I’ve been asked to comment on Helen Andrews’ essay “The Great Feminization”. The essay is cute and nicely written but it’s a failure because the author does exactly what she decries.
Here’s an example. We recently talked here on the blog about how land acknowledgements in Canada morphed into homeowners being told that their homes don’t belong to them. Andrews would explain the land acknowledgements as a result of a feminized culture that privileges compassion and emotionality over rational, cold calculation. And yes, speech codes, land acknowledgements, pronouns and the rest of the woke culture can, indeed, seem like a manifestation of a soft, feminine concern for feelings. But that’s all pretense. The actual purpose of all this is not emotional. It’s purely economic. The goal is to destroy the middle class with its homeownership and its reliance on good, stable jobs.
Remember COVID lockdowns? They were posotioned as stemming from emotional concerns. “Don’t you care about grandma?” was their most popular justification. But the reality was that the lockdowns allowed for a large-scale transfer of the market share previously held by small businesses to big business. Walmart and Amazon gained a huge share of the market. Public funds were channelled into COVID mitigation, creating massive inflation and further impoverishing the middle class.
The same goes for the justice system that releases violent criminals. The argument is that poor criminals, they are suffering from “mental illness”, they grew up in poverty, poor little victims. But the reality is that there is no real compassion behind this. The goal is, as always, to use these criminals to hammer the middle class over the head, both literally and metaphorically. Displacement, fear, and uncertainty create excellent opportunities to strip the middle class of its savings and property.
The reason why I don’t like Andrews’ essay is that it drowns these economic considerations in an ocean of saccharine emotionality. “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” always attracts interest. Gender wars are fun. Men accuse women, women accuse men, women accuse each other of being incorrect women, men do the same to each other. Behind all this enjoyable upheaval hides the cold, indifferent fact that we are all getting poorer. Our lives are getting less comfortable. We are pushed out of our neighborhoods. We have to pay privately for things that are supposed to be covered by taxes. This isn’t happening because anybody is too compassionate or soft. It’s happening because it’s profitable for a small oligarchy.
Andrews’ essay is a huge missed opportunity to speak of all this. Of course, if she did talk about it, she would get a lot fewer clicks. Like any good neoliberal, she milks the emotionality of men and women for cold, hard profit.
Clarissa's Blog 
Healing power of and on this one.
However, that may be a bridge too far for most people.
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Thank you for this. This essay got a lot of positive attention on some other blogs I read, but it didn’t sit well with me although I couldn’t quite formulate why. You explained it very well.
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When I look at my university, it’s not the ladies in HR who are causing the dysfunction. Most of the HR women left and we aren’t allowed to hire replacements. They were never the problem. We are being stripped of cash and that cash is sent into shady construction projects. That’s the grift. That’s the real problem. That anybody is too soft and compassionate is really not our problem.
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No, you are still stuck in your personal outlook. The real questions are why the hell is there an HR department and secondly, why is it always run by women? And no, they are hardly “too soft and compassionate” — they largely function as a female in-group control mechanism encouraging hiring and promotion preferences.. That unscrupulous animals would then develop to actively feed upon those weakening institutions should not surprise anyone, but remember, they are merely a byproduct not the origin.
If you actually doubt that feminization exists or that it poses a dangerous problem, let us leave academia, and discuss fundamental justice. How many of the the current women in the Supreme Court actually deserve to be there? How many would you personally trust to provide an honest, fair, i.e., unbiased judgement on a serious matter directly affecting your husband, and subsequently your family? Think upon it ;-D
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Our HR processes contracts. They have zero power. It’s a bureaucratic thing. We can discuss the need to reduce bureaucracy but I can promise that anybody who believes HR has any power in academia is completely confused.
All of our HR personnel are women because it’s a miserable, low-paid job that men don’t want. It’s the same as secretaries, who are also all women for the same reason. The pay is bizarrely low.
There’s no conspiracy here.
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LOL, Kid, we are going to have to agree to disagree on HR behavior, we have clearly seen different experiences. And I was most certainly not suggesting that it is a conspiracy, the female biase are hardly a secret. This is the kind of horseshit² that I was referring to.
https://people.utoronto.ca/
https://www.jfmeltonlaw.com/articles/understanding-the-80-rule/#:~:text=What%20is%20the%2080%25%20Rule,of%20that%20of%20white%20men.
And I noticed that you ignored the mention of your Supreme Court, relax ours are worse, much, much worse. The recent land decision in BC was given by a Native judge that lacked sufficient brains to recuse the case ;-D
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No Kid, gender wars are definitely not fun, particularly when the attackers does not spare even the children; has little familiarity with, nor care about, historic truth; and resolutely displays absolutely no sense of personal responsibility. Are there nasty surrounding human wolves eager to take advantage of the deliberate, if unthinking, collapse of Western society, you bet. But the original sin belongs solely on the ever envious selfish greed of feminism.
But I will leave you with my joking observation that men are clearly designed to love women for their appearance, their sound, their feel, their smell, and their taste, otherwise we would have likely put a bounty on their heads long, long ago. And however, far more importantly, with Mary Leakey’s kind belief that we have been walking close together for at least three and half million years ;-D
https://www.britannica.com/place/Laetoli
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