Leaving the Sex War Behind: A Call for a Return to Cordiality
There was a time when feminist battles possessed the clarity of moral self‑evidence. Securing the right to vote, equal pay encoded in law, access to education, legal capacity, property autonomy: these struggles belonged to the long tradition of the Enlightenment, expanding the circle of fully recognized humanity. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem embodied a demand for emancipation whose legitimacy was difficult to contest, even for their most fervent opponents.
But something has fractured. Contemporary feminism, particularly the strain arising from American campuses, gender studies departments, social networks and an increasing number of media and institutional circles, resembles less and less a universal movement of emancipation and more and more an ideology of resentment. Where their predecessors fought for equal rights, some of today’s leading figures openly advocate what can only be described as contempt for or hatred of men. Statements like "men are the problem", "the patriarchy must die" and, in more radical circles, an openly claimed misandry treated as an intellectual stance are now regularly heard in these environments (for instance, here, or here).
In response, and this is the tragedy, young men turn toward reactionary figures, masculinist gurus like Andrew Tate, and toxic online communities fed by rage and humiliation. Polarization between the sexes has reached unprecedented levels in liberal democracies. A civilizational fracture is opening, silent but gaping.
My aim here is to analyze this crisis with the rigor that facts deserve, without complacency toward some and without hatred toward others. The goal is neither to deny past injustices nor to minimize legitimate struggles for civil and legal equality. It is to understand how a movement of emancipation has, in some of its contemporary segments, drifted into a logic of confrontation, generalized suspicion and sometimes overt contempt for men. And how this radicalization fuels in return counter movements that are equally simplistic and vindictive.
Understanding is not excusing. Diagnosing is not capitulating.
Emancipation as a Universal Project
To understand the current excesses, one must first honor what came before. The first wave of feminism (the suffragettes, 1848 to 1920) and the second wave (1960s to 1980s) sought the full integration of women into citizenship. These movements followed a logic of extending universal rights, the same logic that drove the abolition of slavery, the democratization of suffrage and civil rights.
It is worth remembering that the major feminist victories of the twentieth century were made possible not only by ideological struggle but also by profound material transformation: industrialization, household mechanization, the arrival of electricity and especially the demographic revolution. Until the end of the nineteenth century, half of all children died before age five. Women were literally compelled to constant reproduction to ensure group survival. Hormonal contraception and the washing machine were not gadgets, they were anthropological revolutions.
These legitimate conquests are today threatened not by patriarchy but by their own ideological digestion. Contemporary neo‑feminism, in its most radical forms, is characterized by a shift in its target. Where historical feminism fought unequal legal institutions, some current currents point to an essence: "patriarchy", "male domination" and sometimes "men" themselves as a suspicious category. The struggle against discrimination has mutated into the construction of a permanent victimhood narrative. Structural critique has morphed into moral essentialism, designating men as ontological oppressors.
From Emancipation Movement to Ideology of Resentment
The 1990s saw the emergence first in the USA and then across the Western world of "campus feminism", infantile, victim‑centered, hostile to masculine virtues and unable to acknowledge the complexity of human nature. This radical feminism betrayed the cause of emancipation by demonizing men while portraying women as fragile creatures requiring constant protection, which is paradoxically the very definition of the patriarchy it claims to fight.
Contemporary academic and media feminism, through its radicalization, has become the preserve of a social class (white, educated, urban) imposing its identity anxieties on the entire social fabric, including on working‑class women whose concerns are entirely different.
The discourse that sees male domination everywhere mirrors certain Marxist readings of society where everything becomes class struggle. Here, everything becomes patriarchy. Any universal explanatory grid eventually becomes blind to its own excesses.
The Paradox of Equality and Biological Realities
One of the most embarrassing facts for radical constructivist ideology is what researchers call the Gender Equality Paradox, or STEM Paradox. A 2018 study published in Psychological Science by Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary, covering sixty seven countries, demonstrated a counterintuitive and robust result. The more gender equality a country achieves, the fewer women choose careers in STEM fields. Finland, Sweden and Norway, often cited as models of equality, have some of the lowest percentages of female graduates in computer science and engineering. Conversely, Algeria, Turkey and Bangladesh have much higher rates.
It is also worth remembering that the arrival of abundant energy and technological outsourcing of domestic labor are the primary factors that freed the vast majority of women from time previously consumed entirely by subsistence. Contemporary neo‑feminism appears marked by a form of technological carelessness, ignoring that these rights are fragile and depend on a technological infrastructure and energy abundance that women themselves can sustain only by investing massively in engineering, technology, energy and agriculture, sectors in which women statistically enroll far less frequently.
The most coherent interpretation aligned with evolutionary psychology and cross cultural data is that in more equal societies, where economic constraints on career choices are weaker, natural preferences express themselves more freely. Women on average, all else equal, tend to choose professions with a strong social component such as health care, education and psychology, while men tend to focus more on objects and systems. These preference differences, documented from early childhood and supported by twin studies, have a partial neurobiological basis.
Evolutionary psychologist Doreen Kimura, and more recently Simon Baron Cohen at Cambridge with his "empathizing systemizing" theory, document these differences rigorously. Neuroscientist Leonard Sax, in "Why Gender Matters", synthesizes decades of research showing neurological differences between male and female brains, including differences in development, sensory processing and stress response, which cannot simply be reduced to social constructs.
This does not mean that women must be confined to fixed roles, because no individual is an average. But claiming, as some radical feminists do, that any statistical difference between men and women in professional choices proves systemic oppression is to erect ideology as a wall against empirical reality. It is essentially to treat women with the same condescension as the crudest patriarchy: denying them the capacity to choose freely.
It is also essential to keep in mind that intra‑sex variability among individuals is, according to the same studies, greater in magnitude than the gap between the average man and the average woman. In other words, while we should not force individuals into occupations that do not match their deeper inclinations in the name of a supposed perfect equivalence between the sexes, we must at the same time help those who wish to do so to overcome deterministic constraints.
The Sexual Division of Labor: Irrationality or Adaptive Wisdom?
Anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, in his major work on family structures and value systems, reminds us that the division of labor between the sexes was not an arbitrary invention of male domination aimed at deliberate oppression. It was an adaptive response to the material and biological constraints of pre industrial life. Shaped by pregnancy, prolonged breastfeeding and bodies more vulnerable to certain forms of physical violence, women had every incentive to specialize in domestic activities and caregiving, while men undertook physically dangerous tasks: war, hunting, protection, external labor.
This observation is neither a justification of female oppression nor an argument for returning women to the hearth. It is a recognition that our ancestors were not fools. Their social organization reflected the material realities of their existence. Industrial and technological revolutions changed those conditions, making deep social reorganizations both possible and desirable. The problem with radical feminism is not its desire to change these arrangements but its retrospective moralization of humanity's entire past, refusing to recognize the adaptive rationality of earlier arrangements.
The Demonization of Motherhood
One of the most damaging blind spots of contemporary feminism is its deeply ambivalent, often hostile attitude toward motherhood. Since Betty Friedan, who compared the home to a "comfortable concentration camp", to contemporary activists presenting pregnancy as a form of bodily colonization, part of the feminist discourse has produced a paradoxical effect: giving women the impression that the desire for children is an alienation to be distrusted.
Neurobiological studies on maternal attachment demonstrate that the mother child bond is not a patriarchal construction but a profound neurochemical reality. The production of oxytocin in mothers, the activation of specific neural circuits during breastfeeding and physical closeness with the infant represent evolutionary adaptations millions of years old. Psychoanalysts and developmental psychologists including France's Myriam Szejer remind us that the first thirty six months of life are crucial for emotional regulation. Eighty five percent of the right brain, which processes emotion, develops during this period under the decisive influence of a stable attachment figure.
Western culture has progressively devalued virtues associated with motherhood and caregiving such as patience, devotion and presence, relegating them to the status of alienation or weakness. The result, documented by repeated surveys, is that sixty six percent of British women and sixty percent of American women say they wish they could spend more time at home with their young children, yet they feel economically forced into the workforce. Feminism promised freedom of choice, yet in conjunction with intensified capitalism, it often produced the obligation to work.
As the social norm shifted to dual income households, housing prices adjusted accordingly. What was once affordable on a single salary is no longer affordable on two. Women gained formal independence but lost, for a substantial proportion of them, real freedom. Many work not for fulfillment but out of financial necessity.
This is not a call to shame mothers who work by choice or necessity but an invitation to design public policies enabling families to truly choose, recognizing that maternal labor is neither insignificant nor easily replaceable without cost.
Cultural Consequences of the Feminization of Institutions
The mass entry of women into higher education, where women now represent about sixty percent of university students in many Western countries, has triggered a demographic shift within key institutions.
When law schools, courts such as France's National School of the Judiciary where seventy four percent of the 2018 graduating class were women, major newspaper editorial teams like that of the New York Times which became majority female in 2018, or faculty bodies become predominantly female, it is not only the face of the institution that changes but also its internal logic and cultural norms.
These institutions tend to shift from an ethic of justice traditionally associated with men and grounded in facts, universal rules and an acceptance of conflict as a driver of truth, toward an ethic of care that prioritizes feelings, inclusion and avoidance of social conflict. This ethic places greater sensitivity on microaggressions and sometimes reframes intellectual disagreement as a personal offense. Wokeness can be interpreted as an epiphenomenon of this feminization. Studies show that while seventy one percent of men prioritize protecting free speech, fifty nine percent of women prioritize creating an inclusive society and protecting individuals from offense even at the cost of restricting speech.
This is not about opposing a "female ethic" to a "male ethic" but about recognizing that group dynamics change when demographics shift massively. Ignoring this is sociological naivety.
The problem is not that women are less talented than men or that feminine interaction styles are in any objective way inferior. The problem arises when a tendency to protect sensibilities and avoid confrontation diverges from the uncompromising pursuit of Truth. If universities no longer pursue truth, what purpose do they serve? If journalists are no longer figures willing to provoke discomfort and risk unpopularity, what are they for? If Justice fails to adhere strictly to codes and procedures even when they produce outcomes that tug at the heart or contradict one's sympathy for the most appealing party, what good is it?
The Ostracizing of Virtuous Men
Perhaps the gravest blind spot of contemporary radical feminism is its flattening of masculine behaviors into a single category. The notion of "toxic masculinity", popularized in the 2010s and officially referenced by the American Psychological Association in 2019, is intellectually dishonest because it conflates very different traits such as stoicism, competitiveness, risk taking and genuinely abusive or violent behaviors.
In response to this discourse, now widely echoed in mass media and across social networks, it is essential to formally distinguish between masculinity as an adaptive pattern shaped by evolution, including protecting, providing and building, and pathological behaviors that represent its distortions. Treating masculinity as a pathology has produced a generation of young men ashamed of themselves, without identity markers and vulnerable to narratives of resentment and victimhood promoted by radical masculinists.
Male Decline: Data and Magnitude
Data are now robust enough that they can no longer be ignored. In Western countries, sixty percent of university graduates are women, a complete reversal from the 1970s. In a school system now heavily feminized in its teaching and administrative staff, boys are labeled hyperactive three times more often than girls. School environments reward stillness and verbal fluency, traits statistically more common among girls at those developmental stages and disadvantageous for boys.
One in seven men in the United States is now classified as NEET, meaning not in employment, education or training, with France showing fifteen percent among those aged fifteen to twenty four. Men represent eighty percent of suicides in most Western countries, relatively unoticed. For boys aged twenty to twenty four, the suicide rate is six times that of girls the same age. Ninety three percent of the prison population is male, mostly from fatherless households. A child without a father figure is statistically more likely to end up in prison than to earn a university degree according to CDC data.
Father absenteeism is a documented risk factor for school dropout and behavioral disorders. Seventy one percent of school dropouts come from fatherless homes. Family disintegration is not a moralistic detail, it has structural effects on male socialization.
Scott Galloway, professor at NYU Stern School of Business, describes what he calls the "masculinity trap" in which poorly educated and low skill men see their value collapse both in the labor market and the relationship market, driving them into social anomie including withdrawal into video games, pornography and extremist ideologies. One in three American men under thirty had no romantic relationship in the past year. Forty five percent of men aged eighteen to twenty four have never asked a woman on a date.
When public discourse presents men as systemic oppressors, struggling boys may internalize illegitimacy or turn toward radical counter‑communities. It is in this space that reactionary figures thrive.
The Demographic Crisis: A Logical Outcome of Anthropological Disorder
The explosion of singlehood is not a mere cultural fad. It is the predictable consequence of structural imbalance. Sociologist Véra Nikolski and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd show that educated women, now the majority on campuses, tend to seek partners with educational and economic status equal to or higher than their own. The pool of such men is shrinking dramatically. The result is fierce competition among high achieving women for a dwindling number of men who meet their criteria, alongside a large population of less educated men structurally excluded from the marriage market.
The demographic consequences are well documented and alarming. Forty years ago, sixty percent of thirty year olds had at least one child. Today that figure has dropped to twenty seven percent. In the United States, half of all births to women under thirty occur to single mothers. Across OECD countries, fertility rates are below the replacement threshold of 2.1 children per woman. This decline is not just about personal preference but a sociocultural environment that has demonized stable family structures, devalued motherhood and rendered men economically and culturally undesirable as partners or fathers.
At the same time, an ideological gap has widened between young women, mostly progressive, and young men who are more drawn to conservative positions. This asymmetry complicates the formation of stable couples.
Economic implications, already visible in pension system projections, are enormous. A society that does not reproduce necessarily sees its tax base shrink, its social protections erode and its technological and cultural dynamism falter. This is not authoritarian natalism. It is civilizational arithmetic.
Are Women the Real Winners?
A delicate question deserves to be asked. Are women overall happier today? Some longitudinal studies suggest stagnation or even relative decline in women's subjective well‑being since the 1970s despite expanded rights and opportunities.
Critics such as Carrie Gress and Ross Douthat challenge the implicit promise that professional success alone can satisfy relational and familial aspirations. The "dual income trap" has transformed the additional female salary into a structural norm, reducing real freedom of choice for those who would prefer to devote more time to family life.
This is not about shaming women invested in their careers. It is about acknowledging that the cultural demonization of motherhood as mere imposed constraint is a dead end. A society that devalues both symbolic and biological reproduction undermines its own foundations.
The Social Value of Masculine Virtues
Anthropology and long term history are clear. Prosperous societies have always known how to channel male energy toward prosocial ends. Courage, physical rigor, risk taking, protection of the vulnerable, sense of duty, sacrifice, construction and maintenance of infrastructure: these traits and behaviors, more frequent and more intensely expressed among men due to documented hormonal and evolutionary factors such as testosterone and vasopressin, represent an irreplaceable social resource when properly directed.
Anthropologists like David Geary and evolutionary psychologists like Jordan Peterson, despite the controversies he attracts, emphasize that young men need challenges, meritocratic hierarchies and heroic narratives to build themselves. Depriving them of such narratives and telling them their virility is inherently toxic does not improve them. It leaves them defenseless before alternative identities offered by violent masculinists or criminal gangs.
Discrediting these inclinations in blanket fashion amounts to symbolically disarming half of humanity. Conversely, masculinity without a normative framework degenerates into brutality. The task is therefore not to abolish differences but to civilize forces.
The goal is to reorient the direction of progress, being attentive to the needs and rights of women while restoring dignity to male roles: protector, present father, builder. This is not nostalgia. It is a necessary response to the real needs of individuals and societies.
Restoring Balance
Historical feminism was right on the essentials. Women deserved full citizenship, bodily autonomy, equal rights and opportunities. These achievements are precious and must be protected. But they cannot serve as a cover for an ideology that pathologizes masculinity, demonizes motherhood, ignores the suffering of boys and men, and destroys the social conditions of reproduction and intersexual solidarity.
The way out is neither radical feminism nor revanchist masculinism. It lies in acknowledging that men and women are different, not hierarchically but complementarily, and that their differences whether biological, psychological or behavioral are not imperfections to erase but realities to integrate into just institutions.
This requires several simultaneous cultural revolutions: rehabilitating motherhood as essential social labor without imposing it on those who do not wish it, restoring the symbolic roles of father, protector and builder without turning them into authoritarian idols, reforming educational systems to accommodate different developmental trajectories of boys and girls, and above all replacing the narrative of sex war with the narrative of indispensable complementarity.
This is the fundamental issue. Homo sapiens conquered the planet not through the domination of one sex over the other but through their collaboration. "Cordiality" between the sexes, as anthropological literature calls it, is a condition for civilization’s survival. Destroying it in the name of any ideology is sawing off the branch on which we all sit.
The crisis we face is not a war between men and women. It is the crisis of a society that has lost sight of its own anthropological coherence. It has been worsened by ideologies which, in the name of the emancipation of some, have denied the legitimate needs of others, provoking reactions that threaten hard won freedoms.
Prosperous societies are those capable of holding both requirements together: the individual freedom of each person and structural solidarity among all. Men and women, confident in their respective identities, respectful of their differences and their complementary needs, are the condition for a renewed social fabric.
Lucidity is not nostalgia. It is the condition of survival.
Everything else is civil war literature.
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