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If Helen Andrews is right, this Opinions page is a reign of terror.
Andrews, a conservative political commentator, made gender-pessimism go viral this month with her essay, “The Great Feminization,” in Compact Magazine.
In the piece, Andrews advances the existing theory of the “Great Feminization,” which she deems the “most significant event of our century — and a potential threat to civilization.” As greater numbers of women have entered historically male-dominated fields such as law and academia, Andrews claims, female group dynamics of toxic empathy and cohesion have created wokeness and cancel culture.
“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment,” Andrews wrote. “It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.”
Andrews’s tweet announcing the essay has 6.5 million views and counting. It’s already triggered a slew of responding essays, with commenters disputing Andrews’s Hobbesian gender-absolutism (Erika Bachiochi), her claim about the feminization of law (Ivana Greco), and her Nietzschean undertones (Rachel Lu). What is even more obvious — and most erroneous of all — about Andrews’s argument is her profound and merciless pessimism about women, moral education, and complementarity between the sexes.
Andrews consistently equates femininity with irrationality and emotion and masculinity with rationality and justice. Though Milton might smile upon such a view, any serious student of history or keen observer of everyday life knows men and women share the same human nature. The particular gifts of femininity — what Pope St. John Paul II termed the “feminine genius” — Andrews dismisses, treating women instead as deficient men, holding up the worst female behavior against the best male behavior.
Perhaps in backlash to the liberal dismissal of sex-based gender roles, Andrews tempts her readers to overemphasize the differences between men and women to the point of rendering them absolutes. She never mentions the role moral education and religion play in helping both sexes overcome their worse proclivities and develop virtue. Instead, the subjects of Andrews’s work are static, defined once and for all by their sex.
The “Great Feminization” is a masterclass in zero-sum thinking, which if true, creates a bleak landscape for everyone. Andrews mimics the flaws of the very movement she rebels against, as Greco observes in her response, “Beware the New Battle of the Sexes.”
“The liberal struggle for gender equality has often pitted women and men against each other in a zero-sum game: For women to advance, men must step aside,” Greco wrote in The Dispatch. “While Democrats struggle to extricate themselves from their own battle of the sexes, strategic conservatives should not launch a new one in their own backyard.”
Men and women were created for one another, and for this reason we thrive the most together, in a society that honors our shared nature and complementary differences.
Though few of our generation might read Andrews’s theory, we can expect to see — if we haven’t already — the trickledown of her thought. Her argument tempts us by proposing an all-encompassing answer to legitimate problems like cancel culture. Yet the only “theory of everything” that holds is the law of love, something “The Great Feminization” leaves totally aside.
It is our job, then, as young people currently in academia and poised to enter the workforce, to prove Andrews wrong — to grow in virtue, give one another grace, and demonstrate a hope beyond her imagining.
Caroline Kurt is a senior studying English.
