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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   27182 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 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.

This rhymes with the old "women can't do science because their uterus makes them fundamentally irrational", which has not aged very well.

A (perhaps weak-man) view of a feminism view of international relations would be "for more than two thousand years, politics in Europe were mostly decided by men (->true). As a consequence (->debatable), most state capacity was spent on murdering other humans in wars (->true). As women got more involved in politics, Europe become a lot more peaceful (->the correlation exists). Therefore, it is essential to limit the influence of men in politics lest they use their influence to follow their instinct for murder (->disagree)."

It is not that either view is completely without a point. On average, women are probably likelier to make decisions based on 'feminine' emotions, and men are probably more likely to accept violence as an appropriate solution to a problem.

But even in single-sex organizations, cultures can be very different. An all-male 19th century chess club will have a very different culture from a band of mongol raiders or a squad of SS officers or the retinue of a medieval lord or an all-male fire department or some rapists sharing roofie ingredients or some RPGlers.

Woke culture in the legal profession has obviously not been good for the rule of the law. (Nor has MAGA culture, btw.) But I am very skeptical of the claim that an gender imbalance will naturally cause a culture to flip.

I think there’s a bit of truth to it. Not that no woman is capable of Law work, but that the social style of women is not how law is supposed to work (or things like science or the military (which I fear a bit more than Law simply because the one army that keeps their military masculine will have it’s day with any country with a feminine military)) as it’s supposed to be about the fair and impartial application of rules, whether or not the outcome is one you prefer. Women tend to have a harder time accepting outcomes that feel mean even if the law is fair and the case is judged fairly. Sure a couple of women probably isn’t going to do it, but enough of them to have the circuit courts full of women who see the fair outcome of a jury trial as mean to someone from a disadvantaged group is going to make a shambles of blind and impartial judgement.

as it’s supposed to be about the fair and impartial application of rules, whether or not the outcome is one you prefer

Yes, but doing that actively handicaps women in the workplace, because their evolutionary specialty rests on those rules being as partial and obfuscated as possible.

The fact that that the full use of that specialty is incredibly destructive is highly relevant, which is why gynosupremacists build their entire worldview atop justifications for being allowed to do it. It's what their instincts tell them will keep them safe. Parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy (and must be considered morally neutral for this analysis to have any worth).

to someone from a disadvantaged group

I think a start to dealing with this would be to institutionally account for the moral hazard this inherently creates. If women want criminals running around because to do otherwise would hurt their feelings, there needs to be some redistribution directly from them to the people their policies hurt. If the teaching profession refuses to do its job by literacy rates dropping because it would be mean to fail people, there's no reason they shouldn't be forced to pay into a dividend dedicated to fixing their mistake in the future.

Society doesn't impose costs on morally neutral behaviour. Also you are suggesting a 'host' solution, you will only get justifications for why it can't be done in return. This would not be possible even if you hadn't brought in the concept of parasitism, now it is double plus infinity not possible.

I hate this framing. And I'm not just saying that because I'm trying to romance 2rafa. You can't just say 'just treat this loaded term as neutral' when you're talking about societal issues, because society isn't just made up of autistic wordcels like us. That said, I'm pretty much willing to talk about anything, so I can't help but notice that I don't want to talk about this in these terms. It probably means you could make bank off of championing this on social media - at least until you are debanked.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm trying to romance 2rafa.

LOL very tempted to tag her. But I won't. This time...

Society doesn't impose costs on morally neutral behaviour.

Of course it does. This is what many taxes and fees are.

Ah God damn it. You're right, I meant to say it doesn't impose costs as a deterrent on morally neutral behaviour.

If the behavior is morally neutral but has costs, a tax or fee might well be imposed upon it not to deter it but to recover said costs.

Right and that's why my argument continued for several sentences after that first one.

Just for clarification, I'm reading this as 'doesn't intend to impose costs...'

Yeah, I think that's probably true. Happens all the time, but not with that conscious intent.

You can't just say 'just treat your outgroup as mistake theorists'

As opposed to treating them as conflict theorists, but there's no insight to be gained by starting from that position.

parasitism

I don't think the tarantula hawk wasp is consumed by guilt at what it has to do to continue its cycle of existence. Not that it has the capacity to feel guilt, of course.

Thus, a particular assumption relevant to my outgroup's behavior- that [at its core] it is an evil animal with evil motivations designed solely to maximize the suffering of others for selfish gain- is therefore flawed and not worth talking about.

Of course, if that hypothetical question ever came up between host and parasite, how would you mediate a dispute between them? Not that a host could conduct that process when parasite-obsessed [for a variety of out-of-scope reasons] hosts are in oversupply, of course, which debanking is an expression of and why it's only become a thing now.

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