Is It Woke? ‘What Is A Woman’

Is online right-wing talking head Matt Walsh’s 2022 faux-documentary What Is A Woman? woke? I have to ask that question because that’s the title of this column: “Is It Woke?”

Guess what? Walsh’s polemical vanity project is not woke, not by any definition. This should not come as a shock. 

In What Is A Woman?, Walsh blithely examines a hot-button issue for the right wing: the right of trans and nonbinary people to exist. The tone of this rageumentary is hostile, as if being asked to refer to someone by their correct pronoun is some existential threat. 

The word “woke” started life as shorthand for being aware of social injustices. To be woke was to be honest about this country’s well-documented history of discrimination, which is a truth that is hard to argue. 

And yet, many conservatives constantly argue about that history and have made it their entire personalities. They have spent tremendous time and effort trying to turn the word “woke” into reactionary slang for everything that scares them, like education, diversity, and trans rights.

And they’ve succeeded, sort of.

Not only is What Is A Woman? not woke, but it is anti-woke, a pop culture cruise missile aimed at a vulnerable minority who have DARED to commit the sin of looking, thinking, and being different. Produced by The Daily Wire, the 94-minute movie is currently streaming on Elon Musk’s Twitter, the controversial social media site. It can also be watched on The Daily Wire’s website (if you’re willing to pony up $9/month for “Insider Plus” status, that is).

What Is A Woman? is a deeply dishonest, slickly produced political ad designed to appeal to preexisting prejudices and permit some conservatives to dismiss people who make them profoundly uncomfortable. It is pure agitprop, which isn’t in and of itself a criticism. The movie is closer to a video opinion essay than an examination of an issue, which leads me to an actual criticism: What Is A Woman? is utterly devoid of curiosity or generosity. It’s fueled by anger and fear, and partisan calculation. Walsh poses like a wise man, but he’s a cyberbully. 

What Is A Woman? is utterly devoid of curiosity or generosity. It’s fueled by anger and fear, and partisan calculation. Walsh poses like a wise man, but he’s a cyberbully. 

To the culture warrior class, What Is A Woman? exposes what they think is runaway pro-trans extremism when, in fact, all it does is expose director Justin Folk as an expert propagandist, lovingly lingering on the handful of subjects who agree with Walsh while mercilessly editing those who support trans youth and adults and made the mistake of assuming Walsh was interested in a good faith conversation about gender.

The movie invents a crisis where there is none, except in the minds and hearts of people who are freaked out by trans people and not interested in ever meeting or talking to one, or even treating them like human beings.  

Walsh eagerly plays a deadpan interviewer looking to trick his guests. His character is a subpar variation of Sacha Baron Cohen’s prankster clown Borat, the fake Kazakhstani journalist who observes and mocks the Americans he interviews. 

But Walsh isn’t a skilled comedian like Cohen, a performer comfortable making a fool of himself and those he interviews. Walsh isn’t funny because he takes himself seriously, way too seriously.

He never flinches nor allows himself a genuine moment. At no point do you get the feeling Walsh can laugh at himself. He can, however, jeer at trans people and the mainstream medical establishment. Walsh confuses cleverness with thinly-veiled contempt throughout a movie that mostly close-ups of the star.

Walsh, of course, is more open-minded when he’s interviewing people who share his perspectives, which is a very human thing to do. And yet, Walsh wants his audience to think he is fair and balanced when he isn’t.

He is at his most insufferable in a series of gotcha interviews with physicians and academics who first engage with him sincerely and then slowly realize, to their horror, that Walsh is not interested in anything resembling a debate. Walsh savors their discomfort, especially a gender studies professor who recoils from Walsh’s shallow interrogation. Walsh is not interested in understanding the experiences of trans people. He despises the whole idea of gender studies, and that’s because his reality is a comfortingly simplistic sitcom where men act tough, and women make their tough-acting men sandwiches.

Walsh never directly answers his question but hints at it in the movie’s opening, where we watch him observe girls and boys at play during a staged children’s birthday party.

To Walsh, a woman is someone with long hair. A woman is someone who likes pink and likes makeup and is confused by fishing poles and BB guns. He believes these stereotypes are immutable facts of life, not merely trends. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is a holy gospel to him.

Walsh is a conservative whose head is full of false memories of a past where gender norms were rigid and suffocating, and gender was a series of deadly-serious fashion choices, and if you made the wrong choice, you were a freak of nature. This view of gender is fundamentalist, and Walsh longs for a society where it is illegal for women to wear pants and for men to cry in public.

The most interesting person Walsh interviews is trans man Scott Newgent, who regrets their transition. It’s hard not to feel his passion as he warns against hormone therapies, for instance. But were this an honest documentary, Walsh would have interviewed trans people whose lives were saved and improved by gender-affirming medical procedures. And while I sympathize with Newgent, one could fill an entire documentary with people who wish they had never gone under the knife. Surgery is risky, elective or not.

What Is A Woman? reminded me of Morgan Spurlock’s 2004  Super-Size Me, the famous stunt documentary where Spurlock tests his thesis that fast food is bad for you by eating nothing but McDonald’s. 

His experiment was flawed from the get-go — if you consume 5,000 calories a day of salts and fats, you’ll probably gain weight.  There is nothing uniquely toxic about McDonald’s. Both movies combine show business flair and shocking amounts of confirmation bias. It makes them emotionally satisfying to those who share their ideological preferences. (I love Big Macs, from time to time, so Spurlock’s methods and scolding never interested me.)

The punchline to this doc is that eventually, Walsh accepts the answer to his question from two sources, infamous Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Walsh’s own wife, and both of their answers are cute but duck the question. Peterson’s definition of a woman is “marry one and find out,” which still confounds me, and Walsh’s wife tells him that a woman is “an adult human female” who needs help opening a pickle jar.

What is a woman? A living punchline to a joke about how women can’t open pickle jars?

So, Is What Is A Woman? Woke?

Evidence For: There isn’t a minute of this movie that is “woke,” by either the correct definition or the hysterical conservative one. Matt Walsh wants a world where trans people are shunned.

Evidence Against: This movie wants to intimidate trans people, their families, and their loved ones while soothing the anxieties of conservatives who are deeply obsessed with the genitals and gender expressions of others. 

Final Judgement: What Is A Woman?  exists in a political reality where the rights and lives of white, American, cisgender families are somehow under attack by a powerful trans majority when the opposite is what is true. 

John DeVore is a sensitive and thoughtful writer living in New Woke City. His favorite movie is Fiddler On The Roof, followed by Hellraiser. Follow his politically-correct narcissism on Twitter.