> 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?
> > 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](https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-great-feminization-hasnt-gone), [completely contradicts the rest of Andrews’ stated political agenda](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/11/the-great-feminization-essay-masculinization/684817/), [things like wokeness occurred without any women in charge](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/opinion/helen-andrews-feminization-compact.html), and how she is simply [factually incorrect on many of its most important claims, particularly around psychology](https://www.slowboring.com/p/womens-professional-rise-is-good). 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.
!ping FEMINISTS
SenranHaruka on
I can tell you the basic thesis that men feel alienated from “feminine culture” is probably true, like there genuinely are just so many subtleties to how the two “cultures” banter, conflict, even what they perceive the function and role of politics is in their lives. But that means the inverse is true too, that even in the absence of discrimination laws “masculine culture” in these same institutions kept women from feeling comfortable or advancing, and the feminization of culture is a logical attempt to find a compromise that leaves us both equally miserable at work.
The loss of cultural dominance comes with it the loss of a ton of comforts and subtleties that men and masculine culture people took for granted and have come to feel entitled to in various social settings, and we see a radicalization from that: “If women have to turn this into a no contact sport to feel comfortable with it, then women shouldn’t be involved in it” from people who genuinely have never known any other way to live or organize an institution. An institution without a male centered focus, culture, and power structure is to them an ocean without water, leaving them as fish flopping on the seabed.
I think these growing pains were inevitable and there will be a compromise but that compromise will necessary mean the previously dominant culture will feel somewhat uncomfortable in society until our culture around gender itself changes, we really can’t maintain a society of boys and girls like this, it fosters division and it denies both genders critical life skills if we insist on dividing those skills into two tracks and lock you into one your whole life. Society needs to androgynize.
Insanemode take: What we’re seeing is similar to a clash of nationalities in a society previously dominated by one nation. Historically the outcome of these has been balkanization and appropriately we’re seeing a retrenchment of voluntary or informal gender separation in cultural institutions outside of those where we are forced to integrate. Our society is headed down the path of the Dual Monarchy from Divergences of Darkness, attempting to create a synthetic Anglo-French Culture at a rate that doesn’t cause either the English or French to flip the table.
2 Comments
> 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?
> > 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](https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-great-feminization-hasnt-gone), [completely contradicts the rest of Andrews’ stated political agenda](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/11/the-great-feminization-essay-masculinization/684817/), [things like wokeness occurred without any women in charge](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/opinion/helen-andrews-feminization-compact.html), and how she is simply [factually incorrect on many of its most important claims, particularly around psychology](https://www.slowboring.com/p/womens-professional-rise-is-good). 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.
!ping FEMINISTS
I can tell you the basic thesis that men feel alienated from “feminine culture” is probably true, like there genuinely are just so many subtleties to how the two “cultures” banter, conflict, even what they perceive the function and role of politics is in their lives. But that means the inverse is true too, that even in the absence of discrimination laws “masculine culture” in these same institutions kept women from feeling comfortable or advancing, and the feminization of culture is a logical attempt to find a compromise that leaves us both equally miserable at work.
The loss of cultural dominance comes with it the loss of a ton of comforts and subtleties that men and masculine culture people took for granted and have come to feel entitled to in various social settings, and we see a radicalization from that: “If women have to turn this into a no contact sport to feel comfortable with it, then women shouldn’t be involved in it” from people who genuinely have never known any other way to live or organize an institution. An institution without a male centered focus, culture, and power structure is to them an ocean without water, leaving them as fish flopping on the seabed.
I think these growing pains were inevitable and there will be a compromise but that compromise will necessary mean the previously dominant culture will feel somewhat uncomfortable in society until our culture around gender itself changes, we really can’t maintain a society of boys and girls like this, it fosters division and it denies both genders critical life skills if we insist on dividing those skills into two tracks and lock you into one your whole life. Society needs to androgynize.
Insanemode take: What we’re seeing is similar to a clash of nationalities in a society previously dominated by one nation. Historically the outcome of these has been balkanization and appropriately we’re seeing a retrenchment of voluntary or informal gender separation in cultural institutions outside of those where we are forced to integrate. Our society is headed down the path of the Dual Monarchy from Divergences of Darkness, attempting to create a synthetic Anglo-French Culture at a rate that doesn’t cause either the English or French to flip the table.