Transcription
Hello and welcome back to Unheard. When a writer or a thinker writes an essay or makes an argument that upsets people, attracts attention and detonates a bomb under the discourse, we tend to pay attention. Why is it generating so much interest? What about this series of arguments is making it so compelling to people?
Well, exactly that just happened in the past week when Helen Andrews, one of the most prominent conservative writers and thinkers, wrote an essay called the Great Feminization, which argued roughly that the woke era, wokeism, is not just an accident of politics and timing. It is all to do with gender and the increasing prevalence of women in the workplace and in influential institutions. Of course, we thought we had to try and get her here on the show to talk it through with us. So, Helen, welcome to Unheard.
>> Thanks for having me, Freddy.
>> So, let's just lay it out for our audience. Wokery is to do with too many women. Is that is that the argument?
>> Too many is a strong way of putting it, but uh if I can phrase it in a less uh inflammatory way right off the bat, uh I believe that future historians will be debating for decades if not centuries why the summer of woke occurred when it did. What happened to produce the mass hysteria that was the summer of 2020 and tapering off uh for a few years after that? uh in the same way that today we debate what caused the Salem witch trials. Well, I enjoyed floating various theories to explain wokeness in my own mind to make sense of it to myself. But as soon as someone proposed in an essay the following theory, everything clicked into place for me. Wokeness is feminization. It is feminine patterns of behavior and group dynamics applied to institutions that had previously operated by more masculine rules of group dynamics. And to check this hypothesis against the facts, all you have to do is look at the demographics of various professions and institutions. Many of them tipped over from being majority male to majority female in the decade or even the five years leading up to wokeness.
>> Uh law schools, for example, tipped from being majority male to majority female in 2016. Uh the New York Times tipped over to being majority female in its staff in 2018. medical schools, the white collar workforce overall, just so many of the basic bedrock institutions uh of society demographically feminized right around the same time that they developed the I would say pathologies of wokeness. And so the fact that the what wokeness entails so resembles feminine group dynamics that can't be a coincidence. So that's my theory that the one caused the other.
>> Okay. So let's just try and explain. I mean, I can't count the number of definitions of woke that we've had on this show over the past 5 years, but I guess you're meaning not so much the sort of radical political ideas as the the atmosphere of cancel culture, those kind of things, or which parts of woke do you think are particularly feminine?
>> The one that I encountered first in my own career, uh, because I argue for a living is the idea that disagreement is a personal affront. that if you disagree with me, I I c I take offense at that. Now, for me, I my belief has always been that if I disagree with you, that's a sign of respect. If I'm arguing with you, that's how I show respect. Um that conflict is not necessarily something that should be minimized. Sometimes conflict is a good thing. Certainly in terms of debate, rational debate, conflict is the essence of that. What we saw during the woke era was this new idea that if you're disagreeing with someone's position, you are questioning their humanity uh or invalidating their lived experience. Wokeness was a way of shutting down conflict rather than living with conflict. And that's a pattern that psychologists have observed in differences between men and women. Uh, and it and to clarify something that's caused a lot of people a lot of confusion and trouble in evaluating this argument for themselves, it's not so much differences in individual men and women in terms of their tastes, but group dynamics, how male predominant groups behave versus groups that are majority female. Uh, it would not be fair to or it would be reductive to say that men like argument and women are more conflict averse. That may be true in general terms, but there are plenty of exceptions. There are plenty of women who like conflict and plenty of men who can't stand it. But when you're talking about groups that are majority male versus groups that are majority female, it is a lot more consistent and fair and true to the facts to say that look, groups that are majority female tend to operate by these HR type rules of you can't ruffle anybody's feathers and you have to lather any criticism in layers and layers of compliments and you have to avoid conflict and be more consensus based and at the level of the group that that does tend to apply
>> because it's a a little bit more than just that sort of cliche, isn't it? That, oh, maybe men are more rational and women more emotional, which I think many men have probably used in an insulting way to women. And many of our female listeners may be bristling at that. It's a little bit more sophisticated as I understand it, which is that there's something quite sort of ancient about uh the way group dynamics worked going back even to our distant ancestors that the way to resolve issues and conflicts, there's a different approach between men and women. talk us through that.
>> That's true. One book that I happened upon as I was pursuing this line of inquiry for myself was a book called Warriors and Warriors by a psychologist named Joyce Benninsson. And I tend dispositionally to be skeptical of evolutionary psychology arguments. I I you know I personally do bristle at the idea that what I do and how I behave has anything to do with cavemen or you know our ancestors on the savannah. But in this case, I think her argument resonated with me because it reflected things I've seen and experienced myself. Uh she said that men developed rules of interpersonal behavior adapted to war and conflict with other tribes whereas women developed rules of behavior consistent with conflict within the tribe and with particularly their female rivals. The example of that difference that I think clicks most easily for people or at least that I find that most ordinary people today recognize most easily is that men are much more likely than women to have a concept of the honorable opponent. To be able to fight someone bitterly, even to the death in war, and yet at the end of it be able to shake their hand and say, "I respect you." and say, "Good game, fellow." and return to some kind of basic status quo of uh yes, we were fighting to the death a moment ago, but I nevertheless respect you and honor you and I'm willing to operate within rules of conflict and the conflict's over and now that it's done, we can be friends again. Women uh tend to be slower to reconcile. I was surprised but pleased to discover that this is true even in primate species that when they observe the behavior of chimpanzees that females who get into conflict are slower to reconcile with their female rivals than males. Uh I don't know, there must be something to it if even chimps are doing it. But women tend to not have that attitude of good game, let's shake hands and and put a you know bury this conflict, bury the hatchet. Women tend to simmer and continue conflicts indefinitely. Um, and Joyce Benninsson offered her evolutionary psychology reasons for why that might be the case uh, in the difference between how men and women handle conflict. But whether or not her explanation for why it's true is valid or not, I think that most people would accept that it is true.
>> Right? Because I think a lot of people when they think about woke ideas and the atmosphere around them would say that there's nothing very soft or consensual about woke ideology. It's really if you're on the wrong side of it, you are never forgiven. You know, it's it's a very harsh way of thinking, you might say. How does that square?
>> That's true. I I think people very easily fall into the trap of thinking in simplistic terms that men like conflict and women are conflict averse. Well, that that is true in in some senses, but it would be a mistake to infer from that that women don't fight or that women don't engage in conflict. They do very much so. sometimes more than men. It's a difference in the way that conflict plays out. I referred a moment ago to the concept of the honorable opponent and standing up and fighting someone to the best of your ability and then accepting the outcome of that conflict however it might go. That is the thing that wokeness is missing. uh instead of you know I if you're a wokester and you've identified somebody in your university department or in your business who has stepped outside the lines or violated the taboss of wokeness what you do is you you don't do what masculine rules of contact would indicate which would be to fight that person or dispute that person say I disagree with you and here's why let's have an argument instead you ostracize that person say I can't even I can't even believe you just said that wow Wow. And shut down conversation and exclude that person from even the realm of things you're willing to debate.
>> Uh that to me was the biggest pathology of wokeness. Uh it made it impossible to discuss any topic on which wokeness developed taboos which turned out to be quite a lot of things that are very important for a democratic society to be able to debate. So yes, of course, wokeness is very much engages in conflict. It just does it in what is to me a toxic and unhealthy way.
>> I'm glad you're saying this, not me, but you're suggesting that actually the exclusionary tactic is more feminine than masculine as a way to get past disagreement. One specific real world example you talk about in this essay was the Larry Summers oustings. This is in the pre-woke almost era. This is looking back to 2005 when when the woke word woke hadn't even been invented. Tell us about what happened to him and why you think it's relevant here.
>> Larry Summers was the president of Harvard University which made him one of the 10 most powerful people in America. He was extremely well-connected. He was an extremely illustrious and wellrespected economist, very academically capable as a scholar on his own terms. He was also very politically connected. He had served in the Clinton administration in the '90s. Really just a towering pillar of the establishment. He was invited in that capacity to speak to a conference on women's representation in science. And he he said at the beginning of his remarks, you know, when the organizer invited me to come here, I said, I've got two versions of this speech. I can give you the nice one where I tell you all the great things that Harvard is doing to improve female representation in science departments or I can give you a genuine sincere off-the-cuff rumination on why I think women remain under reppresented in science. I can give you the re the real talk. I can, you know, the fuzzy bureaucratic one or the real one. And he said he wanted the real one. So here it is. and he uh pro proceeded to give what was actually fairly mainstream assessment of male and female differences when it comes to the hard sciences. He said that men are more likely to be represented out at the tail end of the ability bell curve. So you have more men than women who are way in the top 000.1% of of scientific ability. And that also women tend to be less interested in these systematizing scientific topics than men. So even women who are extremely intellectually capable tend as a matter of taste to be more interested in more humanities and personal focused fields. There were some women in the audience when Larry Summers gave this talk and made those points.
>> I mean, it's worth I'm sorry to interrupt Helen. Just
>> it almost feels nostalgic, doesn't it? To think of a world where you could wade into the question of the heritability of IQ or skills or talents in different fields and not realize that this is an unexploded bomb. I mean, anyone in the years since would be tiptoeing around and would just steer clear of it. But there was Larry Summers in the in the golden days of 2005 just thinking he he'd rip it.
>> Well, one of the most important aspects of this story is that he thought he was off the record. he was off the record and the rules of off the record say that you can't take quotes from somebody's off the record speech and hand them to a journalist. But one of the classic differences between men and women is that men are more likely to be invested in rules whereas women are more likely to uh focus on the outcome that they want that they think is going to be best and kind of fudge the rules to get their way to to the outcome that they want. And that's I whether or not you accept that's true of men and women in general. Certainly in this case the women ignored the off the record rule took Larry Summers's quotes to a feminist journalist and stirred this up into a massive national scandal. And the thing that was so dismaying for those of us who remember watching it unfold at the time is that these women who were trying to get Larry Summers fired and they as they eventually did not offer any arguments. They did not try and say that what Larry Summer said was wrong on the facts. What they said in the quotes that they gave to the New York Times was, "I was so offended I couldn't even breathe. I had to leave or I would have passed out." And I'm sitting there thinking, you're not really beating the allegations that you're emotional rather than rational. 80s, feminist um hysteria managed to unseat one of the most powerful people in the United States from one of the most valuable positions simply on the basis of being offended without even trying to argue that what he had said was wrong.
>> So by that account, the ousting of Larry Summers was a sort of early example of this. Not only was it about the differences between men and women, it epitomized the differences between men and women. I just got to push back a little bit. I feel on behalf of those of our listeners who might be uh not enjoying this. First of all, are you sure that they were all women involved in the ousting of Larry Summers? I feel like if you would did a a full forensic study, there's there's bound to be some blo involved in that story.
>> Yes. And and in fact, there is a journalist, I believe, named Richard Bradley who wrote a book about Larry Summers's tenure as president of Harvard. And it is important to state for the record that over one year elapsed between the speech he gave that got him in so much trouble and his eventual resignation. It is also important to stipulate that there were many many other controversies that Larry Summers got himself into in the course of his Harvard presidency. He antagonized powerful members of the faculty. He antagonized the black studies department and kind of put his foot in it politically there as well and made various budget changes that people didn't like. Larry Summers, if you don't know him, is a
>> he's he's famously a guy who's pretty brash and blunt and not not in it. He's not here to make friends. Larry Summers is. Um so certainly there were many controversies that led to his eventual resignation. Uh he was not fired. He resigned. But I think a fair assessment would say that um the remarks about women in science were the were the straw that broke the camel's back. If you had to name one thing that caused his resignation, that would be the one thing people would pick.
>> I said that some people were upset by your essay. One such person was Kathy Young over at the Bullock. We haven't asked her on the show, so let me read out some of her remarks and you can respond to them. She says, "Andrews has waded into this morass with an ultra simplistic message for those on the right. Everything they hate in modern American culture can be blamed on women, or at least on women's social and political empowerment and their large-scale entry into public life. That message seems to be quite popular. Andrew's talk was reportedly the big hit of Napcon. You made did a speech kind of version of this at the National Conservatism Conference and the video got 170,000 views. So, she's saying you're just you're just bashing on you're beating up on women. You're blaming women for everything that's wrong with the world and it's it's a cheap shot and it's not fair. and she doesn't recognize it and she's uh she's pissed. What do you say to Kathy?
>> Kathy Young has become one of my most dedicated haters. Anytime I write anything, controversial or otherwise, she tends to pop up from the lob peanuts from the cheap seats. So, hi Kathy. Thank you for being my most dedicated reader. Uh in terms of the substance of her argument, I think the most important response I would give is this. Other people who are skeptical of feminism going back all the way to Phyis Schlafley took gender differences as their starting point and then asked given that these are the differences between men and women, what are likely to be the changes in our institutions? Uh how is this likely to play out if institutions tip to being majority female? The important thing about the article I wrote and the position I am taking is that I did not take gender differences as my starting point. I began with the observation that our institutions changed radically in 2020. Wokeness really did mark a significant departure in how our institutions function. So given this huge unprecedented otherwise inexplicable massive social change called wokeness, what could possibly be the explanation for that? So I didn't start with gender differences and saying men and women are different, therefore I think more ladies is going to be a disaster. I started with observing a disaster and asking what could possibly explain it. And I think that the most simple explanation is feminization.
>> Yeah. And you come up with some quite convincing dates here. Law schools became majority female in 2016. The New York Times, as you mentioned, became majority female in 2018. Medical schools became majority female in 2019. And overall, the college educated workforce became majority female in 2019. A lot of people, I think, women or men would hear those statistics and feel like that was something to celebrate. They might say, okay, maybe the way that these institutions work has changed. Maybe there are some negative aspects to that. But overall it's a positive because it means greater participation. It means they will reflect the communities they're serving better etc. You know what the arguments are. Do you also see some positives in uh the additional presence of women in the workplace?
>> It depends on the field. Uh I think there are some fields that are very much enhanced by female representation. I am basing my judgments of whether increasing feminization is a good thing or a bad thing based not on speculation about how I think women tend to be but on observation about how increasing feminization has affected these institutions so far. In the case of the field of law, that is one area where I see the areas of law that are most female dominated, including law revolving around sexual assault and the meto movement. And in the case of campus courts to adjudicate cases of sexual assault, the so-called title n courts that arose under President Obama, that is kind of a a sort of perfect experiment. That's a legal system designed by women according to feminist principles. Uh and I I observe how those courts played out in practice and I think well gosh these Title 9 courts for sexual assault on college campuses were railroading a lot of innocent guys who got caught up in ambiguous situations. So there were many injustices committed by these courts. They don't seem to have the safeguards that I think are really important. These were courts designed to believe women and protect women and yet they tended to do more harm than good. And then during the MeToo movement, what we saw uh certainly in America was many of those same legal principles and habits from the campus courts that existed on universities being applied to actual legal cases of sexual assault prosecutions in the real grown-up courts. things like the Harvey Weinstein trial and all the rest of it. And there was a tendency in those meto cases uh certainly in how they were covered in the press and even a little bit how they were dealt with in courts of law that seemed to me to be inching closer and closer to the problems and the pathologies that were observable in the Title N courts for sexual assault on college campuses. So that's a case where I I am just observing as a fact about the world that I can see with my own eyes that increasingly feminized legal areas or or types of of courts tend to function in ways that I don't like that I think are bad. To be clear, there are some people who thought the Title N courts on college campuses were great, who thought they were uh pillars of feminism. They were really sad when President Trump got rid of them. But I think they were bad. I think they were kangaroo courts. And I think if our actual legal system comes to resemble them, that will be really bad for America and for anybody who has to live under the rule of law. So that's that's my position.
>> So specifically in the example of me too, any particular case, what you would say is the more feminine response would be solidarity with the apparent victim and perhaps more of an emotional uh need to protect that potential victim. Meanwhile, the masculine response would be more sort of comfortable with a controversial outcome and more interested in evidence. I mean, it sounds very nice to men and not very nice to women. This, you know, you you yourself, Helen, are a wonderful example of uh not exactly not this. If you are a woman and you're listening to this and you and you're thinking to yourself, why is this uh clearly very articulate and intelligent lady kind of caricaturing women as these sort of emotional creatures? What what would you say to those listeners?
>> Let's leave the realm of law and go to the realm of politics. And I'm sure you'd know that we could not get to the end of this conversation without mentioning Margaret Thatcher at least once.
>> It is her birthday this past week, so appropriate.
>> I think one result of the increasing feminization of politics is a decline in legislative or parliamentary reparte, parliamentary heckling. It used to be quite common in your in your legislature. uh in Great Britain for people in the House of Commons to heckle each other and shout at each other and have uh rude oneliners and really the parliamentary debate was an art and I think it would be I think most people would agree that that art has declined. Some of that I believe is a tendency to adopt feminine modes of rhetoric which are less uh friendly to the sort of conflict oriented reparte that characterized uh parliamentary debate in the early part of the 20th century. Now Margaret Thatcher among her many strengths was parliamentary reparte. She could take heckling with the best of them. she would not break down and cry or give an emotional response when somebody shouted something uh from across the other side. So, we can't say that women are bad at parliamentary debate or that they can't deal with or can't handle heckling because Margaret Thatcher was quite good at it. Nevertheless, if you have a parliament that is majority female, uh I mean the House of Commons is not majority female uh at this time, not yet. It probably will be someday. But if you have a parliament in which women are have, you know, one-third representation or greater, uh, your style of debate will become more feminized and that will be less friendly to the kind of debate that used to occur. So there's just a a huge difference between saying any individual woman like Margaret Thatcher might be talented in certain male or historically male fields of endeavor, that's fine. But if your entire legislature becomes predominantly female, that will have a change in how what kinds of rhetoric you adopt. Um, and that will be determined not by exceptional women who happen to flourish or be talented at the old male modes of debate, but that will be determined by the average woman in your legislature and the general tendency of the female sex and how it tends to argue. So it there's just a huge difference between individuals and groups and generalizations.
>> A lot of people here in the UK would celebrate that again. I think you know in fact you hear it very often that parliament needs to get over the old boys club. You know Oxford debating society atmosphere which alienates ordinary voters. That's normally the phrase you hear. And they're delighted that the discourse is a little bit more comprehensible and straightforward or fact-based or substantial or whatever. Do you take a different view then? You think we should be trying to get back to that more rambunctious style?
>> I absolutely do. Uh and and in that case, I think it's important for anyone to always separate your own preferences from what is objectively good or bad. It's certainly the case that I prefer the old rambunctious style of debate. Um, but I like to think that I'm able to separate these things and step back and say, well, okay, that's what I would prefer, but what is good for democracy? What is good for the country? And having thought about it and attempted to be objective, I think it's true that the old Ramoka style of debate was better able to handle conflict. Uh, another example is university departments. There are lots of people who look at English departments now or history departments now and they say it's great that history departments are focusing more on traditionally female lines of inquiry. We do more social history now and feminist history now talking talking about ordinary people and we don't do so much military history or kings and queens anymore. That's the old stuff. We are we're and and I think that the rise of women in history departments has been a big factor in that change. But I look at the kind of social history that these departments produce and I think well this is not actually very good. And I think that if you have history departments that don't have any respect for military history or traditionally male fields of history, that's that's bad. And then and and and that I will I will stand on this on this position uh resolutely. I think that is not just a matter of my own personal preference of the kinds of history that I like to read, but I think that's you know objectively true of history departments in general. we have lost something. If history departments become feminized, when parliamentary debate becomes feminized, when all of these things become feminized, things just the institutions just don't work as well.
>> The big question, I think, Helen Andrews, and the one I want to conclude with is what do we do about it? So, let's just say we're with you on the proposition that you observe this shift. If you want to get back to a more rational or different way of being, I guess there are two options. One is that you reverse the great feminization and you start excluding or aiming to uh weight down the number of women in key positions in key institutions. I can't see that being a very popular option, but that must be one. Or I suppose you have to insist that the women that do take part in those institutions can play by the old rules and stick to, you know, what you would call more masculine ways of being. Are they the two options as you see it? And if so, which do you prefer?
>> No, I have a third option which I will propose in a moment, but just to address the option number two there that is one that is very attractive to a lot of people. You say, okay, feminization is bad, but you know, we we'll just tell all the ladies that they have to keep playing by the old rules. That is not a viable solution because if you have a legal profession that is 60% male, then you can insist that the 40% play by your old rules. But once women are 60% of the legal profession, you can try and say we need to stick to the old rules. But if they're the demographic majority, they're just going to say, "No, we're going to change the rules to what we prefer." And there's really no way to set up any barriers to prevent them from doing that.
>> Okay. So option two is out.
>> So option three is all I am proposing and the reason why I think it should be so easy for everyone to get on board with this is fairness. uh right now there is a massive thumb on the scale in favor of women in almost every institution and this is uh uh one of the most you know one of the few things I say in the piece that is genuinely controversial and subject to sincere debate. I believe that the great feminization is artificial. It is the result of social engineering. It is not just the result of women organically out competing men in the fields of the academy or business. It is because of incentives to hire more women and pro promote more women that are the result of laws that have been passed in the United States. So I think that if we simply get rid of all of the hiring targets that currently exist at large corporations saying that you have to have a certain proportion of your employees be female. If we get rid of the legal protections that exist around feminization in terms of HR that say you can't have a masculine atmosphere at your workplace because having a sort of it having a bro club atmosphere in your workplace is currently illegal. A woman who's in that workplace can sue her employer saying, "I feel like success at my office is determined by how well you go along with being one of the boys. Therefore, I'm being discriminated against. And a woman who brought that lawsuit would stand a good chance of success. That is a problem. And that leads employers to feminize their workplace uh to a greater degree than they would otherwise if left to their own devices. I'm saying leave employees to their own devices. In my perfect world, you will have some workplaces that are more masculine, some that are more feminized, and it's really it's a big the world's big enough for everybody. uh everyone can find a workplace to suit their own preferences but right now there are many thumbs on the scale both legal and social to try and improve uh increase female representation. I think if we get rid of those thumbs on the scale and return to gender uh neutrality, gender fairness, pure meritocracy in in this respect, then I think the great feminization problem will take care of itself. So that's that's that's why I don't think of myself as controversial. All I am proposing is a return to fairness.
>> Well, the idea of fairness, I think, is not controversial, but the result that you think it will have, which would be by your own predictions, a rolling back or a reversal of the increased presence of women in the judiciary, in politics, in the legal profession, in the scientific community, in the academy, even would basically result in a much diminished voice for women in the institutions that wield the most power. Are you comfortable with that outcome?
>> Well, first of all, that's what I predict. There are many people who predict otherwise. Many people who say you can get rid of all the affirmative action action programs that women enjoy at the moment and the great feminization will roll on unencumbered. It will continue because it women are just out competing the men. I think there are many feminists who have that position. My position is let's let's see what happens. I I predict things will go otherwise. But assuming that I am right in my prediction about what would occur if we did return to total fairness. I am myself a woman. So I want women to be able to pursue careers and have voices. But on the other hand, I'm also a citizen of the United States and I want my democratic debate. I want the debates in Congress to be debates that I can be proud of to be to adhere to norms of rationality rather than emotionality. I'm someone who has kids and I will eventually send my children to universities. I want the universities they go to to not be hives of woke insanity. I may, God forbid, one day find myself in a courtroom. I would like for that courtroom to operate according to rules of rationality and law rather than rules of which side of the conflict is more sympathetic. So in so many ways I depend on the institutions of society functioning uh as they are designed to and if feminization is an obstacle to that then I think uh I have an interest in seeing that feminization rolled back whatever you know whether I'm a woman or not I'm also a citizen and so many other things in addition
>> Helen Andrews thank you so much I'm sure we'll get quite a few comments under this one but it was an absolute pleasure to hear from you.
>> Thanks very much, Freddy.
>> That was Helen Andrews. Thanks to her for her time, the conservative writer, commentator who was just talking about her amazingly impactful essay, The Great Feminization. I'm sure there will be people listening who disagree and perhaps some who agree will let us know in the comments. As ever, this was unheard.