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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   27353 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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I find it somewhat interesting that the male objections to Helen Andrews' thesis are something like 'hmm, what about China and Japan, does it hold there?' and the female objections seem more like 'Helen Andrews should STFU and be a secretary, how dare she be a journalist if she's not going to advocate for women' or 'if men are so great how come they are so violent and abuse alcohol so much?' or 'here's a long and open-to-interpretation section of a play'.

It's not that "she should be a secretary if she's not going to advocate for women", it's that this is where her argument breaks down (hopefully, she expands on it elsewhere in a more detailed and considered way). If we want to go back to the days of the masculine office, we go back to the days of "women are secretaries and men are bosses". She's sawing off the branch she is sitting on, without seeming to realise it.

As I have been trying to point out, if her argument is that "society is too feminised, the professions are too feminised", then the natural outcome of that is that, as a woman in the professions, she is part of the problem. Just by being a female presence in a male space, she contributes as part of the mass of women taking over. So she must, by the logic of her own argument, step back and step down if she is serious about solving the problem. Otherwise, it's as pointless as land acknowledgements: "yeah we took your stuff, no we're not giving it back". Yeah, women took over the male domains, no we're not leaving.

The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.

It is rational for them to do this, because the consequences for failing to do so can be dire. Texaco, Goldman Sachs, Novartis, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that have paid nine-figure settlements in response to lawsuits alleging bias against women in hiring and promotions. No manager wants to be the person who cost his company $200 million in a gender discrimination lawsuit.

Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized. A landmark case in 1991 found that pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women, and that principle has grown to encompass many forms of masculine conduct. Dozens of Silicon Valley companies have been hit with lawsuits alleging “frat boy culture” or “toxic bro culture,” and a law firm specializing in these suits brags of settlements ranging from $450,000 to $8 million.

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. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?

A lot can be inferred from the way that feminization tends to increase over time. Once institutions reach a 50–50 split, they tend to blow past gender parity and become more and more female. Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year; in 2024, they were 56 percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.

That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?

And then:

As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue a career in writing and editing. Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.

Yeah, but once again, what's fair rules? Unwind all anti-discrimination law? Okay, now can Helen be fired for getting pregnant? And everyone is tut-tutting at me for asking "how many women is too many?" but unless we set some sort of baseline, all too soon it becomes "any women is too many" in a particular profession or field.

I don't think a woman should be hired just because she's a woman, anymore than someone who's a minority or BIPOC or other DEI. But Helen wants meritocracy, and we got here because meritocracy didn't work - the old school tie was stronger than that. "Susan is better qualified than Jim, but Jim went to my university".

Helen wants "not so many women, but I don't get touched, because I am the Magical Woman who is male-brained and won't disrupt the masculine office culture nor soften society with my emotional, feelings-based, style of running things".

Why should I, or any male hiring manager, take it on trust that Helen is that Magical Woman? On the contrary, I get her CV in with the job application, see her name is "Helen Andrews", and toss it aside because "it's legal to have a masculine office culture again, and so I only hire men".

I'd rather have seen a section from Aristophanes' Assemblywomen if we were doing this.

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