The ‘womanosphere’ phenomenon is here

The Radicalized Pipeline for Women No One’s Talking About

When women’s pain is dismissed, the alt-right listens — and “wellness” becomes the gateway.

It starts earlier than anyone wants to admit.

Pre-teen girls on YouTube and TikTok aren’t just watching makeup tutorials anymore—they’re absorbing a worldview. In between beauty hacks and “clean girl” routines, the language of purity, discipline, and distrust begins to take root. Teen Vogue recently called attention to this trend: how young girls are being introduced to alt-right talking points wrapped in the aesthetics of wellness and self-improvement.

By the time they grow into women and encounter real pain — autoimmune issues, reproductive disorders, chronic fatigue, medical dismissal — the groundwork has already been laid. They’ve learned that the body is a problem to be purified, that institutions can’t be trusted, and that control equals safety.

From there, it’s a short step from “clean eating” to “natural order.” From distrust of doctors to distrust of democracy.

Why It Starts Earlier Than We Think

The leap from skincare videos to conspiracy rhetoric isn’t as wide as it looks.

Both speak to the same wound: the sense that something inside you — or around you — has gone wrong, and no one in power seems to care.

When girls grow into women and start navigating real medical systems that minimize or dismiss their symptoms, the message lands with brutal confirmation. Doctors call it anxiety. Specialists order more tests. Answers don’t come. And that familiar hum of invisibility returns: They don’t believe me.

So when someone online finally says, You’re not crazy. You’ve been lied to; it feels like compassion. It feels like the truth.

The Hidden Message in Aesthetic Culture

But mixed in with that validation are subtle cues — about purity, about self-discipline, about rejecting the “corrupt” mainstream. What starts as empowerment morphs into moral superiority. Suddenly, “natural” becomes synonymous with “good,” “medical” becomes “evil,” and the idea of collective responsibility gives way to an obsession with personal purity.

This is how wellness turns puritanical. And how puritanical wellness starts to sound like politics.

At some point, the language of healing becomes the language of hierarchy.

How Pain Becomes Purity

When wellness hardens into a moral code — when being “disciplined,” “pure,” or “natural” becomes a marker of virtue — it stops being about care and starts being about control.

The alt-right doesn’t need to recruit these women outright. It just needs to affirm what they already feel: that the world is broken, that mainstream systems are corrupt, and that they alone can see the truth.

The narrative slides easily from juice cleanses to “cleansing society.” From detoxing your body to “detoxing” the culture. From the self as a system to be purified to the nation as one.

And the women spreading these ideas rarely see themselves as political extremists. They see themselves as protectors — of children, of nature, of truth. Their conviction feels maternal, moral, even holy.

They didn’t set out to radicalize. They set out to heal. But when the world kept ignoring their pain, someone else offered them meaning.

Lois Shearing calls it the pink pill: a version of empowerment that promises freedom but sells conformity in a prettier color.

Choice feminism — the idea that any choice a woman makes is feminist simply because she made it — blurs the line between liberation and conditioning. When every act of self-optimization is framed as empowerment, it becomes nearly impossible to question what’s actually driving those choices.

In wellness spaces, this looks like “I’m doing it for me” — the new mantra of self-surveillance. Dieting becomes “clean eating.” Overwork becomes “discipline.” Self-erasure becomes “alignment.” The same control once demanded by patriarchy is now demanded by the self, dressed in pink and sold as freedom.

What The Pink Pill exposes — and what we’re seeing play out online — is how easily systems of control can co-opt the language of empowerment. The right doesn’t need to silence women when it can simply redirect their pain into moral panic.

When women get pulled into these ideologies, it isn’t weakness. It’s the subconscious mind doing its job: keeping us safe, trying to make sense of the world.

Any belief we don’t consciously reject, we quietly accept. The subconscious can’t sit with two opposing truths for long without trying to settle the conflict. So when someone spends years being dismissed by doctors, family, or culture, the mind grabs hold of whatever brings a feeling of order.

Conflict starts to feel unbearable. The body has learned that tension means danger, that disagreement means rejection, that speaking up leads to loss. Questioning a new belief can feel like risking safety itself.

That’s why logic can’t untie this knot. The belief didn’t begin in thought. It began in the body as a way to turn confusion into control.

When a woman starts to believe stories about purity or persecution, it isn’t that she’s naive. It’s that her subconscious found a story that made her pain feel organized.

Healing this kind of pain isn’t about arguing someone out of their beliefs. It’s about helping the body feel safe enough to loosen its grip. That can happen in many ways.

What actually helps

It’s not about rejecting the establishment. It’s not about walking away from the medical system. It’s about remembering that no one else lives in your body but you.

Before someone turns to EMDR or hypnosis or somatic work, something needs to happen: We must start asking better questions of our leaders. We also must take ownership of our choices and start noticing what feels off. When we begin to hold both things at once — respect for expertise and trust in our own signals- we become empowered. And when we teach this to girls, they will learn they have fulfilling choices ahead of them.

Dr. Ellen Langer writes about how we hand over our power the moment we stop being curious and start following instructions like scripts. But the subconscious doesn’t care about scripts. It cares about safety. And if you’ve been dismissed enough times, silence starts to feel safer than speaking.

That’s why the work isn’t just about treatments. It’s about the space between: where you learn to name what’s happening. Where you start to realize that your beliefs — about your body, your worth, your power — didn’t come from nowhere, they were shaped. Inherited. Absorbed.

And that means they can be changed.

Before politics, before pain, there’s the first moment a girl learns her reflection can be currency. The first time a search algorithm whispers that control will keep her safe. What looks like play is already training — filters teaching self-erasure, wellness tips teaching vigilance.

By the time she grows into a woman with real symptoms and no answers, her nervous system already knows the pattern: don’t trust your body, don’t trust authority, purify instead. The manosphere has its mirror now. The girlsphere. Both sell certainty to people who were never believed.

We like to talk about radicalization as ideology. Most of the time, it’s grief. Grief that no one noticed, named, or tended to. The antidote isn’t debate — it’s presence. Teaching girls to feel before they fix. Teaching them that safety isn’t control.

If we start there, maybe the story changes before the hashtags ever find them.