Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. Last hour, I started going over some of
the highlights of this pretty lengthy piece by Helen Andrews
at Compactmagazine. Compactmag dot com headlined the Great Feminization, and
she's talking about essentially evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and how
men and women behave differently in group settings. And when
you have an organization that becomes, you know, dominated by men,
there were certain behaviors and practices that occur that would
not occur in an organization that is dominated by women,
and vice versa. And again I gotta say standard disclaimer.
I'm not saying one of these is better than the other.
They are just different. And so what we are seeing though,
you know, from a historical perspective, since women entered the workforce,
they became you know, they rose to fifty percent of
workforce population in particular industries and then took over the
majority position. And a lot of these industries have become
female dominated in the last ten years. And what Helen
Andrews is arguing is that woke is feminization, that's that
the tactics are applicable. What we consider to be woke
is sort of this manifestation of a feminization of organizations
or institutions. And she talks about different industries in this piece,
but she says the one that frightens her the most
is the law, which I will give you the stat again,
because she went through these industries here earlier. In the
law schools became majority female in twenty sixteen, law firm
associates became majority female in twenty twenty three, and in
the law she said, 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. Justice is blind, right,
She says, a feminized legal system might actually resemble more
of those Title nine courts that we saw colleges set
up where you could not face your accuser, where the
burden of proof was not on the accuser, right, but
on the defendant. The sort of kangaroo college courts that
were developed that stacked the deck against the accused, which
were mostly dudes, right, lives ruined, kicked out of the
colleges and stuff based on mere accusations. That kind of thing.
That's not the rule of law, as she says, it's
more than just writing rules down. It means sometimes you
may have a sympathetic person in front of you, but
if they violated the law, then you hold them to
account under the rule of law. But if you have
an overly feminized organization that is now interpreting the laws
and meeting out the justice, does that kind of go
in a different direction. How about empathy? Right, everybody likes
to talk about empathy. I don't know when this sort
of happened, but it used to just be sympathy. People
could just sympathize with somebody else, you know, my deepest sympathy,
so I sympathize with you. But then somewhere along the lines,
within the last decade, I feel like the word empathy
started being thrown all around. And this now ties into
a piece or a book rather that doctor Gad Sad
is writing right now called suicidal Empathy. And if you
don't know who doctor said is, and that's Saad Gad said.
He is a public intellectual and considered to be a
trailblazer in applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior. Okay, he's
got a podcast, I believe, and he wrote the He
wrote a book called The Parasitic Mind, How infectious ideas
are killing common sense, And he's working on this new one.
I think it may almost be out at this point,
Suicidal Empathy, and it examines the descent to madness by
highlighting the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional
system is tricked into a hyperactive form of empathy, and
then that empathy is deployed on the wrong targets. How
does this manifest itself? He says, this is how the
rights of a minuscule minority of trans women, in other words,
men biological men, right, But their rights trample the rights
of actual women in athletic competitions. It's how illegal immigrants
end up receiving greater usaid than American veterans or American
victims of natural disasters. Evolution has endowed our emotional and
cognitive systems with the capacity to deploy our resources strategically.
This is why parents are willing to jump in front
of a bus to save their kids, but they're not
as likely to sacrifice their lives to save a random
child across the globe. It does not make them callous,
it's Darwinian right. They do cost benefit trade offs rooted
in universal features of human nature. When empathy gets elevated
to this highest virtue, then people will literally sacrifice their
own lives, their own civilizations, in honor and service to
that virtue. And I saw doctor said Uh interviewed by
Coleman Hughes the other day, and he he gave the analogy,
was it seppuku or seppuku? Where Uh like the this
is part of like the Japanese culture where the warriors
would rather kill themselves than to than to bring shame
or dishonor so they would they would kill themselves because
honor was elevated to the highest virtue in the society,
and rather then run a foul of that highest virtue,
it would be it would be better to not be alive. Now,
swap out honor with empathy. And if you can't empathize
with you know, these these poor people that are coming
from this other country, they just want a better life
and maybe, okay, find some of them want to actually
like destroy the country and blow up a bunch of
Jews and stuff. How dare you not have empathy? You
see this happening in the UK right now, that's what
you're seeing. That's suicidal empathy. That's my opinion. You're seeing
suicidal empathy on display. They have lost the ability to
prioritize self preservation at the expense of empathy, right they
elevate that to the highest virtue. And I would submit
that that is not something that a more masculine society
would elevate. I think that is evidence of a feminized society.
And that's what Helen Andrews is getting at in her
piece at Compact magazine. And then she cites an example.
And I have cited this example since it happened. I
said this at the time. It was happening that it
radicalized me, and it was the bread have an all
confirmation as I covered that, I watched all of it.
I watched all of it. I covered all of it.
I interviewed people throughout the hearings. We played audio, we
took phone calls and stuff, had conversations with men and
women alike about it. And there was one particular conversation
I had that sort of opened my eyes to this
very dynamic. All right, if you're listening to this show,
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. All right, So I said that Brett Kavanaugh accusations,
his confirmation hearings. Right, This was a radicalizing moment for
me personally in my life because I was watching this
unfold and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is supposed to
be weighing evidence and that sort of stuff, they just
blew through all of these guardrails, and I understood the
political motivations for doing so. There was a conversation I
had with there was a It was a friend of
my aunts. They had come to town. I was working
in Nashville at the time. They had come to town
for weekend vacation or whatever, and so I met them
out for dinner. And this was right during the Kavanaugh
hearings and such. And her friend was on the left
and in talking with her about the you know, the
actual evidence and the accusations and all of that stuff,
and I was just I just kept asking her questions,
and at some point she finally admitted that none of
the evidence really mattered. She just empathized with the accuser,
Christine blazey Ford, doctor Christine blaze Ford. She just empathized
with her. Why because I looked at Brett Kavanaugh, and
I see the guy in my past that didn't do
to me what he's accused of doing to blaze Ford,
but he made me feel uncomfortable. And so she's like
projecting onto Kavanaugh all of these grievances that she has
with some other guy, and she projects it onto him
and empathizes with the quote. Victim in the case puts
herself in blazy Ford's position, and so then becomes a
staunch defender. And at that point, none of the logic,
none of the arguments, none of the evidence mattered, none
of it. She would not be moved. That's when things
started becoming clear for me. And that's why when I
was reading this piece and I came across this example,
I was like, totally get it. She says, these two
approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh
confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that if Christine blazy
Ford cannot provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh
were ever in the same room together, well, then her
accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life.
That was my position. She has no actual evidence that
she ever even met him. The feminine position was that
her self evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility,
and that the Senate Committee must respect that. And that's
the difference. And again, it's just difference. Neither one is
automatically better or worse, good or bad. However, when applied
to certain situations or institutions, environments, or businesses, there can
be some downsides. The great feminization, she calls it is
truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted
them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires,
But no civilization in human history has ever experimented with
letting women control so many vital institutions of our society,
from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even
where women do not hold the top spots women set
the tone in these organizations such that a male CEO
has to operate within the limits set by HR human resources.
I have never worked at a place that had a
male HR director never. Why is that? I mean, just
statistically speaking, you would think, right that a dude would
somehow or another be in HR somewhere. I've never had one.
We assume, she says, that these institutions will continue to
function under these completely new circumstances. But what are the
grounds for that assumption? See, this is a very good
question that she's asking. Once again, this is something that
no civilization has ever experimented with before, has seen before,
has realized before. And again I'm not saying we shouldn't
do it. I'm just saying, just like everything else, there
are trade offs, right. The problem, she says, is not
that women are less talented than men, or even that
female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense.
The problem is that female modes of interaction are not
well suited to accomplishing the goals of a lot of
major institutions. And if you just step back and think
about it logically for a minute, if these major institutions
were created a long time ago who created them dudes? Right,
and so they in their little boys club would have
constructed this institution to operate in a way that they
felt comfortable with, that they understood. And now you are
reworking the way these institutions operate. And is that always good?
Is it always for the betterment of the institution. Maybe
an institution is bettered, right, maybe it is improved, but
maybe it isn't right. Maybe maybe the downside is such
that it destroys the institution. Can we even can we
even ask the question? Can we even examine that? That's
what Helen Andrews is asking, And I think it's perfectly
appropriate to do so. Right, if we're living through and
through an experiment, we need to be assessing the impacts
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then this is from Tom who says, Pete, I'm not
proud of it, but Christy blazey Ford matriculated at my
alma mater. Unc. Oh, you can't help. I mean, they'll,
you know, take anybody. I'm kidding, I kid. Helen Andrews
Compact Magazine calling this the Great feminization and it is unprecedented,
and so we don't know what the end result will be,
what the institution's group dynamics will will look like, how
they'll operate in that sort of thing. There there will
be downsides. Okay, there will be downsides. She says, there
are many people who think that the Great Feminization is
a naturally occurring phenomenon. Women were finally given a chance
to compete with men, and it turned out they were
just better. Right, That's why there are so many women
in newsrooms, running political parties, managing corporations. Right, that's what
I've heard, And like, I am all for the competition, right,
let the best candidate win. Right. However, Helen Andrews argues
they're wrong. Feminization is not an organic result of women
out competing men in all of these different positions. She
calls it an artificial result of social engineering. And if
we take our thumb off the scale, it'll collapse within
a generation. The most obvious thumb on the scale is
anti discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few
women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in
your higher management, well that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they
would otherwise not have gotten, simply in order to keep
their numbers up. Again, I'm not saying every single woman
in a position of leadership didn't earn it. I'm not
saying that. However, there are people that have been elevated
in order to avoid lawsuits. This is a rational thing
for businesses to do, because the consequences for failing to
do so can be dire. She then lists a whole
bunch of companies that got sued and had to shell
out millions and millions of dollars. So, right, anti discrimination
law and the threat of lawsuits requires that every workplace
be feminized to some degree. There were a bunch of
Silicon Valley companies that got hit with lawsuits alleging frat
culture or a toxic bro culture, right, And like, I
understand why that would not be a comfortable place to
work in. I don't think I would actually like to
work in some toxic bro culture. It's toxic, right, It's
right there in the description. I don't want to work
in a toxic place. Right. So, women can essentially sue
their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a
fraternity house. But what of the alternative? Can men sue
when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten? No, they cannot,
And so what is the rational natural response? Well, employers
err on the side of making the office, as she
calls it, softer. So, if women are thriving more in
the modern workspace, is that really because they are out
competing men? Or is it because the rules have been
changed to favor them? And I recognize the danger in
simply asking the question. If this piece were written by
a guy, I would feel way less comfortable doing it
today on the show. But the fact that a woman
wrote this, I feel more comfortable giving you the information
because it removes me from the equation. Right. This is
what she is saying. This is what she is arguing.
She's positing these questions. Once institutions reach a fifty to
fifty split between the genders, she says, they then tend
to blow right past gender parody and they become more
and more female. So there's never a balancing that occurs.
It never stays at a fifty to fifty. It always
becomes just more and more and more and more women dominated.
She says. That does not look like women outperforming men.
It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine
norms on previously male institutions. Right, just like if a
woman were to go to work at a place and
it was a toxic bro culture. She would not want
to hang around there, right, she wouldn't want to stay
because it's a toxic bro culture. Well, what's the inverse?
Is there even? Is there even a label for the
opposite a toxic sis culture? No, sis is already taken
with the trans thing. So uh yeah, Like, is there
a toxic female culture? No, of course, not no such thing.
Why would there be no such thing as that? Again,
I refer you to the documentary Mean girls, there is
such a thing. Right, People are people, male or female.
They are people, and you put him in a group
dynamic setting, and they're jockeying for power or influence or
friendship or prestige or whatever. Right they're going to behave
in certain ways in that group dynamic. And this idea
that we can identify when a male culture behaves badly,
but we can't identify when a female dominated culture behaves
badly too, Like, that's well, that seems illogical. What man
wants to work in a field where his traits are
not welcome? What self respecting male graduate student would pursue
a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him
for stating any disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion.
Didn't they fire that guy what was his name, James
Devour or de Moour whatever from what was it Google
or something who was pointing out in a slack chat
with colleagues about, you know, why aren't there more women
coding and in it and programming and stuff. And he
was like going through and he's talking about all of
the differences between men and women, men being interested in
things and women being interested in people, and like there
may be biological differences. And he got fired for it.
Is that something a masculine workplace would do or is
that something a more feminine workplace would do? She says,
our window to do something about the great feminization is closing.
There are leading indicators and lagging indicators of feminization, and
we are currently at the in between stage when law
schools are a majority female but the federal bench is
still majority male. In a few decades, the gender shift
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David Strom one of my favorite writers over at hot
air dot com. He said, seeing the cultural Marxist roots
of woke tells you the what what. Helen Andrews breaks
down in her essay The Great Feminization. This explains the
why the why Woke became so strong. It also warns
us that our gains in fighting woke may be temporary,
because the why behind the what is still going strong again.
Her thesis is that Woke has become so powerful because
our institutions have become feminized, and women have different values
than men. They prioritize different things than men. They behave
in a group dynamic differently than men. I'm not saying
better or worse. I'm saying different. They're different. The decline
of universities corresponds nicely with this thesis. Higher education is
now a feminine pursuit. It's openly hostile to males and masculinity.
Corporate America has feminized, and if you think of the
recent corporate disasters at Disney, bud Light, and Cracker Barrel,
a consistent theme develops, which is men are allowed as
long as they are emasculated. Not all men fit the
masculine stereotype, just as not all women fit the feminine stereotype.
But as classes, as groups, the truth is general after all, right,
so generally speaking, right, Because the truth is general, men
and women think fundamentally differently and act very differently in groups.
Generally speaking, men work collaboratively in a different way than women,
and women's aggression is more likely to manifest as exclusion
from an in group cancelation. Right. That's why Andrews is
arguing that cancelation is a feminine tactic, this cancelation And again,
like I mentioned this earlier from her piece, and I've
heard women wonder at like, well, wait a minute, weren't
you guys just like you guys were just fighting. You
two dudes just like beat each other up the other
day and now you're best friends. How does that happen?
And guys don't really understand it. They're like, I don't know,
He's all right, I guess, you know, like that's and
what she says. From an evolutionary standpoint, you know, men
were engaging in war, but the end of the war
was predicated on you and me being able to live
side by side. If we both survived the war, obviously
we live side by side, and then there's peace and so.
And that's more of an external thing, tribe versus tribe,
whereas the conflicts that women, from an evolutionary standpoint would
encounter were internal to the tribe, and so there was
no sort of off ramp there because you're always in
the tribe and you don't want to be, you know,
extradited from the tribe. That's death right. So you have
to work in more covert ways. You have to shun people,
and you engage in just different kinds of conflict resolution
than guys do. Men and women are different, not saying
one is better, just pointing this out. I feel like
I've said that enough times. Rodney says on the text line, Pete,
you keep making your point by trying to explain and disclaimer.
Oh sorry, he says, you keep making your point when
you're explaining and giving that disclaimer to the conversation. See
Rodney got it. The mere fact that I have to
keep saying that thing is because I am worried about
it being misinterpreted by generally speaking women, because I understand
that men and women hear things. I've been doing this
a long time, and things I've said in the past,
and I will get an explosion of emails from women
who think they heard me say something or they interpreted
it a certain way. And the guys are like, I
understood what you were saying, because again, men and women
are different. I'm not saying one's better. You need both
of them, right. Helen Andrews says, as a woman myself,
I'm grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue
a career in writing and editing. Thankfully. I don't think
solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors
in women's faces. We simply have to restore fair rules.
Right now, we have a nominally meritocratic system in which
it is illegal for women to lose. Let's make hiring
based on merit in substance and not just name, and
we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal
to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR
Lady's veto power. I think people will be surprised to
discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to
institutional changes like the advent of HR, which we're brought
about by legal challenges, and which legal challenges can reverse.
I don't know if that will ever happen. I really don't.
It's an interesting idea, it's an interesting thought experiment. I
don't think that will ever happen unless maybe legal challenges
tear it down. But yeah, toxic frat bro culture not allowable,
toxic feminine culture totally allowable. That's where we are, all right,
that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
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