Ross Douthat Somehow Not Worst Person On 'Did Women Ruin Everything Ever?' Panel

Meet Helen Andrews.

You know, I wasn’t going to write anything about that “The Great Feminization” article that has been making the “Oh God, can you believe this shit?” rounds for the last month or so. I read it. I read the whole damn thing and then decided that it was just too stupid to even address.

If you haven’t read it, the gist of it is that its author, Helen Andrews, believes that the presence of women in various professions is going to lead to the absolute ruin of society.

But this week, I saw, in The New York Times, an article titled “Did liberal feminism ruin the workplace?” with Ross Douthat’s byline attached. It was part of his “Interesting Times” series. An hour long discussion with our gal Helen and Leah Libresco Sargeant, identified as a “conservative feminist.”

Fine. You got me, Helen. Let’s do this.

I watched the whole thing. And then, craving more punishment, I guess, I watched a video of Andrews being interviewed by Meghan Daum, the memoirist who later became a weird “anti-woke” scold. And one thing I can tell you is that Helen Andrews is so far off the reservation that she made these folks sound like the voices of reason, compassion, and progress.

Another thing I can tell you is that Helen Andrews does not have many good female friends. Her perception of “what women are like” makes her sound exactly like an angry male incel who spends far more time in his head stewing about how awful women are than actually interacting with any.

---

---

According to Andrews, male virtues and vices are what propel things like innovation, success, and progress, thus making the world a better place for all involved. These virtues and vices include things like risk-taking, truth-seeking, being able to have a fight and then immediately make up afterwards without holding any grudges, not avoiding conflict, being competitive, taking criticism, bonding by acting like frat boys, being physically strong, being rational …

Actually, now that I am writing this, I am not wholly sure she’s engaged with that many men, either. Or that she’s aware of who the president is. In fact, I suspect her entire understanding of gendered characteristics may have been derived from a little number from My Fair Lady.

Anyway! As David fucking French of all people pointed out in his response to her essay in The New York Times, it is “difficult to overstate how much she idealizes men and disparages women.”

Women, you see, prioritize “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” We engage in gossip and backbiting, we’d rather talk amongst ourselves about our hopes and dreams rather than do actual work, we are averse to conflict and will go off the deep end sobbing if anyone critiques our performance, we are emotionally manipulative and are 87 other flavors of stupid and terrible. And we are an invasive species that has come into workplaces, “feminized them” and dimmed the light of all of these glorious male virtues (and even vices), often even filing hostile work environment lawsuits because of them.

OH. And by “feminizing” these workspaces, we prompted what she calls “The Great Awokening” — about which she can’t specifically say what she thought was bad. The best she could come up with was that it’s bad to prioritize people’s feelings over the progress of various institutions and that #MeToo was bad because we all demanded that people “believe all women” in cases of sexual assault.

To be clear, no one ever actually asked that of anyone, and the “all” was added by conservatives looking to discredit the movement. What “believe women” meant was that women are not lying about the fact that sexual harassment and assault are a problem in society that far too many of us experience, and that when a woman tells you, on a personal level, that she has been sexually assaulted, to not immediately assume she is guilty of lying, like you would with any other kind of story about anything else.

Is this the kind of rationality and truth-seeking Andrews thinks society is losing out on? The kind where you hear one small bit of what other people think or believe and then extrapolate your own distorted version of what that must mean?

But let’s get back to how we have ruined the workplace. From what I’ve gathered, she is mad that:

• Men in sales can’t even have push-up contests anymore

• James Damore was fired from Google just for saying, in a company-wide email, that women were bad at STEM, and that the worst part of that was that it opened the company up to lawsuits because women could point to that as an example of a hostile work environment.

• Companies are constantly hiring and promoting unqualified women over qualified men because they don’t want sex discrimination lawsuits.

• Bosses can’t critique their employees’ work anymore because it will hurt their feelings.

• More women are becoming lawyers, and lady lawyers don’t care about truth or the rule of law and only care about people’s feelings, and will thus throw all the men in prison without due process, just like they threw men off college campuses for sexual assault.

• There are more women entering academia and psychology than there are men doing so, and that’s going to harm those institutions because, again, we don’t care about truth, only people’s feelings.

• More female veterinarians means the corporatization of veterinarians because men are risk-takers who will start their own veterinary businesses, while ladies just want to work for someone. Not, you know, because women have a harder time getting business loans or because literally all things that were formerly small businesses are being corporatized.

• McCarthyism was not an example of men behaving the way women did, because loyalty oaths were just a time-saving measure letting people know “this fella is not a communist, so you don’t have to investigate him!” Because that is exactly how the whole Red Scare worked. (She suggested they not get her started on “McCarthy did nothing wrong.”)

• Male vices, like sexual harassment and not caring how things make other people feel, are things people can file a lawsuit over, but no one can file a lawsuit over female vices, like gossip and backstabbing (I’m pretty sure people have filed a lot of lawsuits related to gossiping).

I could go on. We’re pretty terrible! However, I do think my favorite thing that we are going to ruin in the future is history — and wait til you hear why!

On the other hand, the fact that certain areas of inquiry are ruled out of bounds in history or in psychology now because they are too controversial, that — which is what wokeness is — seems like a genuine problem. That’s not just that feminization has caused some changes, and some of them are good and some of them are bad, and we all need to learn how to live with the world being different now — that’s a bad thing, because it involves history or psychology not doing what it is supposed to do, which is pursue the truth.

She did not give an example, although I would like to point out that no, this is not what “wokeness” is. “Wokeness” means “awareness.” The only people I see pushing to ignore truth in history are the conservatives who don’t want kids to know about racism or anything that makes white people or men look bad. The only people I see demanding that psychology not progress are conservatives who want to pretend that trans people do not exist.

In her essay, she wrote:

The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

Again, I am starting to believe that her understanding of gendered differences is not based on actual interactions with other people so much as 1930s screwball comedies.

In the discussion with Douthat, Leah Sargeant asked Andrews if there were any female virtues, or ways in which women make any institutions better. Andrews snapped back, saying that it was just like a woman to ask her about what she “liked” about women, but that her essay wasn’t about that, so if Sargeant wanted an essay on that she can just write it herself.

In the interview with Daum, Andrews is especially pointed about the fact that, while this is what other girls are like, she’s not like the other girls. She’s disagreeable and is just one of the rare women out there who can “hit with the boys,” who can “compete with the best of them.” Because like the menfolk, she is truth-seeking.

Also in the interview with Daum, Andrews brought up a landmark sex discrimination case in which a woman who worked at a shipyard sued her employer for creating a hostile work environment, because her male co-workers put up pictures of “pinups.” In that conversation, she was very clear that she thought the woman was in the wrong, that the whole idea of a hostile work environment was wrong, that men need to do “fratty” things in order to “build the bonds of brotherhood” and it is simply not our place to question that. She tried to do the same in the conversation with Douthat, but it didn’t work because Sargeant, to her credit, had actually read about the case.

What you’re glossing as a pinup was multiple photos of completely naked women in close-up. The woman had sexist graffiti, and one of her male co-workers thrust his leg in between her legs.

Is there a little bit of rowdiness to men? Yes. But I think it’s actually unfair to men to sweep that kind of pervasive nudity and specific sexist language and physical grabbing as just part of broad male vices that we need more space for in the work force. And I don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as “she didn’t like the pinups.”

Andrews, rather than sticking to her “and the oversensitive woman wouldn’t even let the blue collar men have their jokes or their saucy pictures of Betty Grable in a bikini!” guns, immediately reversed course and claimed that she was using it as an example of the kind of thing that was actually worth suing over.

This is why I am establishing a spectrum of masculine behavior, and I am using that case as my anchor out at one end as the kind of behavior we can all agree, sure, OK, yes, by all means, that should be grounds for a lawsuit.

Such truth-telling. Not like those other women who are scared of conflict and of being disagreeable.

---

---

I did watch one other video of Andrews — one in which her libertarian ex-boyfriend shared that the reason she opposed Obamacare was because it would “ameliorate suffering,” which she viewed as a good, character-building thing and that she said if she were in charge, the first thing she’d do was legalize assault so men would get into more fist fights or “at least live under the threat.” He also called her out for saying she wanted to set people up on dates and then try to seduce the man away in order to “play with his mind” and hurt the woman.

It … explains a lot.

However, if I’ve learned anything from all of this self-inflicted torture, it is that all we really need to do if we want to turn practically everyone in the nation into a feminist and bleeding heart liberal (or perhaps just an opposer of sweeping generalizations) is simply to have Helen Andrews talk to them.