The Women Leaving the New Right. Defectors say the movement has dropped the pretense of protecting women and is now openly “cruel and fickle.”

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Anna’s career and income depended heavily on conservative patronage, and by then, she and her husband had several children to support. For a while, she experienced the ramped-up misogyny as primarily an online phenomenon. But sometime during the Biden administration, young men began repeating repulsive manosphere talking points in her presence — that women are irrational and manipulative, good for little but sex and childbearing. They assumed, she says, “because of how I presented myself” — as anti-feminist, as “based” and unbothered — “that I was not like the other girls.” They demonstrated their fealty to MAGA by enthusing about repealing no-fault divorce, gender-discrimination laws, and even the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote. Often enough, women in the movement would agree. “That was your ticket, your entry point,” Anna says. “It’s a ‘Leave your dignity at the door’ type thing.”

Usually, she silently endured her peers’ soliloquies on women’s deviance and the urgent need to curtail their rights. When she did manage a retort, it was not well received. On one occasion, at a professional dinner, a male acquaintance spewed out some “really gross” things about women (she declines to share details for fear of being identified), and she gently pushed back. “He freaked out,” she says. “He was banging on the table, screaming at me, saying, ‘Nobody cares what you think, woman’ — using the word woman as an invective.” She worried he would become violent. No one at the table came to her defense, men or women.

“You almost don’t realize what’s happening until five years later,” Anna says, “when you look back and you’re like, Oh gosh, I was being used.” She also blames herself: “I was too frivolous with ideas.”

Young women drawn to the cause in recent years for more traditional reasons — religious convictions, pro-life politics, a preference for conventional gender roles — are having a rude awakening of their own, finding that MAGA sexism is not the same as the old patriarchy. On the New Right, male licentiousness, violence, and domination are not only acceptable but valorized. “When Andrea Dworkin wrote about the draw of conservatism for women in the 1970s and ’80s,” says Katya Ungerman, who writes about online culture under the pseudonym Katherine Dee, “there was a certain plausibility to the pitch.” Ungerman has never been a conservative, but many of her friends are young MAGA and she has observed the milieu closely. Dworkin wrote that right-wing women were not deluded: “They see the world they live in, and they are not wrong.” In exchange for female submission, the conservative men of Dworkin’s era offered a refuge from the physical danger and chaos of modern life — or so they said. The right, she wrote, “tells women the rules of the game on which their lives depend” and “promises that despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified rules.”

“That part is gone,” says Ungerman, at least in the segments of the movement with real momentum. The men of the New Right not only fail to be protectors, she says, “they’re not even symbolically protective. They’re very hostile.”

The Fuentes and Yenor messages reinforce each other. The New Right’s approach to women is a pincer movement: On one side are reactionary traditionalists attempting to reestablish women’s abject dependence on men and marriage; on the other are champions of male sexual license and domination, encouraging young men to see women as subhuman playthings. Taken together, Anna says, the MAGA movement is “insisting that women subject themselves entirely to male authority, while advertising that male authority will be cruel and vicious and fickle.” In reality, they’re all on the same team.