“Wheresoever she was, there was Eden,” writes Mark Twain’s Adam on Eve’s headstone. In “The Diaries of Adam and Eve,” Adam initially finds Eve meddlesome and impractical. The more he lets her into his life, the more she complicates it. But years after leaving the garden, Adam acknowledges “it is better to live outside the garden with her than inside it without her.”
Twain was not religious, but he saw there could be no paradise where man and woman were separated.
Americans are less convinced. Marriage rates are in sharp decline, and divisions on gender issues are increasing between younger men and women especially. The American Enterprise Institute found that compared with national figures, “the gender gap is twice as large among voters age 18 to 29.”
Men and women increasingly attend different churches and disagree over important cultural issues compared to 10 years ago. There’s also evidence that partisan differences between the sexes are narrowing the dating pool for singles.
Not only are the sexes dividing, they increasingly understand themselves to be engaged in a zero-sum struggle. AEI has also found that the percentage of men and women who believe the other gender has it easier is increasing, particularly among younger adults.
Cynical terms like “patriarchy” and “mansplaining” have worked their way into common parlance. “Man-keeping” — “the emotional and social labor that women perform for men” is the latest printable byword by which men are belittled and dehumanized to empower women.
It’s therefore not surprising that in this moment of strained gender relations, author Helen Andrews’ recent article on the Great Feminization argues women could be the problem. She insists that conflicts over sexuality, race and class can be traced to women gaining more positions of public influence.
Feminine dynamics — “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition” — drive cancel culture and woke ideology according to Andrews.
Progressive attacks on manhood undoubtedly make the Great Feminization theory feel justified, but it’s really a repackaging of the same zero-sum thinking behind “man-keeping.”
More importantly, it’s playing with a loaded gun. Boiling all of society’s conflicts down to toxic femininity intensifies our crumbling gender relations by yet again making male and female differences an existential threat.
Arguing that feminine influence drives our current conflicts doesn’t resolve the culture war, it simply recasts it as a gender war.
Many have responded to Andrews on the merits. Valerie Hudson, Sophie Gilbert, and David French have rightly called attention to the shortcomings of Andrews analysis, including the myth that censorious regimes began with women.
“The original cancel culture was a male invention,” writes Hudson. “Who, for example, imprisoned Soviet intellectuals and activists in the vast gulag archipelago of the USSR … The regimes that Orwell and Huxley warned of through their prescient books were all male-run regimes.”
Pathologizing feminine influence at the highest levels of society doesn’t just outstrip the evidence; it also draws the sexes into conflict by unfairly pitting masculine strengths against feminine weakness.
For Andrews, the masculine represents order, fairness and stability, while she emphasizes the feminine as prone to being irrational, censorious, and vindictive. This is like suggesting that in public life, men are Socrates and women are Regina George. From that vantage point, it’s no wonder Andrews concludes that “female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”
Notice again the reinforcement of a zero-sum dynamic between the sexes. For Andrews, institutions are either masculinized or feminized. Cooperation between the sexes really means capitulation: one sex embracing the other’s prerogatives because their interests are presumably mutually exclusive.
As illustrated here, to become a combatant in the gender war means elevating the status of one’s own sex above mutually beneficial cooperation. It means losing sight of a world in which men’s and women’s “modes of interaction” are balanced and integrated — and in which we are all better off for it.
In reality, both masculine and feminine approaches to decision making have strengths and weaknesses that benefit from one another.
For example, while working as a teaching assistant for undergraduate logic courses, I learned that while men don’t outperform women at logic, they are much more likely to value reason as the arbiter of truth. Sometimes men in my program praised me for “not being an emotional thinker, unlike most women.”
I knew this was intended as a compliment, but it subtly communicated the idea that understanding the world through feelings made you irrational and less worthy of respect. It was not enough to be rational; women should also embrace a rationalistic worldview.
A hyperfocus on rationality can become a liability, however. “Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason,” says Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind. Haidt argues that reason doesn’t find answers, it just defends them. Our moral conclusions are determined by our intuitions, which are deeply held and often unconscious feelings. Being out of touch with feelings and how they operate on our reason will not make you more rational, it will just delude you into believing all your conclusions are logically deduced.
Here is where the female propensity for understanding the world through feelings becomes a needed balance to the masculine. Reason is an important tool for understanding reality, but because feelings and desires actually steer our reason like an iceberg under the surface, a woman’s attention to these things is anything but irrational.
Andrews laments that feminine values like empathy and cohesiveness undermine institutional commitments to “open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.” Of course empathy and cohesion can become vices, and Andrews is right to point out the excesses of feminine group dynamics. When women want to be part of public discourse, their ideas shouldn’t be unfairly shielded from criticism in the name of empathy.
But when properly balanced, empathy and cohesion are important to the pursuit of truth. Without cohesion, debate simply becomes conflict and without empathy, reason is unpersuasive.
“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own,” says Haidt. “You can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.” Haidt’s point is that you can’t separate the influence of your feelings on your conclusions if you don’t even know they are there, and you can’t persuade someone to embrace the truth without addressing the emotions attaching them to their convictions.
As female representation ramps up in our institutions and organizations, the tensions between men’s and women’s approaches will likely increase. But rather than implying that masculine and feminine approaches are mutually exclusive, we can see that tension as signaling a need to find appropriate balance, not a reason for one sex to simply capitulate to the other.
Like Twain’s Eve, bringing women into the picture may initially create unwanted complexity in our institutions. But those are growing pains, rather than threatening signs. We still need both masculine and feminine influences in our institutions to form an ideal society.