Cultic Studies Are, Alas, Not Immune to "Wimminwursting"

Political cult survivor Alexandra Stein has an interesting piece that recently appeared on the NBC News "Thought Experiment" blog, about some of the ways women are victimized by high-control groups. Unfortunately the title, "Cults are terrifying. But they're even worse for women," is an example of the reflexive feminist impulse always to frame an issue in terms of women's having it worse, regardless of the facts. I respond as follows:

These are interesting and important facts, but the gloss you (or whoever chose the title) put on them is gender-biased. Some of the issues you describe affect both women and men (e.g., "Mothers in these types of closed cultic groups then end up in a position in which they are unable to protect their children"), while others have qualitatively different, non-commensuarable counterparts experienced by men (e.g., "Meanwhile, the 'extra' boys left over as a result of these plural marriages were booted out of the cult and left on the edge of the highway in the Arizona desert to fend for themselves"). This unexamined reflex whereby, when it comes to sex-differentiated experience, "F > M" is asserted based solely on the value of F has been dubbed "the Church of Wimminwursting" by artist and social critic Alison Tieman.