Christine McDougall, who writes at Syntropic World and has spent twenty years building the models and the language her project needs, has published an essay called 95% Yanged Out. It’s a furious, exact, and, in large part, true indictment of a world organised by and for a sliver of its inhabitants — the panel-stackers, the gatekeepers, and the men who absorb a woman’s work without credit and have no shame reaping where her generosity sowed. I know the scenes she describes. I have sat on panels and addressed audiences where all the speakers were men, and a majority of the audience were women. Her portrait of the collective rapture in those moments, the brilliance feeding on its own reflection, is the most accurate I have read. I find it impossible to deny.
Consequently, what follows is not a refutation. It’s an attempt to take her argument seriously enough to follow it all the way to its logical conclusion — including the parts where I think it goes askew and the larger part where I think she is right and have said so many times, both in print and in public forums.
I want to call out a trap before I step into it — because I am about to — and the essay is about exactly this. I co-wrote a book called Manmade, with Adam Jacoby, arguing that men built the institutions behind our gravest problems and are clinging on as the supposed cure. I believe it still. But the instant I produce it here, I have made the move I am about to criticise — the man waving his credentials. Look, I am one of the good ones; now hear me out. Inside the frame I am describing, that’s precisely the reflex that proves the case against me. So I can’t lean on this or any of my other books. It earns me nothing, and asking it to would be an error. The argument that follows has to stand or fall on its own two legs, regardless of who is making it or what he has written before. If it’s sound, my record is beside the point. If it needs my record to be heard, it’s not yet sound.
Here is where I feel McDougall goes wrong. This is worth following carefully, because my claim is that the error runs far wider than her essay. Indeed, it shapes a great deal of our civilisational discourse.
McDougall locates the cause of the crisis in essence. The flaw is within Yang — masculinity itself, in excess and in its most narcissistic form — and the remedy is the restoration of its opposite. Diagnosis by what people are, biologically, rather than by what the system they inhabit selects for. Follow that argument, and something happens to the possibility of reply.
If the defect is essence rather than conduct, then conduct can no longer answer the charge. Why? Because conduct is read as the essence expressing itself. A man who disagrees is the masculine reflex, reaching for an argument instead of doing what’s needed. A man who points to what he has actually done is the masculine reflex again, waving his credentials. A man who agrees without qualification is performing, and that will become quickly self-evident. And a man who says nothing is complicit by his silence. Every available response is pre-interpreted as the very disposition the frame presumes. The doors are several. Each opens onto the same verdict. You are a man. You are the problem.
I have no doubt McDougall argues in complete sincerity; we have been friends for many years. The frame she has constructed is not a trap she alone set but one that sustained, unanswered injury inevitably builds on its own. When the wound has been inflicted reliably along a single nerve — and the exclusion of women from the design of the world-system is exactly such a wound, real, documented, brutal in its persistence — the eye learns to trace the pain back to its source. The people in the corridors of power are nearly all men. Therefore, their maleness is the cause. The inference feels like knowledge because it’s built from decades of evidence, every instance confirming the hypothesis.
But notice what the evidence actually shows. It establishes that the people in power are men — not that their maleness is what put them there. A machine that recruits from incumbent power will reproduce whoever already holds it, and men, having barred women from those corridors by law and custom for centuries, were already inside. That a correlation is durable does not make it essential; something reproduced by exclusion will look, from the outside, exactly like a natural feature. This is the confusion essentialism feeds on. Once the cause is fixed in the category, the category’s members can no longer testify, because their testimony is read as the category speaking.
We have seen this architecture before. We should be able to recognise it by now. It’s the architecture that for centuries interpreted a competent woman in authority as bossy, an assertive woman as shrill, and an angry woman as hysterical — a frame in which what she was governed how everything she did would be heard, so that no conduct could clear her. McDougall names this precisely when it’s aimed at Grace Tame and Greta Thunberg: the platform is grudgingly granted, then the speaker is recast as a harridan for using it. She is right about the mechanism. What I am adding — carefully, aware that a man adding it within this context carries its own difficulty — is that the mechanism belongs to no single polarity. It’s a logic. And a logic runs on whatever identity you feed it. Reverse the terms and it turns as before: now it’s the man whose every act is reread through what he is. Essentialism does not change just by changing its target.
The easy way to win this argument would be to say that the dispositions are not even real — that “masculine” and “feminine” are labels the system pins onto temperaments that have no gender behind them, that men and women are interchangeable, and only oppression makes them seem to differ. It’s the tidy move. It dissolves McDougall’s frame at a stroke, because if there is no Yin and no Yang, there’s nothing to rebalance. I refuse to make it, because I don’t think it’s true and because winning on a falsehood is worse than losing on the facts.
The candid position is that we simply don’t know. The science here is genuinely open, and anyone who tells you it’s settled — in either direction — is selling a falsehood. There is a robust-looking finding, replicated across large datasets, that sex differences in personality, values, and interests are larger in wealthier, more gender-equal societies, not smaller, which is the reverse of what the pure-socialisation account predicts. There’s also a serious, recent body of work arguing that the finding dissolves once you correct for Western cultural clustering and for personality instruments built in the West and misapplied elsewhere – and other work showing the pattern tracks culturally constructed essentialist norms rather than anything innate. The contest is live and unresolved. Honest people hold it open.
So let me grant McDougall the strongest version of her intuition, the version the evidence might yet support: that men and women do, on average, incline somewhat differently — in what they attend to, how they weigh attention against abstraction, how they hold power — and that this difference is not a defect to be erased but part of the variety a whole civilisation needs. I think and hope she may be right about this. But here’s the twist she doesn’t expect: if she is correct, it’s the strongest possible argument against everything else she proposes. Because real difference, if it exists, is precisely the reason to reject diagnosis-by-essence and cure-by-demography.
Consider what follows if those dispositions are real and of value. Then the catastrophe Manmade describes is far worse than a simple injustice. The machine I call ‘industrial economism’ selects for one narrow band of humanity — domination, abstraction, extraction, the disposition we have learned to code as ‘masculine’ — and installs it as the definition of competence. Such a machine is not simply excluding women. It’s throwing away capacities the species needs: the care, the reflective consideration, the empathy, the refusal to externalise today’s cost onto the future. If those capacities are real and unevenly distributed, then their exclusion is not only unjust but stupid — a civilisation impoverishing itself. That’s a harsher verdict on the patriarchy than the interchangeability thesis can deliver, not a softer one. Difference being real makes the crime greater.
But notice what it does to the cure. If the capacities are genuinely distributed across temperaments, then no essence should be running the machine — not the male one that has been, and not its female mirror. The remedy McDougall reaches for is demographic: more women, a swing of the pendulum toward the feminine pole, the stage restacked the other way. That repeats the original error in reverse. It still sorts people into roles by category. It still treats a person as a token of their essence, to be admitted or excluded by their biology. And it forfeits the same richness from the opposite direction, because the disposition it now underrewards is real too and carried by real people who happen to be men. The woman who arrives, in McDougall’s own unsparing image, in a woman’s body and acts entirely as the system requires is not the exception to the pattern. She is the proof that the chair shaped the conduct, not the chromosome.
The error in both the old patriarchy and the order that would answer it is the same: reading an individual off the average. Even where a real average difference exists, the distributions overlap so heavily that the variation within each gender dwarfs the difference between them. Which means you can affirm that women, on average, may tend more toward some disposition and, in the same breath, insist this tells you nothing about the woman or the man standing in front of you. The historical crime was never that anyone noticed averages. It was that power that used the average to pre-assign the individual — she is a woman, therefore caring, therefore not for this office — and dressed domination up as the natural order. Difference, if real, explains variety. It has never once explained subordination. That was always a separate and uglier move, and the essence-talk was its alibi, supplied after the fact.
So the dance McDougall craves — Yin and Yang in true partnership, neither tyrannising the other — is the right end. We want the same thing. You don’t reach it by deciding in advance who carries which gift and stacking the stage to match. You reach it by dismantling the operating system that rewards one narrow disposition and calls it merit, and by building institutions blind to the category and ravenous for the whole range a person actually brings.
This is not the abandonment of merit. It is its recovery. What the old system called ‘merit’ was never the whole of competence — it was one slice, one disposition, domination dressed as capability, promoted as if it were the entire register of what expert work requires. To judge a person on the full range they bring is more discriminating, not less. The patriarchy did not promote on merit. It was promoted on a fraction of merit and called the fraction the whole.
That is what defection from the machine looks like. A man can do it — not as penance, not by disappearing, but in alliance. Man made the name who broke it. The completion is this: what genuinely fixes it is not a counter-patriarchy but the end of rule by essence altogether.
The error is upstream of the search. The refusal itself — the panel turned down out loud, the platform handed over, and the operating system defected from — carries its own warrant. It is right for what it does in the world, not for who applauds it. A man who refuses the all-male stage to be absolved is still inside the frame, auditioning for a verdict. A man who refuses it because the stage is a lie is outside the frame entirely, and the verdict has become beside the point.
And here’s the release in that – the most useful thing I have to offer anyone caught on the same hook. The reason no answer satisfies the closed frame is that the frame has quietly made satisfaction the test. A man reaching for the response that will finally be received as real — the words, the posture, and the deeds that earn the wounded party’s approval — has already lost, because a frame built on essence withholds that approval by design. Approval would dissolve it. So he performs, and he adjusts, and performs again, mistaking his exhaustion for a sign that he has not yet found the right move – when there was never a right move to find, because none of it was ever owed to the frame and was never going to be paid in the frame’s currency.
This is not indifference to the wound. The wound is real, and the obligation is real — owed to the world, not to the frame. The trap holds you only for as long as you want out of it.
So I publish this knowing McDougall may read it as just one more instance of the disposition it describes, and I find I can publish it anyway. We agree about the wound, the rigged stage, the erasure, and the partnership we both want on the far side of it – the dance she names and I do not dispute. We differ on what to call the knife. She calls it masculinity. I call it a machine that put on the garb of masculinity because it was already in the room and has worn it for so long that the two look identical. They are not. And the difference matters, because one diagnosis builds a coalition that can win and the other builds a frame so complete that nothing can answer it.
Christine McDougall has spent twenty years refusing to withhold her argument. It would be a poor tribute to withhold mine.
Read her. Syntropic World. The wound she names is the real one.