The Feminization of Society: Threat or Menace?

Helen Andrews looks at what feminism has wrought.

Mostly dysfunction, decline, and dissension.

This might be a tough read for some women. I don't think this is about women per se, however: It's about women with a specific mindset, the mindset of woke feminism and Girlpower Marxism. The kind of woman being pushed to the fore and put in charge of corporations and academic departments is usually a highly-political feminist who puts feminism and feminist activism far, far above the needs of the corporation or institution she is supposedly serving.

Feminism was, is, and will always be predicated on the idea that Men Were, Are, and Always Will Be Wrong, and therefore any institution previously dominated by men is tainted and must be completely razed and rebuilt according to feminist Marxist principles.

It's like young blacks rejecting studying and reading as "Acting White." When you reject, wholesale, practices that have a proven track record of success, you're committing yourself to unsuccessful practices.

And so too with feminists, who see things like objectivity, professionalism, dispassion, and actual equality and most of all, capitalism itself, as antiquated notions of a diseased Patriarchy which must be rejected entirely.

They don't want to be seen as Acting Male.

And so they keep taking functioning institutions and changing them. And when you change every foundational aspect of a functioning institution, what you wind up with, most of the time, is a non-functioning institution.

And they keep calling this "victory."

2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym "J. Stone," argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire "woke" era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to "different availability of aptitude at the high end" as well as taste differences between men and women "not attributable to socialization." Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers's resignation.

The essay argued that it wasn't just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they'd cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria.

This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as "wokeness" is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

Andrews notes that while we speak of feminism in terms of firsts -- first female Justice, first female astronaut, etc. -- the "tipping point" comes when women gain majority status in an institution.

And women now dominate many institutions, and nearly dominate many more.

The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 1960s and '70s; increasing female representation through the 1980s and '90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent.

Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization's effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

...

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

My own take here is that men tend to have one-on-one conflicts whereas women tend to call up all of their friends and allies when they have a conflict and get as many people as possible on their side and against their opponent.

Men's conflicts resemble private duels. Women's conflicts resemble political campaigns.

And that's what we see everywhere in society now: we no longer have arguments. We have, instead, political campaigns and popularity contests for every single minor personal issue.

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and--this is the most feminine part--"colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers." Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine.

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

I have railed about this a lot: The entire concept of "professionalism" and "professional detachment" went out the window as women began dominating fields. No longer do the professions seek to detach professional expertise from mere personal feeling and opinion. Now, professional power is used to leverage personal feelings and opinions and inflict them on the public.

We keep seeing this in corporate decisions. Look at Star Wars: The smart, obvious play was to keep making Star Wars movies as they'd always been, power fantasies and light war dramas mostly aimed to appeal to male sensibility. (Women just don't have as many fantasies about physically dominating their opponents.)

But Kathleen Kennedy decided to take a brand bought for $4.05 billion and use it to further her personal political ends.

And we just keep seeing this again and again with Bud Light, Cracker Barrel, Amazon's disastrous series under Jennifer Salke, etc. We keep seeing a complete failure -- or an intransigent refusal -- by women in power to consider that maybe a brand that has historically appealed to men or traditionalists should remain that way. They feel that the brands are icky as they are, and must be reshaped into something they'd personally enjoy.

I keep saying the same thing: If someone told me to write a Hallmark holiday romance movie, I'd watch 20 of them, make notes about what the basic fantasy being offered to viewers was, and attempt to duplicate that. I would not make the male character the protagonist and make the drama about whether or not he'd land the unobtainably beautiful female lead. I would not add guns and Brazillian jiu-jitsu. (I would add a lot of dogs, but that's fine, because women like dogs. Who doesn't.)

But every time I turn around that's exactly what female "professionals" are doing, charging into fields they know little of with the Mighty Confidence of a Fourteen Year Old and remaking it all per their personal whims and fancies. They just seem incapable of ever removing themselves from the equation and, well, doing a detached, professional job. It never seems to move beyond Personal Growth and Validation with them.

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The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

These two approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can't provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.

If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. It was possible to believe back in 1970 that introducing women into the legal profession in large numbers would have only a minor effect. That belief is no longer sustainable. The changes will be massive.

She points out that both men and women agree that law will be transformed by women and how it will be transformed. The only difference is whether or not Girlboss Fiat becoming the only rule in law is a good thing or a bad thing.

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.

I don't doubt that many women could do a professionally-detached, "masculine" kind of job in many professions -- if they wanted to.

The problem is, feminism teaches women to despise a professionally-detached, masculine kind of approach to any job. They see it as the Devil's Work. They want to tear down everything and rebuild on feminist, matriarchal, and frankly Marxist first principles.

Andrews turns, finally, to the idea that women just naturally out-competed men to take over the institutions so they should enjoy the fruits of their victory.

That's nonsense, she points out. Women won because they passed laws to guarantee women's victory.

The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.

...

Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized....

Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can't sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?

Read the whole thing. I've cut a lot of good stuff.

posted by Ace at 03:10 PM

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