Over the past week, there’s been plenty of discussion about Helen Andrews’s essay “The Great Feminization.” I’ll return to her argument in full another time. For now, let me make one brief observation about something she only mentions in passing—something I believe is crucial.
For roughly two centuries, the Western world has been shaped—or depending on the moment, ruled and sometimes tyrannized—by women’s movements. But there have always been two of them.
The first was conservative, pro-family, and moralistic. It sought to preserve what each generation understood as traditional virtue. Its most dramatic expression was America’s Prohibition movement, but the pattern runs deeper: nearly every traditionalist cause has been, at its core, female. Women organized it, funded it, managed it, and ensured that the men who fronted it behaved as responsible leaders—responsible meaning, of course, in line with what the women expected of them.
The second was emancipatory and feminist—the suffragettes, the activists, the theorists of liberation. Sometimes they asked for reasonable things, sometimes for absurd ones, but either way, they became an accepted feature of Western civilization, especially among intellectual elites.
The question, then, is why the balance shifted.
Why did the emancipatory feminism become mainstream while the conservative feminism was pushed to the margins?
There are many explanations, but the decisive one is economic. The institutions that now dominate our civilization no longer need the virtues of the workshop or the factory floor. They need the virtues of the office—virtues that, in practice, mean feminine behavior.
Once, the beating heart of the economy was the industrial enterprise. Its core product was a tangible good. Banks and financial houses existed to serve those who built and produced.
Today, under the regime now collapsing, the center of gravity is reversed. The key institution is the bank or the investment fund, and its core product is profit itself.
Factories and firms exist only to serve the production of money.
Is this just wordplay? Hardly.
Imagine two companies. One produces an excellent product but earns little. The other sells junk but turns a handsome profit. Which one survives? Which one dies? The answer tells you everything about our age.
The so-called service economy rests on vast bureaucratic structures—environments that thrive on female-coded behavior: pleasantness, compliance, emotional management, and a quiet willingness to report on one’s peers. No engineers, no warriors required. In such a world, feminism becomes an ally, not an enemy. Once you no longer need builders or fighters, masculinity itself becomes toxic.
Is this an exaggeration? Perhaps—but it’s also a pattern as old as the West.
- They helped the Bolsheviks rise, and it got out of hand.
- We backed Hitler to stop the Bolsheviks, and that got out of hand.
- We nurtured the neo-Marxists to neutralize the workers’ Marxists—and that too escaped control.
- In between came the jihadists, the radical ecologists, and now the gender revolution.
It would be almost uncharacteristic of us if this one didn’t get out of hand too.