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.
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