“But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?”

—The Old Man and the Sea

Have you ever had a Big Idea—an idea with the potential to transform the way people think about their society and culture?

Imagine that you had such a Big Idea, but you weren’t a professional opinionator and didn’t have an easy way of getting your Big Idea “out there” in front of a lot of readers.

Imagine too that your Big Idea was going to be controversial enough, in mainstream circles, that publication under your own name would almost certainly cost you your livelihood.

What would you do?

Here is what I did—and, as they say, don’t try this at home.

THE BIG IDEA

Before getting into the timeline of events, I want to emphasize that I have written this in part for the benefit of other, younger writers, who may read it someday and find it useful—as an account of a process that is relevant to their ambitions but seldom set forth in detail. More than that, though, I see this as a “case history” supporting an argument for changes in how we deal with new ideas (of the non-copyrightable, non-patentable variety) and incentivize their originators.

Now to the what and when: It all started early in the new millennium, after I returned to the US following a decades-long sojourn abroad. As I settled in, certain differences in American culture, compared to what I’d known as a young adult, started becoming apparent. Themes of “trauma” and suffering seemed much more prominent in the culture, from media to medicine. Public policy debates were often competitive exercises in projecting compassion, or “empathy,” in regard to supposed victims. Political correctness, a hypersensitive projection of concern for the disadvantaged, seemed out of control. Even in my own somewhat technical line of work, I noticed similar changes in tone and emphasis.

Eventually the proverbial lightbulb winked on. As I put it in an essay (“The Demise of Guythink”) in late 2011:

… these empathy-related changes in public discourse are due in large part to the recent, unprecedented entry of women into public life in Western countries. Women have not only the right to vote but also a presence in key areas of society—science, law, business, politics—as never before, and it would be hard to believe that their influence has not changed the culture, bending it towards their own cognitive style. People now use the jokey phrase “endangered white male” . . . but what may be truly endangered here is the male cognitive style.

That may not be a good thing, if the male cognitive style evolved to be optimal for managing societies, while the female cognitive style is tuned for the rearing of children. There is a tendency in our culture now to treat empathy as a trait to be simply maximized. But “understanding and building systems,” as [Simon] Baron-Cohen puts it, is useful, too—and perhaps most if not all of our culture’s greatest failings now come not from a lack of empathy but from a failure to see how complex systems fit together, and how they may fly apart.

What also worries me is that too much empathy, or other related aspects of the female cognitive style, may be—we don’t know; probably no scientist would go near this question—less compatible with the reasoned debate and calm analytical thinking that are presumably needed in a healthy democracy, or in any mature society. Several years ago, then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers (who was later a White House adviser) referred rather delicately to the possibility that male/female cognitive differences partly explain the relative lack of female professors in math and science; he was, in effect, shouted down and forced from his post….

An inflexible, authoritarian, shout-them-down tendency is often said to be a feature of PC-think generally. PC-driven marches and protests (on campuses for example) typically are meant not to broaden a discourse but, rather, to repel or suppress an unwanted speaker—much as a mother, without any pretense of democracy or debate, would try to protect her children from an unwanted influence or their own innate waywardness. (“Because I said so!”)

There it was: the Big Idea! And it was big! What other theory had the same power to explain the dramatic waves of change that have been sweeping through modern societies in the past few decades? What other theory combined such a simple and compelling framework of understanding with such dark implications for Western civilization?

I posted “The Demise of Guythink” on a website I had set up—of very modest readership—where for several years I had published various short essays on cultural and science-related topics (anonymously, though some readers knew who I was).

As time went on, though, and the novelty and importance of this idea grew in my estimation, I increasingly thought of getting it published more prominently.

The problem was that I had no clear path for achieving that. I wasn’t a complete nobody—as a journalist, I had written a few books, and more than a few newspaper and magazine pieces, including op-eds. But that had been in the relatively distant past. Moreover, as the world had grown richer and the Internet had become a supremely powerful tool, the barriers to entry for becoming a “writer” had collapsed to virtually nothing, creating more competition than ever and making the process of big-media publication, from a cold start, harder than it had ever been. I pitched a roughly 600-word version of my thesis to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed people around that time . . . and, if memory serves, got the same result one would get from dropping a small stone into the darkness of a mile-deep well.

I might have persevered with other newspapers or webzines, but I soon concluded that that could be an uphill, potentially very costly struggle. The standard line set down by feminist activists—de facto thought leaders for Western women—was that the fairer sex was still hindered, harassed and victimized by all the things men did, and thus needed ever more power to achieve full emancipation and equality. Indeed, it seemed to me that women’s ability to influence men had always depended heavily on their claims to be relatively weak, needing special protection, etc. In other words, in the age-old power contest with males, females’ claims of powerlessness and victimization were basically reflexive and relentless. Thus, my observation that women were already moving past parity and achieving real dominance in many key areas of public life, from teaching and publishing to psychiatry . . . was likely to be dismissed as a fantasy, or, worse, suppressed as a heresy.

My further suggestion that women’s new dominance in Western civilization was hazardous to that civilization, because maternal thinking was not suited to the public sphere, would make this a heresy to be suppressed with extreme prejudice. I imagined screams, shouts and ululations until I was well and truly cancelled and silenced—to the extent that feminists and the Left had to take notice of me. So, publishing my Big Idea prominently under my own name didn’t seem wise, at least not before my retirement, which was still a long way off.

I can’t remember whether I received any direct feedback on the piece I posted on my website—I didn’t have the time or energy to maintain a comments section. But the site analytics suggested that it was read by at least thousands of people over the next year or so. A “manosphere” writer named Matt Forney linked to it in one of his own blog posts. That’s pretty much all I remember about its impact.

SCRATCHING THE ITCH

Years passed. Other events and interests held my attention. It was not until June of 2014 that the urge to write about cultural feminization rose up in me again.

This time I pitched a piece on the subject to Takimag, a small webzine that, although I didn’t normally read it, struck me as suitably uninhibited. The editor, the daughter of Takimag’s proprietor, said she was potentially interested, but wanted it shortened in a few ways. I complied and re-sent it. She then replied simply that she couldn’t use it after all. I was left with no clear idea of her reason, though naturally it occurred to me that pitching this idea to female editors was not an optimal strategy.

Where else could I send it? I figured that if even Takimag—somewhat fringy, and typically framed by the mainstream media as “far right”—wouldn’t touch this hot potato of an idea, and if female editors were problematic, then I’d have to venture still further out onto the fringe. The obvious place was the manosphere.

As a middle-aged family man, I didn’t have much use for “game,” complaints about the contemporary dating scene, or other themes central to that subculture. But the urge to get my idea out there, somehow, anyhow, was strong now. Without much effort (though I again had to shorten my submission by quite a bit), and using a pseudonym as most of their contributors did, I got a new version of my thesis published on Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings site. If you use the Wayback Machine and check the site as of late 2014, you’ll see that the piece was posted in August of that year. (It has also been archived here.) My title was “No Country for Men,” but Roosh or one of his editors, probably for SEO reasons, changed it to “Thanks to Progressivism, America is No Country for Men.”

It was much read and commented upon, within that circle of readers, and for some years it was easily googleable. However, as the mainstream media became more feminized and “because-I-said-so” inflexible, outlets like Roosh’s became less permissible. Ultimately—suppressed by search engines, and with most or all of his monetization routes blocked off—he was forced to shut down. So, although I didn’t see it right away, this was yet another dead-end in my quest.

Posting on Return of Kings did, however, scratch the “get it out there” itch, and another year or so passed before the itch recurred. Using my real name, I pitched a very softened version of my cultural feminization idea to the Washington Post, and surprisingly, the response was not a blank refusal but an invitation to submit my piece for posting in their “PostEverything” section. Looking back, I think I probably should have done that. However, at the time I saw PostEverything as a glorified Letters to the Editor forum, and reasoned that publication there would bring little reward, while leaving me with the usual risk to my livelihood. I guess I also feared that the Post’s editors would alter my thesis in ways I wouldn’t like. So I declined the offer.

I pitched a similar piece to one or two other places around then, and though my records and memories of those efforts have faded, the result was the same. Thus, early in 2017, I reverted once again to self-publication. Using the anti-Trump, pro-feminism Women’s March as a peg, I posted a short presentation of my idea to a blog page on my personal, non-pseudonymous, website where I had posted a few other short essays over the years.

I didn’t keep it up on that site for long. A few months after it was posted, a prospective client of my consulting business, a woman with a moderately high position at a prestigious institution, read it (as indicated by my site analytics info) and immediately ghosted me. I assumed that my thesis, even as softened as it was, was the causative factor in this loss of what could have been a lucrative relationship, and immediately took it down.

We’re nearing the fateful Twitter years, but not there yet. In the Spring of 2018, I submitted yet another softened version of my cultural feminization thesis to Quillette, which was then just emerging as a new and interesting venue for non-woke thought. One of the editors, a fellow named Jamie (Palmer, I think), turned it down politely with the comment that: “Your thesis is interesting but, in the end, unpersuasive and feels like a possible correlation/causation confusion.”

A bit less than a year later, in March of 2019, I sent yet another version of the idea to an editor at the conservative public-policy magazine City Journal, but received no reply.

(As the reader may know already, both City Journal and Quillette have since published pieces offering versions of the cultural feminization hypothesis—pieces that make no mention of me or my essays.)

TWITTER AND “J. STONE”

Once again, failure to get published in other journals led me back to a more D.I.Y. mode of punditry. Later in that month of March 2019, I set up a new pseudonymous website as a home for my essays, and joined Twitter with the idea of using Twitter posts to publicize those essays.

I think my general idea was to be a proponent of “cold logic” over the “hot emotion” of a feminized world, so I used the domain absltzero.com. For my Twitter presence I invented the pseudonym “J. Stone,” which had the merit that it didn’t seem like a pseudonym.

Having posted a quick version of my thesis, titled “The Great Feminization,” on the new site, I joined Twitter and started using my tweets to advertise the essay.

What happened next? Crickets.

At the time, I didn’t know much about the process of drawing attention and followers on Twitter, and anyway was unable to spend much time on it, given my day-to-day work and family responsibilities. But I did try, at least several times per week, to reply to tweets from prominent Tweeters with relevant quips followed by a link to “The Great Feminization”—in the hope that one, eventually, would read it and recommend it to his or her flock of followers.

“The Great Feminization,” by the way—though it was broadly similar to others I’d written, going all the way back to “The Demise of Guythink” in 2011—did contain a fairly pithy summary of the situation:

Feminists these days spend a lot of time worrying about male-dominated culture—“patriarchal culture,” “sexual harassment culture,” “rape culture,” “the culture of silence,” and so on. But shouldn’t they be acknowledging the influence that women now have on culture: on workplace culture, on media culture, on campus culture, on American culture, and on Western culture generally? That feminizing influence may be the greatest single driver of the rapid social changes seen in recent decades.

Consider the following U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics chart of women’s civilian labor force participation rate.

It shows that in 1950 only about 30 percent of working-age women were in the workforce, but by 2000 that figure had jumped to 60 percent and rivaled the participation rate for men, which had been in decline since the early 1950s.

In other words, by 2000 the U.S. workforce had been mostly gender-integrated. On average, workplaces by then had almost as many women as men.

The historic significance of this migration on its own appears to have been underappreciated. Women never made such a move, to such a degree, in any large human society in the past. It significantly altered the structure of ordinary life.

But women in the late 20th century didn’t just move into the workforce. They moved into its upper ranks, to professions that strongly influence societal culture and policy. They became journalists, public relations specialists, lawyers, academics, novelists, publishers, filmmakers, TV producers, and politicians, all to an unprecedented extent. In some of these culture-making professions, by the 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved parity or even dominance (e.g., writers, authors, and public relations specialists) with respect to men. Even where they fell short of full parity, they appeared to acquire considerable “veto” power over content. A 2017 report by the Women’s Media Center noted evidence that at the vast majority of media companies, at least one woman is among the top three editors.

Why is the greater presence of women in culture-making professions important? Because women, on average, think differently than men on a wide range of subjects….

How would culture and policy have changed as a result of women’s new influence? Presumably in ways that reflect feminine psychological traits.

For example, women appear on average to be more empathetic and compassionate, more emotionally sensitive. Some of the most striking social changes of the last few decades appear to have been driven by a cultural shift in that direction:

• • • • More generous welfare programs
      • Expansion of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (affirmative action, etc.) and more groups needing intervention
      • Expansion of the definitions of “harm,” “offense,” and “trauma” (“microaggressions,” “triggers”)
      • Increased attention to psychological trauma in law and medicine, leading to a greater acceptance, and thus a higher prevalence, of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1990s)
      • Less tolerance of deaths in war; but, ironically, a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television.
• 
  • • • Less tolerance for capital punishment
      • Less restrictive immigration policy
      • More emphasis in media and policy contexts on emotion-evoking stories of individuals (e.g., pitiable refugee children) rather than dry analyses of long-term outcomes.
• 
  • • • Suppression of any kind of emotionally disturbing speech (“hate speech,” “mansplaining,” etc.) and even fields of scientific inquiry that are likely to evoke negative emotions;
      • Less affinity for traditional, constitutionally protected forms of confrontation in the legal and political spheres, i.e., less support for open debate, free-speech rights, and “due process of law.”
      • Suppression/replacement of words that evoke emotional discomfort (e.g., “abortion clinic” becomes “women’s health center”)

That’s just from one set of closely related traits. Certainly there are others. For example, women for obvious evolutionary reasons appear to have an instinctive fear of dietary and environmental toxins, which can become pronounced during pregnancy (“morning sickness,” nesting reflex, food aversions). Is it just coincidence that women’s cultural ascendancy in Western countries corresponds to a huge rise in diet-, drug-, and environment-related concerns encompassing the Green movement, anti-GMO attitudes, “detox” fads, the “herbal medicine” racket, “organic foods” preferences, and even the anti-vaccine movement?

Et cetera. It was a quick, accessible outline of my Big Idea, and I gathered from my website analytics that people who started reading it tended to read it through, and often sent their friends links to it.

Still, the daily reader count seldom got into three digits, and sometimes flatlined in the single digits for days at a time, especially if I was too distracted by work to do my reply-guy thing on Twitter. For weeks, and then months, my interest in the whole thing waned, as it just seemed unrewarding.

But the compulsion to get some recognition for my Big Idea was one of those relapsing/remitting conditions that can never be fully cured. Within six months of posting “The Great Feminization,” I began work on a new cultural feminization essay, centered on a more in-depth account of the aforementioned Larry Summers brouhaha.

I initially conceived of this essay, which came to be titled, “The Day the Logic Died,” as something that would be publishable in a respectable conservative venue. But by the time I’d finished it, and weighed its largeish word-count, I knew better, and just posted it to the absltzero.com site.

“The Day the Logic Died” was an exploration of the Larry Summers case as a classic early example of a cancellation hysteria created by activist, anti-rational women in academia and media—a classic demonstration, in other words, of cultural feminization and its unpleasant consequences. I also put in a hypothesis at the end about the deep reasons why men fail, again and again, to hold their own in this new female-controlled cancellation culture. Though it was a long essay, it was probably the most “writerly” one I’ve produced on this topic.

Once again, not much happened in the weeks after I posted it. But a few months later, lightning finally struck, and—using my reply-guy strategy—I succeeded in getting “The Day the Logic Died” noticed by a popular Twitter figure. This was the celebrated “Spotted Toad” (@toad_spotted), who read the essay, liked it, and recommended it to his tens of thousands of followers:

Boom. The essay went “viral,” as they say—Statcounter began registering thousands of hits per day. And as people checked my posts and my bio and saw that Spotted Toad followed me, I began accumulating many more followers. To my surprise, many of these were Twitter-famous or even real-life-famous people with high follower counts of their own. They included Wesley Yang, Walter Kirn, Nick Denton, Marc Andreesen, Helen Andrews, Micah Meadowcroft, and Steve Sailer. One of the best known of these even DM’d me, wanting to know—apropos of the Larry Summers essay—if I was on the faculty at Harvard.

Naturally, this positive reaction encouraged me to spend more time on Twitter, and to keep posting essays on absltzero.com, including essay #3, “Girl Power” (Jan 2020), in which I tried to trace the roots of modern cancel culture back to convent hysterias, Salem, and other female social contagions of yore.

Writing more, both in short-form and long, was probably unwise at this point, given how little time I had to spare for it. But anyway I pressed on, publishing additional essays whenever I felt I had something reasonably new to say.

STONE’S PEAK

Early 2020 brought the COVID crisis. Fear of what the pandemic would do, anxiety over the sudden economic shut-down, and stress over lockdown and mask-wearing rules combined to exacerbate the national frazzlement. Then in the approach to the presidential election, Democratic Party operatives’ stoking of black grievance and white guilt—achieved by pumping several police run-ins with recalcitrant African-Americans into national prominence, and organizing marches and riots—was added to this toxic mix. As I pointed out often that year, mostly in tweets and once or twice in essays, stressed American women had reached a sort of breaking point, causing them—in a social mania akin to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76—to shift their society-disrupting activities into a higher gear.

This contagious frenzy, which Sailer aptly called the “Great Awokening,” was essentially female in a way that, I thought, made the concept of cultural feminization increasingly obvious.

Throughout 2020 and early 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic kept me busy professionally. I did find time to change the domain name of my essay website from absltzero.com to thoughtsofstone.com. I also probably made at least one or two further—now-forgotten—efforts to get published more widely. But those too failed, and by April of 2021, I was getting restless again.

At this point, I had enough big-name Twitter mutuals (who were routinely liking and retweeting my stuff, and reading my essays) that I felt I could ask for their help in reaching a wider audience. In April 2021, I contacted Helen Andrews, a young author and editor/writer for The American Conservative magazine, to see if TAC would be interested in running a short piece on my cultural feminization idea. Based on her tweets, Helen had struck me as very sharp-minded and conservative—and she was clearly enthusiastic about my Big Idea.

She was gracious in her response, reiterating her support for my thesis and heaping particular praise  on “The Day the Logic Died.” After making inquiries, she informed me that The American Conservative as a rule would not publish something by a pseudonymous author. As an alternative, though, she suggested The American Mind, a webzine produced by the Claremont Institute, and she helpfully put me in touch with its editors James Poulos and Spencer Klavan. My short piece on cultural feminization, “Pink Shift,” appeared in TAM’s pages in early May.

Naturally, I felt that this was progress, in the sense that I was reaching a wider readership, and was also basically putting down a public marker of my role in advancing the cultural feminization hypothesis. But though I gained a modest number of new Twitter followers and daily readers of my essays, I was still far from my goal.

Months passed, and the familiar, unpleasant sense of futility grew in me. I had made a reasonable effort—especially given my work and time constraints—to get my Big Idea “out there” and noticed. Certainly a lot of people, in a strong position to help, were well aware of it and its provenance. But how could I propel this idea into the public mind strongly enough that it had to be confronted and considered, and never again ignored or suppressed? And what more could I do to get the recognition I felt I deserved? Whatever the true answers to those questions may have been, I did little other than what I had been doing, namely writing to small-ish media organizations and asking them to publish my Big Idea.

That strategy continued to not work, although for a while, things kept happening to prop up my hopes. One day in mid-October 2021, I did a routine check of the analytics for the thoughtsofstone.com website, and saw thousands—soon tens of thousands—of visitors to the “Great Feminization” essay page. It was clear that all these visitors were arriving via a link on a blog called Marginal Revolution.

Marginal Revolution is the blog of Tyler Cowen, the economist, Bloomberg columnist, and all-round social media star. I wasn’t entirely surprised that “The Great Feminization” had caught his attention, as I had observed in the past that his ideas and mine sometimes ran in similar (at least marginally heretical) directions. We had even had a brief, cordial email exchange during the 2008-09 financial crisis—when he was already very popular, but far more approachable—in relation to one of my ideas (on my anonymous blog) about the future economy.

In any case, Cowen’s link to “The Great Feminization” widened the essay’s circulation not just for one or two days, but for weeks and months—in which many other bloggers and posters cited it approvingly, and visitor counts at the thoughtsofstone.com site stayed high.

Toward the end of that month of October, energized by the Cowen link, I pitched another piece on cultural feminization to Twitter mutual Park MacDougald, a young editor/writer at the Washington Examiner. He told me he was just then bound for a new job at UK’s UnHerd, but would try to get the piece in before he left, if I could get it to him quickly. I did, we did some rapid edits, and on Oct 27 he told me the piece would be online two days later.

The piece—my working title was “Wokeism is a Woman”—didn’t really include anything new compared to what I’d already written on the subject. It started as follows . . .

Consider the hypothesis that most of the dramatic social changes sweeping over Western societies in recent decades, including the rise of social justice ideology or “wokeness,” are driven not so much by a specific ideology as they are by a simple demographic shift, namely, the large-scale addition of women to the ranks of the elites.

It is curious that this possibility has been overlooked for so long. Since the middle of the last century, women in the West have almost completely departed from their traditional stay-at-home roles. They have moved into the workforce alongside men, and have acquired power, often dominance, within all the culturally and politically influential professions. Women are now managing editors, film producers, CEOs, university presidents, cabinet secretaries, senators and congresswomen. They now help direct the culture and the policies that move all of us—the first time this has happened in a large society.

. . . and it ended (in the last draft I have in my files) this way:

In any case, the most important issue about this “great feminization” is where it appears to be taking us. Do we really want to jettison things like due process and free scientific inquiry? Do we really want laws discriminating against America’s legacy population, especially white males, in the name of “equity?”

I suspect that a lot of people, men in particular, already sense at least subconsciously that wokeism and related social changes reflect the new power of women—and hope that the worst of these changes are a sort of emotional storm that will blow over eventually if they just ignore it. I think that view overlooks, to put it mildly, wokeism’s sensational recent successes in transforming Western societies, and its strong roots among the women who help run those societies. Wokeism is too incoherent, too contrary to common sense and human nature, to last anywhere near as long as Western liberalism has. But rolling back its excesses is going to require real effort. Step one should be the recognition—as harsh as it may seem—that wokeism, far from being an enlightened vision of human progress, may be only the projection of a maternal mindset that is dangerously out of its depth.

THE SHARKS

The day before the Washington Examiner piece was scheduled to appear, MacDougald DM’d me to let me know it had been put on hold. I knew that I hadn’t pulled my punches in the piece; moreover, I had experienced one or two last-minute cancellations of pieces in my earlier career as a journalist. So I was not especially surprised when, a week later, MacDougal informed me that they weren’t going to run the piece at all—and that he, about to exit, had little say in the matter. (He offered a kill fee, which I declined.)

It soon became clear that that had been my last chance to get my Big Idea out there and get credit for it. The “Great Awokening” had made women’s central role in wokeness and modern progressivism hard to ignore—and with that (and to some extent the influence of my own essays) other writers with easier paths to high-profile publication were starting to see an opportunity. Other than Cowen with his comment-free linking to “The Great Feminization,” none of them would acknowledge my prior contributions.

Less than a month after my piece on women and wokeness was killed at the Washington Examiner, the writer Noah Carl published a short Substack post (“Did Women in Academia Cause Wokeness?”) arguing that the roots of wokeness lay in the feminization of academia—essentially a much narrower (and I would say incomplete) version of my own argument.

A very similar piece by Mary Harrington appeared on the same day, Nov. 24, in the UK webzine the Critic, about “The New Female Ascendancy” in academia—in the administrative ranks, at least.

Less remarked on is the sex breakdown of the growing proportion of administrators. A recent diversity and inclusion report by the University of California indicates that women make up more than 70 per cent of non-academic staff across (among others) nursing, therapeutic services, health, health technicians, communications services roles, and a majority or near majority across all non-manual staff roles. In other words, if men are still over represented in top academic roles, the non-academic supporting ecosystem is overwhelmingly female.

And that support system has an increasingly symbiotic relationship with student activism, which over my lifetime has (on both sides of the Atlantic) shifted noticeably away from a focus on material conditions toward something more like the bureaucratic regulation of personal identity and interpersonal interactions.

A 2015 look at student protesters across 51 campuses showed the most common demands — alongside greater diversity among faculty — were diversity training and cultural centres. In turn, this focus requires a ballooning staff tasked with managing identities, or variously supporting or disciplining types of relationship, for example via “consent” education: the roles where women predominate.

Overseas at the time, I was alerted to the appearance of Harrington’s piece by a nice Twitter DM from Helen Andrews:

Certainly I agreed that I deserved credit! However, as I replied a bit morosely to Helen (after thanking her again for her help and encouragement), I knew that I probably wasn’t going to be given a lot of credit, given that I was a pseudonymous, non-professional essayist with no high-profile publication of my thesis. Again, it would turn out that even a little credit was more than I should have hoped for.

Surprisingly, one of the writers who advanced cultural feminization as his own big idea was Thomas Edsall, a writer for the New York Times, who managed to get a stealthily subversive essay on all this (“The Gender Gap is Taking Us to Unexpected Places,” 12 Jan 2022) into the Gray Lady’s pages. He quoted Tyler Cowen enough to suggest that he read Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution” blog—which to me also suggested that he had read “The Great Feminization” and that his essay might even have been prompted by it. But if one is writing a column for a woke media organ like the New York Times, where young, female and nonwhite activists are always looking for ways to advance by displacing white males, it would be deeply imprudent to cite a pseudonymous essayist who evidently hated wokeism and other leftist  dogmas. Of course, from my perspective it would nevertheless have been the correct, honorable thing to do; but I think it’s fair to say that in American journalism now those old-fashioned ethics count for very little. Anyway, Edsall mostly stuck to the quoting of relatively dry academic and survey stuff on gender differences in attitudes, which itself was not new.

. . . a Knight Foundation survey in 2017 of 3,014 college students asked: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.”

Male students preferred protecting free speech over an inclusive and diverse society by a decisive 61 to 39. Female students took the opposite position, favoring an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35.

I’ll just list briefly a few of the other relatively prominent writers who started posting on cultural feminization, generally with the conceit that they were making an original contribution:

Richard Hanania. Having discussed cultural feminization as a podcast guest in August 2021, he posted one or two Substack pieces on the same topic early in 2022, with arguments very similar to my own. He was already vastly better known than I, but there was a significant overlap in our Twitter mutuals and general interests, so our stuff would have appeared on each other’s timelines quite a lot during 2019-2021.

Some of the commenters on Hanania’s Substack posts also linked to my older cultural feminization essays, which directed at least hundreds of his readers, and I would guess Hanania himself at some point, to my work. I couldn’t help noticing that someone in Southern California (where Hanania lived then), often using an IP address at UCLA (where he had recently been a grad student), was a frequent reader of the essays on my website. Yet as far as I know, Hanania has never acknowledged my prior contributions. (I have previously criticized Hanania for his promotions of eugenics, Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party, abortions to prevent Down Syndrome births, etc.)

“L0m3z.” This pseudonymous right-wing writer, prominent on Twitter, managed in early 2023 to get a few-hundred-word piece published in First Things (one of the many media orgs on whose deaf ears my pitches had fallen) framing the cultural feminization hypothesis as the “longhouse” theory—a reference to longhouse-dwelling primitive societies.

The idea apparently derives from the book Bronze Age Mindset (2018) whose pseudonymous author’s references to it are pretty cursory.

 . . .

None of that is really important anyway, since the invocation of putative longhouse-based societies clearly fails—or is just unnecessary—as an explanation for cultural feminization. Western culture has been feminized mainly because women, abandoning their traditional homemaker roles at the behest of feminists and for financial reasons, have moved into public life and have achieved critical masses in all important, culturally and politically influential Western institutions. L0m3z basically admitted this in his short piece, though he referred to other, later writers like Hanania and Edsall as having pointed this out, not to me. Like Hanania, L0m3z had had a lot of Twitter-mutual overlap with me, and, I seem to recall, followed me for a few months after Spotted Toad gave me some publicity in 2019. L0m3z also didn’t start writing on Twitter about his “longhouse” idea (judging by Twitter searches) until late 2021.

Heather MacDonald. I had always admired MacDonald’s writing, so I was disappointed to see her piece in Urban Journal in March 2023 about the feminization of academia. It seemed unoriginal from my perspective—and, I guess, also would have seemed that way from the perspective of Harrington or Carl. Worse, the initial title appears to have been “The Great Feminization of the American University,” so that, following the publication of her piece (which of course did not cite me) the Google search ranking for my “Great Feminization” essay of 2019 was obliterated, and readers searching for those keywords were directed to MacDonald’s piece instead. (The fact that Urban Journal changed the title hints that someone tipped them off to the existence of my essay.)

There were a number of other pieces discussing this topic, including one in Quillette, and even The American Conservative. None of these pieces mentioned me. No one mentioned me, apart from a few tweeters in replies and blog commenters.

As time went on, and tardier but better-known writers’ thoughts on this circulated more widely, even people who definitely knew of my work started referring to me only alongside, sometimes even after, those other writers.

Of course I know that to the ones making these references, this “inclusivity” would have seemed perfectly natural, perhaps even generous towards the nobody J. Stone. Nevertheless, I felt at least a twinge of annoyance every time. “Nothing these other writers are telling you about cultural feminization is original in the slightest!” I wanted to shout. “That would become instantly obvious if any of them had the decency to cite my work!” But I knew that no one cared–I knew I was dealing with social forces just as inexorable and irrational as the ones I’d been writing about in my cultural feminization essays.

I continued to post occasional cultural feminization-related thoughts on Twitter . . .

. . . but over time I was, as they say, airbrushed from the picture.

It did not help that I was pseudonymous and intent upon remaining so. It also emphatically did not help that, early in 2022, I tweeted/posted in support of Ukraine’s struggle to withstand Russia’s invasion. A large number of my Twitter mutuals, flying flags I had not known they possessed, revealed themselves to be supporters of Putin or at least derisive skeptics about Ukraine’s ambitions to be a free country. I expressed my own derision in regard to this bizarre, anti-liberty, anti-self-determination attitude, and this resulted in my being unfollowed or muted by many. That the facts on the ground in Ukraine increasingly supported my view probably only hurt me worse in this respect.

In 2022, it was increasingly clear from the dwindling engagement of my tweets that I had essentially lost my audience. In April of that year, less than 12 months after my “Pink Shift” piece had appeared in American Mind, I organized my thoughts on cultural feminization into a self-published ebook, as a sort of tombstone for my eleven years of promoting this idea, and then mostly ceased writing about it. I had come to the conclusion that trying to introduce and get credit for an important new idea, from a standing start, on Twitter or a personal website—or on any venue with a small audience—was a mug’s game, little better than shouting to passers-by from a proverbial soap-box.

A BETTER WAY?

Is this just my own personal gripe—my own self-driven, bad-luck story—without relevance to the wider problems of society? I can easily believe that members of the “opinionator elite,” as I call them, would say so if pressed.

I also think that the vast majority of people, even highly educated people, don’t consider the process I have described significantly problematic. They encounter new ideas all the time, and they generally don’t care about recognizing these ideas’ exact provenance—they don’t see that as affecting their interests. Sure, they’ll pile on the opprobrium if a plagiarist is caught red-handed. But if some pseudonymous nobody complains about his prior work being copied and/or not cited by some mass-followed elite opinionator, the latter and his followers will scoff together at Mr. Nobody’s presumption.

That doesn’t mean they’re right! Consider the distribution of forces here: Firstly, there are the opinionator elites, the gatekeepers of media content and popular intellectual discourse. Obviously, they have no interest in finding fault with a situation that empowers them, and to some extent enriches them. Just as obviously, the great mass of ordinary, non-idea-originator people are not going to see a problem if the elites won’t highlight it for them.

Against this weight of opposition and inertia, we amateur, non-elite idea originators—surprisingly numerous but still constituting only a tiny minority in the grand scheme of things—have little chance.

There is also a general misconception that new ideas of the type I’m referencing here—ideas that appear in media outlets like the ones I’ve mentioned in this story—do not deserve protection because they are of a different nature than the ideas or intellectual works we do normally protect, e.g., with copyright and patent laws.

But while it may be true that the idea “cultural feminization is happening and is caused by women’s entry en masse into culturally influential institutions” is not a patentable invention and is not a book or film that can be copyrighted and sold commercially, nevertheless:

• • This idea has social value in the sense that it potentially explains many otherwise inexplicable sociocultural changes. It may not (yet) have the same perceived importance, but it belongs to the same broad category as Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, and Dawkins’s theory of cultural memetics;
  • This idea certainly can have commercial value for writers who successfully negotiate book and/or magazine deals—perhaps even lucrative sinecures at think-tanks—by claiming to have originated it.

Although I think the mechanism by which non-elite idea originators are disadvantaged is essentially non-rational—a blunt-force social suppression—I can imagine a semi-compelling reasoned case for the status quo, which would go something like this:

People won’t believe that a new ‘Big Idea’ is valid unless the author of that idea has plenty of social support, e.g., from a substantial number of authoritative figures (i.e., elite opinionators) and/or a large mass of social media followers. Thus, the introduction of a new idea must be, to some extent, a popularity contest—which means that one must develop a sturdy network of social support before one can expect the idea to spread widely and proper credit to be given. In most cases, gathering such support requires one to write under one’s own name, instead of hiding behind a pseudonym—this is why so many media organizations refuse to publish pseudonymous authors. In short, you can choose to play the game, with a chance of winning, or you can choose to quit and be a loser.

I believe that this would seem reasonable to many people. But really it is not a very good argument.

Firstly, this “social network argument” enmires itself in, or at least fails to take account of, a logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy. This fallacy is the belief that the genesis of an idea has anything to do with the idea’s validity. In other words, if Adolf Hitler had once claimed that two plus two equals four, it would be illogical for us all to disbelieve it merely because Adolf Hitler stated it.

The Hitler example makes the fallaciousness obvious, but in everyday cases it’s not so obvious. In fact (as I would say my own case illustrates) it’s common in public discourse for a good idea to be rejected or ignored, without any consideration of its merits, because the idea-originator is either unknown or—as is true for a lot of conservative thinkers nowadays—somehow intolerably heretical, from the perspective of media gatekeepers.

My guess is that, despite our gatekeepers’ now having more formal education than ever, they are more prone than ever to stray into this fallacy, because there are more women than ever among these gatekeepers, and (for that reason) the culture itself is more feminized than ever. Women, on average compared to men, are drawn more to the personal, less to the abstract, and so they are more likely to consider the character or politics of a person who is voicing an argument before they consider the argument on its merits. In my experience, a shocking number of educated women do not see the genetic fallacy as a real fallacy. Indeed, the modern wokeist/feminist contention that gender and ethnic identity determine the validity of one’s ideas and contributions is a bold assertion of this view.

Now, of course I recognize that we can’t all be abstract logicians. We are social animals, only a few million years removed from our tree-dwelling ape ancestors, and we tend to make decisions in crude ways, often involving associations that are practically useful but not necessarily linked by causal mechanisms. We are disinclined to listen or read when some unknown or fringe-y person starts pontificating—yet the same idea, restated by a mainstream thinker, will be much more likely to get our attention. This does seem natural to us.

Natural doesn’t mean optimal, though. Keeping slaves and burning heretics are among the many practices that once seemed natural to us humans. In more traditional, “natural” times, we also had no protection for—or even concept of—intellectual property. The fact is that current social structures and dynamics governing the treatment of new ideas end up suppressing many true idea originators and rewarding fake ones. Who really believes that we can’t come up with a better, fairer, more modern approach?

It seems worth emphasizing here that one of the great revelations of modern electronic social media platforms, especially Twitter, is that there are surprisingly many amateur but bona fide originators of useful ideas. Obviously it would be good if these people—whether one wants to include me in their ranks or not—had an easier time making their new ideas visible or at least getting credit when their ideas do eventually begin to circulate. This would encourage more new ideas, whereas the present system (as my case is meant to illustrate) discourages them.

Amateur idea originators are, in my opinion, mostly people whose quirks of genetics and life experience cause them to perceive the world a bit differently than the average person does. This doesn’t necessarily make them smarter than average, but it does allow them to see patterns that others don’t. This cognitive differentness (not the same as autism, though very mild autism sometimes produces a similar phenomenon) often puts them “out of step” with their fellow humans not just intellectually but also socially. Thus, in my estimation, amateur idea originators are often among the least equipped and inclined to climb the greasy pole to win social support.

How to amplify their voices? How to give them credit and thereby encourage their contributions?

The Internet already gives us the basic medium for the essentially costless publication of new ideas. Some of us set up our own websites; others have Substack accounts. It should also be possible to craft search algorithms specifically to find and date instances of a given idea on the searchable web—this would seem an excellent application of current AI technology.

It should be possible, as well, to make an “idea registry,” maybe something like a cross between rXiv.org and Wikpedia, to which anyone can contribute, and where ideas are automatically categorized and time-stamped.

I have two basic models in mind. The most obvious one is the patent system, a modern, logical, merit-based system that does not require inventors to garner social support. And, again, while the commercial potential of technical inventions drove the establishment of the patent system, and political/cultural ideas tend to have less money-making potential, the reality nowadays is that new ideas are more monetizable than ever through books, magazine articles, Substack subscriptions, and so on. I also think most experienced professional journalists and opinionators would admit that it is absolutely routine for better-known writers to “borrow” the reporting and/or ideas of lesser-known writers and monetize them with large publishing contracts. Although, again, the average person doesn’t care, quite a few big-name writers would not have their fame and fat incomes but for opportune appropriations of others’ work.

We may not want to treat new cultural/political ideas as protectable intellectual property in the strict sense, by fining violators, requiring licensing, etc. But having an easily searchable record of the originations of these new ideas would, at least, tend to discourage the rampant theft that now takes place.

The other model I have in mind is the “motif index” made by folklorists. Such an index—somewhat akin to patent examiners’ taxonomies of technologies, and zoologists’ taxonomies of plants and animals—is a hyper-branchiate ordering of folkloric tales according to the functional elements they contain. If such a vast and useful information structure could be built by a few folklorists using pre-Internet, pre-computer technologies, it should be doable much more easily now for new ideas in the Internet age.

I see no downside for this general proposal to “level the playing field” for idea-originators. It seems like a no-brainer, really, and my guess is that, as it becomes easy to implement in the AI age, it will happen, overcoming the predictable opposition/suppression by the elite opinionator class. Perhaps I will even get some credit for the idea!

* * *

Complaints of “toxic” workplaces. Mass hiring of diversity-equity-inclusion commissars. Open-borders immigration sold to the public with tear-jerking images of refugee children. Trans mania spreading everywhere from kindergarten classrooms to corporate C-suites. Personal pronouns in work email signatures. White women kneeling in prayerful mass protests after yet another African-heritage male with a mile-long rap sheet resists a cop and is shot. Removal of traditional due-process rules to favor women’s sex claims. Talk of “reparations” on a trillion-dollar scale, to remedy racial inequalities. Ever-stricter limits on acceptable speech, debate and scientific inquiry. Declining support for truth itself, if the truth might cause hurt feelings. A heavy emphasis on trauma and victimhood in news media, literature, law, and psychiatry. Open governmental discrimination against white males.

All these are manifestations of a societal climate change that has been underway since the 1950s, with a sharply increased pace in recent years. The causes are many, but one is more important than all the rest put together. I am referring to the entry of women into public life, which—particularly in recent decades as women have ascended to the upper ranks of all important institutions—has given them unprecedented cultural and political power.

I’ve been writing about this for more than a decade. During most of that time, my hypothesis was rejected or ignored, presumably because it was considered too heretical. In the past year and a half, other more prominent figures have started to write about some of the particular institutional effects of women’s new power (e.g., on academia), presumably in part because it has become just too obvious to ignore. What I think is still being missed—or suppressed—is the true extent of this process of cultural feminization, and, more importantly, the disastrous future towards which it is driving.

The ubiquity of cultural feminization

Women’s new power is being wielded, and felt, not just in the universities, not just in H.R. offices, not just among mainstream media corporations and big publishing houses, not just among millennials, but everywhere, affecting everyone. It is what I have called a general “pink shift” in the culture. The fact that even traditionally macho institutions such as the military and sports leagues have been affected is a good indication of its power and breadth.

Women’s ascension to power in institutions, and in public life generally, has altered the culture for the simple reason that women, on average, do not think and act as men do. They are more emotionally sensitive and compassionate, more tuned into people and direct relationships rather than abstract rules and systems and hierarchies. They are quicker to form and join social networks, and to spread social contagions. They are more risk-averse, less interested in conquest and exploration, and more sensitive to environmental threats. They have less tolerance for the stressful combat of free debate, less respect for scientific inquiry for its own sake, less patience with the idea of judicial due process. Probably as a result of being more emotionally sensitive, they seem more easily influenced by narratives that emphasize short-term, emotion-evoking consequences, and seem less interested in dry analyses of long-term outcomes. Perhaps especially when they are childless (or their children have “left the nest”), they are more likely to embrace the “disadvantaged” of the world as their virtual children, feeling emotional pain at persistent inequalities among them, and seeking to alleviate that pain by almost any means necessary.

Of course, women differ among themselves in the strengths of their psychological traits, as do men. But the basic idea here is that the two sexes’ overlapping “bell curves” of trait distributions have significantly different averages or means, which I think is evident even on small, organizational scales, but is seismically obvious on a civilization level.

In short, women collectively have their own distinct perspective on the world, and, now that their power exceeds men’s, they are showing their disdain for the world men made, declaring: “We can do better.”

But can they do better? And why is this important question missing from Western public discourse?

Hiding their power

I had trouble getting my earlier essays on cultural feminization published even in smaller, decidedly conservative media. I can’t be absolutely certain of the reasons, but, as everywhere else in media, there were always female editors in the decision chain—often at the top—and of course thousands of female subscribers who might be angered by anything frame-able as “anti-women.”

The idea that women have unprecedented cultural power, and with it have been dramatically reshaping most of the world’s societies, is, of course, not inherently anti-women. Why can’t women just accept their triumph and take a victory lap? Why does there appear to be not just an overlooking of this historic social phenomenon but even (apart from a few opinion pieces) a sort of conspiracy of silence about it, especially among women?

One explanation is obvious. Women as the physically weaker, more risk-averse sex have traditionally wielded power less openly and directly. As such, they tend not to want to reveal their power, let alone crow over it; they prefer to emphasize their weakness and chronic victimization—which, among other effects, triggers a protective reflex among many men.

I don’t think that’s a complete explanation, though. I think that women like to hide their power not only because it’s more effective when hidden, but also because they realize, deep down, that female supremacy is hard to defend as an optimal way of steering civilization.

Even the feminist who openly seeks absolute female power—the kind of woman who asks “why do we need men?”—is well aware of (has “internalized”) the traditional, disparaging view of the female mindset. This is the view (one might call it the Aristotelian view, though it has been expressed by modern women as different as Ann Coulter and Camille Paglia) that women, relative to men, are irrational, flighty, suggestible, overly emotional, unstable, given to herd thinking, and prone to hysterias and other social contagions. And although this traditional view may seem crude and unfair, most women at least understand that there really is such a thing as the “female mindset,” that it does involve greater emotional sensitivity and people-centeredness in most situations, and that it makes women better mothers than they would be if they were more male-brained.

But is this female mindset somehow superior to the traditional male mindset when it comes to shaping culture and policy? I have never seen or heard a woman make this claim explicitly, probably because the weakness of the claim is obvious. Why would a female, maternal mindset be superior in the public sphere, when it is an adaptation for a very different environment, i.e., actual maternity, which in fact has occurred traditionally within the protective bounds of male-managed society? By the same token, why would the male mindset be inferior when it must be, at least in part, an adaptation for the public sphere—where men have reigned from the dawn of hominids?

It seems to me that women, having no solid argument to justify their cultural and political ascendancy (“it’s our turn” “men are toxic”), and knowing that debates in general play to male strengths, have decided simply to avoid the issue by pretending their ascendancy hasn’t occurred.

Female empowerment leads to social collapse

Not every social change driven by this “Great Feminization” process has been adverse, but it does seem that most have—and that the net effect is increasingly dystopian.

These bad consequences also seem very predictable, at least from a male perspective.

Some examples:

New, lenient policing and sentencing laws.

Short-term goal: Stop police oppression of African-Americans.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of law-breaking, rampant crime, business flight.

Municipal laws that prevent removal of homeless and other street people, offer food etc.

Short-term goal: Treat homeless people with compassion.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of homelessness, filthy encampments that spoil large areas of the city, more crime, business flight.

Generous welfare policies

Short-term goal: Treat the disadvantaged with compassion, reduce hunger, etc.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of indigency, spread of welfare dependency, impairment of family-formation (mothers lose incentive to marry), plus all the social pathologies that follow from these.

Promotion of anti-traditional behaviors/lifestyles (homosexuality, transsexualism)

Short-term goal: Empower the marginalized.

Long-term effects: Weakening of social norms, spread of what is effectively antisocial (anti-family) behavior, spread of associated mental illness in the most impressionable, i.e., children and young adults.

Opposition to restrictions on immigration

Short-term goal: Help the “huddled masses” (i.e., the same maternal sentiments expressed in Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet.)

Long-term effects: Incentivization of mass/illegal immigration. Destruction of national identity, lowering of trust, increase in despair, price inflation, brain-drain in origin countries, etc.

Restriction of speech, debate, legal due-process, scientific inquiry

Short-term goal: Prevent the emotional turmoil caused by “hateful” arguments, concepts, or simple observations, e.g., of racial differences in cognitive and behavioral traits.

Long-term effects: Destruction of liberal norms, a maternal “because I said so!” illiberalism, corruption of scientific culture, reversal of scientific progress.

Promotion of equal outcomes vs. equality of opportunity

Short-term goal: Reduce conflict and promote fairness by directly reducing financial inequality (resembling a classic maternal strategy for promoting harmony among children—also probably the norm in family-based paleolithic groupings)

Long-term effects: Destruction of normal, healthy incentives to succeed. Promotion of lazy, redistributive attitude (“I’m a victim of racism—give me money”). A centerpiece of communism/socialism and a key reason for its failure.

Promotion of “harm reduction” strategies (e.g., free needles) against illicit drug use

Short-term goal: Reduce mortality and hospitalizations due to drug overdoses.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of drug use.

The overall pattern should be clear: The feminine mindset, with its focus on short-term, feelgood outcomes in the culture and policy realm, tends to set up perverse incentives, thereby basically guaranteeing bad long-term outcomes.

Incidentally, the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has famously argued, with experimental evidence, that the “female brain,” compared to the “male brain,” is less good at understanding and building systems. It is easy to see why this would be so, if the feminine mindset is relatively blind to the mechanisms that determine a system’s long-run performance—the system in question here being the system of humans called society.

Women’s greater focus on the emotional and the short-term has other adverse impacts on culture and policy. One is the “witch-hunt,” social-contagion-prone atmosphere that now suffuses Western (esp. Anglo-American) culture—and I think derives from the heightened feminine sensitivity to the stress of debate (including greater pain from the cognitive dissonance generated by opposing arguments), and the broader feminine need for emotional harmony in groups. The speed with which women, led by their woke high priestesses, have been dismantling Western traditions in favor of fads and frenzies such as “gender-affirming care for children,” is stunning and ominous.

Even more ominous, though, is the weakness of public opposition, which, of course, is due largely to women’s reluctance even to acknowledge their power, let alone restrain its excesses.

Will the West continue to collapse by a slow process of social dissolution? It’s easy to picture that happening simply as a continuation of trends our cultural matriarchy promotes: Third-World-ization via immigration, white self-hatred, discrimination against men, low Western fertility, diversity over merit, sanctioned lawlessness for protected racial groups, etc. It’s also plausible that the collapse will be more sudden and catastrophic, via, say, lost wars, surrenders to invader-immigrants who are not so feminized (or so civilized), or even, one day, the sentimental granting of civil rights to “sentient” machines. Anyway, as far as I can see, all paths in our feminized civilization lead to the failure of that civilization. It’s almost beside the point to note that that failure will bring this brief, strange period of female cultural hegemony to a close.

* * *

The new Western culture, especially the American variety, offers the old-fashioned conservative male dissident many trends to bewail. Discrimination against white males! Promotion of LGBTQ lifestyles! The trans mania with its mutilation of children and destruction of women’s sports! Suppression of meritocracy, free speech, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law! Runaway entitlement spending! Open borders! Critical race theory! The ESG investing fad! No-prosecute policies in violent cities! Proliferation of social contagions and hysterical illnesses, from ROGD and PTSD to Tik-Tok Tourette’s! Cascades of cancellations of perfectly competent white males, e.g., for “grading too hard in organic chemistry,” or for cracking an off-color joke! Widespread exclusion (in effect) of males from important professions, including public relations, publishing, and clinical psychology/psychotherapy. “Math is White Supremacy!” “Showing up for work is White Supremacy!!” “Not being a pea-brained slob is White Supremacy!!!”

My argument here is that everybody should stop bewailing these trends as separate phenomena—should stop fighting “wokeness” or “ESG” or the trans mania. They should, instead, focus on the one factor that underlies and causes all of these social developments.

Of course, I mean women—or more precisely, women’s newfound power in organizations and institutions, and in the culture generally.

An assumption everyone seems to have made during the decades of female emancipation is that women see things more or less as men do, and are just as devoted as men to the principles underlying Western civilization. Not so! As some feminist writers, including Virginia Woolf, warned long ago, women when they enter public life in business and government tend to look around and see lots of things they want to change. They’re just not fans, to the extent that men are, of things like free speech, open debate, due process of law, meritocracy, free scientific inquiry, maximizing shareholder value, equality of opportunity, and so on.

It’s not that women have worked things out logically and carefully and comprehensively, and now want to formally enact a scheme they think is better. It’s more that things in Western civ, which was made by men, often go against the emotional grain with women, causing them real discomfort, and compelling them to react. Women’s instincts were shaped by evolution for a maternal and domestic context, and seem to bias them towards short-term, feelgood, nurturing, and protective outcomes—on average compared to men. These instincts seem to be especially aroused by things like persistent racial inequality, discussions of race-based IQ differences, ruthless meritocratic competition unleavened by sympathy for the losers, stern cross-examinations of women making rape claims, medical skepticism over women’s unverifiable symptoms, and the kind of frat-boy humor that has gotten so many men cancelled. Now that women are largely in charge, they question why we need such things—or peremptorily try to stamp them out.

There are some nuances to this general theory. First, a lot of women are not woke. But the argument here is really about women on average as compared to men on average, and I don’t think it could be reasonably disputed that women, on average and compared to men, are significantly biased in the direction of wokeness. It’s also obviously true that modest average psychological differences between the sexes could translate to big social changes when one sex takes power from the other. I would suggest too that the women who seek power in institutions are less likely to be “average” women and more likely to be childless activist types. There is, moreover, a hell of a lot of depression and anxiety among modern women, especially younger ones, and that as well may push many women to embrace the woke activism mindset as a therapeutic source of meaning and purpose.

Another nuance has to do with women’s apparently superior ability, compared to men, to align themselves emotionally within a group. This means, in effect, that women in an organization will tend to be less independent-minded, with the tradeoff that they can collectively punch above their weight. Among the examples that come to mind is the recent cancellation of Woody Allen from his publisher due to activism among the publishing company’s junior staff. (The publishing industry, like public relations and psychology/psychiatry/psychotherapy, is utterly dominated by women—“junior staff” in publishing generally means millennial women.)

Women, as I’ve suggested in a recent essay, may also have, collectively, a stronger drive to dominate organizations, to eliminate the greater discomfort they experience when exposed to male organizational culture. Certainly the female-to-male ratio in many organizations now is one that would be condemned as discriminatory (by women) were the proportions reversed.

A further nuance, which I think will become increasingly obvious and important as our societal “pink shift” advances, is that women, as they align emotionally within groups, and ultimately purge dissenting voices, tend to cause the institutions they control to become unstable. In other words, like hysteria-prone convents of half a millenium ago, female-dominated institutions become relatively susceptible to groupthink contagions that swing them irrationally this way and that. Today these contagions introduce relatively mild new absurdities like pronoun declarations and land acknowledgments. But I expect it’s all going to get loopier, and more harshly enforced, as time goes on and female control solidifies.

Lastly, somewhat hair-splittingly, I don’t think that women when left to themselves running male-built institutions necessarily become woke in the way that we see now. I see wokeness as a contemporary, contagious mindset (not quite an ideology) that corresponds very well to, and thus easily infects, the average female mind, still moreso the younger, more neurotic, more activist female mind. But in principle, under different circumstances, one could gin up something substantially different that would also spread well among women, provided that it pressed their main buttons. Certainly in the centuries before women took such a large part in public life, thought contagions among them were common and varied, though usually localized and rarely very consequential (rarely but not never—see, for example, the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria).

But back to my main argument: If wokeness and its variants are all epiphenomena of the new, historically unprecedented power of women in public life, measures taken against wokeness etc. could be ineffective if there is no acknowledgment of the true source of the problem. Indeed all means short of reducing women’s presence in public life might be futile.

I’m not advocating a specific strategy, but I think it’s important at least to highlight this dilemma, which Western countries obviously have no easy way of resolving. It may be that over time, the current, Cultural Revolution-like surge of wokeness subsides and becomes less radical, as the women pushing wokeness are increasingly forced to acknowledge some of its adverse consequences, such as rising crime from weak law enforcement, social dissolution from uncontrolled immigration, the institutional incompetence that flows inevitably from the abandonment of meritocracy, and the aforementioned institutional instability.

Then again, by the time things get bad enough for women to acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily better than men at managing our civilization, the process of degeneration might be very, very advanced. Indeed, it’s plausible that, by then, other, even stronger, less reversible adverse processes—ethnic conflict, for example—will be underway, effectively sealing the West’s fate.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

*

One of the traits that women seem generally willing to acknowledge as their own is a greater affinity for “inclusivity” and the related “equity.” In other words, compared to the average man, the average woman seems to have a stronger preference for a society in which meritocratic competition and rewards, and the resulting inequalities, are minimized. To the extent that this is so, women (compared to men) would therefore tend to prefer flatter, more egalitarian and less hierarchical social groupings—as has often been observed.

Meritocratic competition and hierarchical ordering are among the pillars of Western civilization, so it should be concerning if these are now being weakened by the cultural and political ascendancy of women. However, this brief essay is not (mainly) a judgment of the fitness of this feminine trait-set—it’s a speculation about its origins.

Has anyone done a conclusive study of why women are relatively inclined towards inclusivity/equity and against competition, meritocracy and hierarchy? If so, I’m unaware of it. Since human traits typically are rooted in the prehistoric past, I’m not sure a conclusive study of such a thing is even possible.

In any case, let us assume that these female biases do have primordial roots. What could those roots be?

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, and I guess is the obvious, default explanation, wanting to promote inclusivity/equity could have originated and persisted as a maternal instinct. This instinct would have worked to inhibit the otherwise inevitable rivalries and battles among a mother’s children, thus perhaps increasing their summed chances of surviving to adulthood and reproducing.

Is this “maternal-origin hypothesis” the end of the story? Or can other aspects of prehistoric life also account for the egalitarianism of the modern female mindset?

The primitive social structure in which H. sapiens is thought to have lived the longest—by far—was the extended family-based band that dominated the Paleolithic (“hunter-gatherer”) period. This basic mode of existence was practiced by humans, and perhaps also by their hominin ancestors, for millions of years, whereas more advanced social forms have been shaping us for only the last 10,000 years or so, i.e., the period following the Neolithic revolution.

From a modern perspective, one of the more striking features of the typical Paleolithic social grouping—which still can be observed in various remote parts of the world—is its lack of what we would call private property, a strong share-and-share-alike ethic, and a simple, non-hierarchical, “flat” organization. The 1980 South African film, The Gods Must be Crazy, did a decent job of depicting one such group (of Kalahari Bushmen) and the possessiveness and envy that threatened their harmony when they discovered an unusual and valuable object (a Coca-Cola bottle, dropped from a passing airplane).

The implication of the story, and indeed of standard anthropological descriptions of such bands, is that egalitarianism is and was necessary to keep these groups together—and keeping these groups together presumably conferred some evolutionary advantage by improving the survival chances and overall Darwinian fitness of their constituent individuals.

As Francis Fukuyama has put it in The Origins of Political Order:

Within a band-level local group, there is nothing resembling modern economic exchange and, indeed, nothing resembling modern individualism . . . Both hunting and gathering are done on a group basis by families or groups of families. Hunting in particular leads to sharing, since there is no technology for storing meat, and hunted animals must be consumed immediately . . . Many of the moral rules in this type of society are not directed at individuals who steal other people’s property but rather against those who refuse to share food and other necessities. Under conditions of perpetual scarcity, the failure to share can often affect the group’s prospects for survival. Band-level societies are highly egalitarian . . . within the band, there is relatively little differentiation between families, no permanent leadership, and no hierarchy. [my italics]

That this “paleo mindset” corresponds to key aspects of the modern female mindset points to the possibility that the one helped seed the other—in other words, that the relative female preference for inclusivity and equity in modern times originated not only in maternity but also in the social organization that dominated during the Paleolithic.

As for men, it seems likely that with the Neolithic revolution and the rise of towns, cities, private property, hierarchical government, stratified societies, meritocratic competition for wealth and status, and so on, their mindset was reshaped for this more structured and competitive environment. (This, incidentally, would have given Neolithic men a huge edge over their more peaceful, less competition-minded hunter-gatherer counterparts—an edge that is still painfully evident wherever modern and paleo-type peoples are in contact.)

The female mindset would not have been reshaped to the same extent by the Neolithic revolution if, as I suspect, this revolution brought much less change to women’s lives and roles. Women were still principally concerned with raising children, and in that context their relative preferences for inclusivity and equity, and aversions to competition and hierarchy, would have remained adaptive. Women’s roles in farming also might not have represented a big departure from their gathering lifestyle of paleo days. And although female sexual competition would have made more and more sense in a world where men’s status began to vary greatly, it’s unclear that women—often treated as patriarchal property before marriage in premodern times—had much freedom to engage in such competition until relatively recently. Certainly the competitions for wealth, status, and power that the Neolithic revolution and town/city life introduced would have been almost entirely male pursuits.

Of course, the trait differences resulting from these distinct roles and selection pressures would not have been absolute. Men and women differ genetically by only a single chromosome among 23 pairs of them, and the outcome of that tiny genetic difference is mediated by the environment as well as by factors such as sex hormones, whose doses during development can vary considerably. Just as some women are on the mannish side of the distribution of looks, some would have been on the mannish side of the distributions of psychological traits.

In the same way, or through other mechanisms of atavism, some men even in modern societies would continue to be very “paleo” and egalitarian in their thinking. It’s tempting to speculate further that this reversion, with its associated conviction that simpler times were better times, underlies some relatively old religions and political movements, including Christianity and socialism*—which, though they were invented by men, tend now to be favored more by women.

In any case, to sum up the main idea here: Key feminine psychological traits favoring inclusivity and equity and opposing hierarchy—traits that seem especially influential now as drivers of social change in the era of female empowerment—may have had their origins in the band-level social organization that dominated the Paleolithic period, not just in maternity per se.

I’ll grant that I’m not a professional anthropologist, and my idea here is not particularly complicated or sophisticated. I’m sure there’s a lot more to be said about the origins of sex-specific psychological traits. But my idea seems worth considering—indeed I think anthropologists would have suggested and explored it already, if their feminized, wokeified profession hadn’t effectively suppressed this and many other areas of inquiry.

Incidentally, my hypothesis itself suggests why this suppression is occurring. If women’s instincts on issues relating to inclusivity, equity, and hierarchy are instincts adapted for maternity and a primordial, long-outmoded social structure, then in modern societies these instincts are probably maladaptive when expressed in the public policy realm, however suited they may still be for family life and the raising of children. Even as a hypothesis, this is not a view that feminists can ever tolerate.

*Marx considered paleolithic bands the original communist societies.

* * *

A quick summary for those coming to this for the first time.

I’ve been in the habit of citing one of my 2019 essays, “The Great Feminization” or “The Day the Logic Died,” as an introduction to the idea of cultural feminization. Since those pieces were written, though, I’ve posted other essays on this topic, expanding this “idea space” a bit more with each one. So it might be useful now, to those coming to this for the first time, to have an updated short summary of the whole picture as I see it.

In a Nutshell

Women, because of their different ways of thinking and behaving on average, and their new, strong influence over culture and politics, are the principal drivers of modern social change, including all aspects of wokeness.

From Home to Office

American women—whose sociocultural circumstances are very similar to those of other Western women—obtained full equality in voting rights by constitutional amendment more than a century ago. That had significant cultural and political consequences, but it was only a small part of the story of women’s modern empowerment. The big change occurred in the period 1950-2000, when women shifted, en masse and on a durable, peacetime basis, from being dedicated homemakers to participating more or less equally alongside men in the working world and public life. The labor force participation rate charts below (the first for American men, the second for women) clearly show this shift.

As I wrote in “The Great Feminization”:

The historic significance of this migration on its own appears to have been underappreciated. Women never made such a move, to such a degree, in any large human society in the past. It significantly altered the structure of ordinary life.

But women in the late 20th century didn’t just move into the workforce. They moved into its upper ranks, to professions that strongly influence societal culture and policy. They became journalists, public relations specialists, lawyers, academics, novelists, publishers, filmmakers, TV producers, and politicians, all to an unprecedented extent. In some of these culture-making professions, by the 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved parity or even dominance (e.g., writers, authors, and public relations specialists) with respect to men. Even where they fell short of full parity, they appeared to acquire considerable “veto” power over content. A 2017 report by the Women’s Media Center noted evidence that at the vast majority of media companies, at least one woman is among the top three editors.

Women Think Differently About Cultural and Political Matters

Women’s ascension to power in culture- and policy-making professions has been followed by extensive cultural and political changes. Why? Because women, on average, think differently than men do about cultural and political issues. This should not be surprising: The bodies and minds of women and men were shaped long ago by biological and cultural evolution for their distinct traditional roles in life. Women’s distinct roles obviously have required certain psychological traits or tendencies that are different from male traits. I think most of us would agree that these innately feminine traits include:

1. • A greater emotional sensitivity and capacity for empathy/compassion/nurturing.

• • A greater fearfulness and aversion to risks (concerning dangers to themselves and others), including an extra sensitivity to the risks of toxic and other environmental threats (reflected in hormone-driven pregnancy behaviors such as food/odor aversions and compulsive “nesting”).

• • A greater affinity for people and relationships, and lesser affinity for constructed, systemized, and abstract things.

• • A greater tendency to align emotionally when in a group, especially a group of other women—a tendency that implies a superior ability (individually and collectively) to transmit emotions and other social contagions.

• • A reduced affinity for competition and capacity for resistance to aggressors.

• • Greater affinity for themes of suffering and victimhood, with correspondingly less interest in triumphant “male” themes of exploration and conquest.

Probably most of these traits are interrelated. In any case, when one considers these broad aspects of “innate femininity,” it isn’t hard to see that the very sudden extension of their dominance—from women’s traditional domestic domain to all areas of public life—would help account for the dramatic social changes of the past half-century or so.

It also isn’t hard to see that women tend to support these social changes more than men do—although it’s important to understand that by altering the culture, women have influenced not only their own but also men’s thinking and behavior.

Social changes likely to have been driven by the ascendancy of female traits

• • Much more generous welfare programs.

• • Extensions of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (e.g., affirmative action) and more groups needing intervention (“traditionally marginalized groups”).

• • Excessively honoring (e.g., with pronoun declaration rituals) anyone with a claim to victimhood or some other “special identity” status.

• • Very strong social reactions to media portrayals of racial injustice/inequity, e.g., the near-hysterias following the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN.

• • Inflations of the traditional definitions of “harm,” “offense,” “trauma,” “violence,” “aggression,” etc., as reflected in new terms such as “microaggressions” and “triggers.”

• • An astounding belief (from men’s perspective) in slight or even imaginary emotional upsets as sources of real harm in the world. This belief is reflected in everyday female-produced media content but also in the new hyper-focus on psychological trauma in law and medicine, and of course in the vast inflation of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1980s/90s, before they were discredited).

• • A shift away from the traditional deterrence of criminal behavior with punishment and stigmatization, in preference for compassion-based, non-stigmatizing solutions (e.g., non-prosecute policies for most crimes, free needles for addicts).

• • Reduced tolerance of deaths in war, despite (ironically) a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television.

• • Less tolerance for capital punishment and other harsh sentences, especially where the “traditionally disadvantaged” are concerned.

• • Less restrictive immigration policy, again driven by stories and imagery (pitiable refugee children, huddled masses, etc.) that evoke maternal protective/nurturing instincts.

• • In general, much more emphasis in media and policy contexts on compassion-evoking stories of individuals, with correspondingly less emphasis on (even condemnation of!) coldly logical risk/benefit analyses focused on the long term.

• • Suppression of potentially upsetting ideas or expressions (“hate speech,” “mansplaining”), words, facts (e.g., on racial differences in criminality), free debate and free speech, due process of law (especially when women are plaintiffs), and even some fields of scientific inquiry.

• • Helicopter parenting.

• • Obsession with safety, e.g., as seen in new terms such as “safe space.”

• • Rise of “green” movement and related cultural themes involving opposition to nuclear power, GMO, “toxins,” “chemicals,” even vaccines (a movement that was increasing in popularity, with female leadership, pre-COVID-19). Related shift towards “natural” foods and medicines, including those produced by the relatively unregulated supplements industry. Rise of hysteria variants involving claims of chemical hypersensitivity, toxic metals, etc.

• • Decline in interest in engineering, as shown by greater reliance on foreign-born students at e-schools, loss of Western pre-eminence (to China) in advanced engineering projects.

• • Predominance of “social media” in Western life.

• • Shift away from technical themes and toward social (woke) themes in female-dominated STEM media and professions, e.g., “math is white supremacist.”

• • Shift away from traditional, hierarchical, rule-based religions toward more loosely structured and therapeutic forms of worship and spirituality.

• • Frequent and rapid social contagions of new cultural themes (e.g., wokeness and its various associated behaviors and terminology, from BLM worship to the trans mania), affecting virtually all organizations and institutions—because women, the chief transmitters of these contagions, are highly influential in organizations and institutions.

• • Increase in the frequency and prevalence of overtly pathological social contagions (hysterias) such as Tik-Tok-induced Tourette’s-like behavior.

• • Tendency of professions and institutions to become female-dominated by systematically excluding (especially white) males—who are “problematic” for grouped women, simply because of their innate male resistance to institutional feminization.

• • General increase in intolerant, “hive-mind” behavior in institutions and professions as a consequence of increasing female dominance.

• • Marked preference for inclusivity and equity over traditional meritocratic discrimination, everywhere from schools to companies to political appointees and candidates. “Participation trophies.”

• • Virtually uniform emphasis on victimhood themes in Western literary fiction, coincident with female takeover of publishing industry.

• • Reduced public interest in adventurous endeavors such as manned space exploration (“we should fix poverty and inequality here on Earth first”).

• • Demotion of traditional heroes such as Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson and promotion of their alleged victims, e.g., Native Americans, Sally Hemings.

Obviously, not every woman out there likes or is driving these changes. The differences between men’s and women’s mindsets are differences on average.

Moreover, the mindset underlying these shifts—a mindset that, in some of these cases, seems sensitive to the point of neuroticism—might not even be that of the average woman. I suspect it more closely represents the attitudes of the single, childless activists who have been most energetic in pushing these social changes. For them, perhaps, society and its “disadvantaged,” from African-Americans to Rio Grande-crossing illegal immigrants, are substitutes for the children they don’t have.

Cultural Feminization is Problematic

One sufficient and conservative reason for doubting that cultural feminization is a good thing is simply that it entails the abrupt replacement of a large set of civilizational traits that were embedded in Western people, culturally and probably biologically, over thousands of years. Not every Western trait is essential to the West’s survival or is even still adaptive in the modern world. But discarding these traits at the whim of female activists seems a bit like deleting genes willy-nilly from the human genome. Could you do that without bad consequences? Yes, conceivably—but it’s far more likely to end in disaster.

Another good reason to oppose or limit cultural feminization is that, while men traditionally led societies and thus would have been expected to evolve attitudes and behaviors appropriate for that role, women traditionally were confined to other, more private roles, centering on maternity. In other words, why should we suppose that being a mother, or being shaped by evolution for motherhood, is a better preparation for public life than . . . serving in public life, as men have done for ages?

There are further reasons that have to do with specific effects of feminization. For example, feminization appears to have brought a new cultural and political emphasis on short-term, feelgood consequences, with less emphasis on—I would say a blindness to—long-term consequences. It should be obvious that this is unsustainable and must end badly.

Moreover, females’ lesser affinity, even hostility, for due process of law, free debate, unfettered scientific inquiry, and related aspects of Western, small-l liberalism, seems likely to render the West relatively static, sclerotic, and poor if allowed to run to its logical conclusion.

Then, of course, there is the apparent female (relative to male) embrace of mass immigration to the West from the Third World, which I think has the potential to dissolve Western societies faster than any other factor.

I think it’s worth mentioning too, though it’s more speculative, that the apparent decades-long slide in testosterone levels in men might be an effect of cultural feminization. Testosterone levels in men (and women) are known to be regulated by social cues, such as winning or losing competitions, and so it would make sense that cultural messaging condemning and suppressing traditional masculinity would have a T-lowering effect. Lower T means lower fertility, which below a certain threshold—one that Legacy Americans sank beneath long ago—leads ultimately to the extinction of the population.

Lastly, there is the sense of taboo that enshrouds the idea of cultural feminization, in general but especially when it is framed negatively. The high-profile MSM types (Cowen, Edsall) who have touched the subject (only in the last year or so, as far as I know) have been approving or very mild in their concerns. Also, for more than a decade now, most of the short essays I’ve tried to get published on this subject, including in some pretty right wing publications, have been rejected. In every case, a female editor had veto power, and I think her male colleagues also feared the hostile ululations that would ensue if they published my unvarnished take. Anyhow, an old quote (often attributed to Voltaire) seems apt here: “If you want to know who rules over you, look at whom you’re not allowed to criticize.”

Further reading

“The Great Feminization” (2019)

“The Day the Logic Died” (2019)

“Cultural Feminization: a Bibliography” (2021)

The Great Feminization: Women as Drivers of Modern Social Change (2022)

* * *

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

From conception through adolescence, male and female humans—mammals in general—are driven along distinct neural and anatomical developmental pathways by androgen and estrogen hormones, men having more of the former, women having more of the latter. The divergences in those developmental pathways lead to the innate differences in attitudes and behaviors between men and women.

One of the most striking of these behavioral/attitude differences has to do with risk: Women are, on average compared to men, markedly less willing to undertake risks—more “risk-averse”—and this gender difference has been shown (here and here, for example) to be broadly testosterone (T)-linked. In general, research in the past few decades suggests that either the bloodstream T level, or a marker (based on relative finger lengths) of prenatal T exposure, or both, predicts a person’s propensity for risky behaviors, as well as for competition and aggression.

Social psychology experiments on risk aversion typically examine risk behaviors, such as gambling choices, that can be studied relatively tidily in a laboratory setting. At the same time, in the modern West, low risk-aversion is often framed as a negative, maladaptive trait that tends to lead people astray. In fact, in the real world, the ability to cope with fear and take big risks is probably an essential step in the process of civilization. As Camille Paglia famously quipped, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we’d still be living in grass huts.”

Indeed, a greater willingness to take risks, even in comparison to other male-run civilizations, is plausibly one of the reasons the West got so far out in front of the rest: exploring and conquering most of the non-European world, developing the most technologically and culturally advanced societies ever known, exploring outer space, etc. But now that the West’s culture and policy have been heavily feminized, the lesser female enthusiasm for risky adventures like space exploration—a difference that seems even more pronounced anecdotally than it is in surveys—helps explain why spending on such endeavors has become just a tiny fraction of spending on welfare and other matters dear to women’s hearts.

[link]

That testosterone reduces fear, enhances the willingness to compete, and enhances the desire to dominate probably is a major reason men, on average compared to women, are more competitive, more willing to engage in violence, less subject to anxiety and fear, and less emotionally sensitive in general. Again, this is entirely what one would expect from men’s traditional roles not only as explorers but also as hunters and warriors. And, of course, we know that the vast majority of violent criminals are male. Thus, “willingness to fight” and related traits are obviously gender-determined to a great extent.

Should we care if the West’s feminization makes its people and their leaders less inclined towards fighting as well as exploration? Yes, we should care, especially if not all countries have been feminized. In the latter context, a country’s feminine aversion to fighting could result in its becoming enslaved, or even extinguished in genocide, by a less-feminized rival. But even a more subtle weakness could make a country highly susceptible to a bully’s manipulative threats.

For example, many already view the current New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, as a personification of that weakness.

In general, human civilization seems to requires a willingness—at least in a critical mass of the population—to undertake fearful hardships, stresses, even violence and death, for good ends. Without men and their fear-lowering testosterone, who would supply that crucial willingness?

Testosterone and a feminized culture

Speaking of testosterone, if you haven’t been living in a cave for the past two decades, you know that T levels in men have been declining—in other words, men at a given age today tend to have lower T levels than men of the same age a few decades ago. Studies [link, link, link, link] have found this alarming trend in multiple developed countries including the US. Some of these studies have specifically controlled for potentially confounding factors such as increases in obesity, which lowers T, and still have found evidence of a decline.

No one really knows what is causing this drop in T levels among men. Apart from rising obesity, which almost certainly accounts for some of the problem, suspected culprits include estrogen-mimicking compounds that leach out of common plastics, and the big decline in cigarette smoking among men (smoking inhibits estrogen synthesis, and a few studies have linked smoking to higher T).

One hypothesis that never gets mentioned—well, except by me—is that cultural feminization is itself a significant driver of declines in T. In other words, the recent feminine shift in cultural themes and norms, which effectively suppresses and stigmatizes many traditional aspects of traditional masculinity, and the related loss of male power in society, has had an essentially feminizing effect on the male brain, resulting among other things in lower T levels.

This hypothesis could be tested, to some degree, with simple experiments. For example, I would guess that exposure to images or videos of women shouting—a pretty common motif in modern media—could be enough, depending on the dose, to measurably lower T levels in ordinary males.

To some of you, it may seem totally implausible that sociocultural factors, working via cognition and emotion, could influence something as deeply biological as the secretion of a sex hormone. However, it is a well-established phenomenon—in fact, it’s quite clear that the androgen system in mammals was specifically designed by Evolution to be regulated by social and other external cues.

It is known, for example, that sexual activity raises T levels in men (and women). Also, sports players and even their fans show increases in T levels after winning games, whereas losers show decreases. In general, it seems that T levels in men tend to rise before fights and other challenges, and either stay high or keep rising after wins, and drop after losses—one of Nature’s “winner take all” effects. (There is even evidence that becoming a father—which requires a less aggressive, more nurturing character—downregulates T production.) In other words, T levels definitely do rise or fall based on external sociocultural cues, with negative experiences being more likely to drive T levels lower. And thus, in a feminized society that hands men Ls every day, we really should expect them to show significant drops in T.

T and Civilization

In principle, the consequences of lower T levels aren’t all bad. For example, there appears to have been a striking drop in the rate of violent crime in the US since the 1980s and early 90s.

Of course, there are many other factors, including declining lead exposures, the passing of the 80s/90s crack-cocaine epidemic, and changes in urban policing policies, that could help explain this trend. But the hypothesis that falling T levels, over the same period, have contributed, is at least plausible. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Maybe in that narrow sense, it would. But, again, there would be tradeoffs. Some would involve men’s health: Low-T, for example, is known to promote depression, osteoporosis, obesity, erectile dysfunction and heart disease, among other adverse health consequences. Other tradeoffs might affect society even more profoundly. In particular, low-T would be expected to reduce men’s sperm counts—which, by the way, is a trend that researchers have specifically detected. Lower T and lower sperm counts would be expected, in turn, to make men less likely to marry and/or have children. One well-known study did find that lower-T men in their mid-20s were less likely to be married several years later—and of course many studies have noted the wider trends of falling marriage and cohabitation rates, and associated birth rates, in recent decades.

[link]

Endemic low-T in a society, or a wider civilization as in the case of the West, might thus be considered a clear warning sign that the bottom is dropping out. One would expect this warning sign to emerge in a society that has been subject to a major defeat in war. In the West, in a historically unprecedented turn of events, it may be happening despite Western war victories and geopolitical supremacy. In other words, Western social liberalism, with its handover of most cultural power to women, may have delivered to its men, and to Western civilization, the equivalent of a crippling defeat.

* * *

In prior essays on this site and elsewhere, I’ve argued that the spread of wokeness and its recent marked intensification (the “Great Awokening”) is best seen as a social contagion—of feelings and sociocultural ideas that broadly reflect women’s maternal instincts, and are much more transmissible among women than among men.

I’ve also suggested that wokeness is apt to be ultra-transmissible among females whose feminine, maternal energies aren’t absorbed by husbands and children and may seek another outlet. The terms “cat lady” and “wine aunt” refer to a subset of these individuals, but many unmarried girls and young women, as well as successful career women, also fit this description.

I’ve proposed, moreover, that wokeness is driven into institutions not just by the conversion of (especially female) workers already in place but also by the takeover of those institutions by women and tamed males, via biased hiring.

I’m more certain now than ever that all these hypotheses are correct, as far as they go. But I think there is one more aspect of wokeness that requires an explanation. I’m referring to what could be called wokeness’s spiraling frenzy—its tendency to move away from norms of belief and behavior and towards extremes, wherever it takes hold.

To put it another way: The woke women and their enablers who in the past decade or two have effectively taken control of virtually all major American institutions and professions have not been content to implement a modest set of reforms and leave it at that. As their power has grown, they have increasingly attacked the core values of Western civilization: everything from due process of law to meritocracy to the shielding of children from sexual deviants and predators. As their policies have become extreme, so have their methods. They have made it clear that they don’t want sober deliberations—they want emotional shock and awe!

One could argue that there is a counter-cultural logic to this movement—that it wants to collapse the existing order as completely as those hijacked planes collapsed the Twin Towers on 9/11.

But is the Great Awokening replacing the old culture with a new one that can bind society sustainably—a “successor ideology”?

Wokeness and the Great Awokening are driven chiefly by women, who have their own ways of thinking and persuading—ways that typically seem more emotional and less rational than men’s. So one might suppose that there is a genuine ideology being built here, albeit a feminine one that seems alien to the average male, and that the Great Awokening is just the final, dramatic dash in this “pink shift” takeover of Western culture.

However, to me, that’s not the full story. To me, the Great Awokening’s spiraling frenzy, and its attraction for people who are evidently mentally ill, suggest that it is for the most part only a temporary and reactive social phenomenon: a social “mania.”

Logic and Madness

As many have noted, the Great Awokening bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

The CCR’s spearpoints were cadres of “Red Guard” fanatics, young people (even teens) whose instability and restlessness, suggestibility, and high susceptibility to fanaticism were probably comparable to what one finds in today’s millennial Antifa brigades. These howling Maoist minions sought the erasure of whatever competed with Maoism, which in practice meant just about anything predating Maoist China—history books, art, architecture, temples, even genealogical records. Red Guards and their camp followers toppled statues of Confucius, pasted huge banners with their slogans everywhere, and went around attacking intellectuals or anyone even lightly connected to the teaching of pre-Maoist history or philosophy.

That was the counter-cultural logic part of it. But there was also the crazypants part—shocking, obscene, savage stuff, ultimately including murder and even cannibalism.

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over “counterrevolutionaries” …  Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. [NYT]

Not content with attacking living reminders of the old China, Red Guards also broke into cemeteries and dug up the skeletal remains of ancient Chinese emperors and nobles, desecrating them and denouncing the persons these remains had once been.

Other examples of these social frenzies come to mind. In some of the pre-Christian feasts of Rome and northern Europe, open drunkenness and debauchery, and various other intentionally shocking inversions of everyday social norms, were encouraged, at least in part as cathartic but controlled ventings of accumulated stress. (Modern parties, especially the ones teens and young adults have, seem like echoes of these displays.) As Samuel Johnson famously said, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Or a woman. The infamous convent hysterias of 1500s-1700s Europe supply many illustrations of spiraling frenzies among women, especially sexually frustrated younger ones. In the 1632-34 Loudoun case, for example, at a public exorcism of supposedly demon-possessed Ursuline nuns, a Sister Claire “fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, lifting up her petticoats and chemise, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes.” [link]

Sexual themes dominated the antics of “possessed” nuns, although there were maternal—or inverted maternal—themes too, for example claims of mystical pregnancy, and stories of secret witch conclaves (“witches’ sabbaths”) at which children were eaten.

Themes of sexual violation and impregnation, theft or killing of unborn babies, and witchcraft, along with the same spiraling of fantastic claims and odd behavior, were also typical in the medicalized versions of possession—”multiple personality disorder” and “UFO abduction”—that were popular among young women in the 1970-90s, and ended up discrediting many therapists and psychiatrists, as well as the whole idea of “hypnotically recovered memories.”

To me, these are examples of social manias—not just contagions (for even healthy, sustainable behaviors can be contagious) but contagions that spread intense and increasingly bizarre, often counter-cultural activities, and are essentially reactions to excessive stress.

A holiday from stress and inhibition

As the comment by Dr. Johnson implies, human beings in modern civilizations are inhibited and stressed by the social rules they are supposed to obey and the complex social environments they are supposed to navigate—the “pain of being a man.”

It makes sense that women nowadays would be relatively hard-hit by such stresses. Women’s basic lifestyle has shifted dramatically—much more than men’s has—over the past few generations. Women during this interval generally have had to face new stresses from:

• • higher education and the pressures at higher levels of the working world;
  • the postponement or abandonment of marriage and child-bearing;
  • a new (or newly de-civilized) courtship environment in which their natural desire for love and motherhood is taken advantage of again and again without being fulfilled.

All the while, women have been told (by the most authoritative sources, including Hollywood and feminist activists) that these changes represent “progress” and must not be resisted.

Women also, compared to men, appear to have an innately greater desire for “equality” and social harmony. Yet these lofty, sentimental social goals, during the same critical period, have slipped—frustratingly—further and further out of reach, as the West has intensified its effort to remake itself as a highly multi-racial/ethnic civilization.

In addition to having to face these new stresses, women are (on average) more emotionally sensitive than men, and thus are apt to be more affected by the same stressors.

Small wonder, then, that a very large proportion of women and girls in Western societies can now expect to be diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder. It probably also should be unsurprising that the essentially feminine notion of “trauma”—a highly stressing psychological injury—has now taken on an outsized role not only in Western medicine but also in the wider culture.

On the whole, then, the recent changes in the standard female lifeway, and the demographic makeovers of Western societies, have created a large and chronic background level of stress for women. But the severe emotional contagion of the Great Awokening was triggered only after additional, more acute stressors appeared in the first half of 2020: the pandemic with its lockdowns, social isolation, and widespread fears of illness/death; and then the inflammatory treatment—by left-leaning media, activists, and politicians—of various police killings of miscreant African Americans.

Thus I think one can fairly easily fit the Great Awokening into the broader category of stress-induced, stress-relieving social manias. Amid the furious revels of such manias, inhibitions are necessarily going to be relaxed (for some more than others, of course) and people who were relatively labile, even frankly nuts, to begin with will also be drawn in, given the camouflage these frenzies provide for their behavioral issues.

The function of boundary-pushing

A social mania—one that is true to the concept of mania—cannot run forever. It must end by depleting its energy source or by inducing resistance, just as an individual with psychiatric mania will become exhausted after many days without adequate sleep, and/or will cause herself to be hospitalized and treated by exhibiting increasingly abnormal behavior. If a social mania’s deep purpose is to relieve accumulated social pressures, then its tendency to be ever more immoderate might even be seen as functional—in the sense that the spiraling further and further away from social norms serves to reduce support and induce opposition, thus limiting the damage while allowing the requisite venting of steam. To put it crudely, a social mania with its spiraling frenzy is a societal “cry for help.”

This is all speculative. It’s also a group-level, forest-not-the-trees view that people with an ordinary individualistic bias might find hard to wrap their heads around. But it’s a novel take that I (obviously) think should be considered. On the whole, it suggests that the Great Awokening should interest us less as a new cultural movement, and more as a signal indicating deep problems with the existing culture and society. In other words, it’s a social version of a seismic tremor, or even earthquake, and its intensity and direction of slip are interesting mainly for what they tell us about the underlying stresses at work—stresses that are unbearable and thus have be relieved, in one way or another.

***

I’ve already written a lot of essays about women’s maternal and other sex-specific traits, and how the mass entry of women into public life, in the last several decades, has brought those feminine traits to bear on culture and politics, driving extensive and ongoing changes in Western societies.

I am convinced more than ever that that “great feminization” argument is essentially correct. But there is another facet of male/female cultural competition that I have mostly overlooked until now. It’s really something that relates to groups in general, not just to women, but I think it’s especially relevant to the current female-driven social transformations of Western societies.

The idea here is that, when women a few decades ago began to achieve parity/dominance vis-à-vis men in professions and institutions across the West, they automatically set up a rivalry, a “battle of the sexes,” in each of these professions and institutions. Why? Not because of any particular “female” or “male” trait, but simply because the two sexes are different in general. They have different group identities, different ways of thinking, different group cultures. If only at an instinctive, nonconscious level—and if only to avoid the emotional pain of having to conform to the others’ ways—each has sought dominance over the other.

This certainly seems to be true from women’s perspective. You can hardly open a newspaper or browse news websites these days without encountering lamentations, by female writers, about male workplace behavior—from the mildly irritating to the supposedly traumatizing. These behaviors typically are blamed upon the male domination of the workplace in question, although from my (admittedly biased, male) perspective these complaints often look more like attempts to stamp out the last vestiges of male culture in workplaces that are already significantly feminized.

Women in their workplaces nowadays also—typically with the thinnest of formal rationales—are apt to organize emotional coalitions to oust their male CEOs or other leaders whose ways are insufficiently accommodating to the current female mindset.

I suppose that if one ventures into the “manosphere” reaches of the Internet, one will find similar complaints from men trapped in female-dominated institutions. One will strain to find similar victories, though.

On the whole, the institutional battle of the sexes is something that seems to have really crept up on men, creating a challenge for them that they may be unable to surmount. Men, in particular the white, European-derived men who created the institutions of Western civilization, were trying to be progressive and even-handed when they welcomed women into the workplace (they were relatively welcoming, compared to Asians, Arabs, Africans, etc.). They were trying to be meritocratic. Arguably that relatively fair-minded meritocratic mindset was a psychological or cultural trait that helped Western men build their civilization into the powerhouse it was. (Most men also regarded the scaled-up presence of women in the workplace as a colossal and wondrous sexual opportunity.)

What men didn’t reckon with is that women eventually would reach a certain level of presence and power in the institutions and professions where they worked—a critical mass, as it were—and from that point onward would tend to seek not parity but dominance, and by just about any means.

I submit that we are already seeing this reach for (and, frequently, achievement of) female dominance across multiple institutions and professions. While the most visible manifestation is the one I just mentioned—the noisy cancellation coalition that dislodges a problematic male executive (who is often replaced with a woman)—women also have been feminizing their institutions, and crowding out men, in much less newsworthy ways, e.g., the practice of “preferred pronouns,” “inclusive,” i.e., non-meritocratic hiring including quotas for female execs and board members, mandatory pro-diversity statements, and feminist/ESG/green constraints on investment and general corporate policy.

The upshot of this organizational capture is, of course, women’s use of these entities to promote the wider feminization of culture and politics—often synonymous with “wokeification”—which, again, I have written about elsewhere.

Their steamrolling victories suggest that women are much more powerful and effective than men in these institutional struggles, and, in a way, this should be unsurprising: Men presumably have not been under long-term evolutionary or cultural pressure to cope with competition of this kind from women. Women, on the other hand, as the weaker sex, have long had need of “force multiplier” tactics and instincts.

I strongly suspect that women’s greater power derives especially from a set of closely related female traits that include superior emotional sensitivity, superior sociality, superior ability to catch and transmit social contagions, and superior ability to form emotional coalitions—traits that, again, may have evolved not just in support of maternal functions, but also as special weapons in contests with otherwise dominant males. (I have touched on these points in previous essays, e.g., here and here.)

Of course, women also benefit tremendously from the civil rights dogma and legal regime that has gripped the US and some other Western societies for decades now, and often designates women as “traditionally disadvantaged” and thus worthy of favorable treatment, especially vis-à-vis white males.

Other groups

As I suggested at the top of this essay, women’s quest for supremacy within traditionally male institutions/professions is just one specific example of a much more general phenomenon of modernity. In other words, my hypothesis here is that any two (or more) groups that are sufficiently well defined and coherent, with sufficiently distinct group identities and cultures and so on, are bound to vie for control, to some extent, whenever they occupy the same social space.

Ethnic/racial groups are probably the most obvious examples of highly coherent but non-gender-defined groups that we would expect to see in these wars for institutional supremacy. As in the case of women vs. men, some of these ethnic/racial groups, due to their own particular traits, will be better than others in such contests. Immigrants to Western countries, especially those who have to travel from remote parts of the world, already tend to be the smartest, most ambitious, get-up-and-go members of their societies. Moreover, some of those societies are already highly stratified, with highly intelligent, highly entitled, highly ambitious (even ruthless) upper strata—so the immigrants from those upper strata are really going to pose a challenge to Westerners in the context of institutional struggles.

Thus, we are essentially looking at the flip side, the dark side one might say, of the fact that America and other Western countries attract the world’s best: Yes, many of these immigrants are the best, or are at least highly ambitious and sharp-elbowed, but that also means that they may soon have your job—and may even control your organizations.

Additionally, virtually any non-legacy-Western ethnic group is nonwhite, and ipso facto will be granted further strong advantages by contemporary civil rights culture. These advantages, over the past fifty-odd years, have included preferences/quotas in academic admissions, in public and private job hiring, and in government contracting—even when the group’s members have hailed mostly from elite, wealthy castes in the home country, and have not been “disadvantaged” in any sense.

Apart from the very tangible, often windfall-scale benefits of this civil rights regime, there has been, especially in recent decades, a civil rights mindset within organizations, a mindset that provides a further advantage to nonwhite ethnicities. Cloaking themselves in civil rights victimhood, preaching about the need for more diversity and equity, calling out alleged racists and racism, nonwhites can basically activate and direct that mindset as a further, quite powerful tool for displacing legacy Whites, for individual and group benefit.

I can think of at least several ethnicities that are doing very well in Western societies for the reasons I’ve just described. Indians are probably the most obvious example. They make up only about 1.5 percent of the US population now, and were hardly visible at all in the country half a century ago, but already they are strikingly overrepresented in the ranks of big-company CEOs as well as in other influential professions such as law, medicine, and politics.

Again, according to this general hypothesis, the struggle for control of institutions and professions could involve any other type of group with a significant presence and a sufficiently distinct and coherent identity. I think there are not many good examples beyond gender- and ethnicity-based groupings, but surely the “LGBTQ community” is one that has had some success in influencing big organizations’ policies.

 A General Hypothesis of Cultural Struggle

To sum up, then, my hypothesis is that a “collective instinct” to vie for supremacy over institutions/professions is something that occurs to some extent, and more or less automatically, even non-consciously, within all well-defined, cohering groups of significant size within those organizations. Different groups will have different traits that affect the intensity of their participation, their strategies, and their overall chances of success in these struggles. Some will also be advantaged or disadvantaged by the surrounding law and culture, e.g., civil rights law and culture.

I am not sure how original this idea is. Certainly, the idea of group culture is not new; nor is the idea of a struggle between cultures—what the Germans call a kulturkampf—novel. But the idea that such a struggle begins almost automatically when two or more rival cultures share a defined social space—a profession, an organization, a country—is one I don’t think I have encountered before.

I may not have emphasized enough that this “struggle” normally, for most of its participants, would be relatively subtle and even non-conscious. We all have our conscious explanations of, and justifications for, the things we do, but clearly there is a lot of other stuff going on under the hood—under the “limen,” the threshold of consciousness, as psychologists call it. Thus, Sanjay from the IT department may not be consciously plotting to dislodge the white CEO of his corporation; but, if asked to sign a petition decrying overheard off-color remarks by his company’s white CEO at a recent company retreat, he may be, ceteris paribus, much more likely to sign it if he knows the replacement CEO will be one of his countrymen—even if he isn’t consciously aware of that knowledge’s influence on him.

Another point to emphasize is that many, maybe most large organizations and institutions will have more than one group vying for control (e.g., women, assorted nonwhites, LGBTQs) against the legacy group (white males). These factions will coalesce and separate as needed, negotiating power-sharing strategies and arrangements, one faction slipstreaming behind another that has more power, and so on—similar to the workings of political parties in a multiparty system.

The uniqueness of whites

I have hesitated to include the legacy managerial class—white males—as combatants in these ubiquitous struggles, for the simple reason that they seldom seem to put up a fight. It’s downright eerie how some of these guys, no matter how innocent, will grovel, apologize, and plaintively attempt to appease when attacked, instead of showing any kind of defiance. It’s also odd that these men are so easily isolated; they are like those hobbled old wildebeests from the nature documentaries: left behind by the panicked herd for the pursuing, shrieking jackals to surround and kill at their leisure.

As for most of this social-psych territory, I can only speculate about the source of white males’ peculiar weakness and apathy. Maybe just having been on top for so long is enough to erode the mojo needed to stay there; maybe success has made us too soft, as the ascendant Greeks of antiquity said of the descendant Persians. Maybe we also developed psychological tools, such as hyper-individualism and relative cultural openness, that were once highly adaptive in enabling us to build our great civilization, but now leave us vulnerable as our environment becomes more post-patriarchal and multi-ethnic, and the protection and promotion of the “tribe” acquires a renewed importance.

Indeed, we aren’t merely passive in the face of challenges from women and nonwhites. We—a huge number of us anyway—are quick to respond with active self-loathing and self-abasement. Our women are even quicker in this regard, so I guess that this represents not a male trait but a white trait: a guilt/appeasement reflex that is related to emotional sensitivity and social (“virtue”) signaling.

Whatever the cause, it is or should be remarkable, not to mention alarming, that nonwhites don’t seem to have this self-abasing, guilt-signaling reflex. Nonwhites have at least many skeletons in their ancestral closets as whites do—everyone living now is the beneficiary of hundreds of invasions and genocides going back to ape-men times. Yet I’m sure I’ve never heard an Indian, a Nigerian, or a Filipino lament his own ongoing, deliberate colonization and exploitation of the countries of the West.

Implications

In principle, some struggles between group cultures will merely simmer, remaining unresolved indefinitely, because the factions that would challenge the incumbent white male faction cannot put together the numbers to prevail, or simply because a certain number of white males are needed to keep the organizational ship afloat. But now in the 2020s, after six decades in which Western women and nonwhites have been crowding into Western professions and institutions (lately empowered by blatantly anti-white-male ideology) they seem to be seriously reaching for supremacy, at least wherever white males and their mindset are less necessary.

In any case, one implication of this hypothesis is that adding “diversity” to an organization doesn’t necessarily bring it closer to some happy, stable equilibrium. It may, instead, disrupt what had been a relatively stable balance of forces, stimulating anew the struggle(s) for dominance in that organization—and leading to the further marginalization of white males.

Moreover, struggles among factions within organizations reflect, and also to a great extent add up to, a struggle at the societal level. By this reasoning, increasing demographic diversity in Western societies via mass-nonwhite-immigration is simply adding fuel to the kulturkampf fire, making ethnic factionalism burn hotter to the detriment of most, and increasing the chances that at least in some countries, nonwhites will prevail—marginalizing whites in their own lands.

* * *

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

The sanctions against Russia—both the official economic sanctions and the unofficial, often petty-seeming sanctions such as banning Russian owners from cat shows—arguably represent the first great “geopolitical cancellation” of this new feminized era in the West.

This cancellation obviously goes far beyond the usual diplomatic noises that are made when the blame for conflicts is murkier and the victims more remote from us. It is a public reaction to an outrage that rises explosively above the usual outrages, involves fellow Westerners, and is available to tug at the heartstrings 24/7 on a variety of electronic media.

Moreover, it really does look like a broad translation of the usual domestic cancellation strategies to the geopolitical scene, including economic punishment, censorship, general ostracism, threats of judicial action, and indirect assistance for those who fight the Cancelled One, but of course no direct, overt involvement in that fighting.

Given the scale of this response, the scale of the atrocity that triggered it, and the scale of Russia’s ongoing losses in Ukraine, Putin’s downfall seems inevitable. After killing many thousands of innocent Ukrainians, destroying probably trillions of dollars’ worth of Ukrainian buildings and other infrastructure, utterly breaking Russia’s army and air force, and of course lying through his teeth about his actions and motives, he does not appear to have any way out—any peaceful “off ramp.” He is our generation’s Hitler, and I suspect he already knows that his days, in office at least, are numbered.

There are many potential pluses to a Putin downfall. One is that Russia again will have a chance to achieve what it could not achieve in the 1990s, namely a more mature form of government and economy, oriented towards and not against the West. Such a transformation of Russia, which I think is somewhat more likely than the alternative, would mean a final unification of all the West’s major powers, and at least a temporary “emboldening” of them. That in turn could usher in one of those periods of history, like 1990-2010, in which the West reigns supreme over all earthly comers. In this scenario, bad actors such as Iran, China, and North Korea would have to watch their step, at the very least, and the world in that sense would be a safer place.

But here’s the bad news. Even if the “best case” scenario happens—including a glorious Russian uprising and overthrow of the dictator, maybe even on Easter Sunday (April 24 in the Russian Orthodox calendar)—the West has suffered a blow in its own ranks that I think is of dire significance.

If you’ve read any of my previous essays on this site, you know that I have taken a generally dim view of the West’s future. Cultural/political feminization; mass immigration, multiculturalism and wokeism; and the lack of political tools for solving these problems, have doomed the West in the most basic ways, as I have seen it. On the other hand, conservatives in the West have been gaining strength and coherence in recent years in reaction to the excesses of Letfism/wokeism. As recently as a month ago, it had seemed plausible to me that a Zemmour-ization of the Western Right (Eric Zemmour is explicitly against both cultural feminization and mass-immigration/heavy-multiculturalism) could, eventually and with a lot of luck, restore the situation.

But what Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed all too clearly is that much of the Right in the West is, well, wrong, and about fundamental things. Sadly, these Wrong Rightists include Zemmour as well as prominent commentators in the US, Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance among them.

The Wrong Rightists hate, first and foremost, what they call the Globalist American Empire (GAE). Fair enough—I hate it too. The problem is that they view Putin not as a murderous kleptocrat and global troublemaker (as I view him), but rather as a valuable counterweight to the hegemony of the GAE—a counterweight they want to strengthen, not weaken. These pro-Putin rightists have seemed quite willing to nullify the sovereignty of Ukraine (and, since the invasion started, have been willing to let Putin’s murders of tens of thousands of Ukrainians go unpunished), in order to preserve this counterweight—this bastion of old-fashioned Christian values according to the peculiar delusion afflicting some of them.

Of course, quite a few of the Wrong Rightists are backpedaling now, saying they deplore what Putin did, etc. They understand, at least at some level, the parallels between their sentiments and the discredited sentiments of say, Laval in France and Lindbergh in the USA during 1939-41. They therefore tend to exhibit their distress over the impending collapse of Russia as a Great Power, and the impending destruction of Putin and Putinism, in ways that are more or less indirect. They are peevish about Ukrainian “propaganda.” They lament the “lost opportunity” to have prevented the horrors of this war by barring Ukraine from NATO, thereby calming the nerves of their sensitive hero in the Kremlin. They speak darkly of Ukrainian “Nazis.” They yearn for a swift settlement that preserves Putin in power (and, not incidentally, conceals the fatuity of everything they have claimed or predicted about all this). They emit copious cope about how Russia is still destined to “win.” Above all, they say the West should care less about Ukraine and more about problems at home.

Here are just a few examples of this output (to which I may add soon as time permits):

What I think all this means is that the Western Right in general now is left with much less credibility in the eyes of the average normie citizen, just as occurred in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. In particular, the pro-Putin, “America First” sector of the Right, the sector that happens also to be most deeply concerned with the most serious issues, such as mass immigration, has grandly shot itself through the foot—or maybe through the heart. This has left the Left/center-Right “GAE” coalition in a much better position, so that there won’t be a Zemmour-type president in the USA any time soon—and I’m guessing now there won’t be one even in France. Thus the West’s demise will have been hastened at the very moment of its own apparent triumph over its longtime mortal enemy.

***

Every day, on Twitter and a thousand other media and social-media forums, Americans of a “conservative” or “right-wing” persuasion bemoan and lament the civilizational destruction caused by the crazed, bureaucrat-and-brownshirt armies of wokeness.

I bemoan and lament with them. But what distresses me even more is the destruction—serious destruction—caused by trends that ordinary people on the right approve or at least choose to keep silent about.

One of these trends concerns some of the criminal and civil cases inspired by the #MeToo movement—cases that represent the anti-male, pro-histrionic-female theme in the broad wokeist takeover of the American judicial system. (Another prominent theme in that takeover, the anti-white-law-abiding-citizen, pro-black-felon theme, I wrote about just over a month ago.)

A particularly striking #MeToo case, still in its early stages but already with prominent media coverage, lies before us now.

This is the case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the most media-noisy of the sex kittens paid and kept by the late Jeffrey Epstein. She claims that—more than two decades ago, when she was just 17—she slept with the British royal Prince Andrew, and suffered so much harm thereby that she is now entitled to significant monetary damages. According to the complaint filed by her lawyers:

Prince Andrew committed sexual assault and battery upon Plaintiff when she was 17 years old. As such, Prince Andrew is responsible for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress pursuant to New York common law. The damage to Plaintiff has been severe and lasting . . . .

The below photograph depicts Prince Andrew, Plaintiff, and Maxwell at Maxwell’s home prior to Prince Andrew sexually abusing Plaintiff.

The reader is free to peruse the full complaint [pdf], to follow the case as it progresses, and to make judgments accordingly. I offer here, as a mere bystander who knows none of the parties, only my own humble, hushed opinions.

Which is to say, I think it’s a shameless fraud that demonstrates the shambles of the American legal system under the pressures of wokeist feminization.

Worse, I think it puts on full display America’s cultural corruption—for no media commentator of prominence, as far as I know, has offered even mild skepticism about this outrageous case or others like it.

In other words, while I believe that the stink of this business is more or less universally apparent, the average media person pretends otherwise because the stories generate clicks, and also for fear of cancellation—cancellation by the same hysteria-prone demographic that got people hanged at Salem and other innocents burned at the stake throughout Europe.

Let me clarify that Giuffre’s case against Andrew doesn’t—I mean, logically shouldn’t—have a close connection to the legal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I happen to think the latter were both obviously guilty of sex trafficking and related offenses, even if the sentence Epstein would have received in New York and the one Maxwell is now set to receive will be excessive (on the Great White Defendant principle) compared to typical trafficking cases, i.e., involving some Nigerian or Honduran who really does enslave and brutalize his victims. But no one has ever presented evidence that Andrew was a party to Epstein’s trafficking scheme, or that he was anything other than a gentle fool who, like other fools (Bill Gates and Bill Clinton among them) hung out with his friend Epstein from time to time. (How Epstein generated the charisma to gather such people in his orbit is to me a significant mystery, albeit not relevant here.)

Giuffre’s case rests on the simple allegation that Andrew, in cahoots with Epstein and Maxwell, somehow “forced” Giuffre to sleep with him—which seems not just an unsupported allegation but a preposterous one. Assuming Giuffre and Andrew even did have sex, we have been given no reason to picture it as any less volitional on her part than her demeanor in the photograph would suggest. And I think it’s safe to say that Andrew, whatever his other failings, has never shown a propensity for treating women in the manner alleged.

At the same time, it appears that Giuffre, having partied and traveled widely and gotten to know various men, all on Epstein’s nickel, has been, since E’s legal troubles began, squeezing him or his estate (also Ghislaine Maxwell and Alan Dershowitz) for further money; and the suit against Andrew represents one of the continuations of that broader effort; all of which speaks clearly to the issue of her motive.

In short, the case has the prima facie appearance of being no more than a shakedown: an attempt essentially to extort money with the threat of an embarrassing civil trial if the money is not paid.

Despite this, there is a good chance Giuffre will prevail—her blue-chip lawyers, who probably stand to get around a third of any award or settlement, would not have taken the case otherwise. Most likely she will prevail because Andrew and his family will decide to settle rather than endure the pain of a trial. Even if they are willing to endure that pain, the corruption the #MeToo strain of wokeness has caused in the American legal system, including juries, makes any such case a roll of the dice, at least. The judge in the case also may not be an even-handed Myron Kovitsky type (Bonfire of the Vanities); he is Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee and a paid-up member of the New York liberal elite, whose demeanor in an early hearing does not bode well for the prince.

Shakedowns occur all the time, among highlifes and lowlifes, but this one is so prominent, so front-and-center, and yet apparently so untouchable by simple reason and skepticism. No disinterested observer can question it! Everybody loves Empress Virginia’s new clothes! Little wonder that Dershowitz, target of another one of Giuffre’s suits, has come across as almost apoplectic when talking about her to reporters.

certified, complete, total liar [link]

I’m not neutral on this, because [Giuffre] also accused me of having sex with her, and I proved conclusively — through her own diaries, through her own lawyer, through our own emails — that it would be impossible for me to have ever met her. [link]

Anyway, I hope my writing this emboldens some of you out there to speak up—quixotically, I know, but so be it—and state what is obvious about cases like this, namely that they need to be strongly discouraged somehow, and the men targeted by them need to be better protected. The US and other Western legal systems already make many concessions to women, including protection from incidental reputational harm in rape cases. Why can’t men receive a similar level of protection from the deliberate reputational harm of shakedown cases?

Well, of course, you know why—because women essentially are now in charge, and are remodeling the institutions of Western life to suit themselves. With essentially zero pushback from men. I begin to tire of pointing this out.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

The idea that women, on average compared to men, think differently, behave differently, and vote differently, is not a new one. What I think has some originality, though—certainly it seems to have been too hot, as recently as a few months ago, for any MSM or MSM-adjacent editor to handle—is the idea that women, especially by entering culturally influential professions en masse since the 1960s, have transformed Western societies: pulling them leftward and introducing political correctness, etc., but more precisely feminizing them, with arguably dire implications for Western civilization.

In case it’s useful to others writing in this area (and because like most creative people I crave credit), I’ve listed some of my relevant works in this area—and all the ones I’m now aware of from other writers.

From me

2011    “The Demise of Guythink”

An old blog post, and my first and probably briefest expression of the cultural feminization hypothesis. Inspired by something controversial Jeremy Clarkson said, and also by the Larry Summers controversy which I would later write about in more detail.

2014    “Motherland”

Also an old blog post but a much longer, more discursive account of the hypothesis. Most of the pieces I’ve written since then have been, for the most part, compressed versions of the ideas expressed here.

2014    “No Country for Men” (Return of Kings)

I got this published on Roosh V’s Return of Kings website (under a pseudonym I no longer use).

2019    “The Great Feminization”

Essay on a new website, not using my real name—a relatively brief version of the cult-fem theory, with a bit at the end about testosterone levels and fertility that is probably somewhat relevant, though not really central to the theory. I started the website and placed the essay on it because I had offered a version of the piece to two or three conservative webzines, with no luck.

(Tyler Cowen linked to this essay in his Marginal Revolution blog two and a half years later, prompting a flood of readers.)

2019    “The Day the Logic Died”

A fuller account of the 2005 Larry Summers “intrinsic aptitude” controversy/hysteria, with some cult-fem theory. If you read just one of my essays, make it this one. A favorable reference to this in a tweet from @toad_spotted, some weeks after it was posted, induced many thousands of people to read it—and the “Great Feminization” piece—and encouraged me to keep writing.

2020    “Girl Power”

Some cult-fem theory here, touching on women’s greater ability to form networks/coalitions, especially to cancel (or prosecute) men. Mainly, though, this was an examination of #MeToo-type cases against the historical background of hysterias including medieval/early-modern convent hysterias, Salem, modern recovered-memory case epidemics, etc.

2021    “Pink Shift” (The American Mind)

Short piece summarizing the theory—thanks again to James Poulos & Co. for publishing it.

2021    “The Critical Mass Problem”

More on the apparently superior female ability to form networks and transmit social contagions, as a general source of political/social instability. “The Great Awokening’s transformation of big institutions reflects not only the general fear of personal cancellation within these institutions but also the ‘critical mass’ of susceptible women who work in them.”

Other writers

My initial online searches using keywords like “feminization” were curiously uninformative (a lot of stuff on trans medical issues), but after Tyler Cowen linked to my “Great Feminization” essay two months ago, I started digging again. I’m sure this is still a very incomplete list.

Note that Cowen himself has written about feminization in occasional columns and blog posts, going back at least a few years.

1985    The Feminization of America (Elinor Lenz & Barbara Myerhoff)

The authors “envision the emergence of a new `feminized’ America, a society made more human, less destructive, and more compassionate by women’s nurturing and integrative influences in all walks of life.”

1987    “The Feminization of the American Left” (James Neuchterlein, Commentary)

Contrasts modern leftism with the more masculine leftism of yore. “Feminization, as understood here, suggests the establishment of traditionally feminine virtues (those normally associated with the private realm) as norms of behavior for public life. It indicates an ethic of noncoercion, a preference for emotion over rational analysis and for noncompetitive modes of social interaction, a focus on being rather than doing and on interpersonal relations as the primary preoccupation of the good life.”

1990—present  Sexual Personae and other works (Camille Paglia)

Though never really in a systematic way, as far as I know, Paglia has frequently made references to issues that relate to cultural feminization. For example, in a short essay on #MeToo in 2018: “The big question is whether the present wave of revelations, often consisting of unsubstantiated allegations from decades ago, will aid women’s ambitions in the long run or whether it is already creating further problems by reviving ancient stereotypes of women as hysterical, volatile and vindictive.”

1998    The Feminization of American Culture (Ann Douglas)

Not as relevant as its title suggests. Douglas argues that in the late 19^th century American literature became “feminized” with “books that idealized the very qualities that kept [women] powerless: timidity, piety, and a disdain for competition.”

2006?  “When Did We All Become Women?” (Kathryn Robinson, Seattle Weekly)

“Think of values like nurturing and caring, emotion and sentimentality, connection and community, passivity and submission, vanity and appearance, cooperation and equality, openness and access, manipulation and influence. These are the values on the ascendancy in our public and private lives.” Robinson covers the ground pretty well, and projects the same sense of awe that I had when I started to perceive the significance of this unprecedented cultural development. (Her piece may have been buried in the search rankings until Cowen linked to it a few months ago. Also, the 2006 date attached to the article may have been the date of uploading to the web, not the original magazine publication date.)

2009 “The Education of a Libertarian” (Peter Thiel, CATO Unbound)

Within this essay by the then-not-so-well-known tech billionaire and libertarian evangelist is a recognition of at least one aspect of cultural/political feminization: “. . . I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote. “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

I’ve written about women and their cultural/political ascendancy so much in recent years, especially the last three, that I worry about sounding like the proverbial broken record if I write any more. But it seems to me that as this idea is accepted more widely—including by commentators who see it as their own idea . . .

. . . there is a tendency to narrow the focus (e.g., “female graduates,” “HR ladies,” or “women explain wokeness”) so that the true extent of the West’s feminization is obscured.

Moreover, the case can be made that feminization is having not only an enormous but also a potentially fatal impact on Western civilization as we have known it. Thus, thumping the tub about this subject may be a good and necessary thing to do now.

To that end, I think at least several key points within this overall hypothesis bear repeating:

Women’s broad cultural/political ascendancy has been reshaping the West for decades

The big idea here is that women have been the principal drivers not only of the creeping wokeism post 2015 or so, and of the ongoing semi-spiritual movement known as the Great Awokening, but also of the general “leftward” (in fact, “feminine”) trends in Western culture and politics over the last six-plus decades. This is the period in which women moved en masse into, and achieved parity or dominance within, culturally and politically influential professions such as journalism, publishing, entertainment, law, academia, politics, even blogging.

It is not just from one or two of those professions but from all of them, and in every circumstance along the way (e.g., university life, engagement with social media, office politics, voting, protest marches), that women have been causing cultural and political change, effectively feminizing the West to a degree never seen before in any large civilization.

Activist women—mostly single, university-educated, and/or young—may be the “shock troops” of feminization, and the most dedicated and effective practitioners of wokeism and cancel culture. But women in general have been driving this social transformation.

Women’s ascension to cultural and political power has had cultural and political consequences because women on average are different than men across a wide range of attitudes and behaviors

Gender differences in attitudes and behaviors were presumably shaped—at a biological level with changes that cannot easily be undone—by men’s and women’s distinct roles during the long period of hominid evolution, roles that for women centered on maternity. Women even now in modern times appear to be markedly more emotionally sensitive than men on average, quicker to form social networks, less interested in abstract and inanimate things, less interested in systems, more personal (including ad hominem) in their thinking, and more fearful—not just of ideas and people they dislike but also of toxins and other putative environmental threats. All these differences have had cultural and policy consequences as women’s power has increased in societies designed and traditionally run by men. One could say that women effectively have been using their new cultural and political power to renovate and redecorate their civilization according to their distinctive tastes. As Virginia Woolf put it in her 1938 essay, “Three Guineas”:

Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilization” in which we find ourselves?

Cultural/political feminization therefore involves a multitude of changes

Cultural and political changes that have plausibly been driven by the ascendancy of women in Western societies are not limited to the extreme changes associated with “wokeism.” They include also relatively mild and gradual, long-term trends:

• • more extensive and generous welfare programs;
  • more rights, often including reverse-discrimination-type rights, for “traditionally disadvantaged” or otherwise marginalized groups (blacks, Hispanics, nonwhite immigrants, women, gays, transsexuals, etc.);
  • more emphasis generally in culture and policy on “equality of outcomes” over “equal opportunity,” and on guilt and compassion (vs. dispassionate, long-term calculation) as drivers of policy and social change;

• • more emphasis on “trauma”—emotional upset—everywhere from journalism to law and medicine, with a related emergence of trauma-memory (PTSD) or otherwise trauma-related syndromes that are strongly contagious and now highly prevalent;
  • less affinity for traditional, often Constitutionally protected forms of (emotionally painful) confrontation such as free speech and free debate, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law (e.g., the right to face one’s accuser, and the right to cross-examine)—and increasing affinity for systems that suppress and punish “unacceptable” speech;
  • the acceptance of what amount to special rules for women when they are complainants against men in sex-related court cases, e.g., they can bring cases decades after the alleged crime, and when they claim to have been abused by men they later dated or exchanged love-notes with, their claims are still taken seriously—are simply chalked up to their presumed trauma;

• • the intrusion of distinctively feminine values into the traditionally male-dominated world of sports, such that, for example, athletes putting their “self-care” instincts over their competitive instincts are not derided but celebrated;

• • the alteration of language, including the elimination of upsetting terms and invention of new ones (“safe space”), to reflect the reigning new feminine mindset;
  • the routine, rapid formation of social networks to exert pressure on corporations or other institutions to “cancel” someone who has fallen afoul of feminist/woke orthodoxies;
  • strong environmentalism and related advocacies and preferences (anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-nuclear, climate-change alarmism, veganism, “organic” foods and medicines, etc.), stemming plausibly from women’s relatively strong sensitivity to the idea of environmental harms including toxins;
  • Shifts towards less systematized/hierarchical and rule-based religious forms, from paganism to evangelical/charismatic Christianity.

Cultural/political feminization, far from being “progress,” is probably destroying Western liberalism—the liberalism that emancipated women in the first place

Yes, men on average have their own ways of thinking and acting—their own stubborn, long-evolved biases. And yes, the traditional male mindset is not necessarily optimized for running human societies in the 21^st century. But there is an obvious reason why the male mindset, compared to the female mindset, is probably better adapted for managing culture and politics: Men have been managing culture and politics, and getting punished in the harshest ways for failure, for hundreds of millennia. Women, by contrast, have been working on a large scale in public life for not even two generations—and still seem inclined to blame men when things go wrong.

On the flip side of that argument is another obvious point: Women’s mindset is not simply unadapted or insufficiently adapted by evolution for managing public affairs; it is adapted specifically for other tasks, mainly domestic tasks revolving around the bearing and raising of children. In other words, women’s higher emotional sensitivity (compassion, guilt, fear, anxiety/turmoil); their relative indifference to machines and systems and cold, abstract thought; their stronger fear of toxins; their greater tendency to think un-independently and transmit social contagions, etc. are in a fundamental sense out of place in the culture- and policy-making spheres.

I’m not suggesting that women’s traits are totally separate from men’s in this regard—for virtually any trait there would be two highly overlapping distributions, so that there would be lots and lots of women further towards the “male” end of the distribution compared to the average male.

But there clearly are differences between the means of those distributions, between the average male and the average female in other words; and the central idea here is that those differences, on a population level, are not only meaningful but potentially cataclysmic in their civilizational impact.

That impact is evident not only in the broad cultural and policy shifts since the early 1960s—the “pink shift” as I have called it—but in the more recent and extreme policy changes in places where cultural and political feminization is most advanced: “defund the police,” “let violent criminals out on bail,” “open the borders / diversity is our strength,” “let homeless people camp and crap wherever they like,” “give addicts needles,” “math is racist,” “logic is sexist,” etc. Not all of these policies are wildly popular, and obviously specific groups of hardcore activists are to blame for some of them, but I don’t see how these changes, collectively, could have taken root to the extent they have except against a heavily feminized cultural background—they are essentially ad absurdum expressions of the feminine mindset applied to policy.

I don’t think that every manifestation of feminization will be harmful in the long run. But some will. The move away from free speech towards speech- and thought-policing seems pretty ominous. Even worse, I suspect, is the encouragement of mass non-Western immigration to Western countries. One does not have to “hate” non-Western immigrants to understand that they and the culture they bring with them are . . . non-Western . . . so that the more there are of them, the less Western their host countries become. The women who encourage mass non-Western immigration seem surprisingly indifferent to the fact that non-Western cultures generally are less liberal, and a lot less friendly to the idea of female power, compared to Western cultures even from a few decades ago.

Can liberal Western societies nevertheless avert their impending self-destruction, by—among other measures—reining in cultural/political feminization? We’ll soon see, but I doubt it. I think it could help some to talk more about this cultural feminization hypothesis—“cult-fem theory”—at least as a way of dispelling the holy aura of “progress” that feminization-related social changes have acquired. But could one attack cultural feminization more directly and conclusively? Could one expel women, or even just the “bad apples,” or even persuade them to think and act differently, in all significant Western institutions—legislatures, government offices, universities, corporations, media organizations, philanthropies—where they are now embedded and substantially run things? I don’t see how. I don’t think liberal Western societies have any strong defense against this threat, other than by reverting to overt illiberalism.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

An unpopular cause I feel compelled to stick up for today is the cause of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, all of Brunswick, Georgia, USA, who were recently found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Rightly or wrongly, I am convinced that this verdict is blatantly unjust. I also believe that many Americans, not just the jury and the prosecutor, are complicit in this injustice—an injustice that is much closer to murder (these men are likely to die in prison) than was the actual killing of Arbery.

Grievous miscarriages of justice occur frequently now in the United States, and often arise due to race-related issues that bias prosecutors and jurors. So why am I writing about this particular injustice, and not, say, the travesty of the Derek Chauvin verdict? I think it’s mainly because in the Chauvin case I read a healthy amount of commentary defending Chauvin, whereas in the case of the McMichaels and Bryan I read no defenses, only smug expressions of satisfaction or at least placid acceptance of this verdict, even among people who should know better.

The guilt of the McMichaels and Bryan is, in other words, part of the contemporary American “conventional wisdom” that I have come to distrust almost reflexively.

Why the McMichaels and Bryan were abandoned to their harsh fate so easily, even willfully and joyously, by their countrymen is something I’ll speculate about later in this essay, but first I want to go over some of the basic facts of the case.

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery

Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year old African-American man who lived in Brunswick, Georgia. Like many African-American men, he had a police record for at least moderately serious crimes, including bringing a handgun to a high school football game in 2013, and an attempted shoplifting of a TV from a WalMart in 2017. He was still on probation when he died.

In late 2018, apparently based on his own observations as well as those of family members, Arbery’s probation officer recommended that Arbery get a mental health evaluation. At this evaluation—the defense lawyers brought this up at the trial, but the judged ruled it inadmissible—Arbery described to the evaluator (apparently a psychiatric nurse) “auditory delusions sometimes commanding him ‘to rob and steal’ and sometimes telling him ‘to hurt people,’” as well as general difficulties controlling his anger. Arbery was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and prescribed olanzapine (Zyprexa), a second-generation antipsychotic that is also used treat schizophrenia and the manic episodes of type 1 bipolar disorder; however, he apparently didn’t take the drug for long, and there was no evidence of it in his system when he died, although there were trace amounts of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

The MSM stories after Arbery’s death were heavily biased in the young man’s favor, and tended to omit or downplay anything negative, preferring to show a picture of him looking spiffy in his prom suit . . .

. . . and preferring to emphasize that at the time of his death Arbery was “planning” to attend a local technical college to become an electrician, and often went jogging for exercise.

In general, because of this overwhelming bias, it is hard to trust the information about Arbery that was provided by his family and their lawyer and cannot be verified, e.g., with documents. We can’t say with confidence much more about his background than what judicial records show, namely that he had a history of being armed illegally, and of attempting theft, and of showing signs of mental illness including serious impulse-control problems. This shouldn’t necessarily have had any bearing on the jury’s findings, but it does speak to the broader moral picture, and definitely belies the many MSM portraits of Arbery that were designed, in part, to whip up hatred against the men who killed him.

Late in 2019 Arbery had begun taking occasional jogs into a mostly white neighborhood called Satilla Shores, where the McMichaels and Bryan lived. A video camera also had recorded him, in his jogging clothes, walking into a house in the neighborhood that was under construction—this had happened several times, mostly at night.

In the months immediately preceding his fateful encounter with the McMichaels, there also had been several break-ins or thefts in the neighborhood, including the theft of a gun from an unlocked truck—reported by Travis McMichael on January 1.

On the night of February 11, according to Wikipedia:

Travis called 9-1-1 to report a slender 6-foot-tall Black man with short hair, wearing red shorts and a white shirt, who was trespassing on the site of a house under construction. Travis said, “I’ve never seen this guy before in the neighborhood.” The dispatcher asked whether Travis was OK, and he said, “Yeah, it just startled me. When I turned around and saw him and backed up, he reached into his pocket and ran into the house. So I don’t know if he’s armed or not. But he looked like he was acting like he was.” “We’ve been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately”, Travis said on the call. He told the dispatcher that he was out in his truck, and that as many as four neighbors were out looking for the man. His father Gregory was one of the people out searching that night, and Gregory and at least one other neighbor were armed. Police responded and searched the house along with a neighbor, but found no one. However, surveillance video from that evening showed a man who reportedly looked like Arbery, briefly walking in and out of the house under construction. He did not take anything. The under-construction house did not have doors or windows.

While Arbery died before the mystery of the local thefts could be solved, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that exonerates him in all those thefts, despite the MSM’s implications otherwise. Given his background and the correspondence of his jogging and the local burglaries, it seems at least plausible—and evidently many Satilla Shores residents suspected—that he used his jogging at night as a cover for burglaries, and jogging in daytime to select his night-time targets. (I would be interested to know whether the burglaries continued after Arbery’s death, but haven’t seen any reference to such data.)

On the 23^rd of February, shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, Arbery once again ran into Satilla Shores, and into the house under construction, and once again was recorded on video camera.

A neighbor, Matthew Albenze, also spotted Arbery and called 911 to report the trespass on the building under construction. Wikipedia again:

The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked if the man was “breaking into it right now?” The caller replied: “No … it’s all open.” After the caller said the man was now “running down the street”, the dispatcher said police would respond. The dispatcher asked at 1:08 p.m., “I just need to know what he was doing wrong. Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?” The caller responded, with some parts garbled, saying: “And he’s been caught on camera a bunch at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing.”

Why Arbery ran away isn’t clear, but the perception among those who saw him was that he was trying to escape after stealing something from the construction site. Apparently he hadn’t stolen anything, but if he had known that the cops had been called, then, being on probation, he might have wanted to avoid another brush with the law. Then again, if Arbery was mentally ill, it is probably pointless to try to rationalize his actions.

Soon Arbery ran past the McMichaels’ house, where Gregory McMichael, working in the yard, saw him and recognized him as the repeat trespasser the neighborhood was worried about. He and Travis armed themselves and got into their white pickup truck, and gave chase.

The MSM accounts, and the account of the prosecutor, are worded to suggest that the McMichaels were racist good-old-boys who pursued Arbery that day simply because they wanted to hunt down, and snuff out the life of, an innocent black man whose only “crime” was “jogging while black.” To say that this is false, and as such represents both journalistic and prosecutorial misconduct, would be putting it very mildly. Both McMichaels had law enforcement experience, and obviously (all the evidence leans this way) were attempting a citizen’s arrest, a procedure that has a long history in the United States and at the time was specifically sanctioned in Georgia law. In other words, they wanted only to detain Arbery so that he could be questioned by police.

Whether they had sufficient reason to attempt a citizen’s arrest is debatable. However, to say that in the heat of the moment someone slightly exceeding his rights under a citizen’s arrest law automatically will be charged with false imprisonment, and then murder for defending his life when the mentally ill arrestee attacks him, is completely absurd. Citizen’s arrest laws are not meant to sanction vigilantism, but they also are not meant to be life-destroying traps for honest citizens who are trying to protect their neighborhoods—in what was here a demonstrable absence of effective policing.

The McMichaels tried unsuccessfully to cut off Arbery as he ran, and, they said later, even asked him to stop and let them talk to him, but he didn’t respond and continued running in an attempt to evade them. They could easily have shot him, if killing him had been their intent, but they did not; they simply kept trying to get him to stop.

At some point Bryan, who had seen the chase go by his own house, joined in with his black pickup truck and tried—again, unsuccessfully—to cut off the running man. Note that Bryan was not a close friend of the McMichaels; he was merely another resident in this neighborhood that was now literally up in arms over the rash of thefts and trespassings, and hoped to put the perp behind bars.

Ultimately the McMichaels gave up pursuing Arbery—apparently the neighborhood had many open yards through which he could always evade them—and simply parked their pickup at a crossing where they thought he was likely to appear in his attempt to get away.

At this point, just several minutes after Albenze’s 911 call, Travis McMichael, standing on the road by the driver’s side door, made his own 911 call—but then saw Arbery coming and handed the phone to his father, who stood in the truck bed:

a male caller said: “I’m out here at Satilla Shores …There’s a Black male running down the street.” The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked, “Where at Satilla Shores?” The caller replied: “I don’t know what street we’re on.”

Arbery now as he approached apparently saw Travis standing with his shotgun by the open driver’s door on the left side of the pickup truck. Arbery might have turned around or veered onto either of the lawns beside the narrow road. Instead he kept running towards the truck, though he altered course to the right side of the road, and then ran along the right side of the truck, just a few feet from Gregory McMichael who stood in the truck bed talking to 911. When he reached the front of the truck, Arbery suddenly cut left and charged Travis.

This was the impulse that killed Arbery. You and I, and pretty much every sane person aware of the story, know this, and know that we would never have done what he did. We know that we would have stopped, and we know that if Arbery had stopped, as he’d been asked, he would still be alive, the McMichaels and Bryan would be free, and none of us would have heard of any of them.

But Arbery charged Travis. Bryan, who had been in pursuit of Arbery, parked his pickup in time to catch most of this tragic encounter on his cellphone camera.

Arbery in his fatal lunge had almost reached Travis when the latter fired his shotgun, catching Arbery in the chest. Arbery kept coming and tried to wrest the gun away from Travis. Meanwhile Gregory McMichael, with the phone still to his ear and the line to the 911 dispatcher still open, screamed at Arbery to stop.

The caller shouted, “Stop! … Watch that. Stop, damn it! Stop!”

Why did Gregory McMichael shout at Arbery to stop? Well, obviously because he and his son had never intended to kill Arbery and were astonished that he was making it necessary.

Arbery did not stop. He kept struggling for the shotgun until Travis had shot him with it a total of three times. After the third shot, which went through the left side of his chest, Arbery quickly weakened, staggered, and collapsed to the pavement.

Aftermath

Alerted by the first 911 call, the police soon arrived. Arbery by then was dead. Travis McMichael was splashed in blood and evidently in shock (“No, I’m not all right,” he told the cop. “I just fucking killed someone.”)

But, along with his father, he cooperated. Bryan cooperated too. They freely discussed the events of the preceding minutes, evidently without any sense of having committed a crime. The police did not arrest them, and the local district attorney’s office did not charge them. The Brunswick Circuit DA, Jackie Johnson, saw the case as an unfortunate but not really criminal one involving a mentally ill young man who essentially had brought about his own death through his own impulsive and violent actions.

Johnson had connections to the McMichaels, though, so she recused herself and turned the thing over to a neighboring district, Waycross Judicial Circuit District. The DA there, George Barnhill, felt the same way about the case. According to Wikipedia:

On April 2, Barnhill wrote a memorandum to Glynn County police, recommending that no arrests be made. Barnhill wrote that the McMichaels were within their rights to chase “a burglary suspect, with solid firsthand probable cause”; that “Arbery initiated the fight”; and that Travis McMichael “was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself” when “Arbery grabbed the shotgun”.

By this time, of course, Arbery’s family had got a lawyer, “leaders of the black community” were getting involved, and there were demands for a prosecution. So the whiff of racial protest, with all that entails for a prosecutor’s career, was already in the air. Soon Barnhill washed his hands of the case, with a rather tenuous excuse:

Arbery had previously been prosecuted by his son, a prosecutor for the Brunswick Circuit District Attorney’s Office, in an earlier case [and] one of the defendants [Gregory McMichael] had served as an investigator on the same prosecution.

And so, on April 13, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office handed the case to another nearby venue, the Atlantic Judicial Circuit.

It’s unclear what would have happened if the case had simply been left at the Atlantic Judicial Circuit, with no new event to inflame the situation, but presumably its DA, one Tom Durden, would have been under the same political pressures as the two DAs that had passed on the case.

What did happen is this: On May 5 a local defense lawyer who had consulted informally with Gregory and Travis McMichael uploaded Bryan’s cellphone video to the website of a local radio station. Stories were circulating to the effect that Arbery had simply been gunned down while jogging, and the lawyer apparently thought that the video would convince the public of the McMichaels’ innocence. He thought wrong—not because the video shows the McMichaels to be murderers, but simply because it somewhat shockingly depicts a young African-American man’s death at the hands of two fairly stereotypical-looking southern white fellows. This publication of the video was, remember, in one of the hardest, most hysterogenic periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few weeks later, America would erupt in the Great Awokening after George Floyd’s death—but even now it was clear that this society was becoming very restive under pressure, and its politicians and politically sensitive prosecutors were doing what they could to placate the more restive elements.

From Wikipedia again:

Within hours of the video becoming public, Tom Durden, the district attorney for Georgia’s Atlantic Judicial Circuit, said that he would present the case to “the next available grand jury in Glynn County” to decide if charges should be filed. The convening of grand juries had been postponed until after June 12 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Durden accepted Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s offer to bring in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to investigate. [italics mine]

At this point, with the most senior state politician getting involved in what should have been an obscure case, and more or less signaling—virtue-signaling—which way it should go, the McMichaels’ fate was sealed.

The GBI found probable cause to charge Gregory and Travis McMichael within 36 hours of taking over jurisdiction of the case, and, on May 7, arrested and charged them with felony murder. The McMichaels were booked into the Glynn County Jail. At an appearance before a judge the following day, the McMichaels were both denied bond.

A few days later, Bryan too was arrested and charged.

Ladies of the Jury

When the case came before a jury, it was widely reported that eleven of the twelve jurors were white. It was much less widely reported that nine of those eleven were women.

Women, as I have been writing for the past decade, “wear the pants” now in most Western societies, i.e., have unprecedented and often dominant influence in many realms of culture. This is important because on average women think about and react to the world differently than men. Compared to men, for example, women seem much more emotionally aroused by stories of white-on-black racial conflict. Women, white women, also appear to have been the dominant participants in the bizarre BLM frenzy of the summer 2020 Great Awokening.

If the McMichael/Bryan defense lawyers had read my essays, they would have known this (I write this only half-jokingly—my essays are not that obscure) and accordingly might have tried a different jury-selection strategy—though really, as this and many other examples show, the jury system in the United States is generally unlikely to deliver justice in cases where the forces of Wokeness favor one side.

In any case, the jury members were mostly women, the DA that ultimately charged the three defendants was a black woman (she claimed at the trial, among other things, that the defendants “chased, hunted down and ultimately executed” Arbery), and the lead prosecutor in the trial was a woman. And of course, Al Sharpton sat in the courtroom with Arbery’s family, and a mob of demonstrators camped outside the court building, to remind those sensitive women of the jury what they would face if they delivered the wrong verdict.

The jury, without much deliberation, duly returned a verdict of guilty on most of the charges. These charges included felony murder for all three defendants—even Bryan who had not been armed and had done nothing more than pursue Arbery in his truck. Travis McMichael, who presumably would have been killed by Arbery had he not defended himself, was additionally found guilty of “malice murder,” which means murder with “express or implied malice.”

These charges bring a minimum 30-year sentence before the possibility of parole, and for Travis McMichael, with the additional malice murder rap, there may be no parole—that will be up to the judge.

The Biden Administration, of course, watched this show trial approvingly.

However, it isn’t going to let it go at that. No, the Biden Administration via its “Justice” Department will try to earn further brownie points in the eyes of its voter base, and at the same time try to crush the spirit of conservative Legacy Americans, by pursuing a federal hate-crime trial of the McMichaels and Bryan—scheduled to convene next year.

Meanwhile the state of Georgia, led by “Republican” Gov. Brian Kemp, will also send a message by prosecuting former Brunswick Circuit DA Jackie Johnson—the first one to recuse herself, remember—for “obstruction of justice.” This will ensure that, the next time a black person in Georgia is killed by whites for any reason whatsoever, local DAs will show the proper Stakhanovite zeal in prosecuting.

Flaws in the Law

Note that Georgia law defines the kind of murder alleged in the case as follows:

(a) A person commits the offense of murder when he unlawfully and with malice aforethought, either express or implied, causes the death of another human being.

(b) Express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take the life of another human being which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof. Malice shall be implied where no considerable provocation appears and where all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.

(c) A person commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.

Did “all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart” on the part of Travis McMichael? The answer is obviously no. He did not shoot Arbery from the window of his truck (or at any time until charged) as he would have done had his intent been murderous; he phoned 911 prior to the fatal encounter; he did not flee the scene of the killing; he showed every sign of having been shaken by that killing because he had not expected it; and he cooperated with the police who came to the scene. If he had an “abandoned and malignant heart” (why are these vague and archaic descriptors even allowed in the legal code?) he would have acted like a typical premeditated killer, shooting Arbery in a way that would not implicate himself, and denying involvement if questioned. I can imagine that a lot of American men who are forced to live with the problem of Black crime will now prefer that option, at least those men who are not totally demoralized by show trials like these.

The bigger problem here is the implied notion, noted above, that even mildly overinterpreting a citizen’s arrest law, as any concerned citizen might easily do without bad intent, can abruptly (by the whim of a biased jury) turn the citizen into a felon, and then a murderer if he has to defend himself against the arrestee’s violence. If such a notion were valid, a citizen’s arrest law would be worse than worthless. It would be as if the government invited motorists to drive across a very long and narrow, guardrail-less bridge over a mile-deep gorge, having positioned the bridge in such a way that it constantly swayed and shimmied in the wind. It effectively would be no bridge at all—only a deathtrap for the unwary.

The Malignant Heart of the Matter

Is there even any point in arguing over the legal questions at the heart of such cases? I can remember many racially tinged travesties of justice in my adult life, going back at least to the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995. These cases always feel like inversions of the To Kill a Mockingbird setup—either an apparently guilty black man goes free or gets off lightly, or a wrongfully prosecuted white man has his life ruined. More importantly, the process by which these injustices occur is always (as in Harper Lee’s model of 1930s small-town Alabama) a social process involving race-politics pressures as well as a lot of venality, cowardice, and hysteria. Tom Wolfe somehow got away with writing a big novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, about the modern versions of these circuses, a novel that even in 1987 conveyed strongly the message that American society and its judicial system had been irretrievably broken by decades of racial factionalism.

Similarly, what really drew my attention to this case was the evidence of race-politics pressure on DAs and politicians, the jury’s disregard for the basic evidence that should have exonerated the defendants, the MSM’s wanton mischaracterizations of the case (go back and read their accounts!), and then, above all, the overwhelmingly positive, smug reaction to the verdict by so many Americans.

Of course, Twitter and social media generally are full of people who can cheaply virtue-signal while never having to deal with the unhappy realities afflicting ordinary Americans. Stephen King, for example, lives in a humongous complex on a barrier-island beach south of Sarasota—I know because I once lived nearby—at the least-accessible extremity of a wealthy neighborhood that was designed by its residents to keep out the riffraff, including anyone who looks remotely like Ahmaud Arbery. From that fortress King is unlikely ever to have to face the problem of burglary or thievery, and anyway any losses from such property crime would be infinitesimal in their impact on him.

But I think virtue-signaling is only a small and secondary part of this. Over the past few years, and especially since the COVID pandemic started, the more or less diffuse growth of wokeness in American life seems to have cohered into a Salem-like episode of socially sanctioned savagery—arguably almost as deadly as Salem, and much more broad and durable. I’ve even had the vague imaginative sense (from a distance, as an expatriate) that this mass hysteria has been developing into a kind of cult, presided over by a collectively summoned black perp-god, or purple-haired Gender Studies goddess, who in strident tones demands a constant flow of human sacrifices. (Another writer elaborated this human-sacrifice concept before me, so I will mostly leave that imagery to him.)

The centrality of pictures and videos should give us a clue to how these weird social phenomena arise. If, let us say, a young black man, a man like Ahmaud Arbery, is found dead in the street by gunshot one day, but there is no video evidence of how he was killed, what will be the public reaction? The reader knows the answer already, because such cases occur many times per day across the US, especially in heavily black cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Baltimore. There is generally no reaction, no wider resonance. The man’s family may weep. They may call on the police to solve the crime. But usually only if the cops identify a white suspect (a relatively rare event) will the case make out of the back pages of the papers, and only if the white-on-black killing is caught on video (much rarer) is the case sure to be lifted from the muck of the ordinary criminal court docket into the glare of a Woke Cult show trial.

People in general, and I guess women moreso than men on average, are apt to be distressed when they witness—for example on a video—a violent death. The distress in turn creates a sense of urgency to do something. (Consider how heavily US foreign and immigration policies in recent years have been driven by distressing images in the media, e.g., of wounded children in Syria or refugee children crossing the Rio Grande.) Distress also tends to suppress rational thought, making the mind more susceptible to the beating tom-toms (to paraphrase McLuhan) of mass delusion and madness. And when a killing depicted on a distressing video can be made to seem even remotely consistent with the central wokelore motif of evil whites harming innocent blacks—that very live snarl of wires in the American psyche—the mass delusion and madness will come together and start to lurch in a predictable direction. It will start to be controlled and guided, to do meaningful political work, by a political faction that I would say definitely has “an abandoned and malignant heart.”

It seems to me that there are usually two main group of actors that ignite these episodes: blacks who from basic instinct or family ties support fellow blacks in conflicts with whites, and a certain large stratum of white women who have, in regard to blacks, a powerful guilt and appeasement reflex. Once those two groups start up and gather steam, craven politicians and their judicial minions join in with the rapidity of scurrying rodents, and then the superorganism swells to its maximum size with the additions of journalists and millions of ordinary and celebrity virtue-signalers. This frenzied entity of many voices and noises somehow achieves a certain harmony as it demands “justice,” which is code for: give us a white victim.

One cannot overemphasize how uninterested in truth is this entity. In the case of Derek Chauvin, the entity assured us that the smirk on Chauvin’s face as he held down George Floyd was simply his sadist-cop’s delight at the approaching demise of his poor African American victim. Chauvin was a police officer with long experience of having to deal with unruly and bullshitting black perps, and of course did not have the clairvoyance to know that this particular perp, this one unlucky time, was telling the truth—but try explaining that to some vapor-brained leftist millennial or wine-aunt who is caught up in the full guilt-hate-love ecstasy of the Awokening.

In the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the entity (speaking even through the man who is the current US president) assured us that the defendant was a white supremacist who had gone hunting for innocent protesters. The entity let it be known among the softer minded that Rittenhouse’s victims were black—this became a very widespread perception. Rittenhouse avoided becoming the next sacrificial victim mainly because the people he had shot in self defense were actually white. It must have helped too that he, Rittenhouse, was a cherubic-looking lad liable to trigger the protective maternal instincts of many American women—instincts that are normally directed entirely toward the shooting victim in such cases, at least when the victim is black.

In Georgia, of course, the victim was indeed black and the accused were southern whites who drove pickup trucks, carried guns, probably had a few Confederate flags around, and probably held African Americans in low esteem. On the great totem pole of wokeism, these men were the lowest of the low. Thus, the story the entity told of their vile misdeeds, in the MSM, in social media, in the courtroom through the mouths of sworn officers of the court, was a festival of lies and obfuscations, and essentially the defendants had no defenders other than their paid lawyers.

The victims of human sacrifice in ancient times often were drawn from the lowest, most marginalized castes. Is it not plausible that tens of thousands of years of primitive religion have worn certain paths into our minds such that even now we subconsciously act out those rituals—and perhaps can even experience, every so often, the vivid illusion that an angry god is present and wants to be appeased?

This particular deity will never stay appeased for long, though, will it? And as evidence accumulates that America’s grand racial experiment has failed, will Americans ever face up to that failure and respond rationally? Or will that failure just drive them crazier and crazier, as they deliver more and more sacrificial victims to a god who will not relent?

***

There have been slow social changes over the past century, but there have been fast ones too. A recent one, the year-old outbreak of extreme wokeness called the Great Awokening, has spread with wildfire velocity through US and even foreign institutions, raising the basic question: why did this happen?

Part of the answer is in the term itself. The Great Awakenings were several distinct episodes of intense religious fervor, chiefly in North America, in the 1700s and 1800s, and arguably in the 1960s-80s. They were social contagions, and spread, like viruses, within populations that had for various social and economic reasons been made peculiarly vulnerable to them. They included mass gatherings to hear highly charismatic—one might say hypnotic—preachers, and mass conversions, amid fainting and weeping, to less hierarchical, more personal and emotional forms of Christianity. Contagions of guilt over sinfulness were followed by outbreaks of ecstasy over salvation. But while the Awakenings were, most vividly, mass psychosocial disturbances, they also led to durable changes, in affected Christian churches, in theology and ordinary practice.

The Great Awokening has shown at least a superficial resemblance to its Christian forbears, in its weepy mass gatherings, its heavy inculcations of guilt, its pressure to embrace radically new ways of thinking—whiteness as a sin—and in its swift march through the media and other important institutions. Above all it looks like a social contagion.

Some factors that made America susceptible to this contagion are plain enough. At the time the Great Awokening started there was a deadly pandemic of a real virus, and, for many, an associated, highly stressful interruption of normal life. There were also unnerving riots, lootings, and other social disturbances in US cities, due to some unhappy police/perp encounters that were amplified by activists and politicians in the run-up to a fateful presidential election. As for the themes of the Great Awokening, they were not really new—most had been around since the 1960s, usually on the radical fringes. In general, white American guilt and perplexity over the chronic low status of the average black American has been an unassuageable stressor on the country from the time of slavery.

But I think there is another big piece in this puzzle of why the wokeist gospel, with its hatred of white American heroes and hagiologies of black ne’er-do-wells, ripped so easily and swiftly through the country and its key institutions, including corporations, and even now mostly retains all these conquests.

As readers of previous essays of mine (especially this, this, this, and this) may have guessed already, this missing piece is the involvement of women—women as ordinary citizens, and as members of affected institutions. And although I’ve touched on this theme in these previous essays, I’m coming at it here from a slightly different, cultural dynamics angle.

A Feminine Susceptibility

If history has taught us anything about social contagions, it is that women, on average, are more susceptible to them than men. Women have been the key instigators and transmitters of all the most famous mass-hysterias, including the many medieval and early modern convent hysterias and witch-hunts, but also all the modern, medicalized mass-hysterias–among them Charcot’s neuroses (which kicked off modern psychiatry), multiple personality disorder and other “recovered memory” syndromes, the ongoing child gender dysphoria hysteria, and ordinary schoolyard hysterias of the “children overcome by mysterious gas leak” type. This relative susceptibility to emotional contagion is one of those feminine traits that is sort of obvious anecdotally, and occasionally is given weight by an experimental psychology study, though the idea of it runs against the prevailing pro-feminine orthodoxy in media and academia, so it isn’t mentioned much.

Why are women this way? To me the likeliest, if necessarily tentative, explanation is that the two sexes, with their distinct traditional roles, have evolved distinct sets of psychological leanings and behaviors, and the typical feminine set of behaviors includes a superior emotional sensitivity and sociability as a broad adaptation that facilitates, e.g., child-rearing. The fact that this “enhanced connectedness” makes women more susceptible to harmful social contagions may have been an acceptable side-effect in times when women were mostly restricted to home and hearth. Women’s greater ability to align among themselves may even have ended up as part of an adaptive female defense mechanism against the physically stronger sex.

If we consider just this trait, or trait-set, and ask what its social impact should have been as women entered public life en masse over the past half-century or so, I think we end up making sense of a lot of otherwise puzzling social phenomena. In regard to the Great Awokening, we can hypothesize at least that this has been primarily a contagion among women, especially young women with high feminine energies that are not absorbed by husbands and children and need some outlet.

I would suggest too that the Great Awokening’s transformation of big institutions reflects not only the general fear of personal cancellation within these institutions but also the “critical mass” of susceptible women who work in them. In other words, for example, a male executive at a big corporation might only pay lip service to wokeism to preserve his status, while a female executive would be more likely to enforce it from conviction.

As Orwell once said through his 1984 character Winston Smith:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

I don’t think that women are equally susceptible to any orthodoxy—I don’t expect them to spawn variants of Nazism, or, say, jihadist Islamic ideology. But I think there is a broad range of stuff they go for that comports with the feminine, weaker-sex, caregiving mindset and includes themes of trauma, the loss of agency, the need for inclusivity, and protection from environmental threats. Wokeism ticks most of those boxes, but may also be appealing to women, at least subconsciously, because it is very much an anti-male ideology–so that women have inherently less to fear from it, and may even find it a useful tool for dislodging men, especially white men, who somehow stand in their way.

Silent but Deadly

Like all the other aspects of women’s cultural ascendancy in the West, this one seems to lie there in plain sight while remaining officially unmentionable. How often do we hear of petitions against insufficiently woke persons, usually white males, by students at a university, or reporters at a newspaper, or employees at some publishing house, in which the feminine sentiment of the complaint (“we feel unsafe”) is unmistakable, and yet no one—in a media increasingly controlled by women—mentions the striking preponderance of females among the petitioners? How often do we see images in the media of Great Awokening mass gatherings whose participants are mostly female though there is nothing in the caption or the story text to explain or even acknowledge that interesting fact? It would seem that a big part of female power, even of the modern, feminist, you-go-girl variety, still comes from feigning powerlessness.

In any case, if the entry of women into public life over the past few decades has now reached a “critical mass” that makes Western institutions and culture highly susceptible to runaway ideological fevers and contagions, then the West obviously has a much bigger problem than wokeness itself.

As noted, I’m assuming that these contagions will be broadly limited to those whose themes are consonant with female sensibilities. But, as the experience so far with wokeism suggests—and the quote from Orwell suggests too—female sensibilities may be no less likely than male sensibilities to support the establishment of totalitarian or otherwise inhumane regimes.

Arguably an even worse outcome is to have no regime at all—to have the chaos of anarchy. Is it far-fetched to suggest that anarchy is where the ascendancy of women is taking the West? The feminized elites of Western, especially Anglosphere, countries now promote influxes of ethnically distant foreigners, and official favoritism towards these newcomers, while preaching hatred and suppression of white legacy populations. Propaganda along these lines has become deafening over the past two decades, and it’s now hard to imagine that it could ever be reversed fully. But the long-term outcome of demeaning and replacing a dominant legacy population with a mix of very different, often half-civilized foreigners is almost by definition going to be a civilizational collapse. Another, perhaps mostly Asian-flavored civilization may arise from those ruins, but there is no guarantee that it will be better—in any sense—than the Western civilization that is now swiftly fading.

I want to emphasize that I don’t wish to demean women in putting forward this set of suggestions. Many women are more resistant to the wokeism nonsense than the average male—and, as females, have better insight into the quirks of the female mindset.

But the key idea here is that there is a difference between the average female and average male. In other words, for traits relating to social contagion susceptibility, men and women can be scored along two bell curves which mostly overlap, though they have different means. That difference in the means makes a big difference on its own. In addition, those women out on the more “extreme feminine” tail of the female curve—who I expect are mostly young, single, fertile, with passion and compassion to burn—may have an outsized impact through their particularly strong ability to align emotionally and transmit contagions.

I think this sex difference is also a good example of a relatively subtle average difference measured at the individual level adding up to a striking difference in collective behavior and culture.

All that said, I am not dogmatic about any of this. I’m broadly aware that we as modern humans, with our fixation on the individual, know too little about how our individual traits relate to the shapes and dynamics of our societies. Essentially, we don’t know the recipe for making civilizations that are good but also sustainable. Again and again, across history, we are born to civilizational riches and then ignorantly squander them.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

Is the United States in the process of remaking itself with a new ideology called Wokeism?

A lot of people seem to think so, but I don’t. The idea I sketch out briefly here is that the recent pandemic spread of Wokeism, a.k.a. The Great Awokening, is really only a transitory cultural phenomenon, more than a mass hysteria but less than the development of a full-fledged successor culture. Wokeism does draw upon trends in Western culture that have been underway for decades. However, as an ideology or culture it is basically incoherent and destructive, and does not offer a viable guide to a sustainable new way of life. Wokeism is chiefly marking a period of cultural upheaval—and is telling us nothing of how that period of upheaval will end.

The mess of Wokeism

Wokeism lacks a coherent list of do’s and don’ts, of the kind that normally make up a working culture. It shows no sign of having been thought through.

To give one example, the people who run BLM recently published a “manifesto” on their website which included a vaguely Maoist insistence on collective parenting:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

Apparently this was embarrassing enough, even for the dedicated banner-carriers and fellow-travelers of BLM, that this provision along with the rest of the manifesto was removed from the website soon after it was posted. When I went to the site address (https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/) as I was composing this essay, I got a simple 404 error—suggesting that BLM lacks not only sense but also basic IT skills.

Other features of Wokeism include demands for radical police reforms—radically weakening police powers—or even the defunding/abolition of police departments. Some municipal governments in the United States have been so well captured by leftists that they really seem willing to adopt such measures. But—to state the obvious—these measures, and the criminality and anarchy they are bound to unleash, are things that a developed society with a large, wealthy, and center-right business-owning class will not tolerate for long.

Further down the Wokeists’ unrealizable/unsustainable wishlist we find radical reforms to education, which have the ultimate goal of bringing about equality of outcomes for different racial and ethnic groups, especially in public schools where the Wokeists’ policy grip is strongest. Standardized tests will be de-emphasized, admissions exclusivity weakened, and discipline more or less abandoned, in order to accommodate more disadvantaged groups. Recitations of Woke ideology presumably will start to crowd out traditional subjects such as math and English. To again state the obvious: this cuckoo radicalism will mean only that any family having the means to do so will take their children out of public schools, leaving the unfortunate kids whose parents can’t place them elsewhere to suffer a long nightmare of Woke education.

Then there is the absurd idea of reparations, to be paid somehow to American blacks who, after 155 years of post-slavery systemic racism, have managed to become the world’s richest black population by far. I wonder how serious the Wokeists are about reparations anyway, since actual payment might be construed as an end to the matter, obliging both blacks and Wokeists to move on from all their racial grievance-mongering. (We all know the grievance-mongering will never be put to rest, as it serves an essential partisan-political function.) Actual payment might also do embarrassingly little to alter the essential situation of American blacks, who in many cases would end up worse following their rapid spending of their windfalls.

Open-door immigration appears to be a core policy of Wokeism, though it shouldn’t be, as it obviously harms the interests of American blacks. Even among immigrant groups, the open-door policy is apt to become unpopular to the extent that these groups see further newcomers as a source of unwanted competition for jobs. Of course liberal immigration policies have prevailed anyway in the US over the past few decades, and thus they are sustainable in that retrospective sense. But open-door immigration isn’t a culture or a pillar of a culture—it is effectively an anti-cultural policy, which almost by definition will destroy the host country’s traditional way of life and create a situation in which newcomer cultures will have to duke it out for eventual supremacy. Who seriously thinks that if Chinese-Americans or Indian-Americans take over large parts of the USA, they will continue to permit mass immigration from Africa or Latin America?

Similarly, if the wokeists succeed in making whites second-class citizens in their own country by mandating POC-preferences in jobs and university admissions—which they clearly hope to do—the end-result is unlikely to be a harmonious multiracial/multiethnic USA living under Wokeism. Much more likely will be the outcome seen in multi-ethnic situations elsewhere in the world, namely inter-ethnic strife, followed by the triumph of one or more, presumably nonwhite ethnicities—who may just divide the old USA among themselves and, in their new American country or countries, adopt nationalistic policies favoring their own. To them, the romantic multiracialism of early 21^st century whites may end up being seen as a tragically maladaptive cultural trait—vaguely reminiscent of the predilection for firewater that helped doom 19^th century Native Americans.

Wokeists embody the chaos of wokeism

Apart from Wokeism’s specific policy notions, look at the Wokeists themselves—especially the ones at the business end of Wokeism, where ideas are turned into action. Are these activists bustling Bolsheviks, busily setting up farmers’ or manufacturers’ or soldiers’ collectives? Not exactly. They seem like supremely messed-up people, a very high proportion of whom have histories of mental illness and/or severe sexual identity issues. They seem not only fundamentally unhappy but fundamentally set against the world as it is. That is why they burn and break and topple indiscriminately, destroying even statues of Lincoln. They seem to want the outside world to bear a closer resemblance to the disorder they have within. In other words, they don’t seem to be for anything meaningful. Does an Antifa Autonomous Zone look constructive? Is it something Western people could build upon? How about a burning, rubble-strewn downtown Minneapolis?

OK, but what about rich Woke-capitalist billionaires like Zuckerberg and Bezos? Aren’t they formidable enough to sustain Wokeism as a new culture?

Well, certainly, the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and their ilk are powerful. But I think they have zero intention of sustaining Wokeism in a form that could be called a new culture. They are primarily businessmen who have got to where they are by adapting rapidly in a dynamic business (and political) environment. They are now adapting to Wokeism, because it is a clear and present danger to anyone with commercial interests. Their adaptation is to feign support—they fear Wokeism and don’t want to be harmed by it, and think they can escape the firebombs and boycotts if they get out in front of the whole thing with various empty gestures.

Needless to add, corporations are not about to start hiring obese black trans performers, let alone 75-IQ kids from the ‘hood, to do anything substantive. Woke capitalists’ actions will mainly be limited to the patronage of a few, influential, black “public intellectuals,” who are essentially running legal protection rackets.

Woke capitalism may also encompass a more urgent hiring preference for well educated Asians and Latinos over whites—anyone but whites! But for the most part the corporate version of Wokeism will be symbolic. After all, competitive organizations need competent people, and Wokeism—because of its insistence on equality of outcomes—does almost everything possible to discourage the development of practical competence.

In short, Wokeism on its own can never be a constructive, society-driving ideology or culture. It may seriously damage or even topple the old culture of legacy Americans, and that process may take years and result in terrible destruction, perhaps on the scale of the French Revolution or even the Fall of Rome. But Wokeism is not itself a successor culture that will be around a couple of generations from now.

The importance of demographics and technology

I don’t claim to fully understand wokeism or its origins, but I don’t think anyone can understand it without first understanding how the cultural ground, so to speak, was prepared for it.

To switch to a viral analogy, wokeism was a pathogen that was always around. There is nothing really new about it. It is a mix, a pastiche, of a lot of old, discredited ideas most of which were first put forward by 1960s radicals. Why did it suddenly break out into a pandemic spread? I think the answer is that the big changes that made the outbreak possible were in the susceptibilities of host populations.

One big change was the cultural feminization that followed the mass entry of women into culturally influential professions such as journalism, publishing, law, politics, and science over the past half-century. I’ve written about this in earlier essays. Among other things, this feminization process appears to have made the culture profoundly more vulnerable to empathy-inducing themes of oppressed minorities, downtrodden refugees, and buzz-phrases like “systemic racism.”

American women have not been doing particularly well under their emancipation—their estimated lifetime prevalence of major depression is now more than 20 percent, to note one adverse mental health trend among many. Marriage and birth rates are falling. More and more women, having followed the dictates of feminism and sexual liberation, are living alone and childless. Amid the anxiety and bleak isolation of the COVID-19 crisis, many of them seem to have embraced Wokeness as a belief system that is almost spiritually sublime in its ambitions, and at the same time satisfyingly engages their maternal instincts to protect the weak. Other basic instincts may be involved as well. In any case it can’t be denied that women, particularly white women, have been enormously overrepresented at woke and BLM marches and protests.

Women’s cultural influence in America isn’t going away any time soon. Any new culture that takes hold, or any form of cultural reversion, presumably will have to suit them. But a glance around the world tells us that women on the whole are very flexible when it comes to culture, provided that certain basic needs are met—needs that center largely around motherhood. I can’t believe that Wokeism, in the long run, meets enough of those needs. It seems more like a yearning, a dance, a pose, a fling, than real life.

Apart from cultural feminization and the COVID-19 crisis, two other big factors have obviously been relevant. One is the Internet, and social media in particular, which has boosted in an unprecedented way the potential speed and scale of social contagions. (I think it’s also generally accepted, if not as well studied as it should be, that women tend to transmit social contagions among themselves much more efficiently than men do.)

The other factor is the 2020 presidential election, which has spurred various get-out-the-vote operations and generally has encouraged partisan activists to whip up emotions to energize potential voters. I think various left-wing/Democrat activists did just that in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and that was the spark on dry tinder that flamed into the Great Awokening.

That flame has dimmed considerably in the months since June. It may flare up again if the Democrats sweep on election day. But I think it won’t burn for 70-odd years as Marxism-Leninism did. It doesn’t have the coherence or the minimal connection to human nature that it would need to have. What stable ideology will form on the other side of Wokeism is unclear. But given the ongoing cultural decay of whites and the relative robustness of nationalism among nonwhites, it seems likely that Wokeness will only mark the transition to a new, probably nonwhite-centered culture—or cultures. Those cultures could, ironically, end up being much more conservative and traditional than the decadent mishmash from which Wokeness emerged.

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From the late Renaissance to the early Industrial Age, it was common for European families to send their adolescent daughters to convents for long periods, in order to educate them, to let them become nuns, or just to keep them out of trouble. The experience must have been something like Girl, Interrupted, but with lots of medieval-style Catholicism, stone walls, and cold baths. Not too surprisingly, the prison-like concentrations of stressed, sexually maturing girls began incubating epidemics of hysteria, often with florid sexual aspects. Also unsurprisingly, given the mystical and demonological themes that were prevalent in Christian cultures of the day, the epidemics generally took the form of “demonic possession.”

Sometimes these episodes stayed within convent walls, and either burned out from lack of attention or were broken up by the dispersal of the participants. But in some notable cases recorded in the history books, convent hysterias had significant impacts beyond the convents, namely when the victims blamed their possessions and/or sexual activity on a male priest. Usually this was the priest who said Mass and heard confessions at the convent, and the claims would be that he had either directly debauched his victims, or had done so remotely via priapic demons. These accusations and the acting-out behaviors that went with them could be competitive and contagious among convent girls, resulting in lurid claims even against men they had never met.

One of the most notorious of the convent hysterias began in about 1632 when an epidemic of supposed demonic possession swept through an Ursuline convent in Loudoun, France. The affected young women claimed that they had been possessed and sexually abused by demons sent by a local priest, Urbain Grandier. He was not the convent confessor, and could not have done the things alleged, but he was good looking and wealthy, and was rumored to be a ladies’ man, counting women in several prominent local families among his conquests. Later historians and writers, including Aldous Huxley, who novelized the story in The Devils of Loudoun, suggested that the convent’s Mother Superior, the index case in the hysteria, knew of his exploits and had developed a sexual obsession with him.

To the initial investigators, there was ample evidence that the “demonic possessions” and associated claims against Grandier amounted to hysterical fantasies. But there was also a political dimension to the case: Grandier on an unrelated matter had recently made an enemy of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, King Louis XIII’s right-hand man. On Richelieu’s authority, a new investigation was set up to reach the “correct” verdict and suppress contradictory evidence.

To this end, there were public exorcisms of the possessed nuns. These were fantastic displays in which the women, reportedly well coached by Richelieu’s minions, mimed sexual acts while loudly accusing Grandier of various demonic crimes. Thousands of townspeople and even tourists attended these spectacles, and, no doubt as Richelieu had hoped, many considered the nuns’ antics to be convincing evidence of Grandier’s guilt.

Eventually some of the affected nuns, including the Mother Superior whose antics had set off the whole hysteria, had second thoughts and publicly recanted. Unfortunately for Grandier, the case had acquired too much momentum by then, and he was found guilty, tortured, and burned at the stake in 1634.

The cascade

Some might see witchcraft/possession hysterias like the Loudoun case as just historical oddities, of no relevance today. But I think they belong to an ancient, recurring pattern. After all, outbreaks of sexual-victimization claims among women, and the exploitation of those outbreaks by authority figures, seem as prominent now in the West as they have ever been. Think of the recent Kavanaugh hearings and the public parade of his accusers with their lurid, weepy tales. Think of the Weinstein, Epstein, and Cosby media/legal circuses. This is hardly ancient history!

The idea I sketch out here is that there is a behavioral program, for the most part specific to females, that evolved long ago as an alternative means of empowerment or self-expression but continues to manifest in various ways and indeed accounts for a good deal of contemporary social history.

My argument is basically impressionistic and tentative: I perceive, rightly or wrongly, a pattern that underlies seemingly different social phenomena. I am aware that this is not a terrain that has been or is likely ever to be mapped definitively with social psychology experiments. It is too complex, too squirrelly. It is also much too threatening to current orthodoxy to be a subject of truly free scientific inquiry. So I won’t attempt much more here than to point to cases, describe the apparent pattern, and hope the evidence accumulates enough—in the telling, and in readers’ subsequent experiences—to be persuasive, in the usual human, Bayesian, weight-of-evidence sense.

To me the most essential feature of these episodes is the exploitation of victimhood. Men have a deep instinct to protect women, and some women take advantage of that by claiming to have been harmed or under threat of harm. They do this to gain attention, fame or money, or simply to nullify their shame over something to which they consented but later regretted.

The idea that a trauma has occurred—a trauma that continues to victimize the victim—is arguably the central thread in the history of hysteria. It is evident in the old convent possession hysterias, in female-dominated spirit possession syndromes that still exist in the Third World, and in all the modern-era, medicalized forms of hysteria, going back to Charcot—whose studies of hysterics in the late 1800s are often credited with having kicked off modern psychiatry.

As I see it, another core feature of these phenomena is their ability to grow and spread as a social contagion. Convent hysterias tended to spread infectiously within the walls of individual convents. In some cases, affected young women, sent from one convent to another as part of a dispersal strategy, would seed outbreaks of hysterical behavior in their new institutions. Hysterias in more open settings, such as the one at Salem that began with a group of girls and women acting out “possession” behaviors similar to those seen in European convent episodes, were apt to spread through their communities and into neighboring ones. More modern, medicalized forms of hysteria such as Charcot’s “hysteroepilepsy” of the late 1800s and the “multiple personality disorder” (MPD) that became prominent in the 1980s, also grew in scope as they were publicized and susceptible women learned how to act them out.

Now in the age of the Internet there is the potential for near-instant mass contagions of trauma tales. Even one prominent news story about one alleged victim may be enough to trigger the participation of others from around the world. The Epstein, Weinstein, Kavanagh and Cosby cases all seem to have been driven by this “broadcast” effect.

What about the truth of the claims in these episodes? If a man actually has engaged in serial sexual assault, and his victims complain to the police so that charges are brought against him, how is that “hysteria” or anyway a remarkable social phenomenon requiring explanation? My response is that in such cases there may not be a need for an explanation, but that I’m not referring to such cases here. I’m referring to cases where the claims are obviously to some extent false or exaggerated or opportunistic, tend to be used in ways that go beyond mere law enforcement, occur after delays that may extend for years or decades, and come in cascades that strongly suggest a social contagion. The vast majority of real sexual assault cases, even those involving repeat offenders, never make it past the back pages of the newspapers and don’t generate social phenomena such as I’m describing here.

Another frequent, though not universal, theme in these stories is the victim’s loss of agency—an utter helplessness on her part that implicitly absolves her of any responsibility for her plight, and underscores her urgent need for aid and sympathy. In premodern and early-modern spirit-possession cases the loss of agency was complete by definition and usually was the traumatic event. Late 20^th century MPD cases worked in almost but not quite the same way: The victim’s “dissociation” into “alter personalities” was not the trauma itself but, rather, a reaction to the trauma. As one prominent pro-MPD psychiatrist put it at the time, MPD is the victim imagining that the abuse she is suffering is happening to someone else. However, in both spirit-possession and MPD, the possessing spirits and alters serve as impressive behavioral symbols of the victim’s traumatized state, and often, more literally, act as her authoritative spokespersons—her Gloria Allreds, if you like.

Similarly, Charcot’s hysterics of the 1880s, though they were not afflicted by spirits or alters, were seized by mysterious syndromes that mimicked epilepsies or movement disorders and ostensibly robbed them of their will, contorting their bodies and putting them into trance, “hypnotic” states. The theme of hypnosis, of course, runs through virtually all modern forms of hysteria, as a route to the hysterical state of consciousness and the retrieval of buried trauma memories—and as a suspender of ordinary consciousness and agency.

The loss-of-agency theme is less prominent but still present in more modern, matter-of-fact cascades of sex assault claims, where it continues to underscore the victim’s victimhood. In the Cosby case, for example, his accusers typically acknowledged having dined with him, having drunk alcohol with him, having gone to his hotel room at night, or having done other things that hint at some degree of volition. But virtually all of these women claimed or suggested that Cosby had then robbed them of their ability to resist by slipping them tranquilizer or “knock out” pills of one kind or another. Weinstein’s accusers, for their part, have spoken of his coercion and threats, of his menacing bulk, of his power to destroy their careers. Epstein’s accusers have claimed in some cases that he “enslaved” them, if not by actually clapping them in chains then by flying them to remote islands from which no escape was possible. I am not suggesting that any of these men is innocent, but I think it’s worth noting that very few of the victims in these cases have claimed simply, let alone promptly, that they fought back against the accused but were overpowered.

Perps and buried memories

Historically the most prominent cascades of trauma tales, such as the witchcraft mass-hysterias of the late medieval and early modern era, and the MPD-related mass-hysterias of the 1980s-90s, have been those featuring accusations against real people—accusations of witchcraft or Satan-worship or sexual assault, or some combination thereof. That the older, pre-20^th-century subset of these cases resulted in the jailings and executions of hundreds or thousands of innocent people in Europe and America is well known. Less well known is that the MPD/Satanic-ritual-abuse (SRA)/recovered-memory scares of very recent decades harmed similar numbers of people across the Western world, through false accusations, wrongful prosecutions, and in many cases wrongful and lengthy jailings. The latter episode also corrupted, and exposed the deep corruptibility of, the social work and psychotherapy-related professions, not to mention the media.

But cascades of trauma tales are not always dependent on claims against human perpetrators. One of the more prominent recovered-memory variants that arose in the 1980s and 90s featured trauma-tales that were every bit as lurid as those of MPD/SRA, and often seemed to have been tailored to grab public attention, but lacked human perpetrators and almost never involved law enforcement. This was the “alien abduction” epidemic. Like some of the older spirit-possession cases, abduction stories replaced human perps with otherworldly ones—aliens in this case, of all shapes and sizes, though usually they were said to be the huge-eyed, bulge-headed “greys” that were already prominent in the UFO lore.

The recovered-memory epidemic in all its major variants burned out by the late 1990s, in part because it made enemies of hundreds of wrongfully charged defendants and their families, and in general clashed with traditional mechanisms of due-process (which had developed partly in reaction to early-modern hysterias). The real tipping point seems to have been the development of a consensus in psychiatry and law-enforcement that many of the claimants were fantasists and hypnosis-recovered memories were mostly or entirely confabulations.

Beyond hypnosis

However, around the time that the recovered-memory craze dissolved, a new and remarkably similar epidemic involving traumatic memories started becoming very common. In this syndrome the patient, usually female, complained of sleeplessness, fibromyalgia, irritable bowels, chronic fatigue, or other selections from the rich lore of psychosomatic illness. Instead of hinting that these symptoms derived from some buried trauma-memory, as in the now-discredited recovered-memory epidemic, the patient attributed them to an accessible trauma-memory, perhaps of a recent car accident or divorce, or even something as common as childbirth. It was an easy route to victimhood and the tangible and intangible benefits that went along with that status. For women—also men—in the military, who had no shortage of alleged “traumas” to choose from, and could use such claims to get taxpayer-funded “disability” benefits, it was almost literally a gold mine.

I am describing PTSD, of course—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a clinical entity it was rare in the 1960s/70s world where I grew up. Now it is easily one of the most common psychiatric diagnoses: even in the early 2000s NIMH estimated that more than 5 percent of women and almost 2 percent of men in the US “had PTSD” in the past year (“past-year prevalence”). In the US military, where a PTSD diagnosis can be a monetary gift that keeps on giving, the prevalence has been much higher—even among men, now that the benefits of victimhood in this context are monetary, i.e., go beyond the psychological comforts of victimhood that tend to draw women almost exclusively.

Despite its alleged roots in World War I and earlier “shell shock” cases, PTSD is essentially a modern, culture-bound syndrome. It first came to prominence as a veterans’ complaint with the help of Vietnam Vet advocacy groups in the aftermath of that war. However, as the recovered-memory epidemic receded in the 1990s, sensitive women and their enablers in the rapidly feminizing medical profession began adopting it as a civilian, primarily female illness. From the perspective of a hysteria-aware skeptic, it was and continues to be almost perfect as a replacement for recovered-memory syndromes. There is no reliance on hypnosis, nor does it require claims against a human perp and resulting scrutiny from the judicial system. In a newly feminized, newly sensitized age, how can it even be questioned? Therapists or psychiatrists who doubt its validity (a validity that is of course enshrined in the latest DSM editions) can lose not only their patients but also their professional reputations, even their licenses to practice. Skepticism from within academia or the medical profession therefore has been rare. And when doubts have been expressed they usually have been expressed in opaque academese.

Nothing that I have written in this book should be construed as trivializing the acts of violence and the terrible personal losses that stand behind many traumatic memories. The suffering is real; PTSD is real. But can one also say that the facts now attached to PTSD are true (timeless) as well as real? Can questions about truth be divorced from the social, cognitive, and technological conditions through which researchers and clinicians come to know their facts and the meaning of facticity…? My answer is no. [in Allan Young’s The Harmony of Illusions]

MeToo: Hysteria Lite

In the paragraphs above I’ve touched on the Weinstein, Epstein, Cosby and Kavanagh cases—classic early 21^st century #MeToo stories that ostensibly are free of traditional hysterical themes such as spirit possession, witchcraft and somatization disorders. They involve trauma claims but are not cases for therapists or priests or witch-doctors to handle—they are criminal cases or at least cases involving allegations of serious personal misconduct. Yet they involve seemingly infectious cascades of claims, and my hypothesis here is that they feature essentially the same behavioral program that drives other, more frankly hysterical trauma-story cascades. The claims against a Weinstein or a Cosby may be more veridical than those of a 16^th century novice nun who pretends to be possessed by a demon sent by some priest, but they cascade in the same way, and involve at least some degree of exaggeration and falsehood—as should be evident from even a cursory critical analysis of these cases.

Moreover, there seems to be a social aura of intense feeling around these cases. They don’t exist in isolation as civil or criminal matters to be decided by a sober, judicial weighing of facts. Many women are fiercely, often blindly supportive of the plaintiffs, and are ready to punish anyone who is insensitive enough to express skepticism. Some men too have their protective instincts activated and are also strongly supportive. Many of the rest, perhaps a large majority, are skeptical but know better than to draw adverse attention by saying anything. A few, of course, do voice their skepticism and catch hell for it—and though their skepticism may be well founded and perfectly logical, even obvious, we tend to see such people as foolish rather than honest or brave or perspicacious. An unspoken but widely accepted fact about hysterias and related trauma-tale cascades is that the truth has little power against the mass emotions they harness.

A Peculiarly Feminine Power

“Power” may be an essential concept here. One can speculate almost endlessly about this sort of thing, but an obvious hypothesis is that these female-driven trauma-tale cascades are, at least in part, manifestations of an ancient, instinctive “asymmetrical warfare” tactic—a means by which women can defeat men who are on an individual basis physically and psychologically more powerful. As one well known anthropologist, speaking of female-dominated African possession cults, has put it:

zar possession provides women patients (acting consciously or unconsciously) with an opportunity to pursue their interests and demands in a context of male dominance. [I.M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, p. 71]

Where they are given little domestic security and are otherwise ill-protected from the pressures and exactions of men, women may thus resort to spirit possession as a means both of airing their grievances obliquely, and of gaining some satisfaction. [Lewis, p. 68]

If women have evolved an instinct to use this tactic, or have evolved traits that otherwise favor that behavioral pattern, it’s at least conceivable that men would have evolved their own way of responding. Curiously, though, the way men respond in modern times and cultures seems to be inefficient at best. The accused tend to try to placate the female complainants or otherwise try to avoid the wrath of the furies that have been whipped up against them, yet usually end up facing the mob alone. There is very little of the male banding-together that could provide an effective defense. Perhaps most bystander men in this situation instinctively sense that they are better off not getting involved. In cases where the woman is alleging that a man has victimized her, a certain proportion of men will be sympathetic and protective to her—thus further hindering any male solidarity.

If women have evolved this cascade tactic as a way of evening up the scales against men, it makes sense that they would use it or adapt it for situations in which (a) they can activate the necessary network of claimants, and (b) they can use it to achieve some goal that would otherwise be harder to reach. Conceivably the modern media-driven cascades aimed at “canceling” or “de-platforming” people who have done or said something politically incorrect owe something to this feminine tradition. The complainants who join these cascades usually point to a broader harm committed by the target person, for example against a minority group whom the target has slighted. But they often use terminology reminiscent of older, trauma-tale cascades, i.e., suggesting that they themselves have been victimized and traumatized. In a recent essay on the notorious Larry Summers cancellation in 2005, I noted the language used by one of the prominent complainants in that case, MIT professor Nancy Hopkins.

“When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” Dr. Hopkins said.

Cancellations of people who violate political correctness codes are frequently labeled “witch hunts,” but I think the analogy is not as loose as people tend to assume. Witch-hunts, such as the New England variety, were led by a different and more clearly defined “authority” than the relatively amorphous journalist-activist network that presides over modern p.c.-violation cases. But in both situations, we see a central dynamic in which an initial accusation against a target is followed by a contagious piling-on of claims and vilification until—usually—the miscreant issues a groveling apology, loses his job, or suffers some other adverse outcome. And although there are no data on this, it seems obvious to me from ordinary experience that women are vastly overrepresented among the claimants in these cascades.

Cascade control

Is there any effective response to cascades of this nature? I get the sense that this question tends to be asked most urgently these days about cancellation cascades, which are often unambiguously irrational and unjust. In the Larry Summers cancellation of 2005/06, with which I’m relatively familiar, reasoned argument by high-profile defenders of Summers, including the popular writer Steven Pinker, writing in high-profile publications, counted for remarkably little against the emotional storm conjured up by a handful of feminist academics and their media enablers.

That attack on Summers clearly was aimed at causing him professional harm—he was then the president of Harvard College. Professional harm was the outcome too, for that and countless other cancellations in recent years. Shouldn’t the law provide a remedy in such cases?

It should perhaps, but it doesn’t, and arguably that’s a big part of the problem. In the 1600s and 1700s in Britain and America, tort law actually did provide good remedies, and (with some notable exceptions) increasingly good deterrence, against the very serious slander/defamation of calling someone a witch. Hysterias such as the one at Salem also provided salutary examples of the harm that could be caused when such defamations went uncontested. But beliefs in witchcraft abated in the century or so after Salem, and in general tort law has never adapted to the fact that witchcraft accusations can have modern variants that are despiritualized but still have very serious reputational and economic consequences. That problem would be fixed, at least at the level of conservative-leaning states, if legislators could strengthen laws meant to protect against this sort of harm—in a way that could survive the inevitable First-Amendment-based challenge from federal courts.

Another element of an effective response would be a response that is just as organized and networked and vocal and goal-directed as the attack. Victims of cancellation cascades tend to be isolated and overwhelmed in the mediasphere by howling mobs that intimidate not only the victims but also their employers and would-be supporters, until the victim loses his job and status. One of the more remarkable aspects of the Age of P.C. is the degree to which big corporations have been cowed by such mobs. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that having a louder, more numerous mob on your side—a mob that brings a credible threat of a mass boycott of any company that crosses it—could make all the difference in such cases. Implementing this strategy would mean organizing the Right to oppose almost instinctively any media-driven cascade aimed at canceling someone for a political-correctness violation.

Organizing the Right to this extent seems problematic at present, though. Broadly speaking, the Right lacks the relatively energizing and binding “religiosity” of the modern progressive Left—lacks the Left’s youthfulness too. There is no right-wing equivalent of Antifa. Contemporary corporations seem to sense pretty well that the Left coheres better and thus poses a greater threat to their profits.

On the other hand, considering that hysterias tend to fade out as soon as they are widely seen as such, it might help a lot just to shine a light on this phenomenon—in other words, as I’m trying to do here, by calling attention to cancellation cascades and trauma-tale cascades as putative manifestations of an ancient, hysteria-related behavioral program. To some extent we do this already when we compare cancellation cascades to witch hunts, but we could take it further by arguing that the comparison is more than just metaphorical, and may have ancient roots in female social behavior—behavior that, due to the mass-entry of women into public life in the last half-century, has been more culturally consequential than ever before in history. There must be a reason that feminists, despite their unprecedented grip on Western culture, keep complaining about women’s “powerlessness” with respect to men. Perhaps that illusion of weakness is essential to their actual and ascendant power.

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Author’s note (Oct 2022):

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

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Roughly a decade ago, returning briefly to the US after a decade living abroad in countries with more traditional cultures, I began to notice something about the USA—something that I sensed I wasn’t supposed to notice. Of course like everyone else I could see that the country had undergone and was still undergoing real changes. Some of them seemed radical, like the then-new push for legalizing same-sex marriage. Some of them, such as the strengthening strictures of environmentalism and political correctness, were intensifications of trends that had been in place for decades. I think that unlike most people, though, I came to see these changes less as changes towards the “Left” and more as changes towards the “Feminine.” For a variety of professional and circumstantial reasons I was probably more aware than the average person that men and women tend to differ in psychological traits and also that women had been steadily amassing cultural power as they had entered the upper reaches of professions such as journalism, law, publishing, science and politics. I perceived that America’s cultural changes—reflected widely in other developed countries, especially the UK—were the changes one would have expected in a society where women were gaining influence.

I was initially inclined to believe that the differences between men and women in behavior and policy preferences were mostly subtle—and mostly small in relation to the human capacity for learning new ways of thinking. But relevant events shifted me towards the stronger view that men and women are apt to differ profoundly in their psychology and cognitive functioning, which implies that the changes in store for the culture must also be profound. The “relevant event” that did more than any other to shape this view of mine occurred way back in 2005, though its message has continued to echo in the present.

The day was January 14. The occasion was a conference on “Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce” at the Cambridge, MA facility of the private, nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research. The speaker was Harvard’s President, Lawrence Summers. The audience consisted of a few dozen, almost entirely female S&E faculty from Harvard and other universities. University administrators such as Summers, then as now, were under pressure from feminist academics and feminist-friendly media to even up the male/female ratio in science and engineering, the presumption being that a persistent deviance from 50:50 was due to unlawful discrimination.

Summers, a prize-winning economist and former Treasury Secretary, was considered a sharp-witted man. He was also the head of a major university, and as such would have known how to soothe feminist faculty with the usual aspirational cant. Instead, he decided on this day that he would basically speak the truth as he saw it. January 14, 2005 was the occasion of an unusual midwinter warm spell in the Boston area, with a high temperature of 63. It was the sort of pleasant climatic surprise that is apt to make a man unduly optimistic. A week later, Boston would be paralyzed by a winter storm—and Summers, a condemned heretic, would be on his way out of Harvard.

What did Summers say? Below is a representative selection from the ~7,000-word total. Craftwise his speech strikes me as unduly verbose, and it contains too many, obviously futile, attempts to appease the hypersensitive feminists before him. But it otherwise seems well reasoned and unobjectionable, and even thoughtful and useful, which is the point of this story: The women who had power over Summers—women who represent the revolutionary new regime in Western culture and politics—signaled on that day that they would never be satisfied with “mansplanations,” however logical, that contradict their dogmas.

[emphases mine]

I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard’s policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second and didn’t feel like doing the first. And so we have agreed that I am speaking unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we’re doing at Harvard to promote the crucial objective of diversity.

I am going to, until most of the way through, attempt to adopt an entirely positive, rather than normative approach [i.e., describing things as they are, not how they should be], and just try to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we observe what we observe without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality. It is after all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it’s important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation.

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the—I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are—the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

[#1: high-powered job hypothesis]

I’ve had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same.

… the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children…

… it is a fact about our society that [high-powered jobs involve] a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That’s not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.

…So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do high-powered intense work?

[#2: aptitude hypothesis]

It does appear that on many, many different human attributes—height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability—there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.

If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is … talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class.

Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out [i.e., at the highest-aptitude end of the long tail]… I looked at … the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5 percent of twelfth graders. If you look at those—they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth—but … one woman for every two men would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20 percent. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation—and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways—you get five to one, at the high end. [i.e., aptitude is so much more variable in men that, e.g., the very-high-aptitude pool of male physicists may be several times larger than the very-high-aptitude pool of female physicists].

So my sense is that the unfortunate truth—I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true—is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

[#3: differential socialization and innate preferences—mostly the latter]

[P]articularly in some attributes that bear on engineering, there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization. I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a kind one doesn’t encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs. Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction [i.e., towards males fixing tractors, women working in nurseries]. So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it’s just something that you probably have to recognize.

One [hypothesis for this] is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis for two reasons. First, most of what we’ve learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We’ve been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true.

Summers finished up by noting that discrimination against women in STEM faculty hiring is an unlikely explanation for the present discrepancy, underscoring the likelihood that his own alternative explanations are valid.

[T]here are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that. So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude [the two fatal words, I suspect], and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

Audience members questioned him for a while after that. Almost all were polite. None put a dent in the points he had made. Some were childishly long-winded and seemed to miss his points entirely—almost as if, in some unconscious way, they wanted to buttress his suggestion about “intrinsic aptitude” with clear examples of female illogic and mental confusion. Donna Nelson, a chemistry professor from the University of Oklahoma, responded to Summers’ passing mention of twin studies and their revelations about trait heritability by declaring: “One thing that I do sort of disagree with is the use of identical twins that have been separated and their environment followed. I think that the environments that a lot of women and minorities experience would not be something that would be—that a twin would be subjected to if the person knows that their environment is being watched. Because a lot of the things that are done to women and minorities are simply illegal, and so they’ll never experience that.”

But the only strong hint of ruffled feathers came at the end, when Denice Denton, chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz, stood up and said, with some emotion: “You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I’m not an expert in this area but a lot of people in the room are, and they’ve written a lot of papers … and you know a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your premises.” Acting as if Summers had been aggressively asserting truths rather than cautiously elaborating hypotheses, she complained “so it’s not so clear.”

(Denton committed suicide a year and a half later by jumping off the roof of her girlfriend’s SF apartment building. According to SFGate, the chancellor, trained as an engineer, “had been named this spring in a series of articles examining UC management compensation. She had been criticized for an expensive [$600K] university-funded renovation on her campus home, and for obtaining a UC administrative job” for her girlfriend.)

A few other women at the conference were upset by Summers’s references to “intrinsic aptitude.” Whether a reporter was present I don’t know, but somehow Boston Globe reporter Marcella Bombardieri, who would later quit journalism to become a paid activist pushing progressive, feminist issues in academia, felt this disturbance in the feminist force and ran a story two days later on the 17th.

Bombardieri’s story, headlined “Summers’ remarks on women draw fire,” recast the speech not as the wordy and sedate event it was, but as riotous act of heresy that had traumatized sensitive listeners.

The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers’ talk, saying later that if she hadn’t left, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Note the histrionics of Nancy Hopkins, a woman so overwhelmed with indignation that she went right ahead and reinforced all those old stereotypes about women and their preference for drama over reason. Note too Bombardieri’s last sentence, which a careless reader might take as evidence that a majority of attendees were “deeply offended.”

Naturally, other MSM organs picked up this story and amplified it. Denton and Hopkins now had their national megaphone.

The NYT on Jan 18:

HARVARD CHIEF DEFENDS HIS TALK ON WOMEN

The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, who offended some women at an academic conference last week by suggesting that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers, stood by his comments yesterday but said he regretted if they were misunderstood.

“I’m sorry for any misunderstanding but believe that raising questions, discussing multiple factors that may explain a difficult problem, and seeking to understand how they interrelate is vitally important,” Dr. Summers said in an interview.

Several women who participated in the conference said yesterday that they had been surprised or outraged by Dr. Summers’s comments, and Denice D. Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, questioned Dr. Summers sharply during the conference, saying she needed to “speak truth to power.”

Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who once led an investigation of sex discrimination there that led to changes in hiring and promotion, walked out midway through Dr. Summers’s remarks.

“When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” Dr. Hopkins said. “Let’s not forget that people used to say that women couldn’t drive an automobile.”

Buried in the NYT’s piece was this interesting fact [emphases mine]:

Dr. Summers arrived after a morning session and addressed a working lunch, speaking without notes. No transcript was made because the conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later.

Presumably Denton and Hopkins, who with Bombardieri were the ring-leaders of this hysteria, would say that an off-the-record rule such as that is merely a “Man’s Rule,” designed to protect the patriarchy and keep women down—and thus can be flouted by feminists without fear of reproach!

But they didn’t merely flout this rule: They turned it against Summers, exploiting the apparent lack of a transcript by dramatically misrepresenting his speech as a misogynist rant. Their complaints of psychosomatic injury (“I just couldn’t breathe”) were presented as prima facie evidence that they were the traumatized victims of a serious thoughtcrime.

Many women and men had listened to Summers’s talk, or had heard of his arguments second-hand, and had perceived nothing objectionable. Ultimately it would turn out that an official recording had been made. A transcript of that recording emerged, and it indicated that by traditional, commonsense standards, Summers had neither made false, “hurtful” assertions nor even had been guilty of mild insensitivity. To the contrary, the man had spoken sensibly and sensitively—even oversensitively. My own impression is that he had come to the gathering with the view that his audience of feminist academics included some bad apples who were childish and emotionally unstable and might easily fly into a temper. He simply had underestimated how irrational and unstable they were! And as the hysteria blew up, it was clear that Summers’s feminist antagonists were the ones making unsupported assertions. They and not he were the dogmatists who wanted to quash all opposing ideas.

Bombardieri, for her January 17 piece in the Globe, tried to mute any sense of pushback from defenders of Summers, but clearly had gotten an earful from the organizer of the NBER conference, Harvard economist Richard Freeman:

Freeman … described Summers’s critics as activists whose sensibilities might be at odds with intellectual debate.

Exactly! And Freeman, who these days probably feels much less free to express such sentiments, defended Summers to the Guardian for their Jan 18 piece on the controversy:

Richard Freeman, who invited the Harvard president to speak at the conference, said Dr. Summers’s comments were intended to provoke debate, and some women over-reacted.

“Some people took offence because they were very sensitive,” said Dr Freeman, an economist at Harvard and the London School of Economics. “It does not seem to me insane to think that men and women have biological differences.”

Freeman’s defense of Summers was followed by others’, including that of Hannah Gray, a distinguished member of the Harvard governing body, the Harvard Corporation. Conference participant Paula Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University, also defended Summers, telling the NYT that his “remarks offended some participants, but not her. ‘I think if you come to participate in a research conference,’ Dr. Stephan said, ‘you should expect speakers to present hypotheses that you may not agree with and then discuss them on the basis of research findings.’”

Then there was Harvard colleague Steven Pinker’s reasoned defense of Summers in The New Republic.

Summers did not, of course, say that women are “natively inferior,” that “they just can’t cut it,” that they suffer “an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences,” or that men have “a monopoly on basic math ability,” as many academics and journalists assumed. Only a madman could believe such things. Summers’s analysis of why there might be fewer women in mathematics and science is commonplace among economists who study gender disparities in employment….

The analysis should have been unexceptionable. Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, “Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”) To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.

A defender of Summers in The Atlantic even went so far as to attack his antagonists: “The hysteria about Summers furthers the career agendas of feminists who seek quotas for themselves and their friends.”

But as Larry Summers’s defenders, and Summers himself, must have suspected, reasoning like this was just pissing in the wind. The typhoon of hysteria, deliberately fed by the media and an email-enabled campaign among feminist academics, continued to strengthen. The NYT followed its initial story on Jan 18 with another one the next day, headlined “NO BREAK IN THE STORM OVER HARVARD PRESIDENT’S WORDS.”

Members of a Harvard faculty committee that has examined the recruiting of professors who are women sent a protest letter yesterday to Lawrence H. Summers, the university’s president, saying his recent statements about innate differences between the sexes would only make it harder to attract top candidates.

The committee told Mr. Summers that his remarks did not “serve our institution well.”

“Indeed,” the letter said, “they serve to reinforce an institutional culture at Harvard that erects numerous barriers to improving the representation of women on the faculty, and to impede our current efforts to recruit top women scholars. They also send at best mixed signals to our high-achieving women students in Harvard College and in the graduate and professional schools.”

The letter was one part of an outcry that continued to follow remarks Mr. Summers made Friday suggesting that biological differences between the sexes may be one explanation for why fewer women succeed in mathematic and science careers.

…

Denice D. Denton, the dean of engineering at the University of Washington who confronted Mr. Summers over his remarks at the conference, said that her phone had not stopped ringing and that she had received scores of e-mail messages on the subject. She said Mr. Summers’s remarks might have put new energy into a longstanding effort to improve the status of women in the sciences.

“I think they’ve provoked an intellectual tsunami,” Dr. Denton said.

Emotional tsunami would have been more accurate—but anyway Summers felt the full force of it. He had been a high flier for most of his life; while still in his 30s he had won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for his economics research, in his 40s he had been Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton Administration. Surely other important positions awaited him. But now at the hands of Puritanical feminists he faced the modern equivalent of the stake or the gallows: vilification from every progressive pulpit across the land, followed by professional and social ostracism.

And so, he did what so many victims of witch-hunts, Inquisitions, and ideological purges had done before him: He caved. He confessed his heresy and begged forgiveness. As the NYT reported on day 4 of the hysteria, Jan 20 [emphases mine]:

HARVARD PRESIDENT APOLOGIZES AGAIN FOR REMARKS ON GENDER

With the unabated furor over his recent remarks suggesting that women may not have the same innate abilities in math and science as men, Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, issued a two-page apology to the Harvard community late last night.

“I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women,” Mr. Summers said in a letter that was posted on his Harvard Web site.

“Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science,” Mr. Summers wrote.

It was his third public statement in three days about his remarks at a conference on women and minorities in science and engineering last Friday, with each statement becoming stronger and more apologetic. His remarks have dominated the discussion on the Harvard campus and beyond, with female academics, alumni and donors expressing concern over his leadership.

Mr. Summers, an economist and a former treasury secretary, acknowledged that he had been hearing plenty of reaction himself. “I have learned a great deal from all that I have heard in the last few days,” he wrote in his statement. “The many compelling e-mails and calls that I have received have made vivid the very real barriers faced by women in pursuing scientific and other academic careers.”

He wrote in the letter that he had attended the conference, held by the National Bureau of Economics, “with the intention of reinforcing my strong commitment to the advancement of women in science, and offering some informal observations on possibly fruitful avenues for further research.”

However, he added: “Ensuing media reports on my remarks appear to have had quite the opposite effect. I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully.“

It was abject. It was shameful. It was a surrender to the forces of unreason—to the hysterical mob that had already done so much to distort both science and the hiring of scientists. Despite this crawling penitence, or perhaps because of it, Summers lost his job as Harvard President. In March, a majority of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including female faculty, of course, but also male faculty fearful of the same whirlwind that had consumed their leader, approved a resolution of “no confidence” in Summers. The NYT reported among things that:

J. Lorand Matory, a professor of anthropology and African and African-American studies, told reporters after the meeting that Dr. Summers should step down. “There is no noble alternative for him but resignation,” said Professor Matory, who introduced the resolution….

Dr. Summers, an economist and a former United States Treasury secretary, has been meeting individually with faculty members throughout the Faculty of Arts and Sciences over the last several weeks, apologizing for his remarks about women and for any other offense he might have given and asking for their support so he could move forward.

Although the resolution was only symbolic, and Summers in the ensuing months continued to try to placate and soothe his antagonists, it eventually became clear that his position was unrecoverable. On February 22, just about 13 months after his fateful utterance of the words “intrinsic aptitude,” the New York Times reported:

PRESIDENT OF HARVARD RESIGNS, ENDING STORMY 5-YEAR TENURE

Lawrence H. Summers resigned yesterday as president of Harvard University after a relatively brief and turbulent tenure of five years, nudged by Harvard’s governing corporation and facing a vote of no confidence from the influential Faculty of Arts and Sciences….

… advisers and confidants of Dr. Summers said he privately concluded a week ago that he should step down, after members of Harvard’s governing corporation and friends—particularly from the Clinton administration—made it clear that his presidency was lost.

No one should have shed any tears for Summers. He was offered a university professorship at Harvard, joined a hedge fund, and within a few years became a high-profile economic adviser at the Obama White House. As embarrassing and degrading as it all was, his public confessions and repentance, his surrender to the New Inquisition, apparently were effective in forestalling his full banishment. At the end of the day Summers retained his wealth, his high status, and his potential for moderately high public office.

American civil society, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. Summers’s high-profile moral cowardice emboldened the unreasoning feminism he had faced, and within another decade Harvard and most universities across the land were quasi-totalitarian in their insistence on conformity with feminist ideology. The same conformity spread as well through the mainstream media and entertainment industries, and even into the executive layers of big corporations. Opponents would use labels like “Progressivism” or “Cultural Marxism” to describe this mindset. But such descriptions seemed incomplete somehow, for this brand of Leftism wasn’t simply a different set of policy prescriptions. It also involved a different attitude towards ways of thinking and behaving that seemed fundamental to Western societies. Such as debating with reason and logic.

Women, not universally but on average compared to men, appear to have less affinity for the verbal swordplay of reasoned argument. Polls and surveys routinely show them to be less supportive of free speech and debate. An obvious hypothesis would be that women are not as comfortable with debating because they are, compared to men, more emotionally sensitive—less able to discourse dispassionately about things that affect them. That emotional sensitivity in turn would appear to be an adaptation for child-bearing and child-rearing, which have been women’s primary responsibilities for 99.99999% of human/primate existence. A woman in maternal mode, particularly when the life or health of her child is at stake, would also have more use for a dictatorial bearing (“because I said so!”) than an open-to-reason approach. In recent decades, as women have been moving out of the home and into public life, becoming journalists and politicians and scientists and other influencers of policy, they have been—I submit—bringing this maternal mindset with them.

The Summers episode arguably highlights an even more important dimension of the female mindset. Women as compared to men appear to have a strong ability to transmit their anger and anxiety to other women or to “catch” it from other women, thus forming what one might call emotional coalitions or outbreaks. That trait-set would seem to follow from the fact that women are relatively emotionally sensitive, and it’s easy to see that in certain circumstances, it could be a powerful weapon with which to oppose male hegemony or otherwise allow women collectively to get their way. That susceptibility to emotional contagion, and the matching propensity for emotionally acting-out, would also explain why women (and girls) have been the chief propagators of hysterias throughout history, from Salem to the Devils of Loudoun to the defenestration of Larry Summers. A touch of genuine insight and not mere misogyny may therefore have been what led the ancients to link such behavior with the possession of a womb (ὑστέρα – hystera).

But what of men? Why do we, the “stronger” sex, routinely lose to the “weaker” sex in these conflicts? Why have women found it so easy, in recent decades, to achieve ascendancy over us in the most advanced human societies? Here I can only wade more deeply into speculation and suggest that we the males of our species have evolved a set of instinctive but largely passive, placatory strategies for dealing with outbreaks of female hysteria—strategies to which we still automatically resort even though they no longer work well. Consider for example how men cope with a very old form of hysteria: the female-dominated “spirit-possession” syndrome that persists in one form or another in many traditional, patriarchal societies, and is often organized in “possession cults.” A woman playing this role typically will adopt the voice/personality of an authoritative male “spirit,” and will use its authority to demand gifts or some other concession from her husband. In principle, a husband in this situation could organize with other husbands, disband the cult, deliver exemplary punishment to his wife, etc. In practice—perhaps because millennia of experience have established this as the better way—he tends to accede to the “spirit’s” demands, or tries to work out some compromise. Similarly, hysterias in developed countries, such as the epidemic of Multiple Personality Disorder and its variants in the 1980s and early 90s, have tended to fade out, often from their own absurdity, and have almost never been successfully and abruptly quashed by direct, organized male opposition. A large part of the explanation, in both cases, is that the women at the cores of these hysterias are quite good at co-opting influential men, making it hard for men to unite against them.

Thus it may be that women through their greater ability to form emotional/hysterical coalitions in pursuit of a goal have much more power over men than meets the eye, and correspondingly have much less interest in, or susceptibility to, traditional male tools of persuasion such as reasoned argument. Moreover, it may be that men such as Larry Summers who encounter this primordial feminine power, and retreat before it, are not just behaving “rationally” but are also unconsciously acting out an ancient appeasement reflex. If so, I suspect this appeasement reflex no longer works for men, collectively and in the long run, because in modern societies the traditional limits on female power no longer exist: Now every surrender to that power increases it.

published 23 Aug 2019

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Author’s note (Oct 2022):

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

Feminists these days spend a lot of time worrying about male-dominated culture—“patriarchal culture,” “sexual harassment culture,” “rape culture,” “the culture of silence,” and so on. But shouldn’t they be acknowledging the influence that women now have on culture: on workplace culture, on media culture, on campus culture, on American culture, and on Western culture generally? That feminizing influence may be the greatest single driver of the rapid social changes seen in recent decades.

Consider the following U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics chart of women’s civilian labor force participation rate.

It shows that in 1950 only about 30 percent of working-age women were in the workforce, but by 2000 that figure had jumped to 60 percent and rivaled the participation rate for men, which had been in decline since the early 1950s. In other words, by 2000 the U.S. workforce had been mostly gender-integrated. On average, workplaces by then had almost as many women as men.

The historic significance of this migration on its own appears to have been underappreciated. Women never made such a move, to such a degree, in any large human society in the past. It significantly altered the structure of ordinary life.

But women in the late 20^th century didn’t just move into the workforce. They moved into its upper ranks, to professions that strongly influence societal culture and policy. They became journalists, public relations specialists, lawyers, academics, novelists, publishers, filmmakers, TV producers, and politicians, all to an unprecedented extent. In some of these culture-making professions, by the 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved parity or even dominance (e.g., writers, authors, and public relations specialists) with respect to men. Even where they fell short of full parity, they appeared to acquire considerable “veto” power over content. A 2017 report by the Women’s Media Center noted evidence that at the vast majority of media companies, at least one woman is among the top three editors.

Why is the greater presence of women in culture-making professions important? Because women, on average, think differently than men on a wide range of subjects. That psychological differentness is well established from experiments, and is reflected in the well-known “gender gap” in voting and policy choices—a gap that is even larger when considering women who are maritally independent of men, i.e., single women, one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country.

If one accepts that culture is a strong determinant of behavior, which it is really by definition, it follows that putting a high proportion of women into senior roles in culture-making professions, basically for the first time ever, will have changed the culture and therefore changed how people on average tend to think and act. It won’t have changed everyone absolutely; we are not blank slates. But it will have moved the collective needle—shifted the so-called Overton Window of publicly acceptable opinion, and shifted average behavior as well, even average male behavior. That is, in fact, the underlying logic of organizations like the Women’s Media Center, which have explicitly sought to alter, to feminize, the content of mass media and the resulting attitudes of the public by putting more women into newsrooms.

How would culture and policy have changed as a result of women’s new influence? Presumably in ways that reflect feminine psychological traits.

For example, women appear on average to be more empathetic and compassionate, more emotionally sensitive. Some of the most striking social changes of the last few decades appear to have been driven by a cultural shift in that direction:

• More generous welfare programs
• Expansion of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (affirmative action, etc.) and more groups needing intervention
• Expansion of the definitions of “harm,” “offense,” and “trauma” (“microaggressions,” “triggers”)
• Increased attention to psychological trauma in law and medicine, leading to a greater acceptance, and thus a higher prevalence, of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1990s)
• Less tolerance of deaths in war; but, ironically, a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television

• Less tolerance for capital punishment
• Less restrictive immigration policy
• More emphasis in media and policy contexts on emotion-evoking stories of individuals (e.g., pitiable refugee children) rather than dry analyses of long-term outcomes

• Suppression of any kind of emotionally disturbing speech (“hate speech,” “mansplaining,” etc.) and even fields of scientific inquiry that are likely to evoke negative emotions;
• Less affinity for traditional, constitutionally protected forms of confrontation in the legal and political spheres, i.e., less support for open debate, free-speech rights, and “due process of law.”
• Suppression/replacement of words that evoke emotional discomfort (e.g., “abortion clinic” becomes “women’s health center”)

That’s just from one set of closely related traits. Certainly there are others. For example, women for obvious evolutionary reasons appear to have an instinctive fear of dietary and environmental toxins, which can become pronounced during pregnancy (“morning sickness,” nesting reflex, food aversions). Is it just coincidence that women’s cultural ascendancy in Western countries corresponds to a huge rise in diet-, drug-, and environment-related concerns encompassing the Green movement, anti-GMO attitudes, “detox” fads, the “herbal medicine” racket, “organic foods” preferences, and even the anti-vaccine movement?

Then there is the issue of systematizing. Experiments by psychologists and everyday observations by parents, etc. suggest that whereas the average “male” brain is adapted for understanding and building systems, the average “female” brain is . . . not so much adapted for that. A cultural shift away from traditional “male,” systematizing thinking across society could again explain many specific social changes. One is the great, still-ongoing migration from traditional religions with their managerial hierarchies and highly systematized theologies to new, more loosely structured and personalized spiritual groups, such as Evangelical Christian groups, New Age movements, and neo-pagan groups (e.g., Wicca) which give prominent roles to women. Another plausible reflection of this de-systematizing tendency is the long-term decline of interest in engineering among U.S.-born students, who are now outnumbered by foreign students at U.S. engineering grad schools.

One of the most obvious sex-related differences in human behavior concerns aggression and violence. Women on average are far less violent than men, and consequently make up only about 7 percent of the U.S. prison population. If women have had an unprecedented feminizing effect on the “public mind” in recent decades, in principle that would have reduced the propensity for aggression and violence even among men. Indeed there has been a striking downward trend in violent crime rates in the U.S. in recent decades—a trend that would be even stronger if all the violent crimes committed by people born and raised in traditional, patriarchal societies, e.g., Mexico, were excluded.

How could men have been feminized to this extent? By having less testosterone, for example. The ways in which sex hormones rise and fall in response to social cues is an under-studied area, but two trends stand out alarmingly: Age-adjusted testosterone levels in men have been falling in Western countries in recent decades, and—as one would expect from that—sperm counts have been falling too. Interestingly, those sperm-count studies suggest that whatever is causing the trend in Western societies has been having less effect, or no effect at all, in traditional, i.e., patriarchal societies.

Why is it “alarming” that male testosterone levels and sperm counts have been dropping in Western countries, if one result is less violent crime? Because that’s not the only result. Declining testosterone also means declining fertility and probably also a declining motivation to marry and raise a family. Here again the statistics are consistent with the idea of a Great Feminization. The U.S. in recent decades has seen not only a decline in the marriage rate, but also a collapse of the birth rate for U.S.-born women, to levels below what demographers consider necessary to maintain the population. The “U.S. population” now grows chiefly because of open-door immigration and births to immigrant mothers.

Am I crazy to link female emancipation and near-equality in the workforce to all these bad results, including population collapse? Well, no—I’m only putting forward a hypothesis, and one that seems well grounded in the data. Obviously many factors contributed to the social changes that have swept across the West in the past half century or so. But that women were one of those factors seems undeniable. And the possibility that they were, and continue to be, the dominant factor seems worth discussing, not least because of the potential implications for the future. Yet . . . there has been no discussion. I’ve been circulating this idea for years now, in one forum and another, and it gets no traction at all. It isn’t shot down by some fact or logical disproof; it’s just ignored or dismissed without reason. No “respectable” publication will touch it. I can’t help wondering if that response is yet another reflection of women’s new cultural power.

published 6 Mar 2019

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Postscript (3/25/19): Apparently a similar theory, blaming the West’s fertility decline on feminism, has been kicking around in “far-right” circles. That probably helps explain why doors have tended to shut in my face whenever I’ve tried (over the past 7+ years) to get a version of this essay published–and I’ve been reduced to publishing pseudonymously in fringe publications or on d-i-y websites. In case it’s not already clear, my “great feminization” idea is mainly about cultural feminization, doesn’t have anything directly to do with the formal “feminist” movement, and doesn’t require any dire prediction about population decline/replacement. Also, though it should be irrelevant, I’m not some woman-hating incel; I’m happily married, etc. My interest in the topic of sex differences in culture and policy attitudes developed from the fact that I, a male, work in a profession that is increasingly female-dominated.

 

Author’s note (Oct 2022):

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.