Joakim Andersen analyzes how society is increasingly oversaturated with feminized values and feminine managers, replacing merit, the rule of law, and fraternity with a shift which Helen Andrews calls the Great Feminization.
A fruitful perspective for understanding the contemporary Western world is the great feminization, whether the term is understood demographically, ideologically or metaphysically. It sits at the intersection of several popular terms, from the “longhouse” to “girl‑boss” (“yass queen”) and also contributes to an understanding of the political polarization between men and women.
The perspective is fundamentally not especially new; Swedish author Lars Holger Holm described Sweden as the “witch‑state” a decade ago, and Julius Evola depicted the gynecocracy a little under a century before that. But what only a few years ago was confined to radical milieux, hermetically separated from the rest of the public sphere, is now reaching growing parts of the bourgeois sphere. For many of us who have been around a while, it is an unusual experience. One example, in any case, is how Helen Andrews’ article “The Great Feminization” has been received by broader Republican circles. Andrews has previously written Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster and is one of the more insightful conservative American voices.
Andrews’ reasoning is based on two factors. One is evolutionary: given history, there are differences in how men and women function. Andrews notes, for instance, that female logic proceeds from “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” The other is institutional: women today are taking over central spheres such as media and law. The result is a feminization of those spheres and of society at large. She writes, among other things, that the woke phenomenon is intimately connected to the great feminization: “Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post‑Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently” and “cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”
Andrews’ description of how institutions like the media have been taken over by women is interesting partly because it confirms that much of the talk about the patriarchy is ideology, rhetoric intended to hide a partly opposite reality. She observes, for example, that “in 1974, only 10 percent of The New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent” — similar tendencies are described in law and academia. This leads to those spheres being feminized, i.e., they function differently than before.
Andrews is particularly worried about how the judiciary will operate once it has been feminized, comparing low sentences and reluctance to deport when judges and others feel stronger empathy for low‑functioning offenders than for their victims. Andrews writes of this: “the field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.”
It is also interesting that she regards this as a consequence of social engineering rather than competition or meritocracy: “Feminization is not an organic result of women out‑competing men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation… that does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome?” It could then be turned around by targeted efforts against anti‑discrimination legislation, which would enable the emergence of male spheres.
Altogether, Andrews’ article is rewarding. It can also be read as a dialogue with other thinkers who have addressed other aspects of the same processes. Andrews, for example, is aware that she is not a typical woman; she reminds us here of earlier concepts used to distinguish different types of women (and men). Guillaume Faye, for instance, referred back to Abellio and spoke of the original woman, the masculine woman, and the ultimate woman (who unites traits from the first two). Blüher spoke of Calypso versus Penelope; compare Fanny zu Reventlow’s Viragines oder Hetären, and likewise Ludovici’s use of the term virago to describe a more “masculine” female type. It is not unlikely that Andrews and the smaller groups of women who first made careers in historically male spheres have or had just such virago traits. Regardless, the analysis becomes blunt if we do not have a conceptual apparatus to distinguish between different types of women…
… and between different types of men, one is tempted to add. A dimension Andrews does not directly address, but which is implicit in Boomers, is the degeneration of men that the great feminization presupposes. In a world of “man‑aunts” it is not entirely surprising that male spheres are questioned. Ludovici spoke in this context of “tepid, low‑powered males” and “sub‑normal males.” Blüher wrote that “it is, by the way, not surprising that in our time, when the royal and the men’s will to rule has been pushed aside by the bourgeois type, the women strive for equal rights.”
Liberalism and the bourgeoisie shaped cohorts of man‑aunts and it was then nothing strange that many women wanted to help them take on the social responsibility they obviously weren’t handling. Here we sense a double process, where men are feminized while women are masculinized. This process is depicted productively by Eva Illouz in works such as Cold Intimacies. The arrival of psychoanalysis in the workplace means that it is feminized, but, at the same time, the home and relationships have been quantified and instrumentalized (that is a “masculine” logic). She can be read as saying that the managerial revolution has created a society that combines the worst of the archetypal masculine and feminine.
Akin to Illouz’s perspective is the civilizational critic Ivan Illich. In Gender, he described how historical societies were “genderified,” that is, had masculine and feminine spheres. Women had autonomy within their sphere, and vice versa. Illich argued that our society is an economic regime where men and women are only “sex.” They therefore compete in the same spheres, a competition which women were doomed to lose (“while under the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only second sex. They are forever handicapped in games where you play for genderless stakes and either win or lose. Here, both genders are stripped and, neutered, the man ends up on top”).
One possible reading of Illich is that what Andrews calls feminization is a re‑genderification, where law, media, etc. are genderified as feminine spheres. Her interest in social engineering would otherwise explain why men are driven out from these spheres. Behind this process, we can sense a class of “super‑patriarchs” (compare capital logic and the state as per Jouvenel). In any case, it is metapolitically interesting: the spheres that are feminized belong to a large extent to what Althusser described as ISA, the institutional state apparatus, with predictable consequences for such things as debate and freedom of expression. “The watchdogs of ideology” are more often women.
A deeper perspective is offered by Julius Evola with the concept of gynecocracy. He did not necessarily mean demographic feminization, but a feminization of attitudes, spirituality, politics, and culture. Evola wrote of this that “since things are a process of constant renewal, the varieties of this ’telluric’ culture manifest themselves again wherever a cycle ends, wherever the heroic tension and the constructive will vanish and decadent and debased forms of life and spirituality start to reappear.”
Evola had access to a more nuanced conceptual apparatus and described aspects of the whole as telluric, lunar, aphroditic and amazonian; the keen reader will recognize them from, e.g., politics and popular culture. It should be noted that Evola also describes the counterpart of feminization, the masculine and heroic, in a way that identifies how deeper feminine tendencies can hide behind seemingly masculine phases (compare the consumer society’s telluric sides). The connection between Evola, Ludovici, and Blüher regarding the degeneration of masculinity is clear.
The precondition for the great feminization is the latent contradiction between two of the Western world’s central characteristics. On the one hand, the men’s brotherhood as a fundamental institutional form, and on the other hand, the historical respect for the capable women of the Western world. The men’s brotherhood was secularized and marginalized, from the academy and military to church and the economy, what Blüher described as our society’s creative core was impoverished. Capital and state were able to take its place, and the arena was prepared for the process whereby super‑patriarchs/elites initiated the great feminization of institutions. With today’s well-known consequences.
The process is not entirely new, John Glubb described something similar in The Fate of Empires, but Andrews notes that the great feminization has unique features: “The Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses.” The challenge today is to find new forms where both the men’s brotherhood and respect for women can be united with less dramatic consequences.
Buy Joakim Andersen’s Rising from the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century
Feelings over facts 🤨
You reference feminization of attitudes, spirituality, politics, and culture. But, I think it is more than that.
I keep thinking of the old saying - "Strong men create safe times, which creates weak men, which cause wars, which cause strong men."
And also, the actual feminization of men, through hormones being dumped in the ground water, their mothers taking hormones, hormones from abortions being filtered into the water, the hormones given to cattle, the milk of which is fed to children (and who the hell knows what is actually IN baby formula).
And there is more in this line - Women who chose a partner while on hormonal birth control may discover they are less attracted to their partner after discontinuing it, particularly if their partner was chosen when the woman was on the pill. This is because hormonal contraceptives can suppress the natural hormonal cycle, influencing what types of men women find attractive. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4260593/
But, was this an UNintended consequence? We see more and more of the androgynous looking males every day it seems. Weak, easily led, little spirituality - their weakness leads to either men causing wars to prove their masculinity (we call them neocons), being led around by more forceful women or those weak men trying to lead and failing because of something they lack which other stronger men sense and will not follow. We see a great deal of this in today's politics.
We need strong men to lead - in spirituality, in ethics and character. These were the type of men who created the US, who forged a charter and fought a war for their freedom from the rule of other weaker men; men who built skyscrapers, who built railroads, who protect their families and women. Many of these men are walking away today. They are refusing today's women and refusing to procreate with them due to the laws of a legal system that is biased against men, they say. Looking at most divorce courts, I can't say I blame them. The state of FL even had to change state laws around this due to predatory, beautiful women who were marrying simply for the payoff they could get in divorce court from successful men. Repeatedly, to many men. This was the 'career and retirement plan' of these women.
These male adherents believe modern "Western" society has become "gynocentric" (focused on women) due to feminism and that men are at risk of discrimination in legal systems and relationships. And weak men celebrate this as they think this allows them to become higher on the ladder of success. We see a great deal of this reverse discrimination in the DEI movement, which basically states, "White, straight men need not apply".