Lady Parts

The radical feminism of the Great Feminization

the blue horizon rockets looking like giant penises makes this whole thing sort of incredible to think about

The power of men to make decisions and determine policy, to create culture and to control the institutions of culture, is simultaneously held to be the logical outcome of male dominance and proof of its existence. Every institution that is structurally male-dominant is also ideologically male-dominant; or its structure would change. Every group that is structurally maledominant functions as concrete resistance, material resistance, to the liberation of women: it prohibits the exodus of women from the obligations and disadvantages, not to mention the cruelties, of inferiority.

Andrea Dworkin, “Right Wing Women” (1983)

We’ve all been hearing about one thing this week: Sydney Sweeney. Well, her, and Helen Andrews’ essay on “The Great Feminization”, which she based on a viral (I guess) talk at the National Conservative conference last year, and which she “defended” (in the same way Brazil defended against Germany in the 2014 World Cup semifinals) in Ross Douthat’s podcast in a discussion with centrist commentator Leah Libresco Sargeant. Her brilliant, groundbreaking thesis is “lotsa women around the office these days… and that’s bad”. The question here, besides “why did it take her a year to turn a speech she wrote into a longform article”, is - is she right about women in the workplace?

The lady doth protest too much… and/or too little

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

That’s basically the core of Andrews’ argument, which goes as follows: wokeness (which she doesn’t especially define) is due to women gaining a stronger foothold in academia, media, and other white collar professions, because women are either biologically or socially or both or neither conditioned to prioritize consensus and feelings over duking it out until you get your way. This is because men developed group dynamics centered around war, while women developed them around protecting offspring, which is why men’s beefs with each other are shorter, because war famously does not leave behind any unpleasant after-effects. Women, meanwhile, fight over scarce resources for offspring, which for some reason leads to women being consensus-driven but also scheming and underhanded. After “anti discrimination laws” imposed all matter of quotas on companies and institutions, women started gaining a foothold on the white shoe world, which led to more feminized norms of behavior, which itself led to fewer men, and so on and so forth.

As you might see, it’s not really clear what Andrews thinks are feminine traits, where they come from, and what consequences they bring to society. You might think Andrews is being blatantly hypocritical: she mentions, in one paragraph, male lawyers being more aggressive than female lawyers during discussions; some paragraphs later, she lambasts female judges for talking over their male colleagues. According to Andrews, biology and or socialization leads to women rejecting open conflict, except when they drag the reputations of people like Larry Summers, Brett Kavanaugh, and Bari Weiss through the mud by openly confronting them, which makes them hostile and aggressive. There’s also the question of whether a woman-led judicial system would be too harsh or too soft - she mentions women having too much empathy, but then having too little for accused rapists in Title IX courts in colleges. But wouldn’t allowing for less discussion, less due process, and more decision on behalf of a singular adjudicator be masculine, and not feminine?

During Andrews’s discussion with Sargeant, she comes off worse and worse, being completely incapable of answering basic questions like “why is it bad for a majority of veterinarians to be women”, or “wouldn’t the Red Scare, Cultural Revolution, and Salem Witch Trials, which have been compared to wokeness, disprove your thesis that it’s women”. Her strongest case appears to be that if you completely misread a fabricated statistic about how many medical practices are owned by private equity and apply completely backwards understandings of the causal claims of a very famous social scientist (Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin),

There’s been a million thinkpieces about how Andrews is a clown and a goat (not the basketball kind, the billy kind) and how her thesis makes no sense, completely contradicts the rest of Andrews’ stated political agenda, things like wokeness occurred without any women in charge, and how she is simply factually incorrect on many of its most important claims, particularly around psychology. For example, in the law, the difference isn’t that the judiciary went from being 0% female to 33% female and that’s why judges are ruling in all of these unbelievable ways - it’s because most women on the judiciary bench are liberals appointed by liberal politicians who who agree with them on their liberal ideas and those ideas are why women on the bench decide to rule the way they do. Her timeline is also, fundamentally, wrong: the first steps of “wokeness” weren’t taken in 2016 and 2017, but in 2014 and 2015, with controversies like the “Oscars So White” hashtag and the initial Black Lives Matter protests. And you can look at immigration, which women are more skeptical towards than men, even though this goes completely against the idea that women suffer from too much of the empathies - in fact, you could make a pretty strong case that “woke” is a masculine, not a feminine, way of thinking and seeing the world. And there’s also the fact that women are just more politically intolerant than men, even for their own side of an argument, which makes the whole agreeableness and why-can’t-we-all-get-along thing sort of suspect anyways.

Leaning out

I think that’s all pretty sophistic on my part and also already been done, which is why I mostly cited other people already doing the debunking. I think the real question is whether she’s right about the fundamental dynamics here: that “quotas” and other civil rights discrimination measures are why men are falling behind relative to women. The argument on quotas leading to overfeminization leading to wokeness is pretty interestingly similar to Richard Hanania’s book The Origins of Woke, which makes the argument that the legal system of anti discrimination law created the culture and policy of corporations and universities. Tyler Austin Harper, who isn’t precisely Ibram X. Kendi, called the book “a racist, sexist fever dream, the product of an author whose not-inconsiderable intellect has been warped and distorted—like many young conservatives’—by a noxious mixture of racist pseudoscience and the casual misogyny of the extremely online right” in a review for The Atlantic, where he dissects just how stupid and incorrect the book is. The book substantially misrepresents many of the legal and judicial cases it presents, including one Andrews also mentions, about a woman complaining about her coworkers playing porn in a mechanic shop.

This isn’t really to say that Andrews makes the same case Hanania does (in fact, she doesn’t), but that even a much stronger version of the “civil rights law caused wokeness” claim falls completely apart under scrutiny - not to mention that the research on “DEI initiatives” and quotas itself is extremely mixed. There is some evidence pointing to diversity coordinators not resulting in any improvement in actual, tangible diversity, and the diversity of high-level corporate teams doesn’t exponentially increase on its own: “C-suite” types are substantially less likely to incorporate a second woman after the first one is hired, but the likelihood increases and then plateaus after subsequent women are hired. This is especially true if the women may be perceived to be “diversity hires” or meeting some sort of quota, even if no such quota actually exists. On the other hand, there is some evidence pointing to diversity initiatives actually increasing diversity (mirrored by anti-DEI legislation decreasing diversity), which results in higher employee satisfaction with the office culture - which lines up well with research finding that ethnic and gender diversity results in improved outcomes for research teams, and that imposing a quota on the percent of teachers who are male seems to increase student performance. Gender diversity, in particular, seems to improve the academic performance of both women and men, particularly by making men more competitive, and having a higher share of women in certain educational settings tends to improve significantly the educational and career outcomes of women. There’s also the fact that there’s evidence of significant discrimination in the labor market still, and some of that affects women, and some affects men, particularly in the care sector. However, the evidence for widespread gender-based distortions to the labor market in the United States is somewhat faint, and instead many issues with slower gender progress seem to be related to generational issues - particularly the reluctance of baby boomers to retire. A lot of discrimination is driven by socializing: there’s a strong association at both the social and individual level between spending time with women and having less sexist views, at the same time as cloistered professional networks and selective socializing appear to be determinant at the moment of getting important positions.

So the evidence on diversity in the workplace is very muddled and contradictory, but it’s muddled and contradictory in a way that disproves every possible version of Andrews’ argument. Even worse are her claims about male and female psychological traits - particularly, while there is something to her claims about differences in agreeableness, there’s basically nothing else that she’s right about. On average, men place higher value on money, have more self esteem and self confidence, are less risk averse, are more competitive, and have a stronger internal locus of control (as in, tend to think they are personally responsible for whatever happens in their lives). The evidence translating these factors into labor market outcomes is a bit confusing, in large part because of measurement issues, but for instance men’s preference for money might result in them taking longer working hours and thus making more money, since “greedy” (for time) careers have enormous gender wage gaps.

But this kind of gets to a big issue: the reason women have been less likely to work these long hours isn’t that they don’t want to, it’s that traditional norms around marriage and family meant that women had to become the primary caregivers at home. Without the economic ramifications of motherhood, there basically isn’t a gender wage gap, and in fact, women’s preference for “purpose” over “profit” can result in even longer job hours still - women seem to prioritize work over careers, the exact opposite of men, in fact. In fact, a lot of career decisions are driven by personal meaning and self-actualization (BoBos in Paradise style), which results in moral demands being made of companies - so this means that yes, Feminization might be driven by the demands of women, but these are also the most dedicated employees of major organizations, and their labor might pay off handsomely.

When you start looking at whether personality differences between men and women, at least in the traits mentioned two paragraphs ago, are nature or nurture, the whole thing unravels like cheap yarn. One of the most famous examples is the “negotiation gap”: the idea that women are less likely to negotiate (for pay raises, promotions, etc) than men. For instance, male undergraduates are 19% more likely to have their grades positively revised than female undergraduates; almost a third of this gap is due to gender differences in beliefs and personality traits. But when you look at why women are less likely to negotiate, some of it is indeed driven by personality traits, like women’s lower reported self confidence, but a lot is driven by the fact that women try to avoid the risk of negotiation when there’s ambiguity around it, and that women tend to be more selective and strategic regarding when to negotiate. Much like the cave-women of Andrews’s essay resort to subterfuge to ensure a higher share of the tribe’s berries, college undergrads might decide boosting a grade by a handful of points is less important than having a good relationship and reputation with faculty and TAs. But risk aversion and selectivity, not to mention lower self confidence, might not actually be inherent to women: research finds basically no evidence of a gap in ambition between men and women, but women publicly present as less ambitious in order to avoid risking backlash from other people, especially men, given dominant gender norms around women’s career aspirations - and, when prompting women to defy gender norms and apply to certain competitions, they are more likely to apply. Gender norms are, in fact, extremely important at determining women’s career outcomes, much moreso than discrimination (I’ve written a whole thing about this already): beyond the previously mentioned differences in schmoozing with the boss, there’s also the fact that women tend to experience being punished more severely for the same mistake than men, which might explain some variants of risk aversion - particularly, women’s longstanding reluctance to adopt new technologies at work, which extends to Artificial Intelligence despite no gender differences in likelihood to make a mistake, difficulty using AI, or concerns about the effects of AI on employment or skills. This is common across industries, even though AI proficiency is positive for job outcomes. Similarly, women report being less willing to lead large teams due to administrative burdens and the potential for conflict, but a large driver for this appears to be a lack of mentoring (which, yes, is extremely important) and a lack of accurate information on the specifics of each team, relating to the issues mentioned above. But also, the fact that women are less likely to lead large organizations should assuage Andrews - there will be no Great Feminization for long anyways.

So the Great Feminization thesis runs into a massive hurdle: most personality differences between women and men are, well, basically fake. Most of the issues around whether women are less suited for leadership because they are less likely to be in leadership are based on women thinking that they, for being women, are less suited for leadership. The idea that gender gaps in some personality traits may be driven by socialization (which is, again, Andrews’s thesis) is controversial; for instance, some reseachers point to the gender equality paradox, which points to some aspects of society (particularly career choice for women in STEM) becoming more, not less, accentuated in more gender-equal societies - but this appears to be driven by the role of gender stereotypes in career tracks, as well as by complicated statistical artifacts and, as usual, methodological and data concerns. There is, at the same time, evidence that the risk aversion gap between men and women is declining alongside other traits. So this is a complicated field of study, but the complications are all in Andrews’s detriment: either the Great Feminization is not self-reinforcing because women and men will grow more different, or it is self-eliminating because women will converge to the baseline psychometric traits of men.

Society cutting up men

The final, remaining question is pretty simple: are women actually outcompeting men? But to answer that question, we have to ask a different one first: why does Andrews believe what she believes?

In Right Wing Women, published in 1983, controversial feminist thinker Andrea Dworkin tries to answer this question. The book has had something of a resurgence lately, after being reissued by Picador Press in February of this year (with a foreword by Moira Donegan that you can read here), and its commentary on figures like tradwives, “MAGA women”, and other various bizarre forms of “fasc-she-sm” you sometimes encounter online. Dworkin’s case is pretty simple and straightforward: men are really bad to women, raping, abusing, and exploiting them. Left wing women recognize this and advocate for change. Right wing women also recognize this, and decide to strike a Faustian bargain - to save their physical bodies in exchange for their consciences. To quote the book;

Women die, mourning not the loss of their own lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal, by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.

Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat—all the male auteurs, scientists, and homespun philosophers on street corners will say so proudly. Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less willingly. In effect, she ransoms the remains of a life—what is left over after she has renounced willful individuality—by promising indifference to the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is the primary imperative of survival for women who live under male-supremacist rule.

The political right, in particular, makes pretty appealing promises to women: a safe, orderly world where women are kept fed and clothed by their fathers and then husbands, and are given children to love. The problem, first, was the fact that this bargain was less appealing than it sounded; for instance, Phyllis Schlafly, by all accounts an intellectually brilliant woman with a deep background in national security issues, was rewarded for her groundbreaking organizing to stop dead in its tracks a constitutional amendment that had been all but ratified and ensured widespread support in Washington DC with… no job in the Reagan administration. This gets to the real issue with right-wing gender politics (per Dworkin): to believe in them, you necessarily have to believe that women are inferior, intellectually and in capability, to men, and whether you’re a feminist or antifeminist depends on your apetite for risk. Dworkin, very intelligently, dissects the Sexual Revolution: in a way, the mothers who warned their daughters against giving into free love and flower power were right, because they didn’t secure full equality - so instead of settling with one abusive husband who could provide, they settled for dozens who couldn’t. Insights like this are why Dworkin’s role in modern feminism is somewhat controversial (particularly her ideas regarding porn and prostitution) - but, to be fair, it was also controversial in her own time. They weren’t the Sex Friendly Arguments, but the Sex Wars.

Fundamentally, I don’t see much of a difference between what Dworkin and Andrews think about men: quoth Dworkin “Since men are dominant, aggressive, controlling, powerful because of God or nature, the weak women must always have something to trade to get the protection of these strong men. Either the woman is too weak to care for herself or she is too weak to fend off men; in either case, she needs a male protector.” But I do see a difference between what they think women should do; Dworkin thought women should confront the challenge head on, and Andrews that they should get out of the way.

The interesting thing about Dworkin isn’t really what her book correctly explains, but what it gets wrong, because it’s also what Andrews gets wrong. Dworkin’s foibles are, by now, well known: she was an angry woman frequently prone to insensitive comparisons to, say, slavery, or the Holocaust. Her feminism, like most radical feminism of the 1970s, had serious blindspots when it came to things like race, class, or ability; some of the important academic concepts for Right Wing Women, which come from Michel Foucault and the concept of biopolitics, weren’t really as widely discussed as they are now. But the real blunder isn’t really the lack of intersectional analysis and other such The Right To Sex esque territory, but a much simpler question: why women were, in her time and in different ways now, relatively dispossessed.

Dworkin’s account is so complex it needs at least four charts and the entire final chapter of the book to explain, but in a nutshell, she thinks that women are dispossessed as part of a society-wide ploy to extort reproductive labor out of them. To retain this coercion, men invented not just economic exploitation of women, but also sexual exploitation through marriage, pornography, and prostitution; per Dworkin “A universal standard of human dignity is the only principle that completely repudiates sex-class exploitation and also propels all of us into a future where the fundamental political question is the quality of life for all human beings. Are women being subordinated to men? There is insufficient dignity in that.”. For Dworkin, neither economic nor biological liberation was enough for women - there needed to be a wholesale cultural change around gender norms and economics.

But that’s not what happened. Women, as seen in Andrews’s screed, are basically in charge of anything with, to Dworkin’s dismay, the exact same undergiriding of capitalism and labor exploitation, pornography and prostitution still around, and the nuclear family still being as big a burden as ever. There’s space flights with all-female crews being sent into orbit by the second or third richest man alive, who is the husband of one of the women. The question of how women made their way from the very bottom of the economic ladder to the very top can be answered by the first solo female Nobel Laureate in Economics, Claudia Goldin.

In ancient times, everyone had to work in fields to grow food, and because there’s never enough food, women as well as men worked at extremely high rates. As societies grew wealthy and industrialized, men could afford to sideline their wives and for them to stay home doing domestic labor, since society disadvantaged women relative to men. Then a number of things (the “Quiet Revolution”) happened that made women, around the 1960s but especially after the 1980s, catch up to men. The first was a change in the structure of the economy: most countries provided universal education to women and men, and because men had better opportunities doing physical-heavy labor in manufacturing, this meant that women could specialize in the services sector, and start attending higher education at elevated rates relative to the past. Secondly, new technologies drastically shrank the amount of labor needed to run a home, resulting in a bigger payoff to labor outside the home due to the low time requirement to cook and clean after the invention of the refrigerator, vacuum, and microwave (all of which, also, cost money). Thirdly, there was a cultural change, but a very moderate one: women’s rights activists persuaded society, especially men, of granting them equal rights in the job market, criminal justice, and economic opportunities, at least on paper. This came at a time when most men and most women had, due to labor shortages during World War One and Two, seen their mothers (and in some cases, coworkers) work outside the home. This meant that women were more economically empowered at the exact same time as the legalization of divorce, contraceptives, and abortion allowed them to take decisions over their own bodies and thus delay (or not) reproduction until the economically and personally optimal time.

Originally, women attended higher education to get married: in the 1950s and 60s, at the nadir of women’s labor force involvement, surveys showed that the main reason why women attended college was to find a (successful) husband, rather than a career of their own, because the returns to getting a husband through an education were higher than the results of getting a job through an education. This incentivized entry into higher education, which led to women catching up to and even surpassing men in college attainment - which seems to be caused mainly by women exhibiting more discipline in education and being more responsible with classwork, but which like a lot of these results, might respond to social factors (for instance, there’s not really much of a math gap between men and women before first grade). In detail, women perform better than men academically and have for a few decades, and also face fewer disciplinary issues, which also may entail men just not acquiring as many skills as women over their schooling. Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion parents care more about the schooling of girls (or find it easier to get them to do their homework), resulting in small gaps growing and growing over their educational lives.

Regardless of the causes, women started dominating education and the white collar world at an extremely advantageous time: in the last quarter of the 20th century, most developed and middle-income saw manufacturing decline and service jobs increase as a share of output and employment due to trade, lower unionization, and automation, a divergence that was worsened by the Great Recession of the 2000s. In consequence, the labor market split into two: lower-paying “manual” occupations (which include both construction and, say, childcare) and higher-paying “cognitive” jobs. The well paying “low skill” occupations that disappeared were disproportionately occupied by men: this was driven by the fact that a lot of these jobs (in manufacturing but also construction) had a big comparative advantage in, well, physical strength, as well as cultural norms around acceptable occupations for women. Meanwhile, women benefited firstly, because women experiencing automation risks increased their educational attainment and skill level (as opposed to men), and, more broadly, that women caught up with men in terms of average education and surpassed them in the last decade, at the same time. And the skills required in the cognitive sector aren’t just those acquired in the formal education system, but also soft skills and adeptness at handling social interaction - which women possess at higher rates than men, particularly in conversation, assertiveness, and empathy and positive emotion.

Conclusion

So, fundamentally, Andrews is wrong about the world in the same way Dworkin was - the modest, relative to their revolutionary aspirations, changes achieved by midcentury feminists were sufficient to get women to a point where conservatives see their gains and think, “are they just going to be in charge of everything now?”. In a world of brains instead of beauty or brawn, women seem perfectly capable of holding their own - and, as opposed to the weird personality essentialism of conservatism, seem decently suited to keeping these organizations in track. So if everything Andrews believes is just false and dumb, why does she believe it? Bizarrely, I think that Andrews’ essay is much closer to a form of feminism that is even more extreme than Andrea Dworkin’s - the feminist text closest in content to The Great Feminization is the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas.

Solanas, a crank and C-list artist, wrote the manifesto shortly before the act that made her famous: shooting, but not killing, artist Andy Warhol. The Manifesto is pretty straightforward: per Solanas, women are inherently superior to men in all intellectual and moral capabilities, it is imperative for them to take control of society (preferably through violence - SCUM is supposed to mean Society for Cutting Up Men) and impose their values of, you guessed it, empathy and agreeableness to all social endeavors. Since Solanas thought women are intellectually superior to men, then this arrangement will be eternal, and will result in the spread of a universal socialist progressivism to reign forever. To know the right-wing perspective on this this, I’ll quote Murray Rothbard on “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”:

The egalitarian revolt against biological reality, as significant as it is, is only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the “very organization of nature”; against the universe as such. At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will — in short, that reality can be instantly transformed by the mere wish or whim of human beings.

Put another way, the question of male supremacy was not a question for traditional antifeminism: “…if, indeed, men have succeeded in dominating every culture, then this in itself is a demonstration of male “superiority”; for if all genders are equal, how is it that male domination emerged in every case?” asked Rothbard. Women were never going to outcompete men. Andrews knows how flimsy her claim about quotas and discrimination is, which is why she never pushes it; instead, she seems to invert the fear - women are superior to men, like Solanas said, and LGBT socialism is inevitable with them in charge. Of course, much like Andrews’ writing, the SCUM Manifesto is a bunch of jumbled nonsense. But neither Solanas nor Andrews seems to realize it.