There’s been a lot of buzz about this article. An excerpt:
This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.
Not everything. Many cultures have some form of shunning and some institutions have some type of ostracizing process, and both men and women participate. But I think there’s little doubt that women – and the fact that women now form the majority in so many fields in which that previously wasn’t the case – are key in the process. In particular, women tend to initiate canceling for petty reasons or idiosyncratic personal reasons. Yes, “mean girls” are a thing, and so are mean women.
Initially, when women were a minority in so many professions, women played by men’s rules. But, helped greatly by affirmative action and DEA, once they’ve become majorities or close to majorities the rules change more to women’s rules. I’m a women (I”m even a heterosexual woman, of all things) but I’ve noticed the problem with women’s workplaces for a long time and I’ve had my own difficulties in some of those environments; I’ve been targeted, and my sense is that it’s because of my unwillingness to play by those women’s rules.
I say I noticed the problem in workplaces. But actually, the first time I noticed the problem was in an all-female summer camp. When I was about ten years old and in a cabin with other girls for two entire months, they tried to pick on me. I had grown up in a harsher, more male environment than they, and so I fought back and they left me alone after that. But there was a more gentle soul among my cabinmates who became their natural target. Her persecution by them was an awful thing to watch, and I spent as much time as I possibly could elsewhere. I even tried to coach her in defying them. But she never could summon up the requisite defiance – she cared too much – and so finally I blew the whistle on them and told the higher-ups.
So I suppose I’ve long thought it’s obvious that female-dominated professions will have the problems inherent in female groups. It’s not that male groups don’t have problems – they certainly do – but they’re different problems.
In addition, it’s not just that we now have so many female-dominated groups, it’s that the females in them so often ascribe to leftism and its propensity to get rid of opposing points of view.
The essay goes on to track the process by which different professions became female-dominant. Law school, for example, something to which I can attest. When I entered law school my class was seven percent female, but within just a few years entering classes were nearly 50/50.
From the essay:
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’s not so much women who are valuing feelings over rules – it’s leftist women. I think that’s quite clear if you look at judges. I’m not sure which is more important – the “women” part or the “leftist” part. I suspect they’re intertwined, as women are more likely than men to vote on the left these days. But I really don’t see any difference in the decisions of leftist female judges and leftist male judges.
NOTE: The author begins with a discussion of how Larry Summers lost his position as Harvard president back in 2005. I wrote on that at the time it happened, in this post.
On a personal note – you know why I originally put up a picture of myself on the blog? Because when I was first blogging and didn’t have a photo on the website, everyone assumed I was a man.
