If you are involved in the right in any way, whether a mere passive observer of the goings-on in the realm extending from the sparkling columns of The Spectator to the depths of the For You page, you may have noticed the rise of a certain type of ‘commentator’ being promoted — the young, right-wing ‘radical feminist’ woman. This type of young woman is zealously promoted by the right-wing media establishment, and judging by the very concept of a ‘right-wing radical feminist’, you may at first believe they have something interesting to say about the world. However, if you are looking for novel takes about any issue of interest, you will be looking in vain if you turn to the articles, tweets, and speeches of these people.
The editors of Pimlico Journal are keen to note that this is not a gossip magazine, and I have no interest in naming names in this article, as I want to stay focused on what the rise of this archetype means for the right rather than engaging in petty drama. That being said, you, the reader, can probably list at least a couple of women who fit this description.
What exactly is ‘right-wing radical feminism’? Firstly, it’s not particularly radical. The term ‘patriarchy’ is not part of the core right-wing ‘radfem’ lexicon. There isn’t even any real misandry or conception that men as a whole are oppressors who universally gain from their dominance over women. Gone are the Dworkinian calls for an Israel for women; there’s no Shulamith Firestone-esque hope that artificial wombs will free women from their servitude to men. Not even political lesbianism has survived — whilst some of these right-wing radfems may identify as ‘bisexual’, most do not seem to be particularly sexually or romantically interested in women, to say the least.
As a brief addendum, the above discussion should make it clear that I am not talking about the notorious X account RadFem Hitler. RadFem Hitler does appropriate a lot of the rhetoric of genuine radical feminism (albeit mostly in service of expressing her disdain for young, neurodivergent, right-coded men). She has more in common with the septum-pierced young women who support the Greens and complain about ‘incels’ from the comfort of the UCL Student Centre than she does with, say, the average attendee of the Cambridge University Society of Women.
Rather, what the ‘radical feminist’ aspect of right-wing radical feminism seems to denote is: (a) opposition to transgenderism, and (b) opposition to ‘sex work’. What differentiates the right-wing radical feminist from the authentic radical feminists is that the right-wing radical feminists care about pornography and prostitution because they are exploitative in and of themselves. The authentic radical feminist, by contrast, while agreeing that pornography and prostitution are exploitative, also views both in the broader context of a general social order in which women are oppressed — the patriarchy. This broader perspective is missing from the right-wing radical feminist, and if there are intimations of it, it takes the form of a ‘critique’ of the sexual revolution on the basis that said revolution benefited men in certain ways.
The ‘right-wing’ aspect of right-wing radical feminism is also quite occult. Is it the idea that women can attain greater autonomy through participation in the free market? Through being members of a national collective? Through gradual, organic social change à la Burke? Through a return to monarchy? Or through Randian individualism? Do they mention Oakeshott? Nietzsche? Hoppe? Nick Land? I have found that the ‘right-wing’ component refers, at best, in very rare cases, to a reactionary critique of ‘progress’ and, sometimes, an endorsement of Christianity. (‘Yeah, did you know St Paul was a feminist? He was opposed to prostitution. And the pagans practised infanticide.’) These are respectable enough positions to take, but nothing that hasn’t already been said four years ago by the more generative forebears of these young women in the pages of Unherd.
Overall, then, what does this crop of ‘right-wing radical feminists’ believe? The answer is: nothing really, beyond ‘trans women are not women’ and ‘Bonnie Blue is being exploited by men’. These are two claims that are not actually particularly controversial outside of a university campus (and, arguably, the latter not even there). Today, British law itself no longer recognises self-identified ‘trans women’ as women; transgenderism is in retreat on campuses as it becomes an increasingly provincial phenomenon (the capital of transgenderism is Boston, Lincolnshire). Friends of mine who were gender-critical political lesbians, the types who spoke out against transgenderism during the TERF Heroic Period that coincided with the dark days of 2020-22 Peak Woke, themselves no longer go to talks about ‘trans in women’s sports’ because they recognise that they — for the most part — have won. Don’t let the stickers that still adorn the lampposts on Queen’s Road in Brighton mislead you as to the fact that ‘this trans business’ is simply no longer a particularly salient part of British political discourse. Your centre-left wine aunt who still owns a ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ shirt thinks J.K. Rowling ‘has a point’.
That being said, it is still not easy to be openly gender-critical on campus, especially if you are a woman, and especially if you are at a university at which the dark dogma of Woke still has a solid grip on young minds. I very much believe that the Cambridge University Society of Women, despite the disproportionate and somewhat cringeworthy press coverage it has received (especially from The Telegraph), is a positive development for the women of Cambridge, who do often face genuine social consequences for disputing the claim that a man can become a woman by donning a tartan skirt and fishnets. I hope every notable university in this country, from St Andrew’s to SOAS, will eventually have a society where women can feel assured that no one will denigrate their moral character for merely believing in Common Sense.
It is not objectionable, in and of itself, not to care much about politics, let alone have anything interesting to say about it, and to care only about recognising biological reality. Being a single-issue person is not a crime. What is objectionable is when we have a right-wing media infrastructure that claps like seals and greatly elevates women who have nothing interesting to say about anything, who solely exist to inspire ‘that sense of hope in the next generation’ in Boomers who watch GB News. My criticism of ‘right-wing radical feminists’ is that they are promoted beyond what their talent merits, and this is not only constitutes a harm intrinsically, but also has deleterious effects on the right more broadly.
We believe in meritocracy, and ‘right-wing radical feminism’ is an obvious diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) project. It is Woke — not doctrinally, but functionally. It is simultaneously a product of the sexual frustrations of men working within that ecosystem (which currently has a relative lack of women) and also a result of a wider political selective environment (both on the left and the right, but even more so on the right) in which the principle of ‘where the hoes at’ has been granted unwarranted importance. It permits women without any particular talent to make their way up in the world of the right at the expense of those with greater merit — and the prioritisation of equality of outcome above equality of opportunity (if you will forgive the use of these rather Petersonian terms) is, in fact, Woke.
Moreover, right-wing radical feminism is bad because it orients the right away from the most important problems facing our country, and towards ones that are relatively low in salience, or issues that the right cannot afford to expend political capital on, or issues that cannot be solved through policy, or sometimes even complete non-issues. I broadly agree with the stance taken by the editor-in-chief’s newsletter on the Supreme Court’s decision to recognise ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘sex’, etc. as biological terms: namely, that the ‘trans issue’, whilst having many legitimate victims and not being without consequence, nonetheless has received disproportionate attention from both the mainstream and dissident right. I would perhaps differ with the editor-in-chief on the extent to which focus on transgenderism was disproportionate, but it should be clear to anyone who is not completely ideology-poisoned by Reddit TERFism that, whilst it is disgusting that some autogynephiles have been able to use Woke ideology to harass women, the number of victims of transgender sexual harassment is truly minute compared to the number of girls exploited by the grooming gangs.
Similarly, prostitution and pornography certainly cause legitimate harms, but the number of British women with an OnlyFans is not as high as Louise Perry’s dodgy figures in The Spectator would have you believe. You may think that Bonnie Blue is being exploited, or that her line of work is ‘gross’, but endless discourse about Bonnie Blue is not useful when the British people are set to become a minority in their own ancestral homeland in a few short decades.
Moreover, a general orientation of the right towards sexual revolution revisionism, however good for clicks (some in agreement, some produced by outrage), will have a very negative effect on its performance electorally. The average British woman would not want to partake in prostitution or the production of pornography, but nonetheless will often have libertarian intuitions regarding these issues, especially young women. There is a general suspicion towards the state involving itself in issues of sex and sexuality, and a belief that those who do want the state to more heavily regulate issues of sexuality are themselves — especially if they are Christian and/or on the right — motivated by their own psychosexual complexes and neuroses. This claim, by the way, is not entirely unwarranted: for the naïve, what do you think all of the ‘brothers pray for me’ posts on X you still occasionally see are about?
In any case, pornography and prostitution can be banned, but what would an attempt to roll back casual sex look like — something which, contrary to what Twitter ‘trads’ would have you believe, is not even particularly popular among young people nowadays, who are relatively sexually repressed, at least by the standards of the last two to three decades? A pivot of the right away from crime, the economy, and immigration, and towards the politics of sex would be a disaster, but this is precisely what ‘right-wing radical feminism’ means. I could go on talking about the ways in which right-wing radical feminism could ruin the right, but I would basically be rewriting lots of arguments already made in Pimlico Journal regarding Christian nationalism, but rehashed for ‘radical feminism’.
‘Right-wing radical feminism’ also implicitly affirms and propagates what I would like to call ‘unconscious wokeness’ on the right. Many on the right will denounce DEI, Woke, and related concepts, but it is clear that many on the right, especially the boomers, still implicitly hold Woke values. This is seen most obviously in Tory boomers’ enthusiasm for Kemi Badenoch, who is a silly woman completely devoid of talent and competence, but the fact that she is a black woman means that when she reaffirms GB News-isms about Britain abolishing the slave trade, it comes with a greater moral authority than if a white man said the exact same things. The overpromotion of women and ethnic minorities within the right is a signal that many on the right are unconsciously woke and still believe that being a member of a ‘marginalised’ group confers greater moral status. A similar rationale is quite often at play in the focus on Jews as being uniquely victimised by mass migration.
This is not simply a Boomer issue. Whole swathes of the right, both young and old, mainstream and radical, are still beholden to leftist morality — if not in conscious beliefs, then in practical behaviours. Leftist morality is reproduced and spread through its very manifestation in the act of overpromoting certain groups. In this way, unconscious wokeness normalises itself through the fiftieth Telegraph article about Cambridge University Society of Women and hundredth puff-piece about Kemi. But DEI also replicates itself further to the right, and among younger people, in the promotion of the Women’s Selfie Initiative, and certain ‘Journos’ in the Restore Britain orbit. If we cannot break this cycle, the right will be overflowing in diversity but lacking in talent — and bereft of anything important or even interesting to say about the problems facing our country.
So what is to be done? As the last paragraphs should have established, we badly need an internal War on Woke within the right. The fact that Kemi is an African woman does not make her a good leader, and it is not the case that the minds of leftists will be blown when they hear her say ‘as a black woman, systemic racism isn’t real’. The left have debunking explanations for when members of oppressed groups deny the existence of oppression, which come in the form of appeals to false-consciousness, or membership of other oppressor groups, or calling right-wing black people ‘Kinder Eggs’ and ‘Choc ices’. The Conservative Party, often (erroneously) described as the world’s oldest political party, was itself almost destroyed partly as a consequence of right-wing DEI and the deleterious effects it had on its period in Government (such as the systematic promotion of people such as Sayeeda Warsi, Liz Truss, Priti Patel, James Cleverly, and yes, Kemi Badenoch to positions of serious power in the party). I dread to think how bad parliament will be if Reform hand out safe seats to Charlie Bentley-Astor and other such types.
Secondly, we need other roles for women who want to be involved in the right, but lack the talent for being politicians or commentators. I think it is a good thing that there are women who want to be involved in the right, but we have to bear in mind the fact that it is not prudent nor appropriate to try to turn every woman who was called a ‘transphobe’ at university into the next Candace Owens. So long as there is ‘dumb money’ sloshing around on the right — and there presumably always will be, given the well-meaning but usually politically inexperienced character of many major right-wing donors — there will always be some amount of funds directed towards various hair-brained schemes. Many of these hair-brained schemes are currently male-coded: creating new city-states, implausible infrastructure and industrial projects, teaching thousands of people to speak Ancient Greek. Given the demand for a new ‘Women’s Hour’ (for men), the latest scheme was to launch a higher-brow version of the short-form/podcast, Invert, which features A-listers such as Stella Tsantekeidou, Emily Lawford and Poppy Coburn (where she was sadly Brutally ‘FOGGED’ by Joanna Marchong).
I would argue that, assuming that it is not likely this money could be directed towards more practical ends, it might be worth trying to redirect money away from hair-brained schemes which are male-coded and towards hair-brained schemes which are female-coded: a bigger and better ‘right-wing art scene’, etc., where those in receipt of funds, directly and indirectly, will be disproportionately female. Some readers may scoff at this proposal because it reeks of Pedro Gonzalez-isms about the need for right-wing people to win political power through ‘cultural change’. But in fact, the goals of a ‘right-wing art scene’ can be much more modest than achieving total cultural revolution — namely, to allow people to express themselves creatively without leftist social sanctioning, and to allow like-minded people to meet, socialise, and network — and still, arguably, be good value for money (on the grounds that it serves the ‘where the hoes at’ legitimation function, however objectionable this may be), while also not resulting in the overpromotion of unqualified people into positions of serious influence.
Some readers may think this article is misogynistic and motivated by resentment towards ex-girlfriends or envy towards the women who have found success in UK ConInc. I want to make it clear that I am no ‘trad’, and I have no interest in putting up barriers in the way of genuinely talented women, and this applies to all spheres, not just politics. If a woman is as mathematically gifted as a Gödel or a Tao, she should not be prevented from becoming a professor of mathematics because of Restore Britain-esque points about fertility rates. However, it is incredibly foolish and harmful to act as if mathematical talent is evenly distributed between men and women, such that it constitutes a grave injustice if there are fewer women than there are men winning Fields Medals. Men and women are different — that does not mean that no women can compete with men in certain fields and vice versa, but only that we should not assume that the number of men and women in any particular sphere will be, or should be, equal. These differences are not mere products of socialisation, but almost certainly, at least in part, have an immutable biological basis. TERFs, whose favourite adjective is ‘biological’, should be able to recognise that differing chromosomal configurations do not merely make themselves manifest in crotches and chests, height and muscle mass, but also in psychological dispositions.
This is obvious even at elite universities, where factors like intelligence can be controlled for more. I have met women at high-ranking universities who study philosophy, and told me that they are unconcerned with the actual truth value of the claims made in philosophical texts and care more about the literary or stylistic aspects of said texts. I don’t think any less of the women who have said things like that to me because to condemn them for not caring about whether Deleuze’s claims about the nature of identity are true would be like condemning a tiger for having stripes. It is precisely this acceptance of the way that women behave that is behind my proposal for a larger ‘right-wing art scene’, as a solution for allowing women to be involved in the right without further damaging the quality of the already dreadful right-wing commentator sphere.
There are, of course, women who are capable of being great right-wing commentators. Where actual talent exists, it should be promoted. What we should not do is assume that every woman who makes the right noises about autogynephiles is capable of being the next president of the Adam Smith Institute or a Reform MP. To do so is to keep the right smothered by the veil of Maya that is Woke, and create fertile ground for new Kemis to wreak havoc.
This article was written by Frederick Driver, a regular Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?