The Great Feminization Fight

Femina a Femina with Helen Andrews for the NYT

Ross Douthat hosted Helen Andrews and me on Interesting Times to discuss her “The Great Feminization” and my The Dignity of Dependence.

Helen and I both make the claim that our culture (and our law) neglects real asymmetries between men and women. For Helen, the key asymmetry is about the social dynamics of predominantly male and female groups and the distinctive vices she thinks female-majority groups are vulnerable to.

She is blunt about what she sees as the stakes. In her essay, she wrote:

All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

I, obviously, disagree strongly. I do think there’s a neglected asymmetry, but it’s not about vice. It’s about women’s physical exposure to the dependency of others in pregnancy. And, although the orientation toward childbearing is an absolute distinction between the sexes, dependence, more broadly is not. As I say on the pod:

Douthat: Absolutely, you can have fulfillment and validation outside the work force. Nonetheless, it is the case that lots and lots of women graduate college every year and enter willingly into the system, and the structure that you’re arguing is hostile to their nature and biology, to some degree. Not completely, right?

Sargeant: What I was going to say is: I think it’s hostile to yours, too, Ross, because you are a human being who will one day die. And what I claim, at the most basic, is that when we start our idea of the human person as someone who’s autonomous, who’s free to do things, who’s unconstrained by other people’s needs, that women get caught first as being people, not autonomous individuals. Men get caught later.

Douthat: Right. But it hits women first and hardest.

That means Helen and I are interested in very different solutions. She aims to roll back “hostile working environment” protections, and hopes an authentically, uninhibitedly masculine space will both favor truth seeking and filter out a lot of women who prefer status games.

I want to have a workplace and a culture that is as serious about the material reality of workers as of your factory feedstock:

Sargeant: In any kind of truth-seeking work, you have to be realistic about the materials that you work with. Like, SpaceX — deeply rooted in truth about its materials, cares a lot about exactly what this steel can take, what will happen to this particular part of the heat shield.

But I think many employers and workplaces are not interested in the reality of the materials of the human beings they work with. And there is something unjust about building a system that chews people up and then tosses them on the scrap heap, or chews up their fertile years, promising them egg freezing and ignoring the fact that tends not to pan out, but by the time that happens, they won’t be working there anymore — it’ll be their problem, not yours.

So what does it mean as a steward of your employees? It means being realistic that people are fragile. They have other people who depend on them. They themselves can get sick, injured, pregnant, and a responsive work force will have ways of responding in justice to that.

For me, the core problems I have with Helen’s argument is a different kind of asymmetry. She has a lot to say about female vice, a little about male vice, and a lot more to say about the kind of male excellence that she think women obstruct.

That leaves an obvious gap: Is there such a thing as female virtue?

If I had one goal for this conversation, it was getting a clear answer from her on this point. You can jump to 48:30 here to see exactly how that went. Here’s how it starts:

Andrews: Before I answer that question: It’s a little bit feminine, honestly, to focus on my likes and dislikes ——

Sargeant: I’m not asking about your likes or dislikes ——

Andrews: I don’t write about myself ——

Sargeant: I don’t care about ——

Andrews: I write about the world ——

Sargeant: I’m not asking about ——

Andrews: And I am telling you that when I look at the world, I do not see any institutions that are currently suffering from an excess or insufficient feminization.

Sargeant: Helen, I don’t care about your likes and dislikes because that’s not what I found compelling about your portrait of risk, which we both value as a genuine virtue, not a matter of preference, like chocolate or vanilla.

Do you think there are objective virtues for women in the same way you think there are objective, primatology-based vices for women?

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I’m interested what you all make of it, and whether our debate managed to be a counterexample to this claim of Helen’s:

Men have the concept of an honorable enemy. Men can engage in conflict with an opponent and still respect them. When the conflict is over, they’ll shake the other guy’s hand and accept the outcome gracefully.

Women don’t have that. If you’re her enemy, you are subhuman garbage. No rules govern the fight; no shaking hands when it’s over. It is never over.

She took my hand when I offered it.