Human civilization is built on the complementarity of the sexes. Biologically, this is obviously true, of course, unless you are a gender ideologist or Ketanji Brown Jackson or another federal judge. Men cannot become pregnant, and neither can women without men, whatever the left tries to sell us.
But gender differences go far beyond physical differences, especially when it comes to what we focus on, how we think about issues, and especially our emotional lives.
Despite all the ideological obfuscation that seems to have come to dominate our discourse, even the existence of sexism itself shows that men and women are different. If we weren’t, why would the sexism we all (mostly rightly) decry exist? If men and women were functionally the same, then sexism would be impossible, because characteristics would be randomly distributed. The very notion of “sexism” requires sex differences.
Much of modern life is predicated on the idea that sex is not a real thing, but a social construct, but that is just bunk. It is a childish pretense based on a desire to reshape society, and of course, to feminize it.
Helen Andrews has argued that “woke” is just another word for the feminization of society and that it has done enormous damage. Her essay in Compact Magazine is a must-read because it explains so much of what we have seen in recent decades.
People are uncomfortable discussing this reality because it wrongly implies that the feminine is the “wrong” way to view things, and I understand why that is. In tougher times, masculine virtues are emphasized because, well, war and violence. If much of society’s time is spent in conflict, the male way of doing things will dominate, and much of history is defined by conflict.
But sophisticated societies are built and sustained by creating a balance between the masculine and the feminine, and societies often decline when the feminine comes to dominate, usually due to an excess of safety and prosperity. It’s the “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times,” phenomenon.
One of the peculiarities of the modern age is that as men have become feminized, which undoubtedly has happened, women have, to a certain extent, become masculinized. Feminine virtues have become married to masculine aggressiveness, creating a rather new phenomenon: the shock troops of feminization.
For the most part, these “shock troops” are white women, as explained by Emily Jashinsky in UnHerd. She calls the phenomenon “Dark Woke,” which aims to radically shift the Overton Window of what you can say and do to make woke more aggressive and confrontational.
Dark Woke won’t be vanquished. In the wake of Renee Good’s death in Minneapolis, the movement is reasserting itself from the Midwest to the Pacific coast, pushing Democrats to embrace combative cultural stances — and white, Millennial women are its shock troops.
We can see the results all around us. “First Amendment” activity is now defined not as protesting for your cause, but actually impeding or even assaulting law enforcement officers to get your way. “Occupations” are a version of “Dark Woke,” as is surrounding and screaming at people to bully them into compliance with what are essentially “feminized” demands. “Compassion” expressed as assaults.
56% of liberal women aged 18-29 have literally been diagnosed with a mental health disorder.
And that’s only the number officially diagnosed. The real number is obviously higher. https://t.co/v3T7jMHRj5 pic.twitter.com/AA2YN3KXqT
— Zarathustra (@zarathustra5150) January 15, 2026
Dark Woke women are not the rioters per se, although they often ally with them. They are the people who get in ICE’s face, block the streets, and create most of the viral moments that get blasted around the world. “ICE agent assaults ‘mother.'” When Adam Schiff described Renee Good as just a mother dropping off her child—a bald falsehood—the idea is to tap into our feminine/compassionate emotions and desire to protect women, when the actual woman in question actually put an ICE officer in the hospital by driving her car into him.
You see the clip of her being “nice,” and get explanations that her assault on a federal officer was insignificant. What Millennial mom would do such a thing?
Last fall, the GOP pollster Alex Tarascio “asked likely voters if they agreed that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement, even if it breaks the law”, as he put it in an X post. “Overall, just 24% of Americans agreed. But among white women, 18 to 44, who identify as liberal? The number shoots up to 61%.” Half that number, only 30%, disagreed. Among all liberals, the number was nearly 20 points lower, at 42%. And among all likely voters, the number dropped to less than a quarter of the population.
Why are white liberal women especially eager for battle? People like Good are motivated by a sincere commitment to social justice, to be sure. Good was so moved by the prospect of ICE deportations in Minneapolis that she joined a midday protest after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.
However, there is also no shortage of research in recent years showing that young women on the Left struggle more with mental health than do other cohorts. In 2024, Times columnist Thomas Edsall dug into studies on the “happiness gap”, noting “one of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the Left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups”.
In 2025, a study published by Zach Goldberg at the Right-of-centre Manhattan Institute found that “females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.”
By now, anybody who is genuinely interested in what is happening knows that liberal women are highly likely to be unhappy and mentally ill. This is not a stereotype based on our repulsion of their behavior. They literally are on psychiatric drugs, under the care of doctors for their mental illness, and self-describe as unhappy and alienated.
We don’t just assume that women who dye their hair bright colors are insane. They are, objectively and diagnostically, insane. Not in every case, but the correlation is very high. The study gets a lot of criticism, of course, but so does the claim that sex is binary.
Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good.
Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity.
Dark waking is, almost certainly, driven by a sense that one’s dissatisfaction with life stems from external factors. If only the world could be made “just,” one’s own problems would be solved. It also may explain why, despite most of the controversy over trans issues being about men pretending to be women, the trans phenomenon is dominated by young women who try to become men, and why the pro-trans movement is made up primarily of Millennial and Gen Z women.
This phenomenon is, of course, different than what makes AWFLs so awful. That, I believe, is driven by a different phenomenon. Those people are often wine moms whose experience of the “empty nest” leaves them with a need for other sources of fulfillment, using their positive feminine virtues to change the world. The goal is to “nurture” society in the way they nurtured children. The results, obviously, are horrendous, but the impulse stems from an actual virtue when properly directed. For instance, if directed at volunteering for good causes, being a grandparent, or artistic expression, the results are positive.
If directed at “social justice,” the results are usually negative, as “compassion” leads people to ignore the actual consequences of their actions. Protesting to keep a rapist on the streets, for instance.
At base, I suspect that this transmogrification of a natural human instinct into a force for evil can be traced to the decline in social bonds and trust, the shrinking or disintegration of families, the atomization of individuals, and the need for alternate ways to express natural impulses.
Of course, masculine virtues, when misdirected, can lead to horrific outcomes, too. It’s no accident that most violence is committed by men. Qualities needed to protect families and societies can manifest in both negative and positive ways. In well-functioning societies, we see masculine virtues express themselves as creating physical things, defending the weak, running into fires or the Twin Towers, or the like.
They can come out as predation as well.
That’s a phenomenon well understood. Dark Woke is rather new, although you saw something similar during the French Revolution and in other social movements.
Dark Woke doesn’t result in social justice. It results in conflict and is inherently antipolitical, if you define politics as the process we use to make decisions in a peaceful and mostly rational way.
