"Reciprocal overcompensation is typically spearheaded by radical collectivists... These groups are radical fringes who do not appeal to the majority of the population and certainly not to the liberally-minded." This sounds very similar to the 'Progressive Activists' identified by More In Common's report earlier this year who, apparently, make up only about 8-10% of the UK's population and who, according to the research, tend to "feel more stressed, lonely and sad than most other segments" of the population. I can't help feeling rather sorry for them. https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/research/progressive-activists/
This made me pause and think in the best way. Thank you for writing it ♡ you might also like what we are writing at gēnu if you are interested! Looking forward to reading more from you.
I actually thought of Janice Fiamengo when I read this.
Thanks for articulating something about the conservative side of the gender wars that I've always felt uneasy about. People like Janice Fiamengo certainly do a good job defending men and she makes great points and is no doubt intelligent, but she comes across as engaging in some of what you called reciprocal overcompensation. She seems to have a bone to pick with women, and I always wondered why she seems to want to elevate men by denigrating women. I am mad at feminism too, but I'm still a woman. I don't think less of my feminine traits.
This is great, and it made me think. But i wonder if we're really pinning fringe, toxic femininity on women the way we've pinned fringe, toxic masculinity on men. Rather, I suspect it is middling and more ostensibly benign female behavior that we're criticizing and that is more likely to seep into norms than fringe behavior. In other words, it's not a Western norm for people to rape and pillage (male fringe trait) but it is now a Western norm for people to evade and sugar-coat and prioritize feelings (female average trait), especially in the workplace.
I also think "feminization" is being used, especially by some, not to suggest that females need to be kept out of things, but that males and females working on things should not let a particular corrosive-to-progress style dominate, one that lends itself to the name "feminization" (as might water verses swords, yin verses yang, etc).
My friend Cori is reading a book by Chris Argyris (something about overcoming "organizational defensive routines," I'll ask) and it describes everything that's going wrong in my workplace, though I've called the culprit "HR culture".
Essentially, my business customers just spent literally 2.5 YEARS getting through what should have been the simple pre-work for a project (typically ~3 months of work), thanks to coddling feelings being prioritized over clearly articulating the risk and consequences of lateness, a constant refrain of "celebrating our successes!" over looking honestly at the failures, complaints about my directness or willingness to clearly state where the bottleneck was versus pretending we're all a Team doing our best, etc.
Maybe this is caused by more women in the workforce, maybe by women's culture overriding men's, maybe it's actually about litigation-centric societies (a male trait?) which problemitizes holding people responsible, I don't know. But it's getting worse and will absolutely destroy a project.
I have also joined and left a half dozen feminist or female-only activist organizations in the past decade that were downright torn asunder by fake accusations of racism, quarreling, purity spirals, etc., and these certainly seem to be women's fault. I don't see this happening to Braver Angels or other male-dominated orgs.
It's not that women are worse than men. But that female traits are worse for productivity than male ones... while male ones are certainly worse for other goals.
Anyway, thinking out loud at this point. Thanks for making me think.
I've encountered a particular niche of this feminisation discourse - there is a psychologist out there with a big profile Hanna Spier who is advancing the claim that the harmful components of wokeism don't come "from women" as such but come from cluster B personality traits - that just happen to be more often occur in the female population.
Whereas male problematic traits tend to be the type A ones like aggression and violence. This would actually quite neatly explain the preponderance of radicalisms where problematic female ones cluster on the left while the male ones do predominate on the right.
Thanks again, Helen, for a wonderful master class in making critical distinctions. I especially appreciate your call to discriminate against behaviors vs sex or simply people, as that approach fully preserves both the dignity and the sovereignty of the individual in question.
I do wonder, however, especially given the more sublime approach to conflict taken by some women as argued in the 'Feminization" discourse, how much of a larger collective consensus will be required for this kind of behavior discrimination to take hold and be effective? Obviously, the numbers needed for effectiveness will vary across orgs, as will their potential impact depending on where in the org adherents to this approach sit.
But still, beyond us as individuals refusing to participate in or further promulgate negative behaviors of all kinds, specifically those typical to either/both sex, what would you recommend as steps that could be taken to elevate this approach for wider adoption?
Ha, I always have ideas. But they're reliably half-baked, under-informed, or simply unwise and/or impractical. :)
One approach (not my idea) I have seen work better than others is when a company puts individual learning and development at the core of their larger company mission. This helps keep the individual at the center of the conversation, even as the larger conversations correctly orient to topics relevant to the performance of the company as a whole.
In other words, companies that prioritize the learning of the individual, using reliable practices and doing so with their peers, tend to create higher performing individuals AND higher performing teams.
Of course, people being people, problems still arise - both consistently and constantly. Yet, those problems don't tend to metastasize and take over the larger culture and instead stay localized at the individual and/or relationship level. At least in my limited experience.
What are your thoughts on ways of moving the focus up and over to problematic behaviors and away from lazy thinking of stereotyping and collective attributions?
Short answer: my thoughts on doing this are always big and overarching and philosophical as in this piece or very fine grained and specific to a certain organisation or field. But, in reality, organisations already have legal requirements not to discriminate so it really is a matter of addressing rising problem attitudes that want to do that.
That’s a good example, yes! Pamela Fuller is also someone I recommend for companies trying to address conflicts in workplaces and increase team cohesion.
My last book - The Counterweight Handbook - also has policies for workplaces and suggests a potential overarching framework for schools and universities.
However, I am unapologetic about focusing much more on understanding the nature of an illiberalism problem and breaking it down into its component parts and showing why it is a problem and arguing for why evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles work better and what they would look like in this situation than on developing practical policies to implement them in various spheres of work and institutions. Other people can then make use of this in their own spheres.
Logistically-minded people who have a solid understanding of the structure and workings of their own field but feel a bit blindsided by the sheer volume of ideological narratives surrounding them inform me that I have helped them with this. And I spend half my time consulting with them in areas which have ranged from schools to tech companies to humanitarian aid to the therapeutic professions and even the emergency services. Working with a school and a psychological association at the moment. I still have no idea how to run a school or a psychological association but they do so I have helped them frame their mission statement and principles and then they’ve created policies based on this and then I will tweak them back into consistency if they have developed inconsistencies.
Thanks for both the shorter and longer answers here, Helen. I particularly appreciate your focus on clarifying the "higher ground" of principled liberalism and pointing out the many problems associated with other rationales that operate in the lower ground of any tribal/group mindset and/or efforts of asserting various illiberal means of demarcating common ground.
I see your pieces offered here, and that of several other prominent principle-first, first principle minded writers functioning as candles in the night in that they provide a reference point and clear value for those seeking more illumination, yet still leave up to them to figure out how to get closer to it from wherever they are and through whatever paths they can create or find to get there.
Do Western women have an especial calling to speak out against the increasing Islamisation of the West?
Of the people who I discuss it with, it is generally men who are alert to the threat, whereas the women tend to be naively deceived and ill-informed. With exceptions, but it is a distinct trend that I notice.
I have met two Western women who had married Muslim men and subsequently divorced. I asked them if they had studied Islam before marrying. Neither had. They certainly found out later, but then it was too late. In both cases they had been bullshitted by their future husband about how good it was, and gullibly believed it.
My substack aims to wake people up to the threat from Islam:
I’ve not found this personally, but then I am connected to a lot of ex-Muslim women from my time in the New Atheist movement. Just had a look. Most recent survey finds that 51% of British women and 59% of British men think Islam is fundamentally incompatible with British values so men are slightly more likely to think so but a slight majority of both sexes think so.
I don’t think being male or female is particularly significant here, though. The best people to raise awareness of illiberal values in Islam are ex-Muslims, liberal Muslims and reforming Muslims.
Also, I think people should really be left alone to address whichever issues they particularly want to address. I’m forever being demanded to express views on all sorts of things I don’t prioritise. Gender identity, Israel/Hamas, Covid lockdowns, climate change etc. I’ll focus on what I know and am interested in and religion in general and Islam in particular is one of them.
The UK is expected to be majority Muslim around the year 2070 if current trends continue. And it could well be sooner, depending on scenario.
Islam is bad for everybody, and especially bad for non-Muslim women. Sex slavery is permitted in the Koran. The Muslim rape gangs that blight many UK cities will pale into insignificance compared to what is coming in future decades.
It cannot be airily dismissed as being of no interest.
Islam is very much interested in non-Muslims, and not in a good way, whether non-Muslims are interested in it or not is largely irrelevant.
I am quite curious regarding this: why is it frequently the case that liberal women leap to the defense of Islam? Islam clearly is mysogynst and highly illiberal. Do you have a rational explanation for their strange behaviour?
Is it through some sort of twisted enviousness?
Is it some sort of theological Stockholm syndrome?
Identitarian leftists, you mean? Rather than defenders of individual liberty? Have you really not understood the mechanism before? Yes, I have written a lot about this.
Excellent explication of the feminization discourse! It can be a tricky mess to disentangle, but this is the best attempt I've seen.
Thanks! I addressed it in more detail in a piece linked inside when I first mention it.
"Reciprocal overcompensation is typically spearheaded by radical collectivists... These groups are radical fringes who do not appeal to the majority of the population and certainly not to the liberally-minded." This sounds very similar to the 'Progressive Activists' identified by More In Common's report earlier this year who, apparently, make up only about 8-10% of the UK's population and who, according to the research, tend to "feel more stressed, lonely and sad than most other segments" of the population. I can't help feeling rather sorry for them. https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/research/progressive-activists/
This made me pause and think in the best way. Thank you for writing it ♡ you might also like what we are writing at gēnu if you are interested! Looking forward to reading more from you.
I actually thought of Janice Fiamengo when I read this.
Thanks for articulating something about the conservative side of the gender wars that I've always felt uneasy about. People like Janice Fiamengo certainly do a good job defending men and she makes great points and is no doubt intelligent, but she comes across as engaging in some of what you called reciprocal overcompensation. She seems to have a bone to pick with women, and I always wondered why she seems to want to elevate men by denigrating women. I am mad at feminism too, but I'm still a woman. I don't think less of my feminine traits.
Thank-you for this very thought-provoking essay. I'm keeping it to re-read every time I find myself drifting towards over-compensation.
My method regarding bashing is KISS keep it simple Sister and don’t bash anybody Takes too much self control for me many times but it works wonders
This is great, and it made me think. But i wonder if we're really pinning fringe, toxic femininity on women the way we've pinned fringe, toxic masculinity on men. Rather, I suspect it is middling and more ostensibly benign female behavior that we're criticizing and that is more likely to seep into norms than fringe behavior. In other words, it's not a Western norm for people to rape and pillage (male fringe trait) but it is now a Western norm for people to evade and sugar-coat and prioritize feelings (female average trait), especially in the workplace.
I also think "feminization" is being used, especially by some, not to suggest that females need to be kept out of things, but that males and females working on things should not let a particular corrosive-to-progress style dominate, one that lends itself to the name "feminization" (as might water verses swords, yin verses yang, etc).
My friend Cori is reading a book by Chris Argyris (something about overcoming "organizational defensive routines," I'll ask) and it describes everything that's going wrong in my workplace, though I've called the culprit "HR culture".
Essentially, my business customers just spent literally 2.5 YEARS getting through what should have been the simple pre-work for a project (typically ~3 months of work), thanks to coddling feelings being prioritized over clearly articulating the risk and consequences of lateness, a constant refrain of "celebrating our successes!" over looking honestly at the failures, complaints about my directness or willingness to clearly state where the bottleneck was versus pretending we're all a Team doing our best, etc.
Maybe this is caused by more women in the workforce, maybe by women's culture overriding men's, maybe it's actually about litigation-centric societies (a male trait?) which problemitizes holding people responsible, I don't know. But it's getting worse and will absolutely destroy a project.
I have also joined and left a half dozen feminist or female-only activist organizations in the past decade that were downright torn asunder by fake accusations of racism, quarreling, purity spirals, etc., and these certainly seem to be women's fault. I don't see this happening to Braver Angels or other male-dominated orgs.
It's not that women are worse than men. But that female traits are worse for productivity than male ones... while male ones are certainly worse for other goals.
Anyway, thinking out loud at this point. Thanks for making me think.
I've encountered a particular niche of this feminisation discourse - there is a psychologist out there with a big profile Hanna Spier who is advancing the claim that the harmful components of wokeism don't come "from women" as such but come from cluster B personality traits - that just happen to be more often occur in the female population.
Whereas male problematic traits tend to be the type A ones like aggression and violence. This would actually quite neatly explain the preponderance of radicalisms where problematic female ones cluster on the left while the male ones do predominate on the right.
Thanks again, Helen, for a wonderful master class in making critical distinctions. I especially appreciate your call to discriminate against behaviors vs sex or simply people, as that approach fully preserves both the dignity and the sovereignty of the individual in question.
I do wonder, however, especially given the more sublime approach to conflict taken by some women as argued in the 'Feminization" discourse, how much of a larger collective consensus will be required for this kind of behavior discrimination to take hold and be effective? Obviously, the numbers needed for effectiveness will vary across orgs, as will their potential impact depending on where in the org adherents to this approach sit.
But still, beyond us as individuals refusing to participate in or further promulgate negative behaviors of all kinds, specifically those typical to either/both sex, what would you recommend as steps that could be taken to elevate this approach for wider adoption?
Do you have some ideas?
Ha, I always have ideas. But they're reliably half-baked, under-informed, or simply unwise and/or impractical. :)
One approach (not my idea) I have seen work better than others is when a company puts individual learning and development at the core of their larger company mission. This helps keep the individual at the center of the conversation, even as the larger conversations correctly orient to topics relevant to the performance of the company as a whole.
In other words, companies that prioritize the learning of the individual, using reliable practices and doing so with their peers, tend to create higher performing individuals AND higher performing teams.
Of course, people being people, problems still arise - both consistently and constantly. Yet, those problems don't tend to metastasize and take over the larger culture and instead stay localized at the individual and/or relationship level. At least in my limited experience.
What are your thoughts on ways of moving the focus up and over to problematic behaviors and away from lazy thinking of stereotyping and collective attributions?
Short answer: my thoughts on doing this are always big and overarching and philosophical as in this piece or very fine grained and specific to a certain organisation or field. But, in reality, organisations already have legal requirements not to discriminate so it really is a matter of addressing rising problem attitudes that want to do that.
That’s a good example, yes! Pamela Fuller is also someone I recommend for companies trying to address conflicts in workplaces and increase team cohesion.
My last book - The Counterweight Handbook - also has policies for workplaces and suggests a potential overarching framework for schools and universities.
However, I am unapologetic about focusing much more on understanding the nature of an illiberalism problem and breaking it down into its component parts and showing why it is a problem and arguing for why evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles work better and what they would look like in this situation than on developing practical policies to implement them in various spheres of work and institutions. Other people can then make use of this in their own spheres.
Logistically-minded people who have a solid understanding of the structure and workings of their own field but feel a bit blindsided by the sheer volume of ideological narratives surrounding them inform me that I have helped them with this. And I spend half my time consulting with them in areas which have ranged from schools to tech companies to humanitarian aid to the therapeutic professions and even the emergency services. Working with a school and a psychological association at the moment. I still have no idea how to run a school or a psychological association but they do so I have helped them frame their mission statement and principles and then they’ve created policies based on this and then I will tweak them back into consistency if they have developed inconsistencies.
Thanks for both the shorter and longer answers here, Helen. I particularly appreciate your focus on clarifying the "higher ground" of principled liberalism and pointing out the many problems associated with other rationales that operate in the lower ground of any tribal/group mindset and/or efforts of asserting various illiberal means of demarcating common ground.
I see your pieces offered here, and that of several other prominent principle-first, first principle minded writers functioning as candles in the night in that they provide a reference point and clear value for those seeking more illumination, yet still leave up to them to figure out how to get closer to it from wherever they are and through whatever paths they can create or find to get there.
Again, thank you.<3
Do Western women have an especial calling to speak out against the increasing Islamisation of the West?
Of the people who I discuss it with, it is generally men who are alert to the threat, whereas the women tend to be naively deceived and ill-informed. With exceptions, but it is a distinct trend that I notice.
I have met two Western women who had married Muslim men and subsequently divorced. I asked them if they had studied Islam before marrying. Neither had. They certainly found out later, but then it was too late. In both cases they had been bullshitted by their future husband about how good it was, and gullibly believed it.
My substack aims to wake people up to the threat from Islam:
https://hellish2050.substack.com/archive
Of the people I speak to in person about Islam, approximately 20% of men are naive about it whereas 80% of women are naive about it.
I’ve not found this personally, but then I am connected to a lot of ex-Muslim women from my time in the New Atheist movement. Just had a look. Most recent survey finds that 51% of British women and 59% of British men think Islam is fundamentally incompatible with British values so men are slightly more likely to think so but a slight majority of both sexes think so.
https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Islam20and20British20values.pdf
I don’t think being male or female is particularly significant here, though. The best people to raise awareness of illiberal values in Islam are ex-Muslims, liberal Muslims and reforming Muslims.
Also, I think people should really be left alone to address whichever issues they particularly want to address. I’m forever being demanded to express views on all sorts of things I don’t prioritise. Gender identity, Israel/Hamas, Covid lockdowns, climate change etc. I’ll focus on what I know and am interested in and religion in general and Islam in particular is one of them.
The UK is expected to be majority Muslim around the year 2070 if current trends continue. And it could well be sooner, depending on scenario.
Islam is bad for everybody, and especially bad for non-Muslim women. Sex slavery is permitted in the Koran. The Muslim rape gangs that blight many UK cities will pale into insignificance compared to what is coming in future decades.
It cannot be airily dismissed as being of no interest.
Islam is very much interested in non-Muslims, and not in a good way, whether non-Muslims are interested in it or not is largely irrelevant.
https://hellish2050.substack.com/p/is-it-too-late-for-the-uk-already
You weren’t really interested in my thoughts, were you? You just want to say the same things about the same issue over and over again?
I am quite curious regarding this: why is it frequently the case that liberal women leap to the defense of Islam? Islam clearly is mysogynst and highly illiberal. Do you have a rational explanation for their strange behaviour?
Is it through some sort of twisted enviousness?
Is it some sort of theological Stockholm syndrome?
What is it?
Identitarian leftists, you mean? Rather than defenders of individual liberty? Have you really not understood the mechanism before? Yes, I have written a lot about this.
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/western-centric-intersectional-feminism/