Toxic Femininity
Helen Andrews’s simplistic and reductionist views of gender.
“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
THOSE ARE THE WORDS LIBRETTIST Alan Jay Lerner penned for the fictional Professor Henry Higgins in the 1956 musical My Fair Lady. His lament about the war between the sexes was titled “A Hymn to Him,” and honestly, it could have been the title of Helen Andrews’s much-discussed recent essay in Compact. She called it “The Great Feminization,” but her screed is very much a hymn to men. She takes a Higgins-like approach to sex differences, quite missing the tongue-in-cheek. It reads as if she believes she has alighted on the One Big Explanation for Wokeness—it’s women!
Here is Higgins:
Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square
Eternally noble, historically fair
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat
Why can’t a woman be like that?
One man in a million may shout a bit
Now and then there’s one with slight defects
One, perhaps, whose truthfulness you doubt a bit
But by and large we are a marvelous sex
Now here’s Andrews:
The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday. Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women’s conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus. . . .
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.
Andrews’s essay has received applause from the right, where caveman masculinity is making a comeback, but she has fallen into the trap of black-and-white thinking and subtracted from a reasonable understanding of relations between the sexes.1
Andrews has discovered that men and women are different. A random woman may be taller than a random man, she notes, but on average, most men are taller than most women. I’m not entirely mocking her for this observation. For decades, there were academics and others who denied that sex differences were innate, arguing instead that nearly everything was “socially constructed.” But even with this seemingly anodyne observation, Andrews sails over the top, because not even the most die-hard progressives denied that certain physical traits, like height, are mostly inborn. Where they drew the line was over the contention that men and women had average group differences in intelligence, tastes, aggression, or empathy.
Andrews then makes the case that women, having achieved something like launch velocity in American institutions, were corrupting them beyond recognition because women “favor consensus and cooperation” whereas male group dynamics are “optimized for war.” Cancel culture, she writes, “is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” If not stopped, she warns, women represent a “threat to civilization.”
Sound familiar? It should. Some lefty feminists used to pathologize men in similar ways. That didn’t work out too well. In fact, if the right’s response to Andrews’s essay, along with their embrace of chuds like Andrew Tate is any indication, the right is committing the same error the left made in demonizing an entire sex. A rising number of young men have become resentful of the left’s disdain for traditional masculinity (or any masculinity, in some cases) and have sought respect elsewhere. Alas, many have found it in the Manosphere and other antisocial environs. If the right now argues that women are the problem with society, they may provoke a similar backlash. The gender gap in the 2024 presidential election was smaller than in 2020. Trump got a larger share of the men’s vote, 55 percent compared with 50 percent in 2020, and a slightly larger share of the women’s vote too, 46 percent compared with 44 percent in 2020. But that could change if women are becoming the right’s enemies.
Nor does Andrews grapple with the abundant evidence that cancel culture is far from a female-only preserve. The president and vice president of the United States attempt to get comedians and executives fired, universities defunded, media companies punished, and even restaurants boycotted for wrongthink.
ANDREWS ARGUES THAT BECAUSE WOMEN are more oriented toward cooperation than competition, they will undermine high standards, striving, and excellence in favor of a “workplace [that] feels like a Montessori kindergarten.” Caricature is not argument. While it’s true that men tend to be more competitive and aggressive than women (thus the origin of the phrase ‘testosterone poisoning’), it is emphatically not the case that women lack competitive or aggressive urges altogether. Nor is it the case that men lack the capacity for empathy and teamwork. Andrews frets that women will destroy our great corporations by sitting around in drum circles or something. But the period that has coincided with women’s rise in the corporate world has also seen a rise in real median wages, improvements in productivity, and rising national wealth. The supposedly nefarious female influence on businesses has not prevented the U.S. economy from leaving other rich countries in the dust. Nor have women lawyers and judges presided over the demise of our legal system. In fact, it is three of the female justices on the Supreme Court who seem to have the firmer grasp on the importance of rules and standards in preference to feelings—at least where presidential power is concerned.2
Labeling traits as ‘toxic,’ whether it’s the progressives saying as much about male aggression or the right saying it about female cooperation, is reductionist and simpleminded. All human beings have some mix of these traits, and wisdom comes from recognizing how to appreciate difference without judgment, how to modify innate traits for social good, and how to mine what is best in all. Yes, boys must be taught to curb their natural aggression and channel their energies toward protecting rather than dominating those who are weaker. And yes, girls have to be socialized to curb their cliquishness and include rather than exclude. And if some boys have more female qualities and some girls have more masculine traits, that’s fine, too.
On average, women do tend to prefer work that is interpersonal to work that is solitary. In my 2018 book, Sex Matters, I quoted social scientist Patti Hausman on the question of why more women don’t pursue careers in engineering: “Because they don’t want to. Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.” That, and not “social engineering” as Andrews argues, largely accounts for why women now dominate the fields of psychology and human resources. These are free choices of free people.
Men do tend to be more comfortable with risk-taking, less aware of social cues, and less averse to open conflict than women. But noticing these differences should be intriguing, not an opportunity to weaponize.
Andrews and the right are painting a cartoonish image of both men and women. And they’re playing a dangerous game. Alienating 51 percent of the population is unlikely to go well for them.
In case you missed it, my Bulwark colleague Cathy Young wrote last week on what she called Andrews’s “grotesquely misogynistic screed.”
If you want to talk about damage being done to the legal profession, once again take a look at what Trump and his team have been up to: corrupting the Department of Justice, installing unqualified lickspittles to the federal bench and in prosecutorial roles (to pursue retributive prosecutions), and demanding big law firms kiss the ring. Right-wing cancel culture is more virulent than ever.