The Great Feminization Thesis

One place where the feminisation thesis sort of works is comics, but that's in quite a specific and limited way. There was a weird moment about ten years ago when Marvel, in the space of a year, went from having overwhelmingly male assistant editors to overwhelmingly female.

That wouldn't have been a problem in itself, except for the type of young women being hired - they weren't very professional, they seemed to have contempt for the business and its customers, and this was visible because they were on Twitter all day.

And then Trump got elected president, and all the creative industries went insane.

I suspect there were a few factors behind the hiring spree:

• Disney corporate probably sent a memo to Marvel asking why their workforce wasn't very diverse
• The young women thought they were getting a pathway into a career in the movies, not a boring and poorly paid job in a weird antiquated subsidiary
• Some of the creepy uncle editors managed to get eye candy in the office

It didn't work out well. But the weird thing is, even amongst the backlash, the male fans weren't even all that sexist. Lots of them were saying, we used to have great female writers like Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson, whatever happened to them?

There's a lot of stupid drama internal to the comics business, but that's not a woman problem so much as a one specific woman problem. They could get rid of 90% of that drama just by firing Gail Simone.

But that's just the internal dynamics of a small moribund part of Disney. I really doubt that Bob Iger was yelling down the phone demanding more woke content in next month's Amazing Spider-Man.

Dave Zaslav seems to be wielding the axe with enthusiasm at WB, but their financial situation is worse, and I suspect Disney course correcting is like the proverbial oil tanker trying to u-turn. And turnaround times on movies mean what's being released now is what people thought was a good idea in 2021.

Not impressed.
Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

Correlation is not causation.
Uses the same dubious techinques as Baron-Cohen's autistic male brain, placing systemising and empathising on a spectrum.
She's doing the same with empathy and rationality.

Years ago, discussing Diana Spencer with my mother, I made the fairly obvious comment that she was manipulative. My mother replied that that is what you do if you have no power, because it is the only way you can assert yourself. It made me realise that a lot of learned 'mean girl' behaviour comes from women who have been damaged. I neither like nor admire it, and know how destructive it can be, but don't see it as inherently female, except inasmuch as some family's dynamics often still leave girls at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

But when I think of all-female groups and organisations I'm a member of, where we all knock along comfortably without a management structure. I contrast the very dysfunctional workplace I was in with a harmonious and productive partner organisation, both with a mix of male and female staff and managers, but ours with a history that included an actual Nazi in charge in the 1930s. And I think making it about male versus female stereotypes is ridiculously trite.

This article was incredibly poor in my opinion - i started with an open mind but read through it with increasing incredulity (women can't do law? Why, because they're just too spooky and witchy??).

HOWEVER it was worth it for the hilarious payoff in final paragraph of "oh err, not me... I'm not talking about me!"

I swear to god, no satirically-minded feminist could write it better 😂- chef's kiss and all that

Look, sure that happens. But one could say a lot worse about how men conspire to make work conditions intolerable via competitiveness. IE It essentially becomes a competition with the winners being who will sacrifice the most effectively lowering the working conditions for all. Women & men who can't compete in terms of time commitment to families or just maintaining their sanity are the inevitable losers.

To talk about the ills of feminisation isn't meaningful without weighing it up against those of masculisation.

I do like JesterBell. She's usually pretty spot on.

This may seem like a tangent, but at one time I got interested in the history of McDonalds, because you can learn a lot about business by looking at one successful company. About once a decade they try their hand at serving pizza, and it's always an expensive failure. I know the motivation, because if you're selling burgers then pizza seems an obvious sideline, but you'd think they would have learned by now that the McDonalds model doesn't fit with what customers want when they fancy pizza. Yet they come back and try it every ten years.

But I can't think of businesses outside entertainment who do this thing of doubling down on what customers hate. It's very strange. I suspect Disney have got so big, and some parts of the business so ideological, that they think you just have to slap the Star Wars or Marvel brand on something and customers will buy it. At a certain point you'd have to think reality would set in. The guys at Clownfish TV, who I've followed for years for their insider Disney knowledge, are always saying they'll have to course correct as the money runs out, but it's been an awful long time coming.

There's a lot wrong and much that is distasteful with this theory, but we shouldn't dismiss it out of hand simply because we don't like it. I think it holds some grains of truth. I have worked in some very female-dominated workplaces and something like cancel culture was in operation at all of them. It was done through cliques, exclusions, and machinations and whispers behind closed doors. Management could not be questioned. Deviation from the norm was punished in various subtle ways.

"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."

Andrews suggests correctly that in the aggregate, intra-female dynamics are generally more focused on group consensus and concepts like empathy than male ones that she believes undermines meritocratic principles. But does equal opportunity really do that?

Let's call this screed for what it is, a resentful rebuke of women for demanding a seat at the table for them & minorities under the guise that they 'failed to earn it' as if men did. What's really bothering them is they now have to compete.

"When your'e used to privilege, equality feels like oppression"….

Cue to the usual suspects blaming a 'feminised society' for the fact that women are now out numbering men in tertiary education 'because the education system has been feminised'. That sitting still & focusing for long hours without being distracted comes more naturally to females AND they are now more encouraged to pursue education is conveniently lost on them.

In terms how cosying up to 'allies' who are only too happy to reduce women to their reproductive parts & by extension their roles, reminds me of:

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party….

I do think there is a sort of toxic femininity, which is what you get when the worst elements of female behaviour patterns are dominant.

The classic example is middle school girls culture. Which I imagine many of us have struggled with. Not just as victims either, but getting sucked into the kinds of power plays. If toxic masculinity is the direct wielding power through physical violence or it's threat, toxic femininity is the wielding of power through manipulation of social dynamics.

I take the authors argument to be something to the effect that when you have an environment with more women, the negative social behaviours are likely to follow more typically feminine patterns of using power.

Is that in fact true - I don't know, it would be interesting to try and measure this somehow. Kathleen Stock did write something about something like this in philosophy departments, and in that setting I found it fairly compelling.

The idea that it's more a generational change is also interesting though.

I'm also in some of those interest and hobby spaces, and... let's say it's an interesting experience.

I will give them the argument that a lot of genre writing is poor nowadays and crammed full of "The Message" (TM Critical Drinker) but badly-written stories and films are not the result of women being given creative roles in greater numbers they're the fault of studio/publishing execs' poor hiring decisions and an inability to understand what the audience finds interesting.

I agree with this. One thing I've been asking myself in recent years is, why is Phoebe Waller-Bridge in everything? I think it's part of a Hollywood tradition where they fall in love with a British comedian, spend a lot of money to bring them to America, and then don't really know what to do with them. See also the Hollywood careers of Dudley Moore, Ricky Gervais, Russell Brand...

I don't mind PWB. I think she's a talented writer and performer. But what she excels in is female-centric observational comedy. So naturally they put her to work on Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. I can't think of brands less suited to her talents.

She'd be really good at writing romantic comedies, but for some inexplicable reason they don't make romcoms any more. The studios have put all their eggs into the superhero monogenre basket, then filled those films with unappealing girlboss characters and themes, and ended up satisfying nobody.

And, as Drinker often says, even the hamfisted attempts to be feminist don't appeal to women. Why do we watch Thor movies? To see Chris Hemsworth, preferably with his shirt off, being a masculine hero who saves the day. Not to see him being made the butt of the joke in his own movie.

Not a feminist conspiracy. Much more to do with corporate bosses who have run out of talent and ideas, and lost touch with what audiences want.

I’ve started hearing this articulated in many different outlets at the moment.

I don’t know exactly what I think about it, but one version of it was that women are competing with each other a lot (I accept that) and one of the things they have been doing is to downgrade motherhood…to discourage others (their competition) and then go on to have families themselves. The top dogs want to eliminate the competition type of thing “ahhh you don’t want to be a mother, it’ll ruin your life” sort of vibe.,

There’s something in my ageing brain that I underestimated my whole life how intra female competition plays out….but could it possibly go that far? Nothing would surprise me.

The other thing is I’ve known a lot of teachers, and schools (primary) tend to be very high -% female leaders and….there is almost always an awful environment.

My inclination is that too much masculine or feminine isn’t good for any institution - family, school, workplace, and a balance of both is where the good stuff is.
And woke was almost definitely a ‘feminine’
overload.

It really relies on a lot of patriachal key narratives about 'what women are like' - dishonest, scheming, morally weak, manipulative yadda yadda.

A female religious ‘journalist’ finds new angle to titillate and entertain the public. Willing to sell women down the river in return for attention from men. Nice.

Her thesis reminds me of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory - a superior group is being infiltrated and overwhelmed by 'inferiors' , and Civilisation As We Know it is in danger.

“And oh, by the way, can you wims stop doing it, because you are making it really difficult for me, a totally superior (because of my masculine thinking) woman. Ta muchly, kisses.”

🙄

I skimmed the article, and I must agree with @TwoLoonsAndASprout . The claim is intuitively satisfying to a certain mindset, but evaporates when you actually look for an argument to support the "feminisation" thesis. There really isn't one other than saying "Women have done this therefore they have done it because they are women and now in a majority". This doesn't follow.

A couple of classic bullshit tropes in there, which I'd paraphrase as

• Men have conflict out in the open because they are morally and physically strong, whereas scheming, dishonest women do it on the sly because they are morally and physically weak - I think this a central narrative that is used to keep women down in our societies
• Men are logical and objective and sensibly keep everything in its own compartment whereas chaotic, illogical women insist on seeing links between things and acting accordingly
• General historical/evolutionary bullshit about 'men do war, women do family'
• The law is too favourable to women who accuse men of sexual abuse

Writer sounds like a bit of 'not like all the other girls'

IIRC from the other thread, on my first - admittedly super fast - read through of the article, I was uncomfortable, but simultaneously felt I was being challenged to think hard about why some women have fallen so hard for #bekind-ism.

After reading many other comments on the thread, and going back and re-reading the article, I realised that my discomfort came from the fact that, rather than searching for an explanation, the author seemed to be blaming other women for the state we are in. And it was very specifically other women, because she made it very clear that she was a special “not like the other girls” kind of woman.

So, yeah, same shit, different toilet.

How to Blame Women: Method #235

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.

Helen, may I introduce you to Naomi?😏

In the olden days, when men were in charge, there wasn’t any bullying. There were never any witch hunts, for example, or people reporting their neighbours to the Stasi - oh, hang on…

God knows there is some absolute crap out there purporting to be coming from academics. I started listening to a podcast yesterday on researching the worsening mental health of young people in the last 20 years. About 10 mins in it became apparent that the presenter [male] saw this as the fault of women......😡