CHICKIFICATION MIGHT BE TOO FRIVOLOUS A DESCRIPTION.

For years, the late Rush Limbaugh called attention to the "chickification" of American culture, not in a good way.

In a truly pathetic news story, this is deeply troubling. We have been talking recently on this program about the chickification of American culture, the feminization of American universities, the chickification of the news business. From the Associated Press, this a story by Melissa Dutton, and this is about man showers. Brian, you went to one of these just last week, a man shower.

In that excerpt, from 2008, he alluded to a more destructive phenomenon then presenting in the knowledge and information industries. The "man shower" was somebody's idea about how to make the concept of a bridal shower more inclusive.

A few years later, he noted something about the male allies of the women of the fevered brow.

These guys are all rail thin. They are tiny. Well, I don’t know how tall they are. But they are rail thin. They all have identical looking glasses. They all have the same goatee mustache type thing. Every one of these seven or eight people I’ve noticed.

The people who I have thought were the whistleblower are all highly educated. They all come from the creme de la creme of academe. You put a picture of George Soros’ kid that I mistook for the whistleblower last week, you put him side by side with the whistleblower and I guarantee you you’re gonna see what I’m talking about. Then this guy on Fox just minutes ago.

So these are leftist kids. So what does that mean? Well, it’s possible that these are all young men who have grown up with no sports, have been vegan or vegetarian oriented diets thrown at them, eat a lot of tofu and soy, they have been indoctrinated during the chickification of the country. They look like wusses. They look like the Pajama Boy ad that Obama ran for health care. And they seem like they’re popping up like rabbits out there.

And if you combine all this with the chickification of our culture, you look what’s happening on college campi, more and more men are not going, they feel ostracized, they show up there and become targets. They are mistakenly accused of rape, perhaps, they have newspaper stories written about what a bunch of brutes and just predators that they are. These guys don’t look like brutes, they don’t look like predators, they don’t look threatening in any way.

They look totally chickified. And they think differently. They’re all soft little liberals. They’re all governed by whatever it is that governs liberalism. Emotion and touchy-feely and afraid of words.

That's something Camille Paglia noted, I think in Sexual Personae, about the sort of near men that were the companions of academic women.

A fortnight ago, Helen Andrews reframed chickification as The Great Feminization.  She was not a fan.  The "women's ways of knowing" that the women of the fevered brow brought into the academy and the corporate suites was different, not in a good way.

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

It's a longish essay, and I cannot vouch for its internal consistency, although the central idea appears to be the presence of gendered strategies for conflict.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Those "layers of compliments" are in public, the dishing takes place in the powder room.  Credit her, though, for saying something on the distaff side that the guys have been chafing about for years.

Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.

That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?

William "Legal Insurrection" Jacobson asks a related question.  "Were these observations truly profound, or did we know them but it took a woman to have the space to say them out loud?"

Oh, men knew them.  Marty Nemko noticed the ominous signs fifteen years ago.  "Today, most of the girls and women I see are optimistic while far more males are dispirited or angry. We cannot afford to sacrifice half the next generation, not only for their sake but for all of us."  The chickification of elementary education had a lot to do with it.

Fifty years ago, when the achievement gap favored boys, massive pro-girl programs were implemented: replace boy-friendly competition with girl-friendly "cooperative learning," self-esteem programs, science programs, math programs, more female role models in curriculum, special science recruitment programs, and pressure for teachers to call on girls more, boys less. Today, the response to boys' falling far behind girls is too often for boys to be told to sit still for ever more seatwork, as recess and other physical activities, which used to allow boys to drain energy, are cut. Otherwise, it's a trip to the principal, a suspension, and/or placement in special education and/or that Ritalin leash.

There's a lot more at the link, scroll over and think carefully.  Sasha "Thinking Through the Fourth Turning" Stone, who has the zeal of a convert, expands on all the ways the chickified elementary schools didn't help her daughter very much either.

I raised a daughter in the same progressive schools and culture that bred this madness. Part of why I write this site and have risked so much is to help clear a path for her to live a freer life and say what she actually thinks without losing everything.

But I also watched how boys raised alongside her came of age in a society that punished them for who they were, and many of them wander around aimlessly, or they become mass shooters, or they suffer lives of quiet desperation. And yet, none of us ever thought about why this may be, or at least we didn’t have adequate solutions.

We all know what happened with girls and boys in our schools. I watched it happen. The boys had too much energy, couldn’t be controlled, and were constantly singled out as the problem, while the girls thrived. Yet, the only response was to try to change the boys so they fit, rather than change the system to accommodate their needs.

The same people who could invoke "stereotype threat" at the slightest suggestion that the protected class mascots were being enabled by woke would not brook any discussion of the more serious manifestation of stereotype threat among boys who would not be medicated or loaded with soy.

Retired military man Cynical Publius also reacts to Ms Andrews's article with an observation that might otherwise merit a Friday short take.  "Decisive leadership is good military leadership. Fully and totally collaborative leadership is bad military leadership."  And where Ms Andrews invoked a Montessori classroom, Cynical might be suggesting that in any woman in authority there's a kindergarten teacher aching to get out.  "The other problem I have encountered with female military leaders is the tendency to, consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, treat their subordinates at some level like they are their children."  Or, as Joanne Jacobs puts it, in another short-take-worthy apothegm, "We all hate the HR lady, don't we?"

There are dissenting responses.  William Jacobson found two.  In one, Cathy Young, who used to write for Reason and is now a regular at the Trump-deranged Bulwark, asserts "Helen Andrews’s latest screed is short on rational facts, long on mushy feelings of misogyny."  Ah, yes, use your identity card to call your interlocutor self-despising.  There's an opportunity to compare and contrast supporting research papers.

This doesn’t mean that the patterns Andrews alleges have no basis in reality whatsoever. But it’s instructive to compare her piece with a just-published article by another source she cites: psychologist Cory Clark, currently a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (and a member of the “heterodox” academic subculture). Clark’s article raises somewhat similar points about the possible negative effects of women’s greater tendency toward harm aversion and preference for equity over other values. However, it does so in a nuanced and thoughtful way, while also pointing out the positives and arguing that good institutions should incorporate both male and female strengths. One may question some of the generalizations, but Clark, at least, acknowledges that the differences she discusses are often minor and that the question of nature vs. nurture is far from settled.

I'm not sure the Andrews essay is about nature v. nurture, but whatever.  And woke cancel culture?

Black college students are far more likely than whites to support restrictions on offensive or hateful speech; likewise Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu students compared to Catholics or Protestants. The probable explanation is not that some demographics are inherently more libertarian; it’s that people from traditionally privileged groups tend to think of speech-policing as something that protects everyone else and punishes them, while people from groups that have traditionally faced discrimination and bigotry tend to be more sensitive about demeaning speech.

Bourgeois norms might be a better bulwark against people saying mean things: but the culture studies types have ginned up their edifice of intersectional oppression against which speech policing is a good thing.  And everybody hates Karen in Human Resources.

The second article Professor Jacobson links is from Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle, who calls for us to reason together.

Cancel culture, for example, does feel like female-style aggression — one might even call it “toxic femininity.” (My phrase, not hers.) Since that phrase will probably raise some hackles, let me explain: an all-out reputational attack that seems to come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. It’s a dynamic that will be familiar to anyone who has attended an all-girls camp.

As Joyce Benenson notes in her book, “Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes,” female aggression tends to be indirect and covert, compared to the openly belligerent male kind — think gossip rather than a fistfight.

The dishing takes place in the powder room.  But when the mean girls go from the summer camp to the newsroom, with the connivance of Karen in Human Resources, the belligerence takes a different form.

I think civilization will survive all right, though I concede that the progressive cancellations were in some ways more damaging than their current conservative counterpart, not because they were progressive, but because they were leaderless. The ability to fade into the mob lowers the personal risk of launching an attack, which means you get more of them. Also, when no one is in charge, there are no rules for targeting and no way to halt the attack.

What, no girl boss to say "As you were!?"  Maybe ... the columnist once calling herself Jane Galt and admitting to a University of Chicago background, the way to end chickification is to bet on emergence.

Things might be somewhat less muddled if we acknowledge the reality of male-female differences and remember that those differences are manageable. Most traits aren’t good or bad in themselves; they’re just more or less useful depending on the degree and the context. Extreme risk aversion is a splendid quality in a bank regulator, and a crippling handicap in an entrepreneur. It’s good that employers became more attuned to the feelings of their employees, and bad that some of them became so attuned they compromised their larger mission. We don’t need to protect institutional integrity from the insufficiencies of women so much as craft institutions that maximize the complementary strengths of both men and women — while also minimizing our respective weaknesses.

If you’re tempted to say that’s impossible, remember that men and women have been cooperating for a very long time. We managed to propagate the species for hundreds of thousands of years, under very difficult conditions. I’m quite confident that if we put our heads together, we can also build better institutions for the coming century.

Until the women would have no more children, and the men lost reason and faith.