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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   27268 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

Some excerpts:

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.

Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981). A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.

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.

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.

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.

And we wonder why men are dropping out of the workforce/university...

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. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?

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:

Because, after all, I am not just a woman. I am also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions, who will find it hard to flourish if society becomes more conflict-averse and consensus-driven. I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world. I am—we all are—dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.

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):

Each State Party undertakes to encourage, where appropriate, integrationist multiracial organizations and movements and other means of eliminating barriers between races

Shall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination

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.

It seems to me any theory about rule of law or emotions regarding feminization/masculinization needs to contend with that men commit something like 80 to 90% of violent crime and the large majority of crime in general, and engage in many passionate irrational behaviors statistically more often.

Hearing a story about a woman involved in a shooting during a rage road incident, or a young girl shooting up a school, or gang activity are unicorn events. And it can't just be explained away as women being physically weaker, because guns are an incredible equalizer and if that was the only thing then we would see more women shooting at men as it's more needed for them to use violence (where as men can just use physical strength against women and don't need a gun). Instead, they opt out of it to begin with.Even across racial lines, black women commit less crime than any race of men.

Speaking of road rage from before which gender is more likely to drive dangerously because they're too impatient over a few seconds/few minutes of travel time? Not the women and American men (56%) drunk drive far more than women (29%) do and if you think that's self reporting bias, actual crime statistics for DUIs and studies into BAC levels would suggest men are might be even worse than that, possibly a 4:1 level.

Men are twice as likely to gamble, more likely to play the lottery, getting addicted to sports betting now, and in general make other similar unwise and irrational financial choices more than women do. Men are more likely to do drugs and drink lots of alcohol. While obesity rates are similar, general overweightness is, you guessed it, skewed quite a bit more towards men. Men are even more emotional about even stereotypical "woman" things like relationship breakups if the studies on this are accurate.

The buff muscle packed gang member prisoners are like the peak of many "masculinity" stereotypes, and they're all emotional imbeciles lacking so much thought that they found themselves in jail. And the more "male coded" a young boy is in much of black culture, the more likely they ain't getting far in life.

If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world? If rationality is so masculine, why do men keep gambling away their money, driving drunk and get fat? And if they're more dedicated to truth then how do you explain male dominated politics being so untruthful and so corrupt?

  • -10

Why though? This seems irrelevant to the point of the article which is how institutions function under the different gender styles. Men commit more crime, but if masculinized institutions actually severely punish that crime then it gets deterred and controlled. Under feminine institutions you get catch and release or things like the UK covering up rape gangs over racial concerns (not compartmentalizing and neurotically worrying about how justice effects perception of social groups). This seems clearly worse as men don't stop being masculine with feminized institutions, the rest of society that isn't low functioning is just even more impacted by this subset of males.

This entire comment is: dudes, rocking and the continuation thereof.

While obesity rates are similar, general overweightness is, you guessed it, skewed quite a bit more towards men.

Except "overweightness" was badly defined decades ago (and not fixed because of the growing inertia of Western society) such that the "overweight" range is the lowest all-cause mortality range (the elevated cardiovascular risk is more than compensated by reduced infection risk; in the "healthy" range your body is still skimping on the immune system to save calories). I'm in that range (BMI 27.2) as a result of a high-calorie diet, and before you accuse me of making excuses for base urges, I am literally anorexic and was dangerously underweight (I think my BMI was about 15) until I deliberately ate my way up into the "overweight" range on medical advice. I will brook no claims that this is the result of poor impulse control.

If rationality is so masculine, why do men keep gambling away their money, driving drunk and get fat?

It's men who contribute the vast majority of scientific advancement and creation of new things. The steam engine, the transistor, the telescope, the polio vaccine, antibiotics, nitrogen fertilizers... There'd be no cars to drunk drive, no statistics to collect, no jails, no guns to shoot and no slot machines without men, who made all those things in the first place.

And no men without women, for that matter. I reject this kind of 'war of the sexes' framing about who is better, both sexes are essential and have a distinct but complimentary role. It's not a good thing when men show up in female domains and start trying to change things up to suit their mindsets, the reverse is also true.

Criminals vastly outnumber inventive geniuses, and women were barred from equal access to education for centuries.

Women aren't banned from education today or for the last 50 years in Western countries. Yet there's been no huge surge of amazing female-founded companies as if we suddenly stopped squandering half the talent in the world. The female Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos does not exist, nor does she need to. Extremely stressful, high-risk or very high-performance roles are what men are supposed to handle, by and large. Likewise with dying for their country or getting maimed in industrial accidents.

It can't be 'all the good things about women are due to their innate superiority, all the bad things due to men being mean and oppressive'. Feminism isn't 'women keep all their old privileges and get new ones on top', that's not how it's worked out.

Women aren't banned from education today or for the last 50 years in Western countries.

50? Make that 70. Quite a bit more than that for some countries. Eg. the first engineering degree to a woman in Finland was awarded in 1905.

The University of Chicago was co-ed from its founding in 1890, as was Stanford a year later. Cornell was co-ed since it was founded in 1870. University of California Berkeley was not co-ed when founded, but went co-ed one year later in 1870. The first engineering degree awarded to a woman in the US was from UCB in 1876.

I rest my (and your) case.

Everything you're speaking of is explained by a single variable- agency. Men make their own decisions and follow through on them at much higher rates than women do. Often those decisions are quite bad; 'just being a normie' is a viable strategy for not being significantly below average. But on the other hand it also means far fewer women coming in significantly above average either- the distribution of very high achievement is very male skewed.

Even across racial lines, black women commit less crime than any race of men.

Very literally, this isn't true- black women are the one not-tautological subgroup of women who commit more crimes than any subgroup of men(IIRC asian men at least and some years also white men).

Women and men make different errors while driving. At some point after driving a lot you develop a knack for telling the sex of the driver when you witness some form of danger or stupidity on the road. Or while parking.

If it is reckless - it is usually a man. If it lacks situational awareness or control over the vehicle - chances are it is a woman.

Women and men make different errors while driving.

This used to be true, but nowadays where I live, women drive very aggressive as well, and make 'manly' mistakes a lot now.

For this reason women are also responsible for the vast majority of accidents. They're generally-worse drivers. Men just happen to be specifically worse in the one category which also generates the highest-value damage.

Citation?

The first numerical summary I could quickly find suggests that, while women get into approximately 13% more accidents per passenger-mile, men drive so many more passenger-miles that they get into approximately 45% more accidents per year. Their hyperlinks are broken, though (looks like someone just hit "copy link" to URLs whose results depend on session cookies) and they might have misinterpreted something.

The "highest-value damage" here, of course, is human life; nearly 3/4 of car accident deaths are males, despite females being more likely to die in any particular crash they're in. It's a value judgement as to what makes someone a "better" or "worse" driver, but for a US value-of-life metric it takes several hundred typical non-injury accidents to add up to one fatality.

[Edited to change "~" to "approximately" to fix a formatting bug]

It comes down to enforcecement. Are you willing to walk down the line and execute the violent political extremists one by one, or do you serve them hot chocolate when they wail about their 'lived experiences' that made them act out.

Compromise and serve them warm hemlock?

If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world?

It’s like that line from True Detective, the world needs bad men to keep the other bad men away from the door.

If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world?

Because rule of law was specifically designed to deal with the problem of men's anti-social behavior.

If rationality is so masculine, why do men keep gambling away their money, driving drunk and get fat?

Higher male variance.

And if they're more dedicated to truth then how do you explain male dominated politics being so untruthful and so corrupt?

The goal of politics is not the pursuit of truth.

Because rule of law was specifically designed to deal with the problem of men's anti-social behavior.

Yeah I'd agree. Women in general tend to be peaceful (as we can see by crime rates around the world) and even commit non violent crimes less often. The rule of law came about specifically as a way to address irrational and emotional men who get into fights with each other, steal, drunk drive, or do other insane behavior. Even in terrorist zones like the middle east, women are basically considered at the level of young children for likelyhood being non combatants. We basically never have to worry about a female extremist, despite them still being half the population. It's up to 90:10 ratio.

  • -10

In its majestic equality the law punishes both men and women equally for bad behaviors overwhelmingly preferred by men (which also happen to be the simplest to prove).

The fact that there's no formal check against women's anti-social behavior is kind of the central issue here. Humanity hasn't evolved a way to do that yet, and it's been 150 years since the old ways of doing that were workable (though camouflaged by the fact the 1910s are out of living memory and the massive post-WW2 economic boom covering up the problem for the generation currently in power).

Cool, so now that your question is answered without contradicting anything of the theory you criticized, it seems like it holds up pretty well.

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