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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   27228 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.

Putting women in law and medicine is also dumb for another reason, which is that you force the most intelligent women to have a lower TFR than they otherwise might have. And you force them into a dysgenic and unhealthy motherhood environment, because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.

Also, it seems to me that women just don’t think up interesting ideas at the same rate men do. As someone who ravenuously pursues interesting ideas and thoughts (as I imagine many themotte users do as well), about 99% of interesting ideas I read are produced by men. And if you look at the places where interesting ideas proliferate without the allure of a secondary reward (social attention), it’s overwhelmingly men, like on the anonymous humanities or political board of 4chan (which like it or not has had an enormous influence on today’s online culture). And the games which focus on creative problem solving, strategy or Minecraft style games, are overwhelmingly male, whereas the cosmetic and nurturing games are overwhelmingly female. This tells us something because what people do in their leisure is what they like to do without the watchful eye of society. So, women can do systems-oriented creative problem solving, but will they if they don’t have a structure involving secondary rewards of cogent social reinforcement (degrees and peer competition), by which they can feel superior to their pretty peers? I’m going to say usually not, most just don’t do that, but that’s an issue if we want people who intrinsically love problem-solving in every kind of role like that — such people require less mentoring, less extrinsic reward infrastructure, might come up with a novel insight out of the blue, etc

My parents are gynecologists, and I don't think I've suffered in the least from having my mom be a working doctor.

I believe that it is nigh universal for female doctors to work fewer hours/in less hectic specialties than their male peers, on average. That is not necessarily a bad thing, the concerns @Throwaway05 raises below have far more to do with the AMA limiting medical seats and residencies than it has to do with a universal requirement for all doctors to be Type A workaholics. Yes, if there is a severe paucity of doctors, you want doctors who work longer and harder. Yet the option to have more doctors who don't work brutal hours exists.

because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.

These specific claims are dubious to say the least. The amount of maternal cortisol in breast milk is tiny, and the effects on nursing infants negligible. I think there is a rather significant difference, both quantitative and qualitative, between a "wire mother" and a mother who works full-time.

AMA limiting medical seats and residencies than it has to do

Sir!

I expect better from you, that's not how it works at all. ;_;

What have my rants been for!

Hmm? Doesn't the AMA limiting seats lead to increased wages for physicians plus a relative lack of doctors everywhere, which makes it easier for them to only work in preferred locations (cities)?

I'm not sure which rant in question says otherwise!

This is a meme passed around by anti-doctor idiots.

The government funds a good chunk to most of the residency spots, this number has been flat mostly due to US government dysfunction. Hospitals and States are welcome to fund their own spots and in recent years have increasingly done so (with mixed results since one of the biggest funders is a shitty for-profit health system).

Every year there are tons of unmatched residency spots (almost always in less desirable specialties). Places would rather not be fully matched than pull from the candidacy base.

When it comes to Medical Schools, the number of them has increased wildly in recent years. This has been questionably helpful because most of the new ones are bad and residencies won't take bad applicants, they'd rather try and SOAP or try again next year.

Additionally, because of the salaries the U.S. never has to deal with an applicant shortage - most of the world's best students will try and match here, even if the U.S. schools don't have enough graduates they don't need to worry (again they just won't take them because reasons).

Lastly it seems reasonable to assume that the AMA has some questionable lobbying on this subject in the past, I don't know about this for sure though - what I do know is that most of their lobbying has been spent on social causes and expansion of mid-level practice rights in the last few decades and they have rock bottom support from U.S. physicians at present. They are not an influential lobby either, which is why our salaries have been going down also for decades.

Thank you for taking the time to explain! I'll commit this to memory, whatever is left in it that's not receptor binding variances.

I will say that the shortage in specific competitive subspecialties is a little more complicated - I can't say for sure that they are lobbying to reduce training volumes but it wouldn't be a stupid thing for them to do. That said for many things (especially surgery) getting requisite case volumes and educational quality is an important complicating factor, especially in the era of robotic surgery.

Most of the "shortage" is inadequate primary volume, but primary care doesn't actually pay that much and people want to be in big cities so it is an allocation and funding problem.

But since "pay the doctors more" is an unacceptable response...it doesn't go anywhere.

If you'd like to learn more about the noodly bits of the American system their is a YouTuber Sheriff of Sodium who does long form videos analyzing these things.

Hmm.. I appreciate the context, but it seems somewhat orthogonal to the concerns I'd raised earlier. It is nigh universal (across professions to boot) for doctors to want to live in urban environments as opposed to some sleepy Appalachian town. You can increase the number of rural doctors by either increasing salaries (as you've mentioned as untenable) or by having so many doctors that market forces... force some of them to go to less desirable locales.

Now, I'm not advocating for the latter, I would like to live in a proper city myself. But I think it's obvious that that approach works.

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