Tears For Fears Ideas
Debora Mccaffery
For all our talk of equality, our culture treats violence, incivility, and aggression towards women much more seriously than the same towards men. This creates a difficult dynamic, in which if a man disagrees strongly with a woman, he has to tread very carefully if he is not to be judged harshly by observers.
At about 13:40 in the video, after Christakis has made yet another woman cry by his unwillingness to apologize, a tall black sociology student somewhat aggressively gets in his face, and plays the role of white knight (yes yes very funny pun). Then another guy jumps in, looking and sounding less menacing, and says he wants to talk to him about his experiences.
After a minute and a half, Christakis and the first black guy shake hands and hug, after which the professor is told that he should stop smiling. Having established his dominance over the cowering old Greek, the black guy moves on. Christakis then goes on to keep getting yelled at by young women for another 15 minutes before the video ends.
As long as men and women are treated differently by society, they cannot engage in public debate with each other in a fair and consistent way. And because of human nature, society will always treat men and women differently, as it should. So what should we do?
I think national populism, with its disproportionate focus on male capitalists, has a similar psychological appeal. This movement directs its attention towards businessmen who comply with anti-discrimination laws instead of the largely female administrators and employees who most zealously make use of them. Others blame male postmodern philosophers, tracing everything liberals are doing today to something Foucault or Gramsci said a long time ago. If you want to make a connection between philosophers and left-wing public policy, you would have a stronger case if you talked about Catharine MacKinnon, whose radical ideas about relations between the sexes were to a large extent adopted by the federal government as the basis for sexual harassment law.
The strength of any anti-wokeness movement depends in large part on the strengths of its antibodies to a certain kind of female emotionalism. Jonathan Rauch and most classical liberal types avoid the difficult questions. Religion works better because, like liberalism, it disproportionately appeals to women and provides an alternative model for how the sexes should relate to one another. Relying on religious dogma also frees one from having to intellectually justify arguments that most anti-wokes are uncomfortable explicitly making.
Great essay! It's funny that there actually has been some pushback to tears in public discourse, and it came from the woke left themselves. They frame it as "white women's tears" because appending "white" to "women" is a loophole that makes them a valid target.
Oh boy, I'm a chick and couldn't agree with this fascinating essay more. Look at the crazy and obscure corners of the 'female-dominated' world - yarn & hand knitting, children's literature, etc. They've all become woke and if you do not abide by their orthodoxy you are mobbed into non-existence. Moreover, as a New Yorker of 35 years, I've been ghosted by most left-leaning pals in the name of whatever I don't know. And although I was born and raised a Massachusetts Democrat, at this point I am much more comfortable on the right, where folks just seem more fair, even-handed and just plain sane. Studies have shown that women tend to be 'neurotic' more than men and if this period doesn't display that in its full glory no other time will. We are experiencing 'Victorian-Woke-Vapors'. I used to be very open about making friends with whomever I met, but now I find myself not so open and I absolutely do not want to befriend Jewish women in New York who are the worst - very intolerant and even psychologically abusive (disclosure: my husband is Jewish and I raised my daughters Jewish - I have discussed this intent with them). I just won't deal anymore.
An aside about 'crying': A male friend, an admitting physician at a local hospital, recalled that during the height of the Covid pandemic, female personnel were so over-wrought with the carnage that a room had to be set aside for them to cry in. Some were even capacitated to the point where they couldn't calm down enough to work. He's been on the hospital floor for decades and was rather appalled by what he considered a lack of professionalism. However, when I discussed this with other female friends, some politically conservative, they thought this was okay under the circumstances. I am not so sure. Both of my grandmothers were nurses and they were professional and no-nonsense. There seemed to be an understanding back then, that you had to keep your shit together and just get on with the job, male or female.
My daughter was assigned to read the book "Masculine Toxicity' at graduate school (Columbia U). So, I asked her if she'd be reading about 'Feminine Toxicity'. She looked at me as if there could ever be such a thing. Women are not in a good place and need to rethink what 'being female' is all about at this juncture.
Having mentioned the concept a few times, many have been encouraging me to write a Substack on the feminization of political life and its connection to free speech issues. Noah Carl beat me to it, and the idea has also been picked up by no less an authority than Tom Edsall at the New York Times. I\u2019ve already written about the overrepresentation of women in HR. We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top.
What is left to contribute on the question of how feminization relates to pathologies in our current political discourse? First, I think that the ways in which public debate works when we take steps to make the most emotional and aggressive women comfortable have been overlooked. Things that we talk about as involving \u201Cyoung people,\u201D \u201Ccollege students,\u201D and \u201Cliberals\u201D are often gendered issues.
This doesn\u2019t always show up in the data, and many may not want to discuss anything controversial without having numbers they can refer to, lest they be accused of everything they say being a figment of their sexist imagination. Nonetheless, I think that anyone who has spent time paying attention to politics, journalism, or academia, or wherever people debate ideas, will understand what I\u2019m talking about.
Second, I think there\u2019s a certain weirdness to the arguments made by both sides of the gender issue. To simplify, you have the left, which leans towards the blank slate and opposes gender stereotypes but demands women in public life be treated as too delicate for criticism, and conservatives, who believe in sex differences but say to treat people as individuals. But if men and women are the same, or are only different because of socialization that we should overcome, there\u2019s no good reason to treat them differently. And if they are different and everyone should accept that, then we are justified in having different rules and norms for men and women in practically all areas of life, including political debate. How exactly this should be done is something worth thinking about. Finally, I argue that much of the opposition to wokeness is distorted and ineffective because it avoids the gendered nature of the problem, which also makes fighting it difficult.
Heather Heying has recently written on the differences between male and female competition and the difficulties that result when both sexes are put in the same environment and told to play by the same rules. It\u2019s a valuable read, but her discussion is at a mostly abstract level. It\u2019s worth thinking about the specifics of what debate (or \u201Cdebate\u201D) between the two sexes looks like in the real world.
I recently watched the full Yale Halloween costume video for the first time. For those who weren\u2019t paying attention or are too young to remember, here\u2019s a summary of what happened. If you haven\u2019t seen the video, it\u2019s worth checking out.
In fiction, like in the Netflix series The Chair, whenever there\u2019s a mob of students coming for a professor there\u2019s always a gender balance. But in the Halloween costume video, you see poor Christakis go through a gauntlet of sobbing women. Occasionally a man makes a comment amplifying what the women leading the charge are saying, but the guys are mostly spectators.
One sees a similar dynamic in a discussion between the Georgetown administration and the school\u2019s Black Law Students Association relating to the recent Ilya Shapiro \u201Cscandal.\u201D Over the course of the 24 minutes, among the students I count one man and seven women who spoke during the event. And the one man quickly makes his point and moves on, while the young women raise their voices, talk about how exhausted they are, bring up other incidents they\u2019re upset about, and ask follow-up questions. Maybe because these are law students instead of undergrads, they\u2019re much more composed than the Yale mob, although one again sees that this is an event driven almost exclusively by female concerns. It\u2019s not like no men show up to these things, but those that do are mostly wallpaper.
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