In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies . . . Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize . . . Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition . . . The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female . . . No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society . . . Feminization . . . is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation. – “The Great Feminization” by Helen Andrews, Compact
Once or twice a year, a short article or book appears that sheds so much light, it changes the way people think about important issues.
Praxis Circle often features significant material that our members send us. A few weeks ago, Connie Terry Buehler sent us a link to “The Great Feminization,” an article published by the online magazine Compact on October 16, 2025.
Connie is the founder and CEO of CTB1 (Choose The Best One), an executive recruiting firm focused on consulting, finance, and investment banking. Connie has decades of experience running large corporate human resources departments and recruiting top talent for corporate America. Her passion is helping Millennials and Gen Z find their passion and success in work.
Connie linked us to the Helen Andrews article because it’s thought provoking. She may or may not endorse it. The article explains a perhaps hidden factor that has been forcing America off the rails into cuckoo territory over the last 10 to 15 years. For many of us, American insanity became clear during the Summer of 2020, and we’re seeing signs again now.
Helen Andrews is a “conservative” mother of boys who wrote Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (2021). Since I’m a Boomer born in the exact middle of the Boom, I have plenty of standing on that one. I liked the book a lot and would love to interview her about it. She has much courage and is not afraid to say the truth in highly thoughtful, respectful, and factual ways.
It’s been in vogue for a while to entitle publications or trends “The Great ________,” and this one really delivers (again, “The Great Feminization”). The last such mega-trend we isolated was in our Jonathan Haidt interview involving his book, The Anxious Generation (2024). He argues that children’s social pathologies germinated with the iPhone’s introduction in 2007, accelerating with the release of front facing cameras in 2010 and Facebook acquiring Instagram in 2012. America’s poor control of technology is a main culprit. In Helen’s case, it’s the female takeover of almost every American institution over the last ten years.
Praxis Circle began addressing male-female issues years ago from our inception. Key questions are whether one’s sex makes a difference in one’s life and whether we should shape society at all with an eye toward any biological differences (leaving aside the “gender” issue for now).
A good recent starting point, beyond Ms. Andrews’ article, is our interview with Praxis Circle Contributor Erika Bachiochi. Her full interview appears here, and a clip below from that interview appears below. There Erika explains the third and fourth stages of feminism. She would say, I think, that men and women answer to and demonstrate the very same Cardinal and Christian virtues, though they might apply differently and obtain different responses depending on the situation presented.
An outline of feminism’s four recognized stages might help before we end:
Stage 1: Woman’s suffrage.
Stage 2: Equality in the workplace and outside the family.
Stage 3: Women should desire and have sex like men; to that could be added men are bad, need to be more like women, and warrant less power, and, in general, women need to be more like men.
Stage 4: Sex is a human cultural construct and must be eliminated.
As Erika describes above, technology such as the pill and other contraceptives, along with computer and smartphone technology, had a huge impact on Stages 3 and 4. To that, I would add women’s success in Stages 1 and 2 (applause from Doug), the growth of the welfare state, and changes in social mores generally, as well those specifically taught in educational institutions at every level are all contributing factors to the late stages of today’s feminism.
I hope the title of Ms. Andrew’s article and its apparent theme are not too off-putting or offensive to you. If someone wrote an article titled “The Great Masculinization: How Men Create All Crime and Murderous Wars,” I might simply think “true enough” and then read it to see whether it contains any good ideas about what to do to improve the world. For better or worse, men remain ~50% of the global population, and we aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Most important—which some women don’t recognize—is that men have minds of their own.
As for me, I remain just a typical male Boomer who grew up in the South (Virginia and North Carolina) who always felt he was a normal, traditional, conventional, red-blooded, American male. I never thought men were superior to women and don’t know many who do. In fact, many men know women make them much, much better people.
Now, I’m just a married guy going on 44 years of that foundational institution (with the same woman) who has two sons and a daughter, and seven grandsons and one granddaughter (bless her precious and quite remarkable heart). I’m also seeing increasingly that boys and men are not getting a fair shake in American society. Such an injustice cannot last for long. It’s not healthy for anyone or American society.
Like the vast majority of my peers, I fully believed in and supported “feminism’s” Stages 1 and 2, and I am not surprised in the slightest in the success American women have had during my lifetime. Our IQs are the same, and most jobs can be done equally well by individuals of either sex. Again, like Elon Musk, I feel like the last 30 years have involved the left-of-center moving so fast and far in one direction that I seem to have moved right.
Not so, I would argue. I’ve always believed in equality across every human “identity,” and I believe justice must give people what they deserve based primarily on merit, not status. Again, my views have not changed at all on Stages 1 and 2 issues, though I believe I’m clearly seeing the consequences now of Stages 3 and 4.
My question for you is: have we lost our balance and overshot the mark in some ways in Stages 3 and 4?
Helen raises the issue of whether men have been discriminated against during most of my lifetime, perhaps over the last 20 years. I don’t know, but Helen is beginning to make sense of why social justice, cancel culture, identity politics, and disregard for the law and reason have grown to a point that would have astonished even the radicals of the ’60s and ’70s.
One last question, if I’m not a big fan of Stage 3 and 4 feminism, does that make me a “masculinist”? (Elon, it’s not our fault.)
Man alive, masculinist . . . does that sound weird!
