It's not feminization--it's androgyny

Nate Silver, Helen Andrews, and Richard Hanania K.I.S.S.I.N.G

I didn’t want to respond to the feminization debate too early but life has a way of sending you signals. As such, yesterday I read an article from Nate Silver regarding what he terms Blueskyism. While he published it back in September, I read it just yesterday, and I couldn’t help but notice some overlap between select items Helen Andrews mentions regarding The Great Feminization and select items Silver mentions regarding the art of Bluesky.

My hypothesis

Silver and Andrews are writing about the same phenomenon with varying degrees of precision, using completely different frameworks. One observes social customs and language norms as female in their orientation and another observes much of the same behavior as an echo chamber of cosmopolitan food fights and struggle sessions. I want to bridge these two conversations and redraw the lines a little so that we can further test and refine them while increasing human flourishing (yelling on the internet).

How to ruin an interesting idea

Starting with Andrews, let’s pretend for a minute that all the worst, most cutting and inflammatory accusations about The Great Feminization, that is institutions’ proclivity to degenerate into petty status-signaling games at the cost of doing work or “finding truth” are true. All the worst ones. Things that would make your mother slap you for saying them in front of her simply because she’s a lady and that’s not how you talk to them.

Assuming the underlying message is verifiably, factually true, the reason the framing commits a fatal error is it alienates roughly 52% of the population by dint of their birth, something they cannot change. I believe the term du jour is “assigned at birth,” whereas FOID stands for “female on I.D.” but as David Dennison notes, associating a group of people you need to persuade with verbiage they find unflattering is going to make them your enemy. They will actively work against what you want and it will be your fault.

If you agree with Helen Andrews, who penned the recently controversial article on The Great Feminization, then it just proves that women can’t handle the truth. If you disagree with her, then it’s also easy to admit the framing is bad but this time because the argument is incorrect.

To agree with me, which is to step onto the right side of history by refusing to even participate, you don’t even have to take a stand on the substance of Andrews’ argument to understand why this particular messaging is going to fail at reforming institutions or reinstantiating freedom of association.

Hypertense like a man, argue like a woman

Right at the start of his piece, Silver admits Blueskyism predates Bluesky. And you know who also predates Bluesky? That’s right. Women.

Normally, I would say, put a PAYWALL here and write, “checkmate liberals” on the other side of it but there’s only one problem: According to my sources at Google.com, 60% of Bluesky’s users are male. While I can’t reach through their screen to inspect the penises of all these users (watch out Mr. Will “It Do Be Like That” Stancil), I’m willing to buy this demographic breakdown.

First attribute of Blueskyism: Smalltentism

Silver speaks of three essential characteristics, which I’ll list one at a time (emphasis my own):

The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism

Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.

Compare the passage from Silver to Andrews description of centrist Bari Weiss here (emphasis also mine):

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine.

Colleagues who made the mistake of continuing to associate with Weiss were policed for not adequately distancing themselves from someone “just outside the circle” while Weiss was pressured into removing her name from the masthead and her voice from The Times—censoriousness.

The ever-prolific Bentham's Bulldog has a related piece called The Bluesky Way of Arguing, which makes a similar observation (you know the drill).

All too many leftist act like to refute a view, you only need to show that it is low-status among their friends. This results in left-wing spaces becoming intellectual monocultures where no one can meaningfully challenge completely bogus views. The emperor, in many cases, has no clothes. And this is a shame, in part because I agree with a lot of these left-wing conclusions. I just wish people didn’t argue for them so badly.

All three authors detect speech-policing/censoriousness, consensus-building through social pressure, and punishing dissent but only Andrews calls it feminization.

Second attribute: Credentialism

Silver continues to list qualities he attributes to Blueskyism:

The second essential characteristic: Credentialism

Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.

Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.

This is where you’re probably expecting another quote from Andrews but that’s where you’d be wrong. I wanted to compare and contrast what each author would say about credentialism but Andrews never uses the word and doesn’t really talk about any synonyms or proxy for them unless she’s talking about people certified to practice in a particular discipline like law but this is not really credentialism; just a distinction.

I suspect credentialism is a part of what Andrews describes and many would attribute to feminization, but it’s only some women who are credentialist—namely women who can be and not, say, your post-lady or Uber Eats driver. Women who mirror Andrews and compete for the same money, prestige, and men. Upper middle class women with a Master’s or PhD, specifically, the kinds I describe in Binches be talking. I don’t even specify white women here because I have known a fair amount of black women with advanced degrees who talk about credentials as though they’re unassailable, not to mention women from any other background who so happen to have advanced degrees/training.

The Great Feminization is not really about institutions retrofitting themselves for the 52% of the population who possess vaginas, which would take into account the customs of middle class and lower class women) but about institutions incrementally adopting the language, ticks, palsies, and status games of a particular set of striving women and men known as Elite Human Capital.

Poasting through it

This wouldn’t be a highly refined schizopost if I didn’t loop in Richard Hanania, whose epic banger Women’s Tears Win In The Marketplace of Ideas Andrews quotes in her Compact piece (for which Hanania has made yet another post addressing hers and further complicating things).

In The Origins of Elite Human Capital, Hanania writes, “EHC is the default culture that people destined to disproportionately influence society form when left to their own devices.”

Some paragraphs down he continues:

In a broad sense, there are two things that smart and hardworking people can do with the opportunities that wealth and modern levels of technological development provide. They can try to maximize income, wealth, and control over tangible resources, or seek meaning through their careers. Think of someone who becomes a petroleum engineer and works his way up to executive level management, in contrast to an individual who spends the entirety of his twenties earning a philosophy PhD, and then perhaps another half decade looking for his first real job. Nobody is purely a wealth-maximizer or a meaning-maximizer; most of the upper class is somewhere in between, but that doesn’t mean we can’t speak in terms of different prototypes.

Hanania goes on to describe how petroleum engineers are great but philosophy guys are EHC.

Why do they all sit like this?

To mash it all together, my contention is that what Andrews calls The Great Feminization and what Silver calls Blueskyism are basically the same phenomenon, but that, in addition to picking a poor brand label for her message, Andrews fails to capture exactly how neutered EHC men are.

Another way of putting this might be to say that to be in EHC, you have to be somewhat sexless and androgynous. When people think of girls who work in journalism or NGO’s, do they think feminine (as in Bettie Page) or do they think of women as in (bad at sports)? When people think of the men who use Bluesky, do they think of masculine (as in G.I. Joe) or do they think of male (as in actuaries)? Why do they all cross their legs like they are trying to hide the fact that they have genitals? If you want to be EHC, you can’t do anything that qualifies as macho since macho is a slur that means: things mostly men do that I don’t like (war, fistfights, pushup contests). But if you want to be EHC you can’t be ditsy or a bimbo either. No cleavage allowed. You gotta use those credentials as your moneymaker.

Third attribute: Catastrophism

Silver continues in his piece on Blueskyism:

The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism

Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.

It would be a stretch to say that the men I associate with EHC (Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Derek Thompson, Richard Hanania) are hysterics. While they may not be lumberjacks or firefighters, I don’t see them running around shrieking that everything is on fire. However, I will note that Abundance basically takes the same framework one might use to fight pollution (forrest fires, rising sea levels) and swaps in affordability (along with housing supply, rent-seeking special interest groups). Klein and Thompson could have hit the alarm bell at any time before March 2025 but they waited until it was an "emergency” or more likely seized on catastrophic framing once it was clear they needed to get back into the White House. If the catastrophe you’ve been using doesn’t work, you can always redefine what you consider to be a catastrophe even in the facts on the ground haven’t changed in years or decades.

While you could just as easily stage a false flag operation (I told you this was a schizopost) to catastrophize in a more macho way that requires actual war-footing (tanks, Army Corps of Engineers and shit), we find that EHC prefers a more subtle, professional tone that elicits volunteers, donations, and patronage rather than Abrams tanks and javelin missiles.

Conversely, when you log onto X or Instagram, you may encounter any amount of histrionic women (especially strippers and OnlyFans models, not that I would know) using emotion, eyelash batting, sexuality etc. to raise awareness regarding issues from the environment to Gaza but this does not really capture the vibe of EHC or what it’s like to work in most corporations in The West. If this goes unchecked for long, Human Resources will absolutely run up in there and put a damper on it. What EHC loathes are reminders of sexual dimorphism, anything that makes it hard to pretend people are not just blank slates.

While it’s true well-mannered professional men are often looped in with complete criminals as though the guy in accounting has anything to do with subliterate rapists, this displays a blindspot in EHC’s ability to speak up for men. However, no one who is EHC is about to hire any verified sex worker to do much of anything at your company. If they remind the company too much of female failure modes, they’ll get 86’ed real quick.

Shockingly neither a hit with MAGA nor the EHC crowd.

When Paige Jennings was caught posting thirst from the bathrooms of Lazard Asset Management, the company fired her and she became Veronica Vain, story linked.

Tying it all together

One of the reasons contemporary EHC types (note I’m not blaming women here) have generated so much resentment among the proles Hanania calls Gribbles is that EHC stopped resigning themselves to the idea that there is a financial sacrifice to be made for engaging the in the world of ideas. They have historically been tougher people willing to forego material reward and do things like donate their kidneys (shout out to Scott Alexander). It used to be that philosophers and academicians were willing to focus on the next life whereas now they generate articles asking for the state to subsidize them and their preferred causes: student loan forgiveness, UBI for mommies + daddies, more bike lanes, and social workers.

There’s a place between shrimp welfare and preventing people from starving to death that EHC used to champion without looking so complicit in the patronage systems and inefficiencies (embezzlement) that occurs when groups say they will do one thing but never seem to get the job done with any amount of money: building train tracks in California, closing achievement gaps anywhere, making housing affordable, keeping your water potable. It’s plain to see that the main beneficiaries of many welfare programs are the people who staff them, which is how you get people declaring that we should make doing drugs easier for the homeless.

EHC are not so elite they no longer strive. They’ve always been a bit WASPish and avoidant of too much machismo and bimbofication. They hate when you draw attention to differences in sex (unless it’s to justify wealth redistribution to women/minorities) which is why it is best to understand Helen Andrews not as a traitor to her sex but to her class, which is why whether they’re male or female, her message will never land with anyone who’s EHC. To say what Andrews says without anonymity or fear of retribution, you would need to be much poorer or richer than her.

Conclusion

You’ll find most women laugh at the feminization argument because the office would be completely different if it were actually run according to their desires. Most women would probably prefer an environment where they didn’t feel the need to wear makeup or dress up much. Maybe shaving one’s legs could be spaced out a little more. Maybe people would be a little better at reading the room and you wouldn’t have to worry about guys hitting on you. Ever. Lots of communal snacks in the mix.

Similarly, men feel like they would be able to have pinup calendars and maybe farting contests on occasion if they were really in charge as a group in any palpable sense. You could just tell someone when their idea was stupid before taking a drag off the whiskey bottle on your desk. Maybe you could tell jokes that were a little more inflammatory without fear of retribution. There’s no way you would have to focus on other people’s feelings so much.

But what we have are institutions that did titrate toward norms that are more friendly to women than men but are way, way more friendly to the type of person you find in ideologically sanitized professions where prestige is the coin of the realm. If you want prestige, you better not be too male or female. You’re going to have to have really big, optimistic eyes and a vibe that, above all else, says I am a totally nonthreatening person who only knows missionary.