Writer Helen Andrews turned a viral speech into an essay for Compact that’s been driving the Internet wild since it published Oct. 16. She argues woke culture is the inevitable result of women taking over the majority of academia and other pivotal industries such as law, media, and medicine: “Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”
“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” she writes.
As usual, Andrews bravely makes some countercultural points with enjoyable flair, and a lot of what she says is true. Everyone should read her whole article. Rather than simply replicate what she gets right, however, I would like to argue a few finer points. First, I don’t think it’s accurate to claim we have a “feminized” society. Second, I think Andrews applies her thesis too broadly, arguing it can explain more than it actually does.
Our Society Isn’t Feminine At All
It seems obvious that decaying Western societies are in fact not femininized, because our societies do not champion female hallmarks. The top exhibit for this is the lack of babies. The vast and troubling Western fertility crisis would not exist if women were feminine, because it is feminine to naturally seek children.
Yet 64 percent of American women younger than 50 say they don’t want kids, according to Pew Research last year. Not feminine.
Our culture has also become incredibly immodest, another rejection of a primordial female trait, as Wendy Shalit memorably explained in the late ’90s. Some of the most conservative families I know, who homeschool and strongly affirm defined sex roles and male leadership of homes and churches, allow their beautiful daughters to wear “workout” shorts cut like boxer briefs and crop tops. And this has been true since I was a child.
Trump-supporting female celebrities celebrate each other wearing skin-tight, butt- and breast-baring bodysuits that get the notice of New York Magazine and The New York Times. This is not feminine either.
An essay comprehensively chronicling our culture’s rejection of femininity could get very long, so let’s conclude this observation for now with just one more hallmark example. Our culture’s cold indifference to children — the worst form of hatred — is also the opposite of feminine. Women naturally put children first. This is why women prioritize empathy, cohesion, and safety — because children are irrational, risky, and an obstacle to competition, yet we innately understand their value transcends these male criteria.
Despite rhetoric claiming the opposite, our culture systematically puts children last. The Covid lockdowns sacrificed children’s futures for (largely female!) adult psychoses. Abortion, invitro fertilization, and contraception mass murder children for adult pleasure. Democrats will shut down the government to feed the welfare state that cannibalizes the young’s economic stability, and Republicans help them. It’s not feminine to put the children last.
As I wrote in a speech delivered a year ago to Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, “are we really experiencing a cultural ‘overfeminization?’ It looks to me like, instead, we have a swap. We have feminization where there should be masculinity, and masculinization where there should be femininity. Our women are pushed to act like men, and our men to act like women, and the resulting social transgenderism makes everyone extremely unhappy, not to mention dysfunctional.”
Do we have too many weak men and unhinged women? Absolutely! I’d argue, however, that’s because our society has reversed men and women’s roles and in so doing abandoned both masculininity and femininity. We are not “too feminine.” Our women are not feminine enough, and our men are not masculine enough.
Wokeness Is Definitely Applied Marxism
I also think Andrews is wrong to try to use sexual differences to explain the whole of identity politics, wokeness, cultural Marxism, or whatever is your term du jour. The truth is that cultural Marxism (my preferred term), which was largely created by men like Antonio Gramsci and Wilhelm Reich, has largely been allowed to dominate due to male flaccidity and arose long before women started chaining themselves to fences.
“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,” Andrews claims.
This would not be true if the men controlling academic, law, and media institutions had required that women abide by the existing institutional culture of seeking truth at the expense of feelings. Just like with Adam and Eve in the garden, men are ultimately responsible for the corruption of our culture’s institutions, even if a lot of women helped, because men are the ones who abandoned their responsibilities to preserve those institutions against inversion for the good of our society.
“The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict,” Andrews asserts. “In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.”
Yet the manipulation, subversion, and covert treachery of cancel culture also wasn’t started by women, it was started by men. I’d date it back to Machiavelli, the first prominent Western to abandon Christian virtues and argue for doing whatever worked to gain power. Her characterization above is a pretty apt description of The Prince.
In America as well, it was not women running academia, law, and government back around the turn of the 20th century when these institutions wholesale substituted the relativism of Progressive Darwinism for the American doctrines of inherent, equal natural rights based on objective, observable realities set by the Supreme Creator. Progressivism is the true American antecedent of today’s cultural Marxism (many books have been written on this subject, but my favorite is Hillsdale professor Kevin Slack’s War on the American Republic).
It was men who opened the doors to this destructive philosophy by abandoning their faith in classic Christian mores, violating their natural male duty to protect the weak. We should not confuse women being easy prey for maladaptive atheist ideologies with women being solely responsible for this state of affairs.
Blaming Others Solves No Problem Ever
It is lovely of Helen to take responsibility on behalf of women for our refusal to improve ourselves as a sex by taking to heart accurate rebukes of our collective bad behavior. While this is a generous impulse, and something every individual needs to do, she lets men off too easy. It’s probably because men are our cultural whipping boys, but while that is indeed bad the just response is not to obscure their at-least-equal contributions to and responsibility for this situation.
Here’s my favorite section of Andrews’ article: “Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?”
She’s right — our society institutionally discriminates against men. The more than 100 federal feminist “antidiscrimination” laws alone institutionalize systemic bias against men.
But so what? If men want to re-assume their responsibilities as leaders of homes, churches, cultural institutions, and government, they cannot take Adam’s line, “The women made me do it.” God didn’t accept that excuse in Eden, and we shouldn’t accept it now. Leadership means taking responsibility, not scapegoating (even if women share the blame for the mess, which we definitely do!). Men need to shed their internalized transgender roles just as much as women do.
That starts with ending all the masturbatory whining on X and Substack about how The Woman is keeping them down and taking prudent actions to outcompete women in the public square. If women really are so bad at running institutions, and men are really so darned competent in the workplace compared to women, it shouldn’t be impossible for men to reroute women away from destroying public institutions into what we’re much better at: raising families and lovingly civilizing our husbands.
Read the full article here
