Despite what you may have heard on the website formerly known as Twitter, I do not like the thesis currently known as The Great Feminization. I did not hold hands with the thesis underneath the bleachers after school, I will not be attending prom with the thesis, please don’t put it in the newspaper, etc, etc. (You can put it in the newspaper that I got mad at the person who put that in the newspaper; more on that later.)
What do I think about the Great Feminization thesis, I don’t know. Or, to put it another way: lots of thoughts, some only halfway coherent, and many in active contradiction to each other. I keep tripping right off the bat over the word feminization, which on one hand clearly describes something real but on the other hand seems to get people’s backs up in a way that makes a productive discussion impossible, which is a problem. If you can’t have a conversation about your theory without thirty minutes of preemptive throat clearing about how the term you’ve coined to describe feminized cultural norms does not amount to an attack on women as a category, perhaps it would be easier to just choose a different word. (I say this, but then there’s a part of me that immediately wants to retort that no, it would not be easier— and furthermore, that it’s hard to imagine a more feminized endeavor than quibbling over the language used to describe an idea to the point where the idea itself never gets discussed at all.)
Anyway: Where I probably disagree most with Andrews, or at least am not persuaded, is on the notion that feminization is the downstream effect of having more females in any given environment. It seems clear that the phenomenon known as feminization can happen independent of the presence of women (which is why, again, if we need a name for this thing we should maybe call it something else). It’s correlation rather than causation: not to be all “men be dancing like this”, but some traits and skills are more commonly associated with women than men, and these do happen to be the traits and skills that correlate with success in the attention and information economies of the current moment.