Western men, post WWII American men particularly, have built societies so long safe, predictable, equitable, free, and comfortable, that women are afforded the luxury of imagining that men and masculinity are no longer necessary. Even that men are the only impediment to the utopian world they now have the unencumbered time to envision.
But there is a world outside of our Western bubble that is violent, driven to conquest, and interested only in expanding its own power. The more feminization weakens the West internally, the greater the danger we will be overwhelmed by reality outside of that bubble. Should that happen, and I don't see how to stop it, women's concerns about glass ceilings, workplace harassment, shared housework, and affordable childcare will fade into the rubble and terror as they cower and wonder who will protect them now?
The men their innate biology now sees as stronger, hence superior and more worthy of submission. Web search the term "shit test." Also "revealed preference," as you contemplate the meaning of hundreds of millions of copies of "50 Shades of Gray" and vampire/ werewolf mating fantasy books sold to western women.
The truth is ugly. Lies and collapse are uglier. Protection can be had before it comes to that, but there's a price to be paid for it. As there is for everything. Choose wisely.
Yep, basically this. It’s all fun and games until we need to fight for survival. Economic isn’t too far off for many EU countries, that would probably require removing the feminizing to rebuild.
The most infuriating part of modernity is the ambiguity of authority. Men can tolerate a superior who is a bit of an asshole, but they despise being mistreated by an invisible force they have no redress of grievances against.
Also, while I agree with your point the great feminization far preceded Civil rights law, and there is a biological force in play, it also made all-male spaces, often even private ones, illegal. There was a men's social club in Detroit that was forced to open itself up to women because big business deals were made there. Also, it's illegal to have exclusively male team once your business reaches a certain size. Civil Rights law didn't start this, but it's making sure it gets no competition.
So, law is downstream of culture, and will also be used as a hammer to force law to be downstream of culture, even more so, and with a sweet smile right after the words, “don’t you have some laboring that you need to go do?”
Heads women win, tails men lose and fortunately you are all so cute that men will never experience a moment when the juice won’t be worth the squeeze.
By the way, I don’t disagree with anything you said in your article, especially the last part where you predict that somehow in the future men will determine the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Maybe they’ll choose Allah!
I think the future will be less feminized than the present. Partly because feminized cultures will be replaced by more traditional ones.
But there's so much uncertainty in that prediction, both in the specific mechanisms and the timeframe. There is much ruin in a nation, and I think we'll be able to keep the wheels on a for a lot longer than some of the gloomier critics insist.
To me it seems obvious that the more patriarchal culture/societies are gaining ground, and wether we want it or not they’ll dominate and impose the rules of the game.
Exactly the same thing that happened during colonialism but maybe without even needing to invade the land (rules are going to be enforced by the reality of economics).
The “this is downstream of that” business is suspect, a thought stopper. American politics used to be downstream of the constitution; then the communist-infused feminist education system decided the constitution is evil, produced a plurality of zombie citizens, and now everything is downstream of enshittification. The competency crisis is downstream of that.
It's called feminization, but it's actually decay. Every rotting civilization passed through a stage of faggotry, inward-turning and wet chthonic cults
>I’m here to agree with Alexander and disagree with Andrews and Hanania as to the cause of wokeness and the Great Feminization. Politics and law are downstream of culture, not vice versa.
This incorrect assumption is why you and Alexander start from the wrong principles.
Law-making is downstream of culture--it is driven by democratically elected politicians crafting laws that reflect (generally) majoritarian thought and desire in the culture. However, law-interpretation--the judiciary--is expressly counter-majoritarian and, by design, serves as a check on the excesses of the majority on protections granted (or interpreted to be granted) by the constitution.
And it is through niche legal activism that judicial interpretations flow that constrain and diverge from the majority/culture.
Take, for example, County of Allegheny v ACLU. In 1986 the ACLU brought a case against Pittsburgh (and its county), seeking to enjoin the county from displaying a nativity and a menorah as part of its holiday festivities. The district court denied the injunction, the third circuit reversed saying both displays violated the establishment clause, and the supreme court reversed the third circuit saying *only* the nativity violated the establishment clause (the menorah did not). That Supreme Court ruling in 1989 was in no way reflective of the majority or culture.
Another great example is affirmative action, which has never been popular in the majoritarian or cultural sense (even in California!) but has had legal weight and purpose for generations now. It took SFFA in 2023 for the court to finally effectively say "Justice O'Connor's opinion in Grutter is now overruled, the use of race is no longer permitted in admissions". This is occurring at a time that the Supreme Court is *less* popular or culturally-aligned than at any point I can think of in my lifetime.
You need to pay attention to the legal activists that advance their causes and find purchase through sympathetic judges. Has anything the Courts have been doing protecting federal financial benefits for illegal aliens been culturally popular? Of course not, that's why mainstream outlets are constantly lying saying "this doesn't happen, Trump is lying to you!"--because it is so overwhelmingly unpopular it is easier to mislead the public!
I struggle to truly believe the 1971 ruling in Griggs v Duke Power, greenlighting many cases in the future, holding that even without discriminatory intent, company policies can be discriminatory, was ever culturally popular. And from Griggs, a whole plethora of "disparate impact" jurisprudence has shaped our society wildly.
Essentially arguing "Andrews is wrong because the law is just what is already popular and culturally relevant" is incorrect. The law is often not at all what is popular, rather the law is what judges rule. Andrews' piece in fact precisely argues that the feminizing judiciary (and she points to the 63% of Biden's judicial appointments being women) has the effect of the tail wagging the dog on the law.
In your piece, you argue, the civil rights law doesn't explain why [insert business area here chose to do things that targeted women in the last decade]. But it absolutely does! Andrews argues that laws designed to help women created systems where women effectively could not lose, and thus attained outsized and dominant control over business decisions. You give four examples of things "civil rights laws" don't explain: (i) boys fighting now involves therapists and lawyers, (ii) girlbosses are 80% of animated features, (iii) playgrounds have been neutered, (iv) women buy 80% of books, and publishers don't want to publish for men.
First, you're being too limited in your restriction to "civil rights laws" as the argument is more appropriately "laws generally". And "laws generally" directly explain (i) and (iii), where, just as the civil rights act in the 1960s changed the playing field in its own domain, so did the adoption of laws in the 60s and 70s changing from a contributory negligence framework to a comparative negligence framework--and liability exploded as attorneys pushed the envelope further and further with respect to which cases they'd bring to collect damages.
Additionally, for (ii), are girlboss films popular and do they sell well? (No--they are a reflection of women controlling the content production without necessary business pushback). For (iv) are women controlling what publishers publish and have they excluded men? (Yes--thus books are less likely to match male interests and males have fled the space so now 80% of books are bought by women) Andrews argues our laws have shaped the employee base, which has in turn shifted businesses away from maximizing profits to maximizing femininity. There's a straight line to be drawn there that I don't understand how you disagree with, especially since films and books are less culturally relevant than ever before. Those businesses moved against the culture, not with it (or at least, I think it can be said there were a few years of "this is interesting and new" but the culture moved away quickly and the businesses did not--and have yet to--respond).
All that to be said, the Andrews/Hanania theory has clear explanatory power. That isn't to say culture has no effect (or even that it is small), rather the law has a clear foot on the pedal that is not being lifted, and there is not any reason to believe it will in the near future with the institutional framework we have today (even if culture shifts, which I would argue it already has).
I think maybe I went too far in signaling my disagreement with Andrews and Hanania on the role of law here. My main disagreement is that the law, in itself, is insufficient to explain the religious zeal that advances various equality movements. The fact that judges tend to be selected for their adherence to this zealotry, and that it's less popular among he masses than in elite culture, doesn't really undermine my main thesis, I don't think. The elite may serve as the vanguard but the masses follow in their turn. It really is the case that mainstream culture, as well as elite culture, has radically feminized throughout the west, and the law can only explain a piece of that transformation.
At the same time, it's certainly informative that one of the main legal drivers of these movements, affirmative action, has been consistently unpopular since its inception 60 years ago. Same is true of disparate impact law, but to a lesser extent because normal people have no idea what it is -- when you explain it to them they think you're crazy.
A lot of this can be explained as women having a >4x stronger in-group preference than men. I wish I could remember where I read this statistic but search engines are (as per usual) failing to be competent right now, but I don't think anyone disagrees that women privilege other women all the time, regardless of what's right or just.
If you have one group that is extremely clannish, and another group (white men) trained to not view themselves as part of a group and to commit to meritocracy, it's inevitable the first will steamroller the second. The women will enter institutions by agreeing to uphold the male values (sometimes unarticulated implicit values), and then repeatedly betray them all in order to help other women. Men can't stop this because there's basically no limit to how networked women will suddenly become when it's time to punish a man, no limit to how many women (and male liberals) they can mobilize to crush someone's resistance. The case of James Damore is an excellent case study in this phenomenon at work, #MeToo is another (a giant pile of false allegations mostly useful to women for demonstrating what they can do to anyone even if they're innocent, for any reason or no reason).
If you look across history, basically every society except ours has had strict rules against women being allowed into politics, business, management, law ... anywhere involving decision making in which competence and fairness is required. They just weren't allowed in, at all. This phenomenon where even just one feminine female appearing in a group causes all the men to immediately adapt to her preferences is almost certainly why. Whether it's "female tears" that causes this or whether - much more likely based on the events I've witnessed - it's because the women will immediately mobilize insanely large networks of hysterical over-reactors if anything violates her preferences, I'm not sure really matters.
There's a collective action problem with all this - the man who folds first gets rewarded with sex, the man who doesn't fold suddenly discover all the women in his community now hates him, even if he did nothing wrong. Avoiding this outcome requires that EVERY man be forced to exclude ALL women. And that's the convention we see in the past.
The attack on men has not been, as we were so often told, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, but a disastrous waste and warping of human dignity. My search engine for "manosphere" currently displays 59,300 results which equate the manosphere with misogyny or as a form of radicalization, but this can't be organic. Government efforts must be involved. However, when just about every masculine quality is demeaned, as they long have been, feminism is somewhere to be found behind it.
One great example of business taking the feminine route nobody asked is the Bud debacle. I don’t know if they lost money and/or customers but that was a remarkably stupid move in any case.
I think there's a little bit of a miscategorization here. You are pointing to a real thing which is the feminization of elite society. No question about that, how did the judges get there in the first place, etc. Hanania is pointing out another true fact which is that while elite society has been feminized, there has never been an electoral mandate for the broader feminization of society and that the move from elite feminization to general feminization required both the force of law and the actions of an anti-democratic few in order to make it law. The argument that all of society has just naturally feminized is just obviously not true if you look at electoral outcomes and the idea that civil rights law didn't play a role in feminization is also obviously not true as Hanania shows in his book. So it's just two different arguments, both of which are right
For that reason, it's also very easy to imagine a world in which we don't end up in a totally feminized legal society because we are watching an elected president dismantle that. These forces are much less powerful than they appear, because they are less popular than they appear which is Hanania's point (back when he wasn't an insane person)
Yep, it’s not just the culture. You can afford to please women when they don’t have real power and cannot mess with the larger big decisions.
Problem definitely started happening in the western world right after they got voting rights and all kind of preferential treatment.
Its basically a post war thing, because there wasn’t enough men to balance the women’s vote, and by the 60’s its was already on the path.
In France we had May 68 and it was a revolutionary movement based on Marxist philosophy, that women absolutely love (suits their ideals and natural communistic tendencies).
From there, it was just a matter of time before it degraded into feminist nonsense. The massive Ponzi scheme that is the French pension system is basically the result and now it’s costing France basically all it has.
This is why women like men with confidence. They want to be sure that when they start asking for histrionic bullshit, he will say no and hold his ground.
If there is no pushback, she may lead him to chaos and demise and she’ll responsible for that, and if there is one thing women hate, it’s accountability.
A more traditionalist, shamanic perspective would point out that women are women through biology and nature, whereas it takes the active intervention of the older men through ritual and culture to actually make boys into men. So along with the atrazine turning the male frogs female (aka our whole chemical/industrial estrogenic food supply) we have a disappearance of any real initiatory, non-market masculine culture. Young men need active initiatory rites of passage where they are forcibly separated from the world of women (the mother world) and made to undergo intense ordeals (the boy must die) so as to be reborn as a man among men (the father world), thereby transforming into active agents and stewards of culture. We have none of that. Instead we have a gigantic bureaucratic mega-machine (the matrix) that strives for material comfort/convenience and rewards docility/obedience. The femenization is essentially domestication, as you point out. The impending thermodynamic collapse of the entire global industrial civilization will obviously rebalance the scales as we return to tribal survival reality.
I recall back in the '70s, when Women's Liberation meant that all male-only spaces had to either shut down or allow women, and pickets outside traditional British men's clubs led to the clubs either closing or allowing women. Same for all-male gyms and athletic clubs. How ironic to now see feminists up in arms about males (or, trans-women, as they prefer to be called) invading female spaces.
Later in my life I understood the genius of my father! He gave my mother all she wanted! She got every spangle and dangle possible. She wore the latest fashion! My mother was beautiful! My father a very successful executive, never listened to a word she said!
we have one blinding cataract of empirical evidence right in front of us: white men have created the safest, most comfortable, most just, most egalitarian, most prosperous societies on earth thus far. in fact, white men have pretty much been the only group of humans who have willingly conceded significant power to less powerful groups at their own expense, while they did not have to, and while it was profitable for them not to. now, the safest most comfortable cohort among us, (the safest most comfortable cohort of human beings ever to exist on earth, white women) wish to dethrone us totally convinced they can make things "better" (while dragging in plenty of other "diversity" as long as its not white and male). while i wish them every success, i have very serious doubts about the success of this endeavor. and there is zero evidence to support it in human history. there has not been on single successful truly or even mostly matriarchal society. related, no successful truly multicultural societies. its quite literally not even a thing (because, well, duh, even if and when it "works" neither culture is what it was.) *this will strike most as being racist, misogynistic and white supremacist. it is not. it is merely a series of empirical observations.
while i generally agree with you but there is important part i want to criticise you women and minorities tried a lot for what they have today they fought and some of their acts might not be justified so yes it means the culture white men built had problems for them which must have improved so white men were not immuine to failure mistakes and inhumanity at the same time yes they had power to ignore the weaker groups but remember this kind of looking at problem like yes giving those weaker than us rights were our generousity is also dangerous because we have moral systems which we can't dismiss people sufferings and applause people for not oppressing weaker it's not healthy mindset that is growing in men which is understandable but should not go unnoticed and also i said all of that bullshits to say that men made lots of mistakes in civilisation in order to achieve it of course women will make it and we should address and fix them but not to completely rooting for deleting them from social activity and silence them women must have influence on culture society and other things while their mistakes must be addressed too
The main driver in the reversal of the growth of feminization is probably going to be China. China is actively trying to stop feminization and increase the masculinity of boys and preserve it in society.
If they continue to advance technically and economically, then the elite in the US may rethink the idea that the future is feminine and Indian.
Currently a major hurdle is that White men right of center don't care about the future of their sons only their daughters. Thus the lack of anger over the jihad against young and middle aged white men while the anger at men competing with girls in sports.
I appreciate how this article differed from others on the topic and added to the discussion, rather than regurgitate. As a woman who works in tech in a male-dominated role, I am most used to the male “frat house”/“masculine nerds” environment. I guess I have encountered “feminization” at some companies. I think the main issues there are passive communication, overemphasis on equal treatment and intolerance to dissent. That being said, some of the frat-type environments also develop strong incentives for cohesion to the point that the “wrong” kind of dissent is socially punished, even if the rest of the environment appears masculine. Status signaling becomes an important part of the dynamic as well, detracting from actual progress.
In fact, many “tech bro” environments push for a “shared guiding vision” to align the team—often acting like they are doing some sort of “disruption” or “changing the landscape” even when the goal is often something mundane, like “sell more product and reach X% growth each week.” This can be fun and effective when done well, but for every team that pulls this off, there are countless failed efforts at mimicry, and such priorities often lead to status fixation, cliques, preoccupation with labels, and sensitivity to anyone who disagrees with leadership, doesn’t sound enthusiastic enough, or shares inconvenient facts/stats.
They may make emotional decisions, like condemn the messenger or hold melodramatic meetings in which they lecture people to have the right “spirit/attitude” instead of focusing on progress. In spite of the widespread embrace of masculinity, at times it can hardly feel any different than “nagging” teachers I had in elementary school. Unlike feminized environments, after they scold someone, their attitude is “toughen up, feelings don’t matter—progress is what matters.” But often, what triggered the scolding in the first place was an oversensitive ego/status threat/drama.
So overall, I’m still a little skeptical that those who surfaced this feminization issue and diagnosis are all that intent on actually understanding the causal mechanisms behind it, as I have yet to see anyone closely examine the incentive structure coinciding with its rise. Since “Feminization” also occurs in male-dominated spaces whenever the same incentives (such as for reputation management/public image, risk reduction, and emotional affirmation) appear, clearly the incentives exist independent of gender; these should be examined and changed if one hopes to address the problem.
Strong agree; the idea that workplaces were *less* beholden to cliques, status games, and emotional appeasement before is not well supported in my view or experience.
Another failure of the Great feminisation theory is that it is totally ignorant of very significant cross cultural differences. Are they really claiming that a Dutch woman is more agreeable/consensus oriented than a Korean man? Really?
If this ‘catering to women’ instinct exists to help the reproduction of a group, as you say… it’s clear when you look at statistics concerning the most accomplished of Western women that they are increasingly suffering of childlessness.
So this trend of giving women access to men’s spaces as a way to show us preferential treatment is becoming less and less effective in accomplishing its original biological purpose.
Probably, women are going to realize they don’t feel spoiled anymore (childless women tend to be very unhappy and miserable) and will look for a different means to be recipients of society’s best favor.
Great article. I think we’re watching the most serious unintended consequence of modern feminism play out in real time: collapsing birth rates. This isn’t a culture-war talking point, it’s a demographic reality that, if sustained, undermines the very continuity of societies.
In chasing a model of fulfillment historically designed around male life paths, many women are being encouraged to discard the very roles that make reproduction and family formation possible at scale. The result is a quiet, slow-moving catastrophe. I don’t know where this ends, but it’s hard to see how a civilization survives if it persuades its women not to reproduce.
What you call "persuading" is actually "women having a real choice for the first time in history." Even in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, TFR is plunging. The only places with really high birth rates are the poorest most religious parts of Africa and the ultra-religious parts of Israel that get subsidized by the state. If the only way civilization can survive is 1/2 the population being permanent 2nd class citizens, then it doesn't deserve to survive.
There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fairly recent descendants of immigrants in America who came to the country with views on many moral issues even modern conservatives would consider beyond the pale who are now so super woke American conservatives want them deported.
I simply don't buy the 'religious will outbreed us and somehow fail to lose half their kids to normal liberalism the moment it's offered to them like it has for the past x years.'
Like, people went from Mass-going observant Catholics to burning their bras in a decade in a more conservative society overall - yet this time, the massive majority of them will stay as reactionary as their parents? I can maybe buy a shift to the right on very specific issues, but overall, America in 2050 will be more socially liberal than America in 2025 just like America in 2025 is more socially liberal than 2000 and there will be new issues that cause Culture War ruptures. You'll have transgender conservatives who are anti-cyborg or whatever.
The idea that men historically had “real choice” is pure fiction. Men weren’t free, they were consumables. Drafted into wars, crushed in mines and factories, sent to die by the millions, and valued only for what they could produce or sacrifice. Tens of millions of men were killed in just the two world wars. That’s not privilege, that’s being treated as a resource.
Women were restricted. Men were disposable. Different cages, same lack of freedom.
And if a society defines “progress” as becoming biologically incapable of continuing itself, that’s not liberation it’s a slow-motion self-erasure. You can celebrate “choice” all you want, but extinct cultures don’t get to enjoy it.
The Origins of Woke isn't really about feminization per se. But Hanania does in fact have a theory of feminization which is actually super interesting, and which you don't engage with at all: mate selection in the face of weakened monogamy norms!
“Talk to somebody who went to high school in the 70s or 80s and they’ll tell you the most horrific stories about fights and bullying, events that used to be taken for granted that we now consider exceptional.”
So speaks the sheltered author. It is not exceptional today in inner city schools, increasingly in urban schools, and spreading. Public order is changing fast across the West due to rise in status and numbers of groups that laugh at the West’s feminization. What kitten finds impossible to imagine will probably be normal in a few generations. Yes, it will be unlike the society those like kitten love.
Yes I'm talking about the experience of middle-class white people here. If I instead chose to "center the experience of urban minorities" you would be mad about that too.
You are not strong in the Force, padawan. I’m not mad, and you are missing my point. Society is in motion. Open your eyes, see the future rising now. Otherwise your reforms will be like shooting skeet by aiming at where the birds were. You have to aim at where they will be.
The feminization you describe is a stage in the decay & evolution of our society. The middle class life you discuss is vaporizing right now - killed by rising inequality, decaying social order, and massive rapid demographic change. Rot begins on the fringe and moves to the heart. Fashion, music, and values flow from the inner cities to the middle class.
Talk to migrants & their children, to inner city Blacks, to Hispanics. Then report back about feminization. Now our liberal elites choose their leaders, reflecting elites’ preferences. But that will change.
well i don't know if you are man or woman but honestly men handeled this topic woth more care rationality opposite of women who considered themselves protectors of western traditional values but i didn’t get what do you suggest for stopping this feminization trend ?
Western men, post WWII American men particularly, have built societies so long safe, predictable, equitable, free, and comfortable, that women are afforded the luxury of imagining that men and masculinity are no longer necessary. Even that men are the only impediment to the utopian world they now have the unencumbered time to envision.
But there is a world outside of our Western bubble that is violent, driven to conquest, and interested only in expanding its own power. The more feminization weakens the West internally, the greater the danger we will be overwhelmed by reality outside of that bubble. Should that happen, and I don't see how to stop it, women's concerns about glass ceilings, workplace harassment, shared housework, and affordable childcare will fade into the rubble and terror as they cower and wonder who will protect them now?
"and wonder who will protect them now?"
The men their innate biology now sees as stronger, hence superior and more worthy of submission. Web search the term "shit test." Also "revealed preference," as you contemplate the meaning of hundreds of millions of copies of "50 Shades of Gray" and vampire/ werewolf mating fantasy books sold to western women.
The truth is ugly. Lies and collapse are uglier. Protection can be had before it comes to that, but there's a price to be paid for it. As there is for everything. Choose wisely.
Europe now.
Yep, basically this. It’s all fun and games until we need to fight for survival. Economic isn’t too far off for many EU countries, that would probably require removing the feminizing to rebuild.
That first paragraph of yours is apt and very well phrased! (Nothing wrong with the second one, either.)
The most infuriating part of modernity is the ambiguity of authority. Men can tolerate a superior who is a bit of an asshole, but they despise being mistreated by an invisible force they have no redress of grievances against.
Also, while I agree with your point the great feminization far preceded Civil rights law, and there is a biological force in play, it also made all-male spaces, often even private ones, illegal. There was a men's social club in Detroit that was forced to open itself up to women because big business deals were made there. Also, it's illegal to have exclusively male team once your business reaches a certain size. Civil Rights law didn't start this, but it's making sure it gets no competition.
True, the law serves as a hammer to break open any resistance that culture can't crack.
So, law is downstream of culture, and will also be used as a hammer to force law to be downstream of culture, even more so, and with a sweet smile right after the words, “don’t you have some laboring that you need to go do?”
Heads women win, tails men lose and fortunately you are all so cute that men will never experience a moment when the juice won’t be worth the squeeze.
By the way, I don’t disagree with anything you said in your article, especially the last part where you predict that somehow in the future men will determine the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Maybe they’ll choose Allah!
I think the future will be less feminized than the present. Partly because feminized cultures will be replaced by more traditional ones.
But there's so much uncertainty in that prediction, both in the specific mechanisms and the timeframe. There is much ruin in a nation, and I think we'll be able to keep the wheels on a for a lot longer than some of the gloomier critics insist.
Not if we don’t get a handle on our 38 trillion treasury debt. Things that can’t go on (interest on 38 trillion; hyper-feminized civilization) won’t.
To me it seems obvious that the more patriarchal culture/societies are gaining ground, and wether we want it or not they’ll dominate and impose the rules of the game.
Exactly the same thing that happened during colonialism but maybe without even needing to invade the land (rules are going to be enforced by the reality of economics).
Culture is downstream of law.
The “this is downstream of that” business is suspect, a thought stopper. American politics used to be downstream of the constitution; then the communist-infused feminist education system decided the constitution is evil, produced a plurality of zombie citizens, and now everything is downstream of enshittification. The competency crisis is downstream of that.
It's called feminization, but it's actually decay. Every rotting civilization passed through a stage of faggotry, inward-turning and wet chthonic cults
>I’m here to agree with Alexander and disagree with Andrews and Hanania as to the cause of wokeness and the Great Feminization. Politics and law are downstream of culture, not vice versa.
This incorrect assumption is why you and Alexander start from the wrong principles.
Law-making is downstream of culture--it is driven by democratically elected politicians crafting laws that reflect (generally) majoritarian thought and desire in the culture. However, law-interpretation--the judiciary--is expressly counter-majoritarian and, by design, serves as a check on the excesses of the majority on protections granted (or interpreted to be granted) by the constitution.
And it is through niche legal activism that judicial interpretations flow that constrain and diverge from the majority/culture.
Take, for example, County of Allegheny v ACLU. In 1986 the ACLU brought a case against Pittsburgh (and its county), seeking to enjoin the county from displaying a nativity and a menorah as part of its holiday festivities. The district court denied the injunction, the third circuit reversed saying both displays violated the establishment clause, and the supreme court reversed the third circuit saying *only* the nativity violated the establishment clause (the menorah did not). That Supreme Court ruling in 1989 was in no way reflective of the majority or culture.
Another great example is affirmative action, which has never been popular in the majoritarian or cultural sense (even in California!) but has had legal weight and purpose for generations now. It took SFFA in 2023 for the court to finally effectively say "Justice O'Connor's opinion in Grutter is now overruled, the use of race is no longer permitted in admissions". This is occurring at a time that the Supreme Court is *less* popular or culturally-aligned than at any point I can think of in my lifetime.
You need to pay attention to the legal activists that advance their causes and find purchase through sympathetic judges. Has anything the Courts have been doing protecting federal financial benefits for illegal aliens been culturally popular? Of course not, that's why mainstream outlets are constantly lying saying "this doesn't happen, Trump is lying to you!"--because it is so overwhelmingly unpopular it is easier to mislead the public!
I struggle to truly believe the 1971 ruling in Griggs v Duke Power, greenlighting many cases in the future, holding that even without discriminatory intent, company policies can be discriminatory, was ever culturally popular. And from Griggs, a whole plethora of "disparate impact" jurisprudence has shaped our society wildly.
Essentially arguing "Andrews is wrong because the law is just what is already popular and culturally relevant" is incorrect. The law is often not at all what is popular, rather the law is what judges rule. Andrews' piece in fact precisely argues that the feminizing judiciary (and she points to the 63% of Biden's judicial appointments being women) has the effect of the tail wagging the dog on the law.
In your piece, you argue, the civil rights law doesn't explain why [insert business area here chose to do things that targeted women in the last decade]. But it absolutely does! Andrews argues that laws designed to help women created systems where women effectively could not lose, and thus attained outsized and dominant control over business decisions. You give four examples of things "civil rights laws" don't explain: (i) boys fighting now involves therapists and lawyers, (ii) girlbosses are 80% of animated features, (iii) playgrounds have been neutered, (iv) women buy 80% of books, and publishers don't want to publish for men.
First, you're being too limited in your restriction to "civil rights laws" as the argument is more appropriately "laws generally". And "laws generally" directly explain (i) and (iii), where, just as the civil rights act in the 1960s changed the playing field in its own domain, so did the adoption of laws in the 60s and 70s changing from a contributory negligence framework to a comparative negligence framework--and liability exploded as attorneys pushed the envelope further and further with respect to which cases they'd bring to collect damages.
Additionally, for (ii), are girlboss films popular and do they sell well? (No--they are a reflection of women controlling the content production without necessary business pushback). For (iv) are women controlling what publishers publish and have they excluded men? (Yes--thus books are less likely to match male interests and males have fled the space so now 80% of books are bought by women) Andrews argues our laws have shaped the employee base, which has in turn shifted businesses away from maximizing profits to maximizing femininity. There's a straight line to be drawn there that I don't understand how you disagree with, especially since films and books are less culturally relevant than ever before. Those businesses moved against the culture, not with it (or at least, I think it can be said there were a few years of "this is interesting and new" but the culture moved away quickly and the businesses did not--and have yet to--respond).
All that to be said, the Andrews/Hanania theory has clear explanatory power. That isn't to say culture has no effect (or even that it is small), rather the law has a clear foot on the pedal that is not being lifted, and there is not any reason to believe it will in the near future with the institutional framework we have today (even if culture shifts, which I would argue it already has).
I think maybe I went too far in signaling my disagreement with Andrews and Hanania on the role of law here. My main disagreement is that the law, in itself, is insufficient to explain the religious zeal that advances various equality movements. The fact that judges tend to be selected for their adherence to this zealotry, and that it's less popular among he masses than in elite culture, doesn't really undermine my main thesis, I don't think. The elite may serve as the vanguard but the masses follow in their turn. It really is the case that mainstream culture, as well as elite culture, has radically feminized throughout the west, and the law can only explain a piece of that transformation.
At the same time, it's certainly informative that one of the main legal drivers of these movements, affirmative action, has been consistently unpopular since its inception 60 years ago. Same is true of disparate impact law, but to a lesser extent because normal people have no idea what it is -- when you explain it to them they think you're crazy.
A lot of this can be explained as women having a >4x stronger in-group preference than men. I wish I could remember where I read this statistic but search engines are (as per usual) failing to be competent right now, but I don't think anyone disagrees that women privilege other women all the time, regardless of what's right or just.
If you have one group that is extremely clannish, and another group (white men) trained to not view themselves as part of a group and to commit to meritocracy, it's inevitable the first will steamroller the second. The women will enter institutions by agreeing to uphold the male values (sometimes unarticulated implicit values), and then repeatedly betray them all in order to help other women. Men can't stop this because there's basically no limit to how networked women will suddenly become when it's time to punish a man, no limit to how many women (and male liberals) they can mobilize to crush someone's resistance. The case of James Damore is an excellent case study in this phenomenon at work, #MeToo is another (a giant pile of false allegations mostly useful to women for demonstrating what they can do to anyone even if they're innocent, for any reason or no reason).
If you look across history, basically every society except ours has had strict rules against women being allowed into politics, business, management, law ... anywhere involving decision making in which competence and fairness is required. They just weren't allowed in, at all. This phenomenon where even just one feminine female appearing in a group causes all the men to immediately adapt to her preferences is almost certainly why. Whether it's "female tears" that causes this or whether - much more likely based on the events I've witnessed - it's because the women will immediately mobilize insanely large networks of hysterical over-reactors if anything violates her preferences, I'm not sure really matters.
There's a collective action problem with all this - the man who folds first gets rewarded with sex, the man who doesn't fold suddenly discover all the women in his community now hates him, even if he did nothing wrong. Avoiding this outcome requires that EVERY man be forced to exclude ALL women. And that's the convention we see in the past.
The attack on men has not been, as we were so often told, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, but a disastrous waste and warping of human dignity. My search engine for "manosphere" currently displays 59,300 results which equate the manosphere with misogyny or as a form of radicalization, but this can't be organic. Government efforts must be involved. However, when just about every masculine quality is demeaned, as they long have been, feminism is somewhere to be found behind it.
See: https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-feminization-of-politics
Brilliant stated. Couldn't agree more.
Dang. Great comment. Write this into an article and you have my subscribe.
Thank you very much! I'll consider it
One great example of business taking the feminine route nobody asked is the Bud debacle. I don’t know if they lost money and/or customers but that was a remarkably stupid move in any case.
I think there's a little bit of a miscategorization here. You are pointing to a real thing which is the feminization of elite society. No question about that, how did the judges get there in the first place, etc. Hanania is pointing out another true fact which is that while elite society has been feminized, there has never been an electoral mandate for the broader feminization of society and that the move from elite feminization to general feminization required both the force of law and the actions of an anti-democratic few in order to make it law. The argument that all of society has just naturally feminized is just obviously not true if you look at electoral outcomes and the idea that civil rights law didn't play a role in feminization is also obviously not true as Hanania shows in his book. So it's just two different arguments, both of which are right
Well said. The cultural imperative she describes is real enough, but that doesn’t mean that what Andrews and Hanania describe isn’t real.
For that reason, it's also very easy to imagine a world in which we don't end up in a totally feminized legal society because we are watching an elected president dismantle that. These forces are much less powerful than they appear, because they are less popular than they appear which is Hanania's point (back when he wasn't an insane person)
Yep, it’s not just the culture. You can afford to please women when they don’t have real power and cannot mess with the larger big decisions.
Problem definitely started happening in the western world right after they got voting rights and all kind of preferential treatment.
Its basically a post war thing, because there wasn’t enough men to balance the women’s vote, and by the 60’s its was already on the path.
In France we had May 68 and it was a revolutionary movement based on Marxist philosophy, that women absolutely love (suits their ideals and natural communistic tendencies).
From there, it was just a matter of time before it degraded into feminist nonsense. The massive Ponzi scheme that is the French pension system is basically the result and now it’s costing France basically all it has.
My father never told my mom no. Esp. On big money matters.
Huge mistake. My mother even admits it now. All the sons see that.
This is why women like men with confidence. They want to be sure that when they start asking for histrionic bullshit, he will say no and hold his ground.
If there is no pushback, she may lead him to chaos and demise and she’ll responsible for that, and if there is one thing women hate, it’s accountability.
A more traditionalist, shamanic perspective would point out that women are women through biology and nature, whereas it takes the active intervention of the older men through ritual and culture to actually make boys into men. So along with the atrazine turning the male frogs female (aka our whole chemical/industrial estrogenic food supply) we have a disappearance of any real initiatory, non-market masculine culture. Young men need active initiatory rites of passage where they are forcibly separated from the world of women (the mother world) and made to undergo intense ordeals (the boy must die) so as to be reborn as a man among men (the father world), thereby transforming into active agents and stewards of culture. We have none of that. Instead we have a gigantic bureaucratic mega-machine (the matrix) that strives for material comfort/convenience and rewards docility/obedience. The femenization is essentially domestication, as you point out. The impending thermodynamic collapse of the entire global industrial civilization will obviously rebalance the scales as we return to tribal survival reality.
I recall back in the '70s, when Women's Liberation meant that all male-only spaces had to either shut down or allow women, and pickets outside traditional British men's clubs led to the clubs either closing or allowing women. Same for all-male gyms and athletic clubs. How ironic to now see feminists up in arms about males (or, trans-women, as they prefer to be called) invading female spaces.
Later in my life I understood the genius of my father! He gave my mother all she wanted! She got every spangle and dangle possible. She wore the latest fashion! My mother was beautiful! My father a very successful executive, never listened to a word she said!
we have one blinding cataract of empirical evidence right in front of us: white men have created the safest, most comfortable, most just, most egalitarian, most prosperous societies on earth thus far. in fact, white men have pretty much been the only group of humans who have willingly conceded significant power to less powerful groups at their own expense, while they did not have to, and while it was profitable for them not to. now, the safest most comfortable cohort among us, (the safest most comfortable cohort of human beings ever to exist on earth, white women) wish to dethrone us totally convinced they can make things "better" (while dragging in plenty of other "diversity" as long as its not white and male). while i wish them every success, i have very serious doubts about the success of this endeavor. and there is zero evidence to support it in human history. there has not been on single successful truly or even mostly matriarchal society. related, no successful truly multicultural societies. its quite literally not even a thing (because, well, duh, even if and when it "works" neither culture is what it was.) *this will strike most as being racist, misogynistic and white supremacist. it is not. it is merely a series of empirical observations.
while i generally agree with you but there is important part i want to criticise you women and minorities tried a lot for what they have today they fought and some of their acts might not be justified so yes it means the culture white men built had problems for them which must have improved so white men were not immuine to failure mistakes and inhumanity at the same time yes they had power to ignore the weaker groups but remember this kind of looking at problem like yes giving those weaker than us rights were our generousity is also dangerous because we have moral systems which we can't dismiss people sufferings and applause people for not oppressing weaker it's not healthy mindset that is growing in men which is understandable but should not go unnoticed and also i said all of that bullshits to say that men made lots of mistakes in civilisation in order to achieve it of course women will make it and we should address and fix them but not to completely rooting for deleting them from social activity and silence them women must have influence on culture society and other things while their mistakes must be addressed too
The main driver in the reversal of the growth of feminization is probably going to be China. China is actively trying to stop feminization and increase the masculinity of boys and preserve it in society.
If they continue to advance technically and economically, then the elite in the US may rethink the idea that the future is feminine and Indian.
Currently a major hurdle is that White men right of center don't care about the future of their sons only their daughters. Thus the lack of anger over the jihad against young and middle aged white men while the anger at men competing with girls in sports.
I appreciate how this article differed from others on the topic and added to the discussion, rather than regurgitate. As a woman who works in tech in a male-dominated role, I am most used to the male “frat house”/“masculine nerds” environment. I guess I have encountered “feminization” at some companies. I think the main issues there are passive communication, overemphasis on equal treatment and intolerance to dissent. That being said, some of the frat-type environments also develop strong incentives for cohesion to the point that the “wrong” kind of dissent is socially punished, even if the rest of the environment appears masculine. Status signaling becomes an important part of the dynamic as well, detracting from actual progress.
In fact, many “tech bro” environments push for a “shared guiding vision” to align the team—often acting like they are doing some sort of “disruption” or “changing the landscape” even when the goal is often something mundane, like “sell more product and reach X% growth each week.” This can be fun and effective when done well, but for every team that pulls this off, there are countless failed efforts at mimicry, and such priorities often lead to status fixation, cliques, preoccupation with labels, and sensitivity to anyone who disagrees with leadership, doesn’t sound enthusiastic enough, or shares inconvenient facts/stats.
They may make emotional decisions, like condemn the messenger or hold melodramatic meetings in which they lecture people to have the right “spirit/attitude” instead of focusing on progress. In spite of the widespread embrace of masculinity, at times it can hardly feel any different than “nagging” teachers I had in elementary school. Unlike feminized environments, after they scold someone, their attitude is “toughen up, feelings don’t matter—progress is what matters.” But often, what triggered the scolding in the first place was an oversensitive ego/status threat/drama.
So overall, I’m still a little skeptical that those who surfaced this feminization issue and diagnosis are all that intent on actually understanding the causal mechanisms behind it, as I have yet to see anyone closely examine the incentive structure coinciding with its rise. Since “Feminization” also occurs in male-dominated spaces whenever the same incentives (such as for reputation management/public image, risk reduction, and emotional affirmation) appear, clearly the incentives exist independent of gender; these should be examined and changed if one hopes to address the problem.
Strong agree; the idea that workplaces were *less* beholden to cliques, status games, and emotional appeasement before is not well supported in my view or experience.
Another failure of the Great feminisation theory is that it is totally ignorant of very significant cross cultural differences. Are they really claiming that a Dutch woman is more agreeable/consensus oriented than a Korean man? Really?
If this ‘catering to women’ instinct exists to help the reproduction of a group, as you say… it’s clear when you look at statistics concerning the most accomplished of Western women that they are increasingly suffering of childlessness.
So this trend of giving women access to men’s spaces as a way to show us preferential treatment is becoming less and less effective in accomplishing its original biological purpose.
Probably, women are going to realize they don’t feel spoiled anymore (childless women tend to be very unhappy and miserable) and will look for a different means to be recipients of society’s best favor.
Great article. I think we’re watching the most serious unintended consequence of modern feminism play out in real time: collapsing birth rates. This isn’t a culture-war talking point, it’s a demographic reality that, if sustained, undermines the very continuity of societies.
In chasing a model of fulfillment historically designed around male life paths, many women are being encouraged to discard the very roles that make reproduction and family formation possible at scale. The result is a quiet, slow-moving catastrophe. I don’t know where this ends, but it’s hard to see how a civilization survives if it persuades its women not to reproduce.
What you call "persuading" is actually "women having a real choice for the first time in history." Even in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, TFR is plunging. The only places with really high birth rates are the poorest most religious parts of Africa and the ultra-religious parts of Israel that get subsidized by the state. If the only way civilization can survive is 1/2 the population being permanent 2nd class citizens, then it doesn't deserve to survive.
Understand what you are saying here. The future belongs to whoever shows up. People with Western liberal values are not showing up.
There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fairly recent descendants of immigrants in America who came to the country with views on many moral issues even modern conservatives would consider beyond the pale who are now so super woke American conservatives want them deported.
I simply don't buy the 'religious will outbreed us and somehow fail to lose half their kids to normal liberalism the moment it's offered to them like it has for the past x years.'
Like, people went from Mass-going observant Catholics to burning their bras in a decade in a more conservative society overall - yet this time, the massive majority of them will stay as reactionary as their parents? I can maybe buy a shift to the right on very specific issues, but overall, America in 2050 will be more socially liberal than America in 2025 just like America in 2025 is more socially liberal than 2000 and there will be new issues that cause Culture War ruptures. You'll have transgender conservatives who are anti-cyborg or whatever.
The idea that men historically had “real choice” is pure fiction. Men weren’t free, they were consumables. Drafted into wars, crushed in mines and factories, sent to die by the millions, and valued only for what they could produce or sacrifice. Tens of millions of men were killed in just the two world wars. That’s not privilege, that’s being treated as a resource.
Women were restricted. Men were disposable. Different cages, same lack of freedom.
And if a society defines “progress” as becoming biologically incapable of continuing itself, that’s not liberation it’s a slow-motion self-erasure. You can celebrate “choice” all you want, but extinct cultures don’t get to enjoy it.
The Origins of Woke isn't really about feminization per se. But Hanania does in fact have a theory of feminization which is actually super interesting, and which you don't engage with at all: mate selection in the face of weakened monogamy norms!
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/a-mate-selection-theory-of-feminization
“Talk to somebody who went to high school in the 70s or 80s and they’ll tell you the most horrific stories about fights and bullying, events that used to be taken for granted that we now consider exceptional.”
So speaks the sheltered author. It is not exceptional today in inner city schools, increasingly in urban schools, and spreading. Public order is changing fast across the West due to rise in status and numbers of groups that laugh at the West’s feminization. What kitten finds impossible to imagine will probably be normal in a few generations. Yes, it will be unlike the society those like kitten love.
Yes I'm talking about the experience of middle-class white people here. If I instead chose to "center the experience of urban minorities" you would be mad about that too.
You are not strong in the Force, padawan. I’m not mad, and you are missing my point. Society is in motion. Open your eyes, see the future rising now. Otherwise your reforms will be like shooting skeet by aiming at where the birds were. You have to aim at where they will be.
The feminization you describe is a stage in the decay & evolution of our society. The middle class life you discuss is vaporizing right now - killed by rising inequality, decaying social order, and massive rapid demographic change. Rot begins on the fringe and moves to the heart. Fashion, music, and values flow from the inner cities to the middle class.
Talk to migrants & their children, to inner city Blacks, to Hispanics. Then report back about feminization. Now our liberal elites choose their leaders, reflecting elites’ preferences. But that will change.
well i don't know if you are man or woman but honestly men handeled this topic woth more care rationality opposite of women who considered themselves protectors of western traditional values but i didn’t get what do you suggest for stopping this feminization trend ?