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Notes -
Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/
Some excerpts:
And we wonder why men are dropping out of the workforce/university...
I found the whole essay quite interesting and also somewhat obvious in that 'oh I should've realized this and put it together before' sense. I read somewhere else on twitter that you could track the origins of civil rights/student activism to women gaining full entry to universities in America, as opposed to just chaperoned/'no picnicking out together' kind of limited access. Deans and admin no longer felt they could punish and control like when it was a male environment, plus young men behave very differently when there are sexually available women around. So there's also a potential element of weakened suppression due to fear of female tears and young men simping for women, along with the long-term demographic change element.
Though I suspect it may be more multi-factorial than that, with the youth bulge and a gradual weakening of the old order. A man had to make the decision to let women into universities after all.
I also find Helen Andrews refreshing in that she's not stuck in the 'look at me I'm a woman who's prepared to be anti-feminist, I'm looking for applause and clicks' mould, she makes the reasons behind her article quite clear:
Another idea that occurred to me is that the committee that drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife. The UN Declaration of Human Rights was instrumental in establishing what we now understand as progressivism. That piece of international law, (really the origin of 'international law' as we understand it today, beyond just the customary law of embassies) directly led to the Refugee Convention of 1951 that has proven quite troublesome for Europe's migrant crisis, it introduced the principle of non-refoulement. It also inspired the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965):
Sounds pretty woke! Note that states don't necessarily follow through on international law or sign up with it fully in the first place: Israel, America, Russia and so on routinely ignore these kinds of bodies in the foreign policy sphere. The Conventions and Committees are feminine in a certain sense in that they can be ignored without fear of violence, unlike an army of men. Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.
To some extent international law could be considered an early feminized field, or perhaps it was born female. Are there any other feminized fields we can easily think of? Therapists, HR and school teachers come to mind, though that seems more recent.
The overarching theory is very poor here. Andrews is writing as one of the few women in a field that has always been and continues to be extremely male (American right wing political opinion), and has no real experience of working in a female dominated environment.
Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others, and that arguably challenges other conclusions she makes too. Andrews hints at this but then dismisses it in a very unsatisfactory way (she mentions ‘underhanded’ female competition but then says again later than women aren’t competitive). The implication is that a few women (like her) are fine but majority women (she has never worked in such an organization) are not. In fact, historically there have been many times in which women were more conservative than men. Women were and remain in many parts of the world the enforcers of traditional sexual morality (ie ‘slut shaming’) in the traditional institutions that they manage.
What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.
What really drove academia to be woke from the early 2010s is the interaction between both wider cultural developments like mass immigration and specific sector dynamics, like large numbers of foreign faculty at American universities (the global holy grail for academics because pay is 2-3x what it is anywhere else), extreme competition for tenure due to ridiculous levels of PhD overproduction, the need to narrow that competition, the fact that academia had been broadly very left for many decades (depending on faculty for centuries) and extremely so since the 1960s, making structures very weak to faculty racial activism. Once you decide you must hire many more black faculty, you soon find, for example, that 67% of black people awarded PhDs in America are women, so naturally you will hire mostly women.
This is all obvious stuff that Andrews was too lazy or otherwise unwilling to google, clearly.
Which is why you'd say it's more likely higher agreeableness than higher empathy.
Conformity to an inconsistently sympathetic or safetyist ideology would explain this.
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