Critique or Dodge of Feminism?

Last month, writer Helen Andrews made a big splash with a piece at Compact magazine called “The Great Feminization.” The piece garnered attention not only from the conservative establishment but also from such places as The New York Times, with participation also by otherwise marginalized voices from the huge “manosphere” section of the internet. It is encouraging that the conservative mainstream is finally noticing the more obvious consequences of feminism, since usually it is territory where male conservatives, at least, fear to tread. Importantly, Andrews’ argument acknowledges, backhandedly but undeniably, that feminism is the main component of so-called “woke” ideology, though she does not state it this way.

In fact, she has a peculiar way of presenting the matter. She does not actually criticize feminism; in fact, she never mentions it. Instead, she simply draws attention to the negative effects of women taking over so many professions and workplaces. She attributes this to “demographic feminization,” as if all results from impersonal forces, without any ideological pressure.

At one point, she says that no one intended this “great feminization,” as if feminist radicalism hardly exists. “It’s not something that anybody does on purpose,” she tells an interviewer at (42:50). “It’s not that they are trying to change these institutions. It’s just that that’s what tends to happen.” And perhaps she is correct about the individual women in question. But who instigated these changes and engineered this “Great Feminization,” if not pressure groups driven by an agenda?

This kind of backpedaling away from the implications of one’s own evidence is habitual among establishment conservatives when criticizing feminism, however meekly. Andrews is more daring than most in her willingness to criticize the dominance of women in the workplace and not just feminist political power. But the effect is weak. It ignores all the other devastation wrought by feminist militancy and implies that the extensive social instability and ever-more acrimonious relations between men and women—now exploding all through social media—can be reduced to sex imbalances in workplaces.

Her solution, equally simplistic, suggests otherwise. She advocates removing the legal advantages in hiring and promotion that women enjoy over men so as to “level the playing field” and reverse feminization. But where did those laws come from in the first place? Who pushed for them, and who will now make sure they are never repealed, if not the feminists? Without some accounting for the origins of the problem, it is obvious that no such legal or legislative corrective will ever be permitted.

Ultimately, the article is yet another commentary on the feeble state of professional conservatism.

The most glaring omission comes in what Andrews herself rightly considers the strongest point in her argument: the feminine impact on the legal system. “The field that frightens me most is the law,” she writes. “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”

If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect … judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. … The changes will be massive.

She “expects”? Overwhelming evidence is readily available that this and more have already been happening for quite some time.

Again, typical of media conservatives, she limits herself to obvious examples taken from headline politics: Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court; the kangaroo courts that stage show trials of university students for ostensibly criminal acts that invariably fall well short of that. These high-profile cases indeed demonstrate how “safeguards that our legal system holds sacred” have been violated: “the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect.”

But has she never heard of family law? The omission is conspicuous because she could have definitively validated her prophecy and summarily disposed of any skeptics. The family law judiciary is already controlled by women and has been since its inception, and the result is (as I have often said, without contradiction) the most repressive government machinery ever created in the English-speaking democracies. The constitutional violations make those she predicts seem meager by comparison.

We are talking here about mass incarcerations without trial or record, daily and routine violations of the Bill of Rights, Constitution, and the most basic principles of due process of law—including the presumption of innocence, the rights to bring witnesses and to face one’s accuser, speedy and public trial by jury, habeas corpus, protections against self-incrimination, double jeopardy, ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, plus freedom of speech and expression, the obligation of contracts, and almost any other constitutional protection you care to name. These are principles as basic as the separation of powers and federalism but when it comes to family law courts, if you’re a man, they may as well not exist.

Yet, about all this Andrews is utterly silent. It is impossible that she does not know about it. For one thing, I have published multiple articles saying it in The American Conservative, the magazine she used to edit. Each article cites other authors publishing in mainstream media who also say the same thing.

This wilful ignorance of ongoing constitutional outrages is so glaring that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that she and the conservative media promoting her are, intentionally or not, covering up far more than they are revealing.

For one thing, the injustices have little to do with the proportion of female judges. Male judges, under feminist pressure, are equally capable of rendering horrifically unjust decisions, mostly against defenseless private individuals who are well off the radar screen of professional conservatives.

The root of all this is not gender imbalances in workplaces. It is submission to a radical ideology—a phenomenon that is poorly understood, wilfully ignored, and often manipulated by collaborationist conservatives.

Here, for example, one critic, formerly, at least, from the right, feels compelled to invoke the French Revolution. “Countless male-led revolutionary and radical movements have featured denunciations and purges, secret informants and struggle sessions,” writes David French. “It was not squadrons of women who guillotined dissenters during the French Revolution.” No, it was squadrons of ideologically driven radicals—radicals in whose shadow feminism was developing (recall Marie-Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft) and in whose footsteps today’s feminists follow, with their own version of the Terror.

(This is not hyperbole. While French likewise ignores the depredations of family law, the counter-revolutionary philosopher Louis de Bonald perceived and described its connection with Jacobin ideology in his 1801 book, On Divorce.)

By avoiding ideology altogether and casting the problem exclusively as male versus female personalities (which is also more contentious to prove), Andrews risks trivializing the devastation by consigning it to the realm of “he said/she said” gossip and leaves herself open to nitpickers like French and other conservatives who want to avoid confronting the larger issues.

A comprehensive treatment of the devastation wrought by feminism still awaits its scholar.

Here I will limit myself to what I myself know best and what I already mentioned: the divorce apparat, along with its incubator, the welfare machinery. These earliest and most decisive victories effectively achieved the feminist ambition to legally abolish marriage and the family, all with almost zero opposition from the political right. The impact of these victories alone is incalculable. They are responsible for the ongoing, seemingly intractable crisis of fatherless children, which is the number one cause of every social pathology of our time: poverty, violent crime, substance abuse, truancy—along with the massive growth of government size, power, and spending that is rationalized to control them: judicial aggrandizement, criminal justice and incarceration, education, health, “social services,” and more.

None of this will be rectified by returning to meritocratic hiring and promotion practices. It requires directly confronting the feminist power bloc in ways that not only the Republican Party but the entire conservative establishment (including MAGA) has so far proven itself incapable. This is proven by both Andrews herself and the establishment’s response to her, and it shows why such momentary bursts of critical energy cannot reverse the coalescing rule of modern politics, that the right always loses.

The deeper problem with sex and gender politics today is not entirely one of male versus female traits. Andrews is certainly on to something important with her “Great Feminization,” but I will leave that to the demographers and evolutionary psychologists (Janice Fiamengo has already provided the best critical assessment of her argument). But, right or wrong, Andrews’ feeble remedy demonstrates that workplace balance cannot restore stability to politics, society, families, or relations between the sexes—or, for that matter, redeem professional conservatism from its unending string of defeats. The only effective method is to grasp the nettle and confront radical ideology—not on the terms with which we are comfortable, as some outgrowth of “Marxism,” but on its own terms, which are sexual.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/critique-or-dodge-of-feminism