Guardian Opinion piece - why women are joining the far right

[GoldenWonderwall]

I read this piece this afternoon and I feel like I’m missing the point of it. This could well be ignorance, but I feel it’s been written in a very strange way. I’m getting a feeling that the writers don’t think much of women in general (though they are women) and I wonder why this would be published on a national news site in its current state.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/24/women-far-right-gender-roles-radical-right-migrant-muslim

I’m getting a feeling that the writers don’t think much of women in general

Well yeah, it's The Guardian.

Its the Guardian.
Women are only allowed to vote Labour, and only if labourLGBT allow it.

It's why I don't contribute to the G any more.....

It just spews uncritical "woke think".

I used to read the Guardian religiously but I haven’t read it for months. The only reason I haven’t deleted the app off my phone is because it notifies me of the football scores. I really should sort me out another football app and bin it off completely.

Is there any evidence for this (party membership statistics?) or is it based on rumour and myth (y’know, like how Mumsnet is supposedly a far-right hate speech platform/radicalisation portal)?

I think it's supposed to scare you off from thinking "Rotherham, Cologne et al-may be men from one culture do have a problem with girls and women from another.

I think you need to keep in mind for example that Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo are middle aged, privileged white men but that didn't mean it was they who were talking nonsense when Munroe Bergdorf was on This Week. Or that Shami Chakrbarti made considerably less sense than Portillo and Alan Johnston did when she was a guest.

I keep meaning to unsubscribe.

What a lot of floaty bollocks.
The only phrase that rang true was that women will be the mothers of the future generations waffle waffle.
Yes of course they will because the only human sex that can give birth is the female sex

If I ever do join the far right it will be solely annoy to the Guardian.

If I'm ever in the dock for wrongthink I can of course brandish my Guardian Weekly and have the staff shown up as guilty by association! There's a thought.

The only reason I haven’t deleted the app off my phone is because it notifies me of the football scores. I really should sort me out another football app and bin it off completely.

Download FlashScores and delete the Graund!

More academics (sociologists) who can't communicate with a broad audience, what a surprise. All they seem to be saying is that when studying far right movements you also have to take into account the women who join them. What a truly mind-bending conclusion. They have one example of a far right woman terrorist but that's pretty much it because when it comes to far right violence, men are rather over-represented.

Women's support for far right movements is nothing new. Hitler was very popular with women. Look at France and the Front National and the women of the Le Pen family. But any far right movement will ultimately face the problem that it has to either detoxify or to convince women to buy into their own oppression. Some far right movements are unabashedly masculinist - see Casa Pound in Italy. They don't like women's political involvement.

What Guardian readers should be asking themselves, though, is why the left is not doing a better job at convincing women to join them. Or is this just another article that gives lefty men an excuse to hate on (white - explicitly mentioned in article) women?

So basically, both the far right and far left hate women.

But wHy do women tend to vote Labour? I’ve noticed this left leaning on Mumsnet also. Genuine question.

I feel it’s putting some ideas out there about women in general being very susceptible to propaganda and easily swayed with some inclusive bullshit whilst also appealing to some innate racism. Is the world more accepting of far right ideology right now? You get called a nazi these days if you don’t have organic oat milk in your fair trade flat white so I’m not convinced of that.

I just feel it’s throwing a load of cobblers out there to see if anything sticks but there’s something about the tone of it. I really need to stop reading the guardian, it’s not what I grew up on.

GCSE bitesize:
"Reasons why Hitler rose to power
Hitler was a great speaker, with the power to make people support him.
The moderate political parties would not work together, although together they had more support than the Nazis.
The depression of 1929 created poverty and unemployment, which made people angry with the Weimar government. People lost confidence in the democratic system and turned towards the extremist political parties such as the Communists and Nazis during the depression.
The Nazi storm troopers attacked Hitler's opponents.
Goebbels' propaganda campaign was very effective and it won support for the Nazis. The Nazis targeted specific groups of society with different slogans and policies to win their support.
Hitler was given power in a seedy political deal by Hindenburg and Papen who foolishly thought they could control him.
German people were still angry about the Treaty of Versailles and supported Hitler because he promised to overturn it.
Industrialists gave Hitler money and support."

It isn’t a well written piece, and failed to say what might attract women to right-wing politics: the veneration of family and women’s role within it. We are taught to hate ourselves for our ‘unpaid’ labour, right wing politics reasserts the value of home production and of women who engage in it.

There is a fantastic Sociological text called: Moral Monopoly by Tom Inglis. It described the power of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and examined the key role played by housewives in upholding the teachings, morality and therefore power of the RC church. I need to dust it off in fact, haven’t read it in decades..

Good point, GCSocSci

But wasn't that what third wave feminism was trying to rectify, women hating themselves because they were not emancipated enough?

And the point still stands, for some women, conservative (not just far right) politics can be empowering.

"An analysis of European Social Survey data in seven European countries showed that more than 40% of votes for the populist radical right come from women. Women are more visibly active in radical-right movements than ever before."

It seems to be a load of bollocks because the source has a different take:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0031322X.2015.1024404?scroll=top&needAccess=true

"Why do more men than women vote for populist radical-right (PRR) parties? "

Surely that is a more neutral/less sexist question to ask?

The Guardian article:

" Women play an increasing role " - citation needed
" Kathleen Blee’s work on women’s roles in the Ku Klux Klan, for example, documents ways in which women were active participants in the early to mid-20th century," - so already active 100 years ago
"The strategy has attracted female voters to radical-right platforms." - citation needed
". Other far-right movements have also made deliberate strides to recruit women. Half of the Latvian National Front’s members are women, and it depicts women as spiritually superior to men, " - hasn't this been a part of Nazi propaganda since Hitler's time?
" Women are also visibly violent in far-right movements. Last year, the German neo-Nazi terrorist Beate Zschäpe received a life sentence for her role in 10 murders, two bombings and other crimes." - that's an anecdote, not data.
"It is not only the regulation of women’s bodies that motivates the far right, but also their protection. " - didn't you just say the far right were becoming more liberal in order to attract women?

Thanks DrH.
Must say, I’m not too sure what third wave feminism tried to contribute.

Thing is women need to be emancipated from both exploitative paid and unpaid labour, but the analogy never worked as convincingly to describe our unpaid work, which many of us do because we love those we toil away for. So suggestions that we dump the kids and the housework didn’t sit well with many.

Outsourcing unpaid labour to poorer women also doesn’t work (morally) for many...as it achieves liberation for middle class women on the backs of working class women .. again pointing to a logical affinity between disadvantaged economic groups and right wing/conservative politics.

As I understand it, if you have concerns about, say, Cologne, you might as well marry Tommy Robinson and be done with it.

What a strange article.

There’s no coherent argument or analysis. It seems to be an excercise in juxtaposition of the following words and ideas:

Women, gender, far right, BADDIES.

It’s taking what are neutral concepts politically (woman is a biological reality) and just putting the concept of ‘gender critical woman’ right next to ‘Nazi KKK nasty nasty people.’ All set in a confused mishmash of words, many of them quite big and important sounding.

What does this do? It leaves the reader a bit confused - they leave the article with a sense of ‘well, that was a bit academic but it was worthy sounding and ...umm... gender critical women far right Nazis.

It’s like me writing an article conflating two things that have no real relation but I want the readership to associate them. Let’s take frogs and Nazis.

‘In a quiet pool in middle England, Frog are increasingly associate with Nazis.’

Does anyone else read articles like this and think they’re reading an excercise in psy-ops?

The takehome from this article is:

Gender critical women are very bad. Probably Nazis
If you doubt or have any questions on anything like cologne, you too are a Nazi.
You don’t want to be a Nazi do you?
Stop thinking.

If the Guardian are worried about the increased representation of women who fall to the right they probably shouldn't jettison them from the left.

How very dare these women have opinions and political views of their own? Who has permitted them to think in this way?

If women don't read and agree with the Guardian, then they deserve everything they get.

End the funding of transgender advocacy groups and hold a public inquiry into their teachings in schools

There's only one party with this in their manifesto and they're "far right".
So if I'm a single issue voter, the fact the other parties won't discuss my concerns makes me far right by default. I didn't go there willingly. Realistically I couldn't vote for that party anyway as there's no way they'll field candidates across the country.
It's a funny state of affairs when lesbians, trade unionists and feminists (and those in the middle of that Venn diagram who are all three) are now officially Nazis.
Just goes to show how words no longer have any objective meaning.