"Everything can stay the same, except what women do"

Against Matt Walshism

Whether or not you embrace their (sometimes spicy) ideas, in recent years the online Right has been a powerhouse of inventiveness and political energy. So the spectacle of its recent collapse into a hooting, screeching chorus of low-rent misogyny has been dismaying to say the least.

This came to a head for me witnessing last week’s internet brawl over a young woman on TikTok who described waking up late on a Saturday after attending a Beyonce gig and deciding to make shakshuka:

@pmdpodGiving birth to a shakshuka today. #singleinyour30s #livingalonevlog #childlessbychoice #childlessmillennial

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I’m not going to rehash the argument, save to say she ended up main-charactered by all of the internet’s most rebarbative misogynists, who piled on her to denounce her selfishness and wish her a lonely spinsterhood and miserable solitary death.

It’s a solid rule of thumb that every political movement, once it goes mainstream, will degrade to its stupidest imaginable form. I was there in the 2000s when “social enterprise” was all set to re-order commerce to the public interest, and have since watched in dismay as it’s become the stupid, shallow, venal “woke capital” scam we all know and detest. In turn, something similar is afoot today within the subculture that’s emerged over the last decade or so to critique the class-blind overreach and biology denialism of liberal feminism.

Another reliable rule of thumb is that whenever a significant material upheaval impacts enough of a population, one of its cultural side-effects will be a big argument about men and women, that continues until some kind of consensus emerges about how best to live together under the new, changed conditions. There was a tidal wave of this discourse when the Industrial Revolution kicked off, and it has returned in a new wave with ever subsequent ratchet of our ongoing self-technologisation.

The second wave was occasioned by the Pill and our ensuing entry into the transhuman era; this latest round has been driven by our decisive transition, since the smartphone apocalypse, into a culture that’s not print-first but digital-first - and is also now some way past Peak Progress. In particular, this has forced men and women to reckon with what, if anything, sex means when much of our social interaction is disembodied, and when we can no longer be confident of never-ending rises in mass prosperity.

My hunch is that today most young people of both sexes still generally want to find one another and form families, even if the broader economic outlook is bleak and the scripts and social mechanisms that support family formation have been radically scrambled. Where it comes to addressing the economic outlook and the scrambled scripts, I see several patterns emerging, many of which feed into the new misogyny.

One of these is “gender ideology”: the Meat Lego free-for-all, that leans into radical disembodiment, while running interference for a carnival of usually male paraphilias. Another is coalescing around the “trad” meme, and seeks (often cartoonishly) to recuperate distinct sex roles. Another we might characterise as Total Sex War: mirror-image subcultures of “redpill” men trying to manipulate women into granting sexual access, and women trying to manipulate men into granting emotional commitment. As I set out in Feminism Against Progress, this toxic arms race sees both sexes weaponise the other sex's characteristic preferences and mating strategies in pursuit of individual gratification.

But another pattern again seems to be converging on the idea that we don’t need a larger critique, and can just pick and choose from all the above to make the world a better place by shouting at women. Let’s call this approach Matt Walshism, after its most prominent and odious proponent. He’s not alone, though, and Matt Walshism isn’t even just a male thing: the internet is awash with young female influencers getting rich quick by donning low-cut tops and parroting talking-points from the bowels of the manosphere. And, to my disgust, ever more of the so-called “dissident right” has joined the party, seemingly abandoning humour, provocation, cultural or political critique, let alone or anything approaching policy, and instead retreated into the Matt Walshist safe space that is whining about women.

It’s my sincere hope that this isn’t true, and that I’m just too old and mainstream to be included in the interesting conversations that are (please) happening out of my earshot. If this is so, fine. I look forward to seeing what comes next when these themes emerge above the parapet. But I’m gloomily worried that this is a real subcultural interregnum. That is, the dissident Right is dying, and a new radicalism is yet to be born.

In this dreary interregnum, the consensus appears to be roughly as follows: we can’t do anything about the invidious effects of dating apps, the disintegration of real-world social networks, the inflation or rising house prices or any of the other structural factors bearing down on family formation. We can’t campaign for explicitly pro-family policies such as financial support for stay at home parents. But what we can do is send rape and death threats young, attractive women for not being in a hurry to become wives and mothers against this not especially inviting backdrop.

Sure, there are plenty of pretty young female influencers parroting the liberal line about “finding myself”, dunking on marriage, or expressing revulsion at the prospect of caring for a toddler. I think they are wrong to do so, and may well come to regret it. But are we seriously saying that these women are the crux of the problem? That their opinions are so wildly influential that simply shaming them into silence would solve all the other issues?

Sorry, but this is either deluded or - tacitly - an expression of despair. If your radicalism is laser-focused on scapegoating normie lib women, instead of mobilising against all the other issues that are bearing down on healthy family formation, or making modern life ever more expensive and unpleasant, what you are saying is that everything about the world is fine, except what women do.

In effect, this means you don’t need a critique of the predatory financialisation that destroys real-world value and broad prosperity, let alone meaningful policies for reining it in. You don’t need to think about the limbic capitalism that enslaves us to our basest desires, or how we might mobilise to shut it down. We don’t even need to think about the technologies that shape and mediate our world, and how they might be making things worse as well as better. Instead, you can simply whine that women aren’t doing as they’re told.

This is a total abandonment of politics. It’s the Right-wing equivalent of thumb-sucking. And it’s the oldest, and the lamest, of all the strategies for losing more slowly.