BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
DUH, AGAIN DUH!!!!! Guess they have been thinking with their TRUNTS, though with the exposé by stormy daniels one just has to ask WHY??? One would think NOT MY pres drumpf's / trump's PUSSY GRABBING video would have been warning enough about him, his sycophants and the republican party. AND do they expect any sympathy??? This from the New York Times and The Times / The Sunday Times.....
Opinion Columnist
In 1982, Phyllis Schlafly, perhaps the most important anti-feminist in American history, debated the radical feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon. Schlafly believed that sexism was a thing of the past; to her, if women had different roles in society than men, it was due to their distinct talents and inclinations. She herself, she said, had never experienced discrimination.
MacKinnon pointed out that Schlafly, who’d written extensively about defense policy, had wanted a position in Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon. Any man with Schlafly’s considerable accomplishments, MacKinnon argued, would have been given a job. Schlafly had to concede that her feminist foe had a point.
An ambitious woman who is willing to absolve the right of misogyny can go far, but rarely can she achieve the same status as a man. That’s especially true today, in a Republican Party that’s increasingly giving itself over to the most retrograde forms of sexism.
Recently several Republican congresswomen have been complaining, on and off the record, that their party’s leaders, especially Mike Johnson, the House speaker, don’t take them seriously. It started with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a onetime MAGA icon who is resigning next month. “They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys club,” she said in September. It turns out she’s not alone in her frustration.
Last week, The Times reported on Republican women in Congress who say that Johnson “failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues,” which they seemed to attribute to his highly patriarchal evangelical Christianity. (He recently said that women, unlike men, are unable to “compartmentalize” their thoughts.)
Feeling sidelined by Johnson, some Republican women are defying him. All but one of the House Republicans who bucked leadership to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files were women. Of the eight Republicans who joined with Democrats in November to try to censure their fellow Republican Cory Mills — who has been accused of threatening his ex with revenge porn — six were women.
Recently, rumors have swirled that Nancy Mace, who is running for governor of South Carolina, could soon follow Greene in quitting the House before the end of her term. Mace has denied this, but her disgruntlement is no secret. On Monday, she wrote in The Times, “Women will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath.”
It’s tempting to roll one’s eyes at women who are shocked, shocked to discover sexism in a political party led by Donald Trump. But it’s a sign of progress that these women are not responding as Schlafly did, demurely accepting their subordinate position within conservatism. They may not all call themselves feminists — though at times Mace has — but they’ve internalized basic feminist assumptions about their entitlement to equal treatment. What they’ve failed to understand, however, is that those aren’t assumptions their party shares.
Much has been made about the rebirth of gutter antisemitism and racism within the conservative movement. There’s been less public alarm about the resurgence of unapologetic misogyny. Last month, there was an uproar over the support that the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, offered to Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nick Fuentes, the influential antisemite. We’ve seen far less backlash to Heritage’s hiring of Scott Yenor, who believes that workplace discrimination against women should be legal, as head of its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Among the sort of young men who revel in transgressive antisemitism — which is to say, among much of the conservative movement’s rising generation — calls to repeal women’s right to vote have become commonplace.
Not long ago, most Republicans at least pretended to accept liberal premises about human equality, sometimes even gloating about one-upping Democrats on diversity. In 2008, Republicans tried to capitalize on the disappointment some women felt about Hillary Clinton’s primary loss by putting Sarah Palin on their ticket. There was a moment in 2011 when Michele Bachmann was a leading candidate in the Republican presidential primary race. For years it was almost a truism that the first woman president would probably be a Republican, some steely American version of Margaret Thatcher in high heels and pearls. Republicans didn’t want to raise up women as a group, but they valorized a certain kind of powerful woman, one who disdained feminism and proved through her success that the strong didn’t need it.
Today, however, Republicans are much less defensive about being the party of chest-beating patriarchy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has purged women from the highest ranks of the military. Johnson has attributed school shootings to the “amoral society” wrought by “radical feminism” and the sexual revolution and has said Americans should strive to live by “18th-century values.” Vice President JD Vance is famously contemptuous of women without children.
And the lower levels of the administration are littered with defiant chauvinists. Paul Ingrassia, whom Trump recently made deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, is probably best known for a leaked email where he referred to his “Nazi streak.” But he also reportedly intervened during a federal investigation on behalf of the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate — who is his former client and has been accused of sex trafficking — after electronic devices belonging to Tate and his brother were seized at the border, and he called opposition to women’s suffrage “very based,” a term of high praise on the right.
There are still plenty of opportunities in the MAGA movement for women who embody Trump’s preferred style of hyper-femininity, espouse traditional gender roles, or both. Indeed, the president’s obsession with aesthetics can open doors for women who might otherwise never have careers in politics. Many Republicans like having beautiful women around, and they appreciate being able to put a feminine face on their culture war crusades. But as some women in the party are realizing, there’s a big difference between being useful and being respected.
A correction was made on Dec. 9, 2025
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a departing U.S. representative. She is Marjorie Taylor Greene, not Majorie.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
When you are standing in the kitchen at Ballerina Farm, way out in the western wilds of Utah, beneath the big skies and against the brutal winters and the abundant summers, it is almost impossible to imagine that there are millions of people watching online.
Many miles away, people are scrolling their way through videos of the family’s toddlers running around in muddy linen dresses, rodeo horses galloping through the fields or butter being churned.
Earlier in the summer, I spent the day with Mormon homemaker and influencer Hannah Neeleman, 34, founder and face of the social media page “Ballerina Farm”, in which she stars alongside her husband, Daniel, 35, and their eight children, aged seven months to 12 years, posting about their rustic day-to-day lives from their kitchen and beyond.
Over the last year, their online brand has exploded, with more than nine million followers on Instagram alone, enormously popular for their content’s beauty — blonde babies, a pageant queen mother, beautiful views — but also for its brawn. How dare she make motherhood and domesticity look so easy, many cry.
In the week since we published the interview, we have had an enormous and impassioned response, a whirl of arguments and opinions whipping up speed on social media.
It further confirmed what was known before: Neeleman, whom people have labelled the queen of the internet “trad wives”, has become an avatar through which people hotly debate motherhood, womanhood and freedom to choose either.
Before I left to interview her, the main question I had from friends, family and colleagues was whether it was all true.
One of the most watched people on the internet, her children looked chaotic and happy, home-schooled and free-range. How did she keep it all together? How was she always so calm? Was it really like that?
• Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)
I was also desperate to know how she felt about all the controversy and anger which followed her around the internet. People raged at what she stood for as a “trad wife” — staying at home, looking after children, cooking everything from scratch — but I also wondered whether she was baiting them in some way, making headlines when she competed in the Mrs World pageant 12 days after having a baby, and ignoring all criticism that she was in some way smug or pressurising to other women.
I assumed that behind the enormous brand was a steely businesswoman, with her heels dug in about her choices, defensive arguments at the ready.
Arriving at the farm, driving down a long track, was simply awesome. Just outside Kamas, it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, sitting in the crease between the fertile water meadows below and the arid mountains behind. It was made for Instagram. The children, running around in tiny cowboy boots and climbing fences, were truly as wild and lovely as they looked online, helping each other, entertaining themselves. And Neeleman herself really was as calm.
But it was also a life of contradictions. Children not allowed screens, but who are reality TV characters online for millions. A stay-at-home mother who has made a career out of being so. An analogue, old-fashioned farm, only working because it is underwritten by social media cash. A choice — modern in her ability to have one — to do something so very traditional.
Where Neeleman wanted to be a New York girl and professional ballet dancer, Daniel had always imagined this enormous, daring life for himself, despite growing up in the Connecticut suburbs without a single animal, the son of an airline founder. He had staunchly traditional views, combined with unmistakably 21st-century business acumen.
He expected his wife to stay at home with the children. He was a “firm believer”, he said, that men “make stuff work” and women “beautify”. He wanted his parents to get remarried, despite their divorce 12 years ago. Is that on the cards, I asked. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “The whole divorce thing is so tough, because you have a family get-together and you have to have two [events]. So the parents end up seeing the kids half as much, and the kids see the parents half as much. So it’s just bad for everybody.”
When I asked, Neeleman seemed detached from the politicisation that surrounds her. This was her life, she told me, and she posted about it online. It was that simple. Daniel had more opinions, leading the way when I asked about their stance on abortion, marriage, feminism and the label “trad wives”.
But the most surprising part of the day — perhaps naively on my part — was trying to talk to her alone.
There were so many things I wanted to ask which were inappropriate to do so in front of her husband or young children — about contraception, married life, the trials of motherhood, or just simply who she was and what she thought when she was away from it all.
In recent days there has been criticism that I, a childless, unmarried woman, didn’t understand that this is the reality of having eight children, all home-schooled, and with no childcare. But I felt the exact opposite when I was there. It made me understand exactly how it was to be a woman with eight children and no childcare: demanding and rewarding and gloriously intimate and difficult to find a space to speak.
“When I had Flora,” she said at one point, her kids around the kitchen table. “You mean Mabel,” said one of her sons. She continues: “I was pregnant with Flora.” “No it was Mabel,” he said. “It was Flora,” she said. “It was Mabel,” he said. “Hey,” she said finally, “can you quit chiming in?”
When I asked her about how she felt about the anger of other mothers, who said she only showed the good parts of motherhood rather than the struggles, she was bright and sweet in her response. “I feel like there’s so much joy in making a beautiful meal for your family, it’s very satisfying, especially when you have had some part in growing or sourcing the food that you have a connection to,” she told me. “And hopefully I’m inspiring women to do that.”
I think this is the reason she inspires such strong opinions: the trad life makes women feel threatened by one another’s choices. It is as if one lifestyle is going to inhibit the other. That our freedom — however we interpret “freedom” — is being undermined by the existence of someone else’s.
Women who work in a paid job feel terrified that by promoting the seeming peace and harmony of a traditional home life, Neeleman is threatening their ability to choose otherwise. They fear they are going to experience guilt or resistance if other women do choose otherwise.
Women who look after their children full-time feel judged or patronised for doing so by the women who haven’t, their choices seeming threatened, too. And so, out of fear comes anger, like a bloke punching a wall when his wife leaves him.
“Anything great requires sacrifice,” Neeleman said, as we stood on the side of the mountain, surrounded by babies and chickens. “You know that,” she said gently. “You know what it took to get to where you’re at.” And that, I think, is the very simple and very complicated truth of it.
