Women Ruined Everything. Now It's Men's Turn to Ruin Everything.
Adults, please rise.
Men are in trouble. This is the argument we’ve heard for a few years now, as girls have risen from the sidelines to outperform boys in school, and as the manufacturing economy slipped into something a little more comfortable. Service jobs either appeal more to women than to men or are associated with femininity; thus, men are edged out. A good man is hard to be—without a good job.
At the same time, an elite cultural push to feminize men, or perhaps to dispel what many assume is their acquired—not innate—toxic masculinity, has left many feeling ashamed of their sex category. They’re pressured to tamp down traditionally masculine characteristics, like assertiveness, else they’ll end up entwined with Andrew Tate.
Maybe Trump was right when he said it was “a very scary time for young men in America.”
It wasn’t long ago that girls were in trouble. In the 1960s and 70s, they battled the problem that had no name. Or they fought for the right to have credit cards in their own names or to be legally protected from marital rape. They fought to play college sports, or to not be denied jobs because of their sex.
Even as they excelled in a lot of those arenas, the 1990s saw the rise of “girl crisis” literature, a focus on eating disorders inspired by the pressures of traditional femininity. The STEM pipeline still leaked, even if it stretched all the way to the C-suite. Still, women’s ascent in the professions is undeniable, in part because it turns out they were capable of being doctors and lawyers, and in part because policies and the culture corrected the tilt toward men, hoping the needle would land on equality.
Apparently, that’s not where it landed. Instead, women rose to power, and ruined everything with their toxic femininity, manifested as censoriousness and cancel culture.
That “wokeness” unfolded concomitantly with women’s rise is the subject of The Great Feminization, an essay by Helen Andrews, who argues that women are by their nature unfit for the kinds of leadership roles they’ve assumed, and this is why things have gotten so bad. Andrews, of course, is not that kind of woman, so it’s okay for her to steer clear of the tradwife route. In other words: she has a man’s brain, but a woman’s body. (She does not have gender dysphoria, but since that’s not necessary to be trans, she fits the definition.)
In all seriousness, I understand Andrews’ argument. It’s been going around for a while. Cancel culture is catty, back-stabby. It squelches competition by tattling—feminine—instead of fisticuffs: masculine. What we need, apparently, is to reestablish the natural order, and have men at the helm. Men don’t perform institution-destroying acts like imposing speech codes and trying to shun people for wrongthink.
Except that now we have President Trump doing those exact things. The only difference that I can see is that he’s not doing it in the name of “kindness” or “inclusivity.” Biden used executive orders to impose the belief of gender identity onto the country, and Trump used them to forbid it.
We can battle endlessly about psychological differences among the sexes, and about nature versus nurture. We can accept that some of the ways we evolved have to do with changes in the landscape and technology, with the shift from nomadic culture to agriculture. We can accept that most cultures have some kind of sex-based division of labor, but it’s not exactly the same in each culture. We can accept the bimodal distributions of gendered behavior and the sex binary and the gender outliers. We could also stop insisting that there’s a man or boy or woman or girl crisis, and focus on the best way to be human in this very strange iteration of the world.
Whatever the sex of the people in charge…could they please stop acting like children? Trump siccing the justice department on his enemies is not some expression of healthy masculinity. It’s an abuse of power by someone unable to tolerate dissent or a lack of fealty to his worldview. Which is hardly different from forcing people to sign loyalty oaths disguised as diversity statements or ousting them for saying that biological sex is real.
Women may have been acting like catty little girls, but the fellas are acting like teenage bullies. What we really need are grownups to set boundaries, be able to say no to people, come up with policies that are just and fair, set high expectations, and model good citizenship.
Where are these adults and will they please take the helm of…everything?
The idea that feminism ever claimed “men and women are the same” is a distortion that only works when the movement’s actual purpose is forgotten. From its beginnings, feminism has meant something concrete: women’s insistence on access to the same vocations, institutions, and civic rights long reserved for men. It arose not from a belief that the sexes are the same or interchangeable, but from the recognition that difference had been used as a gatekeeping tool.
What feminists challenged was the presumption that biology justifies exclusion—that a woman’s smaller stature, reproductive role, or social conditioning automatically disqualified her from medicine, law, science, public office or law enforcement, for example. To demand the chance to study, work, and govern on equal terms was never to claim that females are the same as males, only that all women are fully human and therefore entitled to prove what their individual capacities actually are.
The charge that feminism “denied sex differences” mistakes the rejection of barriers for the rejection of biology itself. In fact, feminist thought has long grappled with how to understand difference without turning it into destiny. The goal was not sameness but freedom from confinement by stereotype—the freedom to pursue any path one’s talents allow, irrespective of sex.
Seen in that light, the accusation collapses. Feminism did not erase sexual difference; it simply refused to let difference determine a woman’s horizon.
It is valuable to examine what "feminine" and "masculine" ideals mean, how they can benefit society and how they can be detriments. In the end, of course, and I think this is your point, we have to figure out how males and females, masculine and feminine people, all of us, can make the most of our combined tendencies, strategies, talents and strengths while minimizing our weaknesses.
And, like they say in the Serenity Prayer, we need to recognize the difference -between "strength" and "weakness" without trying to shortcut the analysis by pointing to "masculinity" or "femininity" as the culprit of wrongdoing. It's not that simple. Sometimes feminine ideals are strengths, if applied correctly, and sometimes masculine ideals are strengths if applied correctly. Let's start working together to make the most of our strengths.
I knew we were going to a bad place when there were songs like "Girls Are Gonna Rule The World" because the goal should not be to pass power from males to females, but to have a shared responsibility (and, as you also pointed out, we need adults - not children - to rule the world).
Lastly, I agree with the article in this respect. I don't think every industry has to be 50/50 in its male/female distribution. We need equal opportunity, not equal distribution. If less women want to be engineers, or less men want to be nurses, that's perfectly fine as long as we aren't forbidding the crossover! Maybe we will have a female president someday if she is the right woman, but we shouldn't force the issue. Right now, we need to prevent extremism - stop the unreality and harms of gender ideology, and also prevent a dumb bully from overtaking our government and thwarting democracy.