Girls’ wrestling is among the fastest-growing sports in America. The popularity of the sport is bad news for Red America, where the boys are not alright. Sadly, the rapid growth in girls’ wrestling shows that the girls aren’t alright either.
The New Plymouth, Idaho junior high wrestling team walked out between the third and fourth quarters of the recent district basketball tournament game. About a third of the team were girls. During the delay as the wrestlers walked up the sideline, the announcer said, “Here are the future girls and boys of the New Plymouth wrestling team,” to the applause and approval of the crowd. Trump carried the four precincts feeding the New Plymouth school district with 86 percent of the two-party vote.
Fewer than 123 Idaho girls wrestled in 2018. When the state’s sports association sanctioned girls wrestling in 2022, nearly 500 girls grappled. During 2025-2026, Idaho had nearly a thousand certified participants across weight classes (up to 235 lbs). More than a third are freshmen. A heavyweight division will be added next year to accommodate girls more than 235 lbs.
I recently attended Idaho’s state wrestling championships. The fans wore MAGA hats, “Jesus Loves You,” and American flag garb. They appreciate raw competition, up and down the ticket. They celebrate hard work and toughness. Fewer fans flocked to the girls matches than the boys — and the fans were more subdued. Perhaps they have a lingering sense that something is wrong.
Red America parents have become unwitting participants in the feminist project. Parents do not know what to do with their daughters, so they raise them to an androgynous world where female wrestling — and other aggressive sports — is aspirational. Modern elite women’s sports — especially confrontational and violent ones — were designed to revolutionize female character. For feminists today, as for their godmother Simone de Beauvoir, sports would help teach women aggression and daring, physical confrontation, and a desire for dominance.
The traditional woman, Beauvoir writes, lacked the “free and habitual resort to force” that would allow her to know “the conquering pride of a boy who pins his opponent’s shoulders to the ground.” Women rarely confront one another “as free beings” seeking to vanquish, “to force an arm to yield and bend” and “to assert one’s sovereignty over the world in general.” The “competitive attitude, most important to young men” is little known among young women. Women’s sports, regrettably, for Beauvoir, rarely involve violence.
Idaho’s crouching, attacking, pinning girl wrestlers are Beauvoir’s spiritual daughters. Wrestling makes women who will leave the old femininity behind. Women wrestlers would no longer be, in Beauvoir’s unforgettable phrase, “the second sex.” They would neither need nor desire male protection.
Later advocates have followed Beauvoir in investing more and greater hopes in athletics as a factor in disrupting feminine character. Advocates promote “empowerment” through expanding female participation in soccer, football, or boxing. Leslie Heywood and Shari L. Dworkin, authors of Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (2003), for instance, see the “new cultural ideal” of aggressive, competitive, powerful women “shattering the Victorian ‘frail/docile’ stereotype.” Less feminine, in other words.
Sports are far from the only way women are unsexing themselves. The war on femininity emerges in ugliness, piercings, androgynous dress, and contempt for domesticity, as well as in a vision of sport that deemphasizes feminine grace. No wonder many young men spend their twenties in their parents’ basement.
Feminism lands differently downstream than it does among college graduates. It has revolutionized family life among many elites, as both female and male college graduates delay marriage, have fewer kids, and sink more of their identities into careers. Yet college graduates are doing a better job matching up than those without college degrees. While the marriage rate at age 40 for those with college degrees is above 70 percent, it languishes now just over 50 percent for those without.
The sexual dance itself, a necessary preparation for family life, is compromised at a primal level. The dance is fueled by sexual attraction. Adding a heavyweight division to girls wrestling will not restore it.
Family among many Red Americans is, as Charles Murray showed in the early 2010s, “coming apart.” The romantic image of healthy, rural family life, celebrated in song and literature, has long since given way to dysfunction and mutual suspicion. Divorce rates are high. Cohabitation is common. Religious practice has waned too.
Old wisdom explains why. Women, even after decades of being told that it is their job to take care of themselves, nevertheless still want men who have stable jobs and can protect. There are fewer marriageable men among those without college degrees due in part to the loss of well-paying, stable jobs among those without college degrees, but also to drug use, porn, gambling and other vices. But simply restoring manufacturing jobs will not revive marriage and family among “our people.”
American women have never been dainty aristocrats. But they have never been wrestlers either.
Less feminine women are less attractive to men. Femininity is harder to find among working-class women than it used to be. More than a third of women (about 37 percent in some polls) without college degrees have a tattoo (only 24 percent among college graduates) — significantly fewer than men. Obesity rates are higher among those without college degrees than those with college degrees (45 percent to 32 percent). Church attendance among those without college has also plummeted in the past two generations, especially among females. Families among those without college eat meals together less often and eat out more than others. Babysitting is in decline. These girls are not being raised to be marriageable.
Women should, of course, exercise, play sports and enjoy competition. Women’s sports can have a different spirit than men’s sports, and they can enjoy different sports too. Boys’ wrestling instructs in the extreme toughness and protection necessary to provide for a family, while many girls’ sports like volleyball and soccer do not compromise femininity.
Restoration of the sexual dance requires distinctions between males and females, not androgyny. Red America cannot win the culture war while surrendering femininity at the local gym. The revival of healthy families depends not on mimicking the feminist project, but on rejecting it — starting with what we celebrate in our daughters.
