Feminization isn't about women
It’s the condition of an affluent society that prizes comfort over truth.
I. Introduction: Feminization ≠ women
Everyone is suddenly talking about feminization, but they’re discussing the wrong layer. Feminization has been attributed to women dominating the workplace, but it’s not actually about women, nor is it merely about work.
When I speak about it, I refer to metaphysical poles that characterize our reality. We all have the masculine and feminine principles in us, but they are not tied to sex or gender per se. The ancients used gender as a metaphor for these poles. Institutional feminization isn’t about the dominance of women — it was happening far prior to their entry to the white collar workforce. Credentialism and managerialism are two illustrations.
The current conversation is stuck at the wrong layer, as discourse is these days. I will excavate feminization as a metaphorical descriptor for the tilting of our institutions toward ensuring comfort at the expense of freedom to pursue truth wherever it leads.
Many people have noticed that affective management has replaced truth-seeking, but they misidentify women as the cause. Women just happen to be the best guardians of feminized norms and usually reflect metaphysically feminine qualities. But feminine qualities exist separately from the female sex.
Feminization is the transformation of institutions under affluence and managerialism toward affect over truth as the highest good. We have a professional class running those institutions, obsessed with preventing offense rather than defending the unpopular truth. This is why I write.
II. From material scarcity to emotion management
This turn toward emotion management was inevitable once material scarcity was resolved through efficient resource allocation in the age of managerial capitalism. This mode of organizing economic life not only gave rise to the professional middle class but also cemented them as the guardians of expertise. Their authority over knowledge is based on prestige markers, and credentialism is a hallmark of the feminized elevation of the symbolic over the material.
Affective management is the new raison d’être of institutions under the guise of ever-increasing material production. When survival is no longer the goal of social organization, the management of feelings becomes the aim. The regulation of tone, comfort, and belonging flows from this. Women are well-suited to this aim because of our evolved tendency to maintain consensus and social harmony.
Commentators on feminization have stopped at the literal and have not bothered to analyze the structural conditions underlying. Masculine and feminine tendencies live within all of us. We tend toward one pole or the other, and we’ve fallen out of balance within, causing chaos without.
The denial of sex differences, as I’ve outlined before, is perhaps the most obvious evidence of this process. But note that the blank slate theory is an effect of feminization, not a cause. The prohibition in the academy against even discussing sex differences in several disciplines is an example of feminization, but the institutional inclination is to avoid uncomfortable truths about women’s behavioral tendencies in groups. We now have whole disciplines operating from the axiom that sex differences are constructed, even though there’s no empirical evidence. That is the feminization of knowledge.1
III. Feminization isn’t caused by women, but we’re well-adapted
Women happen to be well adapted to a feminized environment. Such environments:
Avoid conflict at all costs if it means sparing feelings.
Enforce emotional management regimes through bureaucratic control. This is where we often hear about HR, but it should be noted that HR is effective because women are better at enforcing these regimes than men.
Socially enforced silence around conclusions that threaten the professional class’s moral authority. An example is upholding credentialism even if it hurts the very people DEI claims to support.
Obscuring emotional control in the language of care.
Precluding the correction of injustice by blaming the victim for their condition.
Our understanding of reality is increasingly mediated by the need to manage emotions rather than accept truths that lead us to question our own self-concept. Being seen as a good person is more important than doing the right thing. The symbolic is divorced from the material.
IV. The metaphysical masculine and feminine
The feminine principle is creative, receptive, nurturing, entropic, and emotional — the ineffable. The masculine principle is ordering, penetrating, disciplining, structuring, and logical. This duality is the bedrock of our material reality, even as a few of you have probably dismissed this argument as essentialist and binary. I take pains to emphasize that I’m talking about the nature of reality, not sex-typical behavior. Men and women illustrate these inclinations, but this polarity is built into nature independently of how it manifests in humans.
The Indic metaphor for this duality is purusha and prakriti. These terms are roughly translated to ‘man’ and ‘nature,’ but they’re not referring to humans.2 Purusha is pure consciousness, logos, and form. Purusha is symbolized by Shiva, whose manifestation in life is aniconic, represented by a lingam. This translates to ‘phallus,’ but it’s not literally about Shiva being a phallus.3 Once again, people map sex onto the metaphysical symbol of the phallus as the masculine. But formed around Shiva is the yoni, symbolic of the feminine principle of reception. The Shiva lingam represents the union of consciousness and nature.
Prakriti is an entropic material reality that cannot have form without purusha. Logos provides the structure for eros to have meaning; our reasoning and emotive faculties must be in balance. Institutions have reinforced this tendency while also suppressing negative emotions about the privileging of affect over order. Women like me are particularly ill-suited to such environments because we have integrated the bipolar energies. We’re repelled by the smothering of reality under affective management, as are many men. This is why, I suspect, you’re here reading this.
V. Feminization as an institutional condition
Under feminized management, accountability is replaced with social performance. When I’m at work, I know that I can’t actually say anything to a person who dropped the ball or is behaving badly. The act of naming it is aggressive, and holding someone accountable becomes impossible. We’re told “that’s unproductive,” even though low performers drag everyone down. But those people can perform vulnerability and completely escape scrutiny for inferior work because of enforced positivity, results be damned. This is explained as a need for professionalism, which is feminized norms made default — conflict avoidance at all costs.
Mediocrity, therefore, is tacitly enforced, since excellent people can’t even show resentment at having to carry the load. This mechanism of control can be deployed by and aimed toward either sex. Women happen to have emotionally managed me into compliance more often than men by asking me to “be softer,” because only women can get away with saying that to each other.4
Psychological safety sounds like a nice concept intended to create the conditions for excellent people to create something new. In practice, psychological safety is for the insecure, emotional majority to tamp down dissent. The one questioning the process becomes the problem, not the inefficiencies the process introduced.5
Group therapy, similarly, isn’t about everyone ‘taking up space’ but about protecting the right of the most vulnerable person in the room to set the standard for acceptable expression. It’s why my structural analysis of pain is unwelcome in the therapy room. When I was in risk-averse, feminized work contexts, questioning any process was offensive to the emotional consensus managers around me, usually marketers and project managers.
Niceness and safety become the highest goods over results and risk-taking when work is feminized. Nothing new was built without risk, nor were any paradigms shifted. Yet, many institutions with the resources to move us forward are obsessed with managing perception instead. Men are, on average, more risk-tolerant than women, but aversion is an institutional condition regardless of who occupies them. Men can be as risk-averse and intolerant of discomfort as women.
VI. The material and historical base of feminization
In The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith argues that the elimination of material scarcity led to production to maintain employment levels and economic growth. It’s why the four-hour workweek will never be. Economists saw production as the result of consumer needs, but these wants are created by production itself — the process that satisfies them.6 From this condition arose the desire-creation industry — marketing. We’re surrounded by marketing, and so we stopped noticing. Affluence is the bedrock of feminization.
Managerial capitalism arose to coordinate large-scale production and resource allocation, which both led to predictable outputs but also created the urgency to generate demand for goods at the same (ish) rate they are produced. If this process is imbalanced, you either get inflation or depression. Thus, managers had to maintain equilibrium, which required effective control of demand levers. I’m rewatching Mad Men, and I’m reminded that the advertising industry was feminized from the beginning, even though men controlled it.
Once desire determined our actions, the professional class became moral managers. Desire fulfillment became a moral good, framing consumption as empowerment for women. But women’s susceptibility to marketing is also beside the point; desire is metaphysically feminine, and feminization is society organizing around its fulfillment rather than developing discernment.
VII. Conclusion: the bipolar internal condition
Women didn’t cause feminization, nor can it be solved by (unrealistically) changing the gender composition of institutions. The rejection of truth-seeking in favor of consensus is the inevitable condition of an affluent society. The privileging of affect over reason is the default unless we’re constantly vigilant.7 I frequently emphasize discipline and discernment over emotional indulgence, but it’s also a reminder to myself.
The process notwithstanding, the feminine principle is not inferior. There is no beauty without eros, and the masculine alone is sterile and inert. Purusha needs prakriti. The feminist narrative, however, has led legions of women to believe we don’t need men but for sperm (if we want a child, which many of us don’t). That narrative and the labeling of masculinity as toxic have been consequential, not merely memes.
The problem isn’t just that men were rendered superfluous, but also the devaluing of the masculine principle overall. We’ve accused men of toxicity, and I did for decades because I had terrible examples in my family. What I now understand is that abusive men also tilt toward the (dysfunctional) feminine; they can’t maintain equilibrium or structure. But the difference between them and women is their proclivity to violence.
Emotions are certainly crucial to a life well lived, but we seem to have forgotten the need to integrate the masculine and feminine principles within ourselves. Women may need to spend more effort on discerning what’s true from what is felt, and men may need to work harder to be emotionally attuned.
The condition of institutions is downstream of integrating the two poles within us. Institutions won’t change by merely asserting the primacy of truth over affect, because the precondition is that humans value truth more. Calling for a liberal commitment to reason, therefore, is naive. So it is left to those of us who see clearly to create new institutions to defend the unpopular truth against the affective managerial order.
P.S. If this resonated, please share it with a friend. I’ve been writing about feminization for almost a year, but it doesn’t matter if no one knows. And thank you to those who have been sharing — it means the world.
It only happens to be about women.
I’m not an authority on Sanskrit, but purusha in the material context means ‘man,’ though the metaphysical meaning is abstract and not gendered. Underneath the purusha and prakriti duality is Being.
If this offended you and you’re Hindu, please consider that the phallus as a symbol doesn’t refer to genitalia — it is an abstraction.
A female manager actually said this to me.
A project manager once asked HR never to work with me again because I questioned the usefulness of those processes for developers.
Galbraith is essential reading.
Did anyone else hear Mad-Eye Moody in their head?
We must have mind-melded — I posted something similar earlier today on feminisation in institutions and the imbalance between masculine and feminine principles. It’s reassuring to read your piece interwoven with Indian cosmology; it adds a layer of metaphysical depth that complements the institutional analysis beautifully.
This is EXACTLY right. I made a similar comment on Nathalie's recent podcast interview. I even hesitated to use the word 'feminization' when I began thinking about this, because I thought it would imply blame and make people (women) feel defensive.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/job-search-part-4
Nevertheless, it's apt and it broadly describes what's happening. Women didn't feminize our institutions... we ALL did (although women have benefitted disproportionately). Many women are dismayed at the loss of rigor and accountability and merit-based selection that has become common. And many men have enthusiastically feminized themselves and their organizations. Most of them, in fact. This is a much larger cultural and organizational trend, and you've laid out the constituents perfectly.