I used tears to sway my husband. It was a snapshot of the wider gender divide

When COVID shut down the world in 2020, I discovered something shameful about myself. Right from the start, the evidence showed that the disease was chiefly dangerous for a small subset of the population vulnerable due to advanced age or other health conditions. Yet Australia embarked on a cascade of lockdowns – starting with the least affected. Victorian premier Dan Andrews quickly closed schools. NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian prevaricated, but encouraged parents to keep their children home.

My husband and I knew our family faced little risk. He wanted our young child to stay in school. I felt that I had no choice but to tune into community anxiety and home-school.

I couldn’t win the argument with evidence. So I resorted to tears and claimed to be scared of the sickness to win the argument. The humiliating truth: I feared social stigma more than the virus.

I will never stop feeling ashamed of my cowardice.

My fears and the tactics I deployed to get my way in that moment were quintessentially female. Women have been shaped by evolution to seek social approval and appeal to emotion in asserting themselves.

So when US commentator Helen Andrews published an essay this month on “The Great Feminisation”, I was rather inclined to agree with the core of her thesis. Andrews argues that institutions are changing as women achieve parity and in some professions, such as education and law, outnumber men.

Feminine social norms are increasingly shaping public discourse and institutional behaviour, she says, and the emotional and social levers that women (on average) use to achieve their desired outcomes are what we have come to know as wokeness and cancel culture.

Woke ways of approaching the world privilege emotional responses over evidence or sometimes conflate emotion with evidence. For instance, when a court decides that a woman bringing a sexual assault case is believable and bases its findings on the credibility of her emotional response during the trial, undoing centuries of legal safeguards. Andrews fears that if institutions like the law become overly feminised, then “judges will bend the rules for favoured groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavoured groups”.

The classic fictional rendering of this situation is the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, written in the 1950s and inspired by real events. In the racially charged American South, a white woman falsely accuses a black man of rape. The all-white jury, already predisposed against the accused, gives greater value to the white woman’s tears than the evidence presented at trial. The man is convicted.

The dispassionate rule of law, which requires concrete and not just emotional evidence to secure a conviction, is designed to protect against this kind of injustice.

Evolutionarily, women’s emotional appeal for protection would have been a useful safeguard against men’s superior physical strength. In a cerebral world, however, in which both men and women are capable of marshalling facts equally, the trait has the potential to be toxic.

Cancel culture, Andrews argues, is another particularly feminine way of managing conflict. Which also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Social ostracisation is a non-violent form of aggression that is safer for a physically weaker aggressor to engage in than bodily combat. It still wounds. Social exclusion affects the brain in similar ways to physical pain, and can lead to long-term ill-health and depression.

Wokeness and cancel culture have changed business and public life. It’s plausible that the growing number of women employed in an institution is the reason why. I’m also prepared to agree with Helen Andrews that a “feminised” society predominantly run by emotion and ostracisation would be far from ideal. As Andrews asks: “If your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminised, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?”

Yes, yes, yes, and amen to preventing all that. Weaponised wokeness and cancel culture have been twin drivers of modern mania, and we risk losing valuable institutions and contributions to their untrammelled zeal.

But it bothers me that Andrews is fuelling a new gender war based on this mania when manias are hardly a historical anomaly. In fact, humanity seems prone to regular bouts of collective madness. Many have been male-led. A bloodthirsty orgy of human sacrifice emerged from the patriarchal Aztec society. Women were notably not in charge as the Nazis carried out the Holocaust against Jews.

Humanity has learnt important lessons from those periods of dangerous lunacy. The lesson of woke and cancel culture can be taken without pitting men and women against one another.

If the cause of the mania is a feminine way of operating, if women are rejecting and trying to overturn the rule of law on the basis of emotion, the argument in favour of the rule of law needs to be made with the same emotional power. Social justice isn’t achieved by dismantling objective fairness, but by guaranteeing it.

The shame of ostracisation should accrue to the bully, not her victim. We have to accept that a gender-equal society will not be a kinder one – because women have never been the gentler sex. We simply manage conflict differently – less violently, but no less ruthlessly.

As always with Helen Andrews, whom I count as a friend, the essay is excellent and the argument has a great deal of merit. I can’t fault Andrews’ conclusion, which is that male energy is as vital to society as feminine energy. Now that women are empowered, she writes, it’s time to stop making it “illegal for women to lose”.

But, as clickbait, it’s creeping unchallenged into our timelines – eliciting an emotional resonance where a rational approach is needed to manage the destructive potential of another social mania.

What an ironically female way to declare war on the great feminisation.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

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