Richard Hanania on the Feminization Discourse

Richard Hanania, still cancelled in many leftish circles because he used to be an angry young racist, is now one of our most trenchant critics of MAGA. (This essay is getting cited everywhere, even by Vox.) He rose to prominence by attacking wokeness, but he says the new discourse about the woke movement deriving from feminization is already out of date:

I would’ve probably nodded along to the Andrews piece if I read it four years ago. But a lot has changed since then, and being a rational, dare I say masculine, thinker means updating as new information comes in. Establishment institutions have gotten much better since the height of the Great Awokening, as their critics have been circling the drain. This has happened at the same time the right has become more masculine-coded, which has to be factored into any analysis about the supposed dangers of feminization.

I used to criticize the left a lot more, but did the “masculine” thing by updating in the face of new information and coming to see MAGA as the real threat to American institutions. Nobody else still on the right seems capable of this, so perhaps we should call the movement feminized.

The argument, he writes is that:

More feminization → less concern for truth. Sounds plausible given the correlation between increasing female representation in journalism and academia, and the seeming decline of these industries, which I agree has happened. But there’s other evidence we can look at in order to test the theory. Half the political spectrum has completely rejected feminization, as can be seen in their support for Donald Trump, a walking repudiation of everything that the schoolmarm culture represents. Over 80% of Republican members of Congress are men, and Fox News famously treats women as eye candy. In 2024, the Trump coalition became even more male-coded, bringing in outspoken Silicon Valley billionaires and the bro podcast sphere. Did this masculinization of the movement lead to more concern with truth?

And:

Andrews also complains about Title IX kangaroo courts and the Kavanaugh hearings. I agree and was on the side of conservatives in both of these cases. But then you have this, which is beyond parody for something written in late 2025:

The field that frightens me most is the law. 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 tug (sic) at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

Does Helen Andrews read the news? Or any non-right wing sources of information? To talk about the rule of law in 2025 and not mention Trump is like discussing the dangers of religiously inspired terrorism in 2002 and neglecting Islam.

This is where, as I recently said, I end up. I can see that female-dominated institutions will be different – this used to be one of the basic claims of feminism – but I can't take that seriously as a threat in 2025.