The Federalist By: Joy Pullmann
Contrary to propaganda messaging, our society is neither ‘overfeminized’ nor ‘pro-woman.’ It is deeply anti-woman.
This is an adapted version of a speech presented to Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum 2024. Watch or listen to the speech here.
Since the 1960s, cultural leaders in media, Hollywood, academia, and politics have fiercely criticized men for expressing male characteristics, and have fiercely criticized women for expressing female characteristics. This has led some commentators on the right more recently to lambast what they call the “overfeminization” of society.
But are we really experiencing a cultural “overfeminization?” It looks to me like, instead, we have a swap. We have feminization where there should be masculinity, and masculinization where there should be femininity. Our women are pushed to act like men, and our men to act like women, and the resulting social transgenderism makes everyone extremely unhappy, not to mention dysfunctional.
Both sexes are out of whack. We are all transgender now.
Some try to address this by praising men’s positive attributes and criticizing women’s negative attributes. This is a good effort, but so far it has still largely left out praising women for female attributes and, to a lesser extent, criticizing men for feminine behaviors. It’s an improvement on the West’s long reign of feminist socialization, but I think it could use some more improvements.
Is America Really ‘Overfeminized’?
Before we get to those, let’s look at the more recent critiques of social “overfeminization.” One prominent critique of women has become a social media meme called “the longhouse.” It was explained in First Things by a man who goes by the name “Lom3z.” He uses the metaphor of a collective-living primitive longhouse, saying, “More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.”
Lom3z claims our anti-speech culture is a result of overfeminization, complaining about demands for “consensus” and that “the prohibition on ‘offense’ and ‘harm’ take precedence over truth.” “Further,” he says, “these speech norms are enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups — social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force.”
He delivers a ringing indictment of “Safetyism” as a prime example of overfeminized norms, saying: “Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person — who is as often male as female — is the avatar of the Longhouse.”
The pro-abortion writer Richard Hanania defines America’s overfeminization problem as “nobody wanting to stand up to women crying.” Women win arguments because they cry when they lose, and nobody knows how to respond to that in a way that doesn’t make them look like a cad. So, he says, “The strength of any anti-wokeness movement depends in large part on the strengths of its antibodies to a certain kind of female emotionalism.”
In a 2023 video and essay, Chris Rufo mainstreamed the concept of a “Cluster B society,” a theme perhaps most deeply discussed by “Disaffected” podcaster Joshua Slocum. Cluster B is a group of four psychological disorders: narcissism, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial. Rufo and Slocum argue these personality disorders increasingly characterize our society…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (thefederalist.com)
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