Is Anyone Else Tired Of Being Baby-Talked About Politics?

I'm calling for a total and complete shutdown on women making infantilizing libtarded political skits until we settle the gender wars and restore society to pre longhouse debate order. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, in recent years, conservative and right-leaning thinkers have grown a special affinity for attributing society’s decline to a concept known as the longhouse, or, as Helen Andrews has termed it in Compact Magazine, “The Great Feminization.”

The theory goes by some other names, including gynecocracy, matriarchy, or, as our own Andrea Mew prefers to call it, the “hen house.” All of these people bring up salient points regarding marked signs of a feminized society. The person I think has endeavored to define the concept most clearly is Jonathan Keeperman, who writes under the pseudonym Lomez.

He grants it evades easy summary because of its versatile ambivalence, how it’s both politically earnest and an elaborate in-joke. Its use has taken on its own memetic colloquialisms, acting as a stand-in for the various social forces it reviles, whether that be wokeness, progressive politics, increasingly ingrained female sensibilities in institutions, egalitarianism, or women you just plainly dislike.

What Is the Longhouse?

Historically, the longhouse was a “large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian,” he explains, adding that “in online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy and its attendant autonomy for the modest comforts and security of collective living.”

But the real symbol of the longhouse is that of the Den Mother. Think of her like the hall monitor, the mommy that scolds you as a kid, the HR department sanitizing the workplace as much as it stamps out all vestiges of masculinity. “More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.”

"The Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.”

Lomez cites rhetorical shifts such as widely adopted “you go girl” campaign slogans that proudly proclaim the future is female or a glaring lack of concern for how sociopolitical messaging might alienate, if not outright blame, men, such as in Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men. These slogans proved to be descriptive of real trends. Women now hold the majority of professional managerial roles in the U.S. and are out-earning men in bachelor’s degrees and doctoral degrees. “And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management and compliance officers, that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.”

As such, there’s been an overwhelming push for distinctly feminine values as the institutions, the workforce, and education become female dominated, if not female prioritized, and feminine coded approaches to conflict. These include, as Lomez cites, prioritizing consensus, harm reduction, and offense prohibition taking precedence over truth, and which are enforced using feminine punitive measures like social isolation, reputation destruction, indirect and hidden force (like being canceled).

There’s been an emphasis on protecting feelings as the highest good and an aversion to risk-taking in the form of safetyism, as seen during the pandemic, where society was unwilling to make pragmatic trade-offs in the name of safety becoming the highest value. This leads to infringements on personal freedom and expression, and it seeks to dismantle overt hierarchies and competition in favor of diversity and inclusion.

The Great Feminization Hypothesis

Helen Andrews has an excellent piece in Compact Magazine, where she puts forth her hypothesis of The Great Feminization. I agree with virtually all of her points, namely that wokeness as a political ethos is a prioritization of the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition, and that this feminization or “wokening” of all the major institutions has come to rise in seeming direct proportion to women’s occupation of these fields, where they are on the cusp of overtaking, if they haven’t already, the male gender ratio and consequently fundamentally altered the ethos of these industries.

As she evocatively points out, “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 feminized, inward focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?” The problem, she argues, is that female modes of interaction aren’t well-suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions, so when academia becomes majority female, it will be oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. I think this is a “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” question.

Wokeness as a political ethos is a prioritization of the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition, and this feminization or “wokening” of all the major institutions has come to rise in seeming direct proportion to women’s occupation of these fields.

We could easily conceive of these vocations living up to their strictest standards had their core selection processes not been tampered with. Andrews’ main objection seems to be that “the problem, ultimately, is that women didn’t just outcompete men in the marketplace to overtake these institutions in a fair fight.” It is, as Andrews suggests, “an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumbs off the scale it will collapse within a generation.” This is no different than the affirmative action question. We know that companies are favoring women in their hiring practices, and we know this because anti-discrimination law makes it illegal to hire too few women at your company, and failure to comply is a costly offense, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But still, there’s something about the hypothesis I find unsatisfying. Helen Roy and Katherine Dee rightly point out the limitations of Grand Theories of Everything, which attempt to neatly explain all sociocultural phenomena of the past several decades. Dee wonders why there’s no polemic on Landmark or the effects of New Thought or New Age spirituality, as there is on feminization. Roy warns that a theory of everything “explains every historical development as confirmation of itself and reinterprets every contradiction as further proof. The system reabsorbs contradiction and cognitive dissonance. Its heroes are always absolved, and its scapegoats are always indicted.”

One look at the left’s flirtation with Theories of Everything and you’ll see how unsophisticated they all turn out to be: everything is intersectional oppression existing in the context of a patriarchal white supremacist heteronormative society. These theories purport themselves as self-evident. Roy cites even more evocative examples, such as Marx’s class struggle and Freud’s libido, and how they operate “as a closed explanatory loop that absorbs and regurgitates everything through its own vocabulary.”

And that’s where I find this Great Feminization theory perplexing. Everything seems to collapse onto itself and become one muddy soup of sameness. The feminists are at once too masculine but also too feminine. And what of men? Are they the same? Writer and political commentator Rob Henderson, who holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, posits that “online interaction forecloses physical violence, so men adopt more feminine forms of aggression verbal, social, indirect. The medium itself may feminize behavior regardless of who’s using it.”

For me, it’s the fact that I’m seeing the feminization as downstream of an overrepresentation of women, a less plausible explanation now that right-wingers are embracing collectivist ideals and shamelessly embracing the “woke” part of the woke left and using it to advance right-wing ideals. Take it from Carl Benjamin, who says, “the problem with the woke left isn’t the woke part, it’s the left part.”

There’s even been a paradoxical feminization of the manosphere, wherein the men lash out in distinctly feminine ways. They seem envious of female power and value, even overtly complaining that women get free social capital in the form of moral concern and attention by virtue of being women, and they’re asking, “can I have some of that, please?”

Many slyly undermine women’s organic success online and in academia using reputational harm tactics. Between implying that having a female profile picture gets you automatic and instant thousands of followers without any effort or insisting that a woman with a PhD in a real scientifically useful research field isn’t doing real research and that she’s cheapening the title with trash, it’s hard to see the difference between women who blame everything they don’t like on patriarchy (which is a catch-all for the toxically masculine) and the men who blame everything on matriarchy (a catch-all for the toxically feminine).

They have no shortage of narratives about being harmed by women or the excesses of feminism, some of which are pure projection and they even enforce their own form of political orthodoxy through social shaming and pressure to conform (they shame men who side with women as simps and dismiss women’s valid criticisms as feminists in wolves’ clothing).

Even traditional conservative women who spend virtually all of their time holding other women to high biblical standards get a barrage of emotional projection about nagging men and knowing their place for merely applying their moral frameworks consistently. This emotional reaction reminds me of what Andrews described in her article when three female justices talked exuberantly over their male colleagues, and it was celebrated as “an explosion of bottled-up judicial girl power.”

The illogical opposition to men falling within the scope of moral philosophy because it’s “not a woman’s place to lecture him” reminds me of the intersectional woke liberals who lecture white women not to speak over the experiences of black women, as if they have a claim to some inherent positional reverence. Not to mention the increasingly common position on the online dissident right to “repeal the 19th” with the implication being that giving women the right to vote was a mistake because they’re voting the wrong way. That’s not a principled argument; it’s one made out of emotion, and it's eerily similar to the liberal feminist argument that men ought not to have a say on the legal and moral permissibility of abortion because they don't have a uterus. Men make similar allusions to women's lack of risk of being drafted in wars.

So, I’m skeptical that we can be so quick to accept The Great Feminization Hypothesis as the monocausal explanation for woke ideology as downstream of women’s temperament, but it certainly identifies something of real merit. Unfortunately, my hopes of having productive conversations about these issues are being obscured by the reality that lies all around me: how people are resistant to information that doesn’t confirm their pre existing biases.

But let’s say we remove our finger from the scale and let women compete in the marketplace and earn their spot purely on merit (which I’m in favor of), so that the types of women who self-select for and earn their place in these industries are exactly the sort of women who belong there and who will uphold the rigorous standards of their position. The part of her thesis I think doesn’t necessarily hold up is the fact that plenty of male dominated industries still have a culture of safetyism which emerges from them, like tech companies, university admin, corporate boards, police departments, Hollywood studios, even the Boy Scouts have all become feminized all without women’s dominance, sometimes with hardly any female participation at all.

Why Is The Great Feminization a Better Explanation Than Safetyism?

Haidt contends that wokeism is an offshoot of safetyism, “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns,” but he attributes it to different causes than the oversimplified one of the Great Feminization. He traces it back to overprotective parenting styles, the decline of unsupervised play, the rise of social media and subsequent decline in mental health, bureaucratic expansion and administrative overreach, increasing political polarization since the 1980s, and a shift in how social justice is conceptualized.

These explanations provide ample context for why the worst offenders of wokeism can often arise from feminine men or women who are more accurately alienated from femininity. After all, are we going to make the same mistake of the libs’ relationship to masculinity in asserting that the toxic forms of a gendered profile are all-encompassing? Examples like reputation savaging, backbiting, and exclusion are all examples not just of femininity but of a particularly antisocial brand of female conflict navigation. Jordan Peterson cites these as examples of female sociopathy, the foil of which is male physical violence, and I don’t see anyone coining The Great Masculinization of New York Subways.

That poses the question, isn’t the real problem more complicated? Shouldn’t the goal be to cultivate a healthy vision of femininity that’s actually integrated its animus and a masculinity that’s integrated its anima? Because as oppressive as the longhouse can be, frat house masculinity isn’t really a civilizational upgrade either.

Besides, the most politically potent edge of wokeism isn’t even necessarily limited to HR girlbossery, I’d argue critical race theory has been far more impactful, and the intellectual roots of that political theory go back decades. Its most influential advocates have overwhelmingly been men, especially when you trace it back to its roots. Not feminized men, either.

The Great Feminization can’t explain Ta-Nehisi Coates dropping era-defining essays arguing that black Americans are owed reparations or the whole lineage of black male scholars who frame themselves as revolutionaries, taking on America’s racial sins. The spine of that ideology comes from a tradition of male-driven, confrontational, militant political theory that doesn’t look much like the feminized longhouse.

The Longhouse Continues to Haunt the Narrative

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to have many productive conversations about the Great Feminization or the Longhouse (which gets deployed in wildly inconsistent ways online, sometimes just to mean “a woman did something men didn’t like”) because the entire discourse keeps getting drowned out by the steady stream of viscerally spiritual longhousing pumped out on TikTok. Every day there’s another liberal wokescold doing an infantilizing political skit, lecturing her imaginary toddler audience, and the sheer psychic cringe of it all makes nuance impossible.

Arielle Fodor is a content creator who makes satirical videos, “gentle parenting” conservatives out of their problematic worldviews in a condescending singsong voice like a teacher would to a young student or a mother would to her child. Fodor, who’s a former teacher and a mom, takes on the grating persona of Mrs. Frazzled in these infantilizing political lectures that embody the longhouse to a regrettable degree.

The skits feature a host of situations, topics, and objects of scorn. One day, she might be poking fun at a politician, the next it might be the “racist uncle” at family dinner, or anyone who holds an “indefensible” position. Take this video, for example. The premise is “gentle parenting your transphobic uncle at Thanksgiving.” In it, she engages in a fictional scenario where Uncle Mark is being transphobic, and she responds in kind by teaching him how to be a heckin’ decent human being by speaking to him like a child. The implication, of course, is that conservative opinions are like those of children, not worth contending with seriously but to be met with time-out corners and tone policing.

Every day there’s another liberal wokescold doing an infantilizing political skit, lecturing her imaginary toddler audience, and the sheer psychic cringe of it all makes nuance impossible.

By positioning themselves as the serious adults in the room and the object of their scorn as the children who need to be "gentle parented" to understand appropriate reactions and behavior, they successfully leverage condescension to imply their opponents (and their opponents’ beliefs) are beneath them.

Much like you would construct these memes that depict yourself and your side as the virtuous, beautiful, all-encompassing goodness vs your enemies as the ugly, monstrous, all-encompassing evil, and positioning these two opposing forces in a way that makes you have the upper hand (look how cool I look), these skits do not have the same claim to aurafarming. If anything, it’s this bizarro embracement of condescension, smugness, moral superiority, and contempt. The behavior is so viscerally off-putting that it makes me wonder why we even think it normal to speak to children this way (and many think we shouldn’t).

Back to transphobic Uncle Mark, though. She tells him to “try again with kind words, or we’re going to take a break from this conversation.” Modeling the feminine virtues implicit in the longhouse, she tells him, “we use the names people tell us, remember?” (social cohesion over truth) and dismisses valid arguments with “No, they are telling you who they are. You just need to use your listening ears, friend.” And then resorts to passive aggression to undermine and enforce conformity, “Did they give you trouble about your new hairline or your veneers or your LASIK? No, so you can mind your own body, got it, got it?” And if you don’t “got it, got it,” well, Mrs. Frazzled has one message for you, “You actually don’t need to get it,” because “it’s not your job to be the gender police, silly goosey.”

Just when you think your body can’t bear the somatic whiplash of relentless cringe any longer, it gets far worse. “Oh ho ho ho, that’s an inside thought. Catch a bubble, please.” This lecture then loops back onto itself by reaffirming their worldview as self-evidently true: “No, they are who they are, and we are not going to pretend otherwise because you are uncomfortable, so why don’t we do two minutes in the calm down corner?” Oh God, now we’re being sent to time out! Is this going to be followed by re-education? “At this table, we are respectful, so if you cannot be respectful (see: affirmative of self declarative delusions), it is time to take a break (see: think about what you’ve done by dissenting from the hive mind).”

As Wokal Distance puts it on X, the goal of these skits is not to explain anything but to “put you in your place” by treating you like a toddler so they can grab the social high ground in the conversation. Mrs. Frazzled represents conservatives and heterodox positions as illogical toddlers having “big feelings,” and of course, it creates this power dynamic that’s impossible to navigate because your responses are being treated as arguments not worth responding to, characterized as the emotional outbursts of a dysregulated toddler.

The reason this dynamic is so insufferable is not just because the voice and disposition are grating in themselves but because it’s snark parading as an argument. “They seek to win the social battle by poisoning the environment in which a legitimate exchange of ideas could take place.” The infantilization extends far past their mode of response; their worldview itself is similarly oversimplistic and childlike. “Zip it, lock it, put it in your pocket, what do you think feminism is?” Fodor says in a skit mocking antifeminists (because what feminism is is so glaringly obvious, only an idiot wouldn’t understand it, a.k.a. agree with all of its implied presuppositions about the world, power dynamics, and male-female relations.)

The implication, of course, is that conservative opinions are like those of children, not worth contending with seriously but to be met with time-out corners and tone policing.

Lomez has characterized the longhouse in his quintessential Longhouse manifesto, “Think of the Covid Karen: Triple masked. Quad boosted. Self confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person who is as often male as female is the avatar of the Longhouse.”

People like Mrs. Frazzled give the caricature of the longhouse a form, with hundreds of political gentle parenting skits dating back to 2020. Take this one from 2021, which is a bit too on the nose of Lomez’s description. In a pandemic-era skit, she informs America that those who are unvaccinated are no longer welcome to play with vaccinated friends because they “don’t want to die.”

The joke is always that the liberals have the obvious moral high ground because these issues are obviously and easily settled from their perspective. Why would you make a big stink about vaccinations when just quietly and politely getting them grants you instant entry to businesses with a simple proof of vaccine card? It’s not like this completely new vaccine without any long-term trials was completely ineffective and actually caused myocarditis in healthy young men, right? Oopsy! Those concerns are brushed off as “big feelings” she’ll give you two minutes to sit with. Then it’s time to put your big boy pants on and suck it up!

While Mrs. Frazzled is hardly the only such content creator in this niche, she’s by far the most ubiquitous one. She has 1.4 million followers on TikTok, and Rolling Stone ran a story on her last year after she was reportedly met with a huge wave of backlash from “online trolls.” In the article, Fodor admits the gist of her videos is to talk down to conservatives. “[My content] exposes the absurdity of things that people are prejudiced against,” Fodor explains to Rolling Stone. “When you treat them like a child, a tongue-in-cheek kind of talking down to them, the things that some people spend their time and hatred on lose their power.”

She told Page Six she was met with a barrage of death threats, harassing phone calls, and doxxing attacks. We obviously condemn this behavior and wish not to incite any harassment against this content creator. Unfortunately, the reality of being a public figure, especially one who makes contentious political content, is that you attract the ire of the partisan crazies. The inflammatory reactions came after Fodor took part in a fundraising Zoom call for presidential candidate Kamala Harris, “White Women for Kamala Harris.” It sounds like a joke, but the fundraising call was in complete earnest. Fodor was invited to take part as a speaker.

She introduced herself by reminding her fellow white women, “We are here because BIPOC women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen, and get involved this election season. This is a really important time, and we all need to use our voices and influence for the greater good. No matter who you are, you are all influencers in some way.” She also provided them with a useful guide of do’s and don’ts for navigating online toxicity, warning them that toxicity can come from within, too, warning not to isolate themselves and remain in community with one another but warns, “don’t make it about yourself” because “as white women we need to use our privilege to make positive changes.”

“If you find yourself talking over BIPOC individuals or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can put our listening ears on,” she muses. She encourages white women to learn from and amplify the voices of the historically marginalized and to use their privilege to push for systemic change. “As white people, we have a lot to learn and unlearn, so do check your blind spots.”

While Fodor admits her Mrs. Frazzled content is more of an expression of ingroup catharsis than an actual attempt to convince the other side, these people also hide behind the satirical character as plausible deniability, even when they’re arguing in earnest. Several articles covering Fodor’s harassment following the White Women for Kamala Harris appearance attempted to do gotcha journalism by claiming that right-wing commentators who described her comments as “dystopian” or “woke” were just missing the joke and were too stupid to realize that she plays a character.

They specifically list Elon Musk’s comment that it’s “next-level cringe” or others who wrote “I can’t believe this is not a parody” under the video as evidence that they “didn’t understand the satirical approach used by Fodor in her videos and believed she was literally talking to the Zoom attendees like they were toddlers.” Only, Fodor was clearly being earnest in voicing her actual views and advice for fellow white women interested in activism and acting as allies for BIPOC women, with a few strategic references of her gentle parenting content sprinkled in as a tongue-in-cheek wink and a nod, not as some grand Sacha Baron Cohen level gimmick.

Final Thoughts

As long as women like Fodor keep embodying the longhouse in motion, we won’t be able to achieve a more sophisticated political understanding of wokeism: how it arises, under what conditions, how to stave it off, and prevent it from returning.

This grating indulgence in smugness and maternal authoritarianism hands endless ammunition to bad actors who wish to weaponize it as evidence that women have no place in these institutions at all, that their very presence is what has degraded them. The mommy lectures become Exhibit A for a gender panic that gets extrapolated onto all modern women, and it's all so tiresome.