Helen Andrews’s essay “The Great Feminization” reached my feed on the same day that photos spread of the East Wing of the White House—the space traditionally reserved for the first lady and her staff—reduced to rubble. The spectacle was almost too on the nose: Here was the nexus of women’s (limited) history within the executive branch, once home to Jacqueline Kennedy’s Rose Garden and Laura Bush’s restored movie theater, now totally demolished. Donald Trump has made clear his wishes to put a new ballroom in the East Wing’s place. But his planned additions to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue also include the installation of an Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon for America’s 250th birthday celebration. (The former UFC star Conor McGregor, an Irishman whose Wikipedia subsection for “Rape and Sexual Assault Cases” is 982 words long, was personally hosted by the president in the Oval Office in March.)
So … about that great feminization. Andrews’s thesis, published by the online magazine Compact, is that everything wrong with institutions in America comes down to the growing influence of women. Women, she argues, have implemented “wokeness” across the land, and her evidence for this is the outrage over Larry Summers’s comments about whether women might have less natural aptitude for math and science, which led to his resignation as president of Harvard University in 2006. Her 3,400-word essay seems to assert that wokeness is inherently feminine, prizing “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” and that women—with all our feelings and conflict avoidance—are ruining the nation’s most fundamental institutions. If women continue to make inroads, she argues, adding to the ranks of doctors and lawyers and judges and businesspeople, then the “eruption of insanity in 2020”—by which she means the mass protests and efforts to address racial inequality following the death of George Floyd—“was just a small taste of what the future holds.”
“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 “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.
With respect to Andrews, in the midst of all this—the testosterone-addled executive branch, but also the supplicant legislative and compromised judiciary that are bending to its will—her essay comes across as someone watching a tsunami roll over a coastal city and complaining about trash collection. Maybe this particular era, with masked officers (overwhelmingly male, at least as far as anyone can tell from bystander footage) deploying tear gas as families were assembling for a Halloween parade, isn’t the optimal moment to do a head count of the number of women at The New York Times and extrapolate end times for the Age of Reason.
To me, it’s much easier to see that what’s really wrong with American culture right now is the slow-drip infusion of toxic masculinity it’s been receiving since 2016, the year of the “Grab ’em by the pussy” leak, and “Trump that bitch,” and “Such a nasty woman.” It certainly requires less cherry-picking, less abstract philosophical hand-wringing. The political reality in 2025 is that our government is as stereotypically masculine as a dick-measuring contest in a weight room, as in thrall to performative aggression as an illegal cage fight. Outside of politics, in what stands for culture, America’s favorite national pastimes seem to be gambling, weed, gaming, and Joe Rogan. Women still read more than men do, but inevitably get scolded when they do—by Compact magazine!—for not giving enough attention to the “vanishing white male writer.”
The fact that Andrews’s arguments are selective and not backed up by evidence hasn’t bothered her primary audience, whom she must have known would jump on any opportunity to blame American decline on women. More than 200,000 people have watched the original speech that inspired the essay, “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture,” which Andrews delivered at the National Conservatism Conference on September 2. (For what it’s worth, 89 percent of its speakers were men.) On X, people who’d only recently been calling for the Cracker Barrel CEO to be fired after the chain’s attempt at a modernized logo rebrand celebrated Andrews’s piece, with its bold acknowledgment that men are predisposed to “reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace.” (Cancellation is apparently feminine—just don’t tell that to J. D. Vance, who urged citizens to try to get people fired for criticizing Charlie Kirk after his assassination.) There was particular approval for Andrews’s zingy observation that “women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.” Which, to me at least, actually makes sense! Because one has historically incubated rape culture and hierarchical violence while the other tries to foster independent thinking and self-expression via finger paints.
Much of “The Great Feminization” is drawn from an anonymous 2019 blog post theorizing that the increased participation of women in public life had led to an insufferable “shift away from reason and logic in American public discourse.” Andrews is particularly worried about the law: “All of us depend on a functioning legal system,” she writes, “and to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” I’d counter that it might, but we likely won’t find out, given that it seems fated not to survive past next month what with the pardoning of people financially involved with the Trump family, the targeting of political enemies with amateurish lawsuits, and the extrajudicial killings of dozens of people off the coast of Venezuela. Maybe a “feminized legal system,” as Andrews writes, would end up prioritizing squishy empathy over starchy precedent, but it’s hard to make that argument when precedent itself has already been so thoroughly steamrolled.
Andrews wants us to know that she’s not opposed to women, per se. “The problem,” she writes, “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 many major institutions.”
This is an assertion so bold and so unproven that it made me gasp. For thousands of years, men in power have been responsible for catastrophe after genocide after unnatural disaster. If you wanted, you could blame masculinity for these atrocities and deduce in turn that perhaps prizing fundamental rights and the inviolable humanity of other people isn’t such a terrible concept. Andrews doesn’t propose any policy suggestions or alternatives to the Great Feminization, presumably because, as Matthew Yglesias has written, the only viable solution would be “widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying.” (Nevertheless, Project 2025 is doing its best.)
Better, then, to plant the seed in people’s minds for what would really be necessary rather than say it directly and face the consequences. She might call that kind of aversion stereotypically feminine. I’d call it craven.
