A Controversial Thesis [Part 1]

A lengthy illustration will probably serve me best here. If you doze off, I sympathize. I’ll probably still tell the whole thing though.

I have no doubt mentioned several times in this space that I currently work with a bunch of women. To be specific, I work under a bunch of women. My direct supervisor is a woman twenty years younger than I am. Her occasional replacement is a woman five years younger than me. They both report to a woman a few years older, and she reports to another woman roughly the same age. Layers and layers of women in a quasi-traditional hierarchical structure, with me and a couple of other part-time guys on the bottom and an executive male or two way, way up top, whom I almost never see and certainly never interact with.

How do I like that? You didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway: I love it.

You WHAT?

That may seem surpassingly strange coming from a man who worked under other men and supervised both sexes for the last thirty years or so. I liked it best when my supervisors left me alone, which happened most of the time, and when I got to run my shift exactly how I pleased, which also happened most of the time, because it was the weekend and nobody wanted to come downtown to check what I was up to. I prized autonomy and efficiency, and I got lots of both, especially when I had more women working under me. They were more respectful than the men, less likely to question my authority or logic, and provided you treated them well, would jump through hoops to make you happy with their work product in ways men never do.

Some might say I sound like a traditional hierarchical, authoritarian, patriarchal jerk and they’d hate to work for me. Perhaps they are right, though nobody ever complained about me to HR. The women I worked with all those years are friends, and we still keep in touch. So the “jerk” part might be difficult to establish, but I’ll plead guilty to each of “traditional”, “authoritarian”, “hierarchical” and perhaps even “patriarchal”.

So then, why in the name of Gloria Steinem would a man like me ever choose to work under layers of women in an environment so unapologetically feminized?

Reasons within Reasons

Well, I enjoy my non-traditional role for very specific, personal reasons. The primary one is my age. I’ve saved as much as I was able for retirement, and am currently treading water to try to avoid blowing through it irresponsibly and leaving nothing behind. Occasional work is more pleasure than necessity. I am done with management and responsibility. I am done with a five-day, forty-hour workweek, with writing reports and sitting behind a desk, with explaining my decisions to others and telling people what to do. I am done with calculating, negotiating and just attempting to survive the business world. I go to work (1) for the trickle of money it provides, (2) to get regular exercise without going to a gym, (3) for the opportunity to meet and interact with unsaved people, (4) to model Christ for the world through serving others, and (5) to get the (very) occasional witnessing opportunity.

The second reason is that I’ve carved out a niche that works for me. I make myself busy doing all the jobs no woman would ever want, and that every woman is grateful to have done for her. There was some minor initial resistance to my offers to reach the high shelves, climb ladders to take down Christmas lights, go up and down stairs with the biggest loads, fill endless bins with rubble, do the dustiest, grimiest and most unpleasant jobs, and stand when everybody else was sitting. I can now confirm that every woman to whom I offered my enthusiastic services quickly ditched her faux-egalitarianism and played along. Sometimes I take out garbage all day long. In voluntarily assuming the worst of the donkey work, I have manage to avoid any interaction with modern technology (which I have grown to loathe) for almost two years, all administrative chores, and virtually every team meeting. I have also generated near-endless goodwill. I figure it’s the perfect trade-off.

And Now, the Catch

Here’s the catch: I can’t imagine this role working for anyone else. I especially can’t imagine it working for me ten to fifteen years ago, when I needed every cent I could generate, and when allowing others to make decisions for me might have cost both me and the company a fortune.

Moreover, I will readily admit the female decision-making style drives me to distraction. My immediate supervisor was raised by her father and married a man who has spent thirty years in the Air Force, and she has no problem making good, quick, labor saving and profit-maximizing decisions that are best for everyone. Thank the Lord for that! Every other woman I work with turns the most insignificant choices into pointless and interminable negotiations in which I cannot bear to participate, and try desperately to avoid even overhearing.

The feminized negotiation style is inefficient beyond words. The vast majority of what my supervisors are paid to do is a combination of useless chatter and weaponized indecision that results in endless busywork and labors revisited.

Female interactions also involve numerous conversational pitfalls one has to learn how to delicately sidestep to avoid giving offense and maintain professional relationships. Women on the job will say terrible things about one another. I have learned never to agree or chime in, but never to disagree either. Unlike in a male hierarchy, where the “ins” are in and the “outs” are perpetually out, a woman’s expressed opinion of other women tends to depend on who’s listening at the time rather than on any objective, demonstrable set of facts and evidences.

Checking Out

All that is merely a prelude to this: I am glad to be nearing retirement. The working world is not going in any direction that is remotely sustainable, and I totally understand why men are dropping right out of it at an astounding rate, even if the alternative is living in comparative poverty. A twenty-year old version of me could not survive a feminized work environment. A twenty-year old unsaved version of me would probably settle for a life of crime or institutionalization rather than play the kind of political games required to navigate a feminized workplace. For all the fun I am having in a very limited role for a limited time, when I finally check out of the workforce, I will not be looking back in envy at the men I leave behind.

I am far from the only one saying this, though doing so makes the fur fly. In mid-October this year, Helen Andrews wrote an article entitled “The Great Feminization” for Compact Magazine that has generated much debate online. To sum up her thesis in three words, Andrews believes Women Equals Woke. Our DEI woes on the job, she says, are all due to the increasing number of women in the workforce.

A Woman Says …

A few quotes to give you the idea:

“Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”

“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.”

Now, that’s not to say that wokeness isn’t Marxist. It certainly is. Rather, it’s that the energy behind cancel culture comes from normal unregenerate female social behavior, not intellectual propaganda disseminated, digested and believed. Marxism is easy to mock and discredit; the ideology is a joke, its historical execution a gargantuan tragedy. However, it’s not as easy to counter the same ineffective and destructive principles packaged as the normal social behavior of your coworkers. Wokeness is passive aggressive and sub-intellectual. It operates at a level that makes its intrusion into a business almost impossible to defend against.

More Firestarting

Andrews again:

“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.”

“Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.”

“The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday. Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males.”

“Forgiveness, forgiveness,” as Don Henley sang so memorably.

There’s a lot more to the article worth processing, and not enough space to do it in one post, especially the part where I’d like to think about what the changes to the average work environment means for our Christian sons and daughters as they try to navigate the world feminism has created. Tune in tomorrow if you’re interested!