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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   27159 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.

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?

This paragraph is amazing. As if the primary characteristic of people who are oriented towards the sole goal of 'open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth' is their gender! A small proportion of academic communities in history have managed to take this kind of pure truth seeking as their goal. To see gender as the main faultline of truthseeking vs other interests is identity politics at its worst.

The point is not that men in general are dedicated to truth-seeking. The point is that of the small proportion of people dedicated to truth seeking, nearly all of them are men. This is something progressives actually seem to agree on, as their pitch is often "The characteristics of this environment which make it dedicated to truth-seeking are offputting to women, therefore they most go" Not in so many words, usually, but rather often damned close.

This is something progressives actually seem to agree on

Because truth-seeking can, and historically often does, have a natural consequence of breaking the conditions that keep a feminine society comfortably in power. This can be on the low side, where what is revealed gives an advantage to men, or it can be on the high side, where what is revealed gives such a disadvantage to men that their economic value drops close enough to 0 that they start killing each other.

Normally, that just means they get conquered by masculine societies (whose power has different constraints), but there really aren't very many of those around these days.

I don't think the average progressive is intelligent enough to fully realize that, but the same goes for the average traditionalist. The same instinct silently instructs both on how to assert and protect a monopoly on truth- that's what those 3 Moral Foundations absent from truth-seeker morality do.

but there really aren't very many of those around these days.

China, Russia, the Muslim world, India, the Latin American world, Africa. Basically everywhere except Burgerland and Europe.

The Latin American elite is actually pretty woke, and the peasants don't really have a lot of say in these societies. Latin America is very much not based and trad.

Sure, but if we are just talking about what percentage of the societal elite (doctors, lawyers, judges, finance, business, politicians, military officers) are women, all those places I listed are going have much lower percentages than America or Western Europe.

Upper middle class women in Latin America do not face any meaningful pressure to stay home and cook, even if casual sexism often plays well with the general public. These are not blue collar mexican immigrants to the US where women are still expected to prioritize wife skills over career, even if working full time. To use doctoring as a random example, all of the big countries in Latin America graduate more female than male doctors by a significant margin- the closest I found after a quick google search was Peru at 54%. Google indicates that Mexican medical school graduates were majority female starting in 1995.

No doubt, there is a very similar effect to the US where top flying surgeons, full professors, etc are more male than the profession as a whole. But these are societies where upper-middle class females are if anything even more girlboss oriented than the US.

that and they have (had) ministries of women in countries like Argentina, and in countries like Mexico they practice DEI even in politics, where "plurinominal" house representatives are selected based on gender (not even based on sex).

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