<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"           Women&amp;#039;s Right: (From left) Firearms advocate and hunter Regis Giles; conservative commentator S.E. Cupp; pollster Kellyanne Conway poses for the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute&amp;#039;s 2009 calendar, &amp;quot;Pretty in Mink&amp;quot;; attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference pick up Sarah Palin posters; presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann and South Dakota Congresswoman Kristi Noem address the CPAC crowd. Regis Giles glides from chair to podium with the lithe, twitchy ease of a big cat, hazel-eyed and trailing a honey-colored mane, all 20 tawny years of her packed into a skintight electric blue stretch-satin cocktail dress. She doesn&amp;#039;t look like this when she&amp;#039;s spearing wild boar on the shores of Florida&amp;#039;s Lake Okeechobee or taking aim with her favorite CZ 550 rifle, but today Giles is addressing America&amp;#039;s largest annual conservative convention, in Washington, DC, so she&amp;#039;s sexed it up a bit. Besides being a hunter, she&amp;#039;s an entrepreneur. From a website called Girls Just Wanna Have Guns, she peddles T-shirts, buttons, and coffee mugs, but no actual guns\u2014yet. That&amp;#039;s only because she must wait until she turns 21 to get a federal license to sell firearms. Meanwhile, she&amp;#039;s bagged her own reality hunting show, Primal Urge, slated to air on cable&amp;#039;s Pursuit Channel (devoted to all things hunt) in 2012. Giles keeps her speech short, sweet, and to the point. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sick and tired of seeing defenseless girls being abducted in broad daylight,&amp;quot; she says in an unstudied nasal drawl. &amp;quot;My company stands for those girls who&amp;#039;ve decided to arm themselves with a gun that will pump lead into an attacker at 1,200 feet per second. I wanna see more headlines stating &amp;#039;Girl kills attacker with gun&amp;#039; than &amp;#039;Girl found dead after being raped and choked to death.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; The audience packed into the Marriott&amp;#039;s Grand Ballroom erupts in cheers, stomps, and whistles. She&amp;#039;s brought the house down. Like all goddesses, Regis Giles may be considered the progeny of two greater deities: Gloria Steinem and Glenn Beck. In real life, Regis&amp;#039; dad, Doug Giles, is a conservative radio host, the self-described &amp;quot;pastor&amp;quot; of his own &amp;quot;Clash Church,&amp;quot; and a man who calls himself &amp;quot;a big pain in the butt to people who dislike God and the U.S.A.&amp;quot; Her mom homeschooled her and now teaches low-income kids in Miami, where the couple live. Until recently, the Gileses&amp;#039; older daughter, Hannah, claimed a larger share of the conservative spotlight. Also honey-haired and fetching, she posed as the prostitute in the infamous &amp;quot;sting&amp;quot; operation in which activists at ACORN (the political cradle of Obama himself) were videotaped appearing to advise a pimp and a hooker on how to launder money. Regis&amp;#039; niche is as the ambassadress of the polished trigger finger. Thanks to the &amp;quot;Palin effect,&amp;quot; female membership in the National Rifle Association has risen by 20 percent, according to an NRA spokesperson, and Regis extols the virtues of hunting in print and on TV, often posed next to photos of her fresh kill. Although she began taking jujitsu and handling deadly weapons by age nine (&amp;quot;I grew up in Miami and my parents were a little worried about us running around,&amp;quot; she explains), Regis says she hews to traditional gender roles: &amp;quot;I am not a feminist. I believe women have a role in society and men have a role in society.&amp;quot; Behold the new face of conservative womanhood. Young \u00ADwomen like the Gileses are the unintended, some might say ungrateful, daughters of feminism\u2014and their numbers, by some measures, are growing. The sisters are just two of thousands of young women in cocktail dresses who professed their love for guns, low taxes, and red meat at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2011, an annual gathering of 10,000 political activists, more than half of whom are college-age, nearly all of whom are white. CPAC attracts a spectrum of conservatives, from what used to be called country club Republicans to single-issue pro-lifers to libertarians to the neo\u00ADfascist fringe. No matter where they land on that spectrum, all the 35-and-under women I speak with define themselves in opposition to &amp;quot;liberal feminism,&amp;quot; though they may interpret that phrase differently. These young women&amp;#039;s choice of feminism as chief nemesis is as old as Phyllis Schlafly, the 1970s firebrand who almost single-handedly killed the Equal Rights Amendment and still churns out books like her latest, with co\u00ADauthor Suzanne Venker, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know\u2014and Men Can&amp;#039;t Say. It may seem odd that women who pride themselves on being totally modern would train their fire on such a seemingly old target. Though the reasons for that are probably as obvious as politics and ambition: Feminist bashing remains the surest way to earn cred in the conservative movement, and &amp;quot;feminist&amp;quot; is an easy, all-purpose insult, eclipsed perhaps by only the dread &amp;quot;liberal.&amp;quot; Born in the 1980s and &amp;#039;90s, the right-wing girl Millennials grew up at a time when Reagan was almost ancient history, second-wave feminism was fighting grandma&amp;#039;s battles, and the background noise was the whir of talking heads debating whether oral sex was sex at all, courtesy of Bill Clinton. With their moms able to work, gays on the way to acceptance, and abortion legal if fraught, these young women learned to pick and choose among the issues. So they support women&amp;#039;s desire to work, for example, while decrying the supposedly censorious effects of sexual\u00ADharassment law on free speech. Or they use birth control to delay having children themselves while opposing federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which allows poor women to do the same.  Pollster Kellyanne Conway, president and founder of The Polling Company/WomanTrend, says young women just might be on their way to becoming an up-for-grabs demographic, the way \u00ADReagan Democrats once were. According to one of her polls of women 18 to 34, 41 percent call themselves Democrats, but 44 percent identify as either &amp;quot;very conservative&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;somewhat conservative&amp;quot; on health care and education. (Only 22 percent pegged themselves as liberal on these matters.) To Conway, this suggests that a sizable portion of women who vote Democratic lean right, making it tricky to know which candidates will win their vote. Young women are more likely to label themselves as conservative, Conway found, after experiencing some or all of what she calls the Four Magic M&amp;#039;s: motherhood, mortgage, mutual funds, and marriage. &amp;quot;Young women are as Democratic as you think, but they are much more conservative culturally than you think,&amp;quot; she says. Because they&amp;#039;ve come of age in the &amp;quot;postfeminist&amp;quot; era, they support &amp;quot;diversity&amp;quot; but include in that concept diversity of ideology, not just of gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference. Thus, young women can chafe at lining up under the old banners. &amp;quot;The way for political candidates to get them is not to talk in the dated, binary way of are you Republican or Democrat, but, should government do more or less? Are you conservative or liberal? Do you plan to be a mother and get married?&amp;quot; The daughter of a Republican surgeon and a stay-at-home mom, Ashley Sewell is a tall, green-eyed 27-year-old with short black hair who grew up in suburban Fort Worth, Texas. She graduated from Baylor University in 2006 and went to work as a medical staffing consultant, earning just shy of six figures before she was 25. She cared little about politics\u2014until tax time came around. &amp;quot;When I filed, I was moved up a bracket. Uncle Sam told me I owed him another four digits. That just didn&amp;#039;t seem right. My life was all about working. I was in the office at six every morning and usually didn&amp;#039;t take lunch. I was good at it and saw the rewards of my hard work. I bought a BMW. But for the most part I used that money to establish myself, being fresh out of college. I had a great apartment and banked a lot of it, as a foundation for my life.&amp;quot; The tax bill brought her to tears, Sewell says, and eventually to the Tea Party. Which in turn led her to donate time to training activists for Smart Girl Politics, a conservative political network started as a blog by a New Jersey homemaker in 2008 that now has 50,000 volunteers working on behalf of conservative causes. Sewell says she keeps her politics entirely apart from &amp;quot;the personal.&amp;quot; She is pro-life, but she supports state-by-state restrictions rather than federal. And gay marriage isn&amp;#039;t something she&amp;#039;d rally against. &amp;quot;I know what&amp;#039;s right for me, but it&amp;#039;s not my place to say what&amp;#039;s right for you,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;If you live in Vermont and gay marriage bothers you, there are 49 other states to choose from.&amp;quot; Because hers is the first generation &amp;quot;to deal with the brunt of this debt,&amp;quot; Sewell says, &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;re more focused on fiscal issues.&amp;quot; She thinks the federal government should spend on national defense and infrastructure and find savings in &amp;quot;entitlements,&amp;quot; especially that old bogeyman of the right: welfare. &amp;quot;Conservatives are compassionate,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but we find value in charity.&amp;quot; Thanks to the bankability of the telegenic, witty right-wing blond willing to trash the &amp;quot;identity politics&amp;quot; of feminism (a type invented by that now salty dog in a black sheath, Ann Coulter), young women like Sewell have a bevy of bright, sassy women in their own age group to emulate. Among the most prominent is Fox commentator S.E. Cupp. Born Sarah Elizabeth, the 32-year-old was weaned on a bootstrapper&amp;#039;s family story. Her father, she says, was a born-poor Kentuckian who worked his way up from the warehouse to become a senior vice president of a national office-supply chain. Cupp began writing arts and culture journalism at Cornell University and chose the gender-neutral byline because she thought it would be &amp;quot;cool,&amp;quot; not because she ever suffered discrimination. &amp;quot;Now that I&amp;#039;m on television and book jackets, however, the jig is up,&amp;quot; she says, adding, &amp;quot;Now the initials are merely an obnoxious affectation.&amp;quot; Cupp, who wears glasses and favors leather skirts and high heels, says she was always conservative, but she didn&amp;#039;t start writing about politics until after 9/11\u2014she saw the towers fall as she walked down Park Avenue from her job at a midtown PR office. She&amp;#039;s become a multimedia whirlwind, with, in addition to Fox, a column in the New York Daily News, a job giving political commentary on Glenn Beck&amp;#039;s radio network, and several books to her name, including the best-seller Why You&amp;#039;re Wrong About the Right: Behind the Myths\u2014the Surprising Truth About Conservatives. Cupp was born and raised a meat eater (which has practically become a conservative litmus test, what with all the people lining up to attack organic gardener Michelle Obama and her fellow &amp;quot;food police&amp;quot;), but she says she&amp;#039;s had to apply herself to acquire some of the other merit badges of modern conservative womanhood. She taught herself to gut a fish, devoted a year to learning all about NASCAR, and in May participated in her first Alaska bear hunt. &amp;quot;NASCAR was a conscious decision. I was always a sports fan, and it is the second most popular sport in the country and I thought, There has to be a reason.&amp;quot; As for hunting and fishing, she says she started as a young adult and got hooked, no pun intended, by the survivalist buzz. &amp;quot;I fish the salmon run. I bring it to the table in the middle of the river, gut it, and cook it on the bank. Especially as a woman, it&amp;#039;s empowering.&amp;quot; In getting her hands bloody, she follows in the high heels of the former governor of Alaska. &amp;quot;She is unequivocally a woman to admire, whether you like her politics or not,&amp;quot; Cupp says, ticking off Sarah Palin&amp;#039;s triumphs: governor, mother of five\u2014one with Down syndrome, one fighting overseas. &amp;quot;After eight years of judging George Bush as a nepotism experiment, shouldn&amp;#039;t we want leaders like her? She gets a raw deal because the media is inherently liberal, and they don&amp;#039;t like that she isn&amp;#039;t be\u00ADholden to the [feminist] movement.&amp;quot; As with Sewell, Cupp is more Ayn Rand than Phyllis Schlafly. A self-described atheist\u2014with a master&amp;#039;s degree in faith studies from NYU&amp;#039;s Gallatin School\u2014she&amp;#039;s more animated by pocketbook issues than reproductive ones and supports gay rights. Interviewing Jimmy LaSalvia, who helped found the Republican gay rights group GOProud, for her radio show, she enthuses: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re a big tent. And it&amp;#039;s not like you guys are everywhere. It&amp;#039;s good for intellectual diversity! We&amp;#039;re the gay old party.&amp;quot; Cupp&amp;#039;s latest competitor in the punditocracy is Dana Loesch, a conservative St. Louis radio host whom CNN contracted early this year to provide commentary from the right. Loesch, 32, grew up in a Southern Democrat family and campaigned for Bill Clinton before she could vote. The former president&amp;#039;s sex scandal, she says, propelled her to the right. &amp;quot;When the Lewinsky story broke, my first thought was she was a whore. Then it turned out he did have sex with her! I got really mad. I&amp;#039;d gone to bat for him, argued with teachers and friends for him. The first person to screw me over was Bill Clinton.&amp;quot; Loesch eventually married a conservative and is now a mother of two sons; her conversion was also cemented by 9/11. &amp;quot;When I got pregnant, my world changed. I was in Kirkwood [a suburb of St. Louis], my baby is on the floor, and I&amp;#039;m watching these buildings crumble. I blurted out, &amp;#039;Thank God Bush is president!&amp;#039; And I knew I could never go back.&amp;quot; The path to conservative activism begins in college for many women\u2014and sometimes, nothing can solidify your views more than being vilified for them. When the Smith College Republican Club in 2008 invited Ryan Sorba, author of The Born Gay Hoax, to give a talk, the lecture hall was swarmed with students clashing pots and pans and trying to grab the microphone from his hands, according to the most recent president of the group, Lindsay Smith. Sorba couldn&amp;#039;t make himself heard over chants of &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re here, we&amp;#039;re queer, get over it,&amp;quot; and the event was cut short. &amp;quot;It was a disaster and an embarrassment,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;The public safety officers did nothing to aid the situation.&amp;quot; Conservatives have been complaining about the chill liberals put on campus &amp;quot;free speech&amp;quot; for a generation now\u2014and not just at avowedly liberal places like Smith. Ashley Sewell acknowledges that the student body at her alma mater, Baylor, was right-of-center, but even she complains about her treatment. Her first political science professor, she says, asked the class who among them was a Democrat; only three of 50 raised their hands. &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#039;Congratulations\u2014you three are getting A&amp;#039;s.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Since the Sorba fiasco, Smith&amp;#039;s Republican club has thought twice about hosting the most predictably incendiary speakers. Then, too, perhaps the protesters have dialed down a notch or become more receptive to hearing opposing views. Last winter, fortysomething conservative activist Kate Obenshain came to Smith to give a speech titled &amp;quot;Kate Obenshain on the Failures of Feminism: What Does Kate O. have against Gloria Steinem?&amp;quot; While roughly 50 people lined the walls in silence wearing placards that read &amp;quot;Feminist,&amp;quot; Obenshain left Smith convinced that her detractors had been edified, if not converted. &amp;quot;What surprised them was that I was willing to give some ground,&amp;quot; Obenshain says. &amp;quot;I used to think there was no such thing as sexism. Well, there is. But it comes from both sides. Sarah Palin has withstood tremendous sexism from flaming leftists. But I distinguish with students between offensive or irritating sexism, and illegal sexual harassment. There are times when we have to absolutely stand up, and other times when we have to blow past it.&amp;quot; As an example of &amp;quot;an irritant,&amp;quot; Obenshain cites frat boys yelling out rude comments to girls. &amp;quot;The radical feminists say you have to make a big deal about every incident and sue the university; that&amp;#039;s ridiculous. Don&amp;#039;t walk by the frats when the boys are hanging out drunk! &amp;quot;These young women are suffering,&amp;quot; continues Obenshain, who is on the college-lecture circuit under the auspices of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, a Virginia-based non-profit that promotes conservative women&amp;#039;s networking and leadership. &amp;quot;The feminists have told them they have the same needs and wants as men. They don&amp;#039;t get asked out on dates; guys just hook up with them, and they wake up the next day and realize they were used. I have girls coming up to me crying, saying, &amp;#039;Thank you so much for making it okay for me to have a different set of values than what I&amp;#039;m taught.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Alyssa Cordova is director of the Luce campus lecture program. She was raised in a Catholic family in a conservative pocket of northern California; her pro-life belief was one major reason she decided to get active. A curvaceous, dark-haired 25-year-old in black fishnet stockings, black patent leather boots, and a diamond-studded cross dangling above very visible cleavage, Cordova&amp;#039;s look is the antithesis of what many people expect of a religious conservative. &amp;quot;I think on the left, there seems to be an attitude that if you highlight femininity, it&amp;#039;s a weakness. We&amp;#039;re all about dresses and pearls, but that&amp;#039;s not all we are.&amp;quot; To back that up, the Luce Ladies, as they call themselves, put out a calendar of Great American Conservative Women, highlighting women like Coulter, Cupp, and this year&amp;#039;s Miss June, Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas mother who stars in the TLC reality show 19 Kids &amp;amp;amp; Counting. The Luce Institute is not alone in trolling colleges in search of baby Palins. Seven years ago, a conservative University of Virginia student named Karin Agness walked by a campus building called the Women&amp;#039;s Center. &amp;quot;I figured it would be open to all women,&amp;quot; says Agness, now a DC attorney. &amp;quot;I took a tour and at the end asked, &amp;#039;Would the Women&amp;#039;s Center be interested in cosponsoring a group for conservative women?&amp;#039; The faculty member looked at me like I was crazy, chuckled, and said, &amp;#039;Not here.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Agness proceeded to form a book club, called Network of Enlightened Women, devoted to reading tomes like Dinesh D&amp;#039;Souza&amp;#039;s Letters to a Young Conservative. The privately funded nonprofit now has chapters on 20 campuses and a headquarters in Manhattan. NeW still runs book groups, and among its current favorites is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism, by 37-year-old Virginia mother of three and former Republican Congressional staffer Carrie Lukas (who quit her job to be with her kids). Lukas&amp;#039; main point is that feminists have hurt women by advising them to pursue careers before establishing families, leaving them too old to bear children. This flip of kids and career was first advocated a decade ago by author Danielle Crittenden, though Lukas goes much further, indicting day care as harmful and premarital sex as unhealthy, and opining that &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; women want a husband, while feminists &amp;quot;pine for a sugar daddy in Uncle Sam.&amp;quot; To find recruits, the Luce Institute started a campaign a year ago attacking annual Valentine&amp;#039;s Day productions of Eve Ensler&amp;#039;s The Vagina Monologues, a play started more than a decade ago to celebrate female sexuality as well as expose violence against women. &amp;quot;We Empower, It Degrades,&amp;quot; reads a Luce poster, which charges that V-Day funds are donated to liberal feminist groups and points with disgust to Glenn Close&amp;#039;s rallying of 2,500 people to chant the word &amp;quot;cunt.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve found a lot of people on the left who say they kind of agree with us about The Vagina Monologues, but I don&amp;#039;t think they&amp;#039;ll align themselves with a conservative organization,&amp;quot; Cordova says. &amp;quot;Students get excited about this because nobody ever challenges anyone, and these flyers they put up are so vulgar.&amp;quot; Susan Celia Swan, who&amp;#039;s helped produce The Vagina Monologues on thousands of campuses, scoffed at the notion of any backlash to V-Day and at the accusation that the money raised from the play is ill spent. The show has contributed $80 million to shelters and other programs that help victims of rape and domestic violence, Swan says. &amp;quot;Is there something [conservatives] are doing to help end violence against women? How are they empowering?&amp;quot; The young women I interviewed for this article share almost every goal of feminism. They want to be\u2014and in many cases, already believe themselves to be\u2014&amp;quot;empowered&amp;quot;: educationally, financially, sexually. But they resist any effort to put advancing their fellow women front and center. That means opposing everything from gender-based affirmative action, such as government-mandated quotas for female athletes under Title IX, to equal-pay-for-equal-work laws. So on the one hand they may lament that there are only a handful of female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and only 17 female U.S. Senators\u2014&amp;quot;It does matter,&amp;quot; Sewell says. &amp;quot;A woman&amp;#039;s perspective is different from a man&amp;#039;s.&amp;quot; But on the other hand, they&amp;#039;re not going to take to the ramparts to try to increase the numbers. What really gets these women riled up\u2014more than taxes and &amp;quot;big&amp;quot; government\u2014is the belief that the left demeans stay-at-home motherhood. &amp;quot;The point of feminism was to give women a choice,&amp;quot; Cupp says. &amp;quot;If women choose to work, fine; if they choose to stay home, fine. Seventies feminism judged, took away one of those choices.&amp;quot; I ask Cupp, a quintessential Manhattan working girl who says the day she was offered her newspaper column was the greatest of her life, whether she could envision full-time mothering. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d hope so!&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s been my plan to work hard and get to a point where I can stop and have a family. Time works against you. I&amp;#039;m not 25 anymore.&amp;quot; That said, Cupp says she hasn&amp;#039;t really decided whether she wants to have children. Sewell also says that motherhood isn&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;high on the agenda&amp;quot; for her right now but adds, &amp;quot;For a lot of women, that&amp;#039;s what they need to do. In the conservative movement, there&amp;#039;s value in either.&amp;quot; This ideal is so important to the young right-wing girl&amp;#039;s thinking, that while 11 of the 12 heroines in the Luce Women&amp;#039;s calendar worked in either media or politics, the centerfold went to the mother of all mothers. On a chilly Saturday morning, the final day of the CPAC convention, about a hundred young men and women line up to meet a smiling brunette with cascading brown curls, dressed in mom jeans and a smock-style beige jacket. Among those eager to shake hands with mother-of-19 Michelle Duggar is Alyssa Richardson, a James Madison University senior who says Duggar is simply a great role mode for her. The 20-year-old Richardson is working on a business degree and is the president of James Madison&amp;#039;s NeW chapter. Her boyfriend, Patrick Henry College senior Bryant Condrey, was crowned Gentleman of the Year by the NeW girls in a 2011 Facebook vote, based on his definition of a gentleman as &amp;quot;a man who understands his proper role in society, in the family, and in church.&amp;quot; Richardson says she definitely plans on working for some portion of her adult life, but she wants babies, too, and will leave her job when that happens. &amp;quot;The faith that Duggar instills in her children is really inspiring,&amp;quot; Richardson says. &amp;quot;And her Christian principles, that&amp;#039;s what I admire.&amp;quot; When she reaches the front of the line, Richardson thanks Duggar &amp;quot;for making it okay for young women to stay home if they want to.&amp;quot; Duggar murmurs thanks and gamely poses for a snapshot. Just to her left is a pile of brochures titled &amp;quot;The Vagina Monologues Exposed.&amp;quot; With 19 childbirths and counting, Duggar&amp;#039;s vagina could tell a riveting story. But it won&amp;#039;t be participating in V-Day anytime soon. And, you can betcha, that&amp;#039;s just fine with the young women waiting to shake her hand. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a12323/female-conservativism/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>