Everyone panic – the office has grow to be too ‘feminized’! | Arwa Mahdawi

[ad_1] Lean in (to misogyny), girls!

Are you a girl? Do you wish to quickly elevate your profile and get booked on the talking circuit? Are you good at psychological gymnastics?

In case you answered sure to the entire above then gender grifting could also be for you! This often-lucrative profession path entails explaining to much less enlightened ladies why feminism has gone too far and the world is a lot better off being run by males. You get further factors in case you aren’t white, and may clarify to the lots how racism is nice, truly.

You possibly can see this hustle within the tradwife content material throughout social media. As Jameela Jamil just lately famous, all of the “tradwives” preaching to younger ladies about how they need to be submissive little girls are huge hypocrites. They’re all getting cash, constructing their manufacturers and securing their independence whereas telling different ladies they shouldn’t be doing the identical.

You may as well, after all, see gender grifting on the likes of Fox Information, the place formidable, albeit identikit, feminine anchors tut-tut on TV about how #MeToo has gone too far.

And now, as a result of the appropriate has been so profitable in rewriting actuality, you may see gender grifting splashed everywhere in the homepage of the New York Occasions. On Thursday, the Occasions printed a transcript of a latest episode of the conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast Fascinating Occasions. This very attention-grabbing (within the British sense) piece was initially titled: Did Girls Destroy the Office? The headline was then modified to the extra nuanced: Did Liberal Feminism Destroy the Office?

Douthat generously invitations two ladies into his personal office: the podcast options two critics of liberal feminism, Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant, in dialog about “what a right-wing politics of gender ought to appear to be.” Andrews apparently caught Douthat’s eye as a result of she had simply written an essay for Compact referred to as The Nice Feminization, which argues feminism has failed as a result of it has pushed masculine virtues out of our establishments. The phrase “woke” or “wokeness” was used unironically 11 occasions within the piece: a failsafe signal you shouldn't take something in it critically.

Andrews continued to only mutter wokeness, wokeness, wokeness in her dialog with Douthat (variants of the phrase have been used 25 occasions within the dialog), explaining that “the pathology in our establishments generally known as wokeness is distinctively female and feminized … in a really literal sense, our establishments have gone woke as a result of there are extra ladies in them than there was once.”

The dialog unfurls precisely as you’d anticipate. Fastidiously cherrypicking examples, Andrews defined that #MeToo was woke, school campuses are too woke, and “the legislation is at present lopsided in favor of punishing male vices and permitting feminized vices completely free rein.” In response to a query about what constitutes “female vices”, Andrews explains that girls like “gossiping” and have an “incapability to cope with battle instantly”.

Sargeant, who has some legitimate critiques of liberal feminism, does her greatest to push again towards a few of this nonsense, however Andrews does many of the speaking. Hilariously, in direction of the tip of the dialog Douthat asks Andrews: “What do you want about ladies, Helen?” She appears unable to reply that query.

I do know that this is only one man’s podcast somewhat than, say, a bit by the editorial board, however placing a bit like this on the homepage of the New York Occasions in 2025 is definitely an attention-grabbing choice. Taking the form of misogynistic nonsense that you simply see on Fox Information and repackaging it as a pseudointellectual debate in a prestigious publication imbues these arguments with a harmful validity. (In order for you a correct mental interrogation of gendered inequality and supposedly conventional values, by the way in which, I recommend you learn Angela Saini’s The Patriarchs.)

Whereas the New York Occasions is busy pondering whether or not liberal feminism has ruined the office, ladies’s rights are being rolled again all over the world. In the exact same week that this piece got here out, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum was groped by a drunk man as she mingled with residents on the streets of Mexico Metropolis. The chief of a rustic can’t do her personal job with out being harassed in public, and the Occasions desires us to contemplate whether or not the office has been too feminized.

Over within the US, the gender pay hole has widened for the second yr in a row, and the Occasions desires us to contemplate the chance that wokeness has gone too far. Mike Johnson, the Home speaker, just lately shrugged off home assault allegations leveled towards Republican congressman Cory Mills, and we're anticipated to ponder, with a straight face, the concept that the office is now hostile to males. Pete Hegseth, the protection secretary, has been accused of sexual assault. (Mills and Hegseth have denied the allegations.) Two out of the 5 males on the US supreme courtroom have been accused of sexual misconduct. The president of the US is an adjudicated sexual predator, who related to Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile, and we're presupposed to suppose that our establishments have been feminized. Fascinating occasions certainly.

Mexican president urgent expenses after being groped “That is one thing I skilled as a girl, however it's one thing that every one ladies in our nation expertise,” Sheinbaum stated after being groped on the street. “If I don't file a grievance, the place does that go away all Mexican ladies? In the event that they do that to the president, what occurs to all the opposite ladies within the nation?” The incident has felt like a private affront to many ladies in Mexico, the place violence towards ladies and femicide are main issues. However it's important to ask your self, don’t you: has feminism gone too far?

Almost half of LGBTQ+ TV characters cancelledGLAAD’s 2025 report on queer illustration on TV exhibits a small enhance from final yr’s 468 to 489 LGBTQ+ characters throughout all platforms. Nonetheless greater than 200 (41%) of these characters gained’t return, attributable to sequence cancellations, endings or restricted sequence format.

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