Did We All Become Female?
By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org
- Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. —Romans 12:2
Looking back over the last fifty years—which is certainly possible if you’re as old as I am—we can’t miss the gradual but sweeping shift, subtle as it once was, that reshaped business, education, religion, politics, and even our personal relationships. Undeniably, one of the great cultural revolutions of our time, feminism has quietly made the “feminine” the default mode of Western behavior—almost as naturally and unnoticed as our conversion toward light eating, self-empowerment, and emotional transparency.
By feminization, I mean the traits traditionally associated with women—nurturing, empathy, emotionality, cooperation, and sensitivity. These values now dominate both our public and private lives, giving lie to the old prediction that the sexual revolution would masculinize women.
This cultural swing is now obvious in the gender movements. The men’s movement of the 1980s, once focused on reclaiming rugged masculinity, has softened into a pro-feminist appeal to sensitivity and emotional connection. The rise and fall of groups like Promise Keepers—who once warned against “the feminization of the American male”—reflect the same trend.
Feminism itself has thoroughly evolved, because early feminists emphasized strength, independence, and competition. But hold on, weren’t these once considered masculine traits?
As it so happens, this was but a part of the Gestalt of the eighties and beyond. Since women can’t really be like men, then men must become feminized.
Not overtly of course. Besides, there were plenty of good, old-fashioned, rock solid masculine guys still to be found in the seventies and eighties. Let’s just say Alan Alda was no John Wayne and leave it at that.
In a recent Andrew Klavan Show, Klavan turned his attention to the topic of feminism in an episode titled “The Great Feminization.”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Rht_r2ZXE)
Around the 8:42 mark he says, “I noticed in the 2000s when we had the golden age of television. I’ve talked about this before. We had shows like The Sopranos, The Shield, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, The Wire, and Justified to some extent. They were all shows about anti-heroes—bad guys who were macho. And the obvious reason was that when you outlaw masculinity, only outlaws can be men.”
For men today, masculinity does indeed seem “outlawed.” And like Klavan, I’m glad to see a few very brave and exceptionally sharp women who have noticed this as well—and who are willing to criticize feminism as a destructive force.
Klavan introduces us to one in particular: Helen Andrews.
In a speech delivered at NatCon 5 in Washington, D.C., titled Overcoming the Feminization of Culture, Andrews begins:
“The libertarian economist Tyler Cowen once wrote a blog post describing all the revolutions he’s seen in his lifetime… And right there between the fall of communism and the invention of the internet was something called the Great Feminization.”
Andrews continues:
Helen Andrews
“In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym ‘J. Stone,’ argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard marked a turning point in our culture. The entire ‘woke’ era could be extrapolated from that moment—most of all from who cancelled him: women.”
Then she made a significant observation:
Larry Summers gave a talk—meant to be off the record—arguing that female underrepresentation in the hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end,” as well as genuine preference differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization.” Some female professors in attendance were offended and leaked his remarks to the press, violating the off-the-record rule. The scandal eventually led to Summers’s resignation.
As Andrews notes, the issue wasn’t simply that women cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they cancelled him in a distinctly feminine way—not through argument, but through emotional offense.
From my perspective, that moment goes a long way in explaining how, twenty years later, the West—including America—has arrived where we are now: a culture weeping, screaming, and objecting to anything that still resembles the bygone era when Archie and Edith Bunker could sing:
“Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade
Guys like us we had it made
Those were the days.”
And in the next verse: “Girls were girls and men were men.
That was from All in the Family, the show once ranked number four in TV Guide’s top fifty of all time.
The point isn’t that women don’t belong in colleges and universities, or that they lack a rightful place in fields like media, law, politics, policing, or the military. It’s not just a troubling list of social and professional spaces women now occupy that they seldom did fifty years ago.
No, the real point is that as women now dominate—and continue to dominate—these professions in growing numbers, they often do so to the detriment of men who are being pushed out or ignored. The result is a different kind of society, one we may not like for very long.
This cultural shift isn’t just theoretical—it’s measurable. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were women. By 2018, women formed a majority of the newsroom, and today they make up 55 percent of the staff. The pattern extends far beyond journalism. Medical schools became majority female in 2019, as did the nation’s college-educated workforce. By 2023, women had also become the majority of college instructors. And while men still hold a slight edge in management, women now account for nearly half—about 46 percent—and the balance is shifting rapidly.
The timing of these demographic tipping points aligns almost perfectly with the rise of “wokeness.”
As women gained dominance across media, education, and medicine, the broader culture began reflecting the same set of values. We can rightly call this the feminization of the moral imagination.
Essentially, wokeness—and by extension, feminism—elevates empathy over logic, safety over risk, and emotional harmony over competition. It is less about ideas than about feelings; less about truth than about consensus. The cultural mood changed not by revolution but by transformation. It shifted because those who now hold institutional power are the ones who tell the stories, teach the values, and define the virtues.
Now, the real question presses in: What happens next?
A civilization with a feminized moral imagination may achieve sensitivity, empathy, and emotional cohesion, but it will struggle, not only to defend itself, but to define itself.
A society can nurture endlessly, but eventually it must also protect, confront, build, and endure. No culture survives on comfort alone.
We now find ourselves standing at a crucial point in history. If the West is to recover its strength, clarity, and purpose, it must remember that a civilization actually needs both the feminine virtues that soften it and the masculine virtues that sustain it.
Photo by Jennifer Ojman on Unsplash
