Is Feminisation the Root of Cultural Decline?

Beware the hysteria of a monocausal explanation

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Since the great ‘Vibe Shift’, the particular brand of morally certain, hyper-mediated feminism that was at the heart of the woke era has lost its cultural dominance. In its place has risen a sort of performative, post-liberal pseudomasculinity —at least in the US— oriented around bluntness, reactivity and moral relativism (traits it very much shares with its predecessor). There’s also a sort of camp, pantomime toughness. Given the cultural change, we are seeing more women who exhibit hostility to women and ‘feminisation’ gaining traction in the culture.

This is unsurprising, and not altogether bad. In-group critique once again seems possible after years in which only counterintuitive, sentimentalised gender narratives were acceptable in the public square — explicitly narratives that elevated women as a blunt category to inherently virtuous victims. It is valuable to remember that women, like men, are a mixed bag, and some of us are absolutely dreadful. To accept this is to grant women the full, complex humanity we’ve always granted men.

In the ‘before time’, womanhood was presumed inherently virtuous: every woman was to be ‘believed’ no matter what she was claiming or in what context, every male-dominated space was presumed to be corrupt and exclusionary, and every observable sex difference was explained away as social conditioning. The result was a bizarrely dehumanising and paradoxical revival of archaic chivalric thinking under the banner of progress. It was ideologically monolithic, coercive and boring.

Given all that, the present moment may merely be in part an overcorrection. The way that media has discussed women’s issues generally over the last decade has been utterly preposterous. There has long been a tedious and ubiquitous narrative that middle class white women are at the coalface of feminist progress — that it is their corporate or academic promotion, their access to paid family leave, their representation in STEM or tech or whichever other industry happens to be most lucrative at the time — which is where the most salient or important change happens.

In this way, much leveraging of gender and other identity politics in the workplace over the last decade has been a cynical crowbar with which to concuss professional rivals and winkle open the door of opportunity for oneself. Middle class victimhood became a means of self-advancement. It’s always convenient when your principles align perfectly with your own interests.

I’ve written plenty about the issues with the spineless marketing device that has been so much of popular feminism over the last decade. How it has become so fractured that it doesn’t meet the necessary or sufficient conditions for either a political movement or a coherent ideology. How if numerous totally opposing and incompatible conceptions of feminism can all lay claim to the word, then saying ‘I am a feminist’ is a statement without meaning — a collection of noises you can make with your face.

So it was in a spirit of openness that I read the viral article by Helen Andrews for Compact, The Great Feminization. In it, Andrews considers the madness of the woke era, in which cancellation attempts were as ubiquitous as avocado toast. That was a time when New York Times journalists and academics would take to Twitter to distance themselves publicly from a newly controversial colleague while fantasising about how they’d decorate that colleague’s desk once assigned it after their Twitter-mob-fuelled firing. Andrews doesn’t consider it for very long or very carefully, however, before coming to this conclusion:

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?

Andrews argues that the increasing representation of women in positions of influence in culture has changed institutions. I have no interest in countering this — I think she’s correct there, and that this was largely the point — women wanted to change professional and educational institutions such that they would be more accessible and less hostile to women. A major demographic change in a structure or organisation will necessarily represent a dispositional change. Influxes of new types of people will reliably shift norms, incentives, and culture. There’s plenty of psychological evidence to suggest that group dynamics among and between women exhibit distinct differences from those between men. Andrews suggests correctly that in the aggregate, intra-female dynamics are generally more focused on group consensus and concepts like empathy than male ones.

Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits.

However, the essay is a bait-and-switch. Andrews robes it in what looks like empiricism, listing the increasing representation of women in various fields, but it is ultimately rhetoric — a lazy monocausal explanation for a multi-causal and multifaceted sociopolitical phenomenon. Complex phenomena do tend to have complex causes, so epiphany moments of ‘It was Miss Scarlet in the library with the Wrench of Feminisation!’ should generally be treated with skepticism. Andrews looks at the undoubted expansion of managerialism, corporate gutlessness as represented by the terrifying soft power of the HR lead, and global economic strain, and represents it all as a sloppy form of cultural monism, in which the increasing influence of ‘feminised traits’ leads to an automatic dominance of feminised values, which in turn means that everything you might identify as tyrannical, inadequate or unsound (‘woke’) within culture is an expression of female group dynamics.

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

The essay highlights the dangers of an outdated view and warping reality to fit a grand theory. As Richard Hanania has observed, this sort of pre-2020 analysis already feels obsolete. Andrews’ argument has an aroma of 2017 emanating from it that is, frankly, beyond stale. Unironic use of the word ‘woke’ can in itself be a signal that a person is stuck in the tar pit of pre- and pandemic era politics. She is attempting to describe a moment which has passed as though it is current and failing to amend her position in light of all that has happened since. The substance will fit if you don a pair of blinkers and bash it into the available space with a balled fist.

It is important to be charitable in reading Andrews’ article, as anyone’s — any person who touches on gender in writing will be forced to make generalisations and should be given the breathing room to do this without every generalisation being taken as a universally assumed truth about individuals. She takes pains to point out, reasonably, that of course individuals differ but that in the aggregate men and women tend to cleave to certain traits and behaviours.

However, there seems to be a lack of willingness to consider challenges to her grand theory on Andrews’ part. In one part of the essay, she says that “In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies”. While this ignores the passivity and covert politics inculcated by culture and class (the male-dominated academic environments I’ve spent time in have been as wildly passive aggressive and conflict-averse as the female-dominated media environments), or most middle-class office environments generally (gender irrelevant), I’m not sure that this covert undermining and ostracism Andrews describes as feminine can’t be very reasonably considered a form of competition, and a pretty devastatingly effective one.

The binaries Andrews draws on above are rooted in whatever evolutionary theory fits her purpose, and arguing backwards from her conclusion. I have no issue with the idea that sex differences exist, and that some or many differences between women and men are inherent rather than socialised. What Andrews suggests here, however, isn’t evidenced within her argument and doesn’t follow from it.

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.

Traits Andrews terms ‘masculine’ are valorised as civilisational virtues, while traits she deems ‘feminine’ are pathologised as decadent, overtly negative and unreasoned. Despite her protests, she pitches these traits as very much ‘inferior’ in an ‘objective sense’. As a philosopher with a deep interest in truth and open debate, I’m eager to find these men who are oriented toward it. I’d enjoy a chat with them. Having spent time in academic departments before and during the most insane era of what Andrews calls ‘feminisation’, I’ve never found academic environments to be as focused on ‘unfettered truth’ as they are on status signalling, collegial competition and resentment, funding and political expediency. The focus of that expediency may have shifted as departments welcomed more women, but the fact of it remained the same.

Andrews is not making a sociological or even a philosophical argument — she’s constructing a subjective moral hierarchy. The argument is based in emotion, generating a single bogeyman to provide a mythic and simple explanation for our overwhelming, coercive and crumbling managerial modernity, and arguing backwards from a conveniently all-encompassing conclusion. It does not consider even briefly the socioeconomic context or the very specific sort of woman Andrews’ critique might largely apply to. It merely presumes that men built ‘the West’ and women broke it, but not rational and upstanding women like Andrews, just the stupid ones who cry at the bit in films where the dog dies.

I’m really just interested in whether Andrews’ essay makes decent sense, or is convincing. It doesn’t, and it isn’t. I’m glad she wrote it. I think that women should get better at critiquing and being critiqued by other women. The insanity of the last decade led us to believe that telling another woman she’s wrong and making a bad argument is somehow gender treachery, or that great taboo of feminist social media, ‘unkind’. It is in fact treating women like adult people, and that’s good for us since we are, in fact, precisely that.

It’s always tough to critique the ingroup while maintaining a ‘Not I!’ exceptionalism, and Andrews fails to do that and it’s a bit awkward, and yet these sorts of arguments are best made from within. It might be argued that to be seriously engaged with, they only really can be made from within. If a man had written Andrews’ article, it probably would have been dismissed out of hand by all except those who were already comfortably blaming women for the collapse of culture and the spineless hegemony of managerialism.

Increased female presence does change culture, and it can theoretically change it for the worse in some contexts— it’s dishonest to pretend that this isn’t the case. Being people, women can be just as terrible, coercive and domineering as men, even if it often takes different forms, and this can be expressed in environments where women with these inclinations come to positions of power (bureaucracies do love to promote the most self-interested political operator in the office, gender irrelevant, after all). But ‘feminisation caused wokeness caused feminisation’ is a bad argument, and Andrews doesn’t prove much beyond wishful thinking and - unfortunately - a terribly stereotypically feminine (as she might term it) tendency to conflate emotion and reason in her essay.

If you want to argue that the collapse of culture is exclusively the fault of women, go on ahead. But do it convincingly.

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