An article on “feminization of political life and its connection to free speech issues.”
Some quotes:
We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top.
we are justified in having different rules and norms for men and women in practically all areas of life, including political debate. How exactly this should be done is something worth thinking about. Finally, I argue that much of the opposition to wokeness is distorted and ineffective because it avoids the gendered nature of the problem, which also makes fighting it difficult.
One can think of antifa, which punches people it disagrees with, as a more masculine form of cancel culture, and it’s generally less effective than the more feminine HR class in shaping our politics.
I think we have a few options for how we treat public discourse. The first two are
Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.
Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates.
Instead of either of these options, I think we’ve stumbled upon a hybrid system, where
- We accept gender double standards, and tolerate more aggression towards men than we do towards women. We also tolerate more hyper-emotionalism from women than men.
Option (2) is what I think most people mean by the feminization of intellectual life, but Option (3) is actually worse, because it also introduces double standards we see everywhere in our culture.
As long as men and women are treated differently by society, they cannot engage in public debate with each other in a fair and consistent way. And because of human nature, society will always treat men and women differently, as it should. So what should we do?
Given that (3) is so horrible and basically gives a veto to hysterical women over all public policy, we have to choose (1) or (2).
conservatives wish they were facing a more masculine form of authoritarianism. Men know what to do when other men try to oppress them. They resist and fight back. But who wants to participate in a struggle where women’s tears are what you need to overcome? Men can feel invigorated after a fistfight with another man, even when they lose! Nobody feels that way after arguing with his wife.
Many would like to believe that all the ugliness they see can be traced to a grand plan thought up by some evil pudgy Asian man in Beijing, rather than being the result of nobody wanting to stand up to women crying.
The strength of any anti-wokeness movement depends in large part on the strengths of its antibodies to a certain kind of female emotionalism. Jonathan Rauch and most classical liberal types avoid the difficult questions. Religion works better because, like liberalism, it disproportionately appeals to women and provides an alternative model for how the sexes should relate to one another. Relying on religious dogma also frees one from having to intellectually justify arguments that most anti-wokes are uncomfortable explicitly making.