About that "cancel culture" article
There's a flurry of bad takes from a session at the NatC conference and a following essay. This will make you lose faith in humanity
Stop me if you've seen this, but at the NatC (pronounced: 'Nazi') conference, Helen Andrews had a fiery session on how Feminism is destroying the workplace. As Karen Cox [1] leads off with:
This Compact Magazine essay by Helen Andrews has gotten a lot of positive attention on the Right Wing lately. Here is a thoughtful critique, here is one less intelligent, and here is one so stupid it’ll make readers brains hurt. Andrews is a well-compensated recipient of Wingnut Welfare, having been an editor at both The American Conservative and The Washington Examiner.
You can go read that This Compact essay, and if I know my audience, you will be horrified by the drivel she spews.
I will get back to Ms. Cox's treatises later, but I wasn't aware of this particular bit of self-loathing. I mean the Right has long had performative women who debase themselves to make a point, from Anita Bryant and her gay panic in the 70's, and Phyllis Schafly's crusade against her half of the human race to halt the seemingly (at the time) inevitable ratification of the Equal Rights Act (ERA), but this takes the cake.
While I am not going to dive too far into the text of the article that was published in This Compact Magazine, apart from saying that the rise of women in the professional world was likely a mistake, and in some fields, like law, they've been disastrous.
Now, just writing that, I need to take a shower.
The reason for this post is because while I never saw the original recording of Helen's prewsentation at the NatC conference, nor the longer form article on This Compact magazine. But, one morning when I was doing my usual news browsing on the NY Times, I stumbled across this take by David French that triggered my "What the Actual Fuck" response:
From the article by French:
We have met the enemy of civilization, and it’s women.
Not individual women, mind you. Because any given individual woman can possess masculine characteristics. And certainly not homemakers — those are the women who are doing the job they’ve done for millennia, taking care of the family.
No, the challenge to civilization is presented, in the view of Helen Andrews, a writer and editor who served as a senior editor at The American Conservative, by the women who are entering the workplace in such great numbers that they now make up large portions or majorities of their professions. In that case, the supposed feminine commitment to “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition” manifests itself as the dread wokeness and ultimately destroys institutions and professions.
You can almost sense his thoughts. He wants to (partially) agree, but ...
The but is the cack-handed positions that are deeply misogynistic (why is it that a fuck-ton of "conservative" women harbor some almost unbelievably toxic misogyny...) and problematic.
First, it’s yet another contribution to one of the most prominent debates in America — regarding the differences, whatever they are, between men and women and the declining dominance of men in education and the work force.
Second, it scratches some specific itches of the new right, including the desire to return to an imagined American past that was far better than the present along with the relentless impulse to decry the supposed decline of America, one of the new right’s favorite themes, as something that “they” have done to “you.” There are villains in every new right story, and in this case the villains are women, and the crime they commit is … being themselves.
That is almost a solid acknowledgement of his positions, and in this era of the Right flaming anyone who shows even a hint of compassion for the Transgender community. Man, are they hateful to all things female.
He then goes into 8 paragraphs where he talks about how he nods in agreement with this, and it totally fits with his priors.
A big thing was Ms. Andrews' long tirade about how one of the principle differences and shortcomings of women in the workplace is that women are too empathetic, and that makes them particularly unsuited for the business world.
Last pull from Mr. French:
... her position is that the increased representation of women in the government, economy and education is a “potential threat to civilization.”
That’s a big claim, and big claims require compelling evidence. As I read Andrews’s essay, I was struck by two thoughts: She doesn’t understand men, and she doesn’t understand the past.
It’s difficult to overstate how much she idealizes men and disparages women. This is very consistent with a new-right culture that has responded to anti-male extremes of the far left with a manosphere that glories in male strength and aggression.
Yeah, she's a c-word, and David French is bummed that her fucked up reasoning sours his take.
The Bulwark weighs in ...
Not to be outdone by David French, two writers at The Bulwark decided to wade in. First is Cathy Young[2].
Her take is predictable:
It’s not that women are bad, says Andrews; but their distinct qualities and values—“empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”—transform these institutions in ruinous ways. Let too many women flock to academia, and we get touchy-feely stuff instead of “open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.” Too many women in journalism spell the decline of “prickly individualists” willing to brave public disapproval. (Other, that is, than Andrews herself, who is careful to inform the reader that she’s not like other girls: she has “a lot of disagreeable opinions” and is not down with a “conflict-averse and consensus-driven” culture.) Business? Goodbye, “swashbuckling spirit”; hello, “feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy.” Worse, Andrews frets, “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” And culture-wide, the triumph of girl power means the never-ending tyranny of “woke.”
That is a decent summary of Ms. Andrews article.
She notes that while the article is largely egregious in its misogyny (the good thing about this post is I am typing "misogyny" often enough that I no longer have to think about the spelling when typing it...)
This doesn’t mean that the patterns Andrews alleges have no basis in reality whatsoever. But it’s instructive to compare her piece with a just-published article by another source she cites: psychologist Cory Clark, currently a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (and a member of the “heterodox” academic subculture). Clark’s article raises somewhat similar points about the possible negative effects of women’s greater tendency toward harm aversion and preference for equity over other values. However, it does so in a nuanced and thoughtful way, while also pointing out the positives and arguing that good institutions should incorporate both male and female strengths. One may question some of the generalizations, but Clark, at least, acknowledges that the differences she discusses are often minor and that the question of nature vs. nurture is far from settled.
Like French, Ms. Young wants to identify that women are more empathetic, and conflict adverse, and that is no bueno in business and politics.
I really can't even with this.
Anyhow, not enough to talk about it by Cathy Young on The Bulwark, founder Mona Charen had to weigh in.
Mona is one of the people that when I do click on one of her articles, I cone away feeling dumber.
Mona, like Phyllis Schafly before her, is a fairly garden-variety self-loathing Conservative woman, who has been a successful rightwing gadfly, lobbing culture war red meat into the ecosystem, and being successful whilst bashing her half of the human race. (She literally wrote a column for The Bulwark about how it was liberal policies that led to a generation of lost men, and that toxic masculinity is not only not bad, but needed, because how will we fight and win wars without roided out men? Yeah, she's fucking gross)
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.
I really got nothing to say. Sure, she does get around to saying that her misogyny is not helpful, but that she (Andrews) has some solit points.
Just fucking kill me...
The better take(s)
As I mentioned at the top of the post, Karen Cox, a lawyer (and an actual professional woman) has some thoughts. She conveyed them in two posts, linked below. Do read both, and in order, to get a better idea of what Helen Andrews said and how fucking insane it was, read these.
First is about "evidence" and why the NatC session and article fails at any reading of the word "evidence":
Before I get into the meat of my argument, I need to make a small digression and answer the question ‘What Is Evidence?’ The answer to that obvious depends first on the parameters of the proposition being proven, but a good general definition comes from the Federal Rules of Evidence Rule 104:
> Evidence is relevant if:
> (a) it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence; and
> (b) the fact is of consequence in determining the action.
That isn't too hard to understand, but it seems to be beyond the comprehension of evidence:
Her two specific examples of victims of ‘cancel culture’ are Larry Summers and Bari Weiss. Summer’s ‘cancellation’ inspired the blog post Andrews linked, and we learn that he got fired from his position as President of Harvard University only to become a hedge fund multimillionaire and then an advisor to Barak Obama. Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times because people were, in Weiss’s version, unwelcoming to her. Weiss then founded The Free Press on Substack and is now the head of CBS News. We should all get canceled like that. Neither Summers nor Weiss suffered much of any harm and certainly nothing serious.
So, what do these two examples tell us about what ‘cancelation’ means? The one thing Summers and Weiss both experienced was harsh and even sometimes unfair criticism. People said mean things about them. Some of those mean things were factually correct. Given that Andrews thinks women will sacrifice accuracy for empathy and avoiding hurt feelings, the fact that she uses two people whose only consequence was getting their feelings hurt does not really support her case
This whole post is just gold, but the crux of her analysis of Ms. Andrews' point is:
Andrews does cite extensively Dr. Joyce Benenson, a Harvard professor who studies sex differences in chimpanzees. I didn’t read the book Andrews cites, but I do think it’s reasonable to question whether Benenson’s work is uniquely applicable to the questions Andrews poses. In either a scholarly paper or legal brief, Andrews would have to distinguish critiques of Benenson’s work from the works of other scholars or experts and provide evidence supporting the claim that Benenson’s conclusions should control the issue being discussed. That doesn’t happen. Andrews cites Benenson as though Berenson is the only person researching this question. One question Andrews never considers is whether the observations that cites from Benenson have any explanation other than unalterable biology.
So, since we can dismiss her definition of ‘cancel culture’ and her ‘evidence,’ is there anything in her policy recommendations worth considering? Of course not.
Andrews’ biggest policy recommendation is found at the end of her essay: she wants to see ‘disparate impact lawsuits banned. Actually, that is my paraphrase of her argument. What she actually states is that she wants women removed from the legal profession entirely
The links below are astounding, and if you don't read any of the up front posts, I highly recommend Karen's 'stack.
Karen
Karen
But not only Karen has solid takes. The Atlantic also published a great article by Sophie Gilbert: "No, Women Aren't the Problem" (gift link)
This long paragraph is stunning:
“The Great Feminization” catastrophizes wildly about the future, presumably because what’s happening in the present utterly undermines its central thesis. Eighty-five percent of Republicans in Congress are men. From January to August, an estimated 212,000 women left the American workforce while 44,000 men gained jobs; Black women are being disproportionately—perhaps even intentionally—excised from the federal workforce. According to a new assessment from The Ankler, only four of the top 100 American films in 2025 so far have been directed or co-directed by women. Democrats are currently so desperate for strong male role models to promote as candidates that they’re all tangled up over whether a burly Maine oysterman’s Nazi-symbol tattoo is defensible. As for emotions run wild, Cabinet members brawl in public like rhesus monkeys on HGH: In September, the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, reportedly told the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, Bill Pulte, “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face,” because Bessent heard Pulte had been talking to Trump about him behind his back. (The anecdote slightly refutes Andrews’s argument that men “wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.”) Also in September, the “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, summoned all of the nation’s generals to Washington and gave an erratic lecture about facial hair and implementing a “male standard” for combat roles. In April, a Fox News chyron called Trump’s tariffs “manly” as a roundtable discussed whether they might even be able to reverse the crisis of masculinity, presumably by making soybean farmers so poor that they have to join ICE for the signing bonus.
Back to the fuckery: Ross Douthat beclowns himself in the NY Times.
Staff fart-sniffer, and rad-trad Catholic, Ross Douthat[3], decided that he hadto get in on that action. He invited Helen Andrews on his NY-Times overly-slick podcast to discuss her serious treatise (gah, that hurts to type). Here's a link to it (gifted). I can't listen to this drivel, and I gave up on the transcript, but the comments are pretty solid:
Kelly is on to something here...
Karen es en fuego!
The key point here by Veritas is:
It did not become mandatory to believe all women. It became mandatory to take allegations from women seriously, which warrants further investigation when previously, they were discarded in an HR bin as someone who was causing trouble. This is problematic when there is a power discrepancy i.e. boss and subordinate.
Amen!
That's all folks!
I could go on and on (and on), but this is already nearly 2,900 words.
If you got to here, go give Karen's Substack "A Feminist Changes a Lightbulb" a view and a subscribe.
1 - Her stack, A Feminist Changes a Lightbulb, is just awesome. Please go subscribe, che doesn't take money, and she writes DAGGERS...
2 - Cathy Young was a hire to cover/opine on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She's a typical libertarian, and she seems to want to play the role of a modern Ayn Rand.
3 - Wonder how to pronounce Ross' last name: "douche-hat"
