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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

The Great Feminization Thesis

58 replies

UtopiaPlanitia · 20/10/2025 16:20

I came across this article today. I’m reading my way through it and thought it might be of interest to FWR. I’m not sure what I think of the argument that’s being made (I think it might be a generational issue rather than a sex-based difference that’s causing this) but it’s worth engaging with the article to see if a coherent case can be made for the thesis.

Excerpt below to give a flavour of the article:

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

'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?

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.

The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 1960s and ’70s; increasing female representation through the 1980s and ’90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s.'

The Great Feminization

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world.

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

OP posts:
Supporterofwomensrights · 20/10/2025 17:13

The writer appears to be calling for a 'masculine office culture again' and specifically describes this elsewhere in the article as 'pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women' - you're damn right it does!

The reality is that men are still in charge at every work place I've been in.

An incredibly misogynistic article.

It's kind of ironic that it's been posted on this board because it's full of women who apply ration to gender ideology madness.

Heggettypeg · 20/10/2025 17:09

The "feminisation of society" story is as old as the hills; this is just the latest iteration. Sometimes it's framed as women having too much influence, sometimes it's more focussed on "decadence" and effeminacy. Two thousand years ago, Tacitus was holding up the manly German barbarians as an example to Rome, which in his opinion had gone soft and become corrupt. He spoke approvingly of how the barbarians didn't tolerate homosexuality and drowned the offenders in bogs.

The narrative always appeals to men who want to believe that if they'd "had their rights" (as ordained by God or Nature) they'd be a heap big macho warrior man who could (and would be allowed to) boss everyone around by brute force. But alas, human beings have become Civilised, and women and softy men can tell him to behave himself and be backed by social disapproval and the rule of law. Snot Fair!

The narrative also appeals to women with a heavy dose of internalised misogyny and a rose-tinted view of how men interact with each other.

TwoLoonsAndASprout · 20/10/2025 16:51

There are some v interesting comments on this article on another thread, but I can’t find it.

Maybe the last few pages of the NHS/Peggie thread?

MumoftwoNC · 20/10/2025 16:47

I mean, it wouldn't be hard to refute these awfully weak arguments, we could talk about spurious correlation, etc. But, just why. What a waste of effort, engaging with this nonsense.

MumoftwoNC · 20/10/2025 16:43

I do think all this gender nonsense took hold because people were too ready to listen to unequivocal nonsense if it's in a pseudo-intellectual wrapper.

Read that stuff in the op. Just because it's written in words of many syllables, doesn't stop it from being obviously a load of crap. Why are we even inquiring further to find any grain of truth in it? It's clearly incel-tastic women-blaming rubbish, just no.

It's the Judith Butler effect.

Just, no.

DeanElderberry · 20/10/2025 16:39

Someone linked to that the other day. The stereotypes of female behaviour or 'modes of interaction' in sets up bear no resemblance to anything I have encountered, either at work or away from it. And I rather think the male stereotypes it presents are equally distant from reality.

Maybe they are an accurate representation of what happens in some parts of the USA some of the time, products of a particular style of education and set of social expectations, but beyond that the whole thesis seems a pointless waste of pixels.

Hoardasurass · 20/10/2025 16:37

Sounds like incel theory from that excerpt so I'll be swerving that thanks though

MumoftwoNC · 20/10/2025 16:36

Well that's a load of incel-tastic nonsense.

Whatever goes wrong, it's because women forgot their place eh

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