Should I Cancel My New York Times Subscription?

When is clickbait dangerous?

Guys….I was going to write a lovely little ode to my new fuzzy blanket today (recommend by

Grace Atwood

), but now I have to defend feminism. Fucking sigh. I want my life to be more fuzzy blanket.

I was stopped mid-scroll yesterday by a New York Times headline: Did Women Ruin the Workplace?

By this morning, it had morphed into Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?

Both are clickbait. Worse, they’re rage bait. And as someone who spent years crafting viral headlines for a living, even I think this one is shameful and dangerous in a world where most people will only ever read your headline, where most people will be easily influenced by a flash of words on their screens and never absorb any context.

The ensuing video podcast from conservative opinion columnist Ross Douthat doesn’t even make much sense. It’s a word salad of interviews with Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant, both conservative writers, both critics of feminism, but with very different views of what a right-wing politics of gender should look like. I both read the transcript and listened and still couldn’t find a coherent argument in any of it.

Now, I’m not against any media platform giving space for people to express their opinions. That’s what free speech is for. And frankly, I want to hear from people who don’t necessarily think like I do. But in this case we have a conservative columnist interviewing two conservative writers and providing no real foil to their ideas.

Here’s how he introduces his guests:

“Helen, you recently wrote an essay entitled The Great Feminization that argued that feminism has failed us because it’s made our institutions too feminized, driving men and masculine virtues out.

And Leah, you have a new book called The Dignity of Dependence, where you suggest that liberal feminism has failed us by forcing women to suppress their nature and fit into workplaces and social systems made for men.”

The general core of this conversation seeks to connect feminism with the current obsession with “wokeness”, even suggesting the two are somehow synonymous. They’re not.

They then go on to argue that this feminine wokeness ruined the workplace.