It’s not often that I read a tweet or article that rearranges the way I look at things.
You know about the fight against Wokeness, which I have defined as “the exploitation of left wing social justice concepts to virtue signal as a means of exerting political control.” That’s not the only possible definition, but it works in many if not most contexts.
But what is the cause of Wokeness?
I saw this tweet from Helen Andrews about her article in Compact Magazine:
The article is titled, The Great Feminization and it made several interesting points, some of which challenged the way I look at the phenomenon, some of which were ominous:
The Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses….Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.
Looking at the cancellation of Harvard President Larry Sommers for saying that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization,” Andrews observes (emphasis added throughout excerpts):
This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. 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. How did I not see it before?
She then goes through several fields where women were once a minority and now are a majority (in some cases a super-majority) and observes:
Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female….The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies….Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.
Read the whole thing, as they say, but this point about the inevitable loss of “the rule of law” rang true and ominous:
The threat posed by wokeness can be large or small depending on the industry. It’s sad that English departments are all feminized now, but most people’s daily lives are unaffected by it. Other fields matter more. You might not be a journalist, but you live in a country where what gets written in The New York Times determines what is publicly accepted as the truth. If the Times becomes a place where in-group consensus can suppress unpopular facts (more so than it already does), that affects every citizen.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 tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic….If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. It was possible to believe back in 1970 that introducing women into the legal profession in large numbers would have only a minor effect. That belief is no longer sustainable. The changes will be massive.Oddly enough, both sides of the political spectrum agree on what those changes will be. The only disagreement is over whether they will be a good thing or a bad thing….It is good that people are receptive to the argument, because our window to do something about the Great Feminization is closing. There are leading indicators and lagging indicators of feminization, and we are currently at the in-between stage when law schools are majority female but the federal bench is still majority male. In a few decades, the gender shift will have reached its natural conclusion. Many people think wokeness is over, slain by the vibe shift, but if wokeness is the result of demographic feminization, then it will never be over as long as the demographics remain unchanged.
She concludes:
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.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.
Were these observations truly profound, or did we know them but it took a woman to have the space to say them out loud?
Clifton Duncan responded to Andrew’s article:
“The only reason people are talking about “The Great Feminization” now is because it’s affecting women.Men young and old have been talking about it for decades.For decades boys and men have had their desires dismissed; had fathers denigrated and denied them; had their spaces, interests and hobbies invaded; had primary and higher education weaponized against them; had jobs and promotions unjustly denied them; had reputations ruined by false allegations; watched pop culture fester with anti-male slop; had wealth and progeny stripped away by prejudiced family courts.What happened when they voiced these complaints?They were called misogynists, resentful of their inability to match women’s success as they seethed over the dismantling of the patriarchy.They were called losers, whiners and complainers who should shut up, grow up, man up and get married.”But now—As men avoid women at work, or withdraw from the labor force altogether; as men leave the church; as men abandon dating and marriage; as men reciprocate women’s embrace of modernism and rejection of traditionalism; and as womanhood faces erasure, ironically (but predictably) at the hands of the very liberals and progressives women celebrate for hatcheting away manhood and masculinity—Only now, as the consequences of treating women’s needs as all that matter and men’s needs as superfluous (and offensive) are evident,Only now, as men usher in a new sexual revolution by unapologetically focusing on themselves and their own happiness, refusing to serve a society that’s signaled repeatedly that it no longer values them and prompting more and more women to wonder “Where Have All the (Good) Men Gone?”Only now has it become safe for *women* to broach the topic of “The Great Feminization” and be lavished with acclaim for making the exact same points men have been chastised for making for over 25 years.Symbolic.
Some more reactions:
More from Andrews:
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