From Hysteria to Toxic Empathy: How We Pathologize Women's Politics

For years, I assumed the hate I received was personal. I thought it was an attempt to intimidate me simply because I am a woman. It’s the internet, it’s a cesspool, we know this. But then I started to really look at it. I tracked the repetition in my inbox. I analyzed the recurring attacks on 'liberal women.'

I asked myself why the insults felt so uniform, and why my male counterparts never received this degree of vitriol. Yes, everyone gets hate, but between myself and other leftist women we’ve had our lives threatened, rape threats, and even our families threatened on a regular basis. I needed to know, so I looked deeper.

What I discovered shattered my initial assumption. This wasn't just misogyny; it was strategy. I had stumbled onto a years-long, coordinated alt-right movement designed to break us, and I was looking right at the heart of it. I wasn't being bullied by a few angry guys in their basements. I was being targeted by a marketing campaign.

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“Toxic Empathy,” “suicidal empathy," “AWFL,” "pathological altruism," and “cluster B society.”

These are psuedo-clinical terms weaponized to describe a very specific condition that makes a woman a threat to society. And do you know what the symptoms of that condition are? Caring about others.

You may look at this list and you see insults. I look at this list and I see a diagnostic manual for a psychiatric ward that doesn't exist. They take the foundational human instinct to care for the vulnerable. You know, the instinct that built civilization, and they reclassify it as a biological error.

If a woman looks at a refugee crisis and feels pain? That isn’t moral clarity. That is “Suicidal Empathy.” She is endangering the tribe.

If she votes for social safety nets? That is “Pathological Altruism.” She is sick with kindness.

But for many of the men parroting these thing, such as Costin Alamariu, Andrew Tate, Ben Shaprio, Gad Saad, James Lindsay, and even Vice President JD Vance what is happening to ‘leftist women’ is more than just a sickness. These women are a threat.

That’s where "AWFL" and "Cluster B" come in.

"AWFL” = Affluent White Female Liberal. It allows them to dismiss any woman with a degree and an opinion as a screeching, out-of-touch harpy who is inventing problems to fill the void in her soul. This is what they’ve been calling Renee in 4Chan circles.

And "Cluster B Society"?

Cluster B is an actual psychiatric diagnosis. The symptoms are intense mood swings, impulsivity, attention-seeking, lack of empathy, manipulation, and difficulty managing emotions, leading to significant distress and interpersonal problems. They are weaponizing the DSM-5 to gaslight an entire gender. They are claiming that progressive politics are just the externalized symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissism.

Do you see the trap? If you argue with them, you’re "hysterical." If you empathize with the marginalized, you’re "suicidal." If you organize, you’re "Cluster B."

It is a clear, organized messaging campaign targeting leftist or liberal women.

Writers like Brad Wilcox and Daniel Cox argue that liberal women are unhappy because they rejected traditional sources of meaning like marriage and religion. According to this view, women chose careers and activism over family and faith, and now they are paying the emotional price.

I am living, breathing proof you can do both. I am married with kids, and I am an activist. I am a writer.

The idea is that leftism, trains women to constantly focus on what is wrong with the world, racism, sexism, climate disaster, and that this focus naturally leads to depression and fear.

The goal isn't to debate policy. The goal is to convince the audience that the woman speaking isn't a political opponent who is wrong; she is a mental patient who is having an episode. And you don't debate patients who are a “threat to themselves or others,” you sedate them.

You just point at the woman screaming about the injustice and say, “Don’t mind her, she’s unwell, she’s hysterical.”

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And yes, this matters. It matters more than you think. Let’s look at the history.

In the 19th century, there was a convenient medical diagnosis for women who didn’t want to shut up, stay home, and keep having babies.. They called it hysteria. If you resisted the life chosen for you, you weren’t unhappy… you were mentally unstable.

Men would often throw their wives into mental institutions for anything and everything. And it was legal. Women were viewed as property. In many places, he didn't need a judge. He needed his own testimony and the signature of a compliant doctor who was also, invariably, a man, and typically a family friend.

Some of the reasons listed from admission into an asylum between 1860-1892.

Women were thrown into asylums for things such as: reading too much, any gynecological issue including infertility, using contraception, refusing sex, or even “egotism,” which simply means putting themselves above the “family” (him).

The common cures for hysteria? More sex with their husband, pregnancy, childbirth and rest.

Today we say, look, women can have credit cards without their husband’s permission (since 1974 at least) or women can vote, and we like to think we’re safe now.

The word hysteria was derived from the Greek word for uterus (hystera). It was a special term just for women who were “over-emotional.” The diagnosis was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1980.

But beneath all of the chaos and the evil in the world, they have hidden it well. In the last few years, the wind didn't just change direction; it turned into a alt-right wind designed to blow women right back into the kitchen.

And they aren't using new arguments. They are using the same logic. The exact same logic that says biology is destiny and empathy is a weakness. It is the exact same logic that kept the vote illegal until 1920.

There was a time not long ago when Americans used to treat political opponents as people who were wrong. I think your tax plan is a disaster; you think mine is theft. We argue. We vote. We move on. But today? To the alt-right, the opposition isn’t simply wrong. If you are a woman and you don’t get in line with their beliefs, you must be sick, you must be mentally ill.

But here is the kicker. Here is the part that actually breaks your heart. They aren't doing it alone. It’s not just men at the barricades. It’s women.

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‘Anti-feminist’ women are the ones handing them the ammunition.

Caroline Downey looks at a generation of young women furious about a collapsing world and diagnoses it as a pathology. “Toxic empathy.” She medicalizes rage to make it easier to dismiss.

I stumbled upon an article of hers this week, and that was the inspiration for this piece.

Hannah Pearl Davis built a brand on the promise that female silence saves marriages. Obedience as self help. The 1950s rebooted with a ring light. Karoline Leavitt stands at the White House podium insisting abortion is unacceptable even to save a woman’s life, calmly explaining that women’s survival is negotiable. Brett Cooper repackages anti feminist regression as edgy counterculture. Allie Beth Stuckey literally wrote the book calling empathy the problem.

The “toxic empathy” line is also something that has been repeated over and over and over again by none other than Elon Musk.

This is not a rejection of empathy by accident. It is a deliberate system that trains people to suppress compassion in order to preserve power.

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Renee Nicole Good & The Anti-Women Movement

Renee Good fit their bullshit theory perfectly. Renee Nicole Good was 37 years old. She lived in Minneapolis. She was a mother, a poet, and a singer. On the day she was killed, she was acting as a legal observer during an ICE raid. Her job was simple: watch, document, and make sure federal agents were held accountable.

Legal observers exist so the state knows it is being watched.

ICE initially claimed Renee acted aggressively. But videos that spread quickly online showed something very different. Her car was moving away from officers when ICE agents fired the shots that killed her.

Renee fit the exact stereotype the Right has spent years attacking. She was white, liberal, involved in the arts, and physically present to challenge state power. In far-right language, she was an “AWFL.”

The response from the Right was celebration. These are the same people who condemned any negative feedback on Charlie Kirk after his death making jokes about how Renee good “turned right” because of how her body fell after she was shot three times in front of her wife and dog.

White nationalist figures openly celebrated her death. Nick Fuentes framed the killing as payback for the George Floyd protests, claiming it restored order after the “chaos” of 2020.

The story they told was simple and cruel… Renee died because of her “toxic empathy.”

She cared too much. She put herself between the state and people the state had labeled criminals. In their view, her death was not tragic but enviable because of her “disease” and the “disease” of white progressive women everywhere.

“This is what happens when you leftist women get out of line. See how crazy they are? They are bad people!”

This is what pathologizing women’s politics does. It makes murder sound like logic.

In the days that followed, users on X used the platform’s AI tools to generate fake images of Renee’s dead body. These images were sexualized, mocked, and made deliberately grotesque. Her corpse became content. This is a new form of political violence. It is not enough that a woman is killed. Her death must be replayed, edited, humiliated, and consumed. The goal is not just cruelty toward her, but terror toward other women.

I will not censor names, if you said it, own it.

This kind of behavior shows how deep the hatred runs. Renee was no longer treated as a human being. She was turned into content. Her death became entertainment. This is what “anti-empathy” looks like in practice. It is not just indifference to suffering. It is enjoyment of it. It is cruelty performed publicly to scare others into silence.

They are betting on the shame. They are betting that if they diagnose our conscience as a pathology often enough, we will eventually lower our eyes, lower our voices, and apologize for making a scene. They want us to believe that looking at cruelty and refusing to look away is a symptom of madness, rather than a requirement of humanity. But here is the flaw in their strategy, and it is a fatal one: They have confused a marketing campaign for a moral compass.

So let them have their acronyms. Let them have their pseudo-science and their diagnostic manuals and their hollow, terrifying apathy. Because if standing between the vulnerable and the violent makes us hysterical, if demanding a world where compassion isn’t treated as a “biological error” makes us unwell, then we should wear that diagnosis like a badge of honor. History has never been written by the sedated; it is written by the women who — despite the threats, the mockery, and the labels — refused to be ‘cured.’

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