The Morality Pageant

On Helen Andrews’ Feminization piece

Yes I do have a constructive vision in mind, which I will write at a later time. For now, please enjoy this critical essay.

Every time I think the anti-woke stuff is wearing out its welcome, another piece appears to exemplify the healthy and growing appetite for the more punitive expressions of the Right. Still, it’s shocking to see people praise Helen Andrews’ feminization essay as “seminal” or “necessary” in any way given how thoroughly this territory has already been mined. Lomez has been writing about the same topic (the Longhouse) for conservative outlets since at least 2023, and was interviewed by Ross Douthat for the New York Times earlier this year; Helen is hardly the lone “truth-telling” woman, either: Anna Khachiyan routinely mocks female emotion as narcissism, and Allie Beth Stuckey—again on Interesting Times—has been crusading against what she calls “toxic empathy.” Each repeats the same refrain: that women are manipulative, sentimental, and prone to weaponizing their tears.

I hardly need to explain why this discourse is so attractive right now. Add up enough years of virtue signaling and, of course, the pendulum will swing the other way. I was there for the pussyhats. The HR voice. The hollow empathy and the crocodile tears of late stage Obama-era liberalism and the echos of it in Biden’s promises. It was excruciating. I get it. We should be wary of the distortions of the siren scold. But scold I will, when the baby is once again being thrown out with the bathwater in the name of “hard truths.” The Right has developed a fetish for cruelty masquerading as honesty these days, doubly so when it comes from a woman¹. Rather than building a constructive vision for the future, they seem determined to heap coals on the flaming bonfire of the gender war, the same war they blame for our plummeting birth rate.

That isn’t even my main gripe. The problem is much more severe. Overemphasizing the excesses of woke culture and then attributing them to “feminization” contributes to the most malignant spiritual disease of our day: the erasure of moral language. We all saw “cancel culture” trickle down to the masses, but what’s happening now is subtler and more insidious. These totems of the culture war have become metaphysical - they shape not just our politics, but our personal sense of what goodness and truth mean.

Andrews’ core claim that modern work culture has become “feminized,” casts men as rational, hierarchical and productive, and women as emotional, egalitarian and indulgent: enforcers of so-called “therapy culture.” Again, she is responding to something real: performative sensitivity and draconian, mandated “empathy” are known forms of bureaucratic control. I hate tone-policing as much as the next girlboss, but she makes a crucial mistake in treating the sheep’s clothing as the wolf itself. If what’s wrong with our culture is too much empathy, and empathy is coded feminine, then femininity itself - women - must be unserious.

Her argument rests on the unspoken assumption that moral judgment is a masculine virtue. To Andrews, empathy (girlish, frilled) clouds reason (chiseled, plain) and creates an organizational - yea, civilizational - liability. In her world, only the cold and rational man can be trusted with Truth. Yet moral intuition depends on feeling: the raw data of moral cognition. Emotion is the starting point of judgment and something that has always been accessible to both men and women. Indignation, awe, remorse, and yes, empathy - all these gut-level feelings are what make moral reasoning possible. When that capacity is simultaneously gendered and discredited, it is not only the moral agency of women that suffers, but moral knowledge itself.

Both the Right and Left have shoehorned gender into metaphysical dimensions it was never meant to occupy, attributing reason to men and feeling to women, exalting or pathologizing either one according to the agenda du jour to such an extreme degree that we have been left with nothing less than a dense moral fog. This mode yields a Nietzschean outcome regardless of who is in charge or how they got there, a world where all morality is performance whether through cruelty masquerading as truth or domination hiding behind compassion. It is a deeply cynical portrait of reality, one in which only power can answer to power.

In Andrews’ case, her fantasy of restoring a bygone hierarchy to the workplace by treating feminine emotion as a liability (and what else could be her endgame, aside from lobotomizing all women and suspending them in a vat of testosterone?) only serves to further abolish and degrade moral order. This posture flattens morality itself into aesthetic preference, indistinguishable from the moral relativism she claims to reject.

The rest is predictable. Quick are the banshees to run screaming, stomping and flattening the fabric of reality and dismissing all forms of feeling on their face. Lomez mythologizes the same story as Andrews, describing a social matriarchy that represses healthy masculinity and enforces emotional coercion. Khachiyan — that pale imitation of Paglia — joins in by tirelessly mocking all expressions of female emotion or care as narcissistic display, and Stuckey paints over it with a thin veneer of theological self-righteousness, warning that empathy can become “toxic” if it overrides “truth.” At least it’s better, right? No more mommy corporation, no more fingerwagging chinless schoolmarms telling you what to do, coddling, lulling you into estrogenized mediocrity. No more of that. Just the cold, bracing Truth.

It’s all the same story: once softness becomes moralized as decline, emotional austerity can be the only vehicle for truth. Years in, thanks to the Take Economy, truth can only be truth when it’s dressed in the harshest language possible. Harshness is the only thing that cuts through the fog, the only way to prove you aren’t like the others, the only way to show you know what’s what. For a truth to pierce in the anti-woke sphere, it must pierce indeed. It must cut right to the heart and wound and slice up all that soft flesh, and if you die, all the better. Survival of the fittest. The endpoint is cruelty, just as it was for performative empathy. Power is the only truth. Sincerity is suspect. Redemption exists in neither world.

1. How thrilling to be the first! The first real woman. A woman who speaks hard truths. Who sees things clearly. A woman with the mind of a man.