The Feminization of Politics
Emotion... Over Justice and Rightness and Logic
Some thoughts on Judge Reyes’s trans-focused court opinion, local ‘leaders’ in Florida debating ICE training for their police, the outbreak of anti-Musk and anti-Tesla hysteria, standardized tests, criminal sentencing guidelines, and a few other things, which may seem unrelated but are not.
When I refer to the ‘feminization’ of politics (or society, or the workplace) I’m referring to a movement towards subjective perspectives, feelings-based worldviews, and the protection of self-esteem and psychological comfort. It’s a movement away from logic, and rules, and competition. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it, and I see it everywhere.
Last year I wrote about the maternal and the paternal orientations and their applications in society:
The paternal orientation values achievement. It creates standards (high ones, if possible) and then expects people to live up to them-or pay the costs. It demands logical evidence for arguments and tends to support free speech and value-neutral policies. It is concerned with establishing rules, and following them. It demands standards of behavior and punishment for violation of those standards. It takes inequality and suffering and offense as unavoidable aspect of life which have no bearing on the rules. The rules are written to help society: build, defend, compete, thrive. This is a muscular orientation which leaves feelings to be managed by the individual and does not try to ameliorate inequality to make people feel better or to increase fairness, although it might do it help society build and thrive. Capitalism, logic, modern warfare, the criminal justice system pre-1970’s, are all paternal models.
The maternal orientation values unconditional love. It wants to help people. It wants to support them and protect them from the slings and arrows of the world. It tends to regard everyone as equally precious and regards differences in outcome as lack of support or investment rather than deficiencies in talent or application. It wants to forgive miscreants and tends to believe that everyone is basically good and can demonstrate that, if only they’re given the right outlets. It’s less concerned with achievement and is suspicious of competition (especially physical competition). It abhors aggression. It regards communication as an opportunity to bring people together and wants to preclude and restrict words and ideas which hurt people’s feelings. It NEVER wants people to feel left out. It truly is ‘inclusive’. It defaults to society and circumstances as explanations for life outcomes. The progressive mindset, a lot of pedagogical theory, equity, and Critical Theory are all maternal models.
A feminized standardized testing apparatus (for example) would carve out multiple accommodations and set asides for different identities of test-taker (ignoring the fact that the accommodations blur and distort the starting line, which is the basis for all useful social competition). It would offer counseling to poor performers. Ultimately it would seek to elide the entire concept of standardized testing, with its bell curves and outliers and its bountiful social rewards. It is more important for the test-takers to feel comfortable and to erase any advantage or inordinate reward under the feminized scheme. In the older (traditional, masculine) conception the test has rules, and the rules should be equal. Some will succeed and some will fail. THAT is the utility of the test: discerning who’s better at taking such tests and who’s not. If a person is a slow reader or has bad eyesight or some cognitive deficiency that is not a handicap to be erased by accommodations, in the traditional picture. Those are precisely the things (as well as other weaknesses) that the test is designed to illuminate! Your score is your score. Curiously, the feminized cosmology tends to gravitate towards hyper-socialization and unwieldy bureaucracies and extensive programs (to help the stragglers and assuage people’s feelings and to address a hundred different adjacent issues) but it is an infinitely individualistic orientation. The individual’s feelings and comfort and sense of fairness are everything. The traditional cosmology is more collectivist in its aims. Tests exist to show society who’s smarter or a better reader (or a better guesser) than others, and the individual’s experience and sense of ease is completely irrelevant.
A feminized criminal justice system would go to great lengths to factor in the various identity categories and trauma markers and psychological diagnoses of defendants. It would demonstrate a marked tendency to identify reasons and mitigating factors for offenses, whereas the traditional criminal justice philosophy is less interested in such questions. Did you rob someone? Then society must impose a punishment, even if your life has been fraught and sad and difficult. Even if you’re a Native American in Canada. Even if you’re trans, or brown, in Great Britian. You committed a crime and now you must bear the consequences, because any other outcome weakens the entire edifice of social meanings and incentives that we’ve constructed. For the collective good of the group, and for the benefit of public safety you must be punished, to preclude the possibility of re-offense and to deter other potential offenders. Feminized systems would shrink from imposing uniform punishments for crimes, and would tend to give offenders extra chances. It would turn towards victim-offender programs and inpatient treatments.
Meanwhile, femininized criminal justice might turn to its real concerns: thoughts and feelings and ideas. Robbing or beating someone might be treated with some leniency (depending on the offender, and the circumstances-is he deserving of sympathy?), but expressing ‘hate’ will not. Neither will right-wing organizing. In this new and spreading scheme feelings become the guide for legal operation: if lawyers and judges are angry, punishments will be levied. If they feel sorry for the defendant penalties will (mostly) be withheld. This is now, in many courtrooms. the guiding conception in Canada, and Ireland, and Great Britain, and Germany, and elsewhere.
As I said, I see these kinds of changes everywhere. They seem to correspond with the interests and values of other cultural changes, with the organizational interests of our bureaucratized society, and with our increasingly isolated and subjective realities.
This might be an element of ‘just so’ reasoning, but I think that men needed functional teams in which weakness was a major liability. If you couldn’t keep up you lost status, and possibly your life. Conflicts were solved by open competition and physical aggression and so they were solved quickly and directly (also a premium when teamwork was required). Rules and reality were important when you were contending with a dangerous world. Feelings and impressions only matter in a small bubble of social safety, which has expanded to encompass much of the world. Women existed in a different social context, in which everyone participated, in every activity, and so group cohesion was more important than efficacy. Without the need for or inclination toward physical conflict, social aggression and coalition-building and gossiping proliferated. When you add the decisively established general female preference for interests in ‘people’ (relationships, expressions, characters, drama), and the male preference for ‘things’ (machines, logical systems, weapons, vehicle, objects, instruments) a picture begins to form.
I have the curious sense of regarding a completely alien viewpoint when I consider the school administrators whose overriding concern is to accommodate every test-taker to their utmost ability, or the therapist who wishes to validate and affirm the viewpoints and impulses of her patient, or the judge overcome with a treacly concern for the antisocial youth standing before her. These situations seem so simple to me: life is hard, there are rules, and if you break the rules you need to pay the cost or society stops working. There are benefits available, but you must accomplish the growth before you get the benefits, regardless of where you started out or what happened to you. In my view there is simply no other way to run a society. Within that arrangement there is room for concern and empathy and outreach and assistance… but not at the expense of the rules. If you dilute the rules the whole incentive structure comes down, manipulated by people who always want easier ways forward and lighter sentences and more money (rarely to their benefit). I see every punishment and burden and failure as an opportunity to learn and grow, whereas many other people (mostly women) simply see harsh impositions.
It’s difficult for me to tell how much of feminization actually relates to females themselves. I don’t think there’s any doubt that men are generally more comfortable with logical systems and women with interpersonal ones, that men tend to be more favorable toward the idea of value-neutral free speech policies, whereas women tend to lean towards banning ‘harmful’ and ‘hateful’ speech. I see evidence for these bimodal psychological and social tendencies everywhere, in my experience and in the data. It’s quite possible that what I call ‘feminization’ is actually the byproduct of a more comfortable, safe, psychologically fragile, and neurotic civilization. It’s equally possible that these changes are being driven by our movement towards a more safetyist and bureaucratized and managed society-that is, that the organizational pressures are such that courts and colleges and social welfare agencies and corporations are incentivized to focus more on our feelings and our comfort as a way to generate work for themselves and protect their continued existence and growth.
Most of the ‘nonbinary’ respondents are also women, it should be said…
I imagine that all of these trends contribute to one another. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the increasing representation (majority, in many cases) of women in the leadership of schools and hospitals and police departments and federal agencies has qualitatively shifted the culture in these organizations. It should be noted that I only see these changes moving in one direction (which is why I’ve taken to writing about this trend more and more). Our society continues to promote women (as a group) at the expense of men (as a group) as these tendencies continue to become more pronounced. Are the two changes connected? I can’t say, but they’re both happening. They’re both moving in a similar direction, in concert.
And, when the most absurd and flagrant examples of the feminization trend are displayed by individuals, they usually happen to be women.
Case Study: Fort Myers City Council
Few things are more frustrating than trying intently to communicate with another person… and failing. Usually there’s some issue of phrasing or miscommunication or presumption at play. Another possible factor is emotion.
In the clip below, three City Council members voted against a memorandum agreement which would allow city police to receive training from ICE, and to detain immigrants under ICE warrants. It should be noted that this proposal wouldn’t lead to any extra scrutiny of migrants-it would simply result in police knowing what to do in the event that an arrestee turned out to be illegal, and to begin the steps to contact ICE.
The clip below is from the final minutes of the deliberation period. Women in the room, including city councillors, are weeping, unaware of how distasteful (and, frankly, frightening) that might be to city residents. Listen to their statements: “I [am] the only immigrant sitting in this council”; “I can’t stand this”; “This is a day I hate to be in this seat.” It’s all emotion and melodrama. It is multiple elected officials, unselfconsciously focusing purely on their feelings, ignoring the circumstances in front of them.
"It was a little bit embarrassing. I think when we’re sitting on the dais, there really shouldn’t be room for emotions, because when we get emotional over things, we don’t always make the best decisions. We need to be strong, and we need to use facts and truth and information to make our decisions and not feelings of emotion."
-Fort Myers Mayor Kevin Anderson, speaking about the City Council meeting
I don’t think there’s any doubt: these women were simply overcome at the idea of police being mean to immigrants. The fact that the only people affected would already be under arrest for suspicion of other crimes mattered not a whit. The abstract metrics of the program, the costs and the benefits and the legal duties of the city government? Ignored.
Perhaps there is a clip out there of men behaving in this way in some municipal government, but this particular instance happens to involve women. “My city is not for sale,” Council member Darla Bonk says, dramatically (and nonsensically).
These are the people which have been selected by voters to lead-to deliberate and choose the path forward, given difficult circumstances and challenges. Could any of them actually demonstrate real leadership? To make a decision she didn’t like but knew was best? I doubt it. When feelings are your guide, evidence, logic, and rules fade into the background.
Note: the memorandum was passed the next week, after people had been given a little time to process their emotions
Case Study: Judge Ana Reyes
District Court Judge Ana Reyes ordered President Trump to reinstate transgender personnel affected by his recent executive order.
All day long I read court opinions (at work). They’re usually quite dense, and formulaic, marshalling precedents and citations and working their way through systematic chains of reasoning. There was absolutely none of that in this opinion. It’s quite astonishing.
Everything in this judicial decision is entirely specious, of course. The only question is whether the president has the power to make this decision (along with the Secretary of Defense). OF COURSE they do, regardless of what Judge Reyes (with her extensive combat experience) thinks about it. Of course, her reasoning would suddenly pivot in the opposite direction if the situation was a conservative judge blocking the executive integration of trans people into the military. In that situation, the executive powers granted to the executive under the Constitution would suddenly become very important.
A legal system run on feelings isn’t a legal system at all.
None of this relates to the question at hand remotely, of course. An argument CAN be made that women diminish military readiness, at least in many roles. Ditto for gay people, at least before the successful gay rights movements of the 1980’s and 1990’s.
“Crickets from Defendants”? Seriously? I read about another judge who quoted Taylor Swift lyrics in his decision recently. Remarkably, this individual was a man-at least technically.
There are a million possible reasons why transgender people would degrade unit readiness. Do they require unusual or additional medical support? Do they have specific physical and psychological concerns? Do they change unit dynamics, as people of different genders always must? Are they particularly susceptible to certain pathologies? Do they tend to buckle under stress at slightly higher rates than non-transgender people?
The truth is that the military has, for several years now, talked out of both sides of its mouth on this issue. If transphobia is a salient social concern, if trans people need to be expressly validated, if pronouns must be stated and correctly used, if any hostility shown towards trans people individually or the concepts of gender ideology in general is harmful then the existence of trans people in the military degrades military readiness.
Military readiness is less about any individual’s skills or tendencies, and more about the team environment. Outliers can be weeded out, but the team is everything. That’s an idea that is probably foreign to Judge Reyes. Essentially, she thinks that trans people are good for the military because she feels that they are, and because any indication that they (or women, or pregnant women, or even sex workers probably) might not be is a possibility foreclosed by her ideological prejudices.
These are the kinds of people who imposed these policies from the top-down, with almost no demand from the NCO corps or warrior trainers. Now they seek to consolidate it (to reverse its abolition) using the same reasoning, and the same arrogant disregard of the actual experiences (the “lived experience” if you will) of military officers. Why not poll infantry company commanders, anonymously? See if they think trans people would be a net positive or negative for their rifle companies? Of course they’ll never do this. They already know the truth (they feel it, so strongly). Now all that’s left is to impose it on the rest of us.
Addendum: Judge Patricia Millett
During a review of the rushed deportation of gang members, Obama-appointed Judge Millett said
“There were planeloads of people. There were no procedures in place to notify people. Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemy Act than has happened here.”
I’m not sure exactly what the Judge was referring to here but I think it’s pretty obvious she used the term ‘Nazi’ to dramatize the situation. It certainly doesn’t introduce any interesting legal or historical information. It seems that, again, the Judge is feeling indignant and angry and is venting emotions in her official role, regardless of whether she has legitimate basis to weigh in on these decisions or any right to impede them. Of course she will try to stop President Trump! She feels really angry about what’s going on. Those feelings will guide her actions and beliefs, and jurisprudence and logic won’t be allowed to intrude.
Undoubtedly… but why should an appeals court judge ever be making this kind of observation from the bench? She feels this way-that’s why.
Case Study: Musk Derangement Syndrome, and the ‘Do Something!’ Reflex
If one wants to find evidence of a growing emotions-centered political style, a disregard for rules and evidentiary standards, and the increased tendency to seek psychological fulfillment (rather than policy changes or legislative victories) in the political process you could do no better than the messy and inchoate rage against Elon Musk.
Let’s retrospect a bit, first. Remember the season of ‘joy’ before the election? Remember the Harris campaign, that strange exhibit of class alienation? Remember ‘vibes’? Remember all of the nervous Democratic strategists trying to point out the serious reservations that ordinary people had about educational stratification and class privilege and the tidal wave of dysfunction and violence which was the Biden immigration policy?
My caption at this time:
It’s not working, and Harris is 100% the meme. I’m beginning to believe that Kamala Harris was assembled out of platitudes and classism and pure political ambition, like a Golem of the managerial class, brought to life in some dark ritual. Whichever necromancers executed the spell forgot to throw ‘policy knowledge’ and ‘authenticity’ into the pot though. Good for memes! Bad for elections.
It turns out when you base your political messaging and strategy upon feelings you achieve a suboptimal outcome. I only wish we could apply this reasoning to educational policy and criminal justice and mental healthcare (for the claim surely applies to those areas as well).
We now have large numbers (pluralities, according to many polls) of Democrats wishing that, in the context of the federal budget negotiations, Chuck Schumer would have done something (even if it meant temporarily crippling the Blob, which is the entire motivating animus for the party these days). They feel this way because they feel this way-there’s no acknowledgement of costs or consequences or tactical reality anywhere near these expressions.
Jasmine Crockett doing her best ‘hood’ impression. Congresswoman Crockett is running entirely on feelings at this point.
Then there are the many, many people embarrassing themselves and putting themselves in legal jeopardy because Musk has become the explicit enemy of the Blob, self-appointed ‘Slayer of Leviathan.’
Do these people understand the intricacies of agency spending or the implications of Musk’s review and Trump’s changes? No, none of them do. But that’s irrelevant! They are angry. That anger is their reality, and it twists and dodges any contrary fact or awkward new piece of data.
Reddit is full of posers and cowards, but the emotions are authentic.
When you feel something so strongly, doubt and consideration (and communication) go out the window.
there seems a sudden uptick in violence, rage outs, extreme positions and actions, and a general “losing of the plot” going on in the last few weeks.
it seemed to coalesce out of nowhere. but it didn’t.
it’s a recursive dogmatic worldview losing traction and imploding into a bed of pre-bunking and pre-preparation for precisely this.
for a great many people who have been isolated in a great many echo chambers, the bumpy part of re-entry to reality is starting and the self appointed "moral majority" coming to terms with the fact that it was never either of those things is going to cause mass scale breakage.
you can see how out of control this spirals and how each new mirror or encounter with reality just sets of the next surge into wild new persecution theater and savior complex to justify actual violence and to project what’s going on in the desperate swirling of one’s own mind onto one’s enemies.
Of course, many of these people are men. Many of these changes similarly have little to do with women, their outlooks or values. Those observations are irrelevant to my point. This is a collective social change, and it’s sweeping along everyone. The issue is that we now live in a qualitatively different society-one in which feelings and impulses and instincts are gratified and affirmed, one in which people rely for their jobs and services on vast, feminized bureaucracies which minister to social pathologies and mental health problems and medical/educational needs using their own bizarre and diffuse playbooks (and which rarely perform their central functions well or solve any serious problems). Of course people feel emotional! Of course emotion is driving policymakers and voters at every level! Of course the old systems of general fairness and logic and governmental restraint have been thrown out the window. They’re no longer useful or wanted. The administration must decide, in every case, for every situation. Rules and standards are simply too simple, too uncompromising. The place we’re moving toward now validates every discomfort and resentment you have, erects a bureaucracy to minister to it, feeds you incomplete and emotionally compelling facts to serve its purposes and build its narratives, and works to erode the old principles of discussion and responsibility and restraint. Feelings are an excellent source of fuel to stimulate progressive change, and they’re an excellent opportunity to redefine social and psychological issues and expand the reach of the Blob.
Welcome to the feminization of American politics.
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A one-time friend of mine has for decades been jabbering about "the goddess" and the lost "feminine" in spiritual circles. We now have a society that worships Baphomet and the punishment is coming unless Trump can turn things around.
Good differentiation between masculine and feminine tendencies. Obviously at present our society has swung too far to the feminine ones. Both perspectives are necessary but there can't be an imbalance in either direction or society won't function well.