In the National Post, Barbara Kay outlines the way society has been trending further away from traditional values and more and more toward the values of “empathy, safety, and cohesion” which have been predominantly feminine values in contrast to more male-oriented values of “rationality, risk, and competition”:
In September, public intellectual Helen Andrews caused a stir when she delivered a provocative 17-minute speech, titled “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture”, to the National Conservatism Conference, later published as an article for Compact, titled “The Great Feminization“.
Andrews summarized feminization as the prioritizing of feminine over masculine interests, but additionally prioritizing “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”. All these traits combine, she believes, in institutions where females are numerically dominant, to define “wokeness” and “cancel culture”.
Andrews points to Bari Weiss’ 2020 resignation letter from the New York Times where Weiss was labeled and ostracized for her social ties and cut off by perceived friends. In 2018, the newsroom there had tipped to a female majority which Andrews argues changed the work environment’s dynamics to one where cohesion is preferred, and covert undermining would replace open debate in favour of emotional harmony.
And I would argue that the more feminized society’s institutions become, the more readily extreme, empathic attitudes replace rational decision-making at policy-making levels, and the more society loses confidence in its ability to thrive.
Ironically, instead of directing empathy towards our own citizens, feminization also tends to direct empathy internationally. That is exactly what is happening at our national level, when our government earmarks funds for programs such as “Gender-Just, Low-Carbon, Rice Value Chains in Vietnam”.
This is also happening at a micro-level to the Jewish community in North America. Our spiritual leadership in non-orthodox synagogues is growing increasingly female, and, by no coincidence, is wokeness spreading, and, by no further coincidence, so is alignment with radical anti-Zionism.
[…]
Claims that Israel was guilty of genocide and apartheid, the authors write, were a constant feature of their education. Most shockingly, they write — and this at a rabbinical training institution headed by a female rabbi — that “the sexual violence Israelis experienced (on October 7) was never mentioned, even during Women’s History Month”.
What about the Christian clergy? A 2024 report on female Christian clergy found that in a 2018 sample, about 14 per cent of U.S. churches were headed by a senior female clergyperson. So, churches are not yet in danger of feminization. Good luck to them.
If there is a solution to the feminization-linked problem of anti-Zionism in the non-Orthodox rabbinate, I don’t know what it is. I only know this trend cannot end well for our community. What is essential in Jews’ spiritual homes now, more than ever in our history, is that they be spaces where “ahavat Yisrael” — love of Israel — is the prevailing norm. If we are not for ourselves, who will be?
On a more individual level, the Great Feminization has worked not to make women equal, but to increase their existing privileges and to demonize men who even notice the inequality now runs directly opposite to the narrative:
Image from Steve’s Substack
Over thirty years ago, I knew a woman who felt ecstatic joy taunting men with her nudity. She loved to flash her breasts at truckers on the highway. Thrilled at the thought that she left them frustrated, she would boast about her sexual power.
This is clear, unequivocal abuse. Imagine her taunting a village of starving Africans with BBQ’d steak. She then flees to her 5-star hotel, laughing and bragging that she had left them hungry and frustrated. This is how the West raises women. Self-obsessed, over-entitled and insufferable (insert obligatory, “not-all-women” clause here – yawn).
Feminists have gotten more sophisticated with their abuse since then. We now have transgressions that include absurd accusations like prolonged looking, mansplaining and manspreading. TikTokers go to the gym essentially nude in order to video and humiliate men who happen to notice.
We had the, “Yes means Yes” campaign that insists a man should repeatedly pester his partner with endless questions for permission during every intimate encounter. Never mind that a normal woman is likely to leave the bed after a few of these interruptions, rightly despising the insecure man who obeys that tripe. Anywhere outside of a deep feminist indoctrination camp, a woman will wonder whether your mother dropped you on your head as a child. I’ll bet that not even the most committed believer follows their own advice. This is not good communication — it denies healthy context, body language and facial expression.
And there’s nothing romantic about it; it is designed for feminist power. There is no number of reassurances that could possibly satisfy. The emphasis upon a non-stop verbal Q&A is courtroom strategy. And that’s the point: eliminate the human context, and set a trap for the man. “Did he ask permission to engage in number 17 of the 32 listed steps before sex? No, your honor, that’s where the sexual assault happened.”
Human intimacy is negotiated using mostly unspoken signals, and everybody likes it that way. Obviously there’s a need for clear communication, especially in a new relationship. I only need to include this disclaimer because the world is filled with pedantic manhating feminists eager to accuse me of denying women’s humanity. Grow up, child. Healthy women have absolutely no problem setting their own limits during intimacy. I’ve never met one who didn’t.
We cover for even the worst of women’s transgressions. When a woman murders her child, we call it infanticide and blame postpartum depression. When she murders her husband we call it battered wife syndrome, which is the title of a book by Canadian feminist law professor, Elizabeth Sheehy. Feminist lawyers even argue to eliminate female incarceration and close all women’s prisons, and for decriminalization of husband murder. This nonsense from the feminist cult for women with daddy issues protects mentally ill women who need psychological help, and/or belong in prison.
Every woman has a plethora of options, and near-infinite sympathy and support, in Western culture. Maybe that’s the problem: we don’t hold women responsible for their own behavior. Many women have not been socialized into adulthood.
At risk of making this a TLDR post, here’s Mark Steyn on the cultural side of our ever-more-feminized culture:
Welcome to another in our ongoing series of As I Said Twenty Sod-Bollocking Years Ago. Women have inherited the thrones of great powers — Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Victoria — and presided over massed ranks of courtiers drawn from the “pale, male and stale” (thank you, David Cameron). But America and its client states are the first in history in which every significant venue aside from ladies’ sport is now dominated by women. The west is closer than any society should be to the end of men — which is a big source of the terrible confusion in our schools that has led children to offer themselves up for bodily mutilation and irreversible infertility. Helen Andrews’ much noted “viral” essay on the phenomenon informs us inter alia that by 2024 American law schools were fifty-six per cent female and that sixty-three per cent of judges appointed by Joe Biden’s autopen are likewise on the distaff side. Elsewhere, fifty-five per cent of New York Times reporters are women (up from ten per cent half-a-century ago) and 57.3 per cent of US undergraduates are what we would once have called “coeds”.
At the same time, the principal source of immigration to the west is from a patriarchal culture even more severe (if you can believe it) than 1950s sitcom dads. If you live in London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Dearborn, do you see more body-bagged crones on the streets than you did a generation back? Are you figuring on seeing more still in another twenty years? Or are you betting that the tide will have receded?
It is at the intersection of these two not entirely compatible trendlines — a feminised society with a patriarchal immigration policy — where lies the future (such as it is) of the western world. With that in mind, the annual commemoration of the 1989 Montreal massacre each December 6th has a symbolism that extends far beyond my own deranged dominion. Not just because it was an early example of the state hijacking the actual news to impose a narrative more helpful to its own needs. In the dismantling of manhood and manliness, no lie is too outrageous. As I wrote in The National Post of Canada on December 12th 2002 – twenty-three years ago:
For women’s groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lépine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.
M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband “had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men”. At eighteen, young Gamil took his mother’s maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name “Gamil Gharbi” has not sullied its pages in the thirteen years since.
The Gazette notwithstanding, that might open up many avenues of journalistic investigation, don’t you think? The potential implications of Canadian immigration policy. The misogyny in particular of Islam, and its compatibility with developed societies. But instead everyone who mattered in the Dominion’s elite decided it was all the fault of Canadian manhood in general — of Gordy and Derek’s, or Émile and Pierre’s, culture of toxic masculinity. That narrative has held for two generations. The only even slight modification has been from a sliver of academics who posit Gamil Gharbi as “the first incel“. I’m not sure “incels” — young men who are “involuntarily celibate” — existed as a mass phenomenon back in 1989: they are a consequence of the societal feminisation Ms Andrews writes about. The “incel” segment was by far the most interesting part of the Tucker/Fuentes convo, and the least remarked upon, but the notion that they’re itching to kill women bolsters the original 1989 framing, so the media are minded to entertain it.
Yet we all know, surely, that the young ladies in that Montreal classroom would have benefited from a little bit of available “masculinity” that day. Alas, the men to hand were in a certain sense far more profoundly disarmed than the wildest dreams of “gun control” advocates. From my book After America:
To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal’s École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.
Which is the more disturbing glimpse of Canadian manhood? The guy who shoots the women? Or his fellow men who abandon them to be shot? For me, the latter has always been the darkest element of the story. From my column in Maclean’s, January 9th 2006:
Every December 6th, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the Montreal massacre — the fourteen women murdered by Marc Lépine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you wouldn’t know that from the press coverage. Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obediently did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
So the annual denunciation of manhood in general is the precise inversion of the reality of the event. That was unusual in 1989, but has become routine since: the UK Government’s “Prevent” programme, set up in the wake of the July 7th Tube bombings to “prevent” further “Islamist” attacks, now focuses its energies on the threat from a “far right” boorish enough to insist on noticing all these Islamic provocations; January 6th is an insurrection for which trespassing gran’mas have to be hunted down and banged up in solitary, but Thoroughly Modern Milley telling the ChiComs he’ll ignore his commander-in-chief or James Comey taking to Twitter to urge his chums to “eighty-six” the President is true patriotism of the highest order; in German cities saving democracy is so critical that it is necessary to ban the leading political party.
So the inversion of reality is pretty much standard operating procedure these days. There is, however, a sense in which that terrible one-off atrocity from the late Eighties has become a portent of tomorrow — of a western world thoroughly unmanned. Your average feminist lobby group doesn’t see it that way, naturally. “The feminism I think of is the one that embodies inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world through the humanity that women do bring,” says Stephanie Davis, executive director of Atlanta’s Women’s Foundation. “If there were women in power in representative numbers — fifty-two per cent — I think that the World Trade Center would still be standing.”
