise that would protect them from all men except their own husbands. Conservative women may understandably object to this characterization, which discounts the philosophical reasons for their political beliefs. Nonetheless, Dworkin’s work remains worthy of our attention, and her insights help clarify the work that must be done.
We must build a feminist movement that doesn’t pit the interests of men and women against each other—a feminism that values motherhood and the female body instead of seeing them as obstacles to women’s fulfilment. We need a feminism that takes male violence seriously, while still defending a vision of marriage and family life based on love, mutual respect, and growth in virtue. Such a positive, hopeful, realistic vision has the power to teach men and women to treat each other with the kind of dignity that Dworkin envisioned.
