Why the "Feminization" of Progressive Culture Is a Big Problem

It keeps us from coordinating at scale

Recently I explored how, at a recent festival, a ketamine journey (K hole!) dissolved my boundaries and set me thinking about how surplus repression—beginning with toilet training and reinforced through sexual taboos—creates obedient subjects, trapped in what Wilhelm Reich called “character armor.” I connected this with our primate inheritance of male violence. I explored how civilization redirects blocked instinctual drives — libido, Eros — into habituated mind-control and mechanized slaughter. But I also looked at the triumph of symbiosis in nature, where cooperation eventually “out-competes” domination (consider a tree versus a tiger), although not necessarily on our little human time-scales.

Back in America, I watch my society collapse into fascism as the Right seizes control of not only our institutions but also, even scarier, the mechanisms for producing and reproducing “subjectivity” in itself, while the mass populace seems incapable of effective resistance. Not grasping how the Right weaponizes “frames” or the ultimate intention of narcissistic psychopaths, progressives somehow fail to powerfully assert their moral and social vision.

Progressives seem paralyzed and overwhelmed by the avalanche of horror coming from Trumplandia, as well as the massive Right Wing media swarm, funded by the fossil fuel and tech oligarchy. Even though progressives comprise the much larger group, we seem smaller and weaker because we are much less coordinated as well as less aggressive.

At this point, I sense we are approaching a species-level bifurcation: We either remain trapped under repression, invasive mind-control, and primate male violence, or we find a way to break free, building a new culture based on peaceful cooperation or symbiosis. In material terms, there is still the potential for all of us to thrive and flourish as one human family. For this to happen, we would need to radically reduce wealth inequality and allocate our finite resources sensibly and fairly.

It is also possible that a percentage of the population is choosing to self-terminate, in an evolutionary sense, due to their propensity for abject passivity and susceptibility to mind control. Those who are so credulous as to unquestionably swallow evangelical rhetoric and anti-vaccine propaganda may, in a longer arc, be choosing to remove themselves from humanity’s evolution via a type of natural selection.

I find it fascinating to consider how the current NeoReactionary upsurge — incredibly seeking to regress the U.S. back to some bizarre amalgam of 1930s Germany meets 1850s Colonialist slave-holding America — seems to draw so much of its fury from the frustration and anguish of White males. Many men, particularly on the Right, felt that women were making too much social progress. They were starting to escape the yoke of patriarchal oppression. Therefore, the “pro-natalism” and “tradwife” movements seek to establish conditions where women in the future will not achieve higher education or careers. They will become baby-producing units as soon as they exit adolescence.

The social program of dark triad personalities like Trump, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and so on, often seems confusing, illogical, and self-contradictory, yet it works effectively to benefit those who seek “power over” (instead of “power with”) and social control. Even the logical contradictions and bizarre confusions help their project. For instance, combining pro-natalism and anti-abortion / anti-contraception policies with a Libertarian goal to eliminate healthcare and social services seems crazy — but it will engender a population that is young, uneducated, defenseless, and hence incapable of resistance. Women will become mothers when young, making it impossible for them to develop political consciousness.

Thiel — the tech oligarch who created J.D. Vance as his proxy — believes that women should lose the right to vote, writing: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Trump and House Republicans recently pushed the SAVE Act along with an executive order that would require documentary proof of citizenship to vote. Critics warn this would disenfranchise many millions—particularly married women whose current surnames often don’t match their birth certificates. Courts have already blocked part of this devious plan, but the Right still seek to push it through.

One thing that surprises me is that progressive women, for the most part, do not seem to be intensively mobilizing their communities and networks against fascism — particularly as “Trumpism” is a direct attack on the societal gains made by women over the last seventy years, as well as an existential strike against women’s lives and freedoms. My inchoate sense is that women have made those gains, in part, because they are much better than men at forming horizontal networks and communities — for instance, networked communities of women who support each other as entrepreneurs, as yogis, or in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. In a peaceful society, women’s greater emotional intelligence leads to increasing success over time. So the Right Wing wants more wars and imperial conquests and even civil war to stop this development.

I have a number of women friends who manage sizable networks of successful and enterprising women, but they seem intent on remaining apolitical (while sometimes pursuing other good causes, such as animal rights). For instance, Bibi Brzozka runs a large online community focused on “holistic health and intimacy.” Layla Martin has built a Tantric empire, helping women find “epic sex and legendary love.” Shiva Rea and Sharon Gannon, among others in the yoga world, have thousands of followers. Other women I know have female support networks in the dozens or hundreds.

Our current unfortunate reality — as I keep reiterating in these essays — is that the Trump regime that has seized power literally threatens the future of humanity as well as most forms of life on Earth. Climate scientists are now saying we may reach 3 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels by 2050 — within the lifetime of most people reading this. But even that could be conservative, considering feedback loops in the climate system that work together to accelerate warming, coral bleaching, desertification, and so on. For instance, the loss of forests and jungles means that those once-verdant areas become carbon emitters instead of “carbon sinks.” By 2050, as many as two billion people in the Global South may be trapped in zones that are essentially uninhabitable.

Politics, in other words, is becoming “biopolitics” in an existential sense. Everybody needs to understand this. We should all explore how we use our leverage in society to change the dynamic away from spiraling toward certain, inevitable doom.

It took me while, but this finally brings me to the uncomfortable, controversial topic I planned to explore today. I want to propose that the “feminization” of progressive culture is a problem we have to reflect on and confront. I theorize that this “feminization” of culture is one of the obstacles that prevents us from coming together to address this societal and geopolitical emergency in a coherent way. This is not a question of pointing fingers of blame at any one or any group. The process has developed naturally and, in a sense, organically. Let me try to explain my thinking.

The common argument made on the Left is that our society suffers from a masculine polarity, an excess of patriarchal control. This is, of course, true on one level: Men have built the institutions, the war machine, and so on. But there is a metaphysical interpretation of contemporary society which reverses this commonly held idea.

Hinduism tells us that the masculine/feminine dynamic is an expression of the Shiva/Shakti polarity. In Hinduism, Shiva represents pure consciousness, stillness, detachment, the “unmoved mover.” Shakti is the energy and movement that leads to manifestation — Maya/Shakti/Kali give us the comforting illusion of this materially projected universe. We are said to be in the Kali Yuga, when the destructive energy of Kali dominates.

The Kali Yuga is the “Iron Age” of materialism, which includes the scientific belief that the universe is material or physical in nature (which quantum physics subverts). This has led to a worldview that denies the possibility of a soul or spirit that exists beyond this finite existence. This has led to an excessive focus on material accumulation, creature comforts, and the hoarding of wealth and capital. The root of the word “materialism” is Mater, or mother. Materialism, in the age of Kali Yuga, represents the all-devouring dark mother, the ecstatic Kali who dances on corpses. Modern Western society worships wealth and material progress because we have lost legitimate, coherent pathways to attain initiation and self-transcendence, which are, in truth, far more important attainments than gold toilet seats or private Qatari jets.

In a time when the masculine Shiva current is diminished and our society’s focus is on the feminine aspect of material manifestation, society as a whole is, in a sense, “enslaved” by materialism and the lower or even “demonic” aspect of the feminine. Please note that I am considering feminine and masculine as polarities and I am not referring to men and women as such. There are men with stronger feminine polarity and women with stronger masculine polarity, and so on, as David Deida has discussed. At the same time, it must be admitted that women tend to express more of the feminine polarity, and vice versa.

As an example of what I am exploring here, I was impressed by the courage of Anuranda Pandey’s “The intellectual poverty of women's society” on Substack. Pandey argues that women’s conversational norms tend to be structured around emotional safety, relational cohesion, and status preservation. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of intellectual rigor and truth-seeking.

Pandey suggests that, in mixed-gender settings, discussions tend to default to the most emotionally vulnerable woman, leading to a “regression to the mean” where abstract thought and debate get banished in favor of themes that reinforce consensus and therapeutic shares. Women’s social discourse often becomes a rehashing of personal reports and emotional processing. She argues that this suppresses the testing of ideas and prevents genuine truth-seeking. As she puts it, “truth-seeking always becomes the bottom concern in both co-ed and women’s spaces unless more than one person elevates it as primary.”

Pandey believes that this unconscious dynamic not only keeps women intellectually weaker than they might be, but it also fuels our contemporary political dysfunction. By discouraging debate and stifling investigation of seriously uncomfortable topics, women reinforce identitarian and “woke” ideologies that thrive in spaces where rational exchange is displaced by status and emotional signaling. While women often profess openness to diverse perspectives, in practice they assert their moral views obliquely, cloaked in relational speech. The result is a stifling of critical thought, leaving debate to male-only arenas, and trapping women in a cycle that undermines both personal sharpness and broader political culture.

Now of course I know that some women are systems thinkers who love to explore difficult ideas, but I still find something authentic, generally, in what Pandey has shared here — and I think it is important to fully bring it up to consciousness. Ironically, when I first brought this idea up to two women friends who are, themselves, community builders with large networks, their immediate reaction was to dismiss it and accuse me of “blaming women.” I am not blaming anyone but seeking to understand unconscious dynamics that reinforce the status quo.

I have learned over time that when people quickly dismiss a subject and turn it back on you, it is often because there is energy and even a perceived threat to their identity or the structure that they unconsciously want to maintain. In progressive circles, there is a bit of a tendency, these days, to see women as blameless, while men are generally the ones who are at fault. I noted that I am completely fine with saying that “men” (those with a strong masculine polarity) often act like self-serving or hyper-rational assholes; I do not think “women” (those with a strong feminine polarity) should be exempt from analysis or criticism either.

“Men” actually tend to defer to “women” in many respects, and in many ways, particularly in progressive cultural spaces. Men are biologically programmed to seek approval from women. Much of what men do to amass capital or pursue achievements of various kinds is based in their desire to attract women as mates and make them happy. Psychologist Warren Farrell analyzed this in his landmark book, The Myth of Male Power. In our contemporary progressive culture that tends to prioritize the feminine polarity while lacking a true initiatory path and coherent concept of transcendence / realization, men tend to defer to women’s discursive and rhetorical norms, which includes the tendency toward consilience and immediate social harmony. Hence, it is not seen as generally acceptable to focus on the long-term consequences of Trumpism or fascism, which will literally lead to catastrophe unless we build a large-scale, well-coordinated opposition movement in a short period of time.

Okay, that is what I wanted to blurt out today, fairly quickly, before my own internal self-censoring mechanisms leap into action. Please reflect on it, share it if you want, and let me know what you think in the comments — feel free to disagree, politely!