It struck me as odd that when you pressed her on the specific facts of the pinup case, she pivoted and said that, essentially, that was her "extreme" example on the one side of the spectrum, when she discussed it first dismissively as though the sensitivity of the female employee was representative. Relatedly, the push up example is so myopic - it's not just women who would be shut out of that sort of workplace nonsense, so would your 40-year, $650 per hour law partner, or your brilliant colleague in a wheelchair. It's not just whiny women who would have a basis for objecting to that...? (Which is the whole point of your book, which I'm loving!)
I think the female virtues discussion was, as you suggest, a paradigmatic example of the kind of inability to have a direct conversation that allegedly plagues female spaces on her part. She could have just popped out a list of "female virtues" (which, considering the piece and its fallout, you would think she would have at the ready), but instead insinuated that you just projected onto her piece, deflected, and tried to move on. She doesn't seem to have an answer, so it became "your problem" - good on you for pressing the point.
Regarding the law in general, Andrews seems to have had no extended contact with female lawyers in real life. She certainly has not witnessed a female prosecutor nail someone to the wall, or a male defense attorney dismiss his client's abhorrent behavior. Andrew's whole argument seems to just come down to characterization - the dismissive male defense attorney isn't engaging in the "female vice" of prioritizing equity or mercy over justice, he is strategically maximizing his best facts for the purposes of winning the case, all characteristically male activities. A female defense attorney, however, is throwing the rule of law to the wind...
Thank you for giving a working mom a book full of language to hand to people when I start to spew about how motherhood has changed how I see the world!!
Yeah it's a pet peeve of mine when people shift tack in arguments without acknowledging that they're doing so, and without explicitly conceding when they're admitting they were wrong about something. It would have been so much better if she'd said: "OK fair enough, maybe that example wasn't the best one for me to pick to illustrate excessive feminization of office spaces, as it was pretty extreme, and was rightly the subject of litigation. Nevertheless..."
The pivot made no sense because that's not how she cites the article in the piece:
"Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized. A landmark case in 1991 found that pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women, and that principle has grown to encompass many forms of masculine conduct."
Right? It's so important as a tactic too, because now in addition to disagreeing with Andrews, I'm suspicious of any characterization of rates of lawsuits, examples to support her argument, etc.
What universe is she living in where the law isn’t already “feminized”? My state’s Supreme Court has a 6-1 female to male gender ratio and has been at least majority female most of the 21st century. The Court of Appeals is not as heavily tilted but it’s still majority female, and I’d say the trial courts are at or close to gender parity. If this shift in gender was going to have an impact on jurisprudence it would have already. And while I haven’t done any specific research on how men and women’s judicial opinions differ, I’ve done a shit ton of normal legal research and it’s not like there’s a sharp dividing line or even any noticeable change from say the 70s when all judicial opinions were written by men to now when it’s as likely as not that they’ll be written by women. The idea that we’d be facing some sort of crisis if we let women write their opinions into law is both flagrantly offensive and some 30-40 years out of touch.
Here’s an example of a case that if Andrews’ thesis is to be believed, would send American jurisprudence down the toilet. It’s six female justices and one male deciding the extent to which the coercion defense applies when a woman who’s been a victim of domestic violence commits a crime to escape from her abuser. In other words, it’s six women deciding whether to validate another woman’s fear of a man, and whether to overturn the ruling of a male judge who didn’t. Somehow all of their delicate lady brains managed to approach the law logically and coherently, and didn’t hand down a decision that said “you know what gals? Go nuts!”
And it didn’t even break down along ideological lines either! It was three conservatives and three liberals voting against the ideological center of the court. With three typically defense-friendly liberal feminist justices voting against an unusually sympathetic defendant!
That's an excellent counter example! I agree that, especially at the state and local level, you would think the hypothetical chaos would have begun by now. There has already been a generation or two of passionate female public defenders appointed to the bench, and nothing is burning down. Poorly written headlines about cases in the 5th and 9th Circuit or at SCOTUS do not an industry trend make...
This is also all looking at the law just from the criminal/courtroom side - I would be hard pressed to think that the female 1Ls in the law school class of 2016 that went into large M&A firms will grow into partners who put aside client interest and fees/contingencies for the sake of empathy, or however Andrews would characterize it. Those lawyers were joining advocacy firms to begin with...?
The law is certainly a world/industry that runs on status, but even assuming all the faults of women Andrews assumes, women can play that game just as well as men.
You can’t be a good transactional attorney without empathy. You need to understand how your counterparty sees things, what they’re trying to achieve, what they value, what will piss them off and make them dig their heels in, especially how they see you. If you charge in with an excess of the “masculine virtue” of competitiveness, you’re going to miss opportunities for a positive sum interaction
Ooh yes!! And how can a prosecutor make wise charging decisions without empathy for the victim and the potential defendant? How can a defense attorney do their job at all without it? Anyone counseling a client through a mediation for any reason needs it- she just doesn’t know lawyers or the industry, or knows such a cherry picked sample to be meaningless.
It was fascinating listening, and I loved how you didn't let her off the hook on female virtue. Tough and gracious. I enjoyed reading her long piece, but I wish I could avoid wondering what it is that motivates her frustration, which seems to be present in much of her work and untethered to the basic arguments she is making.
Your comment about the system being unfair ultimately to both women and men because humans must die made me cry. Thank you for this. That's the heart of it.
Honestly, all respect to Helen, but her aim here seems to be to simply genderize certain cultural phenomenon ("triumph of the therapeutic" so to speak) that have been observed for decades long before women started making up large percentages of the professional workplace. Christopher Lasch's writings had a moment with conservatives from like 2017-2019 but it went away, largely I think, because when you really dive into his thinking and writings he is very critical of how conservatives have responded to these trends. Feels like Helen is re-packaging similar thoughts, but flattening them into a women vs men lens which is easier to digest for the more cultural warrior oriented wing of today's conservative movement.
Listened to it this morning. Good debate! The handshake comment strikes me as odd — has she never watched a women’s soccer match? We always shake hands at the end. We respect our “enemies”. Same in the workplace: I have female “rivals” and that are also dear friends. Their excellence inspires me to be excellent. No simmering distaste here. I both compete with them and totally admire them.
Yeah I find that sort of thing paradigmatic of the whole weakness of her argument. It just doesn't strike me as true, at all, in any way, and this is so strongly and obviously and even *trivially* the case that it just makes me question every other thing she wrote. Reading something like that, I just can't fail to wonder "has she even ever met another woman? what's going on here?".
Ah, so there's a reasonable minimum case: there are certain vices the women tend to, which are not the same that men tend to, and that hegemonic numbers of women in certain traditionally male-dominated fields undermines the integrity of those fields because the vices women tend to undermine those fields.
However, Helen is making the much more extreme claim that virtues and vices are themselves gendered.
The unstated implication is that men ought only to pursue manly virtue and woman only to pursue womanly virtue. Your pushback is to interrogate if Helen has a fully realized account of gendered virtue, or whether she believes the old idea that the virtuous woman is a masculine woman.
Fascinating. Thanks for engaging this (and in real time, not on X).
Where have these ideas of gendered virtues come from? In the Christian tradition, men and women alike are called to have the courage to take up their crosses and follow Christ, as well as cultivating all the fruit of the spirit which many might call feminized virtues. It seems to me that it stems the a pagan tendency to sexualize everything that Christianity specifically counters.
Abigail Favale has done good work on this, by the way.
Unfortunately, I think many in Christian culture are being drawn back into this thinking as a way to rescue the idea that there are genuine differences between men and women. This seems to be the wrong way to go about it. It’s reactionary.
Even in the minimum case you are arguing, the big fault I find is that it's a smaller percentage of women entering a field that triggers this allegation of "undermining the integrity". You might remember earlier this year when Mark Zuckerberg was complaining that there's not enough "masculine energy" in corporate jobs? Facebook's workforce is 63% male (as of 2023; this might have changed a bit but its fair to say it's more or less around this now). Either he's ignorant of this fact, or - and this is more likely - even having a minority percentage of women is too much for some people.
This podcast shook me and another good friend - we both are digging for more, and you likely will generate a dozen book sales just from me and my bookclub (which you are totally invited to attend now)
From my perspective as an academic philosopher, the discussion of “female virtue/vice” and “male virtue/vice” seemed to me to suffer from a basic error: the failure to distinguish between the virtues themselves and the contexts of their exercise. Gender roles (whether you think they are grounded in or dependent on sex or not) obviously shape how we exercise the virtues. But so do our age, our professions, our family relationships, and so on; all of these are cross-cutting, which makes singling out any one of them somewhat artificial. Spending quite so much time discussing “female virtue/vice” and “male virtue/vice” seems to miss the more essential point that virtues and vices are human qualities that belong to us insofar as we are human. I take it, Leah, that that’s in part the point you were making when you raised fortitude as one such dimension of good character. But I would go further and simply reject the premise, just as Socrates does in Plato’s Meno, that there are any such things as female or male virtues or vices in any interesting or illuminating sense. Looking cross-culturally and cross-temporally shows you that human variation is much more interesting than that.
It was a tremendous counterexample. I’m not well versed in your work, so I’m not as famiiar with your overall feminism, but I’m glad you wrote this.
I don’t necessarily believe that virtues and vices can be either masculine or feminine. But what I did notice is that when you demonstrated the (as defined within the conversation) masculine virtue of directness and clarity, neither Helen nor Ross was comfortable with you stepping into that role.
I think the problem I encountered and that I have seen is that when some people in the workplace encounter a colleague who displays virtues they culturally associate with another gender, those virtues are taken as vice. Voilà the shining armor.
I believe Ross and Helen are both missing the fact that virtues and vices are customary, not inherent. Their concept of virtue is tied to their Roman Catholic descendency which ascribes these virtues by sex, with a focus on childbearing driven by merit of the same expansionist attitudes.
What they are reacting to is, in my opinion, an apparently newly-found need to adapt one’s personal cultural perspectives to suit an increasingly multicultural workplace. Sometimes referred to as white backlash, but it maps to cultural gender norms as well.
I was raised in the Roman Catholic church in Canada myself. I’m descended from les Filles du Roi. Our story is one of strictly enforced childbearing roles that were designed intentionally to colonize New France.
What Quebec did right (in my opinion) after the sexual revolution was to create tax credit incentives and childcare programs designed to continue to encourage childbirth while also respecting individual autonomy.
Helen did not acquit herself well. She could not for the life of her answer your very simple question. And bobbed and weaved when you rightfully pressed her. Very revealing!
I think it goes beyond that; Helen Andrews treats feminization as a kind of deadly disease carried by women, who must be held back from most organized activities for the good of civilization.
Oooh! I watched from the section where you asked her about female virtue & stayed through the end -- definitely would like to watch/listen to the rest when I get a chance. I have to say I particularly loved this comment of the moderator's" "We're in a society where men & women are not relating successfully." Simple, succinct, and packed w a lot to ponder. (Obviously not true in every case, but broadly? Yeah, I think he has a point.) I love that you made this point: "I think many employers and workplaces are not interested in the reality of the materials of the human beings they work with." This, I think, is a core truth of our society right now and one that is directly contributing to a lot of the discontent, malaise, & anger that we see, and your call to recognize that each of us, as humans, rotates in & out of states of dependence is one we've too long ignored.
I think I see a big, ironic parallel with the conservative evangelical women who build media empires teaching other Christians that women shouldn't teach.
Also, I would characterize myself as a direct feedback-giver and a truth-seeker...does that make me masculinized? These [Andrews's] kinds of arguments about feminization have always made me question whether I'm the wrong kind of woman or naturally bad at being a woman, and I have been holding in snarky remarks about it for what feels like ever. It's in gender frameworks of mutuality, care, and dependence that I have found some freedom to be comfortable with my actual created self, feminine AND non-stereotypical.
...which brings us back to the very beginning of the conversation, with the equivocation on "woman" and "femininity". Pretty much impossible to have a productive discussion w/o shared definitions!
I too have felt that my willingness to argue/discuss/dissect in "masculine ways" makes me not fit in with my own gender and somewhat frightening to a lot of the opposite gender. Frustrating when all I really want is to get at the truth by looking at a question though my own lense and the lenses of other truth seekers!
I haven't watched it yet - I certainly will - but I had an immediate gut reaction against the claim that I, as a woman, can't shake hands and respect my opponent after a disagreement. I most certainly can, and I would argue that such an ability is a virtuous goal, and largely connected to an individual's maturity rather than her sex.
I have disagreements with both, but I respect Ms. Sergeant who can actually hold an intellectual argument. I'm not much interested in Ms. Andrews. That Great Feminization essay was just silly to anyone with an exucation. She claims to want to open up the conversation on that made-for-social-media term, "the Great Feminization", and cant even respond to a pointed question in a friendly conversation. Hell, she's too lazy to even define what she means by "woke" (but we love to pitch that around on the Right, dont we?). Whatever.
Ms. Sergeant is a whole other matter. She has a mind to pay attention to. I will start reading her ideas and listening to her arguments. I have a suspicion though that we will inevitably come to the abortion impasse and that will be that. But for now, I will try to not look down the road too far - which is difficult given how this administration has gutted legal abortion.
So many interesting moments!
It struck me as odd that when you pressed her on the specific facts of the pinup case, she pivoted and said that, essentially, that was her "extreme" example on the one side of the spectrum, when she discussed it first dismissively as though the sensitivity of the female employee was representative. Relatedly, the push up example is so myopic - it's not just women who would be shut out of that sort of workplace nonsense, so would your 40-year, $650 per hour law partner, or your brilliant colleague in a wheelchair. It's not just whiny women who would have a basis for objecting to that...? (Which is the whole point of your book, which I'm loving!)
I think the female virtues discussion was, as you suggest, a paradigmatic example of the kind of inability to have a direct conversation that allegedly plagues female spaces on her part. She could have just popped out a list of "female virtues" (which, considering the piece and its fallout, you would think she would have at the ready), but instead insinuated that you just projected onto her piece, deflected, and tried to move on. She doesn't seem to have an answer, so it became "your problem" - good on you for pressing the point.
Regarding the law in general, Andrews seems to have had no extended contact with female lawyers in real life. She certainly has not witnessed a female prosecutor nail someone to the wall, or a male defense attorney dismiss his client's abhorrent behavior. Andrew's whole argument seems to just come down to characterization - the dismissive male defense attorney isn't engaging in the "female vice" of prioritizing equity or mercy over justice, he is strategically maximizing his best facts for the purposes of winning the case, all characteristically male activities. A female defense attorney, however, is throwing the rule of law to the wind...
Thank you for giving a working mom a book full of language to hand to people when I start to spew about how motherhood has changed how I see the world!!
Yeah it's a pet peeve of mine when people shift tack in arguments without acknowledging that they're doing so, and without explicitly conceding when they're admitting they were wrong about something. It would have been so much better if she'd said: "OK fair enough, maybe that example wasn't the best one for me to pick to illustrate excessive feminization of office spaces, as it was pretty extreme, and was rightly the subject of litigation. Nevertheless..."
The pivot made no sense because that's not how she cites the article in the piece:
"Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized. A landmark case in 1991 found that pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women, and that principle has grown to encompass many forms of masculine conduct."
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/
Right? It's so important as a tactic too, because now in addition to disagreeing with Andrews, I'm suspicious of any characterization of rates of lawsuits, examples to support her argument, etc.
What universe is she living in where the law isn’t already “feminized”? My state’s Supreme Court has a 6-1 female to male gender ratio and has been at least majority female most of the 21st century. The Court of Appeals is not as heavily tilted but it’s still majority female, and I’d say the trial courts are at or close to gender parity. If this shift in gender was going to have an impact on jurisprudence it would have already. And while I haven’t done any specific research on how men and women’s judicial opinions differ, I’ve done a shit ton of normal legal research and it’s not like there’s a sharp dividing line or even any noticeable change from say the 70s when all judicial opinions were written by men to now when it’s as likely as not that they’ll be written by women. The idea that we’d be facing some sort of crisis if we let women write their opinions into law is both flagrantly offensive and some 30-40 years out of touch.
Here’s an example of a case that if Andrews’ thesis is to be believed, would send American jurisprudence down the toilet. It’s six female justices and one male deciding the extent to which the coercion defense applies when a woman who’s been a victim of domestic violence commits a crime to escape from her abuser. In other words, it’s six women deciding whether to validate another woman’s fear of a man, and whether to overturn the ruling of a male judge who didn’t. Somehow all of their delicate lady brains managed to approach the law logically and coherently, and didn’t hand down a decision that said “you know what gals? Go nuts!”
https://law.justia.com/cases/wisconsin/supreme-court/2025/2023ap000874-cr.html
And it didn’t even break down along ideological lines either! It was three conservatives and three liberals voting against the ideological center of the court. With three typically defense-friendly liberal feminist justices voting against an unusually sympathetic defendant!
That's an excellent counter example! I agree that, especially at the state and local level, you would think the hypothetical chaos would have begun by now. There has already been a generation or two of passionate female public defenders appointed to the bench, and nothing is burning down. Poorly written headlines about cases in the 5th and 9th Circuit or at SCOTUS do not an industry trend make...
This is also all looking at the law just from the criminal/courtroom side - I would be hard pressed to think that the female 1Ls in the law school class of 2016 that went into large M&A firms will grow into partners who put aside client interest and fees/contingencies for the sake of empathy, or however Andrews would characterize it. Those lawyers were joining advocacy firms to begin with...?
The law is certainly a world/industry that runs on status, but even assuming all the faults of women Andrews assumes, women can play that game just as well as men.
You can’t be a good transactional attorney without empathy. You need to understand how your counterparty sees things, what they’re trying to achieve, what they value, what will piss them off and make them dig their heels in, especially how they see you. If you charge in with an excess of the “masculine virtue” of competitiveness, you’re going to miss opportunities for a positive sum interaction
Ooh yes!! And how can a prosecutor make wise charging decisions without empathy for the victim and the potential defendant? How can a defense attorney do their job at all without it? Anyone counseling a client through a mediation for any reason needs it- she just doesn’t know lawyers or the industry, or knows such a cherry picked sample to be meaningless.
It was fascinating listening, and I loved how you didn't let her off the hook on female virtue. Tough and gracious. I enjoyed reading her long piece, but I wish I could avoid wondering what it is that motivates her frustration, which seems to be present in much of her work and untethered to the basic arguments she is making.
Your comment about the system being unfair ultimately to both women and men because humans must die made me cry. Thank you for this. That's the heart of it.
This is why I was so glad to do this in person, not on twitter.
Honestly, all respect to Helen, but her aim here seems to be to simply genderize certain cultural phenomenon ("triumph of the therapeutic" so to speak) that have been observed for decades long before women started making up large percentages of the professional workplace. Christopher Lasch's writings had a moment with conservatives from like 2017-2019 but it went away, largely I think, because when you really dive into his thinking and writings he is very critical of how conservatives have responded to these trends. Feels like Helen is re-packaging similar thoughts, but flattening them into a women vs men lens which is easier to digest for the more cultural warrior oriented wing of today's conservative movement.
Totally. I thought she was highlighting real issues. I just don't see them as being issues caused by "feminization".
This is exactly right
Listened to it this morning. Good debate! The handshake comment strikes me as odd — has she never watched a women’s soccer match? We always shake hands at the end. We respect our “enemies”. Same in the workplace: I have female “rivals” and that are also dear friends. Their excellence inspires me to be excellent. No simmering distaste here. I both compete with them and totally admire them.
Yeah I find that sort of thing paradigmatic of the whole weakness of her argument. It just doesn't strike me as true, at all, in any way, and this is so strongly and obviously and even *trivially* the case that it just makes me question every other thing she wrote. Reading something like that, I just can't fail to wonder "has she even ever met another woman? what's going on here?".
Ah, so there's a reasonable minimum case: there are certain vices the women tend to, which are not the same that men tend to, and that hegemonic numbers of women in certain traditionally male-dominated fields undermines the integrity of those fields because the vices women tend to undermine those fields.
However, Helen is making the much more extreme claim that virtues and vices are themselves gendered.
The unstated implication is that men ought only to pursue manly virtue and woman only to pursue womanly virtue. Your pushback is to interrogate if Helen has a fully realized account of gendered virtue, or whether she believes the old idea that the virtuous woman is a masculine woman.
Is that an accurate summary?
Yep, that’s one of the main threads!
Fascinating. Thanks for engaging this (and in real time, not on X).
Where have these ideas of gendered virtues come from? In the Christian tradition, men and women alike are called to have the courage to take up their crosses and follow Christ, as well as cultivating all the fruit of the spirit which many might call feminized virtues. It seems to me that it stems the a pagan tendency to sexualize everything that Christianity specifically counters.
Abigail Favale has done good work on this, by the way.
Unfortunately, I think many in Christian culture are being drawn back into this thinking as a way to rescue the idea that there are genuine differences between men and women. This seems to be the wrong way to go about it. It’s reactionary.
Even in the minimum case you are arguing, the big fault I find is that it's a smaller percentage of women entering a field that triggers this allegation of "undermining the integrity". You might remember earlier this year when Mark Zuckerberg was complaining that there's not enough "masculine energy" in corporate jobs? Facebook's workforce is 63% male (as of 2023; this might have changed a bit but its fair to say it's more or less around this now). Either he's ignorant of this fact, or - and this is more likely - even having a minority percentage of women is too much for some people.
This podcast shook me and another good friend - we both are digging for more, and you likely will generate a dozen book sales just from me and my bookclub (which you are totally invited to attend now)
I’m delighted!
Mic drop at 22:20. 👏
I am very grateful to a female lawyer who flagged the actual facts of the case for me.
From my perspective as an academic philosopher, the discussion of “female virtue/vice” and “male virtue/vice” seemed to me to suffer from a basic error: the failure to distinguish between the virtues themselves and the contexts of their exercise. Gender roles (whether you think they are grounded in or dependent on sex or not) obviously shape how we exercise the virtues. But so do our age, our professions, our family relationships, and so on; all of these are cross-cutting, which makes singling out any one of them somewhat artificial. Spending quite so much time discussing “female virtue/vice” and “male virtue/vice” seems to miss the more essential point that virtues and vices are human qualities that belong to us insofar as we are human. I take it, Leah, that that’s in part the point you were making when you raised fortitude as one such dimension of good character. But I would go further and simply reject the premise, just as Socrates does in Plato’s Meno, that there are any such things as female or male virtues or vices in any interesting or illuminating sense. Looking cross-culturally and cross-temporally shows you that human variation is much more interesting than that.
It was a tremendous counterexample. I’m not well versed in your work, so I’m not as famiiar with your overall feminism, but I’m glad you wrote this.
I don’t necessarily believe that virtues and vices can be either masculine or feminine. But what I did notice is that when you demonstrated the (as defined within the conversation) masculine virtue of directness and clarity, neither Helen nor Ross was comfortable with you stepping into that role.
I think the problem I encountered and that I have seen is that when some people in the workplace encounter a colleague who displays virtues they culturally associate with another gender, those virtues are taken as vice. Voilà the shining armor.
I believe Ross and Helen are both missing the fact that virtues and vices are customary, not inherent. Their concept of virtue is tied to their Roman Catholic descendency which ascribes these virtues by sex, with a focus on childbearing driven by merit of the same expansionist attitudes.
What they are reacting to is, in my opinion, an apparently newly-found need to adapt one’s personal cultural perspectives to suit an increasingly multicultural workplace. Sometimes referred to as white backlash, but it maps to cultural gender norms as well.
Leah is also Catholic, by the way.
Yes! I did note that.
I was raised in the Roman Catholic church in Canada myself. I’m descended from les Filles du Roi. Our story is one of strictly enforced childbearing roles that were designed intentionally to colonize New France.
What Quebec did right (in my opinion) after the sexual revolution was to create tax credit incentives and childcare programs designed to continue to encourage childbirth while also respecting individual autonomy.
Helen did not acquit herself well. She could not for the life of her answer your very simple question. And bobbed and weaved when you rightfully pressed her. Very revealing!
I think it goes beyond that; Helen Andrews treats feminization as a kind of deadly disease carried by women, who must be held back from most organized activities for the good of civilization.
Oooh! I watched from the section where you asked her about female virtue & stayed through the end -- definitely would like to watch/listen to the rest when I get a chance. I have to say I particularly loved this comment of the moderator's" "We're in a society where men & women are not relating successfully." Simple, succinct, and packed w a lot to ponder. (Obviously not true in every case, but broadly? Yeah, I think he has a point.) I love that you made this point: "I think many employers and workplaces are not interested in the reality of the materials of the human beings they work with." This, I think, is a core truth of our society right now and one that is directly contributing to a lot of the discontent, malaise, & anger that we see, and your call to recognize that each of us, as humans, rotates in & out of states of dependence is one we've too long ignored.
I think I see a big, ironic parallel with the conservative evangelical women who build media empires teaching other Christians that women shouldn't teach.
Also, I would characterize myself as a direct feedback-giver and a truth-seeker...does that make me masculinized? These [Andrews's] kinds of arguments about feminization have always made me question whether I'm the wrong kind of woman or naturally bad at being a woman, and I have been holding in snarky remarks about it for what feels like ever. It's in gender frameworks of mutuality, care, and dependence that I have found some freedom to be comfortable with my actual created self, feminine AND non-stereotypical.
Yeah, I'm a very direct person (uh, as everyone saw on the pod), and that doesn't make me less of a woman.
...which brings us back to the very beginning of the conversation, with the equivocation on "woman" and "femininity". Pretty much impossible to have a productive discussion w/o shared definitions!
I too have felt that my willingness to argue/discuss/dissect in "masculine ways" makes me not fit in with my own gender and somewhat frightening to a lot of the opposite gender. Frustrating when all I really want is to get at the truth by looking at a question though my own lense and the lenses of other truth seekers!
Leah you’re so great—thank you! I wanna grow up and be you someday (though I think you’re younger 😜)
I haven't watched it yet - I certainly will - but I had an immediate gut reaction against the claim that I, as a woman, can't shake hands and respect my opponent after a disagreement. I most certainly can, and I would argue that such an ability is a virtuous goal, and largely connected to an individual's maturity rather than her sex.
I have disagreements with both, but I respect Ms. Sergeant who can actually hold an intellectual argument. I'm not much interested in Ms. Andrews. That Great Feminization essay was just silly to anyone with an exucation. She claims to want to open up the conversation on that made-for-social-media term, "the Great Feminization", and cant even respond to a pointed question in a friendly conversation. Hell, she's too lazy to even define what she means by "woke" (but we love to pitch that around on the Right, dont we?). Whatever.
Ms. Sergeant is a whole other matter. She has a mind to pay attention to. I will start reading her ideas and listening to her arguments. I have a suspicion though that we will inevitably come to the abortion impasse and that will be that. But for now, I will try to not look down the road too far - which is difficult given how this administration has gutted legal abortion.