Patriarchy Sucks. So Does The Emerging 'Matriarchy'.

"The Great Feminization" illustrates why women shouldn't run everything, either. What we need now is a Great Social Integration, led by us Normies.

Photo by August de Richelieu on Pexels

My friend Sam called me a few weeks ago. “You know Roberta So-and-So, right?” he asked.

Yes, I told him, we’re connected on Facebook, but I haven’t talked to her in years. Sam wanted to vent. It seems our Ontario premier in all his buttheaded glory wanted to end rent control and Roberta, ever the progressive activist, posted that the working class should launch a day-long strike.

Sam agreed completely with her dislike for the housing proposal, but pointed out that a strike simply wasn’t feasible for many working class people—like immigrants who would lose their status if they didn’t work. Or dog walkers—doggies gotta exercise and poo, even during hurricanes. Or au pairs—children, same thing. Or people who depend on whatever peanuts they’re paid and couldn’t afford a self-imposed day off. Or to get fired.

Roberta didn’t like the challenge. She got a little snippy with him.

Sam invited me to review the exchange. He’d kept it polite but called out her rudeness as well as her illogic. She accused him of ‘mansplaining’ to the ‘silly little girl’. I’ve known Sam for about fifteen years or more and he’s a good debater. He quotes facts and sources and can be sarcastic sometimes but he’s no mansplainer, ever.

“Did you point out how she’s speaking from a position of privilege?” I giggled. The housing proposal (now tabled) would adversely affect Roberta, a self-employed artist, and her partner, an actor, but they can both arrange their schedules to include a strike.

When I returned to the thread to make sure I was attributing Roberta’s words accurately, I found all the comments removed.

Roberta had played the pouty child and whined ‘misogyny’ at someone who merely observed her lack of situation consideration in a public forum—then erased the evidence. Her immature reaction was oh-so-woke: Getting mad, playing the victim, and shutting down the conversation.

All hail the Matriarchy?

Just earlier that day I’d read Helen Andrews’s viral essay for Compact, The Great Feminization. She argues that women’s success in breaking several glass ceilings are the cause of wokeness, that it’s the result of female social and relational dynamics subsuming formerly male cultures.

She notes that once sex parity occurs in a culture, the imbalance flips. The men leave, she speculates, because they don’t like a dominant culture that treats them as the enemy and complains to HR if they make a rude joke or state a controversial opinion. Men will talk over each other, bust on each other, and self-promote in a way that women aren’t socialized to do. Women, she says, introduce themselves and then proceed with the business at hand, guided by the female dynamics of consensus and cooperation. It’s not that either style is bad, they’re different, and both exist for good reasons. You don’t bring an olive branch to a knife fight, for example, and you do, in fact, catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Andrews doesn’t believe women are simply outperforming men to explain the new lopsided F2M disparity; she credits, instead, affirmative action and DEI; ‘the thumb on the scale’.

Andrews’s connection between wokeness and female psychology isn’t new; it emerged in non-woke forums for the last couple of years. I disagree with her that female dominance is the reason why wokeness arose, although she’s correct that it maps in the same direction. I think it’s one, rather than the reason.

She has a point about the ‘thumb on the scale’; DEI panders to increasingly deteriorating ‘marginalization’ and has introduced real doubt about certain suspiciously woke-candidate public figures, but there’s no question women are also rising because of genuine competence, motivation and ability. It’s hard to blame DEI when men don’t enroll in university as much as they once had, or come to class as much, or drop out more often. Women graduate with impressive degrees and run businesses because many men have ceded the glass ceiling to play video games and and worship Nick Fuentes.

Women are also running the show at college campus protests, which, love them or hate them, are early hands-on lessons in leadership, which will carry into the world beyond.

I certainly understand why men wouldn’t want to attend classes with hostile chickie-boos who collectively shout down anyone without a pre-approved progressive opinion, but men have been falling aside also of their own accord.

No snowflakes, please!

Andrews’s article is one piece of the complex puzzle surrounding the rise of wokeness, rather than, as she assumes, the sole explanation. Especially as we watch the rise of the clearly male-dominated woke right.

The connection between wokeness and the now-obvious female characteristics—gossip, ostracism, inclusivity, non-offense, and a Nazi-like devotion to agreeableness—is so glaring I’m surprised I never noticed it myself. I, who was subjected to so much female toxicity in school.

On then-Twitter, it was hard to know who you were actually engaging with in a faceless anonymous world. The LGBTQ gang blurred the lines further and you never knew which cyberbullies were male or female between the ears, where it really counts. Now it seems clear, biological women have been leading that Charge of the Indict Brigade.

Other writers have argued similarly. The serious chill on free speech, the authoritarian desire to coerce agreement, the obsession with inclusion for anyone except conscientious objectors, the love affair with hurting rivals via ostracism—that’s eighth-grade girly crap, inside and out. Can I borrow your sparkly unicorn lip gloss?

We normies don’t want to see a matriarchy replace the patriarchy. I’d much rather explore how we can now dial it back a bit and make it safe for men and their style, too. What could we accomplish if we weren’t so busy fighting over ‘sex parity’ in a way that would sound stupid if we suggested ‘eye color parity’?

A failed experiment

I explored how men and women can combine the best of their strengths earlier this year in Better DEI Will Teach Women How To Handle Conflict With Male Employees. I argued that women aren’t taught properly how to handle conflict like adults, and that if a woman has a problem with a male colleague, she needs to bring it up with him first, rather than drag HR or the U.S. Supreme Court into it.

If thousands of years of patriarchy is a bad idea, so, clearly, is the emerging Matriarchy. I already feel oppressed by woke progressive women and their panting male lapdogs, and it’s only been fifteen years so far. I absolutely, positively, cannot abide another 11,985 years of this bitchy high school shit.

What can we do to teach males and females to treat each other as respected colleagues rather than chromosome-based enemies?

I’ve found various exercises that can be incorporated into the workplace, activist groups, academia, and elsewhere to foster better communication methods and reduce interpretive friction. Like taking a workplace statement, “The project deadline needs to be moved up,” and take feedback on what participants think was said. Was the person frustrated? Blaming? Withholding information? Another exercise forces people to shift from blaming and accusing language to focus on why something needs to change, without, I hope, putting too much emphasis on feelings, of which there’s already too much. (Thanks, ladies. Not.)

Another confronts the assumption that one’s preferred style on how to handle a particular decision—a restaurant or a picnic in the park for the annual company summer social?—or whether meetings are best held in person or on zoom—to force participants to understand others’ differing approaches and to consider ideas that aren’t necessarily their own. Others focus on collaborative problem-solving, and handling conflicts, like two demands for an employee for the same time.

The exercises don’t address male and female work or communication styles specifically, but still challenge certain gender-related habits and styles, and to temper one’s inclinations that don’t foster greater collaboration (like the notion that one’s opinion is superior or that we always need to arrive at a group consensus, which often actually means others aren’t satisfied but assent just to get the hell out of the meeting).

I think it’s good to push women to stand up for themselves more, say, with salary negotiations. It’s good to expect men to consider others’ feelings, to contemplate the impact of a given action on others. We can debate and discuss, but sometimes, consensus rather than arbitrary rule is the best way. It’s good that men take risks; it’s good that women point out how many people might get hurt if a particularly risky plan goes awry.

The Great Feminization screams for a course correction. Its companion wokeness, as one writer argues, poisons at a very young age. With it now on the chopping block, powerful men and women can change imbalanced policies and force recalibration of existing toxic workplace styles to offer more adult conflict management and resolution. I hope one day to see the HR ‘profession’ eliminated entirely. Or simply devoted to finding the best corporate insurance plan.

With DEI largely purged from decent society (yes, thank you, Donald Trump), the world may one day become safe again for grownups.

What This Country Needs Is An Enema—And It’s Getting One

Men needed First Wave feminism to recognize how difficult paternalism and mindless sexism was for the other half. Today complacent entitled women need a similar bottom blaze. If we’re strong enough and genuinely good enough to make partner or lead a project team to build something new, we’re strong enough to conquer our own humophobia, and understand the difference between mean-spirited jokes and humor that builds camaraderie by making it okay for all of us to laugh.

Helen Andrews made some good points, although some are a little weak (feminization won’t destroy Western civilization), and a few of her critics haven’t effectively rebutted her either. As the future’s female leaders leave the cossetted campus environment and encounter the Real World, it will be critically important that we un-teach the negative and counterproductive thought patterns and beliefs they learned at school, and remake them with a new workplace style more inclusive than they would have tolerated back at Harvard U.

We’re the Normies. We’re the true progessives, seeking human, not gendered, progress. United we stand.

While I pin the the ‘No Woke’ and ‘Politically Homeless’ buttons I ordered online to all my coats and jackets, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.