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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.

In September, I gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference along the lines of the essay above. I was apprehensive about putting forward the Great Feminization thesis in such a public forum.

That's the problem right there. This lady should step down and stop taking a place that rightfully belongs to a man, with the masculine qualities of rationality, risk, and competition, rather than cluttering up organisations and forcing them to stagnate with her feminine qualities of empathy, safety, and cohesion.

She should know her place and be content with being a secretary to the (male, of course) "senior editor at The American Conservative" and the "...managing editor of the Washington Examiner." Imagine the effrontery of this lady to take over such senior roles! Much better suited to support roles to enable the man to function efficiently as she uses those feminine qualities to ensure good office manners.

  • -31

I'd agree (and do in spirit) but in this case I think our civilization is so sick that it requires such as this. A man isn't allowed to say what she's saying.

The woman is complaining the system is broken; expecting her to keep functioning according to the old system's rules isn't catching her in hypocrisy.

it's hypocrisy if you say "the important professions, including journalism, have been taken over by women and this is bad for society" while holding senior positions in journalism as a woman. It's the alcoholic surgeon: "drinking is bad for you, you should give it up" "but you show up for work drunk every day!" "yeah well do as I say, not as I do". Who wants an alcoholic surgeon, no matter the level of their qualifications, operating on them? How am I to believe her cure for society's ills when she is taking jobs from men?

(That reminds me back when my class was fourteen and having debates on 'how to solve unemployment?' and one notion we got was "all the married women should stop working, that would then free up jobs for men". Yeah, it doesn't work like that. Society now requires both partners in a couple to be working, else you can kiss any chance of a mortgage, for one example, good-bye).

I think the author is saying that she is smart and got her position through merit, and is willing to prove it, but she thinks most women in high positions did not. Does this make her kind of an asshole? Hell yes but she did say she's a disagreeable sort of person.

Sure, but if the argument is that "society is becoming too feminised", then it doesn't matter if she got her position on merit: she's one of the feminising forces. Her argument rests on "I'm different" which, uh, is not very convincing: the only women who should have male jobs are women who behave like men. Fine, great, but how do we get women who behave like men? Because she starts off with the difference between male qualities and female qualities, which is biological essentialism and which does boil down to "there may be some exceptions in women who behave like men, but in general don't hire women because too many women in the professions spoils the profession".

So again I have to ask: what is the correct ratio of men to women in any job, profession, or field? How many is "too many"? What is the tipping point? And the only way to be sure (maybe the tipping point comes at 51% women to 49% men, but maybe it comes at 33% women to 66% men! we don't know!) is to have no women in the profession, or at least not above a relatively low level. Lots of female secretaries, to lots of male bosses. Lots of nurses, to lots of male doctors. Lots of kindergarten teachers, to lots of male professors.

If she is the mother of sons fearful for them in a feminised world, then she has to give the example of stepping down to be replaced by a man. And if she doesn't do that, then her argument is the old problem that feminism has dealt with before: pulling the ladder up behind you. She's okay, she's One Of The Boys, she values all the male values so it's okay for her to get that senior position, but other women just aren't the right fit, not trustworthy, too... female.

If she is the mother of sons fearful for them in a feminised world, then she has to give the example of stepping down to be replaced by a man. And if she doesn't do that, then her argument is the old problem that feminism has dealt with before: pulling the ladder up behind you. She's okay, she's One Of The Boys, she values all the male values so it's okay for her to get that senior position, but other women just aren't the right fit, not trustworthy, too... female.

Madame -- I'm assuming based on what occurs to me as cattiness and barely-disguised passive-aggressive hysteria but lmk if I'm wrong -- this is a strawman.

Her argument is that if we just took the thumb off the scale and left things to meritocracy the system would balance itself out naturally. She's not positing an optimal number of women. She's saying that the women who belong would fit in and the ones who don't would fall out as a matter of course because Men and Women Who Get Things Done wouldn't be forced to put up with them.

More to the point, she's talking about the ones who behave the way you're behaving right now.

There is no hypocrisy here, only what occurs to me as an unfortunate lack of self-awareness on your part.

What would your argument be for why meritocratic hiring would be likely to prevent feminisation? Is it that the high-merit candidates are low on feminine traits, regardless of their gender?

(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)

(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)

To give an example of some of the stuff @TitaniumButterfly is talking about, here's the way the tertiary entrance rank worked in Victoria (where I live) when I was in year 12 (back in the oughties!).

You do four or more subjects, and get a score of 0-50 for each. Languages other than English (LotEs) get a +5 to their score; uni-level subjects get a +5 to their score. Then you add up your top four subjects' scores, and add on 10% of your fifth- and sixth-highest scores. So far, so good.

Except that English is required to be counted as one of your best four, and LotEs can count as one of the top four (and you can do more than one, for a theoretical maximum of +16) while uni-level subjects can't (and you can only do one of them, for a theoretical maximum of +0.5).

Guess what sex does better at English and other languages (my score for English was 15 points lower than the worst of my other six subjects*). Guess what sex is more likely to be doing uni-level science in year 12 (I'd have done two - physics and maths - if I could). Girls' best subjects are prioritised over boys' when calculating the TER, which means yes, you will wind up with more girls than boys qualifying for competitive uni positions, including science courses which have nothing to do with year 12 English (i.e. writing essays about Hamlet or the linguistic differences of Aboriginal English) or LotEs. This is not meritocracy - not, at least, when talking about sex disparities.

*Actually, I'm like 70-80% sure that I failed English outright (which doesn't count as a score at all, and means you can't graduate), but my English teacher fudged the paperwork. Not that it wasn't justified after the complete trainwreck my life was at that point, but this demonstrates even further how wide the gulf was between that and my other subjects.

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