The Great Feminization Thesis

[UtopiaPlanitia]

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.'

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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......😡

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…

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 my own life, I've come across the same attitude as argued in the article in a lot of the male-dominated interest & hobby spaces I frequent. Some of these men very much project an imaginary sign saying, "no girls allowed".

I also experience it a lot in online film and game reviewing/discussion forums, especially those that are sci-fi-related. Men are loudly moaning about so-called "boy-brands" (such as Star Wars) being feminised or forcibly turned into "girl brands". I find their argument spurious and insulting because, as a woman I can relate to and empathise with male characters (and have had to for most of my life until we started to get great female characters like Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor) so I can't understand why these men seem to be completely incapable of empathising with and relating to any female characters in media/pop culture.

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.

Edited to add: I still think most of what the article complains about is possible conflict between generational social norms or a facet of US middle-class societal norms, I don't see the behaviours she describes as inherently sex-based.

How to Blame Women: Method #235

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.

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'

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.

“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.”

🙄

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

You might like this sarcastic video by independent filmmaker JesterBell (aka Female Frodo Baggins) railing against Hollywood's strong top down promotion of The Message (TM) and the studios' strangely persistent intention (despite annually declining viewing figures) to ignore the interests of their strongest market segment (in my view comprising both male and female fans) in an attempt to chase demographics who will never be interested in geeky or action or sci-fi projects. It may be heretical to say so in Hollywood but not everyone wants every film to be about interminable CGI-heavy superhero melees 🤷‍♀️ And I say that as someone who would watch at least one series of a show about paint drying as long as it was set on an alien space station in the year 2463.

Hollywood's change to distrusting/disliking its audience and preaching at them rather than concentrating on good storytelling gets a mention too. I think her video (in tune with male YT pop culture critics like Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Doomcock, and the Movie Cynic) is complaining about some of the same types of changes in culture that get lazily labelled as 'feminisation', but she's doing it in a less 'Not Like The Other Girls' tone than the article in my OP:

"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….