We have met the enemy of civilization, and it’s women.
Not individual women, mind you. Because any given individual woman can possess masculine characteristics. And certainly not homemakers — those are the women who are doing the job they’ve done for millenniums, taking care of the family.
No, the challenge to civilization is presented, in the view of Helen Andrews, a writer and editor who served as a senior editor at The American Conservative, by the women who are entering the workplace in such great numbers that they now make up large portions or majorities of their professions. In that case, the supposed feminine commitment to “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition” manifests itself as the dread wokeness and ultimately destroys institutions and professions.
That’s the core thesis of an essay by Andrews that was based on a speech she gave at the National Conservatism conference in September.
Both the essay and the speech are generating an immense amount of conversation. The speech, “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture,” has been viewed over 175,000 times, a number that dwarfs the views for any other speech at this year’s convention. The essay is the toast of parts of the right on X, where it is hailed as “electrifying,” “incisive” and “provocative,” with a “great deal of explanatory power.”
The reasons are plain to see. First, it’s yet another contribution to one of the most prominent debates in America — regarding the differences, whatever they are, between men and women and the declining dominance of men in education and the work force.
Second, it scratches some specific itches of the new right, including the desire to return to an imagined American past that was far better than the present along with the relentless impulse to decry the supposed decline of America, one of the new right’s favorite themes, as something that “they” have done to “you.” There are villains in every new right story, and in this case the villains are women, and the crime they commit is … being themselves.
Before I dive into the problems with Andrews’s argument, I want to begin with a note of agreement. “The great feminization,” which she defined in her speech as “the increasing representation of women in all of the institutions of our society,” has had immense consequences for American life and culture. It is very much worth studying and understanding the ways that our nation and civilization have changed as a result.
For example, it’s worth understanding why men have largely fled certain fields that they used to dominate, including (as Andrews highlights) academic psychology, where women earn 75 percent of the doctoral degrees.
I also agree with Andrews that men and women are dispositionally different in the aggregate. By that, I mean that while any given woman can certainly be more stereotypically masculine (or any given man can be more stereotypically feminine), as a group men and women do tend to approach the world differently.
For example, a 2022 study of nearly 306,000 people in 57 countries found that women demonstrated more cognitive empathy than men in 36 countries, they were similar in 21 countries, and there was no country in which men registered higher cognitive empathy than women.
I also agree with Andrews that even the most well-meaning legal reforms can have negative effects. Misdirected zeal in a righteous cause can create profound injustice. Overzealous enforcement of laws prohibiting race or sex discrimination, for example, can sometimes infringe core constitutional rights, including the freedom of speech.
It’s also true that an overzealous commitment to fighting crime can tempt a country to forsake due process or to relish in cruel or unjust punishments, such as cheering strikes that kill suspected drug traffickers without even a whiff of legal process.
In fact, those are precisely the areas in which illiberal leftism has been most damaging. Speech codes were often motivated by a desire to prevent racial or sexual harassment at universities, but they were so broad in scope that they violated the free speech rights of students at campuses across the country.
Campus tribunals frequently violated the due process rights of male students out of a desire to protect women from sexual abuse. But neither of these observations is new, and neither challenge rose anywhere close to the status of a civilizational crisis.
In both cases, in fact, the illiberal threat is receding — thanks in part to years of litigation I was myself involved in that resulted in legal doctrines that preserve civil rights laws without doing violence to constitutional rights.
But Andrews goes much, much further than observing that the culture of the workplace changes as more women enter a profession — or that just ends are sometimes pursued through unjust means. Instead, her position is that the increased representation of women in the government, economy and education is a “potential threat to civilization.”
That’s a big claim, and big claims require compelling evidence. As I read Andrews’s essay, I was struck by two thoughts: She doesn’t understand men, and she doesn’t understand the past.
It’s difficult to overstate how much she idealizes men and disparages women. This is very consistent with a new-right culture that has responded to anti-male extremes of the far left with a manosphere that glories in male strength and aggression.
She paraphrases the work of the psychologist Joyce Benenson, saying that men “developed group dynamics optimized for war, while women developed group dynamics optimized for protecting their offspring.”
How does that play out in the real world? “Men, therefore, developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday,” Andrews wrote. “Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women’s conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus.”
While conflict can be followed by immediate peace, that is far from the historical norm. The past and present are littered with interminable conflicts. It was a male-dominated world during the Hundred Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War, and any number of protracted conflicts throughout world history. Women aren’t responsible for the endless carnage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The list could go on and on and on, but men are very capable of holding grudges, and the history of the masculine-dominated world is one of persistent, brutal conflict across continents and cultures.
Or consider this remarkable assertion: “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” How can that claim survive even the most cursory historical analysis? Countless male-led revolutionary and radical movements have featured denunciations and purges, secret informants and struggle sessions.
It was not squadrons of women who guillotined dissenters during the French Revolution.
Even in the present day, the MAGA movement engages in cancel culture with remarkable vigor. And those cancellations are intended to protect the feelings — yes, the feelings — of the men on the right.
Why else would one engage in a search-and-destroy mission for anyone who either celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death or simply criticized him after he died? Why detain an immigrant, a Turkish grad student who came to the United States on a valid visa, whose offense was coauthoring an opinion essay? Why try to stop elementary school children from reading books like “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story”?
When you encounter the young men of the new right — their faces all too often twisted in rage — “rational” is often not the first word that comes to mind.
Andrews vastly understates the role of emotion in masculinity. We are not coldly rational creatures. Many of the greatest achievements of civilization are rooted in part in the emotions of men — from the magnificent music of the greatest composers to the soaring words of our nation’s founding fathers.
At the same time, many of the world’s greatest horrors, past and present, are rooted in male emotion. The rage and fury of war have bathed the world in blood. Hatred fosters discrimination. Greed leads to exploitation.
But Andrews’s most remarkable statement was her assessment of the role of women in the legal profession. “The field that frightens me most is the law,” she wrote. “All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”
What’s the basis for this assertion? She went back to the Obama administration: “A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama.” Those Title IX procedures often were woefully inadequate. They often did violate the due process rights of the (mostly male) accused students.
If you want to talk about the most systematic and sustained abuse of due process in American history, I’d refer you to Jim Crow. How many female judges or lawyers populated the Southern justice system before the Civil Rights Act?
That brings us to a larger point: As the workplace has become more inclusive, Americans have become more prosperous. As women have gained more political power, our nation has become more just.
Consider the immense and positive social changes in the United States since women won the right to vote in 1920. That’s not because women are better than men, but it is a consequence of bringing half of humanity (with all of the gifts and talents of countless millions of women) into full and equal participation in our national life.
In many ways, Andrews’s piece is an essay-length argument for the old Ben Shapiro line, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Facts, in this telling, are rational and masculine. Feelings are irrational and feminine. Facts can be trusted. Feelings cannot.
That’s an impoverished view of moral reasoning. Kelly Chapman, a culture writer for The Spectator, posted a beautiful response on her Substack, where she writes under the pseudonym Audrey Horne. “To Andrews,” Chapman argued, “empathy (girlish, frilled) clouds reason (chiseled, plain) and creates an organizational — yea, civilizational — liability.” But, as Chapman observed, emotion isn’t an impediment to moral reasoning; it’s indispensable to it.
“Indignation, awe, remorse, and yes, empathy — all these gut-level feelings are what make moral reasoning possible,” Chapman wrote. “When that capacity is simultaneously gendered and discredited, it is not only the moral agency of women that suffers, but moral knowledge itself.”
This is exactly right. We are all balls of reason and emotion. To render either automatically suspect, or to embrace either unconditionally, is to diminish part of our humanity and undermine our capacity for virtue. In fact, they are so linked together that it’s impossible to truly separate them in our minds or hearts.
The new right groans under the weight of its nostalgia for a nation that did not exist. It pines for a story that vindicates its reactionary rage. And in writing about a false enemy that destroyed a fake past, Andrews and the many other architects of the right-wing gender wars are committing the very sins they attribute to the enemies they detest.
Their emotions have gotten the best of them. In the name of masculine toughness, their fear and insecurity lead them astray.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was inspired (if that’s the appropriate word) by reports of yet another racist and misogynist Republican group chat. Is this just another case of men (and a few women) behaving badly or is something darker and deeper happening?
When you combine all the elements — yet another Republican racism scandal, death wishes from a Democratic politician, Vance’s decision to excuse the inexcusable — you can see the ways in which 10 years of Trumpism have twisted the American soul.
I know very well that there were corrupt and venal politicians and political staff members before Donald Trump. I know that America has endured periods of more extreme anger and polarization than we’re enduring today (and not just in and around the Civil War). But we’re currently trapped in a dynamic that is tempting many millions of Americans to indulge their worst impulses.
First, when the most powerful and successful politician of the past decade is an immoral man who is dishonest, cruel and illiberal at a fundamental level, it creates a situation — especially in his own party — that rewards all the same vices.
The result is a push-pull dynamic that pushes people of good character out of the party and pulls in new leaders and new people who share the leader’s ethos. Every year, this cultural trend reinforces itself. Decency becomes rarer, and decent people feel more isolated.
Our Saturday round table — this time I chatted with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jamelle Bouie — was a fun change of pace. We stepped back from the daily news cycle and talked about the outsized role of the South in American politics and culture. Here’s how I started the conversation:
I’m going to tell y’all a story that is — I’ll say it this way: It’s the first moment when I knew that Never Trump was absolutely cooked. And that was early in 2016.
There had been some glimmers of hope that Donald Trump could be stopped after the Iowa caucuses. Remember, he underperformed there. Then he comes to the South, and I can remember watching him — here’s a New Yorker, a New York real estate developer, a reality TV star. He should not, on paper, be somebody who’s going to really connect with the American South.
But then I looked at him, and I watched him operate, and I thought: “Oh, we’re done. He’s sweeping Super Tuesday.”
Why? Because he was a very familiar figure if you are somebody who’s paid attention to Southern culture and politics. He immediately fit into that mold of Huey Long, of George Wallace, of Edwin Edwards from Louisiana, and I thought, “This person is absolutely connecting at a very fundamental level with his audience.” And he’s kept connecting.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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