Shrieking Leftist Women Can’t Boss Us Around Anymore

About 15 years ago, my infant daughter and I went to Mass in the Washington, D.C., area at one of the oldest churches in the country. It wasn’t furnished with a cry room or even a window in the vestibule where the Mass could be viewed apart from the congregation. I stood just inside the church with my cooing babe-in-arms, trying to make sure I could make a quick getaway if she started crying.

My daughter made the usual baby noises — nothing loud, but the kinds of sounds happy babies make. I noticed a woman near us immediately move away but thought little of it as Mass progressed. Then, when the homily started, this woman, wild-eyed and with her jacket swinging for dramatic effect, rushed past me, barking in her best whisper, “I can’t believe you would bring a baby to church!” and stomped out.

Unnerved as any mother would be, I felt terrible, but it was also clear this was a broken woman with major issues. After Communion, I returned to where I had been standing at the back of the church and realized it was right in front of a statue of St. Anthony holding the baby Jesus. “How dare he bring a baby to church?” was the thought that brought a smile to my face.

Unhinged women, like this woman at Mass, have been having a moment — like a 50-year moment. Most of us have gotten so used to their strong emotions that we think this is just how women are: highly volatile, often malicious, spiteful, and calculating. If someone does something a woman doesn’t like, she throws a tantrum, much like a child, to get her way. Like the placated toddler, the cycle continues. This cycle is most pronounced in power corridors like Washington, D.C., where political authority and lapdog journalists meet, and few women of the preferred political stripes are ever confronted with real pushback. Anger and tears have always supplanted real arguments and debate.

Few men or women have the courage to just let the tantrum run its course and give the unhinged woman a strong NO or, better yet, tell her it’s time to put her childish tactics away and make a real argument, sans tears or terror. Not only have these outbursts benefited angry women by giving them what they want, but they know everyone fears them. A woman can warn those around her with a look, a raised eyebrow, or a curt turn on the heel, putting everyone on notice.

That is, until now.

Like a sliver of light at dawn or a violin’s first notes in a symphony, at long last, the old tactics are being neutralized. The once-powerful raging faces of Karens — and now Margarets — can no longer command the same effect. Men have finally decided they have had enough and are just not taking it anymore.

The confirmation hearings for several of President Trump’s Cabinet picks have provided evidence that the era of shrieking women is coming to an end. Viral memes show woman after woman in politics and the media trying to roll out the tired, 50-year-old vitriol, and instead of taking the bait, or looking like a deer in the headlights, men are riding through it unfazed or even using it to score points of their own.  

Both Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren directed their venom against Pete Hegseth in his hearing to become secretary of defense, with Gillibrand saying he had made hurtful and mean comments. “You will have to change the way you see women to do this job, and I don’t know if you are capable of that,” she added. Warren picked up the same thread, cutting off the nominee’s response about lowered standards for women with, “Mr. Hegseth, let’s just stop! Let’s just stop! Let’s just stop right there!” She sounded like a higher-octane version of Kamala Harris’ “I’m speaking” schtick from the 2020 vice-presidential debate — that is, until Hegseth eventually made Warren look like a fool with a calm, cool, and collected correction about not being a general.

J.D. Vance also deftly handled his first interview as vice president on CBS’s “Face the Nation” with Margaret Brennan. Vance disarmed Brennan repeatedly but left a real mark when she suggested that an allegedly properly vetted Afghan, who planned a terrorist attack, may have been radicalized after he arrived in the U.S. “I don’t really care, Margaret. I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.”

My favorite, however, is the security guard at the Department of Education, now nicknamed Captain Doge, who stood unbothered as a screeching bunch of congresswomen and men demanded to be let into the building.

It isn’t just men in politics who are done with the female drama. Young men have had enough of their boomer grandmothers’ behavior and are choosing a different kind of woman for their future. They aren’t voting like their feminist-beaten or cowed fathers and are rejecting the culturally confected shame of “toxic masculinity.” They want to be men, not Pajama Boy.

The dismantling of the USAID slush fund to left-wing media will have its own snowball effect, as the journalists who manage to keep their jobs realize that they can no longer just cheerlead for their favorite (and lucrative) Democrat causes but have to do the work of scrutinizing the very public figures they have propped up for decades.

How did we get to this point anyway, where it seems the most natural thing in the world is for a woman to throw a fit? It started in the ’60s when women were informed they were victims, a status that meant they could do no wrong. Slogans like “believe all women,” “the future is female,” and “hear me roar” became rallying cries. It is a powerful thing to be told not only that you are a victim who deserves special status but that what you think is unimpeachable. Women moved forward confidently in a politically manufactured sense of self-righteousness.

Personal rage poured out into the public square, with the proliferation of women’s marches to make sure people were listening. Women’s anger was emblazoned on crude signs and vulgar hats, with shirts optional. (I once got stuck in my car in the ’90s, surrounded by a sea of topless and angry women at a march in Portland, Oregon … It was not pretty.) The virtue signaling of these marches went well beyond the actual march routes, communicating to Western women everywhere that this is how you get what you want: become a childish vulgar tyrant.

We’ve spent 50 years encouraging women and girls to be the most vicious and immature form of female. It seems that now, however, women are also waking up to the reality that maybe there isn’t anything wrong with a woman who is lovely, warm, kind, and competent; who can have a discussion without throwing a fit or an inanimate object; who wants to love her children, respect her husband, and worship God; and who is mature, thoughtful, elegant, and fair, no matter what her education level, income, or even political leanings. These are the kind of women who can start filling in the expanding-by-the-minute gap left by the screeching elites.

Unfortunately for shrieking women, but fortunately for the rest of us, the whole world is now seeing in real time that their sway over our culture is waning. Some invisible switch has been flipped, and the hoi polloi are no longer under their thumb. Truly, America is being unburdened by what has been.

Carrie Gress is a fellow at Ethics and Public Policy Center. A mother of five, she is the author of 10 books, including “The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity.” She is the editor of the online women’s magazine Theology of Home. Her latest book is “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us.”