Cluster Bs and Queen Bees: Time to Dismantle the Cult of Feminism?

A Dialogue between Carrie Gress, PhD and Hannah Spier, MD

In this email exchange, we explore the rise of toxic female social dynamics through the lens of Cluster B traits, Queen Bee behavior, and the broader impact of feminism. Together, we try to get to the bottom of the psychological and cultural mechanisms driving these patterns—and what needs to be done to dismantle them.

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Hannah Spier:

Dear Carrie,

Thank you very much for agreeing to this dialogue, there are many things I am eager to explore with you in such an exercise.

You were kind enough to have a look at the article I wrote on the feminization of medicine, in which laid out the consequences of the dramatic increase in female physicians since 1970. Your feedback about the witches the word witch not having a clear meaning is a valid criticism.

I therefore added a footnote to the article explaining how the term was meant. My understanding of the term "witch" came from those falsely accused, such as healers and midwives who were unfairly targeted for fitting a stereotype (at least according to Britannica). However, you are right that it’s important to specify the term belongs to a group who genuinely practiced satanic rituals and worshiped the devil. There seems to be evidence it was also used by women displaying antisocial behaviour or living outside societal norms, who embraced it as a way to gain power and challenge traditional structures.

With that, I still believe there’s truth to the idea that women have a natural connection to spirituality, as reflected in the Jewish belief that women are more in tune with the spiritual and eternal. Wouldn’t it then follow, that without a proper space to practice that spiritualty within a religious framework, it tends to seek other outlets? I think one of these outlets today is medicine. This is where I disagree with your earlier point about holistic medicine, which often includes "spiritual guidance" alongside therapies like lacking evidence, but marketed as valid "alternatives" to evidence-based medicine.

How do you see the relationship between women, spirituality, and society evolving in a world that is increasingly secular? What opportunities or challenges do you think this presents?

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Carrie Gress:

Women have been long known to be more spiritually and religiously engaged. It is only recently where data shows that that men’s faith is outstripping that of women. But yes, historically, women are more likely to gravitate to faith.

Curiously, whenever the Judeo-Christian is weak, paganism surges. Our culture has become awash with pagan and new age practices. I even wrote an article for “The Federalist” describing the pervasive occult presence in the shelves at the largest book chain in the United States. New age practices are on the rise. The general population considers them to be benign, like reading horoscopes or getting reiki massages. Women desire something deeper in their lives and search for meaning and wisdom, but this healthy desire can be derailed when what the culture has on offer is a true avenue for that which they are searching. The esoteric arts are often associated with healing, so it makes sense that these non-scientific elements check a lot of boxes for women, spiritually, emotionally, and maybe even professionally.

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Hannah Spier:

Thank you—this is fascinating and given me a lot to think about. If I haven’t misunderstood, it seems we agree that the feminization of medicine has seen it transformed into a kind of pseudo-spiritual outlet for many women.

This reminds me of the times I recall thinking in my own psychiatric practice, “This person would be so much better served by a priest.” Yet, recommending they seek out a religion is so far outside their line of thought that it’s not even something they would entertain. It left me little choice but to recommend meditation or mindfulness practices, which they find more palatable. Which is fine if that helps them emotionally, but I see it increasingly being sold as medicine to those who need proper treatment and, like you say, taking increasingly extreme forms. This blurring of lines leaves people spiritually and emotionally adrift, searching for something medicine (alternative or otherwise) will never be able to provide.

It’s no wonder, then, that women will search for a different spiritual outlet, as spirituality is such an important part of healing for them. Research coming out of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy shows how profound this connection is. It’s the experience of encountering the divine—whether a feeling of oneness with the universe or God—that reduces sensitivity to negative emotions. These substances, like psilocybin or DMT, are the only drugs we’ve discovered that reduce symptoms cross-diagnostically. Women, who are disproportionately affected by anxiety and depression, are also the most likely to seek out alternative healing practices and psychotherapy.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

I’ve also been reflecting on my experience in a Jewish community that, while orthodox in name, sometimes tries to retain members by appealing to modernity—at the cost of timeless traditions. I’ve seen age-old laws rationalized away to satisfy feminists, for example. But in the process of rationalizing, they eliminate the transcendent, starving women of that connection.

Given your research into early feminism and the spiritualism they practiced, including the occult, how can we give spirituality back to women in the effort of counteracting and recovering from feminism? And returning to the early feminists, do you think their engagement with spiritualism and the occult was a response to this same loss of transcendence?

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Carrie Gress:

These are such important questions. One of the realities of the 19^th century is that it wasn’t this prim Victorian era that most of think it was. In the U.S., there was so much social upheaval between the Civil War and then the wreckage that followed. The notion of a Third Great Awakening spoken of during that period has a lot of weird things going on – religious revival turning into orgies, spiritualism, mediums, seances were rampant. Even the inspiration for The Wizard of Oz, and its spinoff, Wicked, came from Matilda Gage, who was the mother-in-law author L. Frank Baum with whom he used to engage in seances. Gage was right there with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony – both of whom were engaged with “spirit tables” for their inspiration. Any kind of traditional Judeo-Christian tradition was vilified, as witnessed particularly in Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible, a juvenile commentary on the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The efforts to stir up women and make them angry was also highly effective. The socialists called it the Gospel of Discontent, with the communists later realizing what a boon it was to have angry women on their side. In 1902, the second cardinal in the United States, Cardinal James Gibbons warned women in the Ladies Home Journal to be aware of the “restlessness” the culture was stirring up, while Betty Friedan wrote six decades later in The Feminine Mystique about the “ache with no name.” When women don’t have an ordered relationship with God, they will find surrogates, they will seek out, however unwittingly, something to fill it.

One thing that I’d love for you to comment on is the “Queen Bee” mentality that is so rampant today, often with women engaging it without even knowing it. They use this rage and anger to silence those around them, with most people walking on eggshells, hoping not to send said woman into yet another tirade. First, how do we help women navigate this so that they don’t become so vulnerable to feminism’s emotional grooming? But perhaps more importantly, how do those who are on the receiving end deal with it? Especially given that women tend to hold long term grudges and will act vengefully against a target in a way that seems to never be slaked?

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Hannah Spier:

Before talking about Queen Bees, I love what you just said—that when women don’t have an ordered relationship with God, they find surrogates. I see this clearly in the mental health profession, where spiritual healing courses are prescribed religiously, albeit with disappointing long-term effects. How did you so effectively create a space within Catholicism to provide women with such a popular spiritual channel?

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Carrie Gress:

The development of TheologyofHome.com didn’t happen overnight. I generally thought women’s magazine-type content was fluffy and not really very important, but as my colleague, Noelle Mering, and I got deeper into it, it became clear to me that this is the kind of content women enjoy. Not only that, but it is the kind of content that women were reading that had led to the adoption of Marxist and communist ideas. Women haven’t been reading Marx, they’ve been reading Cosmo and Vogue, and roughly getting the same message, albeit in very subtle and compelling ways. Our idea for Theology of Home, which eventually became a series of books, was that we had to help women start seeing reality, but through a medium that was compelling, attractive, and just something they wanted more of. There are very few sites/books like it because I think most social conservatives think like I did, that magazine-style content is fluffy and unserious. I think this is a huge tactical error not only because we have lost the culture at large, but also because this is really all the left has – glossy and attractive content – because they don’t have the truth on their side. This is why it’s beautiful and abundant. But what happens if we start loading a better message into beautiful media? Something very powerful, but also not tried.

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Hannah Spier:

That’s a brilliant insight—we need to use media more intentionally to shape a better message to women and influence toxic social dynamics. Especially when it comes to what you asked about earlier regarding female power structures. The term Queen Bee Syndrome originally described corporate women who climbed the ranks in male-dominated fields. Perhaps the same dynamic applies to feminist leaders? Reading The End of Woman, I was struck by how these women were intelligent and conscientious enough to organize a movement, disagreeable enough to silence dissent, and Machiavellian enough to weaponize victimhood. They railed against men yet craved their affection. They don’t seem like traumatized victims (though some had difficult experiences) but rather ambitious, manipulative, and driven by status—much like high-achieving corporate Queen Bees. What do you think of this analysis?

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Carrie Gress:

Yes, I think you have summarized this very well. I also think there is something that I’d love for you to dig into about the kind of women who go all in on feminism. One thing that is striking is that most women today didn’t actively choose to be this kind of woman, to be strident, aggressive, manipulative; this was something the culture foisted upon us. But there are certainly women who seem to flourish in it as Queen Bees. Can you talk about this?

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Hannah Spier:

Like corporate Queen Bees, feminist leaders surround themselves with a circle of women to further their cause, and feminist spaces seem to attract women high in Cluster B traits. The traits heightened in Cluster B disorders are particularly suited for female aggression—black-and-white thinking, impulsivity, destructive attention-seeking, high suggestibility, manipulativeness, extroversion, narcissism, and emotional dysregulation (the hallmark of the disorder). Plagued by a sense of emptiness, they latch onto a group identity to fill the void, acting on its behalf regardless of who gets hurt (some consider it the female equivalent of antisocial personality disorder). Feminism is an easy sell to these women, already struggling with emotional maturity.

Perhaps this is because they are especially effective in intrasexual competition—running reputation-destruction campaigns, cancelling dissenters, and shielding the Queen Bee from attack. Not all women are equally prone to female aggression. By nature, women prefer to silence dissent rather than engage with it. Unlike men, who resolve hierarchy disputes through direct competition, we rely on behind-the-scenes, risk-averse social coercion—driven by our vulnerability and the existential threat exclusion poses to our children. In a group of women, solidarity within the group is valued over the advancement of the group itself. This is why female-dominated spaces are so toxic and why so few speak up.

I think this is so rampant now as you point out, because feminism cloaks pathological behaviour as justifiable moral outrage. By teaching that all their struggles can be blamed on men, society, or "the patriarchy"—rather than their own choices—it prevents them from maturing, keeping them locked in perpetual victimhood and self-righteous rage.

But there is also more emotional instability for feminism to feed on. The increased prevalence of Cluster B traits in women today is not just fertile ground for feminism but, I believe, a direct cause of it. As more girls grow up with emotionally unavailable working mothers, we see an attachment crisis. The girls I treated would seek out conflict yet spiral into near-fatal self-injury at the slightest reminder of their childhood maternal neglect.

For navigation, I think we need to start acknowledging female aggression for what it is—just as we do with male aggression. Ignoring it only allows it to escalate. We must remove bad actors and dismantle their power structures. Even the most powerful Queen Bees fall when their coalitions fracture—remember Linda Sarsour? Once a dominant feminist activist, she was forced out after making unacceptable alliances. When enough women defect, the Queen Bee collapses.

We have plenty of qualitative evidence that colleges—indoctrination camps of toxic femininity—only worsen emotional instability. Perhaps the real solution is encouraging alternative Queen Bees and female in-groups—healthier spaces.

Clinically, I’ve only seen real improvement when Cluster B girls form attachments to maternal figures (grandmothers, even therapists), as well as redirecting their need for attachment toward family life. Pregnancy and its hormonal shifts within a stable relationship with a man who is low in neuroticism also seem to have a calming effect! From where I’ve sat, so much of feminism’s spread seems to come from the breakdown of mother-daughter relationships. What do you see as the most powerful mechanisms driving this transmission, and do you think cultural shifts alone can break the cycle?

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Carrie Gress:

This is all really interesting and insightful because I do think so much of it goes back to women who are broken, particularly within the family. When you start to see where all of this started it was with our grandmothers’ generation – it is hard to imagine a worse thing that could be passed down from mother to daughter, generation after generation, as some kind of heirloom. It is perhaps most heartbreaking to see where it has all led and under what guise it has been perpetuated. While women thought they were destroying the patriarchy and freeing women up to be free and happy, they’ve really been self-destructing through the collision of what women are told with make them happy – radical autonomy – and what they are made for – deep and think relationships.

I think there is a real need for female voices to lead women out of this mess, but there are a few obstacles to deal with – such as the queen bees, who don’t want to give up their control; there is also the reality that women are often more tribal than men, so a kind of “Jordan Peterson for women” is really hard to imagine because of the various reasons women connect/identify/feel close with other women. There is something very important about re-establishing the family or finding some kind of emotional surrogate who can become a mentor or model for other women.

Of course, none of this can happen or change the course we are on unless we start looking at the vital importance of motherhood. Fifty years of denigrating it as something beneath us must be reversed. Its beauty, its life-giving power, its vitality and vulnerability, needs to be remembered or even re-seeded in the minds of women. There is something wonderfully compelling about the woman who can see the needs of others, who can help not just remedy them, but help us to feel seen, heard, loved. Contrast this with the queen bee who can only grasp, or crush, or take from others. The ordered woman, who may not be a biological mother but still understands the concept of mothering, understands how to care for people and why it is important. She knows what it means to build others in a self-less way. For those on the receiving end, there is something special about her care. It can be a kind of balm to the soul. A gift without the expectation of repayment.

How do you think we can help those who find themselves in the grip of feminism, particularly the emotional aspect, women who don’t know how to regulate their emotions, but also use them to control others? Is the best thing we can do to make this know and exposed as an immature tactic that the feminist ideology has encouraged because it is powerful, or are there things we can do to truly help women understand how corrosive it is?

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Hannah Spier:

You’re absolutely right that we need to paint a better picture of motherhood, simultaneously making the feminist rage uncool. The rise of the new "soft girl" trend might be a quiet rejection of the feminist boss-girl, but it still falls short of taking responsibility and embracing family life.

To help women in the grips of feminism, we should take a cue from successful therapy for Cluster B patients. Reparenting works. Reward good behaviour, highlight bad behaviour, and stop reinforcing self-destruction. We don’t coddle borderline patients—we set boundaries and push them toward emotional maturity.

Right now, the system supports women in their belief that they’re victims and incentivizes prolonging their adolescence (because until we become mothers, we are really just girls). Why learn to regulate your emotions or temper your worst impulses if no one in your life is more important than you?

I agree with you, that a “female Jordan Peterson” won’t be enough. If we want end feminism’s influence, don’t we have to do what feminists did? Advocate for policy change to reshape society.

Since the government engineered this mess, undoing it from the top down is the only way out. We signal the feminist message in countless subtle ways—no wonder young people say, “Kids later, first I want to live a little.” Everything from financial incentives for delaying family to tax penalties on single-income households, daycare subsidies, affirmative action, the two-income trap, and career penalties for mothers reinforces the same idea.

And in the spirit of “if you’re not getting cancelled, you’re not doing it right”—the only antidote to hysterical feminism is tempting girls to plan for family earlier.

What you’re doing is so important in this fight. Your books give the intellectual grounding needed to call for such a change, I think, and Theology of Home is exactly the kind of storytelling we need to make family life aspirational again. I really want to do something similar in my own community.

But I can’t help but feel like we’re still far from having a unified voice against feminism. Before we can push for real policy change, we need to establish—clearly and collectively—that feminism is a malignant ideology, not something that can simply be "balanced" with family values. From our conversation, it’s clear we both see feminism as fundamentally opposed to family, not something that can peacefully coexist with it. But in this, I fear the real battle is first convincing conservatives.

I’m grateful to be in this fight alongside you, and I appreciate the work you’re doing. Thank you for doing this exchange of ideas with me! Looking forward to seeing where it leads.