Women's speech norms are the true cause of feminization
It didn't begin in institutions, nor is it about the share of women
Introduction
For the past year, I’ve been circling feminization as a phenomenon. I’m not the first one to consider it, and the weakest arguments have now exploded around it to the detriment of the conversation we desperately need to have. It’s not about liberals or conservatives, nor is it about women, morally speaking. This isn’t the length of my usual essays because I want you to sit with just this idea for now.
I’m here to give you the incentive structure and mechanism by which institutions stopped seeking truth and began enforcing safety, consensus, and harmony. This isn’t about a gender tipping point, nor does it mean we kick women out of institutions to revert them.
It is simple, dangerous, and explains something no one has been willing to say out loud: feminization does not begin in institutions. It begins in the interpersonal sphere and then escapes into the public sphere, where it is encoded as managerial culture.
Women’s speech norms are the root cause of the erosion of truth in public life. What seems harmless is corrosive, and we can’t name it because we can’t name women as agents of their lives.
Women’s society is intellectually poor
The intellectual poverty of women’s society is the structural privileging of consensus and harmony over debate and the testing of truth claims. The bond is emotional, not rational. Intellectual display, in fact, is unwelcome in the female social space. This isn’t because every woman is individually opposed to it, but because of social incentives and enforcement by a minority of women who can’t compete but want power anyway.
The pattern is structural, not about individual pathologies. Despite these disclaimers, it remains dangerous to argue that women have group incentives to infantilize each other in the name of obscuring the intellectual hierarchy among ourselves. We don’t realize that it’s happening or why we’re doing it because it’s the default.
How feminization begins interpersonally
The feminization of institutions begins at the micro-interpersonal scale. Women’s speech norms demand hedging, softness, and actual baby-talk. Feminist academics and writers call this women’s relational talk and excuse it as harmless, and then ask why anyone dared to notice and question it. The incentive for the diminution required in female spaces stems from the incentive structure.
Speech norms and status preservation
These speech norms require passive voice, conflict avoidance, opacity, emotion, and safety to produce the harmony and consensus on which female friendships are usually based. Accountability in such a scenario becomes impossible because it requires clarity. These speech norms seem harmless when confined to social spaces, but they serve a specific status-preservation requirement: if some women are explicitly more articulate, precise, or correct than others, then the plausibly deniable female hierarchy destabilizes. This must not be allowed, or it would undermine the feminist consensus that men are threatened by women’s intellect and that they hold us back unfairly.
What comes next
Next week, I will elaborate on this line of argument to explain the reasons behind the speech norms and how they escaped the lab into the workplace. For now, here are my two cornerstone essays on the topic, published earlier this year.
The intellectual poverty of women's society
Knowledge and wisdom cannot foment where debate is banished. Women’s spaces are, therefore, reflexively anti-wisdom. Individual women in them may be wise, but the spaces are ruled by the lowest common denominator. Wisdom requires sharpening your knowledge, practicing discernment, and most importantly, acknowledging openly when you’re wrong.
Elite overproduction, managerial feminism, and the death of mobility
Women’s entry to the professional world has changed its nature, whereby they now diffusely exercise power that can’t be named through structures we’ve been told are patriarchal. But as the professional class has become more feminized, it self-justifies and controls behavior covertly. Feminism is a system of class reproduction, yet it’s assumed to be a benign empowerment mechanism.