Matt Walsh created a firestorm with his 2022 documentary, What is a Woman? Its interviews ruthlessly exposed the gender confusions and distortions pervading much of the political and cultural Left on matters of sex and sexuality.

Conservatives claim a contrasting intellectual and moral clarity on such matters. They affirm an exclusive male/female binary biologically. They declare that this biological divide entails distinctions between men and women not just in body but in thought and feeling. Moreover, these differences then naturally have ramifications for the proper ordering of households, society, and politics.

Yet the Right doesn’t seem to have sex and sexuality entirely ironed out. The Old Right seemed committed to the family values and traditional gender roles of Leave It to Beaver. It took its bearings from Christianity, combining the truths that God made all humans alike in His image with their natural distinctions as male and female. By contrast, men of the New Right seem more enamored with the bad boys. These include the flagitious intellectuals (Bronze Age Pervert), the provocative jackasses (Steven Crowder), and the sexually debauched (Hugh Hefner). Some even retain a willingness to engage with the likes of Andrew Tate, whose moral evils have expanded into criminal accusations.

While some seek Biblical foundations for their views, the New Right’s intellectual energy flows more from a return to ancient pagan (and more modern Nietzschean) notions of virtue and vice. It sees contemporary views of equality as making men effeminate and Christian virtues like humility as inhibiting a masculine expression of thumos. The male education inherent in the concept of the gentleman must be replaced with a revived noble savage, whose virtue of conquest extends from the battlefield to the boardroom to the bedroom. Among its most strident apologists, the New Right says political and public life is inherently masculine. By these lights, women both are degraded themselves but, more importantly, degrading to men and to society, when “liberated.”

This footsie with (if not embrace by) such characters and ideas comes in reaction to the successes of the contemporary Left. Progressives have won the gender wars, the argument goes. This victory has created not only gender confusion and distortion but also an anti-male bias. In response, real men need to fight against these corrupting forces with any and all means. Sure, we will hear (vague, brief) admissions regarding their faults. They are no Ward Cleaver. But we mustn’t be too hard on them. For when these men get attacked as “toxic” and “misogynist,” the true target is men, period.

These ConservaBros would do well to read Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost. The Bard hilariously mocks their (and some Old Right) views of women. In the process, he concludes with a view of the sexes more insightful and affirming of men and women than our current conversations.

Shakespeare set the play in Navarre, the northeast part of today’s Spain. Ferdinand rules this city-state as king. At the play’s opening, he brings together three lords with whom he plans to form a “little academe” through which they will be “still and contemplative in living art” (I.i.13–14). He offers a traditionally masculine goal for this intellectual pursuit: greatness that will elicit glory and, through that glory, a kind of immortality. This glory will not spring from the most traditional of forums—the battlefield. Instead, it will be realized in the reputation they and their city will garner for intellectual greatness. It seems he wants Navarre to become the new Athens; he and his lords, the new philosophers.

Ferdinand does seem to have battle on the brain. He speaks in militaristic language about their project. He declares the men must “war against your own affections/And the huge army of the world’s desires” (I.i.9–10). They are warriors engaged in conquering. But instead of other peoples, they will establish an empire over their own souls. Ferdinand’s reasoning assumes the loftiness and moral good of the mind juxtaposed to the baseness and evil of the body and the desires. Two of the lords confirm this perspective. One named Longeville, for instance, says that for him, “the mind shall banquet though the body pine” (I.i.25). Another, Dumaine, chimes in next that, “The grosser manner of these world’s delights/He throws upon the gross world’s baser slaves” (I.i.29–30). Following the body and desires place one in bondage to vice. Focus on the mind leads to liberation and virtue.

To win this battle, over the next three years, the men must live off a meager diet of one meal a day and a complete fast one day a week. They must sleep no more than three hours a night. Finally, they are “not to see a woman in that term” (I.i.37).

This last rule points the audience toward the men’s view of the other sex. To achieve this victory and glory, the men must abstain from women’s company. Women, then, both lack what these men seek and contain what they wish to avoid. Women lack reason, at least to the degree necessary to engage with these men and to contribute to their intellectual pursuits. Instead, women seem only good for mating bodies, not matching wits. Here they possess what the men wish to avoid. For they appeal only to the men’s base desires, tempting them toward enslavement to passion. In making this rule, the men imply that the female sex not only dissuades men from the good; women also fall prey to the very ills the men seek to conquer. Their lesser rationality means their own bodies and desires must rule them. They are slaves and base ones at that.

We see a similar, distorted manliness and its view of women in the soldier Armado, who is no lord and certainly no intellectual. The others keep him around for sport due to his dimmer wits. However, Armado is a soldier. He has the forum of the battlefield and sees his military role as part of his masculinity. He confesses to another character, though, that, “I am in love” (I.ii.56). He chides himself for it, observing that, “it is base for a soldier to love” (I.ii.56–57). He wishes his manly, military might could conquer this enemy, saying, “If drawing my sword against the humor of affection would deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take desire prisoner” (I.ii.58–60).

What is wrong for a soldier with love? Armado sees love as unmanning him. Love will reorder his soul and how he then acts. Armado articulates this fear when he laments that he will exchange his sword for a pen (“rust, rapier”), manly feats for effeminate poetry (“I shall turn sonnet. … [W]rite, pen.”). The masculine virtue of courage will be gone. Women, again, stand as the means of de-masculinization. Armado loves a woman and through the love she has caused, he has experienced the emasculating of his thumos. He even compares himself to Sampson and how that Biblical paragon of manly strength was overthrown by love for a lady.

The preceding perspectives treated women as base. At another point, though, some of these same men put them on a pedestal. Later, Ferdinand and his lords fall hard in love. Berowne, who had objected to the prohibition from the start, makes an argument that they needed women and the love of them for a proper education all along. Loving a woman “gives to every power a double power/Above their functions and their offices” (IV.iii.305–306). One better perceives the true, the good, and the beautiful when in love. More than mere perceiving, the man in loving gains delight, itself an impetus to deeper learning.

What kind of being could elicit such heights of mind and heart in a man? It seems only a goddess. Having made assumptions about women that reduced them to less than men, these same lords then speak of them in worshipful terms. Ferdinand writes of the woman he loves that she is a “queen of queens” and her virtues so great that, “No thought can think, nor tongue of mortal tell” (IV.iii.37–38). Longeville composes a sonnet for his love in which he calls her “a goddess” (IV.iii.61). He even attributes salvific qualities to her, saying of breaking his “earthly vow” to abstain from women that, “Thy grace, being gained, cures all disgrace in me” (IV.iii.62–63). Berowne affirms that indeed his friends are deifying these women, commenting on Longeville’s sonnet as a work, “which makes flesh a deity/A green goose a goddess” (IV.iii.70–71). The women are elevated in this view though still passive, contributing by being seen and loved by men.

Shakespeare mocks both sets of views. He does so by introducing women to the audience and to the men so sure in their ideas about them. In Act II, the Princess of France arrives with her female entourage. She comes to do business for her father, the King of France, in negotiating with Ferdinand. Forced to participate in these talks, Ferdinand and his lords must partially break their oath through some interaction with these women. In these encounters, they quickly fall in love.

These women are not how the play’s men pictured women in general. They show themselves more than a match for the men intellectually. The women exhibit keen perception of their male counterparts, both in their virtues and vices, giving a much more accurate appraisal than the men do of them. They do not match wits with the men in various scenes; they run circles around them in their intellectual and verbal abilities.

In fact, Shakespeare gave the play’s most perceptive moral and political insights to the French Princess. While not disdaining physical beauty, she finds intellectual and moral virtue more precious. She also critiques the desire for glory, arguing that “Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,/When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part/We bend to that the working of the heart” (IV.i.31–33). Love of glory breeds pride and pride itself all other vices enlisted to maintain that pride. She sees such ills as wrong for any but especially for one like herself, a political ruler.

Thus, this Princess’s very mission repudiates the various male perceptions of women. She exercises political rule in carrying out her duty on behalf ultimately not of her father but of her country. In negotiating, she must engage intellectually and keep rein on her passions, not as a passive goddess to be adored but a serious stateswoman to be respected. The wisdom she shows in these scenes cannot be separated from her public role. Shakespeare shows her as a qualified stateswoman.

The women, though great, exhibit human vices, too. They argue with each other as they debate how to respond to the men’s newfound love for them. They insult and even speak in bawdy and catty ways. At one point, the women fall to insulting. In addition to sexual innuendo about each other’s activities, one calls another “a light wench,” another a “mouse,” and still a third has jesting references made to her skin color (V.ii.19–28). Contra the pedestal placed underneath them, these women are far from perfections of piety, goddesses of purity.

In these scenes, Shakespeare pokes fun at the way men view women and, therefore, view themselves. Some on the New Right could learn much from the Bard’s skewering. Ferdinand and his band’s original view of women is not as different from some of the current bad boys as might at first appear. The former’s sexual abstinence and the latter’s sexual indulgence spring from a common assumption: that women are substantially less intellectual and political in ability and motivation than men. It betrays a kind of Gnosticism that morally divides mind from desire and body, then sexualizes the manifestation of those distinctions.

Some of the Old Right could learn from the play as well. They can tend toward placing women on a moral pedestal, as paragons of the modest virtues. This view also often plays, though often unintentionally, into downgrading women’s intellectual abilities and relegating their political contributions to indirect effects in governing the home. It also demands a female moral perfection impossible to human beings and a power over men that somehow must be both passive and dominant in its formative capacities. Yet, as noted before, the Old Right still takes its cues more decidedly from Christian gentlemanliness than a revival of pagan boorishness. It still must think seriously about how to apply human equality in God’s image in relation to every application of sex distinctions. While Shakespeare pokes fun even at manifestations of this view, he ultimately shares its Biblical underpinnings, not the pagan notions of elements in the New Right.

Shakespeare’s critique of both perspectives does not deny kernels of truth in them. He thus affirms true sexual difference. But, as Christianity teaches, all humans, male and female, share in the common possession of reason, affection, and a physical body. Like the original American Suffragettes, Shakespeare shows it is not just women’s common humanity but their distinct perspectives and abilities that call for full political participation. Women and men do have diverging tendencies in the interaction of the mind, heart, and body as well as the relationship between hearth and political community. But we should not try to over-realize prescriptions on these truths lest we fail to account for the fullness of human nature. And if the sexes really are so different, then the fullest realization of humanness and the best manifestation of home life and political rule cannot directly involve only one sex.

The play ends not with the men and women marrying, as one might think a Shakespearean comedy would. Instead, the women require the men to wait a year before they will consider an offer of matrimony. They require the men to act to prove and improve themselves during this time. These women become the means for the men to achieve the virtues they sought through the women’s absence. In each one’s marriage, intellectual and moral education will then be a joint enterprise. And in the marriage of Ferdinand and the Princess, political rule will occur together, as they share each one’s wisdom with the other toward a better, more whole statesmanship.

This future shows the relationship between the sexes to be one of true partnership. This partnership affirms our common humanity, sexual differences, and the consequent need for each other at home and in politics. We could learn much from this picture, thereby avoiding gender distortions from whatever side.