Culture Friday: The feminization of everything

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, November 14th.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is author, speaker, Katie McCoy. Good morning Katie!

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning, Nick and Myrna.

EICHER: There’s a viral essay in Compact magazine that has stirred a lot of debate … and claiming to explain the real engine powering today’s woke culture. Writer Helen Andrews says it isn’t ideology at all—it’s demographics. Specifically, it’s what happens when women become the majority in powerful institutions. She makes the point … and I’m quoting Helen Andrews here … she writes that when fields like law, medicine, and journalism tipped female, they took on what she calls feminine traits: namely, she says, empathy over logic, safety over risk, consensus over confrontation.

She labels this the “great feminization” of American life and warns it could threaten open debate, meritocracy, and even the rule of law.

So Katie, you studied all the waves of feminism, do you think the Andrews argument is fair? Or is she missing something, blaming women for cultural changes that have deeper causes?

MCCOY: It’s a thought-provoking theory, but at the base of it, I think that she’s confusing or conflating the symptoms of a cultural malady with the diagnosis of that cultural malady.

Now the things that she brings up are observationally true. You can look back, especially in second-wave feminism, 1960s and 70s. First of all, it metastasized in the academy, and then it spread to a woman-centered view of specific disciplines, like medicine, law, history, etc.

The problem comes when she’s denying the connection to Marxism, and she does so in an absolute black-and-white way that’s just not historically or philosophically accurate. At the core of feminist theory, which is what this author is criticizing—at least the effects of it—is critical theory. It’s just critical theory applied to gender. That’s what effectively feminism is.

So the diagnosis, according to critical theory, of the problem of humanity: it’s all a matter of power. Who has it, who doesn’t, who should have it, who shouldn’t. Running underneath all of it is conflict.

Now, with that in mind, let’s think through what she was arguing in this essay. What she describes is grounded in feminist critical theory—not the presence of females, but the deconstruction and then demonization of masculinity and the replacing of it as a dominant influence with a new dominant influence, which is the feminization of humanity. Right there at the core of it is conflict.

What she does is identifies the symptoms. Now those symptoms are valid. But here’s the irony, Nick: when you really get into her argument, the irony of her theory is that her solution appears to be just continue the problem the opposite direction. She says we need to just change which gender, and then consequently, which gendered characteristics, are dominant in that power dynamic of society. That’s not going to fix the problem.

So what should the solution be as we come across ideas like this? Well, the solution is recognizing that innate gender differences, rightly ordered and expressed, have a created design behind them—that God’s design for male and female in his image is very good, Genesis says. And then when we are aligned with the intent of that design, from our relationship with our Creator, then our relationship in our other human relationships, and then consequently society writ large, will be in harmony.

BROWN: Okay, I’m sure we’re going to come back to this, but let’s pivot just a bit from the great feminization to the radicalization of young women.

So let’s talk about exit polls and what they reveal about young Christian women. David Mitzenmacher wrote a stunningly powerful piece on what he calls the radicalization of young women, and there are several excerpts that just struck me.

So let’s talk about the exit polls from last Tuesday’s election, and I’m wondering, Katie, what do they say about young women?

MCCOY: Effectively, we are seeing all the chickens come home to roost, because now we have two generations since second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution that happened concurrently with that, where the message that women were told is it is effectively all about you. It is all about your experience. Your experience is authoritative over every other source of authority, including Scripture, including indeed nature itself.

That the pursuit of your happiness is your deepest and most precious pursuit, and anything that would be getting in the way is not just in the way, but it is oppressive. And so what you have is a culture that has constantly told women that if you don’t want to have a baby right now, you shouldn’t have to. In fact, anyone that will be pushing that on you is part of the problem that goes all the way back to the patriarchy.

Here we are again: critical theory, gender conflict, all of this stuff. You could put it in a big pot of soup and you just let it simmer. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Women drawn to—this article notes things we’ve talked about—that young men are trending more ideologically right, young women are trending more ideologically left. And part of that, I believe, is that as women are less and less connected to family life, they are more self-identifying with a political cause. You can go read Mary Eberstadt’s Primal Screams for some research on this.

But identity politics is taking the place of God, religion, family, and all of the ordering principles and priorities that those relationships bring. So as a result, if your happiness and your political alignment are the most foundational aspects of your identity, then you are going to protect them. And you’re going to privilege and prioritize them over and against everything that Scripture says, everything that Christianity espouses, and everything that your church teaches you.

EICHER: Katie, I want to return to a theme inspired by Helen Andrews.

In a recent piece in the Free Press, Bari Weiss invited several women to weigh in, including former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, from the first Trump term—and I wanted to call particular attention to her.

DeVos warned about compassion becoming unmoored from justice—feelings elevated over facts—and said that mindset leads to Title IX–style injustices she witnessed firsthand.

So in Christian terms, Katie, how do we hold mercy and truth together?

MCCOY: When former Secretary DeVos gave her response, it was so perfect that she cited Micah 6:8, because that is an organizing verse for so many of us when we think about who we should be in society—that we would do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

And we see, whether it’s from all the way back in the Pentateuch, the book of Deuteronomy, to the book of Acts, to the model of the early church, we see this pattern that justice and mercy go together in God’s people in the ministry that they have to others who don’t know Him.

Why? Because every human being’s value comes from being an image bearer of God. We see in the early church that they were taking care of the poor and they were proclaiming a biblical sexual ethic. These things don’t have to be in conflict with each other. In fact, they shouldn’t.

In fact, I’ll go even further, Nick, and say that if they are, then we as God’s people are looking a lot more like the world than we are the church.

BROWN: One more question for you, Katie. What risks arise when cultural debates about gender spill into theology—when traits coded masculine or feminine get moralized as good or bad?

MCCOY: Yeah, so when we think about typical male or masculine traits, typical female or feminine traits, when we start talking about which one is intrinsically more moral or more virtuous, I hope that we know more than to do that.

But let’s talk about what’s wrong with that. First of all, when you look at Scripture, the primary goal of every human being is to know and glorify God. We do that as male or female, but virtue is not gendered.

In fact, in the whole scheme of Scripture, there are not that many gendered passages, and the ones that are deal with our relationships to each other, and that is part of how we express our discipleship. But the idea that certain virtues are gendered—that goes against the teaching of Scripture.

For instance, we’re all called to be gentle. Now we express that gentleness according to our design. If a man has courage, a woman has courage—is that going to look and be expressed differently? I think it can.

So here’s how I think we should think about this. When we’re talking about characteristics between men and women, we often think about them as a seesaw. We’re trying to keep this right balance. But it’s not a seesaw. A seesaw is precarious. The slightest move and you throw it off balance.

I want us to think more about the relationship between male and female characteristics not as a seesaw but as a jungle gym. A jungle gym is bolted into the ground. A jungle gym has a foundation. You’re using something to dig it into the earth. It has a foundation that is not going to move, and it’s not going to change with the wind.

With that foundation—upon that foundation—we build our sense of what it means to be male and female. That foundation is nature and Scripture, or what we call general revelation and special revelation.

So if we were to just shift to hammering sins that are more typically associated with women—like gossip, manipulation, codependency, immodesty—if we just shift and make some kind of overcorrection, well then we’re right back to viewing the problem as one of balance rather than foundation.

The last paragraph of Mitzenmacher’s article hits the nail on the head. He takes seriously the foundation of forming women’s discipleship—that is calling them upward, calling them to fulfill their purpose, that is grounded in who they are as morally accounted image bearers of God.

That’s not seeing male/female as a seesaw. That’s seeing male and female as grounded in the foundation of God’s created design. And we build upon that as we are growing in virtue and growing into the character of Christ.

EICHER: Author and speaker Katie McCoy. Always a pleasure.

MCCOY: Hey, thanks for having me.

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