Ah, Yes: They’re Protesting Because No One Will Have Sex With Them

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“Resentful childless harpies unconsciously longing for domination.” —Jordan Peterson, in a tweet characterizing 18-to-22-year-old college students participating in pro-Palestine protests

While pundits lashing out at the student protesters participating in recent actions started out making allegations of antisemitism among the activists, a new, more personal flavor of scorn is now emerging. Some have accused the students of acting only out of a desire for attention or thrills, not actual conviction. Others have mocked students for being foolish, childish, and self-indulgent, as when a bunch of adults ridiculed the Columbia student occupying Hamilton Hall who asked for the delivery of food and water and described it as “humanitarian aid.”

But an even troll-ier line of reasoning emerged this week. According to some on the right, the real problem with college students today is a matter of confusion over gender and sex. These protesters are undersexed and ugly. And feminism is probably to blame.

Studies have shown that Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations had in their early adulthood, a fact that has inspired a certain set of concerned pundits, who in previous decades might have gotten stressed out about teen pregnancy, to fret instead about the effete men and cold women of the younger generation. When the well-known New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway, a person whose politics you might describe as center-left, went on Real Time with Bill Maher on April 26, he pulled from this source of elders’ angst in making his critiques.

“I think part of the problem is young people aren’t having enough sex, so they go on the hunt for fake threats,” he said on the show.

Former CNN host Don Lemon, who appeared on the show with Galloway, didn’t disagree. “It would definitely take the edge off,” he quipped.

A day later, speaking on CNN, Galloway tried out the argument again: “I think that protesting is kind of the new, if you will, sex,” he said. “Young people aren’t having as much sex.

“And also for the species to survive, you get a dopa[mine] hit from gathering together and fighting off a perceived enemy,” he explained, adding some pseudo-evolutionary logic to the idea. “And I think they’re erring on the latter, if you will. I think they’re on the hunt for what I call a fake mortal enemy.”

The next permutation of this emerging idea came from Megyn Kelly, who on her podcast on Tuesday mulled an important question about the students protesting the mass murder of civilians in Gaza.

“Why are they so unattractive?” she asked. “Why are all the protesters so homely? I don’t think they’re unconnected, I’m not going to lie. I think attractive, smart people are not drawn to this nonsense. They’re living their lives being successful. It’s the unattractive and/or dumb people who feel the need to do this to feel like they matter.”

Galloway crawled and Kelly walked so that Kelly’s former colleague Greg Gutfeld could fly. On The Five on Fox News on Thursday, Gutfeld pointed out that the protests appeared to be populated largely by “young women.”

“They look miserable, disheveled,” he said. “Meanwhile when you see those counterprotesters, those frat boys—healthy, good-looking guys. They’ve got it together. These women are a mess.”

Here, Gutfeld pulled on another string familiar to conservatives—campuses are too full of women, and run by too many other women, and all this feminization is probably causing student mental illness—and came close to articulating the argument in its final form: Liberal women are unappealing and unhappy, and they’re taking it out on everyone else.

“There’s something going on in our culture where leftism has led women down a path where the only purpose they perceive is outrage,” he explained. “They’ve devoted their aimless energy into causes that serve only to undermine their future, their happiness.”

Gutfeld means something specific here: a rejection of traditional gender roles. He makes that clear in his next point: “We’ve derided motherhood to a point where their only baby is abortion,” he said. “That’s the thing they want to protect.”

So women are unhappy because they are aimless; they are aimless because they are too liberated; they are therefore unleashing violence on college campuses. (A subtext—and sometimes overtly stated point—in these discussions is that feminist women are also unhappy because they are always ugly, and men, therefore, don’t date them.)

It’s this last point that the right-wing celebrity psychologist and author Jordan Peterson distilled to its ultimate form Wednesday.

Responding to a tweet from the conservative commentator Richard Hanania arguing that “masked college girls are just really into Hamas,” Peterson theorized that these unappealing, aimless, liberated women had found a solution to fix all the problems that emerged from their feminist worldview: Bowing at the feet of Hamas, finally getting the subjugation they don’t even know they want.

“Resentful childless harpies unconsciously longing for domination,” he wrote of these teenagers. “Why else worship at the altar of Hamas? Why else would it be so overwhelmingly female?”

Why else, indeed?