Why Women Should Not Bash Women

On criticising individuals and ideologies without endorsing misogynistic narratives

(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 5,750 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.4% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2025 is to increase that to 7%. This will enable me to keep doing this full-time into 2026! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

---

This is not an argument that all women have a duty to maintain a political solidarity with all other women, uniting as a sex class in order to organise in the interests of women as theorised within feminism. On the contrary, I think women are individuals with highly diverse political views and we each do best to find solidarity with others whose principles we share, regardless of their sex or other demographic feature. Standpoint epistemology is highly flawed and invariably requires deciding some members of a group represent its authentic voice while deeming others inauthentic. At this point, it seems clear that it would have been better to just support the people whose ideas one respects and whose values one shares in the first place.

It is not an argument that women should refrain from criticising other women due to a sense of sisterly feeling or a belief (not entirely false) that women are more sensitive to criticism. On the contrary, if you wish to criticise a woman, go right ahead, with the usual expectations that you will do so accurately, fairly, civilly and, ideally, with charity and with the intention of robustly testing ideas against each other. The idea that women cannot stand up to robust criticism is an infantalising one which prevents women from being taken seriously and trusted in positions of intellectual and political leadership. I have encountered this a few times, more commonly from men, and felt thoroughly disrespected by it.

My interest here is in the way in which liberally-minded women - those of us who care about what is true, find value in engaging with diverse viewpoints and reject identity-based collectivism in favour of treating people as individuals - engage with the current feminisation of society discourse. I am seeing many women engage with this from a position of openness and willingness to engage in argumentation about the reality of psychological sex differences on average and the ways in which a more female-typical distribution of traits could potentially influence workplace culture. This is good, not least because it is precisely what the catastrophising, black-and-white-thinking proponents of this hypothesis insist women do not do. We very much need truth-seeking women who are willing to engage with a variety of arguments on this issue regardless of who may be offended or distressed by them to have a prominent place in this discussion.

Nevertheless, I think it is important that we take care not to be so open-minded that our brains fall out. We must keep core liberal principles which object to collective blame on the grounds of both accuracy and ethics in mind. For many of us, who could absolutely be considered feminists in the sense that we uphold the equal rights and status of women in society, it was the failure to do this which alienated us from feminist movements. Many of us have objected to the demonisation of men and the pathologisation of normal and morally-neutral masculine traits as toxic alongside an assumption that women cannot behave badly and that more female-typical traits cannot have any negative and harmful manifestations. (Favouring women in this way appears to be, at least partly, innate and known as the Women Are Wonderful Bias).It therefore seems not to be altogether a bad thing to have some focus on the ways in which they can be harmful. However, I appeal to women not to participate in negative generalising about women as a whole due, to what I would argue to be a misguided sense of fairness and reciprocal overcompensation.

Reciprocal overcompensation occurs when people perceive an injustice being done to one group and seek to restore fairness by treating the other group unjustly. It is the mechanism by which, for example, some who rightly perceived a longstanding denigration of black people wrongly responded to this by engaging in or accepting the denigration of white people, rather than committing to not denigrating any people on the grounds of their race. It is the process by which we get a rapidly swinging pendulum as people rush madly from one direction to another seeking to exert a counterforce against whichever form of illiberal authoritarianism seems most alarming at any time.

Who are the people who tend to rush back and forth in reactive opposition to illiberalism? It is the liberally minded centre, isn’t it? These are the people who broadly support liberal values in that they object to authoritarianism and believe in treating people as individuals who all share a common humanity. I suspect this is the majority of people. I use the term ‘liberally-minded’ to distinguish the large set of people on the right, left and centre who hold the cultural values of liberalism almost intuitively and may not describe themselves as ‘liberals’ from committed liberal thinkers who spend a lot of time thinking about their first principles and consciously applying them to ethical decision making.

Most people prefer to do other things with their brains than dedicate them to thinking about first principles of liberalism and this is perfectly reasonable! We need people to be applying their intellects to a wide range of things. Most people who hold broadly liberal values will not spend their lives advocating for freedom of belief and speech, encouraging viewpoint diversity, discouraging the formation of orthodoxies and setting out the benefits of individualism over collectivism. Nevertheless, they can generally be relied upon to detect authoritarianism and recognise when certain people are not being treated as individuals of equal status to everybody else and object to it. This is good! However, I would urge them to spend a little time thinking about the first principles of liberalism when engaging with cultural discourses which feature collective blame of demographics. The defining characteristic of the liberally-minded as distinct from committed liberals is that their liberalism is reactive. The way in which we react matters.

Reciprocal overcompensation is typically spearheaded by radical collectivists. It is the Critical Social Justice (woke) anti-racist activists who led the charge on addressing anti-black racism with anti-white racism. It was radical feminists who sought to redress misogyny with misandry. Now that we are experiencing an illiberal anti-woke backlash, it is extreme anti-feminists who seek to reinstate misogyny using feminist misandry as a justification and white supremacists who want to renormalise anti-black racism using the anti-white racism of the CSJ movement to justify this.

These groups are radical fringes who do not appeal to the majority of the population and certainly not to the liberally-minded. Nevertheless, they can be enabled by a misguided sense of justice that can make sense to the liberally-minded. We humans seem to have a strong tendency to think both collectively and retributively. When you think of great things your country has done, do you feel a sense of pride even though you were not born at the time and had nothing to do with it? You probably do. When you think of awful things your country has done, do you feel shame? You might do. Shame is an unpleasant emotion and so motivates people to look for a way in which this was not their fault and not being alive and having had nothing to do with it is a perfectly reasonable one. We can also feel this way about other collectives we might belong to like our race, our sex or even our sexuality and about the collectives other people belong to. This can lead to a collective sense of justice even among those who broadly uphold liberal principles.

The Critical Social Justice movement was enabled to rise this way. It had a very strong case that women, racial minorities and sexual minorities have been treated poorly for a very long time. Few people would disagree with this and most would say it was morally unconscionable. The liberally-minded certainly would. They are also likely to feel complicit in it even if they know they are not on a rational level. This collectivist sense of justice enables reciprocal overcompensation not because many people think anti-white racism, misandry and condemnations of cis/heteronormativity will help anything, but because it feels wrong to complain about overreach in these directions given the history of enslaving black people, subordinating women and prosecuting homosexuals. This moral reaction makes sense on an intuitive level but it was absolutely wrong on the level of principles and profoundly counterproductive to its own goals. The correct lesson to learn from any feelings of collective shame for past injustices is to recognise the faulty and unethical thinking that enabled them and develop consistent principles against it, not use the same thinking against different groups.

The dynamic of reactive overcompensation now appears clearly in the current discourse about the feminisation of society. And here is where I want to address women in particular. We will all have noticed that women do feature quite prominently among the people arguing that if women continue to take up positions in core institutions, they will soon dominate them and this will result in the loss of all respect for truth and freedom and, ultimately, bring about the death of Western Civilisation. The women taking this absolutist stance are, of course, not liberally-minded. They are very socially conservative women who seem to quite like the idea of patriarchy. We may not be able to convince them not to think this way, but can we take care not to enable them?

Since I have been producing pieces for The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain, I have been fortunate enough to discover very many excellent women writers who are not specifically focusing on issues of liberalism but certainly have liberal values as their default setting. They are addressing a very wide range of cultural and political issues that tangentially overlap with my own interests and this has inevitably included the feminisation discourse. This is excellent. It would be profoundly unhelpful if this debate became dominated by the kind of “blank slatist” feminism that denies psychological sex differences to exist at all and is deeply biased against men and the equally reality-denying, essentialist forms of social conservatism which assigns ‘natural’ spheres of existence to men and women and targets most of its ire at women.

This debate certainly needs women who reject both narratives, who value and care about the interests of both sexes and accept that psychological sex differences do exist but that this manifests in a number of ways and tells us little about any individual. I am somewhat concerned that some of the very women who objected to unfair generalisations about men are now at risk of engaging in parallel unfair generalisations about women. My perception is that this impulse comes not from any antipathy to women at all, but from of a desire to demonstrate fairness, humility, and openness to criticism and from a sense of collective responsibility for discourses which have claimed to speak for women as they denigrated men. We have seen this response before in feminist men who have regarded themselves as complicit in misogynistic attitudes towards women and abuse of women even though they were guilty of neither, simply because of their sex. It makes perfect intuitive sense that liberally-minded women, wanting to be fair and open to critique, would listen earnestly to concerns about feminisation. We must be wary, however, of the temptation to overcorrect and descend into collective blame of women for biased representations of female-typical traits in order to prove we are intellectually honest and to take responsibility for narratives unjustly critical of men that we never engaged in.

The feminisation discourse holds that women are largely responsible for anti-social behaviours like psychological bullying, malicious gossip, character assassinations, cry-bully tactics, social ostracism and punishing dissent indirectly via third parties. We can concede that this kind of unpleasant, dysfunctional behaviour is engaged in more by unpleasant, dysfunctional women without claiming that this defines women, the vast majority of whom are not unpleasant and dysfunctional. That is, we can address ‘toxic femininity’ claims in the same way we did ‘toxic masculinity’ claims. While the vast majority of violent crime and especially sexual crime is committed by men, the vast majority of men are not violent sex offenders. This matters not only because believing otherwise does most men an injustice but because we (presumably) want to engage with social reality as it really is and address problems effectively.

Beware of a tendency to say, “Yes, this is a female thing and it is a problem” due to a misguided sense of fairness and balance and imply that this kind of behaviour is common to women and only women and all women are complicit in it. Resist the urge to overcompensate for narratives which have held men to be awful by conceding that women are awful too. Most women and men are not awful, but some are and when they are, it can manifest in different ways. We can and should acknowledge this, not least because recognising antisocial behaviours as aberrant behaviours is important to identifying them, intervening on them and protecting people and institutions from them. Attributing problem behaviours to ‘men’ or ‘women’ gets in the way of addressing them because we cannot require people to become less male or female. We can require men and women to behave in the socially acceptable ways that most men and women already do.

Neither men nor women as a whole are complicit in the worst behaviours more commonly committed by members of their sex. Nor does anyone need to take responsibility for behaviour that is not their own. What would that even look like? In practice, it looks like collectivist, ideological self-flagellation that does absolutely nothing to address any problems but just feeds into divisive and polarising political narratives. It may ease some intuitive sense of complicity and create a superficial feeling of fairness but it cannot address any real problems because it does not map onto reality. Nor is it ethical to pathologise whole demographics of people. Nor is it productive to create a sense of male or female identity based on the most destructive manifestation of sex-typical traits. We do much better at creating positive and healthy concepts of masculinity and femininity when we actually like our own sex and the positive manifestations of traits more prominent in our own sex.

The feminisation discourse, like the toxic masculinity discourse frequently makes the fatal error of reading neutral traits in the most negative way possible. This is not the fault of evolutionary psychologists, cognitive psychologists or social psychologists who routinely warn against doing this very thing. Humans do not seem to have naturally statistical brains at the best of times and are particularly prone to reducing complex and overlapping bell curves of traits to distinct categories. Morally loading these created categories into collective idealisation and devaluation of whole groups is what tribalistic humans tied into essentialising and polarising political narratives do. Those of us who care about what is true and about what is ethical should not assist in this.

The research that underlies the feminisation discourse finds that “men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.” The researchers note that this maps onto the well-replicated finding that men are more interested in working with things on average while women are more interested in working with people. Somewhat more men are willing to research and address topics that could cause distress and offence while more women are willing to suppress such research. This maps onto men being more assertive, competitive and stoical on average while women are more agreeable, empathetic and emotionally expressive on average.

We have options in how we respond to these trait distributions. We could regard them very positively and note how complementary they are. We need to care about both things and people and we need to be able to address difficult and sensitive topics while also being aware of the need for rigorous ethical standards when studying them and thoughtfulness for the likely impact on humans when conveying them. We could consider them in a neutral way and note that these are both valuable and necessary but might sometimes conflict and work out systems to resolve those conflicts optimally. We could (and alas, we have) use some sex differences on average to conclude that men are toxic and callously indifferent to the wellbeing of others and that they need to unlearn traits like assertiveness, competitiveness and stoicism for their own sake and everybody else’s. We could alternatively decide that women are censorious truth deniers and their agreeability, empathy and emotional expressiveness requires them to be kept out of both institutions of knowledge production and the ballot box.

I would suggest that, for the sake of effective problem-solving we need to take the neutral stance most of the time and create systems and expectations which make the best of traits for truth-seeking and concern for social wellbeing and do not allow for negative manifestations of either to derail things or harm people. This reality-based assessment also acknowledges the reality that men and women have overlapping traits and much individual variation by discriminating against behaviours. This gets at 100% of potential problems while discriminating by sex only gets at them when they manifest in the expected sex. For the sake of human wellbeing and relations between the sexes, we would also do well to take the positive/complementary approach in the way we address things, think about ourselves and speak to each other. We should engage in the fallacious, totalising negative approach never.

Women who like men (and most of us do) and have objected to discourses demonising them should not be afraid to also openly like their own sex and object to the demonisation of ourselves too! We can absolutely acknowledge that some forms of psychological bullying, censoriousness, social ostracism and indirect aggression are more commonly committed by women without bashing women as a group. Please do not be so fair-minded and open to criticism that you become unfair to your own sex and open to criticisms that are actually misogynistic negative generalisations. Avoid trying to overcompensate for the Women are Wonderful Bias by presenting women in generally negative terms. Do not feel yourselves to be complicit in radical feminist narratives that have demonised men simply because they claimed to speak for women if they never did, in fact, speak for you.

I like women. The support of a solid social circle of close female friends has sustained me through all my life’s hardships. Having a select group of emotionally intelligent and empathetic women who know me very well and care about what is happening with me and upon whom I can call to talk through anything in precisely the exploratory way I find most valuable has been a huge support in my life. Women have mentored me in my work in social care and as a writer and been sympathetic to my anxieties and qualms. They have improved my workplaces and organisations precisely because, as well as being brilliant and good at their jobs, they are more likely to be attuned to and care about the wellbeing of everybody in it. My own organisation, Counterweight, was dedicated to supporting people at risk of cancellation during the peak of woke and was run overwhelmingly by women volunteering their own time precisely because they cared about the state of society and of people. These are objectively good qualities to have! Men typically find them admirable and lovable too, just as we find typically masculine traits admirable and lovable.

The dedication in The Counterweight Handbook

Some women I have encountered have, of course, not been admirable and lovable. Some have been psychologically abusive, emotionally manipulative and have engaged in malicious gossip, social ostracism and indirect aggression against me and others. I have helped organisations deal with censorious problematising activists who operated like this and more (but by no means all) of them have been female. But this behaviour does not define ‘women’ and we can and should criticise it as problem behaviour, not the defining characteristics of a sex.

Liberally-minded women - those of us who care about what is true, value viewpoint diversity and object to collective blame being laid against any group - we are in the best position to push back at the misogynistic, totalising, catastrophising narrative of the feminisation of society discourse. We can engage with it honestly and in good faith and with willingness to acknowledge that psychological sex differences exist and certain anti-social behaviours are more common in women. We can agree that protections are needed within organisations to prevent them from being captured by activists who claim to have the wellbeing of vulnerable people and the cause of social justice at heart. We can assert the reality that this is a manifestation of an ideological commitment and not the natural functioning of an entire sex and that, generally, caring about the wellbeing of humans and the good of society is a positive thing! We can assert consistently liberal principles which treat people as individuals and object to prejudice and discrimination against whole groups of people defined by negative generalisations. We can do good here, but only if we hold that evidence-based, liberal line firmly.