Claire Lehmann calls the waahmbulance about women who protest stuff

We Hunted the Mammoth relies on your donations to fund its beta male lifestyle. Please drop a few bucks here or here if you can!

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.

—

Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon.

Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.

We Hunted the Mammoth depends on support from you to survive. So please donate here if you can, or on Venmo!

An initial half-hour writing consultation is FREE. Click for details.