Feminism, feelings, and attacks on truth

We have heard far too much in recent years about toxic masculinity. But these two words should never be linked because masculinity is an essential and desirable human virtue. It is also an aspiration.

For Christians especially, this is an incontestable fact. One only need consult Genesis 1:27 to learn why. God created the masculine by His pleasure and He called it good. Yes, we live in a fallen world, tainted to the core. But masculinity does not hold a special devious status, regardless of what elites say. In a Christian anthropology, it is one half of the divine nature in creation. As such, it is desirable.

Let me give you a simple everyday illustration. The women in your workplace kindly set up a young peer on a blind date. These women care for her and she’s excited about the prospects of this mystery man. Naturally she asks, “Tell me what he’s like!” The women happily explain, “Well, he’s very masculine.”

That raises suspicion for no healthy woman, anywhere you find women. She is charmed because she knows masculinity is a mysterious and desirable trait. Toxicity is not a thought because she knows being masculine is the opposite of machismo or passivity. Women get this intuitively.

Of course, it is the same with women. The feminine is an equal and essential, yet distinct, virtue because of Genesis 1:27. Mysteriously, the feminine uniquely reflects the image and likeness of God in humanity because God’s Word tells us this is the case. But it too can be infected by weakness and insecurity, becoming something else. Modern feminism is one of these. As Chesterton noted, it is the pursuit of erasing the truly feminine.

Helen Andrews, the former senior editor of The American Conservative, wants us to consider the fruit of what she calls “The Great Feminization.” This is the public phenomenon where the virtue of individual femininity has been turned in on itself in a politically and legally enforced social transformation. She confidently made her case in a recent NatCon speech and an influential online essay. Andrews has caused a stir to be sure, but her ideas are worth considering.

The Great Feminization is a socially engineered over-representation of women within leading social institutions. Women are increasingly outpacing men in select career fields.

Women are outearning men in bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees. They also became the majority white-collar workers in 2019. Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Law schools tilted female in 2016, and female law firm associates first predominated in 2023. College instructors tipped women-ward in 2023 as well. The majority of New York Times staff were female for the first time in 2018 and today they hold 55% of jobs there. Women also run most of the book publishing houses and heavily dominate psychology careers. Ladies are not yet the majority workforce managers in America yet, but they currently stand at 46%. It won’t be long. There are too many such gains to list fully here.

At first blush, this all seems like desirable progress. But Andrews warns it comes with a very steep and unanticipated price. The 50/50 gender parity that feminism touted as fairness has no moderating equilibrium. As women have become more dominant across institutions by policy—your institution can be sued for not having enough women—men have fallen behind. Andrews posits this has resulted in an unhealthy feminization of whole disciplines and careers, and along with it, the emergence of woke culture. The developmental timelines match up, and her reasoning is not without merit.

She explains, “Everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” She invites us to “think about all the things that wokeness means: Valuing empathy over rationality, safety over risk, conformity and cohesion over competition and hierarchy.” She explains, “All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine” by policy in leading cultural institutions. Increasingly, as major institutions became dominated by groups of ideologically driven women, these institutions change in predictable ways in accord with collective female values.

Andrews notes what is plain: “In moral reasoning, women have an ethic of caring and men have an ethic of justice.” She adds, “In making a moral judgement, men will ask what are the rules and facts. Women tend to be more interested in context and relationships.” When institutionalized, these values birth wokeness, even among men.

Of course, both of these feminine ways of seeing the world have always been essential in parenting. They make marriage and the family work. But they are just now being applied in ahistorical, socially engineered ways throughout important institutions, most of which are cratering in public confidence.

Journalism and academia are the institutions tasked with pursuing and educating on truth. Now we have the widely enforced norm where some truths dare not be pursued because they make others feel bad. Andrews uses the examples of Larry Summers, who was chased out as Harvard’s president because he spoke the scientifically and demonstrably true truth that women tend not to prefer careers in the hard sciences. There was also James Damore, “the Google guy” fired from a truth-seeking company because he circulated a scientifically correct memo carefully explaining why Google coders are mostly all men: The work is simply more conducive to the wiring of the male brain. The increasing wokeness of the Grey Lady was why Bari Weiss ceremoniously resigned her dream job there. It became a feeling, not a truth-seeking institution.

Andrews’ thesis is indeed provocative and consequential, but she is not alone in these observations. U.K. writer Noah Carl wrote on this very thing in 2021. Two scholars in the field of social psychology, Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, gave compelling evidence for it in 2022. Winegard took the subject up again recently in defense of Andrews.

Andrews is not saying the feminine is inherently toxic. She is after all, a strong, healthy woman of some accomplishment. She is positing that the socially engineered “equity” of women across so many institutions turned the genuine virtue of the feminine into an “-ism” and that has not been without concerning affect. Her solution is to simply take our thumb off the scale, let women compete and appreciate that intentionally feminizing our institutions has not been without cost.

True or false, this woman’s ideas enrich the debate.