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Claire Lehmann wants you to know that something is very wrong with young women today. No, not because they’re suffering from unprecedented rates of anxiety and depression, or facing assaults on their reproductive freedom, or drowning in student debt while the planet burns. No, the “woke”-obsessed antifeminist is concerned because these terrible gals are banging drums in libraries and throwing soup at (protective glass in front of) famous artworks to protest climate collapse and genocide.
In her recent piece for The Dipshit, sorry, The Dispatch, titled “When Women Are Radicalized,” Lehmann frets that young women are becoming dangerously committed to progressive political causes–and that society, disturbingly, hasn’t freaked out about this nearly enough.
Whether the cause is Gaza, climate change, Black Lives Matter, or feminism, overrepresentation of young women has become the norm in progressive activism. And this shift signals a susceptibility to ideological extremism.
Lehmann’s argument is simple: women are showing up at protests, so that’s bad, right, they must be getting radicalized. Her evidence for this: they’re, you know, showing up at protests. Sometimes they fling soup. Sometimes they delay traffic. Sometimes–brace yourself–they skip school. The horror.
Her examples of this new female extremism are really not terribly extreme.
Some protesters banged on drums in the Columbia library, chanting for a free Palestine. Lehmann reports this as if it were a hostage situation, and her indignation seems just a tad on the performative side. At the very least, her moral outrage is rather spectacularly misaligned. On the one hand, there are tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, millions displaced, aid blocked or bombed. On the other, some people brought drums to a library. And it’s the latter situation that gets her mad.
Next she waxes indignant at climate protestors throwing soup and paint at famous works of art, which on the surface sounds needlessly provocative even to me, but her account omits a key detail: the Just Stop Oil activists in question didn’t actually throw anything directly at Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” or Degas’ “Little Dancer”–these artworks were behind protective glass. No permanent damage was done. We’re talking cleanup, not the painstaking restoration of cultural treasures.
And then there’s the specter of Greta Thunberg skipping school at the age of 15, which Lehmann mentions twice, as if Greta had firebombed a schoolhouse.
Yeah, some of these tactics are disruptive. What else is protest supposed to be? Yet Lehmann treats these women not as passionate participants in mass movements, but as ideological zombies corrupted by the evil forces of … their own empathy, citing a survey that found women score higher than men on Care, Fairness, and Purity. “These tendencies,” Lehmann warns, “can also make young women particularly receptive to political narratives framed in terms of trauma, injustice, and moral absolutism.”
In other words: women care too much. And somehow in the world of today, in which masked government henchmen dressed up like ersatz Proud Boys are hauling supposedly “illegal” immigrants off to lord knows where, women giving a shit about shit is the big bad deal.
Lehmann continues:
While generally not coercing people through violence, female radicals coerce through threats of shaming and social exclusion.
Oh, no, not shaming! Not feeling left out! Someone might disagree with you in the group chat! Call the FBI!
This is the article’s big move: comparing young women’s desire to hold one another accountable for injustice with the actual violence committed by radicalized young men—mass shootings, alt-right fascists driving into crowds of protesters, you know the drill.
Lehmann’s entire argument depends on a deeply unserious equivalence. She gestures vaguely at the dangers of protest-related inconvenience, but can’t actually point to anything that rises to the level of radicalization as it’s usually defined–ideological commitment so extreme it justifies violence or terror. And she admits as much:
Women rarely engage in political assassinations or mass shootings, the way a small subset of fanatical men do.
Right. But soup.
Lehmann never engages seriously with what these women are protesting. Gen Z women are the first political generation to come of age in a post-Roe, late-capitalist, climate-emergency world. They’re furious, and justifiably so. Lehmann’s core complaint isn’t about radicalism. It’s about discomfort. She’s unsettled that today’s most visible protest movements are being shaped and sustained by women, often queer women, often women of color, often very young. And instead of engaging with the reasons for that, she diagnoses them with moral hypersensitivity.
Thing is, women have always been a huge part of protest movements, and they’ve sometimes used radical tactics. The suffragettes weren’t politely tweeting about the vote–they were bombing mailboxes and burning down buildings. And yet somehow, today’s soup-flingers are framed as more dangerous. Or more tragic.
The real problem, Lehmann seems to think, is that progressive activism is popular among young women. That solidarity, empathy, and moral intensity–things we usually consider virtues–are being turned against the institutions of the status quo. So she reaches for a grab-bag of evolutionary psychology and moral panic:
This artificial consensus can snowball, as individuals assume everyone else in their peer group agrees with a given sentiment, completely unaware that many don’t.
Huh. A Turkish student at Tufts University, a young woman, was “detained” by ICE for six weeks earlier this year for the crime of … co-writing an essay in the school paper critical of Israel. But god forbid some young conservative woman feel a moment of trepidation before tweeting, sorry, x-ing, about how genocide in Gaza is just fine, when you think about it.
Lehmann paints young women as hapless herd creatures, duped by social media and peer pressure. It couldn’t be that they actually believe in something. No, they’re just afraid of being left out.
Lehmann offers this ominous final warning:
Recognizing this pattern is the first step toward protecting young women from the misguided narratives that exploit their moral sensitivity. But to change it, we must first name it.
Yeah, let’s name it. It’s called giving a shit. It’s called being alive in 2025 and noticing that things are fucked.
The radicalization we should be afraid of is the one that ends in real violence, not the one that ends in a chant. But maybe that’s too inconvenient a truth for someone more alarmed by Greta Thunberg’s report card than the bodies buried in mass graves in Gaza.
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Ooh, the effectiveness of disruptive protest; what a great topic.
Now I must say from the off, I cannot stand Just Stop Oil. Firstly they are not environmentalists. Although they disrupt all sorts of events, they happily trot off to Glastonbury. Michael Eavis is an unapologetic capitalist and is quite open that the festival subsidises the dairy farm; and animal agriculture is now taking over from oil as the biggest driver of climate change.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/meat-and-dairy/
As for the paintings, these are so vulnerable that even a few molecules of contaminant can cause irreparable damage. I have a lot of friends who do art preservation and restoration, and they were furious with JSO. JSO may claim there is no risk, but note they cannot provide any evidence to rebut the professionals. Also they trashed the actual frame. Which itself is an antique.
They’re also such hypocrites. They will disrupt weddings, but when one of their ilk was finally sent to prison (they are from the class that expects the law to protect them but not to bind them) their family was complaining about how they now wouldn’t be able to attend a wedding, that loads of family members were flying to. Talk about tone deaf.
But my main grievance is that they ruin things for genuine environmentalists. Disruptive protest has been shown to actually undermine causes and reduce public support. JSO are well aware of that, so it’s just narcissism. In fairness JSO have now abandoned disruptive protest, but the damage has been done.
Similarly, the ‘free speech’ issue seems to have thrown up some inconsistencies. I must confess, I did find the left defending the idea that ‘jews should be eliminated’ was a legitimate argument to be made on campus bewildering. Especially bearing in mind how censorious the left usually is. What happened to safe spaces and words are literal violence? I am a big fan of free speech, but when you occupy buildings and don’t allow Jewish kids to enter libraries then I think that crosses the line. People are there to be educated, and when you prevent that again I think you’ve crossed a line, especially when you’re meant to be an educator.
The irony is in the US this has just given ammo to Trump, but over here it’s been more. case of be careful what you wish for. Queers for Gaza were very successful in replacing a pro-trans Lord Chancellor with a pro-Palestinian one. In fairness she had been very open about her views on LGBT issues. So now our universities have free speech tsars. And the Lord Chancellor has made it very clear that, as far as the law is concerned, anti-zionism is not anti-semitism, but also that gender critical views are not transphobia.
And she is making sure that is enforced.
https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/university-of-sussex-fined-585-000-for-free-speech-and-governance-breaches/
So this is a complex topic, and one that I think has demonstrated some inconsistencies on the left, and ultimately been very counter productive.
Polite discussion and quiet engagement on climate change has just resulted in an entire industry dedicated to gaslighting scientists. Nothing is going to change for the better unless we are disruptive. Cause seeing your house sink beneath the waves is way more disruptive
The people who were trying to mitigate it might very well be the catalyst of the worst-case scenarios: from the unrealistic goals of climate targets, to the demonization of nuclear energy, to our inability to properly communicate the science, it has all fueled the fossil fuel industry’s influence over politics and led people further away from scientific expertise. It’s identical to why young men are becoming more conservative.
@ gijoel
I can understand why people get frustrated, and may thus seek an outlet to at least feel they are doing something, but there are now numerous studies that show disruptive protest lowers public support for causes.
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000230
They did a study over here recently where they showed split people into groups. One group was shown activists own footage of protests. The control group was not. The groups are then polled on their support or otherwise on various issues. The groups shown the footage expressed lower support for environmental proposals than the control group.
We had this with animal rights. Animal rights used to be notorious for disruptive and indeed violent direct action. A number of groups ended up being proscribed. Then it was recognised as being counter productive, so tactics changed. And that has proved far more successful, and having much broader appeal.
It’s also been useful legally. Freedom of Information requests are a really handy tool in animal rights. In the past such requests were denied under the public safety exemption, but recently the security services had to concede that animal rights organisations are no longer violent or engage in harassment, so the courts now grant the requests.
So I do understand your position. I just feel now though that this has really backfired on the left.
> Similarly, the ‘free speech’ issue seems to have thrown up some inconsistencies. I must confess, I did find the left defending the idea that ‘jews should be eliminated’ was a legitimate argument to be made on campus bewildering. Especially bearing in mind how censorious the left usually is.
> The irony is in the US this has just given ammo to Trump, but over here it’s been more. case of be careful what you wish for. Queers for Gaza were very successful in replacing a pro-trans Lord Chancellor with a pro-Palestinian one. In fairness she had been very open about her views on LGBT issues. So now our universities have free speech tsars. And the Lord Chancellor has made it very clear that, as far as the law is concerned, anti-zionism is not anti-semitism, but also that gender critical views are not transphobia.
You do realise that there are trans Palestinians, right? You also realise that there are Jews who support this movement, yes?
I’d ask why you are like this but this is entirely in line with other times you’ve criticized David and/or leftist commenters.
The cause of your “bewilderment” is that “the left” as a monolith does not actually exist and it turns out that “being against capitalism” and “being against what Israel is doing in Palestine” constitute broad categories of different ideological leanings. You have the terminally online types who imagine themselves as part of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard and think edgy comments are the peak of legitimate activism. You also have people like Vaush, Destiny, Beau of the Fifth Column, and, frankly, you and many others in these comments over the years, who make broad claims of supporting progressivism and even leftism but have only the harshest of criticisms against any example of leftists doing anything specific. And of course if they bring up examples of leftists having an opinion, weirdly it’s always the really edgy shit characteristic of the first group. Strange how that works. But anyway then there’s the people who actually organise but are always criticized one way or another for not being absolutely perfect by people who would have never joined them anyway.
As for the actual disruptive protest discourse, all I know is that nobody outside of the animal rights groups cares about animal rights. You could talk to someone about animal rights and they’d say “oh I guess that makes sense” but you haven’t gotten them to do something about it. There are leftist activists who happen to be vegan, but when it comes to people who reduce everything to animal rights, I don’t see the supposed popular appeal. The only reason I hear about animal rights activism is because I know someone who posts about it on their socials. They posted stuff from Toronto’s Pride Parade, which pro-Palestinian activists are mad at (and forced early cancellation of) due to funding ties to Israel. War causes heavy pollution and environmental damage, so I guess she’s a hypocrite, tone deaf, not a real environmentalist, etc. etc. idk I think this argument sucks and I don’t care to replicate it.
I’d argue the actual point of why protests have to be disruptive to be effective, but David already demonstrates in the original post how radical action has served various causes in history. MLK was deeply unpopular in his time, etc. If Thunberg weren’t a vegan I imagine you’d go full right-wing rag on her, too.
On the issue of disruptive protests being “unpopular”, It can be compared to a dysfunctional extended family. Not all dysfunctional extended families work exactly like this, but sadly enough do. People get divided into 3 groups. Group A is the troublemakers and abusers. Group B is the people who demand family unity and harmony, and maybe a few people who aren’t directly affected and refuse to get involved. Group C is the primary victims of, and people who stand up to, members of group A, and often both.
There is only one way to truly “win” this scenario, at least from an outsider perspective: to expel or at least severely limit the participation of members of Group A. But in real life, that hardly ever happens. Group B would never consider this a real win because their primary goal is to keep the family together, and it’s easy for Group A to convince them that Group C are the real troublemakers, anyway. Even in cases where child molestation or something similarly vile is an open secret, it can be shockingly difficult to sway Group B on this – so long as they don’t actually see it, the real problem is the people complaining about it.
The only “acceptable” solution, from the position of both A and B, is for C to appease A. This does not work; it just makes things worse for C while A still disrupts the “harmony” for B. The solution to that is more appeasement. And more. And more. In the end, most or all of C “breaks” in some fashion, by leaving, dying, shutting down completely, etc. A starts making things much worse for B, the entire family falls apart, and C gets 100% of the blame for it… and possibly gets their reputation permanently trashed, especially in a small community, while former A and B members come out smelling like roses.
That just leaves “unacceptable” solutions. Members of C moving far away and going no contact is a common one, though the equivalent of that on a national scale is emigrating, which isn’t a viable option for most people. Getting members of Group A arrested for serious crimes can work if they’re doing so and you can prove it, unless they’re the police or have a lot of pull with them, and you can probably guess where I’m going with that. Flipping the script can sometimes work, but that’s a long-term project with an uncertain outcome and requires at least one member of Group C to have a significant influence within the family, but on the national level too few people with any real power and influence are willing to stick their necks out. So far.
One can try to convince at least some of Group B that the “acceptable” option would not work even if Group C were willing (and they’re not) and there’s no way to avoid disruption and conflict, so please butt the hell out of it, except a bit more diplomatically. That’s not a solution, but it does make other solutions easier if successful, which is why I advocate at least trying (and then get jumped on for failing to adhere to purity politics). Resistance is rarely going to be “popular” or “sympathetic” but making it seem less like “the real problem” helps.
You could also maliciously sabotage group A members or purposefully implode the family, but those are nuclear options with huge risks. The national level equivalent of those is the cold and hot versions of a civil war respectively. Thus far the only 21st century western country which went there was Greece, and that was because Golden Dawn took over rather suddenly and left people with no other real options. Fortunately that was dealt with relatively quickly. It won’t work out that quickly or cleanly in places where the creeping fascism is, well, creeping.
Instead of X, Twitter should have been renamed “DOA” in honor of where it will most likely end up once Elon Klutz is done mismanaging it.
@Chris Oakley: That doesn’t make any sense. “DOA” means “Dead On Arrival”… or, much less commonly, “Dead Or Alive”. In order for Twitter/X to be DOA, it would have to have been dying when Musk was buying it and had already been dead (or close enough) by the time Musk took possession of it. Or, I guess if you meant it in the business sense, then he never bought it because buying it was too stupid or impractical to be worth considering. Unless you’re saying that he’s going to try to sell it off when it’s about to collapse completely? In which case it’s not DOA *now*, and that would just be weird to name something after a prediction of its future failure. And if you’re using the second sense, that would imply that bounty hunters are going to be coming after Twitter/X and if Musk was honest he should name it such in anticipation of that eventually happening? That’s even weirder.
If your intent is that it’s slowly dying off thanks to Musk’s influence and has little chance of long-term survival, best thing I can come up with is “moribund”.
A law firm ended up taking over Twitter’s UK HQ. Some before and after pics here. To be honest, both scenarios look hellish.
https://www.legalcheek.com/2025/07/paul-weiss-completes-refit-of-twitters-former-west-end-office/
Bad news trump’s budget bill passed. Say goodbye to medicaid and hello to ICE having more money than Russia’s in a war military arm.
Meanwhile dems are busy being racist to Mamdani of New York and being right wing in all aspects.
I think the issue is that, unlike many past protest movements, the video clip style of protest can be highly symbolic, and functions almost as a form of slacktivism. The protests don’t achieve meaningful change, nor do they seem to want to. Videos of climate activists cementing their hands to airport tarmacs seem to incite anger and division, rather than achieving any stated climate goals. It’s this performative nature, and the failure to gain buy-in from larger parts of the population, that make it particularly ineffective and difficult to watch. It would make more sense to protest for economic equality, healthcare access, and egalitarian goals. With young women out-earning male counterparts and gaining 60% of the degrees, men are still committing suicide at a 450% rate and dying on the job at a 900% rate. I think progressivism’s primary issue is it’s inability, and even refusal, to engage with an objectively oppressed and subjugated diaspora of young, poor/working-poor men who’ve seen their bodies and emotions systematically devalued and deprioritized to the point of near-erasure.
The world’s been run by vapid whores
Since the Time of Dinosaurs.
Their disregard for social mores
Destroys our homes and closes doors.
Most of this cannot be fixed –
This evil batter’s too well-mixed!
Bad solutions must be nixed
In the times we stand betwixt.
Here and there I see the sign
That things are really not that fine!
These demon strumpets take what’s mine
Through means of witchy, evil design.
You all shall be exposed to rot
Of your deeds committed, though you think not.
Your perfidy shall be caught
In nets of justice, rightly brought.
Into the darkness I see you shiver
Your evil cannot dam the river!
Men shall revolt, a fight we’ll give her
With lots of gall, bile, and liver.
The return of real men, that bright shining day
We all shall be happy, in the manliest way
Into gynocracy not one of us shall stray
In the face of evil, deterrent we’ll spray.
Radiant muscles, arms building things
During all summers, falls, winters, and springs
Will show you jackals what riches man brings
Society takes flight on masculine wings.
@Daniel C
[snip butwhataboutism regarding men on a feminist blog]
C-
@weirdly named troll who I thought would have been banned by now
I leave finding the problem with this rhyme as an exercise for the reader.
Meter is all over the place in this section.
That’s getting kinda homoerotic. Maybe lose the misogynistic overtones and move over to a yaoi literature site? Your efforts might be more appreciated there. :3
@David C.
“its inability” not “it’s inability,” possessive form of “it” does not use apostrophe, “it’s” is a contraction of “it is.”
@Sylvia
It is a reference to one of Jimmy Gardner’s lines in Dark Seed II, specifically when he tells Mike Dawson to “Take a hike, before [he gets] hurt!” I accidentally typed “Take a Hawk” when meaning to type “Take a Hike” but kept it because I liked it better.
Also, I would consider the possibility that the homoeroticism is something that you are imagining, appreciating strength is not the same thing as wanting to fuck something strong. You are projecting.
Be that as it may, writing poetry isn’t exactly an activity traditionally regarded as masculine.
Stop trying to live up to some externally prescribed model of “how you have to be to be valid” and just be yourself. You’re valid. No matter what the jocks at your school, or the Tate clones on Youtube, or any of them claim. (Though much of what you’ve written is BS!)
@Sylvia
Shakespeare, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Hopkins, Tennyson, Byron, Horace, Homer, Milton, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Pushkin, Heine, Goethe, Basho, Tu Fu, Li Po, Whitman, Lowell, Service, Donne, Borges, Neruda,Lorca, Vallejo, Dante, Michelangelo, Simic, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cummings, Olson, Celan, Sakutaro, E. A. Robinson, Rilke, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns… All men, and the list goes on.
@Sylvia
There is nothing wrong with rhyming “dinosaurs” with everything else there, the “-saurs” rhymes perfectly with words like “cores,” “pores,” and “boars.” You are probably from some part of the world where people pronounce it in such a way that it rhymes with “tsar.”
Take a Hawk, Dawson,
However that ‘mores’ doesn’t rhyme with whores, dinosaurs or doors.
@Jazzlet
This is the first I’m hearing of it; every person I’ve heard use the phrase has pronounced it like “social Moors.”
Over here it’s pronounced like you’re requesting additional flat fish.
@Alan Robertsclaw
I am not accustomed to taking pronunciation guidance from someone who likely pronounces things like “schedule” as “shed-jewel”
I also do the “Orange Hwip” thing.
In a truly shocking turn of events,[/s] the troll is an ignorant fuckwit.
Look up the US pronunciation of “mores”; it’s pronounced “mor-ayz.”
Stupid is so alpha…
@Gaebolga
Thank you for saving me the trouble of delivering that information. Sheesh. Bad enough for a troll to be boring, but a troll who can’t even write decent doggerel? I weep for the future.
@Victorious Parasol
You’re welcome; we’ve got to distribute the tedious tasks, lest we become burnt-out husks of competence in a sea of vapidity…
“Fixed” it, inasmuch as something that bad can be fixed…
…anyone else wondering why our “rugged,” “manly” moron – who claims to value his supposedly iconoclastic views – is all bent out of shape because people are disregarding social mores? Sounds pretty sheeplish to me.
This boy is so very soy…