Toxic Femininity
And The Victim Mindset
The defeat of Kamala Harris has triggered an outpouring of toxic behaviors that is indicative of a much deeper rot in society. Women are shaving their heads to protest the election of Donald Trump swearing off men. This is all part of a bigger trend of a South Korean feminist movement known as 4B that has crossed the pond. That is no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children. “F–k being skinny, f–k being hot, f–k being all the things that the patriarchy wants us to be, ’cause clearly they don’t give a s–t about us,” said one user who began haphazardly shaving her full head of hair on camera. “Stop dating men, stop having sex with men, stop talking to men, divorce your husbands, leave your f–king boyfriends, leave them,” she said. And as expected, social media can take it to the extreme with a spike in online videos promoting the use of Aqua Tofana, a tasteless poison that women used in the 17th century to poison their husbands. Dubbed the MATGA movement to “Make Aqua Tofana Great Again”. And this general negative mentality is not just restricted to women. There are many men who are also pretty angry because they think that Trump’s election is a regression on women’s freedom, climate change and social justice.
The common theme is that Trump is this misogynistic, philandering, porn-star shagging, p—y grabbing, convicted rapist and felon. He architected the downfall of women’s reproductive freedom when his appointees on the Supreme Court removed the abortion protections of Roe v. Wade. And they believe he will go on to create an anti-woman dystopia reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. Further evidenced by the fact that online misogyny is surging after the election.
But as I’ve pointed out before it was women that helped Trump win not men. And this whole thing appears to be a strategy driven more by emotion than logic. While it’s true that Trump’s Supreme Court appointees were responsible for the fall of Roe, the idea that his next administration will rob women of abortion rights is flawed. It attempts to make a federal case of what is definitionally no longer a federal issue. The right to terminate a pregnancy now rests in the hands of the states, and Trump has explicitly said he would veto any attempt to ban it nationally.
All this catastrophizing is the natural endgame of a culture that has veered away from a balanced set of core values and into a culture much more sinister.
Femininity vs. Masculinity
Healthy femininity includes values such as care, compassion, empathy, kindness and belonging. While healthy masculinity promotes values of duty, honor, responsibility, sacrifice and courage. This is the “Carer” vs. “Warrior” spectrum of values. These values are not inherently tied to one's gender; individuals can embody a mix of both feminine and masculine traits although at the group level women exhibit more of the feminine traits more often and vice versa for men. The key is to recognize and appreciate the diversity of values that contribute to a well-rounded individual and society.
The 21st century has seen the rise of women in the elite professional and cultural spheres. Women are outpacing men in college completion, including in every major racial and ethnic group. They get about 52 percent of professional-managerial roles. They earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on societal culture more generally.
So there has been a remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. But privileging feminine strategies does not eliminate conflict. Rather it yields a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is also greater tendency to respond to an offense by mobilizing social resources to demean and ostracize the alleged offender.
Coddling
Generally when you think of the word “safety” it means physical safety. But gradually, in the 21st century the meaning of safety underwent a process of “concept creep” and expanded to include emotional safety. This concept creep has now been taken to the extreme for other words like abuse, trauma and harm. Or generated completely new coddling concepts like trigger warning, micro-aggression, self-care and safe space.
Stanford University tried and miserably failed on their “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” with a list so long that would render any conversation into a field of linguistic landmines. Georgetown University drew mockery after news broke the college invited students to a "self-care suite" the day after the election to recover from the stress of it all. The suite reportedly offered treats like milk and cookies and hot cocoa as well as Lego toys and Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises to get their minds off the election results. Several professors at Harvard University canceled classes that day, made attendance optional or extended assignment deadlines. The University of Puget Sound announced a full week of "self-care" election activities for stressed students.
This coddling culture is symbiotic with the politics of the modern left. Hurting the mental health of liberal women the most. And the mental health data by gender and politics support this theory. A study done on youth shows the diverging trends in depression among liberals and conservatives and especially for liberal girls. The survey asks four items about mood/depression. And it found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls. All those girls are grown adult women now.
And this is further exacerbated in young women because they are ideologically diverging from men as they become much more progressive, while young men remain more conservative. The big, structural shift that coincides with the growing gender-politics divide is the creation of echo chambers or filter bubbles in social media and elite institutions. Combined with the conformist ideology of wokeness deeply embedded within these institutions—this may be reinforcing beliefs in people that the world is deeply unfair and outside one’s control—a “Victim” mindset.
Condescension
As mentioned at the start of this post, many people have responded in extraordinary ways to the outcome of the election. Some have thrown temper tantrums. Others have expressed elitist disdain. And some have decried the 75.6 million Americans who voted for Trump as uneducated, sexist and racist. This is the natural next stage of a victim mindset. When others don’t see you as a victim given all the reassurances you’ve gotten that you are, your negative feelings and words start to convey your disdain for those disagreeable others.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of free speech and the tenor of our public discourse where consensus and the prohibition on “offense” and “harm” take precedence over truth. We are expected to indulge with theatrical zealotry the preferences, however bizarre, of the never-ending scroll of victim groups whose pathologies are above criticism. Insinuations that someone is stupid or evil because they see the world differently undermines the principle of charity and grace we should afford everyone before judging them.
Bromides like “woman’s rights are human rights”, alongside other unhelpful tautologies like “love is love” and “no human is illegal” become thought terminating clichés since they shift the discussion away from the arena of tradeoffs into the virtue signaling kindergarten of word games and vibes. This elitist condescension birthed a whole generation of smug voices like John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver whose whole schtick catered to the coddled types in this culture longing to hear that everything sucked and the world was falling apart because of the stupid people in power and their dumb redneck supporters.
Cancel Culture
These toxic norms reach their final destination through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups––social isolation, reputational harm and ostracism. To be canceled is to feel the whip of toxic femininity. And given toxic femininity is much more pervasive on the left we would expect more cancellations coming from the left. And the data supports this. Campus de-platforming happens much more from the left.
There is even a database to document all the people unfairly cancelled for speech or behavior within the boundaries of “reasonable expression”. The behavior doesn’t even have to be recent and it doesn’t even have to be your own action. You could be cancelled for liking the “wrong” tweet, something your spouse said, criticizing BLM, saying you’re country is NOT racist or even a joke. Most of the examples in the database are for “offenses” against the left. Some HR professionals even collude to get people fired from their jobs.
In what is truly a sad development, this also means getting so worked up that you’d be willing to wreck relationships with friends and family. A Yale-affiliated psychiatrist, Dr. Amanda Calhoun, said on MSNBC that it was "completely fine to not be around" family who supported Trump. On "The View," co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg agreed. "I think when people feel that someone voted not only against their families, but against them and against people that they love, I think it's OK to take a beat," Hostin said.
This was followed by heart wrenching stories of women boycotting Thanksgiving with their Trump supporting family while some said they are “breaking up with their Republican boyfriends” in the wake of the election. One woman is canceling Christmas because her husband voted for Trump. Other users have taken to the platform to encourage women to “take it a step further” and “collectively get hysterectomies”, permanently cancelling any hope of future children.
Solutions
Let’s start out with the obvious. I’m completely against anyone that suggests we need to clamp down on the meteoric rise of women. This is not about scapegoating an entire gender for the problems in our culture. The empowerment of women is a giant net positive to any society and is overwhelmingly supported by the data. This is about fixing an over-correction in our cultural milieu. Moving the core values of the culture back to a healthier balance between the “Carer” and “Warrior” mindset.
So we need reform in our institutions like the universities, legacy media, the mental health establishment, government bureaucracies, public education and the political left. Specific policies would take a whole book to properly unpack and whole books have been written, but here’s a start:
First, stop playing to the worst cognitive distortions in people effectively performing “reverse CBT” on them.
End the administrative bloat especially the woke DEI bureaucracies where most of the catastrophizing and negative thinking originates.
Open the Overton window especially in institutions that pride themselves on academic freedom—even for programs like gender studies and critical race theory.
But also reorient institutions and departments towards truth seeking, knowledge production and objective mission-focused problem solving instead of poorly disguised political activism.
Fix the fatherlessness epidemic.
Curtail compulsive social media use especially in young people.
Encourage conversations and constructive debate with people from diverse political leanings regardless of their immutable characteristics.
And finally try to love thy family, friends and neighbor. You might find many of them are incredibly hard working, helpful, self sacrificing individuals. Maybe you’ll come to realize that there are very fine people…on both sides.