Why are so many women woke?
Scandinavian study reveals male-female dichotomy
Amajority of Canadians reject “wokeness,” according to recent polls. But more than that, a new paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology reveals something else — a male-female dichotomy. It is women who, for unclear reasons, disproportionately promulgate and buttress such progressive ideology. These findings are not surprising to anyone who has loudly opposed the politics of woke — myself included — and who has had largely female wrath visited upon them for their heresy.
Women should reject leftist radicalism. We suffer because of it. Instead, we promote it at work, in universities, in politics, our communities, and at home. We are the primary drivers of woke hogwash. This admission is both humiliating and enraging — but it’s true. Canadian institutions are beholden to this mostly female minority that not only bores us to tears — care to hear another personalized land acknowledgment, anyone? — but terrorizes us at the mere scent of wavering fealty.
“Wokeness” has been described as everything from a political epithet for a bogeyman of the extreme left to a catch-all for any cause whatsoever that concerns itself with the well-being of an identifiable group. A more reasonable definition, borrowed from political scientist Yascha Mounk, is that wokeness is a version of social justice based on what he terms “the identity synthesis.” It views human beings not as individuals, but as a collection of group identities that are either oppressed, or oppressive. And to be oppressed is to be virtuous; to be a victim is to hold precious social cachet. The more oppressed one is, the better a person they are — and the more we should all be forced to cater to their every whimsical desire. It goes without saying that wokeness is a race to the bottom of human dignity, potential and uniqueness.
Wokeness has infiltrated every aspect of our society — from education to employment to sports. Yet it is women who suffer the most severe consequences. We are the ones who have lost our private spaces and sports categories. Our girls are expected to undress in change rooms with grown, intact males. Complaints not permitted. We’ve been accomplices in silencing ourselves, demonizing ourselves, and cheering on those who wish to refer to us by our body parts or functions. That any woman accepts “uterus owner” or “chest feeder” as something other than misogynistic tripe is incomprehensible. Utter nonsense. Why would we do this to ourselves?
The Scandinavian researchers referred to an emergent and global public discourse on “woke” as a debate that has been “largely datafree.” In response, they crunched numbers from two studies to reveal the huge sex divide on the subject. The authors retitled “woke,” with academic flourish, as “critical social justice attitudes.” And who holds these attitudes the most? Women, of course — more than twice as often as men.
In saner times, the statements the researchers used to gauge public sentiment would read as (bad) parody. But we do not live in sane times. Study participants were asked to agree or disagree with everything from “(U)niversity reading lists should include fewer white or European authors” and “(T)he ideas of Karl Marx should not have more influence in national politics” to “(T)here are no biological differences between men and women.” The statements were selected oft-used opinions espoused by the shills of intersectional feminism, queer theory and post-colonial theory (among others). The resulting analysis concluded that these ideas had “little to no support from men” but “moderate” support from women. The authors did not provide an explanation and suggested future studies examine why women are “woker” than men.
Why is this happening? Does far-left ideology fill a void in certain women? What is that void? Is it that droves of Western women are deciding not to have children? Are we replacing babies with “oppressed people”? Is it simply in our female nature to be drawn in by the allure of what some see as virtuous compassion for the downtrodden? There is ample evidence that empathy is a biological and
sex-differentiated phenomenon, rooted, unsurprisingly, in the female role of motherhood. And while modern feminist theory has it that divergent behaviours between the sexes are always taught and enforced — socially constructed, as they say — scant evidence supports such a claim.
Female compassion is an enticing explanation for all of this. However, if we accept that women embrace wokeness because of their relatively more empathetic nature, a new problem emerges: Why, when women are shown the naked truth (sometimes literally, à la exhibitionist males in our private spaces) about the harms of this ideology, do they simply not denounce it? Why do they want to stick around to find out the next degrading moniker they’re expected to refer to themselves by? If “front-hole haver” doesn’t inspire in all women a vicious rage, I can’t imagine what will.
There’s something more going on. If women possess an evolutionarily superior sense of compassion, it doesn’t make sense that so many of us would happily give away our daughters’ rights to fair sports or sex-segregated spaces. Or accept that female rape victims should shut up about the males inside their refuges. These are not compassionate or empathetic things to do.
Some claim that a cabal of wealthy, powerful men is taking advantage of women’s good nature and manipulating us into wokeness. This claim is neither compelling nor complimentary of female intelligence. Quite the opposite: To argue that machiavellian men have the prowess to control our thoughts and actions necessitates our entire sex being stupid. We need to admit, instead, that a subset of women is complicit in this culture-destroying, thought-terminating scourge.
There is a deep cruelty in radical progressiveness. To woke persons, others can only be saintly or evil — nothing in-between. It evokes the psychology of the “in-group, outgroup” dynamic, which, curiously, is a dynamic more often enforced by females. In psychology studies, women have also been shown to demonstrate higher degrees of malevolence when compared with males. Perhaps this is the uncomfortable answer needed to explain the male-female wokeness divide: Perhaps it is not a tendril of our good nature that makes women “woker” than men but merely a reflection of our darker, malicious side.
Whatever it happens to be, what’s clear is that we need more women to demonstrate the courage of their convictions — and denounce the destructive, far-left dogma that is running roughshod over the majority of Canadians.