At this year’s Screen Actors Guild awards, 87-year-old actress Jane Fonda accepted a lifetime achievement award and made a politically charged speech. Unlike most of her fellow stars, however, Fonda did not take up one pet cause — instead, she got right to the heart of the deep cultural polarization that ails us.
After noting that actors must learn to empathize with those they are portraying on screen, Fonda declared: “Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke.”
Fonda is right: Empathy is not weak — or woke. At least, not per se. It is best understood as the impulse and ability to feel and identify with the feelings of others. Correlated with agreeability, empathy is a characteristic disproportionately evinced by women.
Thoughtfully directed toward virtuous causes, empathy is an asset; it’s what makes many women quick to volunteer for noble causes and to help neighbors. What Fonda is really implying, though — and what today’s most vocal leftists uniformly believe — is that empathy is a virtue unto itself when indiscriminately deployed on behalf of the systemically marginalized. Or, as Fonda put it: “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
This is the false belief that makes today’s elite left and its predominantly educated, female adherents so out of touch with everyday Americans — and, as I have written, so apt to hurt the very people they purport to help. For example, in the name of fighting institutionalized racism, they agitate to eliminate the tools of law and order that majorities of people of every demographic are depending upon to keep them safe.
Or, for another example, they welcome male athletes claiming a transgender identity onto female teams, and thereby endanger and disenfranchise the women for whom those teams exist.
As shown in polls assessing Americans’ political views, a vastly disproportionate number of the people politicizing ideologically differentiated empathy in this way are women. It would be fair, then, to term this baseless glorification of misguided empathy “toxic femininity.” After all, it is an exact inverse of the toxic masculinity displayed by infantile or misogynistic men — only displayed by infantile or misandrist women instead.
Toxic masculinity is best understood as the glorification of indiscriminate aggression. Just as women are on average predisposed to greater empathy, men are on average predisposed to greater aggression. Yes, these traits exist for men and women on overlapping bell curves — the most aggressive women are indeed more aggressive than the least aggressive men. Nevertheless, just as virtually all of the people at the tail end of the distribution for empathy are female, virtually all of the people at the tail end of the distribution for aggression are male.
Like the predominantly female predisposition to empathy, the predominantly male predisposition to aggression is a morally neutral fact. It is how one directs aggression that determines its virtue or its toxicity. The violent criminal and the protector who apprehends him are typically both male — and both exhibiting prototypically male aggression.
The real question is not whether most men will always be more aggressive than most women. They will. The question is whether men maintain control over their aggression and harness it to achieve, protect and serve, rather than to menace, assault or mock. It is the reflexive celebration of aggression, regardless of circumstance, that can indeed make masculinity toxic.
Femininity can be made similarly toxic by the ideological deployment of empathy. The question is not whether most women will be more empathetic than most men. They will. The question is whether women develop mastery over that empathy and harness it to compliment reason, order and responsibility, rather than to patronize, excuse or tokenize.
Socioeconomically underprivileged minority kids aren’t doing as well on standardized tests, and are getting suspended at higher rates for misbehavior?
Toxic femininity says: Eliminate the tests and institute restorative justice policies (thereby guaranteeing weaker academic attainment among these students and devolution of order in their school) in a fact-free profession of virtuous empathy.
But adult womanhood says: Find better options and motivation for test prep, ratchet the discipline up until it becomes an effective deterrent to most misbehavior, and expel the incorrigible out of righteous empathy for those who want to learn.
Males identifying as transgender feel marginalized and uncomfortable playing on the men’s team? Toxic femininity says to let them play on the women’s team — thereby depriving female athletes of the safe and fair competition that women’s sports were instituted to offer — in deference to the trendy cause of protecting transgender rights.
But adult womanhood says that sex is a biological fact, not a subjective identity, and that women’s teams are for women. This in no way infringes on the legal rights of people who identify as transgender, and who should of course be treated with equal dignity. Dignity does not entail blind deference.
For those who preach politicized empathy like Fonda, identification with the feelings of the student who never does her homework, the kid who hit another student, or the trans woman athlete is an indicator of personal virtue. What about empathy for the student motivated to study because of the standardized test, the kid being victimized by troublemakers, or the female athlete who loses her roster spot to a biological male? Well, that’s not so virtuous.
This amoral illogic is lazy, self-aggrandizing and infantile. In these empathy-addled, toxically feminine little girls masquerading as grown women, the toxically masculine little boys masquerading as grown men get exactly the enemies they deserve.
What about the rest of us, though? We deserve better.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.
