Toxic Femininity

Mona Charen
Thu, 30 Oct 2025 13:31:18 -0700
Opinion

"Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" — Henry Higgins

Those are the words librettist Alan Jay Lerner penned for the fictional professor Henry Higgins in the 1956 musical "My Fair Lady," and honestly, it could have been the title of Helen Andrews' much-discussed recent essay in Compact. She called it "The Great Feminization" but her screed is very much a hymn to men.

Andrews' essay has received applause from the right, where caveman masculinity is making a comeback, but she has fallen into the trap of black-and-white thinking and subtracted from a reasonable understanding of relations between the sexes.
Updated: Fri Oct 31, 2025

"Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" — Henry Higgins

Those are the words librettist Alan Jay Lerner penned for the fictional professor Henry Higgins in the 1956 musical "My Fair Lady," and honestly, it could have been the title of Helen Andrews' much-discussed recent essay in Compact. She called it "The Great Feminization" but her screed is very much a hymn to men.

Andrews' essay has received applause from the right, where caveman masculinity is making a comeback, but she has fallen into the trap of black-and-white thinking and subtracted from a reasonable understanding of relations between the sexes.

Andrews has discovered that men and women are different. A random woman may be taller than a random man, she notes, but on average, most men are taller than most women. I'm not entirely mocking her for this observation. For decades, there were academics and others who denied that sex differences were innate, arguing instead that nearly everything was "socially constructed." But even with this seemingly anodyne observation, Andrews sails over the top, because not even the most die-hard progressives denied that certain physical traits, like height, are mostly inborn. Where they drew the line was over the contention that men and women had average group differences in intelligence, tastes, aggression or empathy.

Andrews then makes the case that women, having achieved something like launch velocity in American institutions, were corrupting them beyond recognition because women "favor consensus and cooperation" whereas male group dynamics are "optimized for war." Cancel culture, she writes, "is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field." If not stopped, she warns, women represent a "threat to civilization."

Sound familiar? It should. Some lefty feminists used to pathologize men in similar ways. That didn't work out too well. In fact, if the right's response to Andrews' essay, along with their embrace of chuds like Andrew Tate, is any indication, the right is committing the same error the left made in demonizing an entire sex. A rising number of young men have become resentful of the left's disdain for traditional masculinity (or any masculinity in some cases) and have sought respect elsewhere. Alas, many have found it in the Manosphere and other antisocial environs. If the right now argues that women are the problem with society, they may provoke a similar backlash.

Nor does Andrews grapple with the abundant evidence that cancel culture is far from a female-only preserve. The president and vice president of the United States attempt to get comedians and executives fired, universities defunded, media companies punished, and even restaurants boycotted for wrongthink.

Andrews argues that because women are more oriented toward cooperation than competition, they will undermine high standards, striving and excellence in favor of a "workplace (that) feels like a Montessori kindergarten." Caricature is not argument. While it's true that men tend to be more competitive and aggressive than women (thus the origin of the phrase "testosterone poisoning"), it is emphatically not the case that women lack competitive or aggressive urges altogether. Nor is it the case that men lack the capacity for empathy and teamwork. Andrews frets that women will destroy our great corporations by sitting around in drum circles or something. But the period that has coincided with women's rise in the corporate world has also seen a rise in real median wages, improvements in productivity, and rising national wealth. The supposedly nefarious female influence on businesses has not prevented the U.S. economy from leaving other rich countries in the dust.

Labeling traits as "toxic," whether it's the progressives saying as much about male aggression or the right saying it about female cooperation, is reductionist and simpleminded. All human beings have some mix of these traits, and wisdom comes from recognizing how to appreciate difference without judgment, how to modify innate traits for social good and how to mine what is best in all. Yes, boys must be taught to curb their natural aggression and channel their energy toward protecting rather than dominating those who are weaker. And yes, girls have to be socialized to curb their cliquishness and include rather than exclude. And if some boys have more female qualities and some girls have more masculine traits, that's fine, too.

On average, women do tend to prefer work that is interpersonal to work that is solitary. In my 2018 book, "Sex Matters," I quoted social scientist Patti Hausman on the question of why more women don't pursue careers in engineering: "Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works." That, and not "social engineering" as Andrews argues, largely accounts for why women now dominate the fields of psychology and human resources. These are free choices of free people.

Men do tend to be more comfortable with risk-taking, less aware of social cues and less averse to open conflict than women. But noticing these differences should be intriguing, not an opportunity to weaponize.

Andrews and the right are painting a cartoonish image of both men and women. And they're playing a dangerous game. Alienating 51% of the population is unlikely to go well for them.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, "Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism," is available now.