An online magazine called Compact has published an intelligent and provocative article by Helen Andrews, “The Great Feminization.” In a nutshell, what Andrews accomplishes — complete with supporting statistics and scary anecdotes — is to trace the development of contemporary “wokness” and its attendant “cancel culture” to the female takeover of institutions and professions. She has it that the feminine tendency to emotion over reason is what fuels these behaviors, and the loss of masculine leadership in the corporate, legal, judicial, and academic world leads to a loss of objectivity and the ascendancy (to put it in my own words) of pathos over logos.
It’s a very good read, and I find myself agreeing with the whole thing — with the minor exceptions of a mild echo of feminism (“As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue a career in writing and editing. Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces.”) and a needless hat-tip to evolutionary mumbo jumbo (“She theorizes that men developed group dynamics optimized for war, while women developed group dynamics optimized for protecting their offspring. These habits, formed in the mists of prehistory, explain why….”).
While Andrews tries to end on a positive note, the implications of the data she presents are alarming — really alarming. Please read the piece if you have time, and share it.
Then, after you’ve done so, consider that there is a big trend now in the upper echelons of ecclesiastical governance to expanding female leadership roles in the Church. Pope Francis by word, and, especially deed, augmented female roles in Church governance. (This is in addition to what has become de rigueur in many dioceses, at least in this country: to make the diocesan chancellor a female lawyer.)
The newly named Archbishop of Vienna, Msgr. Josef Grünwidl, seems to think that female cardinals may be a good idea.
There is a female genius I have grown to appreciate more and more over the years, and many of those with whom I collaborate on important matters are women: very competent and gifted ones. But, as Helen Andrews makes abundanlty clear in “The Great Feminization,” the eclipsing of masculine leadership has led to institutional dysfunctionality in secular academe and the professions, which is a practical argument for the common-sense idea that the practice is contra naturam.
Doesn’t Holy Mother Church have enough problems already?
