On fighting like a girl

Great Feminization, not-so-great conversations

Despite what you may have heard on the website formerly known as Twitter, I do not like the thesis currently known as The Great Feminization. I did not hold hands with the thesis underneath the bleachers after school, I will not be attending prom with the thesis, please don’t put it in the newspaper, etc, etc. (You can put it in the newspaper that I got mad at the person who put that in the newspaper; more on that later.)

What do I think about the Great Feminization thesis, I don’t know. Or, to put it another way: lots of thoughts, some only halfway coherent, and many in active contradiction to each other. I keep tripping right off the bat over the word feminization, which on one hand clearly describes something real but on the other hand seems to get people’s backs up in a way that makes a productive discussion impossible, which is a problem. If you can’t have a conversation about your theory without thirty minutes of preemptive throat clearing about how the term you’ve coined to describe feminized cultural norms does not amount to an attack on women as a category, perhaps it would be easier to just choose a different word. (I say this, but then there’s a part of me that immediately wants to retort that no, it would not be easier— and furthermore, that it’s hard to imagine a more feminized endeavor than quibbling over the language used to describe an idea to the point where the idea itself never gets discussed at all.)

Anyway: Where I probably disagree most with Andrews, or at least am not persuaded, is on the notion that feminization is the downstream effect of having more females in any given environment. It seems clear that the phenomenon known as feminization can happen independent of the presence of women (which is why, again, if we need a name for this thing we should maybe call it something else). It’s correlation rather than causation: not to be all “men be dancing like this”, but some traits and skills are more commonly associated with women than men, and these do happen to be the traits and skills that correlate with success in the attention and information economies of the current moment.

This isn’t even a new argument; Hannah Rosin wrote more or less this same thing in a mega-viral Atlantic article fifteen years ago, and then again in her 2012 book The End of Men. And while I recall a certain amount of controversy at the time —that it was too soon to declare victory for women, that we needed to stay on guard lest the patriarchy rise again — it seemed like she had cottoned on to an observable phenomenon that was both logical and inevitable, and not even necessarily about the sexes so much as the digital revolution, disembodiment in daily life, and the natural tendency of societies to get softer as they become more civilized.

Forget Rosin and Andrews and the 21st century gender wars entirely: have you guys ever read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells? It’s a tale of a dystopian future in which the world has schismed into two discrete races of human beings, the beautiful, sensitive, gentle Eloi, and the brutish Morlocks who live in subterranean caves — and while this is ostensibly a parable about class divisions, the gendered implications in Wells’s vision of the future have been always present and never particularly subtle.

Morlocks be dancing like this. (Illustration by Virgil Finlay.)

All of which is to say, it’s hard to fully sign onto the Great Feminization as contemporary theory of gender-everything when the phenomenon it describes is also reflected in the text of a work of science fiction written in 1895.

The phenomenon is still real, though, and one need not assign blame to women as a class to see how contemporary society is a place that generally privileges more feminine-coded traits — including but not limited to the ability to form social alliances, to talk about feelings, and to destroy the lives of people you hate through the power of weaponized gossip. You can also very obviously trace a line from, say, the practice of trashing in 1970s-era feminist spaces to the cancel culture of the past ten years; there’s a reason why the communities consumed by this type of drama tend to be either filled with or dominated by women, why it was online knitting communities and YA authors eating each other alive over microaggressions circa 2020 and not, like, the fantasy football league. The data bears this out, too: at the population level, women are simply more censorious, more into public shaming or socially ostracizing people, more hostile to ideas they consider offensive or harmful.

Of course, men are more prone to literally punching each other to death, so it’s not like they’re better. But nobody is trying to rewrite the rules of various institutions right now to center the people whose preferred form of conflict resolution is punching, nor are we currently in the midst of a decades-long project to make workplaces more comfortable for men by stigmatizing the ways in which women prefer to engage. That thing Andrews said about running the office like a Montessori kindergarten got a lot of blowback for being (maybe unnecessarily) waggish, but it’s genuinely among her strongest points. Right now, a woman in a male-dominated industry who doesn’t like the pinup calendar on her boss’s wall can sue him for creating a “hostile environment”, and win, and be applauded — whereas a man in a female-dominated workplace who doesn’t like the “Male Tears” mug on his boss’s desk can just go cry about it, preferably into the mug, while everyone points and laughs.

This may not be the world’s biggest problem, or even a problem at all. But surely it’s a thing worth discussing, particularly given the evidence that at least some of the things we’ve done to level the playing field for women are causing significant and unanticipated second-order effects. One of the most interesting implications of Andrews’s thesis (unexplored in the article, although I understand she may be writing a book on it) is that women’s increased participation in the workforce is upstream of loneliness, loss of community, and the “bowling alone” phenomenon — because the women who used to volunteer their time and labor to community-building are now channeling their talents and ambitions into paid work. If that’s happening, it would good to know it, and to understand what it means.

Of course, getting to that understanding takes time, thought, and a willingness to tolerate ambiguity — all of which are evidently in short supply these days, particularly amongst certain writers at a certain website whose name rhymes with “pool shark.” I don’t want to dwell on this part, but long story short, I was working my way through an early draft of the post you’re currently reading when a journalist published an article in which she claimed, inaccurately, that I “liked” Andrews’s thesis and was trying to contort myself intellectually in support of it — and then tripled down on the inaccuracy and publicly mocked my request for a correction before finally, mysteriously changing her mind and updating the piece in the middle of the night.

Because the journalist in question has done this to me before (she’s a bit of a serial offender on this front), I’ve already written at length about how much I resent being nonconsensually cast as the antagonist in some nuance-intolerant person’s political morality play. Feel free to read that essay; I will only add, in this case, that if it doesn’t quite clear the legal bar for defamation to publish false claims about a fellow journalist’s intellectual output, it is still disgraceful conduct, and bad manners, and a very stupid waste of everyone’s time.

On that note: it remains inaccurate to say I “like” Andrews’s thesis, except as a subject for debate, and if you think that’s a distinction without a difference, all I can say is that you and I are simply not going to have a productive conversation about this (or anything else, probably.) What I really don’t like, though, is the Manichean shape of a discourse that tries to shut down that debate by insisting that you are either a bad person who likes the thesis or a good person who rejects it. Look: I am not a Helen Andrews completist, I have neither rifled through her underwear drawer nor read her diary, but I do get the sense that she’s engaged in roughly the same project as I am, trying to figure out why things are how they are and to articulate the truth as she understands it. That doesn’t mean the Great Feminization theory is true, or that it explains everything; it just means that if Andrews is wrong, it’s wrong as in mistaken, not wrong as in evil. And if the stakes of advancing a wrong argument in Compact magazine are not zero, they’re still low enough that we should be able to talk about it without behaving in a way that ironically makes it seem like it might be actually correct.