Fascinating article … by a woman, no less … arguing that wokeness is a symptom of feminization, and feminization will probably destroy our society (although she does not put it that bluntly, being a woman). She points out that women are now growing majorities in many professions, and offers a simple solution:
“Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out.”
Well worth reading, even though many people would probably disagree with some of her characterizations.
Methinks (in inherently-inferior masculine rationality) the present chaos (created by the inherently-superior feminine emotionality) will only possibly be resolved when things deteriorate sufficiently so that male aggression and (God forbid) even physical strength can possibly sort things out. You know, how things worked before we became so woken as to be broken. [note: in v1.0 I typed “faminine” instead of “feminine”]. Hmmm. Maybe prophetic as to a likely component of the soon-to-be broken woken? Sorry but I find such heresies as these are highly therapeutic.
As one of the very few women who comments here, I’ll say first that this post, and the article, don’t bother me. I ain’t mad or even miffed. But I do have one question:
Why, after centuries of unquestioned dominance, did the men allow this to happen?
I was working with a pair of young men in their primes recently. One of them didn’t look very strong at all, but they were both supermen, throwing large heavy boxes of books to each other. One of them is my employee, so if course I’ve noticed before that he can, inter alia, pick up small fallen trees and throw them off the trail.
I thought, why are guys like this putting up with any crap, when they could break any of the rest of us in half?
Now you’ll say (and I concede this) that it may have to do with the feminization of early education. Tru dat: being a teacher used to be a prestigious profession; then women entered en masse and it became low status. (Nonetheless they have tremendous power in our country for one reason: women HAVE to work now, a household needs 2 incomes—and if the teachers strike the women can’t go to work. C’est ça! )
You’ll probably blame the 19th Amendment. But THAT couldnta been passed without the consent of men.
Hey look : I know you gents are stronger ‘n me, I believe you to be smarter in certain crucial areas. I love and admire ya for it, ‘k?
I can give you the tin-foil hat explanation – the shadowy forces who really run this “democracy” rule through Divide & Conquer. They have obviously used race & ethnicity as tools to divide the population, but what could be a better tool of division than gender since it more or less cuts the population into two numerically equal halves?
Whether a society that pits women & men against each other is sustainable …that is a whole other question! But since at least some of those shadowy forces want the human population cut by about an order of magnitude, maybe that unsustainability is a welcome side effect.
As to why males of our generation allowed themselves to be sidelined, I can only offer one person’s experience. Back in the late 1980s, the men who ran the large company I worked for decided to put women in physically-demanding supervisory positions in the field … positions that had traditionally been all-male. Those male executives made it very clear to all their male employees that anyone who raised any concerns about the introduction of women to those roles would quickly become an ex-employee. Today, most of the people in charge of that business are female, and it is not doing so well economically. But there is no going back – at least not until bankruptcy.
Isn’t that one person’s experience more an effect than a cause?
Fair point. For the male executives of that business, promoting females was personally a risk-free decision – they were at the top of the tree, and no female was going to take their job during their working lifetime. But why did those males decide to promote women, even though it was obvious to everyone that some of the women they promoted were not up to the job?
Maybe it was peer pressure; other male business leaders were boasting about promoting women? Maybe it was pressure from activist shareholders demanding advancement for women? Maybe it was a serious business decision, recognizing the declining number of male graduates in technical disciplines and the need to compete more forcefully for female graduates? Or maybe it was simply an episode of the Madness of Crowds, like anthropogenic global warming or the Covid Scam?
Whatever the cause, here we are on the morning after, nursing a headache and wondering why we had those extra drinks.
……or maybe something has happened to the men. Maybe they didnt want to be the Dominus, the paterfamilias, any more. Maybe they lost their nerve.
Well, there’s no “maybe”: they DID. The question is whether THAT phenom was a cause or an effect.
To come of age as a young man in the late 1960s-early 1970s was to be drafted. Lotsa boys pretended to be gay, or made much of various illnesses or physical peculiarities, or developed devout Quakerism, to get out of going to Vietnam. The spectre of dying in that jungle warped the plans and diverted the lives of everybody in my generation. And I’d say most young men of the professional classes did not go.(Pace @Devereaux ). Who would’ve WANTED to be a strong, fit, masculine young man? Nobody I knew.
(For young men that was kinda the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand: the “sexual revolution”, meaning the young women were all just givin’ it away. But on the other: certain death in the jungle. )
I think it is highly likely that the assumption within this question is false. The assumption is men held woman down. I don’t know this isn’t true, but I suspect that it is.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the world was agrarian. Which jobs did woman not get because men held them down? Abe Lincoln slept with other men on his travels which was not uncommon. How many woman wanted a profession that required you to sleep with men in order to do what was necessary to function.
There is often requirements to be able to do a job that are not simply what most people think are the requirements. I think woman didn’t want many of the non-farming jobs because of these types of requirements.
I believe that woman with few exceptions did not have the desire for jobs until the requirements changed.
This includes political positions were the requirement through most of history was that you be able to lead men into battle.
When I went to Engineering school, we had 2 woman out of thirty or forty graduates. Today it is very close to fifty percent. Woman were not excluded. The woman in my classes received preferential treatment from the professors and male students. The change has little to do with men holding woman down and a lot to do with woman’s choices. A lot of money has been spent and requirements changed in order to attract woman.
No,@Metellus, I wasn’t assuming “men held women down”. I was only pointing out the way things were/are. During my undergraduate studies in anthropology, I never encountered any society where the men weren’t dominant ( and yes that includes the legendary Trobrianders, who are matriLINEAL, not matriARCHAL).
Why? Superior physical male strength, and females’ extreme vulnerability during pregnancy and lactation, which conditions women would be in from puberty until cronehood,if they lived that long. I don’t blame that on the men.
I recently met one of our longtime online correspondents (you all know him! ) IRL. “You, Hypatia, will have to give up YOUR right to vote for the good of our country, to prevent the other, crazy women from voting,” he rumbled (and I’m a sucker for a bass voice..). And I know all you polymaths probably agree!
I reckon it’s a question of how far back we’d go. Would I be forbidden my legal education, would I be forbidden even to learn to read and write? That IS scary, I’d be so lonely without our vast literary and judicial Athenaeum….
But please, @Metellus, and all dear polymaths, I am not hostile to your viewpoint on this issue. As an anthropologist (or an anthropologist manqué) I logically couldn’t be.
Since RGF was a few decades “ahead of its time” as the saying goes (ie: if George Gilder had written RGF rather than and when he wrote “Sexual Suicide”… well… that just wouldn’t have been the right TIME, don’t you see?) – things just HAD to come to this the best of all possible worlds.
So what am I talking about nowadays?
It’s beyond the time when someone like Gilder could publish RGF as a book. We no longer have such luxuries. We’re about to pack it in while we palaver.
If people want anything remotely resembling “gender” equality that is a sustainable foundation for civilization, given the feminine “let’s you and he fight” attitude toward immigration of military aged men, they have two choices now:
Nuke the social pseudosciences with Hume’s Guillotine so we can recapture the word “science” in everything that matters at the level of civilization.
Bear in mind that WHEN civilization collapses, Militia.Money provides such a foundation that, in the words of the “language” section:
Instead of using the words “adult” and “minor,” or “female” and “male,” or “authority” and “layman,” or any of the many other pairs now used to designate and confuse social roles, this Law uses only two words “sovereign” and “shielded.”
PS: If people think I’m down on Gilder they need to understand that it was Gilder’s books on “Reaganomics” that (along with attempting to get a rocket company started) led to another 1992 essay of mine since his advocacy made me acutely aware of the realities of wealth centralization vs family formation in the last gasp of Western Civilization called “The Baby Boom”.
Just to add another aspect to this, if it is not already obvious – the vast majority of men had no influence on political & business decisions to give women the benefit of positive discrimination in education & employment. We men did not really do this to ourselves, it was done to us. Yea, “democracy”!
No see that’s where I hafta disagree. Maybe you mean they were out-voted? But a lot of the measures I think you’re referring to weren’t adopted by “direct democracy”. Legislation is adopted by the people’s representatives, and the legislators are majority male. It was the result of a CULTURAL change—and men changed, too.
You make a good point. Where I might disagree is because the “people’s representatives” are clearly unrepresentative of the population – and have been for many a year. While the “representatives” who voted for changes in the laws to discriminate in favor of women may have been male, that should not be offered as proof that the majority of men in the country wanted those changes. Did the majority of men want to commit the US to the Vietnam War? But the “representatives” went along with that too.
Here’s a hypothesis – the big Cultural change actually stems from the decision of a California judge back in those distant days. Previously, the rule among mortgage lenders had been to consider only one income when determining the size of a loan. A childless couple who both were working sued to have both of their incomes taken into account, doubling the size of the mortgage they could get – and a judge agreed.
Of course, as any economist could have predicted, increasing the amount people could borrow drove up the price of houses – and soon it required two incomes to afford a house. That changed the Culture!
I think too that the entry of women into the workforce en masse had a huge effect, driving up home prices for one thing. So then, soon it wasn’t a matter of choice whether or not a mother would work—she HAD to, the household needed two incomes. That in turn led to the stranglehold of the teachers union,
One thing that’s missing in the discussion is the feminization of men. Much as I enjoyed Ms. Andrews’s article, it is unsurprising that this humanities major didn’t think to explore biological causes and solutions. Besides the obvious social pressures to adopt more feminine values, there’s a case to be made that there are environmental (e.g., hormones in water and food). An article published last month in Nature caught my eye, especially these sentences in the abstract:
Given the strong influence that adipose tissue health has on systemic metabolism, additional insights into mechanisms by which oestrogens affect adipose tissue phenotype and function are critical. Not only is adipose tissue affected by oestrogen signalling, adipose tissue is also a major source of circulating oestrogens, and the only appreciable source of oestrogens for men and postmenopausal women. [emphasis added]
Given the explosion of obesity in the West, it’s not crazy to think it might be a factor in the feminization of men.
As for the future, I’m more sanguine than Ms. Andrews. As more helicopters crash into airplanes, more Navy ships collide at sea, and more buildings fall down, even the women and various diverse members of society will start to clamor (or clamour, to go with oestrogen) for competence, even as they continue to proclaim their support for DEI. Paraphrasing Robert Conquest, everybody is conservative about things that really matter to them.
Overweight men larded with estrogen is clearly an issue, but is it the source of the problem? Looking back, it seems that the issue of excessive feminization started in the decades before the pounds began to pile on.
Notice one of the other big factors that affected men in the last half-century – de-industrialization, and the loss of physically strenuous jobs in steel mills, shipyards, etc. Men were displaced into offices and service jobs where the need for masculine traits was diminished.
We are a herd species. As the need for male behaviors and attributes in the West declined, demonstrating such behaviors was driven out of the mainstream.
Perhaps Re-Industrialization is the Holy Grail – the vehicle to restore balance between the genders in addition to solving the problems of under-employment, unsupportable trade deficits, and out-of-control government deficits. All that, and please women by making men what they used to be.
). And I know all you polymaths probably agree!