Why Women Love Woke
The toxic relationship: mad and sad women go woke; woke makes women go mad and sad.
Two Graphs: one showing the growing ideological gap between men and women, and the other showing that politically left-leaning women are disproportionately more likely to have a mental health condition. In other words, women have become more politcally radical and more psychologically unstable. What came first? Did woke drive women mad? Or are mad women responsible for the rise of woke?
Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in the West and is responsible for 30-40% of chronic sick leave. Specifically, it is women and girls who are suffering the most. While rates of mental illness are rising for both men and women, women are three times more likely to experience mental health problems than men. They are also twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and depression than men. Rates of self-harm among females have tripled in the last thirty years, and rates of suicidality have doubled.
This has all happened within a culture that professes to value feelings, emotional well-being, and mental health awareness. More people are going to therapy than ever before. More people are training to become therapists than ever before. These are all mostly women. Currently around 70 – 80% of psychologists and therapists are female. Those seeking help from them, are also more likely to be female. But it dosn’t seem to be helping. Indeed, one in three women will now take anti-depressants in their lifetime. Statistically, this must mean that many of the new cohort of female therapists will also be struggling with their own mental health difficulties. Depressed females are seeking treatment from depressed female therapists. It is not surprising, then, that women’s mental health is getting worse. However, women’s poor mental health is not worsening just because they are getting together and exacerbating their problems. There is a much more broader and underlying problem: their lifestyles are making them unhappy.
In the last fifty years, the amount of women in full time work has increased by over 50%. Similarly, in the last thirty years, the amount of women who are unmarried and single over the age of thirty has increased from 18% to 54%. It is now estimated that half of all of women aged 25 to 44 will be single by 2030. In short, women are working more and they are marrying and having a family less. Many people point to the negative effects of social media or the pressures of the beauty industry, as to why women are so sad, anxious, and depressed. However, the problem seems to be much more fundamental than this. There is now an increased pressure on women to focus on their careers at the expense of relationships. Meaningful relationships are what make people happy, especially women.
Women are now going to university more than ever before (while men are increasingly dropping out). It is in university where they come across ideas and perspectives that end up making them even feel worse than they already did. Feminism, Critical Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, Marxism: young women are encouraged to be cynical about the world, see oppression everywhere, hate their country, hate men, and hate anyone who thinks differently to them.
There is now a growing ideological gap between men, who are more likely to be conservative, and women, who more likely to be woke progressives. This gap is not widening because men becoming more right wing; it is widening because young women are increasingly adopting radically far-left political positions. Perhaps, given that more women are entering full time work (which some will struggle with because of their poor mental health) woke ideas such as harm reduction, focusing on emotions, caring for victim groups, and a critique of meritocratic capitalism, appeals to them. If men can work longer hours and work their way up the workplace hierarchy quicker than women can, it is easier to call this ‘patriarchy’ rather than confront the fact that men and women are different, and that many women cannot compete with men (nor do they want to).
DEI, safe spaces, therapeutic spaces, bringing your whole self to work, harm reduction, psychological safety, emotionality, conformity, conflict-avoidance: we now live in a highly feminised culture and this femininity has taken over the workplace. It is a toxic and destructive form of femininity and, ironically, the reason why so many women are making poor life choices that leave them unhappy and mentally unstable. If women want to feel better, they must first end their toxic love-affair with woke progressivism, which has plunged them into a downward spiral of insanity and despair.
Of course this is true, on average, across very large populations. There are thankfully many women who DON'T think in this way (we are reading the words of one of them). And it's important to note that the gap between older and younger women re; wokeism is as great as that between men and women.
Wokeism is, especially, a young, white, liberal, female phenomenon. This is surely likely in part to relate to evolved characteristics. It's almost a heresy to say it these days, but gender is very probably NOT a 'social construct'. It is not simply the product of learned or socialised behaviour. It relates in part to very real biological differences between men and women.
Women, on average, display a particularly strong inclination towards self-protection (ultimately to protect the child), which is reflected in traits such as agreeableness and a susceptibility to social contagion - a self-protective herd instinct. This very acute female self-protection instinct is probably why 'feminism' exists at all. It is why it exists as a human psychological possibility. Women are also, on average, relatively high in negative emotion which - in turn - induces self-protective anxiety and risk aversion. The woke inclination towards 'equal shares' for the vulnerable (equality of group outcome, irrespective of merit) is also a particularly female (motherly) instinct.
I can remember Ben Shapiro saying that even HE is a Marxist at home! The problem is that what works well in relation to the nursery doesn't always scale up successfully to the adult public world.
But it's only fair to broaden this discussion beyond women. If men tend to realise the error in all this, and men are not generally as 'woke' as women, then why aren't they doing anything about it?
To me, men are, in practice, just as complicit in the woke phenomenon as women are - precisely BECAUSE so many women are attracted to it. Men tend, in practice, either to offer direct support for it or else tend to do very little to challenge the women who hold strongly to this view.
Why? The answer probably also relates to evolved characteristics, in this case male ones which tend to reflect a general positivity and protectiveness towards women (i.e. an OUT-group protective instinct rather than an IN-group one - probably for the same evolutionary reasons, to protect the child). Last year, a chemical in female tears was found to reduce male aggression. That is a natural proof, and a reflection, of the tendency in men to think and act positively and protectively towards women. It is actually hard for men seriously to challenge women; they are much more likely to offer support for them, and to defer moral authority to them.
The complementary nature of men and women, which sustains our population, can thus, in very particular circumstances, work to conspire against us. We can become each others worst enemies, descending into a self-perpetuating socially destructive wokeism like a dog chasing its own tail!
It's rather a cliche, but the first 'woke' feminist narrative in Scripture is the Serpent flattering and exploiting Eve. God isn't telling you to abstain from eating the fruit of the tree for YOUR benefit, he informs her. He's doing so for HIS benefit. It's to stop you from becoming like him. But YOU are every bit as good as he is. Eat, and realise your own full potential - sister! And so she ate. But where was Adam in all of this? He just sat there and went along with it - because it's her.
It's not just young women who need to 'wake up' and pull us all out of this mess. It's also men. And to do it, we need to recognise once more the innate complementary differences between us, and how, in certain circumstances, these can be exploited and turned against us by a bad faith Serpent.
Wokeism is a Serpent of our times.
And the reason older women have not succumbed to him is that he wasn't in their schoolrooms.
Another great one Amy and thank you for not hating us men.