I’m fascinated by Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit for the same reasons I watch ABC’s The Bachelorette. The dating show tries to awkwardly reconcile fundamentally opposed interpretations of gender roles in a woman’s pursuit of an opposite-sex partner. The woman crowned as the bachelorette each season represents a certain type of conformity. She is feminine, unattainable, a prize to be won, flirty, and non-threatening to masculinity — the ideal future wife. At the same time, her role is highly subversive to traditional norms of courtship — she’s “dating” 25 men at once. This scenario totally boggles the normative masculinity of the contestants pursuing her. 

Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit, which targets college and high-school age girls, grapples with these same contradictions in a much darker and more prescriptive way. Speaker after speaker emphasized to the audience that they should become wives, mothers, and accessories to the astroturfed conservative movement rather than pursuing a demanding career. These themes were nearly identical to last year’s YWLS.

Read more at: https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/career-women-right-wing-media-tell-young-girls-give-their-dreams-young-womens