October 22, 2025 edition
Last Friday I spoke with Helen Andrews about her mega-viral article for Compact The Great Feminization. Normally this would be paywalled for the first week, but I’m making it available to everyone right away.
I have some additional thoughts, too.
Helen Andrews’s essay The Great Feminization, which posits that the phenomenon we often call “wokeness” is an extension of feminine social norms into institutions that were historically male-dominated, has been the talk of the internet since it was posted on Compact on October 16. Responses range from rapturous to rebuking.
The way I see it, Andrews’s thesis amounts to one of those universally acknowledged, if also unprovable, truths that makes the internet tear its hair out. In lieu of verifiable statistics, we have a mountain of anecdotal evidence (aka lived experience) that amounts to a volcanic eruption of, well . . vibes. But, hey, there’s a lot to be said for vibes. In other words, I believe Andrews is very much onto something, even if there’s not enough hard data to make an airtight argument. (Though this paper by the University of Pennsylvania’s Cory Clark may help.)
As you may know, I’ve been banging on about the downstream deleteriousness of third and fourth-wave feminism for more than a decade. I published an entire book about it in 2019 and, for two years, co-hosted a podcast that was essentially devoted to pointing out the fallacies of “if women ran the world, there would be no war” logic. (Our very name, A Special Place in Hell, referred to Madeleine Albright’s famous—and widely borrowed and misattributed—quote that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.)
I’m probably Andrews’s ideal reader, so during our conversation, I tried to keep my biases in check and engage with some of the critiques against her. Nevertheless, listeners may notice that I did not invoke the name Donald Trump or address the obvious point that the supposed proliferation of “female-coded” social norms exists alongside an extremely “male-coded” government body that is increasingly authoritarian. That’s to say nothing of the redpill industrial complex of bro podcasters, manosphere influencers, and anonymous X trolls with Greek statues for avatars.
Why didn’t I go there? Honestly, it just seemed too obvious. I had an hour with Andrews. Playing the “but what about Trump?” game would have been as big a time waster as playing the game that goes “but what about all the women who do not embody stereotypically female traits—or all the men who do?” Okay, what about them? As Andrews emphasizes, she’s interested in looking at averages, not outliers. And as I say at one point, the kinds of women who tend to be interested in these questions are likely to be exceptions to the very rules they’re pointing to.
As for Trump and his mega-brand of MAGA masculinity, I would argue that it’s less a counterpoint to the great feminization than a direct result of it. Boorish male tendencies cannot be blamed on female ascendancy, of course—they’ve been with us forever. But the popularization, monetization, and overt political weaponization of those tendencies—the Trump effect, the Rogan effect, the Andrew Tate effect, and so on—speak to something more recent. It turns out there’s a big audience for thumbing your nose at the HR lady.
Enjoy the interview and please share your thoughts in the comments.
Guest Bio:
Helen Andrews is a former senior editor at The American Conservative and the author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Her article The Great Feminization was published in Compact Magazine on October 16.
Housekeeping
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