The Not So Great Feminization Theory
Did women cause the woke virus?
There was a very interesting recent essay by Helen Andrews—another contribution to that burgeoning genre, “the origins of woke” in which earnest detectives hunt for the moment when the West went mad, as if madness required a moment, and as if men did not always contain the seeds of their own undoing from the very beginning. The popularity of the essay speaks to its topicality and the sense of relief that “finally, someone said it out loud.” This, in itself, of course, is often good, but the essay also makes many good points, and I find it generally profitable, you should read it, yet I have some problems with its central thesis.
Andrews blames everything on feminization. “Wokeness,” she says with confidence, “is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.”
Simple! Simply feminine! How reassuring to discover that the most destabilizing ideological development in the West since 1945 can be explained by the increasing presence of women in institutional life. One almost admires the economy of it—one variable, one explanation. Easy. Clean. Neat.
Now, I share much of Andrews’s concern—her disgust, even—with wokeness and the enforced emasculation of Western culture and its men. Yet I must strongly disagree with her thesis, which mistakes a correlate for a cause, a symptom for a disease, and—worst of all—women for fools.
Even if we concede that the great feminization of Western institutions is a fact (and it is), there is no reason why such feminization should automatically result in all the destructive effects of wokeness. Why should women think it is their mission to fight capitalism, white men, settler colonialism, Western art, decolonize museums, destroy statues, correct history, and make the world around them dysfunctional and gay? Why would white women, who I assume are most women in this feminization wave, handpick the absolutely worst charlatan activists and bow in front of them? Why do they think their “epoch” means to transcend the demands of “truth” for the truth of “the struggle” (Listen to the music! struggle/kampf/jihad!), like Wikipedia/NPR CEO Katherine Maher said in her famous speech? Do such ideas follow from women being women or from being taught certain ideas? (I suggest we recognize our condition and start capitalizing all nouns in English.)
