Richard Hanania writes about the “gendered nature of wokeness”. A fresh heresy for your delectation this morning, gents.

“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’s 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.”

snip

“When public discourse operates according to male rules, women become more likely to select out of it. They focus more on career, children, hobbies, and family. This is why leftists have a point when they say that concepts like objectivity and free speech work to favor male voices. But while these concepts provide a male advantage if applied to areas like journalism and academia, we’re all better off when society cares more about truth and less about the emotional well-being of a small and hysterical minority. In other words, a world that valued truth and objectivity over feelings would have fewer female executives, senators, and journalists, but be better for everyone because it would have more economic and technological growth, while not encouraging women’s worst instincts (more female representation in high status careers does not appear to have done much good for women’s mental health). It might have more war too, but, as mentioned already, society has been pretty good at recognizing the harms that come from the excesses of masculinity. We haven’t even begun to think carefully about equivalent pathologies stemming from traits of the other sex.”