In a column published September 15 at American Thinker, writer J. Robert Smith argues that modern feminism has curdled into something openly sinister — a movement whose central commitments now run against men, marriage, family, and children. He anchors the claim in a trio of recent news events, then traces the animating spirit back to Gloria Steinem, whom he calls “a Washington of destruction.”
From ‘Freedom Trash Can’ to ‘Lost Their Minds’
Smith opens in 1968, at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, where a few hundred members of the group “New York Radical Women” protested what they considered a sexist “cattle auction.” Citing History, he notes that the famous bra-burning never actually happened — the “bra-burner” stereotype, per that account, was used to belittle the movement. Instead, protesters dropped bras, mascara, and similar “symbols of oppression” into a “freedom trash can.” Smith’s response is dismissive: a bra, he asks, is a symbol? His real punchline arrives at the end of the piece, when he concedes the myth may be false but insists that what feminists actually trashed were their minds — “and for too many, their souls.”
The column’s treatment of the protesters is openly derisive. Smith describes the young women in bathing suits who chose to compete as the “circuit-blowers” for the demonstrators, and he mocks the activists’ appearance, writing that among feminists there seems to be an unwritten rule that the more one resembles Frida Kahlo, the greater one’s credentials.
Steinem, Recast as a Destroyer
Steinem died this month — the column identifies her as a Toledo native born in 1934 and credits Harper’s Bazaar (September 3) with recounting the career that made her the face of second-wave feminism. Her undercover exposé of Playboy Bunny cocktail waitresses at Hugh Hefner’s club, published as “A Bunny’s Tale” in Show magazine, catapulted her to national fame, the magazine noted.
Smith grants that Steinem was feted by corporate media as a feminist George Washington. His own verdict is that she backed abortion, ballyhooed the pill, celebrated promiscuity, and routinely demeaned marriage — though she eventually married and was widowed. In his telling, her pursuit of female “liberation” was an act of nihilism, intentional or not, and it is that nihilism he calls “the cancer eating away at contemporary feminism.”
He also takes aim at the scale of her signature scoop. Steinem’s month undercover, serving drinks to cigar-chomping men, struck him as trivial compared with earlier muckrakers — Ida Tarbell’s takedown of Standard Oil, or Nellie Bly’s undercover reporting from a New York asylum. Women in the 1960s, he writes, already had access to higher education and opening workplaces; suffrage was long settled. “Cleavage and bunny tails combined weren’t a cause of outrage,” he writes, and the women Hefner employed could have handed back their tails and taken jobs at Marshall Field’s.
The Column’s Three Modern Exhibits
Smith then pivots to the present. His first exhibit is the September 10 anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, he writes, social media was flooded with venom from “liberated females,” who he says dominated the hate far out of proportion to men. He compares the tone to the Manson Family girls of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and cites the Daily Mail, via MSN, reporting that the ugliness has continued a year on — which he frames as an outgrowth of a mental health crisis among progressive women.
His second exhibit is the hung jury in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who, in Smith’s characterization, strangled her three young children with unambiguous premeditation. One male juror held out for conviction; nine women and two men, in his count, favored acquittal — a split he attributes to arguments about hormones and what he calls “twaddle.” He writes that female jurors berated the holdout, a Black man, yet no cries of racism followed, and that some jurors went on camera to air grievances against him. The holdout, Smith notes, is now being doxxed.
The Healey Signing and the ‘Moral Inversion’
The final example comes from the same state. Governor Maura Healey, described in the column as a lesbian Catholic, signed legislation allowing healthcare providers to perform what Smith calls near-term abortions — killing “fully formed babies in birth canals.” He describes Healey signing with a satisfied grin and handing the pen to someone as a souvenir, while the women around the desk smiled and applauded. Even if those present believed the law was medically necessary, Smith writes, the moment should have been solemn. Late-term abortions, in his view, are medically unnecessary and inexcusable, and the “my body, my right” formulation is “amped-up narcissism.” He predicts a future generation will regard abortion with more disdain than slavery is held in today.
The Argument Beneath the Argument
Smith’s broader case is historical. By the late 1970s, he contends, feminism was a spent force: the major gains had been made, and what followed was consolidation. Second-wave feminism, in his reading, had little to do with advancing women’s rights; it was partly about staging stunts to keep the movement alive, and worse, it became the vehicle for an agenda he calls outright sinister. Man-hating became de rigueur, he writes, and “patriarchy” became the euphemism of choice — the claim being that men want women barefoot, pregnant, and toiling over hot stoves. Or wearing bunny tails.
From there he extends the indictment to children and gender. Modern feminism’s principal tenets, he writes, set it against males, marriage, family, and children unless all bend to feminist edicts. Children, he says, are treated as disposable or plastic; gender is designated at birth; boys are too rambunctious and assertive and must be stifled, with drugs if mothers and teachers can’t manage it.
It is a sweeping, deliberately provocative catalogue, and Smith makes no pretense of evenhandedness. The through-line is his contention that the movement Steinem helped define did not simply lose its way but lost its mind — and that the cost has been borne by marriages, families, and children, born and unborn. For readers who share his priors, the column reads as vindication; for those who don’t, it reads as a broadside. Either way, it is a window into how one corner of the right is framing feminism a year after Kirk’s killing and in the wake of the Clancy mistrial.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/when-feminists-trashed-their-bras-they-lost-their-minds/