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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   27269 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.

Medicine is becoming increasingly feminine, with majority female doctors and med students. This is a global phenomenon, and I lived through it in med school myself. Well, I wasn't really complaining about all the women, as potential dating options, but I imagine India lagged behind in that regard. This didn't have any obvious impact I could see, since senior doctors were still mostly male, and even our women are far less Woke than the West.

In the UK? It's more obvious. I am loathe to make strong statements, since I don't know how much of the cultural differences in the workplace at our hospitals is due to the women, and how much of it is general zeitgeist bleeding through.

I can still say that the men are on tenterhooks, it takes a single complaint to absolutely screw us over. I've seen male consultants treat female trainees with kids gloves solely because of such fears (which are entirely justified), even if the trainee in question hasn't shown any such tendency. I'm talking avoiding being in the same room, for fear that a lack of witnesses will make a potential defense untenable.

Hell, I recall that when I'd circulated a request for feedback to other doctors I worked with (it's mandatory for my portfolio), the only person who left a written comment was an older female trainee who made a pointed comment about a joke I had made (and had even confronted me right after I made it).

This has a chilling effect. I can hardly say that it's killed medicine, which would be hyperbolic, but I am sympathetic to the general thesis.

In the UK? It's more obvious. I am loathe to make strong statements, since I don't know how much of the cultural differences in the workplace at our hospitals is due to the women, and how much of it is general zeitgeist bleeding through.

It’s a complicated issue. In Britain, white doctors and nurses are subject to the extremely common and overrepresented predations of overseas and BAME (the UK term for ethnic minorities, for any readers) doctors and nurses who are extremely overrepresented in sexual harassment and assault claims. Certainly when I read through a bunch of the decisions a few years ago I found that the vast majority of serious sexual misconduct by doctors appeared to involve non-native medical professionals (whether first or subsequent generation).

It’s true for other crimes too. As the GMC itself noted 7 of the 9 doctors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter since 2004 were BAME. BAME doctors are referred for misconduct at more than double the rate of white doctors. International medical graduates are referred at more than 2.5 times the rate. (The GMC’s solution, in true current year fashion, was to try to fix the disproportionality, which could only be due to racism, not to investigate the cause).

Anecdotally doctor friends report leering, pestering and other sexual harassment by foreign doctors, many of whom speak poor English and have questionable medical skills, and some (eg Pakistani Muslim) domestically trained ones too. Obviously there are many civilized overseas doctors, yourself surely included, but the context is important when looking at why there might be a heightened women’s sensitivity here.

As the GMC itself noted 7 of the 9 doctors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter since 2004 were BAME. BAME doctors are referred for misconduct at more than double the rate of white doctors. International medical graduates are referred at more than 2.5 times the rate. (The GMC’s solution, in true current year fashion, was to try to fix the disproportionality, which could only be due to racism, not to investigate the cause).

In a comparable situation in another industry, it was once pointed out to me that such disproportionality was after everyone in question had already bent over backwards to avoid coming down on the non-whites.

It wasn't that they were ~2.5 times more likely to cause major problems; it was that they were so much more likely to cause problems so bad that they couldn't be swept under the rug.

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