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Modern feminism has become remarkably good at celebrating women, just as long as they’re not too feminine.
In popular culture, it manifests in various ways.
Women are celebrated for their professional achievements, encouraged to embrace only that form of success.
Egg-freezing is promoted on podcasts and in magazine features, implicitly asserting that a woman who delays motherhood to pursue her career is independent and empowered.
But a woman who delights in pregnancy and motherhood, or who stays home with her children or homeschools them — or one who simply believes men and women are different?
At best, she’s portrayed as brainwashed and oppressed, stripped of all agency.
At worst, she’s a tool of the patriarchy.
Take US soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who appeared on “The View” this week to denounce the women and girls fighting to eject biological men from women’s sports.
“It’s an attack on women in society,” she declared.
Rapinoe scoffed at the notion that women’s sports protect women’s physical safety, suggesting that biological women and transgender males only differ in how they “look.”
“They’re using this as a wedge issue . . . You know, ‘we don’t want our little girls to be unsafe’,” she added mockingly.
I learned the reality of those differences the hard way.
My high school athletic department allowed boys’ and girls’ soccer teams to scrimmage — but banned it after I was knocked unconscious by a ball kicked by a male player.
Long before biology became a culture-war talking point, it left me with a concussion.
Ironically, Rapinoe herself played on the US Women’s National Team that famously lost 5-2 to FC Dallas’ under-15 boys’ squad.
If the best women’s soccer players in America can’t physically compete with teenage boys, why is it hateful to acknowledge that reality when girls’ safety is at stake?
The left’s hostility doesn’t stop at biology: It extends to the choices women make.
This week, podcast host Jennifer Welch doubled down on her recent attacks on homeschooling mothers.
She called homeschooling “a patriarchal step of the fascist project” and described mothers who homeschool their children as “dumber than a box of hot rocks.”
She imagined them trapped at home with “piece of s–t, closet-case husbands,” deliberately kept “dead-ass broke” so they’d lack the financial independence to leave.
Yet homeschooling families, and there are millions of them, span every income level, political persuasion and educational philosophy.
I should know: I’m a full-time working mother, homeschooling my oldest five children.
In truth, though, Welch’s ignorant diatribe was less about homeschooling than about expressing contempt for the women who choose it.
Just as Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “First Partner,” did when she lashed out at “tradwives” last month.
“I want to make sure those women have a voice . . . that isn’t just about consumerism or being in service to men,” she said in comments dripping with derision
In progressive feminism, every choice a woman makes is worthy of celebration — unless her choices are aligned with those that have defined womanhood for the vast majority of human history.
The same discomfort was on display in a recent New York Times feature examining the pregnancy style of women in President Donald Trump’s administration.
The writer seemed perplexed that women like Usha Vance, Katie Miller and Karoline Leavitt have embraced their pregnancies by wearing fitted clothing, accentuating rather than concealing their changing bodies.
It was ostensibly a fashion story, but the theme was something else: bewilderment.
For decades, professional women were taught to minimize pregnancy, to treat it almost as an interruption to real life.
Here were conservative women doing precisely the opposite — continuing to pursue ambitious careers in government while also displaying genuine joy at being visibly, unapologetically pregnant.
Progressives insist they’re defending women’s freedom, yet they increasingly reserve their harshest criticism for women who freely choose marriage, motherhood, homemaking, homeschooling or large families.
Those who argue that men and women are biologically different are accused of sexism.
And those who embrace those differences by becoming mothers and organizing their lives around their families are accused of internalized misogyny — or even fascism.
Rapinoe asks us to believe there are no meaningful physical differences between men and women.
Welch and Newsom insist women who devote themselves to home and family must be brainwashed captives.
Elite media outlets can’t quite understand why successful women would celebrate pregnancy instead of downplaying it.
Modern progressivism isn’t defending the definition of womanhood; it has hollowed it out.
It denies the reality of women’s bodies while sneering at the distinctly feminine roles women have embraced across millennia and civilizations.
For all their rhetoric about empowering women, today’s progressives are remarkably uncomfortable with women as they actually are.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
English (US)