Feminization, Patriarchy, and the Blame Game

On The Great Feminization and who's really to blame for all this change.

You may have noticed that the Trump Administration is very manly:

deptofwar

A post shared by @deptofwar

In his speech to all of the Generals in the entire United States Military at Quantico last month, Secretary of War¹ Pete Hegseth demanded the US Military “defeminize” and get back to “standards.”

I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat unit with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men, or troops who are not fully proficient on their assigned weapons platform or task or under a leader who was the first but not the best. Standards must be uniform, gender neutral and high. If not, they’re not standards. They’re just suggestions, suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed.

It’s not just administration officials. Helen Andrews, a conservative commentator, recently gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference that was “the only speech anyone was talking about,” according to the National Review. The speech Overcoming the Feminization of Culture was turned into an essay for Compact entitled The Great Feminization and is now making the rounds² on the internet.

Conservative men (like Pete Hegseth) have been making a not-so-subtle argument that the feminization of our culture is the problem - maybe Helen Andrews’s piece is hitting because it’s a woman making the argument:

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?

Andrews’ essay leans heavily on a book of the same name written by an anonymous author, J. Stone.

Andrews moderates many of Stone’s more radical positions and dresses them up for public consumption. Stone warns of the collapse of Western Civilization in the final paragraph of an essay titled Mistress of Misrule:

Will the West continue to collapse by a slow process of social dissolution? It’s easy to picture that happening simply as a continuation of trends our cultural matriarchy promotes: Third-World-ization via immigration, white self-hatred, discrimination against men, low Western fertility, diversity over merit, sanctioned lawlessness for protected racial groups, etc. It’s also plausible that the collapse will be more sudden and catastrophic, via, say, lost wars, surrenders to invader-immigrants who are not so feminized (or so civilized), or even, one day, the sentimental granting of civil rights to “sentient” machines. Anyway, as far as I can see, all paths in our feminized civilization lead to the failure of that civilization. It’s almost beside the point to note that that failure will bring this brief, strange period of female cultural hegemony to a close. adding that the real problem is anti-discrimination laws (and the human resources officers who enforce them).

Andrews adds that the real problem is anti-discrimination laws (and the human resources officers who enforce them).

I disagree with Andrew’s logic. Especially the way she ignores emotions we often associate with men (anger) when she describes women as too emotional for the workplace.

Andrews and Stone join a long line of thinkers who’ve fretted over the collapse of Western civilization . In fact, a concern for the collapse of Western civilization is the burning ember that fuels the conservative movement.

Here’s Edmond Burke, the founder of conservatism, in Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790:

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.

Here’s Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West in 1918:

Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

One day, the French Revolution is the cause of the fall of Western Civilization. Next, it’s the industrialization and urbanization of America. Today, Stone and Andrews argue, the real cause is women.

It’s easy (very easy) to scoff at these predictable waves of moral panic coming from conservative thinkers. The nugget in this that I want to challenge myself to take seriously is fear in the face of radical change. In 1790, Burke witnessed the violent collapse of a 1,000-year-old monarchy and feudal social order represented by the French Revolution. This was a massive change for Europe and Western society more broadly. In 1918, Spengler was living through the Industrial Revolution, which dramatically changed how millions of people around the world not only worked but also lived together after thousands of years of largely agrarian existence.

We, too, are living through a massive shift in our society and culture, marked by the large-scale entry of women into the workplace. The anxiety people feel around this change is real. Conservative arguments gain traction when they point out the costs of change, even if their ultimate conclusions border on ridiculous.

Women and men, on average, are different. Of course, a dramatic gender shift in our workplaces and institutions has changed things. Is acknowledging that sexism? According to Stone and Andrews, when Larry Summers was fired from Harvard in 2005 for speaking to those differences in an off-the-record talk, it was the pivotal moment in the “woke era.”

Nature seeks balance, and for every Helen Andrews and J. Stone there are advocates of a more liberal and progressive worldview who, in their circles, might believe that men are, in fact, worse than women. Generations of patriarchy have consequences - and many of them are devastating: girls being denied education, child marriage, and the scourge of domestic violence. But I worry that the conversation on the left becomes “men are broken and all the systems and institutions they run are bad, too”.

In other words, Western civilization is a corrupt, sexist, racist, colonial project because men were in charge.

For much of my early adult life, I myself would have argued this exact point. As a political science major and women’s studies minor, I studied and supported a moral framework that centered care and empathy as the correct political values. I would have argued the exact opposite of Stone and Andrews —that the real problems in Western civilization were caused by men and the absence of traditionally feminine moral values.

I would direct you to seminal feminist text, but this Terminator tirade from Julia Sugarbaker on Designing Women sums it up best:

I gave birth to three sons. My belief that men are the problem could not coexist with these beautiful boys I’m raising.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion helped me start to unpack my thinking about gender and values. It wasn’t until I read Haidt describe other moral values—fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty — that I began to expand my moral imagination.

My boys - and the amazing men in my life - weren’t the problem. I could punish them for being born male, but that wouldn’t cure for the discrimination and sexism I have experienced in my own life.

Men and women are different.

When the gender balance in our institutions changes, those differences are on full display. Add the stress on those institutions caused by accelerated technological change (which Andrews conveniently ignores), and we have a complex tangle of issues that all the Human Resources officers in the world can’t fix (and that firing them won’t solve).

Civilization is no more at risk today than in 1790 when Edmund Burke freaked out over the French Revolution, but he was right to be concerned about the violent change he was witnessed. Plenty of his contemporaries shared his concern, including Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist foremother and author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women, who wrote home to England that “death and misery, in every shape of terrour, haunts this devoted country.”

Then as now, it will take the full palette of our moral values to articulate the risks and rewards of great change. Neither gender bears full responsibility for the problems. But together, perhaps, we can find a solution.

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This Week’s Low Stakes Controversy

In honor of Sarah’s discussion of the days of the week on the Good Morning News Brief this week

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What We’re Reading this Week

• Sarah: The Rules of Investing Are Being Loosened. Could It Lead to the Next 1929? (New York Times Magazine | Gift Link)

• Beth: Sing Your Own Setlist (NeighborFood by

  Courtney Rowland
  )

• Alise: The Black Wolf by Louise Penny

• Maggie: Trump is Sleepwalking into a Political Disaster (The Atlantic)

Next Week on Pantsuit Politics: Representative Sarah McBride³

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1. Formerly Defense

2. Women change their minds (The Argument), Women’s Professional Rise is Good, Actually (Slow Boring), Toxic Femininity (The Bulwark), and more

3. SQUEAL!!!!!!