The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Is Lindy West Getting Cancelled?

Posted on | March 24, 2026 | No Comments

Most people — even people who follow politics closely — never figured out that the Great Feminist Boom of 2014-2017 was not a coincidence. All the institutions of academia and media did not suddenly decide to the embrace and promote #feminist brand by accident. No, that cultural moment was organized to support the Right Side of History™ crusade to make Hillary Clinton America’s First Female President.

Having examined the reasons for the failure of her 2008 presidential bid, Team Hillary recognized that being identified as a feminist was a net negative for her and, in war-gaming her 2016 campaign — a process that began as soon was Obama got reelected in 2012 — they saw the importance of creating an “Astroturf” project to make it seem as if feminism was a mainstream grassroots movement. Young women who were targeted by this effort were generally too naïve to comprehend the cynical partisan calculatIons behind it, and sincerely believed that they were part of a spontaneous emergence of feminist consciousness, a belief that was much more flattering to their egos than to recognize they were pawns of a multimillion-dollar P.R. operation in service to the selfish political ambitions of one very wealthy and powerful woman.

All of which is to say that only a fool would have thought it was a coincidence when, in September 2015, Guardian columnist Lindy West “encouraged other women to share positive abortion experiences online using the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion in order to ‘denounce the stigma surrounding abortion.'” Nor was any intelligent person surprised when, a few months later in May 2016, Lindy West published Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, which was universally praised in the liberal media and immediately became a bestseller. The TV rights to Shrill were then bought by Hulu, which turned it into a 22-episode series.

Pro-abortion hashtag, book contract, TV deal — all these things occurred in the span of a few short months that just happened to coincide with the presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton. While I am not prepared to claim that Lindy West’s sudden ascent to fame and fortune was funded by the Clinton campaign (or perhaps that it was a clandestine CIA agitprop operation), neither do I think it was coincidental.

All of that is preamble to the latest turn of events, in which Lindy West has published a new book, and liberal women are trashing it.

Like everything Lindy West has ever written, Adult Braces is an exercise in solipsism, a song with one note — “Me! Me! Me!” — and while she was able to get a New York Times bestseller and a TV series out of this shtick 10 years ago, her target audience doesn’t seem eager to consume another installment of the “my-life-as-feminist-metaphor” saga.

West’s new book got completely dismantled in The Atlantic, with English feminist Helen Lewis calling it “the tombstone for Millennial Feminism.”

What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance. . . .
It isn’t social conservatism that has seen so many readers disbelieve West’s rapid-onset bisexuality. Millennial Feminism failed because it was suffocating, immiserating, and often at odds with observable facts about human nature.
Today, very few traces of it remain. Jezebel was sold off and closed. Tumblr has withered. The viral internet no longer reliably delivers traffic to epic takedowns of problematic figures, so hungry young freelancers have largely stopped pitching them. The publishing industry’s lust for jeremiads about “white feminism” is over. No one has used the word girlboss unironically in years. A key feminist legal precedent, Roe v. Wade, fell in part because Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire, a fact that makes me wince every time I remember that one of the most-lauded books of Millennial Feminism was Irin Carmon’s Notorious RBG.

What she is saying is that, in retrospect, maybe the kind of feminism Lindy West represented wasn’t good feminism, i.e., the kind of feminism that is consistent with Democrats winning elections. Anyone could see at the time that, for example, Lindy West’s beliefs were “often at odds with observable facts about human nature,” but feminists (including Helen Lewis) were willing to tolerate that until it resulted in Donald Trump twice being elected to the White House. Lindy West was a highly praised bestselling author, and then Trump beat Hillary. Four tumultuous years later, the elderly white man Joe Biden managed to “win” the 2020 election, but was compelled by the terms under which he obtained the Democratic nomination to make Kamala Harris his running mate. Then when Joe’s brain short-circuited in a June 2024 debate, he got kicked off the ticket and Harris was anointed as the Democratic standard-bearer — losing to Trump even worse than Hillary lost to Trump.

Liberals judge everything by whether or not it helps Democrats win elections, and the experience of the past 10 years is such that we might say feminism has been “weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

Did the decade-long failure of feminism — in terms of its utility as a partisan weapon for Democrats — result in this sudden outburst of criticism directed at Lindy West? It’s hard to say, but Helen Lewis’s takedown in The Atlantic set off a tsunami wave of Subtackers denouncing West’s brand of feminism. The bisexual “throuple” angle in West’s new book got Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s dander up:

For the last decade or so, there’s been a crossing of wires of sorts, wherein queer liberation and feminism are meant to be the same project. More specifically: the idea is that if women could simply abandon straightness, there, right there, is the feminist future. Abandon cisheteroland, and the feminism manifests.

As she explains, this is at the very least short-sighted, and results in harms that are perhaps not intended, but are entirely predictable.

In the context of analyzing Lindy West’s fat-feminist shtick, Kat Rosenfeld remarks about how “the same liberal communities which prided themselves on openness and tolerance also harbored an absolutely staggering contempt for the sensibilities and cultural practices of red America, and especially of the white working class, which they mocked mercilessly for being backwards and unenlightened . . . And one thing about the rural white working class: not always, but often, they’re fat.” Lindy West grew up as fat in deep-blue Seattle, where her size was socially coded as working-class, and the anti-fat prejudice she complains of is widespread among liberal snobs. However, as I explained in 2018, “Preferences Are Not Oppression”:

How is it that America (evidently unique among all nations) stands accused of a “monomanical fixation” with being thin, while at the same time we’re experiencing an obesity epidemic? And does Lindy West actually believe this “warps every single woman’s life”?
My daughters are not fat. My two daughters-in-law are not fat. My teenage sons’ girlfriends are not fat. If their lives are being “warped” by a “monomanical fixation,” they haven’t mentioned it. Some people are just naturally thin, more or less, and thus suffer no hardship because of the general preference for thinness. “Fat feminism” is a movement organized to convince us that our normal preferences are wrong. If you think a skinny woman is more attractive than Lindy West, your preference oppresses Lindy West, in much the same way (and for much the same reason) that she considers “stigma” against abortion oppressive.

The slow-motion approach to totalitarianism means that most people don’t realize how we have gone, in the space of about 40 or 50 years, from prohibiting certain beliefs as “racist,” to now attempting to prohibit other beliefs, attitudes and opinions for no reason except that some people’s feelings are hurt. The taboo on “racism” (which must be put in quotation marks because its definition has become increasingly vague) was based on the understanding that such attitudes motivated actual harm to black people. In the context of Jim Crow, lynching, etc., these harms were quite a bit more serious than mere hurt feelings, OK? But now the Left is trying to stifle free speech on the basis of a need to “de-stigmatize” various behaviors. What this means is that, for example, the practitioners of polyamory demand that they should be exempt from criticism, in the same way that Lindy West by denouncing “the stigma surrounding abortion” means that she should be exempt from criticism.

The Thought Police aspect of all this is what disturbs me most. I am fully capable of examining evidence and listening to arguments and making up my own mind without any external guidance, and I do not wish to prohibit people from publishing bad books full of wrong ideas, which is what Lindy West does. So long as we are free to criticize these bad ideas, without the Thought Police suppressing our criticism, other people are free to make up their own minds, just as I am. The totalitarian tendencies of those whom Helen Lewis calls the “high priestesses” of Millennial Feminism were obvious enough 10 years ago, but it wasn’t until Trump got elected and reelected that liberals began to have second thoughts about this movement. Lindy West getting cancelled is yet another reason I am proud that I voted for Donald Trump. So much winning . . .



 

Category: Feminism, Liberals

Comments