What are the best indicators that a person will embrace left-wing authoritarianism? An interesting study, related by psychologist Jordan Peterson years ago, found that the best indicator was having low verbal intelligence.
Number two was “being female.”
None of this would surprise commentator Andrea Widburg. (I don’t think it did surprise her, either, when I recently related it to her.) This is likely ditto for PJ Media’s Megan Fox, who questioned women’s suffrage in 2016. And it certainly wouldn’t shock Helen Andrews, who recently wrote a very popular article titled “The Great Feminization.” As you may imagine, she doesn’t find it so great.
Andrews opens talking about the 2005 cancellation of then-Harvard president Larry Summers. What happened? Summers, seeking to explain at a conference why there were relatively few women in hard sciences, mentioned two factors. It was partially due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end,” he suggested. Second, men and women make different career choices “not attributable to socialization.”
He was subsequently destroyed via a feminist jihad.
The kicker is that Summers delivered his arguments most deferentially, fully aware of his audience’s feminist sensitivities. It didn’t help him. Nor did the most important factor: that what he said was wholly true. Moreover, writes Andrews, citing a 2019 essay by one “J. Stone,” it
wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments.
“This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine,” Andrews later added. “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”
The Harridan Code
Now, it should be noted that, as I’ve pointed out, all societies have their social codes, enforced via scorn and ostracism (and sometimes more). Yet there is a difference. Heresy laws, let’s say, were considered to be based on the objective and were applied to everyone. Cancel cultists, however, make no such claim; their code is subjective. It doesn’t have principles but ever-changing preferences based on what currently “feels right” and who the “transgressor” is. (E.g., a black person can use the n-word; a white person may not.) This feelings-orientation is an obvious clue that at issue is a feminine phenomenon.
Andrews then states the bottom line. “Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment,” she writes. “It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.”
Andrews presents the numbers on this. (E.g., women dominate academia now; they also constitute 46 percent of managers.) But here’s something else. Many complain about how internet comment sections, such as at the notorious MSN.com, exhibit iron-muzzle-level censorship. Unmentioned:
It is mainly women doing the censoring.
In fact, according to a Grok AI analysis I ran, 70-plus percent of internet content moderators are female.
This isn’t surprising, since men and women disagree profoundly on free speech. As Andrews writes:
One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.
Don’t Make the Girls Cry
This difference is easily explainable. When interacting, men routinely razz each other, sometimes mercilessly (“Hey, listen, ya’ fat b——!”). As a wonderful woman I knew once put it, “It sounds so mean.”
Of course, though, it isn’t meant that way. It’s a form of male bonding, a type of jocular fun. Men roll with these punches and then continue being buddies. Interacting that way with women, however, would generally hurt their feelings.
And when women control comments sections — or college/workplace/governmental speech codes — they naturally, instinctively, reflexively apply their “sensitivity” mindset. They censor “offensiveness” that could bruise feelings. The problem?
It’s completely subjective. Most everything offends someone and most everyone is offended by something. But you can’t and won’t prohibit most everything, so what happens?
You end up picking and choosing winners and losers — based on what you feel yourself is offensive — whether you realize it or not. This also can hurt feelings: those of the censored group. So when someone says “I’m being compassionate,” you always have to ask: toward whom?
Yet the most tragic casualty isn’t feelings. It’s Truth. This is because since “the Truth hurts” (sometimes, anyway), it’s what’s often censored in “sensitivity’s” name.
As an example, Larry Summers lost his position not because he told damaging lies. In fact, no one could refute his assertions. All that mattered was that politically favored people (feminists) claimed to be offended and hurt. The real tragedy, too, was not that Summers was canceled. It’s that the Truth was.
More Consequences
This issue is too deep and complex to treat comprehensively in one article. But the aforementioned Widburg sums up some other problems inherent in “the great feminization.” Pulling no punches, she writes that female
dynamics may work well for interpersonal relationships, especially among groups of women in a village who must carry out tasks and raise children together, but it’s a failure at the national political level. Women are backstabbers, although the neurotic young women at the front line of leftist protests have become shrilly aggressive; they’re unable to compartmentalize, which means they cannot separate the personal from larger institutional or national goals; they carry grudges, which means wars cannot end, and more.
I mentioned part of the above years ago in “The Security Sex.” I pointed out that the family is by its nature a socialist unit. Aligning with this is the female mindset, which also is socialist by nature. The problem is when this is applied to the wider society — the nanny state results.
“The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things”
Returning to Andrews, she’s greatly concerned about this application of the feminine mindset to the wider society. She’s troubled about the prioritization of feelings over principles and the implications for our legal system. As she writes, a prerequisite for having the rule of law is that you follow rules
even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
As to the basic sex difference at issue here, coming to mind is an interesting study I read years ago. It concerned how boys and girls settle differences, differently. The boys would try to make sure things were fair for all involved and then shake hands, saying, “Deal? Deal.” The girls, in contrast, simply tried to ensure that all involved felt good about the outcome.
So from early ages, we see boys instinctively referencing principles. (Fairness involves the application of principles.) In other words, the boys are looking beyond themselves, toward the objective. The girls, however, are looking within themselves, toward their feelings, which are subjective.
Yet as has been said, “Feelings are not good indicators of reality.” Emotion changes with the wind; proper principles, which reflect Truth, are that sober, steady hand.
Andrews fears that this feminization does not bode well for our civilization. Her essay is long and quite masculine, too, in the sense of being very well reasoned. In other words, if her thesis is correct, her thesis will ultimately be dismissed by a society that increasingly considers reason patriarchal and passé.
