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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

It has been an extremely poor run of films for projects like Disney and WB and Paramount etc but, as you point out, inexplicably execs like Bob Iger acknowledge that quality is poor but they're doing very little to nothing to course correct. I can't understand why basic common sense hasn't encouraged shareholders to remove him except that it's the 2020s and nothing works logically, the way it's supposed to, these days. Checks and balances may as well not exist because societies at large are often just ignoring them when inconvenient.

The basic idea of 'give the customer what they want and you'll make money' seems to have been badly upset by either ESG scoring or EDI programmes or generational/social/ideological behaviours from the younger uni-educated creatives.

I don't believe pop culture/business practice/the law have been feminised, I think they've been negatively affected by the ideological and political forces that have had a strong effect on the rest of society. I believe inter-generational and class-based differences are much more to blame for the rise of inept professionals and dysfunctional organisational cultures in general rather than it being because women gained larger presence in civic society and the business world.

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.

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.

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.

That's a good point. The Marvel rebrand that was all about sex-swapping characters or creating self inserts (Ms Marvel) or turning everyone queer was too much for an awful lot of people. The comics industry has always sort of floated near a financial knife edge but I'm not surprised it's doing so poorly these days after the ridiculous changes that were made to proven, well-beloved titles and characters for no other reason than it was in support of pushing a particular type of critical social justice.

A lot of my media and reading is escapism (picked up the habit as a kid living through The Troubles and it never left me) but I also like to see allegorical stories (think either classic Trek or X-Men at its best) examining societal issues in a thoughtful/measured way. The creative industries seem to have lost these two skills or have decided that (re)educating the consumer takes precedence over enjoyment or independent thought.

What are your thoughts about ESG and companies complying with what funders like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Morgan Stanley consider to be 'moral' corporate culture? I think that's had a huge societal and civic impact that would generate the effects of the feminisation the OP article describes. And I don't see orgs like BlackRock et al as adhering to strongly 'feminine' organisational cultures 🤔

I thought it was an excellent article. Saddened to see that people on this board are so defensive. Some self reflection is needed after the Filia disasters. But no, that’s not gonna happen

It was trash @HeMann and OP is largely incoherent, and I am cheered by the radical feminist responses.

I think the bigger puzzle for me is how some of the basics of storytelling have been lost. I think part of that is down to political trends, like denying differences between the sexes, but there are some things that genuinely puzzle me.

I was thinking of when Marvel began to introduce young female versions of established male characters, and some worked and some didn't.

X-23 is an example of it being done well, at least in early versions before they started doing dumb things with her, because you could tell they'd thought about the character. A female version of Wolverine, with the claws and fighting ability and regeneration, has visual appeal, but Wolverine is also a very distinctive character with lots of quirks, and they put some work in making her in some ways the opposite of the original. If Logan is the man without a past who can't remember the terrible things he's done, Laura remembers too vividly and can't escape her trauma history. It's an intelligent way of doing a female version.

Of course then they ruined it by trying to make Laura the main Wolverine, which nobody was interested in.

The unsuccessful version I can think of is Araña, not because the books were horrible (I read and enjoyed them), but because the nature of Spider-Man is that Peter Parker is an everyman character, and Anya is also an everyman character, but young and female and Hispanic, and that feels more like checking boxes than having a dramatic contrast with the original that you can use to build up the new version.

I don't have a worked out thesis, but I think the loss of creativity has a few institutional and financial and demographic factors involved. More female representation might be a factor at the margins, and in some specific cases, but even then I'm cautious, because it might be (like Kathleen Kennedy) one specific woman in the wrong job, and the same problems could be caused by the wrong man in the job.

What I really don't believe is that ESG is a major factor. The guys at Kotaku In Action (the Gamergate subreddit) discovered ESG and made it their theory of everything, and it just doesn't work. It might encourage companies to do a bit of performative wokeness, but it doesn't explain why Russell T Davies went so badly off the rails, or why BBC casting directors believe that the UK population is 40% black and 25% gay.

Why not?

I wrote one short paragraph in my original post saying I was in the process of reading the article and wasn't sure what I thought of the argument being made by the author (I mentioned other potential issues that I thought were worth considering instead of her concept of 'feminisation'), and I gave a snippet from the article as an example of what I meant - how is that incoherent?

I encountered another theory on the lack of good storytelling, for the life of me I can't remember where though, and it was that the current generation of writers and creatives are not good at telling stories because of lack of personal life experience i.e. they've live largely middle-class lives and haven't lived through the sorts of strongly formative experiences that affected previous generations, the examples given were things such as WW II, Vietnam War. The theory was that this leads recent generations towards a desire to remix previous works to better fit their current personal morality. In addition, rather than engage in creation of compelling original works and characters they are hamstrung by the restrictive, and ready to take offence, nature of their social millieu.

It's a variation on that old evergreen argument that 'people are too soft nowadays'.

I think that was a Critical Drinker thing (when he was on Triggernometry maybe?) - I find he's often very insightful when he does interviews, maybe more than on his own platform.

My go-to example of a writer who's lived the live is Paul Dehn, because in the space of three years in the 1960s he worked on the screenplays for Goldfinger, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Deadly Affair. They're quite different from each other, but as spy movies go, that's a stellar output. I don't think it came out until after his death that Dehn was not only a WWII veteran but was a covert ops man who did assassinations.

I'm not saying we need trained assassins writing films, but a bit of life experience would really show through. I struggle to think of any actors or writers below retirement age (except JKR!) who've come into the entertainment business after experiencing hardship or doing working class jobs. It's mostly nepo babies these days, and it really shows.

@SionnachRuadh, re the nepo babies: I find it endlessly tiresome that “famous people” of whatever stripe think that being famous somehow qualifies them to write children’s picture books. There is so much dross now in that field it’s depressing.

Yes, that sounds like where I heard it. And I agree that Drinker is much more considered on other platforms.

In the last number of years when various online critics have been discussing popular culture as it intersects with the effects of critical social justice and the politics of sex/gender in daily life, I've found (among the various channels that I watch) Drinker, Nerdrotic, Amala Ekpunobi, Misha Petrov, and Sydney Watson are pretty evenhanded in their analysis and much less likely to veer over to Disparu levels of sexism and claiming everything has been feminised so that's why society is going wrong (that man can be enjoyably sarcastic but has some strong ideas about what 'proper' masculinity entails and why women can't really enjoy scifi and action films 🤯).

I think there's also the production time lag when it comes to course correction. I can't remember who said this, but it was a good point - if there's a casting decision that looks really baffling, look at who was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly two years ago.

So with Captain Marvel, it wasn't just the flaws in the script and concept - they could have got away with that if they'd cast a beloved genre actress like Katee Sackhoff or Michelle Rodriguez instead of Brie Larson, a dour indie actress who seemed to have little interest in the project. Why was Brie Larson headlining? Because she'd been cast two years earlier when she'd just won her Oscar and was the hottest thing going.

So in the nature of things, a terrible film coming out today will probably have been greenlit four or five years ago. Bob Iger could u-turn today and we wouldn't start seeing the results until 2029.

I think what will change things is financial pressures. Even Disney is feeling the pinch. The streaming boom where they hired tons of writers, many of whom weren't very good and many of whom were more interested in being activists, that's over. A lot of the dead wood didn't come back after the writers' strike.

And I don't think pinning everything on the giant effects-laden blockbuster makes sense, because budgets are becoming so bloated it's almost impossible to make a profit. And in the streaming world the big event movie seems to be declining.

Something that puzzles me is the disappearance of unpretentious medium budget films that probably won't be mega-hits but will stand a good chance of making a tidy profit. Detective stories, military actioners, romcoms, cheap and cheerful horror, they've almost disappeared. If I were advising them I'd say, get back to basics.

Because those ills as in cancel culture didn't occur in a vacuum. They are essentially a reaction to patriarchal injustices not being addressed. James Damore comes to mind. 'I'm only stating facts' might superficially seem reasonable hence all the sympathy he got but effectively it was attempting to maintain the patriarchal status quo by refuting responsibility for female advancement & making females look emotionally unreasonable.

I'm not justifying cancel culture btw as I wouldn't justify terrorism rather explaining how injustice breeds 'vigilantism'.

The thing is, a lot of those apparently 'feminine' behaviours might stem from female socialisation to be gentle, kind, caregiving - all of which is a direct result of patriarchy. They're not inherently female behaviours. So if their evaluation of wokeness is correct I you could suggest that it is because socialisation hasn't kept up with the progress of legal/financial/workplace equality. That's assuming we take those feminine behaviours to be negative, of course .

Not saying I agree with their take on wokeness; I actually think the generational argument may hold more water. Either case would really require more investigation to prove though.

Ironically the start of the article predicates the beginning of wokeness on the idea that women didn't like being told they were 'naturally' inherently weaker and less capable than men. It's logic is rather circular on that score.

That the body evolved for reproduction & the mind didn't seems naive at best.

Actually the mind/brain evolved
for survival. What develops the brain is a complex interaction between environment, individual genetics and culture.
This article is just the evo-devo just so story with a new woke twist.

Survival kinda entails the continuation of the species & that's always been a constant regardless of the environment.

The continuation of the species requires the ability to adapt to build shelters, understand and exploit the environment etc etc.
The knowledge and skills necessary to send people into space has nothing to do with reproduction. Women are whole complex unique individuals.