The Upside of Feminization

Jo Bartosch on female scapegoating

The Upside of Feminization

Jo Bartosch

The hysterical commentators warning that women are destroying civilisation really need to man up. Alas, male victimhood is a rich seam. The fear that women are conspiring against men online, voting with our hormones, capturing institutions and, naturally, causing wokeism is almost irresistibly appealing. Such complaints generate engagement as reliably as a shaved head in a chemo GoFundMe. They are certainly helping marketing professor Gad Saad shift copies of his latest book.

The idea that the “great awokening” was caused by the “great feminization” has been so successfully spread it is now an orthodox opinion for the online right. The argument, most powerfully proposed by journalist Helen Andrews, runs that as women entered the workplace en masse, organisational culture shifted. Equality and diversity became entrenched, and institutions began to prioritise empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition.

There is enough truth in this argument to make it seductive. Across faiths, women have long polled as more religious than men. These days we are also more likely to profess belief that men can become women if they look sad enough and claim sufficiently womanly feelings. Men, by contrast, are often less persuaded by transgender ideology, because they recognise how powerful male sexuality is as a driver of behaviour. Unlike women, they can see that the Emperor is really just an entitled flasher, because they can be emperors too.

But there is a more plausible explanation for apparent female credulity than the right-wing fantasy that women are simply less rational than men. Given that most women live alongside men, love men, and depend upon men at various points in their lives, cognitive dissonance about the risks males pose is hardly surprising. It is easier, and certainly safer, to believe that violent and deviant men are rare aberrations than it is to confront what the possibility of male violence means. The fashionable #bekind approach allows women to avoid acknowledging their own vulnerability.

Against this backdrop, female risk denial begins to make sense. You might expect women, being physically weaker, to be more alert to danger. Instead, we are often more willing, or at least more willing to pretend, that no threat exists. So barriers that protect us are pulled down, leading to prison abolition, open borders, and admitting men to female hospital wards. Whether this reflects hardwired “suicidal empathy,” as Saad and his acolytes insist, or is the product of a culture that punishes women who dare to put themselves first, we will probably never know. But female political behaviour is not necessarily evidence of female power. More often, it is evidence of female adaptation.

The sexes are undoubtedly diverging politically and psychologically. But what we are witnessing is not simply feminization run amok. We have built a technological environment that takes the rough edges of male and female psychology, sharpens them, and then expresses surprise at the result. If we want to understand contemporary culture, we must open our eyes to both the good and the bad effects of both sexes’ collective tendencies. When we do so, the story becomes much more complex. Women as well as men contributed to the moral framework of Western civilization; likewise, men as well as women drove the ideological capture of our institutions.

Men Bankrolled Genderism

That women have entered workplaces, and that workplace culture has changed, is undeniable. But the idea that the modern ideological order was fomented by deranged women in HR departments is far less convincing.

Helen Joyce has written insightfully on this, arguing that it is simply not true that women have imposed genderism on the world. “It’s been pushed above all by governments and corporations, which are run not by teenage girls and young women who tell pollsters that ‘trans women are women’, but predominantly by middle-aged men,” she writes. “I’m sure hardly any of them believe this. But they don’t care about the harm it causes because it’s a cheap virtue signal that doesn’t hurt them.”

This is the glaring weakness at the heart of the “great feminization” theory. If women are really responsible for the ideological capture of institutions, why has so much of it been bankrolled, protected, and normalised by powerful men? Governments, tech firms, broadcasters, universities, and corporations are not run by anxious female HR assistants. They are run overwhelmingly by men who discovered that fashionable moral causes offered status without sacrifice.

There is another reason transgender ideology is so easy to slide into. It does not upend old-fashioned sexism so much as repackage it. It asks for no uncomfortable introspection about the stereotypes we all, to varying degrees, collude in. On the contrary, it rewards their enthusiastic performance. Womanhood and manhood become a set of cues to be adopted, affirmed, and applauded rather than a material reality to be reckoned with. The flattery is mutual: those who claim to be the opposite sex are validated, while those who validate them are spared the awkward business of examining their own assumptions about sex.

Most men instinctively are not persuaded by any of this. But there is a highly motivated minority for whom the confusion of fetish and identity is deeply important. Their sense of self depends upon it, and their activism follows accordingly. These are the campaigners who have advised institutions and lobbied governments for decades, never mind the philosophers who laid the groundwork for these anti-realist views. Men who present themselves as women offer a version of femininity that is instantly legible and deeply reassuring in its familiarity. It is easier, after all, to applaud a stereotype than to dismantle it. It is far easier to indulge the performance than to listen to matronly, unsexy feminists with their more radical reading.

The Great Digitization

A more plausible civilisation-shaking force than “feminization” is the emergence of the digital world itself. Its overwhelmingly male progenitors imagined a utopia in which minds could meet, free from the burden of the body. They neglected to consider that women might have vulnerabilities and needs different from their own. Anonymity stripped away the social norms which once, just about, held relations between the sexes together, while simultaneously creating endless new opportunities for abuse.

Pornography sits at the centre of this transformation. It is the digital world’s most successful school of sexual norms, creating a culture in which millions of men are trained that they have a right to indulge any fetish they please, where women’s bodies can be tried on as costumes and used as tools. The entitlement these men feel to perform their paraphilias in public might be facilitated by workplace policies, but it was forged online. It would be stranger if a generation raised on this did not begin to confuse fetish with identity than if they did.

Robert Jessel and I argued in Pornocracy that the internet has not brought the sexes together so much as driven them into rival digital tribes. Emily Lawford recently made a similar point in The New Statesman, noting how online life increasingly functions less as a shared public square than as a machine for monetising grievance, resentment and sexual antagonism.

The result is a kind of cultural bifurcation: parallel feedback loops that occasionally collide but rarely comprehend one another. Clementine Prendergast has observed in The Spectator that the extremes of male and female online culture often mirror each other in unsettling ways. On one side sit highly feminised spaces steeped in therapeutic language, performative vulnerability, ruthless social policing, and mindless misandry. On the other are male-dominated subcultures equally obsessed with status, self-improvement, victimhood, and the degradation of women and girls.

Much of the debate about the manosphere and its female equivalent fixates on the users themselves. But this misses where the real power lies. These environments did not emerge organically from male or female nature alone. They were structured, curated, and amplified by platforms designed to maximise engagement by rewarding outrage, narcissism and division. And the architects of those systems were, overwhelmingly, men who simply didn’t consider that their needs might not be universal. It was not Pandora who uncorked the technological pithos. Those systems were, in the main, built by men.

It is striking how often both male and female dysfunction are ultimately blamed on women. Boys retreat into the manosphere? Single mothers and feminism are blamed. Men become isolated and porn-addled? Society has apparently become insufficiently masculine. Women obsessively edit their faces for social media? Vanity. Women monetise sexual performance on OnlyFans or avoid intimacy altogether for self-protection? Selfishness. Male behaviour is endlessly framed as reactive, downstream of female moral dominance. But contrary to Beyonce’s assertion that girls run the world, we really don’t.

When norms shift in ways that are difficult to explain or control, women are always cast as the vectors of contagion. This is nothing new. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s were introduced to curb the spread of venereal disease among soldiers and sailors. Were the male punters targeted? Of course not. Instead, women suspected of prostitution were detained and subjected to compulsory internal examinations.

Whether spreading disease or spreading wokeism, the underlying belief remains the same: women are somehow powerful enough to reshape civilisation while simultaneously too foolish to understand the damage they are doing. The issue is never men, whether nineteenth-century punters or the architects of the digital world.

Feminization, Christianity, and Western Civilization

There are more generous historical interpretations of what critics now sneer at as feminisation. Historian Tom Holland has traced social justice movements, and even atheism itself, back to Christianity.

In the classical world, strength, dominance, and status were openly admired. Christianity inverted this moral order, elevating suffering, weakness, and compassion. Given this, it is hardly surprising that women played a central role in transmitting these values. For all their faults, Christian churches afforded women a dignity stripped from them under the hypermasculine ethics of antiquity. In this regard, Western civilisation, from human rights to bodily autonomy, is arguably the product not simply of Christianity but of feminization itself.

It is revealing that so many commentators are prepared to believe women’s moral instincts changed society for the worse but never for the better. Was the campaign to abolish slavery “woke”? Was the introduction of the age of consent “woke”? Was universal suffrage “woke”? Each emerged, at least in part, from traditions of moral concern and care for those on the edges of society. Viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology, all could be dismissed as the product of women with displaced maternal instincts somehow exerting immense cultural power. Yet these are now regarded as the moral foundations of civilisation itself.

If women are to be blamed for the culture, then they must also be credited for its conscience.

The “great feminization” thesis takes phenomena emerging from the interaction of technology, pornography, psychology, and sex and reduces them to a familiar story about female influence gone rogue. This is why the theory ultimately fails. It cannot explain why gender ideology has been enforced by male-led institutions, nor why its imagery maps less onto women’s lives than onto male sexual fantasy. The culture has not simply become more feminine. In many respects, it has become both more masculine and pornographic, and more feminine and compassionate as a result.

If we are serious about understanding how modern culture is formed, we will have to look beyond HR departments and podcast studios and towards the systems that shape what we see, what we desire, and what we believe.

Yet, for all the popular rhetoric about masculine rationality, ours is a culture remarkably willing to surrender to the emotional comforts of male victimhood and woman-blaming.