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The Great Feminisation

Politics
#1

This article was shared by james on MoA yesterday. It’s an interesting read.

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone,” argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire “woke” era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization.” Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers’s resignation.
Continues

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#2

Interesting isn’t it how “pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women” but the hairy ten stone trans woman (sic) in your demarcated changing room does not. Sure, several decades passed, but it suggests the author has a damn good point. Recognising, of course, that academia is a hermetically sealed, massive-scale, conditioning mechanism for the professional and management class.

It’s also paradigmatic, perhaps, that the man who considers himself as the world’s most powerful is almost entirely a creature of whim, driven by lust for revenge, never sticking to any task long enough to see it through, and constantly distracted by Unkie Benjy and the puppetmasters. Not so much masculine or feminine - whatever those might mean - but infantile and raging against the adult world.

Off-topic, though not entirely (the hero being a very feminine young woman - spitting image of Audrey Tautou) I do recommend Alien: Earth. Addresses issues around identity and transhumanism with some skill, and bags of gore of course. Plus a memorably hateful antihero who is narcissism personified, aNd driven by infantile rage.

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#3

I’d have concerns about the narrow focus of this article. Structurally it reminded me of a tirade against migrants, in which society’s ills are draped round bashy migrant news snippets tweaked to order for the cumulative effect. The ills themselves, which are supposed to represent the raison d’etre of the tirade, are not examined in terms of any other variables that may have caused them. But it must be true because if you just look at the migrants…migrants dunnit.

Cancel culture is OTT of course but according to Andrews the only thing that’s happened of note to bring it about is increased female representation in various professions, like law and medical schools and the newpaper industry. However this has not translated into female-dominated judiciary, medical boards and boardooms which are still largely male arenas. Andrews does not even consider the rise of the internet and social media during the period of her female revolution as a more obvious explanation.

Just to pick out one issue, admittedly a vexed one; Andrews writes

“These two approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.”

There were many accusations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh which contributed to the overall concerns about his suitability for the position of Supreme Court judge. As sexual assault is not helpfully carried out in front of reliable witnesses, Andrews would have them all vamoosed.

Ironically Andrews deals in the same approach of emotionalising that she accuses ‘women’ of.
Would the accused’s life be “ruined” if he had not been made a Supreme Court judge? Hardly. I won’t accuse her of being sterotypically emotional, as her loyalties do not appear to lie with her biological sex.

It’s like there is a kind of good ol’ days we need to return to. World wars, the mafia, gangland warfare, industry-funded governments and boardrooms where groups of logical men (definitely not Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, Bill Gates or Prince Andrew though) chew the fat and come to the right decision for the benefit of humanity. All of this will be ruined if women take over, or lurk there in the background, with their emotionalising. Oh, wait a minute.

Andrews may have a point here and there, seemingly over-utilised to support her own personal crusade.

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#4

“Interesting isn’t it how “pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women” but the hairy ten stone trans woman (sic) in your demarcated changing room does not. Sure, several decades passed, but it suggests the author has a damn good point.”

Ha ha well expressed - but if there is a point it is yours not Andrews’; she doesn’t mention any transgender issues. Probably for a very good reason; it would negate her argument as the cancel culture around trans issues is as powerful as any around, but can hardly be attributed to female 'empathy - it operates against women in general.

But is it true that women don’t find the new found intimacy with male bodies discomfiting? I think the reality is that most of the victims of the hostile envirnoments in both cases - biological women - are fearful of speaking out.
In fact the two scenarios have a lot in common, if you allow for the effects of time. In days mostly gone by when pinups were normalised, women would avoid the backlash from complaining, whereas nowadays have more confidence in expressing there concerns in legitimate and accepted terms, like the degradation, objectification and sexualisation of women, and the dreaded…rape culture.

But in the case of the hairy trans woman (I don’t want to be weightist :slight_smile: ) women can’t speak out. We know eg from covid that fear rules workplaces, and women have been wrongfooted by the transplantation of men into their essential being, the new, powerful abstraction of transphobia and the cancel culture constructed around it trumping some of their long-fought gains in social equality. Even high profile figures like Graham Linehan and JK Rowling were rocked by it; however their public profile eventually giving women confidence to organise and complain, the reminder that women do in fact exist leading to some notable legal reversals.

Agree about academia…and Trump…the puppeteers are in the background. Thanks for the book rec.

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#5

Thank you, I had hoped to convey by this the glaring omissions in her article. But you’ve put it much much better.

I sense that mainstream feminists (and I would assume that must mean nearly all women, if they have their eyes open) do indeed owe thanks to Linehan, Sydney the jeans woman whose name I’ve forgotten, Rowling, even Rosie the Canterbury MP, for kicking back at some personal cost to the identity fetishists.

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