Don't Prove the Anti-Feminization People Right

If they're saying women are too easily offended and prone to silencing dissent, let's not dig ourselves in a hole immediately.

Photo by Julee Juu on Unsplash

The “anti-feminization discourse” (largely kicked off by Helen Andrews’ article in The Compact about the “feminization” of our institutions for the worse) has set off a cascade of sub-discourses about how women are, or aren’t, the cause of le wokisme and modern workplace ills, with their passive aggression, cliqueyness and propensity for taking easy offense. Before I read any of it, my take—designed to piss off both conservatives and progressives in different ways—was that even if women did feminize the workplace, that was probably good, because the world needs a woman’s touch. Come on, does anyone really trust men to stock the microkitchen with anything other than those dry ass Nature’s Valley granola bars?

I was half-joking, but like…half. As a woman who worked not only in male-dominated tech but at gaming startups, I know a thing or two about “masculine” workplaces, including one place where a middle-aged CEO, quite literally dripping with sweat, aggressively performed expletive-laced karate on a boxing dummy whenever he was angry (which was all the time). Another place involved another CEO with an obvious drinking problem, who threatened to spank me with a wooden paddle for being late, and then revealed he had used the wooden paddle on a male employee last week. What were both of these places missing? Women. Well, except for me and maybe one other woman. And by the way, most of the male employees were miserable too.

I have also worked at very feminine workplaces. (I’ve worked at a lot of places, mostly because I got fired a lot for being bad at my jobs.) You could argue that an office culture is too “feminized” if the dynamic is passive-aggressive, gossipy, and cliquey in a way that can’t clearly be proven in a lawsuit. It’s much easier to allege misbehavior when your boss is openly performing non-consensual BDSM than when you have been systematically excluded from informal gatherings—and the latter has happened to me too! I would simply argue that both are the same sides of the toxic workplace coin, but a male-dominated toxic workplace is likely to be more harmful—perhaps even physically harmful, in my male colleague’s case—and therefore it’s no surprise that it’s easier to take legal action against such a place. Helen Andrews pointed out that the modern workplace condemns male vices more than female ones and made the comparison of a workplace resembling a frat house or a Montessori kindergarten (you can sue for a frat house environment, not for a Montessori one). This was an odd juxtaposition, because a frat house workplace would quite obviously be rife with actual legal violations. For better or worse, being annoying is not illegal.

Then The New York Times released a conversation with Helen Andrews, initially titled, “Are Women Ruining the Workplace?” but later changed to “Is Liberal Feminism Ruining the Workplace?” with the intention of summarizing Andrew’ argument. It feels worth mentioning that this is not a softball “you’re so brilliant, tell me about how bad women are” interview, but rather a debate between Helen Andrews and another female writer,

Leah Libresco Sargeant

, who disagrees with Andrews. And despite how inflammatory a title it may have been, it was a question, not a statement. The answer to that question may very well be a resounding “No!”

But many of the responses to this conversation—not the conversation itself, but the icky-sounding title of the conversation, were basically the exact things that Helen Andrews believed women did to “ruin” the workplace. I don’t want to pile on so I won’t link to the comments I saw, but some included:

• calling for whoever came up with the title to be fired

• suggesting the title was “dangerous” in an era when women’s rights are under attack

• calling the New York Times fascist for agreeing to even speak to Helen Andrews

• sarcastically suggesting that the title be changed to “Are Men/Toxic Masculinity Ruining Everything?”

• Suggesting people should stop subscribing to The New York Times over this