This is harder to do in a mixed-sex environment.

I have always been a first-wave feminist as an extension of my Classical Liberal belief in the rule of law and equality before the law.  In other words, all individuals should be treated equally before the law regardless of their sex (and race and religion).  There are, of course, some small differences to be accommodated based on the physical aspects of sex difference, but those are minor issues at the margin.  Everyone equal before the law is the overarching principle.  

Second-wave feminism, and more currently third-wave feminism, drift further into the margins or irrelevance based on ideology and defiance of reality, and are especially marked by an increasing accommodation of authoritarianism and coercion.  

In addition, second and third wave seem increasingly focused on casting women as marginal figures to be protected by the State from harsh realities.  Under these ideologies, women cease to have agency.  Under first wave-feminism, women were assumed to be strong and capable of playing an equal role with men in the concourse of life.  With second and third wave feminism, women seek special treatment owing to their frailty and weakness.

Bring back and cultivate strong, confident women.  

These choppy waters make it increasingly difficult to have good-faith arguments and more perilous to advance any hypothesis contra the extremist ideologues.  Consequently, I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to see Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas by Richard Hanania.  The subheading is: How belief in the blank slate plus residual gender double standards create "cancel culture," and the difficulties of fighting back.

I am even more astonished after a couple of weeks that there has been little furore over his thesis.  

Having mentioned the concept a few times, many have been encouraging me to write a Substack on the feminization of political life and its connection to free speech issues. Noah Carl beat me to it, and the idea has also been picked up by no less an authority than Tom Edsall at the New York Times. I’ve already written about the overrepresentation of women in HR. We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top.

What is left to contribute on the question of how feminization relates to pathologies in our current political discourse? First, I think that the ways in which public debate works when we take steps to make the most emotional and aggressive women comfortable have been overlooked. Things that we talk about as involving “young people,” “college students,” and “liberals” are often gendered issues.

This doesn’t always show up in the data, and many may not want to discuss anything controversial without having numbers they can refer to, lest they be accused of everything they say being a figment of their sexist imagination. Nonetheless, I think that anyone who has spent time paying attention to politics, journalism, or academia, or wherever people debate ideas, will understand what I’m talking about.

Second, I think there’s a certain weirdness to the arguments made by both sides of the gender issue. To simplify, you have the left, which leans towards the blank slate and opposes gender stereotypes but demands women in public life be treated as too delicate for criticism, and conservatives, who believe in sex differences but say to treat people as individuals. But if men and women are the same, or are only different because of socialization that we should overcome, there’s no good reason to treat them differently. And if they are different and everyone should accept that, then we are justified in having different rules and norms for men and women in practically all areas of life, including political debate. How exactly this should be done is something worth thinking about. Finally, I argue that much of the opposition to wokeness is distorted and ineffective because it avoids the gendered nature of the problem, which also makes fighting it difficult.

Read the whole thing for greater elaboration and for the links.  It is an uncomfortable argument yet there are some elements that are clearly true.  

Ed West references the piece in The fall of communism, the trouble with mental health awareness, and the Zemmourification of France.  He makes a couple of related points.

Public debate has historically involved all-male contests, and men know what the rules are when contesting other men; it’s almost like a contact sport, in which you expect to get hit and it’s nothing personal. Indeed, it’s considered dishonourable and unmanly to take it personally. This is harder to do in a mixed-sex environment.

What is more, the sex ratio of any political movement clearly has an influence on its style, and the Great Awokening is surely related to the huge increase of women at universities; its tone is quite different to, say, the 1968 protests, when radical Leftism was far more male-heavy.

An interesting discussion worth having but hard to have in our current public intellectual extremism.