The saga of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif at the Olympics. The explosive Times feature about the “tradwife” Hannah Neeleman. Whatever has happened to the Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance to make him once insist that a coven of vengeful witches – sorry, “childless cat ladies” – are hexing ruin on people’s lives.
They’re not news stories. They’re concurrent threads in the dystopian nightmare being woven for western women by the kind of far-right political forces you wouldn’t want near you to darn your damn socks.
Khelif’s crime – in the eyes and relentless social media feeds of the “let us tell you how women should look, act, reproduce, breathe and exist on this earth” brigade – lies in choosing not to portray herself as an aspirational Sports Illustrated swimsuit model when her job as a professional athlete is, literally, to punch other people in the face. There’s an online community of “transvestigators” who spend their days with Adobe Photoshop filters and an alarmingly fragile sense of personal identity determining every prominent woman who takes her work seriously must secretly be a man, lest the confections of gender that they cling to collapse in the face of, um, concrete evidence to the contrary. They’ve been going on about Michelle Obama in this way for years.
Don’t be fooled by their rhetoric into thinking that Khelif terrifies because of her height or strength. It’s taking the sport of boxing seriously enough to pop her opponent’s nose rather than flailing about like a hapless doily in a boxer costume that’s the issue. There is, you see, a preferred model of femininity for those in the yelping far right, and it’s of the pretty, homebound, jobless kind that spawns children in the quantities of a brood animal. This demand reflects a masculinity so delicate it relies on the economic and physical dependence of a partnered woman to provide the comparative illusion of strength – it’s packaged online as a fantasy product for weak men by the “tradwife” accounts.
There are bleak laughs to be had at the inherent structural hypocrisy of women insisting on the value of a life of domestic service when they’re running for-profit media enterprises from their kitchens. The chuckles, sadly, are thin when one reads the Times piece about Neeleman, the tradwife queen of Ballerina Farm. Neeleman insists her loving husband didn’t bully her out of Juilliard dance school, and she disputes he answers her questions for her, but his own admission that the domestic labour around their eight children their “traditional” marriage obliges leaves her “so sick with exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week” sure reads as slightly creepy from the son of a billionaire. Maybe this life was “her choice”… but one wonders if an older Neeleman may consider it a shit one. Note: the value of women in such a “patriarchal bargain” decreases as the years pass and these external standards of “feminine” beauty become harder to physically satisfy.
That spectre of the valueless aged woman underscores the misogyny of the “childless cat ladies” theme of JD Vance. The aspiring US vice-president spent his week deliberately stalking his nemesis, the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, from rally location to rally location. The optics of him alongside a besuited gang of smarmy white men on an airport tarmac resembled way too much the kind of swaggering tableaux that would inspire me to flee an office Christmas long before any drinks were served.
These are hardly isolated examples – so why is the new sexism happening? Yes, the internet, yes, its infrastructure of coordinated amplification. But I’ve come to believe the recent angry discourse of woman-hating has been triggered by a generational phenomenon.
The women of generation X – my generation, of which Harris is arguably a part – lived in the golden window of womanhood where sex could be casual and fun, and largely untainted by the cruelties encouraged by internet porn. Where the feminist promise encouraged education and careers and financial self-sufficiently as liberation. Daughters of the cold war who never expected to live past 30, we are now perimenopausal and menopausal with an aggressive “screw you, you’re not the boss of me” punk energy that is entirely unprecedented … and we’ve joined the global leadership generation.
And we’re changing things. In Australia, generation X women’s leadership is fighting medical misogyny, gaining fair pay in feminised industries, making reproductive rights sacrosanct and legislating against gendered violence. The female generation who moshed were always in it for a good time, not a long time – but we know tangible material changes that we make are hard to undo. So do the far right, so they try to legislate women’s containment and terrify the younger women – the Khelifs, the daughters of Vance voters – about the price of stepping out of line. Humiliation. Undesirability.
There’s an alternative. It’s the punk enthusiasm to revel in everything that upsets these jerks. Be proud of our education. Love our careers. Determine the shape of our own families. The Swifties get it: ditch the boys and party on with other girls – banding together organisationally, electorally and socially. Vote for a woman not because she’s a woman but because she’s the best at the job. Let them cry about it; keep boxing.
There’s a lesson that generation X learned from one of our seminal texts – the nuclear anxiety movie WarGames – that instructs us how to fight the right’s gender war, whether you’re a childless cat lady, a harassed champion boxer, or a suffering stay-at-home wife.
“The only winning move is not to play.”
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
