“Modern feminism is like a cult. If you don’t adhere to the cult mentality, if you are not 100 percent in, and if you question anything, you are banned. If you go against the cult, they will eat you alive,” says Rebecca Barrett, 33, a progressive-turned-traditional housewife from Florida.
Barrett’s transformation from living in a state of what she now views as misguided anger to a happy, radiant, and fulfilled wife and mother-of-one is striking. Of course, there are the obvious outward signs of femininity; the softer hairstyle, and figure-flattering clothing. But it’s her attitude and outlook that are most inspiring.
Barrett says modern feminism is all about “chasing the victim hierarchy,” and one has to be more and more the victim in order “to stay in the club.”
“That’s not how life works,” she told The Epoch Times. “For me, there was a decade of believing that I was the victim. Feminism is ingrained in the media and in everything from childhood on. You don’t necessarily have to say that you’re a feminist, but a lot of the belief system that you hold as a woman is rooted in feminism.
“I want to help women understand that and break free of it if that’s what they want.”
Barrett says the biggest lesson she learned going from feminism to a traditionalist is “taking accountability and responsibility” for her actions. “For me, it was a huge wake-up call,” she said.
“It’s easier to blame everyone else for your problems, than owning that you made mistakes as well. You are part of an issue, a problem or the solution,” she added. “We all like to take accountability and we all like to own up to our wins, but a lot of times we want to just blame everyone else for our problems and own the wins.”
The ‘Extreme Phase’ of Hating Men
Barrett is open and honest about the circumstances that led her to take a hard-line view of men. Her mom was a stay-at-home wife and parent, and Barrett saw her as weak for not having a career and staying in the partnership.“I started to hate men at a very early age because of infidelity in my house,” she said.
The disdain grew when she moved to New York in 2015, starting her first company. Driven and ambitious, she worked in the oil and gas industry straight from college. Launching a new business in an all-male field was tough, and Barrett, bolstered by other women CEOs and female empowerment groups, began to get resentful.
She said: “It was like putting gasoline on the fire. I got mad at the men that I worked with. I would be resentful of men I would date. Once you start listening to feminism and feminist ideology, you start like ‘Oh, I can blame them. I can blame them for my problem, and I don’t have to feel bad for doing that.’ They come with the argument, ’that’s not what feminism is about, it’s about equality of the sexes, about equal pay.' Yes, that’s textbook feminism—it’s not what happens in practice out in the real world.”
Barrett goes further, asserting that many feminists target white men specifically for being the issue, and pointing out the irony since a lot are white themselves.
“You are blaming something on white men, that they have no control over—they were born that way,“ she said. ”They want equality of outcomes, meaning, I should have the same outcome as my white male colleagues because I’m a woman. No other reason for that, just ‘because I exist as a woman and they exist as a man.’ That’s one of the main issues of modern feminism. We’ve gone to this extreme phase of hating men. Misandry is widespread today.
“We’ve been seeing a lot of the abortions and stuff going on—they say the same things. They have no other talking point other than ’my body, my choice.' If you even question that further, they can’t articulate it, because that’s all they know.”
Seeing Through the Delusion
The switch that altered her perspective flicked on when Barrett started to detect holes in the ideology.“I would pick up on flaws time and time again,“ she said. ”We would have female led conferences where you could go to any speaker, and every topic was like: ‘The white man is holding you down’, or ‘We need to fight for our seat at the table.' Everyone is blaming someone else for the reason they’re not there. Corporations, institutions; everything is systemic. They love throwing around the word ‘systemic.’”
Reading the works of Jordan Peterson, a well-known Canadian professor of psychology and best-selling self-help author, started to give Barrett the understanding that accountability for her problems is on her, and she began to move away from the “victim mentality” that, she says, is crushing women’s chance at happiness.
She met her husband, James, also 33, in 2018. By then, the walls she’d built around her had started falling.
“I would shut men down all the time—I wouldn’t even give them a chance. For some reason, I gave my husband a chance,” she said. After that the couple were inseparable, but it wasn’t easy. Still shackled to her previous mindset, Barrett approached relationships with a competitive attitude, always wanting to one-up her men.
“That’s not healthy whatsoever, that’s not how any relationship should work or function. That’s the reason why we have men and women, or yin and yang—because we complement each other in our skills and thought processes,” she said.
It took extensive premarital counseling and a lot of work to achieve the contented, healthy marriage the couple have now. James, being more traditional, had a certain take on what men and women are supposed to be in a marriage, and Barrett had other ideas. She wanted to be the working parent, and for her husband to stay at home with the baby, for instance. It was all a far cry from the situation the family are in now.
Barrett says traditional men want peaceful women. After a long day of work, they want to come home to a woman who is not yelling at them or nagging them. “They want to find peace in their house,” she said. “They don’t want to argue, they don’t want to fight … the number one need of a man is that he wants to feel respected. Women’s number one need is feeling loved. Both feel love in different ways. A man feels love by being respected, a woman feels love by being adored, she wants that adoration.
“It’s a two-way street: The more I respect my husband, the more love he gives me, and vice versa. It’s not a competition, it’s not keeping score. [If] I genuinely respect my husband and with my respect I’m going to do the things that show respect to him. In turn, his natural way of reciprocating that is providing me with more love and care.”
With the realization that the sexes ought to not battle, but complement one another, Barrett now thinks of herself as a traditionalist. She stays at home with her baby daughter River Rein and loves the role of mother and homemaker. Besides revamping furniture, sewing, and learning about growing food, Barrett spends an hour each day options trading on the stock market. Sometimes she’ll even tackle electrical jobs.
“Running around, taking care of my daughter, doing house chores—that to me is fun. As women, we like to do these things anyway, at least a lot of us do,“ she said. “You like your house clean; you love decorating and it’s a full-time job. My friend calls herself a ‘domestic engineer.’ We are domestic engineers: I take care of the household and I problem-solve every day.”
Braving the Feminist Backlash
A lot of feminists have been very upset by Barrett’s stance. The backlash she has received for communicating that her husband works full-time while she stays at home has, at times, been savage. Going back to her cult premise, Barrett asserts that by not adhering to modern feminism and questioning its ideologues, she’s been thoroughly canceled.“There’s a massive misconception,” she said, “that you are a slave to your husband and children; that you have no say in your life, you have no skills, and you can’t work. When I was younger, I also thought it was stupid. Why would anyone want to do that? Now that I’m here, I’m like ‘wow, this is amazing!’”
There’s so much societal pressure, Barrett says, and a lot of it comes from women. “I get a lot of criticism from women saying, ‘What if he cheats on you and leaves you? You’re gonna be left with nothing. How can you teach that to other women?’ I’m not teaching that to other women. I’m encouraging them to hone their skills, to learn new things,” she said.
With her channel, Barrett tries to help other women—especially younger women—know that it’s okay to question their existing ideas if that’s what they want. The woman she talks to is like she once was: miserable, and struggling with her feminist identity and belief system.
“A lot of women feel stuck,“ she said. ”Of course, there are a lot of women who are thriving in corporate environments, but a lot don’t.”
This, she says, is due to many females getting to the point in their career where they don’t wish to chase the next promotion, but to settle down and have children. “That’s our biology, that’s intrinsic in women. It is really dangerous, that they are pushing this work narrative: ‘get your education, go chase a bag, go chase your career, focus on your career, because the career will never leave you, the career is going to be there forever instead of a man.’”
One of the main contradictions Barrett sees in modern feminism is that it says it’s women’s prerogative to do whatever they want while demonizing those who choose to stay at home with their kids.
“My choice is to stay at home and take care of my family,” she said. “Why is that bad? So many women are telling other women: ‘Oh, well, you have internalized misogyny. You are setting women back to the 1950s.’ That’s sad.”
Barrett stresses “femininity is a beautiful thing” that has been completely undervalued in our society. Modern women, she says, have been taught that femininity is weak.
