How to say “women shouldn’t work” in 2025

“Less feminism, more femininity”

“Less burnout, more babies”

“Less feminism, more femininity”

These were the directives offered by the influencer and host of the “Culture Apothecary” podcast, Alex Clark, at this year’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit— an annual conference hosted by MAGA conservative Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. The New York Times, The Washington Post and New York Magazine’s The Cut, all covered this year’s event and its record-breaking attendance, powered by American women in their late teens and early 20s.

Despite the demographic’s overwhelming support for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, fewer Gen Z women voted for Harris in 2024 than voted for Biden in 2020. And among white women, support for Trump matched support for Harris among 18-29 year olds.

Meaning in an era of growing misogyny and violence against women, young women’s support for the Democratic ticket (led by a woman and explicit in its support for restoring women’s rights) decreased compared to 2020. And a meaningful share voted for the convicted felon, also found liable of sexual abuse, who aggressively pursues policies that constrain women’s autonomy and wellbeing.

These are the voters Turning Point USA is working to mobilize through events like the Young Women’s Leadership Summit and it’s message that limiting women’s ambitions to marriage and motherhood is the “real” meaning of empowerment. “We should bring back the celebration of the MRS. degree,” said Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA’s founder.

“The most common theme I heard from both speakers and attendees was that young women should opt out of higher education and focus on getting married, becoming a homemaker, and raising as many children as possible,” reported journalist EJ Dickson for The Cut. “Overall, the young women I spoke with were less animated by any specific social issues and more by frustration with the vision they felt liberal millennials offered them: the brand of Lean In-inspired girlboss feminism that suggests modern women can deftly balance families with career.”

Through a romanticization of what Dickson calls a “soft-focus brand of femininity,” the summit works to sell these young women what psychologists refer to as “benevolent sexism” — a seemingly positive, but ultimately, restrictive ideal of womanhood, exemplified in trends like the #tradwife and #feminineenergy on social media. As I’ve written before:

“[These trends adopt] the language of wellness and self-care to claim that true “empowerment” isn’t achieved through a more expansive vision of what women can and should have access to, but through the framework of constraint. Where freedom, rest and liberation are no longer enabled by women’s claims to their public and professional ambitions, but in letting go of them— either a little bit or altogether.”

In contrast to “hostile sexism”, which punishes women who step out of line with these patriarchal prescriptions of womanhood (like women who pursue their career ambitions, women who don’t marry or have children, non-binary, queer and trans women, and those who don’t “sufficiently” comply with patriarchy’s standards of “femininity”) benevolent sexism promises to reward the women who fall in line.

Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash

Both forms of sexism, hostile and benevolent, work together to limit women’s power and channel their time, energy and labor into supporting men’s own. Not in those terms of course, but through an aesthetic of pretty clothes, clean living and picture-perfect families — promising security, ease and purpose such that women’s subordination is made to appear not only normal, but desirable. And women’s autonomy is made to look as unappealing as possible.

As Turning Point USA influencer, Alex Clark, put it on the Young Women’s Leadership Summit stage “The left, they’ve got Tiktok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks, and a ring light. We’ve got girls who look like they just walked off the cover of Vogue.”

This embrace of benevolent sexism is rightfully recognized as a response to the disillusionment coming out of the post Lean In-era, but it’s also important to recognize how benevolent sexism falls into a much broader pattern. One that has been documented in countries all across the globe.

In their 2025 paper, “Worse for Women, Bad for All,” psychologist Magdalena Zawisza and her colleagues found that women are more likely to embrace benevolent sexism’s patriarchal gender roles and ideals (like those championed at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit) in countries where they face greater hostile sexism from men.

It’s this combination of hostile and benevolent sexism, also called “ambivalent sexism,” that enables what the researchers refer to as a “protection racket”: where women are actively (and logically) set up to fear men’s growing antagonism. As a result, women become more likely to endorse benevolent sexism, which promises women that they will be protected from men’s hostility, as long as they accept their place in the patriarchal gender hierarchy and comply with its’ prescriptions of “femininity.” Per Alex Clark: “More babies and beef tallow, less blue hair and birth control.”

In more simplistic terms: If you do what men want, maybe they won’t hurt you. In fact, the more you do what they want, fulfill their needs (housework, reproductive labor, caregiving) and conform to their desires (whatever combination of clothing, cosmetics, plastic surgery and sex work it takes to fit into their vision of ideal womanhood), the more they’ll “provide for” and “protect you.” But Zawisza’s research exposes just how much this promise of male protection and provision in exchange for women’s compliance is a mirage.

It turns out that benevolent sexism actually correlates with a greater acceptance of intimate partner violence toward women, a larger gender gap in unpaid domestic labor, and fewer women in the paid labor force — as well as lower economic productivity, shorter healthy lifespans, more collective violence, and more antidemocratic tendencies for everyone.

Countries where people strongly endorse benevolent sexism are also those where people most strongly endorse hostile sexism, “suggesting that whatever protection benevolent sexism ostensibly offers, women fare less well in societies that strongly endorse benevolent sexism,” conclude psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske.

In other words:

No matter how perfectly you perform the patriarchal ideals of “womanhood,” no matter how many babies you have, how many sourdoughs you bake, how much pilates you practice, or how many “hawk tuah’s” you perform, you are less likely to be safe or secure in a society that celebrates those ideals.

What women like Clark get right are the real costs of hostile sexism — where backlash against women’s professional and political power leave them far more exposed to burnout and far less able to access the same rewards (pay, power, leisure), as their male counterparts. But they reframe these undesirable outcomes as the consequences of feminism, not the patriarchal backlash against it. And they overlook the even higher cost of benevolent sexism —where promises of provision and protection against men’s violence are not only not upheld, but women are left with even less autonomy and power to push back against it.

What benevolently sexist mandates like “less feminism, more femininity” actually do, is rely on these pitfalls of patriarchy to sell women more of it.

You can’t get ahead? You don’t need affordable and accessible healthcare, housing and childcare, you just need a husband.

You’re burnt out? You don’t need to worry about workplace cultures that subject women to disproportionate burnout and backlash, you just need a man to provide for you.

You’re disillusioned? You don’t need equitable rewards for your educational and professional gains, you just need to have some babies.

You’re exhausted? You don’t need the same support for your career ambitions that you provide your male partner, you just need to let go of those ambitions altogether.

You’re vulnerable? You don’t need to worry about your autonomy and men’s violence against women, you just need a man to “protect” you.

This repackaging of sexism, from hostile (“women shouldn’t work or have their own autonomy”) to benevolent (“women just deserve to be healthy, supported and protected — and the best way to do that is to get married, have children, and ideally, give up your career”), has not only proven effective in limiting women’s public and personal power, it’s become part of the playbook for getting women to support their own subjugation. By turning up the dial on men’s hostile sexism — by threatening women’s rights, their safety, their well-being and their autonomy — women become more likely to embrace benevolent sexism, “which prescribes male protection to counter male threat,” per Zawisza, and her colleagues, effectively growing an eager audience for messages like Clark’s.

“Benevolent sexism legitimizes and preserves gender inequality, undermining resistance by promising “benefits” such as male protection and provision,” they conclude. But as their research also points out, these so-called “solutions” to the real unsustainability and dangers of modern womanhood do not make good on their promises, and often, make things worse.

Subscribing to sexism, however benevolent, doesn’t challenge patriarchal hostility and misogynistic violence against women, it reinforces it. Restricting women’s labor to the home doesn’t reduce the burden and burnout of being overworked and undervalued, it exacerbates it. Stripping women of their autonomy and increasing their dependence on men doesn’t protect them from men’s violence and abuse, it leaves them more vulnerable to and less able to escape it. It’s no wonder women in societies with lower hostile sexism are more likely to reject benevolent sexism. Because no matter how much you idealize a patriarchal vision of womanhood or dress it up in beautiful instagram aesthetics or whimsical conference swag, it’s a vision that demands women want less, and a reality that leaves us all worse off as a result.