FEMINISM IS A LIE.

We've understood that, dear readers, for over thirty years.  It comes as a surprise to Washington Post reporteditorialist Kara Voght, who files a report from a Turning Point gathering that reads more like field notes from Zamboanga, or perhaps outer space.

The throngs of teen and 20-something women flowed into the ballroom of the Gaylord Texan hotel on Friday night in a blur of shimmer and pink. There were sequins. There were bell-bottoms. There were sequin bell-bottoms. Most opted for some form of heel — often platformed, sometimes bedazzled. Others sported go-go or cowboy boots. (Kari Lake’s daughter wore a rose gold pair of the latter.) A disco ball as wide as a bathtub hung above them, giving them a silvery twinkle as they settled in to neat rows hundreds of chairs long. “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire blasted through the sound system.

They were ready for their trip back to the 1970s — or to a certain anti-feminist version of the era, anyway.

As long as there are youngsters who understand that the popular version of the late Sixties, followed by that kidney stone of a decade that was the Seventies, were a prolonged E-T-T-S moment, there is hope for the country.

“That decade fundamentally changed the narrative surrounding women, what our role should be, what our lives should look like,” said Alex Clark, the evening’s unofficial emcee for the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, an annual event thrown by Turning Point USA, a sort of MAGA youth group. “All these years later, I’m not sure that was very good advice. Are you?”

Clark, who hosts a pop culture podcast for Turning Point, dressed for her opening-night speech in a sequined shift dress. The summit’s branding stretched across the screen behind her, all groovy lines and fat serif fonts in mustard, mauve and sienna. It was inspired, at least in part, by “Mrs. America,” the 2020 miniseries about the failed fight to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (with an implicit solidarity with Phyllis Schlafly, not Gloria Steinem).

“In the ’70s, women were given all sorts of lies,” she continued. “They just told us, ‘Well, you can be a man.’ And I guess we’ve kind of accomplished that. But are we happier?”

No.  It's more important, though, for Post readers to be reinforced in their prejudices.

What does it mean to be young, female and conservative in America, 2023?

At the leadership summit, there were answers. It means posing for selfies in a mirror made to look like a magazine cover with a headline that reads, “Birth control is so last year.” It means having it all — but having kids and a husband before trying to get the rest. It means buying tampons and beauty products and other items from companies that market themselves as pro-Christian or anti-“woke.” It means embracing a particular kind of American nostalgia, one where women’s liberation means being free from the complexities of modern gender politics.

Perhaps most of all, it means seeing transgender women as a grave threat to womanhood.

That last sentence is clickbait. Reality is subtler.  Think of the gathering as a safe space for a different sort of marginalized population.

[Texas A&M student Georgia] Chapa had been to a number of Turning Point events. In her experience, the co-ed ones are (informally) more oriented to partying and finding a “dudeservative” to marry, she said, while the women’s summit is more of a “feminine escape.” It’s women supporting women — specifically, women supporting women in their choice to reject liberal gender politics.

“It’s nice to be here, where you agree with everybody on the conservative issues,” said Sarah Miller, a student at Boise State University who was attending the summit for the first time. “I walk around here and I have my filter off. We all agree on the core themes. You can make jokes. It’s a really nice sense of community.”

That might be an opportunity for the women of the fevered brow to find some common ground, with or without the "mansplaining" jargon.  If the traders offering products and services pose questions such as "Are you dating a beta?" there might be limits to those areas of agreement.  High powered careers get in the way of people's personal lives, though, and if the conference is alerting participants to that reality, that's a corporal act of mercy.  Perhaps it was not feminism per se that is the lie, it's the belief that you can have it all.  Sorry, no, not this side of the big rock candy mountain.