The New Girl Disorder - Why are young women so prominent in anti-Israel protests?

In late May, a strange post appeared on the X account of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Dear University Students in the United States of America,” it read, “you are standing on the right side of history. You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.” As it happens, the Supreme Leader’s government has struggled with its own resistance, ignited by the regime’s murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, accused of violating Iranian laws requiring head coverings—the most visible, but far from only, limitation on women’s basic freedoms in the Islamic country.

It’s hard to imagine that the cleric looked closely at images of the campus protesters denouncing Israel for its military response to Hamas’s monstrous terror attack last October. If he did, he would have noticed that they were predominantly female. It was women holding the microphones, addressing the press and crowds; women leading the chants of “From the river to the sea”; women giving interviews about the encampments; and women issuing demands to university administrators. In some images, so many women were involved that it seemed as if men had inexplicably vanished, like the missing in the sci-fi series The Leftovers.

The demographic makeup of the university demonstrations was something new for the United States. American women have led political protests before, but those generally concerned “women’s issues,” such as Prohibition, abortion, #MeToo, and the like. Granted, women marched with men in the 1960s civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests, but they usually played secondary roles, such as cooking food, typing speeches, and sometimes serving as playmates; “The only position of women in SNCC is prone,” in the memorable words of Stokely Carmichael. (Recognizing their second-class status among otherwise progressive male comrades motivated activist women of the era to start building the second-wave feminist movement.) Decades later, at Occupy Wall Street, a male protester produced a Tumblr video featuring photos of some of the comelier females sitting in at Zuccotti Park. He called it “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street.” Those days are over. Imagine publicizing a “Hot Chicks of the Campus Encampments” video in 2024; the writer would have to go into a witness-protection program.

The vibe has shifted—and not for a reason that the Ayatollah would celebrate: women are all but conquering the twenty-first-century academy. They not only make up well over half of undergrads and graduate students on university campuses; they also hold half of all professor positions, as well as six out of eight Ivy League presidencies and more than a third of college presidencies overall. Younger women who came of age in the new millennium have been thoroughly prepped for leadership as valedictorians, debate-club and student-council presidents, and Rhodes, Marshall, and Truman Scholars. If the protests offer further evidence for the dimming of patriarchy, they also show how women’s growing dominance in social institutions introduces new and ambiguous power dynamics.

Women’s prominence at the protests helps explain why, despite menacing sloganeering and electric tensions, little serious violence occurred. Men’s higher propensity for physical conflict is a human universal; when they find themselves in tense interactions, the likelihood of mayhem rises. With women running the show, you might stumble across an interpretive dance performance, as at Columbia’s encampment, but probably not much physical violence. True, when the cops arrived to break up encampments, things got rougher. But this was inevitable, with some protesters resisting police commands; there’s no gentle way to transport defiant dissidents to a police station. (Also worth mentioning: the police were mostly men, and, on some campuses, they seem to have lacked training in crowd control and de-escalation tactics.) The most disturbing exception to the relative nonviolence was a brawl at UCLA on April 30, where counterprotesters, including Jewish students and outsiders, tried to rip down barricades erected by a campus pro-Palestinian group. Videos of the fight showed only male participants.

Don’t take this to mean that women are not aggressive; they are. Their strategies, however, are frequently more cunning than men’s, and invisible not just to their more guileless victims but even to themselves. They’re masters of the covert psyop. Social exclusion—keeping out people whom the in-group deems deplorable—is a preferred tactic, as described by popular “mean girl” ethnographers like Tina Fey and Rosalind Wiseman, the latter the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes.

These pop observations have found scholarly support in the work of academics like Cory Clark, director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania, and Joyce Benenson, a researcher in evolutionary biology at Harvard and author of Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes. Both writers find that women have different psychological tendencies and moral priorities than men do and that, because of women’s rising status, those “priorities have more power than they used to.” Over the past several decades, safety (both physical and emotional) has taken on a talismanic power in the feminized academy. Equity and inclusion have become major moral concerns. Trigger warnings, cancel culture, and deplatforming are imposed to protect the marginalized and oppressed from ideas deemed harmful by the in-group—and serve as ways to ostracize those who don’t share those convictions.

This kind of social exclusion was exactly what we saw on campuses. Then Harvard provost Alan Garber noted that the issue was not open anti-Semitism but the social “shunning” and “pervasive” attempts to “vote [Israeli and pro-Israel Jewish students] off the island.” It began well before students pitched tents on quads. Reporting by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times revealed that shortly after October 7, a Columbia lesbian group, LionLez, sent an e-mail letting Zionists know they were unwelcome at an upcoming event. Similarly, a Barnard hip-hop dance team removed a four-year veteran, an Israeli American, from its WhatsApp channel, where practices and events were announced.

Once protesters established the encampments, they could pursue segregation policies more systematically. The Los Angeles Times described the UCLA scene in the days preceding the April 20 melee. Pro-Palestinian students used wooden pallets, trash cans, and metal barricades to block the path from a central plaza on campus to the encampment. If a suspected pro-Israel student came near, the demonstrators alerted allies by yelling, “Zionist! Zionist!” and refused him entry. Eventually, wristbands were provided for the in-group to show to appointed guards so that they could be distinguished from the undesirables—that is, the Zionists, who had to find an alternate route. Columbia protesters used a similar approach. In a well-publicized instance, one announced, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” The intruders were then told, “We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to destruct [sic] our community.”

The large presence of women made the absurd demand for privacy in an outdoor public space in the middle of one of the busiest cities on the planet only somewhat more comprehensible; people tend to expect more protection for women, for reasons that will become clear. Still, the tactic proved effective for three reasons. The protesters could, first, directly assert their ownership of university space; second, humiliate pro-Israel Jews; and third, keep the support of faculty and the broader public, who might turn against them if any blood were shed. That the protesters accomplished all this without physical violence is testimony to women’s ability to wield soft power. A short time later, a splinter group of mostly male demonstrators reverted to the 1960s (male) approach, breaking windows, pushing through doors, and scuffling with maintenance workers to occupy the university’s Hamilton Hall. The hard-power tactics were counterproductive, giving the administration the excuse it believed it needed to call in the cops.

Unlike males who might cross their arms across their chests, jut out their chins, or flare their nostrils when fixing for a fight, women sometimes hide their aggression behind a mask of civility—maybe a tight smile or a stiffly polite comment. A video of an incident during the protests at the University of Washington provides an example. A few students holding an Israeli flag argue with a larger group of anti-Israel protesters blocking their way. A small, soft-spoken woman enters and, with the cool authority of a veteran teacher warning her naughty fourth-graders to behave, says to the Jewish students, “I’m going to ask you not to yell.” She suggests that the Jews take a different route to avoid confrontation. She continues, “I think you want to walk that way [meaning down the path her allies are blocking] because it’s antagonistic.” The men feel checkmated. Do they point out her hypocrisy: She thinks they’re the antagonistic ones? Should they push her aside? Walk off with heads down? Just in case they didn’t do the right thing—retreat—a group of large men, faces partially obscured by keffiyehs and chests puffed out, appear and encircle the Jews, who, by contrast, don’t look like candidates for the football team. The encounter was “peaceful,” perhaps, but the gender dynamics bristled with psyop belligerence. A woman making a show of being a caring, civil person masks her own hostility by projecting it onto others. And just in case her targets figure out her passive-aggressive game and try something, she calls in male protection.

The soft power of social exclusion wasn’t the only familiar female tactic common at the campus protests. Women also relied on “safetyism” and often exaggerated harms. Columbia School of Social Work’s Layla Saliba, quoted repeatedly in the press, claimed to have suffered a “chemical weapon” attack after counterprotesters pranked her by spraying make-believe “skunk spray” in her vicinity. (The School of Social Work, whose students were well represented at the protests, is 88 percent female.)

Several viral moments from the demonstrations also capture this dynamic. Asked why student activists wanted to keep Zionists out of their encampments, a UCLA art history major responded, “Our top priority isn’t people’s freedom of movement. It is keeping people in our encampments physically and emotionally safe.” A Columbia grad-student spokesperson, Johannah King-Slutzky, notoriously demanded food and water for the Hamilton Hall occupiers. Responding to a reporter who asked why the university should support trespassers, she retorted, “Do [administrators] want their students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill?” It was a matter of “basic humanitarian aid,” she complained, ludicrously. One leader of the University of Pennsylvania encampments, Eliana Atienza—daughter of a Philippine television celebrity father and a Wharton-educated mother who founded the most expensive private school in the island nation—tweeted that Penn had left her “houseless.” She went on: “This is their weapon. So disappointed to be attending an institution that resorts to administrative violence.”

Yet it’s worth remembering that women have reason to exaggerate dangers and embrace safetyism. Societies have always needed to adapt to the biological reality that women are the smaller and weaker sex and bear the children necessary for group survival. Protections for the weaker sex have taken various forms, from the hunting and gathering division of labor to medieval chivalric rules to the “women and children first” moral code that left otherwise cold-blooded captains of industry standing on the Titanic’s deck, watching stoically as their wives and children rowed to safety as they went down with the ship. Even today, when women can serve in the military, they rarely get assigned to combat roles. Nor will you find many women toiling in the most dangerous civilian jobs, such as oil drilling or logging. Whenever Gazan casualty figures are cited, the numbers of women and children get singled out. This emphasis has propagandistic advantages, offering seeming evidence of Israeli brutality and Gazan innocence, but it also reflects enduring and socially valuable instincts of protectiveness toward the vulnerable.

Modern economies complicate those instincts. To get ahead, women must compete aggressively in the classroom and workplace. Toughness is an advantageous trait in this context—hence the popularity of female boxing classes and sweat-drenched gym workouts. Contemporary social-justice thinking, however, gives women a new route to protections similar to those they could count on in the past. Instead of deserving special respect because of their relative physical frailty, on this view, women should be safeguarded because they’re historically victims of male violence, coercion, and sexism. In an insightful essay on this topic, Richard Hanania writes, “For all our talk of equality, our culture treats violence, incivility, and aggression towards women much more seriously than the same towards men.” That’s one reason why the University of Washington men marching with an Israeli flag found themselves paralyzed by a female peer.

Male restraint of this sort may be necessary in a civilized society, but it can also enable a bullying strain of female hyper-emotionalism. At a June protest, a young keffiyeh-clad woman gave a remarkable display caught on video, a screaming tirade that lasted several minutes. Eyes popping, she screeched repeatedly about the “lies” Israelis had told about rapes on October 7. When a counterprotester asked if she supported Hamas, she shouted louder yet, “Yes, I support Hamas! I am Hamas!” Of course, most women don’t let themselves get so wild, and cooler heads escorted the frenzied protester away. In general, college students have been well trained in the art of bourgeois self-control; how else could they have passed muster with admissions officers? But some young women like this one have come to view anger as a way to show their toughness and to unnerve men, who can’t respond in kind. Because men are stronger, their anger could register as a genuine threat.....

The thing is.....by tilting the education field to favor women (and yes that’s exactly what has been happening for a couple generations) to the point that women now comprise a majority of students both undergrad and grad.....the feminazis will ultimately have done great harm to women.

Why?

Women won’t marry “down”. They don’t want men who earn less than they do as a general rule. Men have no problem at all marrying a woman who is of lower economic status and who makes considerably less than they do, but women are very different in this. So as they rise up the food chain in the corporate world, there are fewer and fewer men they will find acceptable. The result is a lot of cats, boxed wine, bitterness and unhappiness. There is a reason women report being less happy now than they self reported 50 years ago.

Orwell is characterized by the Left today as a misogynist, and the only “evidence” they have are quotes like that in a fictional book...though...not so fictional anymore.

Many women (most especially and specifically Feminists) believe they are the moral superiors of men, and their fallacious belief is buttressed by the fact that many men of my generation (and those before me) elevated women onto a pedestal.

The thing those women don’t understand is why we put them on pedestals at all, and it wasn’t because we thought them to be morally superior. We put them on pedestals because they brought aspects to the table in given situations that men generally do not, and intelligent men recognize this symbiotic intellectual and emotional relationship.

The grave error that females of these types fall prey to in this is that those same types of women don’t reciprocate that generally positive sentiment of male/female complimentary relationships, and they believe they bring not only their own female-related aspects to the table that men lack, but somehow believe that they as females also bring the critical male aspects to the table (male aspects that women, no matter how fervently they believe they do possess, simply do not generally possess or supply) so in their minds, men are not necessary.

Hence the fallacious, corrosive, and offensive mindset of “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. I have come to believe this is the root of many problems we see in society today.

Experience shows that the feminist mindset is not only false, but dangerous and intentionally divisive. And we have seen the fruits of that poisonous tree expand throughout society and into the fundamental concept of family, resulting in epidemic single parent families which, although they sometimes happen out of necessity, are not something to aspire to. The statistics on single-parent families and their outcomes are clear and undeniable.

And just to be clear, this is a Leftist Feminist mindset.

Conservative women are more often than not cognizant of the specific differences between males and females, and are generally aware that, apart from the obvious physical differences, men bring character traits to the table that compliment those characteristics that are not generally dominant in females, and vice versa.

But that commonsense mindset is not what drives everything in American society today ranging from investment to military planning and deployment. They want to take the idiotic “GI Jane” mindset that is so prevalent in Hollywood and the media, and treat that as if it were a fact, and a state that must be achieved.

I can hear the dry, sardonic voice of the character in that movie saying that!

When you look at government today, two of the biggest flaws are a vacuum of reason in government legislation and actions, and a complete and total lack of accountability.

Witness the stupid hearings with the Secret Service Director. No accountability. It is not even an issue that is being seriously discussed.

This may just be a coincidence with the quote you mentioned, but it is food for thought.

Male restraint...may be necessary in a civilized society, but it can also enable a bullying strain of female hyper-emotionalism

IMO, societal efforts to achieve a golden mean for human equity, happiness and fulfillment move on a sinusoidal path. Constantly varying between the extremes of over correction in one direction or another.

We are currently in a peak of amplitude associated with correcting the historical mistreatment of women, minorities and certain deviants in the American culture. I think the "wave" has moved too far in that direction, risking American physical and financial security.

I'm praying an adverse reaction to a nomination of Harris will mark the start of a turning point toward sanity in American culture. Godspeed to Trump and Vance.

“Why do girls like bad boys?”

The manosphere has written extensively on the “why”.

Short summary:

—Excitement—good boys are boring
—Drama—particularly if girls are raised in homes with lots of conflict they need lots of drama because that is what they are used to
—Sympathy—the bad boys tend to get into situations where they need to be “healed”—whether physically or emotionally
—Alpha theory—the female ape brain wants the biggest and strongest and meanest ape

etc etc etc

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