It's Not Feminization. It's Indirect Competition.
A person who has been wronged cannot retaliate directly. The target is too powerful, too central, too well-defended by allies and reputation. So the wronged person finds an insider. Someone close to the target, someone the target trusts, someone who has just been given a fresh grievance of their own. Through a careful mix of flattery and manufactured outrage, the insider is convinced that the target deserves what is coming, that the destruction is principled rather than personal, that history will call it justice. The architect orchestrates from a distance. The coalition is built one ally at a time. The target is isolated. The killing blow lands at the moment the target is most alone, and the people delivering it walk away believing they were heroes.
This is the assassination of Julius Caesar. This is also the destruction of Regina George. The architecture is identical. The body count is the only thing that differs.
In Rome, the architect is Cassius. He cannot match Caesar in combat or charisma and he knows it. So he does not challenge Caesar. He recruits Brutus, Caesar’s closest friend, by planting forged letters in Brutus’s window so Brutus believes the people are calling for him to act. He builds a coalition of senators, each with their own resentments. He frames the assassination as civic duty so the men holding the knives believe they are saving the Republic rather than serving one man’s envy. On the Ides of March, Caesar walks into the Senate alone. The conspirators surround him. Twenty-three wounds. Brutus strikes last. The men holding bloody knives believe they are heroes.
In a high school in suburban Chicago, the architect is Janis Ian. She cannot match Regina George in social standing and she knows it. Regina ostracized her years ago by spreading a rumor that Janis was a lesbian. A direct attack on Regina would fail. So Janis does not challenge Regina. She recruits Cady Heron, the new girl Regina has invited into the Plastics, by feeding Cady’s growing resentment after Regina betrays her with the boy Cady likes. She builds a coalition: Cady, Damian, eventually Gretchen and Karen. She frames Regina as a life-ruiner who deserves what is coming, so Cady believes she is acting on her own outrage. The destruction is methodical. Strip Regina of her boyfriend. Strip her of her best friends. Strip her of her body through Kalteen bars. By the time Regina is told she cannot sit at her own table because she is wearing sweatpants, she has been left with nothing to defend. The girls who destroyed her believe they are heroes.
One ended in literal blood. The other ended in social blood. The architecture is the same. Identify a target. Build a coalition. Manufacture moral cover. Isolate. Strike when the target cannot defend. Walk away believing you did something righteous.
Nobody calls Cassius feminized.
What Helen Andrews Saw
In October 2025, Helen Andrews published an essay in Compact called “The Great Feminization.” Her central claim was that cancel culture, ostracism, and consensus enforcement are not new ideologies. They are what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. Wokeness, in her telling, is an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. The essay went viral. It was praised at the National Conservatism conference. It was shared across the manosphere. It was cited by religious conservatives arguing against women in church leadership. It was critiqued in Persuasion, pushed back on by Richard Hanania, and discussed in The Free Press by seven women in turn.
I read it and I need to be honest about what I felt.
I recognized it. Not intellectually. In my body. The particular frequency of a whisper campaign. The silence that descends in a room when one person has been designated the target and everyone else knows it but nobody will say it aloud. I have a complicated relationship with women. My birth mother tried to kill me. The worst bullying I experienced in my life, the kind that leaves no marks and therefore in the eyes of anyone who was not there never happened, came from women at my international school in Singapore. Coalition-building, whisper campaigns, strategic exclusion, the slow social suffocation that operates through smiles and silence. I have felt this in my body enough times to know exactly what Andrews is describing.
So when she said the word “feminization,” something in me wanted to agree. The pattern was real. The pain was real. The temptation to name it, to say yes, this is the thing, women do this, was strong enough that I had to sit with it for a long time before I could see clearly. There is a kind of relief in being told that the thing that hurt you has a name. It validates the recognition. It makes the suffering legible. It produces a clean narrative, and that legibility feels, for a moment, like power.
I think that is part of why the essay landed the way it did. Many readers, women included, have been on the receiving end of these tactics. Andrews offered a name for the experience. The relief of any naming is real, the way a doctor naming a long-untreated symptom is real. The diagnosis matters because the relief matters. It is also why the diagnosis has to be right.
And the shape was wrong.
I knew it was wrong before I could explain why, because of something I had read in eighth grade. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was assigned in English class, and I remember the moment Cassius first appears, Caesar warning Antony about the lean and hungry look of him, and the way the play unfolds afterward. Cassius does not duel Caesar. He does not raise an army. He whispers. He recruits. He plants letters. He builds a coalition. By the time the knives come out, Caesar is alone in a room of men who believe they are saving Rome. I was thirteen years old and I knew, even then, that I had seen this before. Not in a Senate. In a hallway. In a cafeteria. In the careful arrangement of a girl being made invisible while others pretended not to notice.
When I read Andrews in 2025, that memory came back. I had been about to agree with her, and Cassius came forward instead. The tactics Andrews calls feminine are the same tactics Cassius used to assassinate the most powerful man in the ancient world. Either the most masculine environment in human history was somehow feminized in 44 BC, or the tactics are not feminine at all. They are the tactics of anyone who cannot win in the open. They belong to Cassius and Janis equally. They belong to whoever cannot match the target directly and decides to win another way.
Which raises a question worth bringing forward. If Cassius and Janis are doing the same thing, what is the thing they are doing? Because the word “feminization” does not survive contact with Cassius. So what is the actual mechanism, and what should we call it?
What the Research Actually Says
The research has a name for what Cassius and Janis are doing, and it is not feminization. It is indirect aggression, and the term comes out of a body of work that began in Finland in the late 1980s and has been replicated across cultures, age groups, and institutional settings ever since. The researchers who built the field were not interested in gender wars. They were interested in why human beings, when they want to harm one another, choose the methods they choose.
The founding figure is Kaj Björkqvist, a Finnish social psychologist whose team in the late 1980s and early 1990s laid the conceptual foundation for the entire field. The concept that matters most for this argument is the effect/danger ratio. Björkqvist’s claim was simple and powerful. People do not pick aggression strategies based on their identities. They pick strategies that maximize the intended harm to the target while minimizing the personal danger of retaliation. This is not a gendered claim. It is a rational actor claim. It applies to anyone, anywhere, in any environment. When direct confrontation is too costly, the person who wants to inflict harm shifts to indirect strategies. The shift is automatic. It is how human beings have always behaved when they cannot win in the open.
In 1995, two American developmental psychologists named Nicki Crick and Jennifer Grotpeter published a paper that would launch a thousand citations and one of the most durable cultural narratives of the last thirty years. They studied 491 American children in grades three through six. They coined the term “relational aggression,” which they defined as harming others through the manipulation of social relationships: exclusion, rumor-spreading, friendship withdrawal. And they found that girls used it more than boys. The paper was a sensation. It became the scientific foundation for the popular belief that girls are uniquely wired for social manipulation. It launched the entire mean girls genre, gave Tina Fey her source material a few years later, and entered popular psychology as settled fact.
Then the field kept doing what fields are supposed to do, which is replicate, extend, and complicate. The findings did not hold the way the popular narrative did.
In 2008, Noel Card and his colleagues published the largest meta-analysis of the relational aggression literature, synthesizing results across many samples and many studies. The gender difference, they found, was minimal. A nine-country cross-cultural study that followed found an effect size of .08 for relational aggression between the sexes. To put that number in plain language: if you tested hundreds of people, you would barely be able to detect a difference. It is, statistically, almost zero. The same study replicated the well-established gender difference in physical aggression without difficulty, with an effect size nearly three times larger. Boys hit each other more than girls do, robustly, across cultures. Girls do not gossip and exclude meaningfully more than boys, once you look at large enough samples across enough environments.
The headline that should have settled it came in 2004. John Archer, a British psychologist, published a definitive meta-analysis in Review of General Psychology on sex differences in real-world aggression. His finding was this. Men and women feel equally angry. Anger itself shows no sex differences. What differs is expression. Men, on average, express anger through higher-cost methods such as physical confrontation. Women, on average, express it through lower-cost methods such as social manipulation. And even that difference is limited to specific developmental windows and varied with the way researchers measured aggression. It is not universal. It is not fixed. It is context-dependent.
The emotion is identical but the strategy differs. And the strategy differs only because the costs differ.
Here is the framework that makes everything click into place. Anne Campbell, a British evolutionary psychologist, gave it the deepest theoretical treatment in a 1999 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences titled “Staying Alive.” Her argument was that women evolved a stronger cost-sensitivity to physical danger because, for most of human history, infant survival depended disproportionately on maternal survival. A mother who died in a fight left children who were unlikely to live. So selection pressure produced a sex that, on average, weighs the costs of direct confrontation higher than men do. The strategy follows from the constraint. It is not femininity. It is the rational adaptation of any organism that pays a higher price for physical risk.
Campbell is careful, and her care matters. She is not saying women are wired for gossip. She is saying women evolved a lower threshold for fear in situations of bodily threat, which produced, over evolutionary time, a tendency toward strategies that achieve goals without putting the body in danger. Change the constraint, and the strategy changes. Put a man in an environment where direct confrontation will cost him his career, his standing, his livelihood, and he will reach for the same indirect tools women have been refining for millennia. The mechanism is universal. The distribution across sexes is a function of which sex faced the higher historical cost for direct confrontation. That is a different claim from “women are wired this way,” and the difference is the entire essay.
I want to be precise here, because the precision is what this debate needs.
The evolutionary literature is correct. I am not contesting it. Women, on average, are more likely than men to default to indirect strategies when faced with conflict, and the reason is the one Campbell gives. The distribution exists. It is real. It is small but it is real. Andrews is not hallucinating a pattern. She is reporting a pattern that the data, read carefully, supports.
But the feminization thesis is not a distribution claim. It is a dominance claim. It says that institutions are now dominated by indirect competition because they are now dominated by women. These are two completely different arguments, and the evolutionary literature only supports the first. To get from “women are statistically more likely than men to use indirect tactics in any given conflict” to “the rise of indirect competition in institutions is caused by women’s presence in those institutions” requires a second step that Andrews does not take. She just assumes it. The correlation between women’s institutional entry and the rise of indirect competition is presented as if it were causation. It is not.
The evidence cuts the other way. The institutions where indirect competition has metastasized most aggressively, like academic science, congressional offices, prestige journalism, top law firms, are still majority male in their senior ranks. The Senate that destroyed Caesar was 100% male. The places where rational-appearing aggression is most refined are still places men run. If the dominance of indirect competition were caused by women’s demographic entry, you would expect it to track women’s numerical presence. It does not. It tracks something else, and we will get to what, but it is not femininity, and the evolutionary research does not say it is. The evolutionary research explains why a randomly chosen woman is somewhat more likely than a randomly chosen man to whisper rather than punch. It does not explain why whispering has become the dominant mode in our institutions. That is a separate question, with a separate answer.
Now the part of the research that is rarely cited.
In 1994, Björkqvist and his colleagues published a study of aggression among 333 university employees in the journal Aggressive Behavior. They identified two distinct types of covert aggression in the workplace. The first was social manipulation: gossip, coalition-building, strategic exclusion. Women used this more than men. If you stopped reading there, you would have everything you need to support the feminization thesis. But the researchers also found a second type, which they called rational-appearing aggression. This is the use of institutional procedure as a weapon. Deploying logic and rules not to solve a problem but to destroy a rival. Weaponizing committees, formal complaints, performance reviews, and bureaucratic process as instruments of indirect competition. Men used this form significantly more than women.
Both are indirect. Both are covert. Both involve disguising aggressive intent in order to avoid retaliation and social condemnation. The architecture is identical. What differs is the channel. Women, in the institutional environment Björkqvist studied, routed indirect competition through social networks. Men routed it through institutional machinery. Same strategy. Different costume. Same goal. Different vocabulary. The institution did not become “feminized.” It became a place where direct competition was penalized, and both sexes adapted accordingly, using whichever indirect channel they were most skilled at navigating.
The men in these institutions are not standing aside while women cancel and ostracize. They are doing the same thing through different means. The HR investigation that ends a career. The committee that quietly kills a hire. The performance review that uses procedural language to settle a personal score. The formal complaint that is technically about policy and actually about power. None of this is feminine. All of it is indirect. And men have been doing it for as long as institutions have existed, because men have always been in environments where direct competition with their superiors would get them fired or killed.
The research, taken seriously, points to this. Indirect aggression is not a women’s tactic. It is a strategy that any rational actor adopts when direct competition becomes too expensive to survive. Women are overrepresented among its practitioners in some samples, in some cultures, in some specific developmental windows, for reasons that are partly evolutionary and partly socialized. The overrepresentation is real. It is also small, context-dependent, and does not explain why indirect competition has become the dominant mode in our institutions. The distribution is one question. The dominance is another. Separating them is the work this essay is trying to do.
So if the dominance is not caused by women, what is it caused by?
The History the Frame Has to Ignore
Before answering that question, it helps to look at the history. Two pictures hold the feminization thesis together. The first is that indirect competition, the whisper campaign, the coalition, the use of reputation and procedure as weapons, is a feminine repertoire, recognizably women’s work. The second is that women have always wielded soft, indirect, behind-the-scenes power, while men have wielded direct, open, contested power. Both pictures need to be true for the thesis to work. Both have a hard time surviving the historical record.
Start with men.
Cassius is not an outlier. Cassius is the median ambitious man in any environment where direct contest with a superior would end his life or his career. The Roman Senate produced Cassius because the Roman Senate was a hierarchical institution where overt rebellion against the most powerful man in the state was unsurvivable. So Cassius did what people in that position have always done. He whispered. He recruited. He arranged.
A few decades after Caesar, the same architecture produced Sejanus, the praetorian prefect who spent years quietly destroying rivals around the emperor Tiberius through whisper, treason trial, and arranged scandal, before he himself was destroyed by the same methods. The Tudor court ran on this for a century. Thomas Cromwell brought down Anne Boleyn through coalition, manufactured evidence, and procedural execution, and was himself brought down by the same machinery five years later. The court of Louis XIV at Versailles was an indirect competition tournament, designed by the king to keep the nobility too busy whispering against each other to organize against him. The men in those rooms were not feminized. They were trapped in an environment where direct competition with the king meant death, so they competed through every other channel available.
If there is a single book that systematizes indirect competition for ambitious men, it is The Prince, written in 1513 by Niccolò Machiavelli during a forced political exile. Machiavelli’s project was to lay out, with cold clarity, how a man without a hereditary army or unchallenged authority could acquire and hold power. His advice is almost entirely about indirect competition. Cultivate the appearance of virtue while doing what is necessary in private. Use others to deliver bad news so the blame attaches to them. Build coalitions of interest rather than coalitions of affection. Destroy rivals through proxies. Strike when the target is isolated. The book has been on the shelf of every aspiring political operator for five hundred years, and the operators reading it have been overwhelmingly men.
The twentieth century industrialized the technique. Stalin’s purges were not direct contests. They were a closed system of denunciation, manufactured evidence, show trial, and choreographed confession, in which thousands of men destroyed thousands of other men through procedure rather than physical confrontation. The Great Purge was rational-appearing aggression at industrial scale, conducted almost entirely by men against men. The Cultural Revolution ran on the same architecture: struggle sessions, public denunciations, the careful isolation of a target before the destruction. The Red Guards who carried it out were teenagers of both sexes, but the architects were men, and the institutional machinery they built was the most refined indirect competition system the modern world has produced.
None of this is unusual. It is what ambitious men have always done in environments where direct confrontation is too costly. The bookish boy in any schoolyard who could not match the bigger boys physically learned, by age eight, to compete with words, rumor, alliance, and clever framing. He was not feminized by this. He was responding rationally to the asymmetry. The same boy, grown up, now knows how to kill a colleague’s promotion in a hiring committee through a carefully placed concern, because the institutional environment makes that the only channel through which his ambition can move.
The pattern across history is clear enough to state plainly. Wherever a man cannot win in the open, he competes indirectly. The strategy is universal among men, and it always has been. There is no period of history in which men only fought each other directly and indirect competition was somehow feminine. The Senate, the Vatican, the court, the politburo, the partnership track, the tenure committee, all of these are environments men built for themselves and then filled with the indirect tactics the environment rewarded.
Now the other half.
The picture of women as historically powerless, confined to influence and whisper, is a recent invention. Across most of recorded history, women wielded direct power inside the institutions that mattered most to daily human life. The household was not a sentimental backdrop to the real world of male politics. The household was the unit of production, of moral formation, of economic decision, and of political alliance, and women ran it. And from inside that institution, working with the tools the culture made available, women shaped nations.
Return to Anne Boleyn for a moment. A few paragraphs ago she appeared as Cromwell’s target, brought down by coalition and manufactured evidence. But before she was a target, she was the architect of one of the largest political transformations in European history. Anne refused to be Henry VIII’s mistress. She held out for marriage. She worked on Henry steadily for years, shaping his thinking, isolating him from his existing advisors, replacing one religious frame with another. To marry her, Henry broke with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, founded the Church of England, and remade the religious and political identity of a nation that has carried the consequences for five hundred years. Anne held no office. She raised no army. She worked from inside the only institution open to her, which was the king’s household, and she changed the religion of England. The men around her noticed she had done it, which is why Cromwell eventually destroyed her. You do not need to take down a powerless woman.
Anne is not an exception. She is the visible case of a pattern that runs through history almost everywhere you look once you stop assuming women had no power.
A Roman matron managed an estate that in many cases had hundreds of slaves and dependents, made daily decisions about labor and food and discipline, and exercised legal authority over her children that was direct and uncontested. The paterfamilias had ultimate legal authority, but the actual day to day government of the household was the materfamilias‘s domain, and her authority over the people in it was as direct as any senator’s authority over a subordinate. Medieval European chatelaines ran fortified estates while their husbands were at war, made military decisions, defended walls, and held vassals to their oaths. The image of the powerless woman waiting in the tower is iconography. The reality of women like Eleanor of Aquitaine is closer to the average than the romantic version admits.
Women ruled directly even where the rules said they should not. Empress Wu Zetian ran the Tang dynasty for decades. Catherine the Great seized the Russian throne and held it for thirty-four years through purges, wars, and reforms that were as direct as any male monarch’s. Elizabeth I executed her cousin and ran a state. The dowager queens and queen mothers who shaped European politics for centuries were not whispering from behind the throne. They were on the throne. The notion that women only ever influenced power indirectly is a description of the Victorian middle class projected backwards onto everything else, and it does not survive an afternoon with the actual record.
And inside the household, where most women lived their lives across most of history, the power they exercised over their husbands, sons, and brothers was direct, daily, and material. A mother shaped her son’s character with rules, consequences, and physical correction. She decided what he ate, what he learned, who he married, and often what he did for a living. A wife managed the family economy and made the decisions that compounded across generations. A sister, in many households, raised her younger siblings outright. The idea that this kind of authority is somehow indirect because it operated through speech and proximity rather than through formal title is a modern category error. Direct power is the power to shape outcomes through known authority. By that definition, women have always had it, in the institutions where they had presence. The error is in only counting institutions whose names we recognize today.
Which brings us back to the original picture. The feminization thesis requires that men, throughout history, won through direct contest, while women, throughout history, won through indirect manipulation. Neither half of that picture survives the record. Men have used indirect competition for as long as institutions have existed in which direct competition was too costly to attempt. Women have used direct power for as long as households and courts have existed in which they had institutional standing. The strategies follow the environment, not the sex.
If the strategies follow the environment, then the question about why indirect competition has become the dominant mode in our institutions is not a question about who is in the room. It is a question about what kind of room we have built.
What Actually Changed
The story the feminization thesis tells is that women entered institutions and brought feminine norms with them, and the institutions adopted those norms. The story the historical and empirical record actually tells is something different. Two trend lines have crossed in the last several decades, and the temptation has been to read the crossing as causation. The first trend line is women’s entry into formal institutions. The second is the systematic, deliberate, multi-decade removal of direct competition from those same institutions. Both are real. Only the second explains the rise of indirect competition. The first is, at most, a small contributing variable.
The removal of direct competition has happened simultaneously in three places. Inside institutions, in childhood, and inside the cultural script we use to talk about boys. Each of these changes was undertaken for what its proponents considered good reasons. Each of them, by itself, has costs that can be argued about. Together, they have produced an environment in which direct competition has become structurally unavailable to almost everyone, and indirect competition has become the only viable strategy. This is not feminization. It is the universalization of constraint.
Start with institutions.
Forty years ago, a manager who had a problem with an employee called the employee into their office and worked it out, with whatever degree of skill or fairness the manager possessed. Today, in any organization above a certain size, the same dispute moves through a different channel. The employee files a complaint with HR. HR opens an investigation. There is a paper trail, a procedural review, a formal finding. The manager’s direct authority has been replaced by a bureaucratic process. The shift began with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and accelerated through the 1990s as discrimination law expanded and corporate liability grew. Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, who have studied this transition for thirty years, have documented its full institutional architecture in a series of papers and books, including their 2016 Harvard Business Review article “Why Diversity Programs Fail.” Their finding, drawn from data on hundreds of firms, is striking. Bureaucratic grievance systems, designed to protect employees from biased managers, do not generally produce the outcomes their designers intended. They produce retaliation. They produce paper trails. They produce procedural battles in which both sides learn to deploy the system as a weapon. They are, in the language of this essay, the most efficient indirect competition machinery ever installed in the modern workplace.
This is not an argument against the protections themselves. It is an observation about what happens to the competitive dynamics inside an institution when direct manager authority is replaced by procedural process. Direct competition requires legible authority and survivable confrontation. When both sides know that any direct conflict will move into a formal process, the rational strategy for both sides shifts. You do not confront. You document. You build a coalition. You wait for the moment to file. You disguise aggressive intent so that the procedural review does not catch you. You become, by structural necessity, what Andrews would call feminized, regardless of your sex.
The same shift has happened in academia, where tenure systems and bias-protection committees have transformed hiring and promotion into procedural battles in which a single anonymous complaint can derail a career. It has happened in journalism, where editorial decisions that would once have been made by an editor in a five-minute hallway conversation now move through Slack channels, sensitivity reviews, and HR escalations. It has happened in publishing, in technology, in medicine, and in law, anywhere that a combination of liability exposure, anti-discrimination law, and bureaucratic risk-aversion has converted personnel disputes from manager-to-employee resolution into procedural compliance. The structural form is everywhere the same. The strategies it rewards are the strategies of indirect competition.
None of this required women to enter the building. Most of the architects of these systems were men. Most of the senior managers using them are men. The dominance of indirect competition in modern institutions is not a story about who is in the room. It is a story about what the room rewards.
Now look at where the people in those rooms grew up.
For most of human history, children played in unsupervised mixed-age groups for several hours a day, settled their own disputes, took physical risks, and learned, through direct experience, what works and what doesn’t when other people push back. Across the last sixty years in the United States and other developed nations, this has changed almost completely. Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, has documented the decline in free play in a series of papers in the American Journal of Play. His central finding, drawn from longitudinal data across multiple countries, is that children’s unsupervised, unstructured, self-organized play has fallen sharply since roughly 1955, and that the decline closely tracks rises in childhood anxiety, depression, narcissism, and feelings of helplessness across the same period. Gray’s argument is not that childhood has become unhappy because adults are mean to children. It is that children learn how to handle direct conflict, take risks, and tolerate distress through unsupervised play, and that we have removed almost all of that environment from the typical childhood.
The replacement is supervised activity. Adult-organized sports, scheduled lessons, classroom learning, structured playdates. In every case, an adult is present, an adult sets the rules, and an adult resolves conflicts. The child does not learn to handle direct competition from peers. The child learns to handle the procedural authority of the supervising adult. By age twelve, the child has spent thousands of hours in environments where the way to win is to read what the adult wants and provide it, and the way to settle disputes is to appeal to the adult. They have spent, by comparison, very few hours in environments where the way to win is to outwork or outthink or outargue a peer who can push back, and the way to settle disputes is to handle the conflict themselves.
This hits boys harder than girls, on average, because boys’ default play patterns are more physical, more risk-seeking, and more rough than girls’ default patterns. The supervised environment penalizes boys’ default behavior more frequently than girls’ default behavior. Schools, which have moved steadily toward zero-tolerance discipline policies for any physical conflict, have been the leading edge of this. A schoolyard fight that would have been resolved between the boys themselves in 1965, with a teacher’s mild intervention, is now a disciplinary referral, a parent meeting, sometimes a suspension. The lesson the boys learn is not that direct conflict is sometimes useful and has costs. The lesson is that direct conflict is institutionally unsurvivable. The rational adaptation is to compete indirectly, the way Cassius did, the way Janis did, the way ambitious people have always done in environments where direct competition is too expensive.
Now add the third change.
The phrase “toxic masculinity” was rare in academic literature before about 2015. Sociologist Carol Harrington has shown that the number of articles using the term prior to 2015 almost never exceeded twenty per year, and almost all of those mentions were in narrow corners of academic journals. Then the term entered mainstream discourse, partly through the rise of #MeToo, partly through political polarization. By 2017 there were thousands of mentions, mostly in popular media. The original concept, drawn from the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s, was narrow. It named specific behaviors, like emotional repression as a path to violence, contempt for vulnerability, dominance as an end in itself. Used carefully, it described real and harmful patterns.
The pattern that followed is what the psychologist Nick Haslam, in a 2016 paper in Psychological Inquiry, calls concept creep. Harm-related concepts in psychology and culture, Haslam shows, tend to expand in two directions. They creep horizontally, coming to refer to qualitatively new phenomena. They creep vertically, coming to refer to quantitatively less extreme phenomena. He documented the pattern across six concepts: abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma. In each case, the original meaning was narrow and specific, and the current meaning is broad and elastic. The same pattern has happened to toxic masculinity. The original concept named extreme behaviors. The current usage covers, depending on the speaker, ordinary roughhousing, competitive sports, direct argument, risk-seeking, sexual interest, ambition, anger, and the simple preference of boys for the company of other boys. Harrington herself has shown that the term is now almost never defined and is used primarily, in her phrase, to signal disapproval.
The consequences are visible in the data. A 2023 study by psychologist John Barry of more than four thousand men in the United Kingdom and Germany found that men who believed masculinity itself had a negative influence on their behavior reported significantly worse mental wellbeing than men who did not hold this belief. The cultural script that pathologizes ordinary masculine behavior is producing measurable harm in the people it is supposedly designed to help.
The show Adolescence, released in 2025 to enormous critical acclaim, is the cultural artifact that most cleanly illustrates the dynamic. The show takes a real and rare phenomenon, the radicalized adolescent boy who commits violence against a girl, and presents it as if it were the natural endpoint of unsupervised boyhood and online masculinity. The framing implies that left to themselves, ordinary boys drift toward this outcome. The data does not support that. Most adolescent boys are not radicalized, not violent, and not on a trajectory toward the events the show depicts. But the framing has consequences for how parents, teachers, and institutions read ordinary boy behavior. The boy who roughhouses, who argues, who pushes back, who gets in trouble, is now seen through the lens of a possible future violence rather than as a child working through normal developmental pressure. The intervention is to suppress the behavior earlier and more thoroughly, which means suppressing the practice of direct competition earlier and more thoroughly.
This is the cultural piece. The institutional piece removes direct competition from the workplace through bureaucratization. The childhood piece removes it from play through supervision and zero-tolerance discipline. The cultural piece removes it from the script we use to talk about boys, by recoding ordinary masculine behavior as proto-toxic. Together, these three changes produce an environment in which direct competition is structurally unavailable to almost everyone, regardless of sex. The strategy that succeeds in this environment is indirect competition. The people who succeed are the people who are best at it.
Which brings the question of who is in the room into focus. Yes, women have entered formal institutions in larger numbers over the last few decades. Yes, women, on average, have a slightly stronger statistical preference for indirect strategies, for the evolutionary and socialization reasons we already discussed. Both of these are true. But neither of them, separately or together, explains the dominance of indirect competition in our institutions. The institutions were going to become indirect competition environments regardless of who entered them. They were redesigned, by their own architects, to penalize direct competition and reward indirect competition. The architects were largely men. The senior staff are still largely men. And the strategy the institutions reward is the strategy any rational actor adopts when direct competition becomes too expensive to survive.
The gender correlation is real. The gender causation is not. Two trend lines crossed. We mistook the crossing for an explanation, and the explanation we constructed has flattered the people who already wanted to believe women are the problem. The actual mechanism is structural, it is universal, and it would have produced the same outcomes in an all-male workforce. The Roman Senate is the proof. The Politburo is the proof. The all-male academic department in 1955 that destroyed careers through tenure-committee whispers is the proof. We did not need women to discover indirect competition. We have always known how to do it. We just used to live in environments where direct competition was sometimes available, and now we do not.
If this is right, the question of what to do about it changes completely.
What Merit Actually Means
This is the place where Andrews and I converge, and where I want to be careful, because the convergence is partial and the distinction matters.
Andrews ends her essay with merit. So does this one. She writes that the way to fix the problem is to make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name. I agree. We mean different things by the word, but we land on it for related reasons, and the related reasons are worth holding onto. Both of us recognize that the current institutional environment rewards strategies that do not track output. Both of us would like the strategies that track output to be rewarded again. The disagreement is about why output has stopped being rewarded and what bringing it back would look like.
In Andrews’s frame, merit is a value being violated by women’s preference for cohesion over excellence, and the path back to merit involves restoring the conditions under which men’s preference for direct contest can structure institutional life. In my frame, merit is not a value at all. It is a structural condition. Merit, in this sense, is what exists when the criteria for evaluation are stated before the competition begins, the measurement of those criteria is honest and consistent, and the person being evaluated can verify, after the fact, why they received the result they received. That is the entire definition. It is not a claim about who is more deserving than whom. It is a description of an institutional condition under which direct competition becomes possible because the rules of the contest are public and the outcomes are legible.
This is what the organizational justice research has been showing for the better part of forty years.
In 2001, Jason Colquitt and his colleagues published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology synthesizing twenty-five years of research on what is known in the management literature as procedural justice. Their finding, drawn from hundreds of studies, was that procedural justice, defined as fair, consistent, transparent decision-making processes based on accurate information, is the strongest predictor of organizational commitment, of trust in authority, of reduced withdrawal behavior, and of improved job performance. The same year, Yochi Cohen-Charash and Paul Spector published a separate meta-analysis drawing on 190 studies and nearly 65,000 participants. Their finding was that procedural justice, the perception of how decisions are made, is a stronger predictor of organizational outcomes than distributive justice, the perception of what people get. The way the system makes decisions matters more than the rewards the system distributes.
The research goes further. In 2007, Kenneth Harris and his colleagues published a study in the Journal of Business and Psychology showing that perceptions of fair procedures directly weaken the connection between organizational politics and the outcomes that politics usually produces, like turnover intentions and reduced job satisfaction. Translated out of management language: when people perceive evaluation as fair, indirect competition loses its grip. The political games stop paying off, because the metrics are clear and the procedures are transparent. There is nothing to manipulate. There is no subjective space in which to maneuver. The strategy that requires moral cover and procedural ambiguity has nothing to work with.
Gerald Leventhal, in 1980, gave the operational definition of what fair procedures actually look like. His six criteria are still cited as the gold standard. Procedures should be based on accurate information, applied consistently across people and over time, free from bias, representative of all affected parties, open to correction and appeal, and aligned with ethical standards. Read carefully, this is a description of an institutional environment in which direct competition becomes possible. The criteria are knowable in advance. The application is consistent. The outcome can be checked. There is nothing for indirect competition to grip.
This is what I mean by merit. It is not a virtue. It is a building. You construct it deliberately and you maintain it deliberately, and when you do, the strategies that succeed inside it shift. People stop building coalitions to take down rivals because the coalitions cannot determine the outcome. People stop manufacturing moral cover because there is no subjective evaluation to influence. People start, instead, doing the work, because doing the work is the only strategy that pays.
Notice what this argument does not require. It does not require any claim about whether men or women are more deserving. It does not require restricting anyone’s access to anything. It does not require turning back the clock on women’s participation in formal institutions. It is fully compatible with continued progress on every dimension of inclusion that the last fifty years have produced. What it requires is that the institutions be redesigned so that direct competition on legible criteria becomes the dominant strategy again. Anyone who can do the work, regardless of sex, benefits from this redesign. Anyone whose career has been made through indirect competition does not. That is the alignment of interests this argument actually produces, and it is a different alignment from the one the feminization frame produces.
There is a limit to the argument that I want to name directly. Not every domain of human work has measurable output. Teaching, parenting, most of medicine, most creative work, much of leadership, and most of the work that matters most cannot be reduced to clean metrics. In those domains, evaluation will always involve significant subjective judgment, and indirect competition will always have some grip. The merit argument is not a totalizing solution. It is an intervention at the places where intervention is possible. And it is most powerful in exactly the places where indirect competition has metastasized worst, which are the institutional settings where output could be measured but has been deliberately replaced by procedural compliance. The professional partnership where billable hours used to settle promotion. The academic department where citation counts and replication used to settle tenure. The hiring committee where a structured interview used to settle a job. In each of these cases, a measurable evaluation system was replaced, over the last several decades, by a subjective one, and the subjective replacement is what made indirect competition the dominant strategy. Restoring measurable evaluation in those domains is not a radical proposal. It is the recovery of a structural condition that recently existed and that we deliberately set aside.
This is the actionable version of the argument. You do not need to restrict women. You do not need to roll back inclusion. You do not need to declare a culture war on indirect competition. You need to redesign the evaluation systems in the institutions where measurable evaluation is possible, so that direct competition becomes available again, and the strategies that depend on subjective ambiguity stop working. That is a structural intervention with a structural mechanism, and it is supported by forty years of empirical research that has been sitting in the management literature waiting for someone to apply it to this debate.
A Note on Janis
There is a moment near the end of Mean Girls that I have been thinking about throughout this essay.
After Regina has been destroyed, after Cady has been suspended, after the social order at North Shore High has collapsed, the principal calls all of the junior girls into the gymnasium for a session designed to address the patterns of relational aggression that have torn the school apart. Cady eventually stands up and confesses. Janis, the architect, also stands up. She names what she did. She tells the room she manipulated Cady into destroying Regina because she had been wronged by Regina years earlier. She makes the indirect direct.
The social system in the school does not survive that confession. Not because Janis is punished, but because the confession breaks the structural condition that made the indirect competition work. Indirect competition requires moral cover. The architect needs the agents to believe they are acting on their own outrage. The agents need to believe the destruction is principled. The audience needs to believe the target deserved it. Once the architect names the design, the moral cover collapses, and the system that depended on the cover collapses with it. This is not a moral lesson. It is a structural fact about how indirect competition works. When the indirect is named, it stops working.
The debate about feminization has been an exercise in indirect competition about indirect competition. A pattern was identified. The pattern was given a gendered name. The gendered name flattered some of the people doing the naming and indicted some of the people being named. The frame did not match the structure of the thing it was describing. Stating what the pattern actually is, where it actually came from, and what would actually weaken it, is the same move Janis makes in the gymnasium. It does not solve the problem by force. It dissolves the moral cover that allowed the wrong frame to keep doing its work.
Indirect competition is not a women’s strategy. It is what any rational actor does when direct competition is too costly. We have built institutions in which direct competition has become too costly for almost everyone. Women are not the cause of this. Men are not the cause of this. The architecture is the cause, and the architecture is fixable. The first step is calling the thing what it is.
It was never feminization. It was always this.