In late May, a strange post appeared on the X account of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Dear University Students in the United States of America,” it read, “you are standing on the right side of history. You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.” As it happens, the Supreme Leader’s government has struggled with its own resistance, ignited by the regime’s murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, accused of violating Iranian laws requiring head coverings—the most visible, but far from only, limitation on women’s basic freedoms in the Islamic country.
It’s hard to imagine that the cleric looked closely at images of the campus protesters denouncing Israel for its military response to Hamas’s monstrous terror attack last October. If he did, he would have noticed that they were predominantly female. It was women holding the microphones, addressing the press and crowds; women leading the chants of “From the river to the sea”; women giving interviews about the encampments; and women issuing demands to university administrators. In some images, so many women were involved that it seemed as if men had inexplicably vanished, like the missing in the sci-fi series The Leftovers.
The demographic makeup of the university demonstrations was something new for the United States. American women have led political protests before, but those generally concerned “women’s issues,” such as Prohibition, abortion, #MeToo, and the like. Granted, women marched with men in the 1960s civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests, but they usually played secondary roles, such as cooking food, typing speeches, and sometimes serving as playmates; “The only position of women in SNCC is prone,” in the memorable words of Stokely Carmichael. (Recognizing their second-class status among otherwise progressive male comrades motivated activist women of the era to start building the second-wave feminist movement.) Decades later, at Occupy Wall Street, a male protester produced a Tumblr video featuring photos of some of the comelier females sitting in at Zuccotti Park. He called it “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street.” Those days are over. Imagine publicizing a “Hot Chicks of the Campus Encampments” video in 2024; the writer would have to go into a witness-protection program.
The vibe has shifted—and not for a reason that the Ayatollah would celebrate: women are all but conquering the twenty-first-century academy. They not only make up well over half of undergrads and graduate students on university campuses; they also hold half of all professor positions, as well as six out of eight Ivy League presidencies and more than a third of college presidencies overall. Younger women who came of age in the new millennium have been thoroughly prepped for leadership as valedictorians, debate-club and student-council presidents, and Rhodes, Marshall, and Truman Scholars. If the protests offer further evidence for the dimming of patriarchy, they also show how women’s growing dominance in social institutions introduces new and ambiguous power dynamics.
Women’s prominence at the protests helps explain why, despite menacing sloganeering and electric tensions, little serious violence occurred. Men’s higher propensity for physical conflict is a human universal; when they find themselves in tense interactions, the likelihood of mayhem rises. With women running the show, you might stumble across an interpretive dance performance, as at Columbia’s encampment, but probably not much physical violence. True, when the cops arrived to break up encampments, things got rougher. But this was inevitable, with some protesters resisting police commands; there’s no gentle way to transport defiant dissidents to a police station. (Also worth mentioning: the police were mostly men, and, on some campuses, they seem to have lacked training in crowd control and de-escalation tactics.) The most disturbing exception to the relative nonviolence was a brawl at UCLA on April 30, where counterprotesters, including Jewish students and outsiders, tried to rip down barricades erected by a campus pro-Palestinian group. Videos of the fight showed only male participants.
Don’t take this to mean that women are not aggressive; they are. Their strategies, however, are frequently more cunning than men’s, and invisible not just to their more guileless victims but even to themselves. They’re masters of the covert psyop. Social exclusion—keeping out people whom the in-group deems deplorable—is a preferred tactic, as described by popular “mean girl” ethnographers like Tina Fey and Rosalind Wiseman, the latter the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes.
These pop observations have found scholarly support in the work of academics like Cory Clark, director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania, and Joyce Benenson, a researcher in evolutionary biology at Harvard and author of Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes. Both writers find that women have different psychological tendencies and moral priorities than men do and that, because of women’s rising status, those “priorities have more power than they used to.” Over the past several decades, safety (both physical and emotional) has taken on a talismanic power in the feminized academy. Equity and inclusion have become major moral concerns. Trigger warnings, cancel culture, and deplatforming are imposed to protect the marginalized and oppressed from ideas deemed harmful by the in-group—and serve as ways to ostracize those who don’t share those convictions.
This kind of social exclusion was exactly what we saw on campuses. Then Harvard provost Alan Garber noted that the issue was not open anti-Semitism but the social “shunning” and “pervasive” attempts to “vote [Israeli and pro-Israel Jewish students] off the island.” It began well before students pitched tents on quads. Reporting by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times revealed that shortly after October 7, a Columbia lesbian group, LionLez, sent an e-mail letting Zionists know they were unwelcome at an upcoming event. Similarly, a Barnard hip-hop dance team removed a four-year veteran, an Israeli American, from its WhatsApp channel, where practices and events were announced.
Once protesters established the encampments, they could pursue segregation policies more systematically. The Los Angeles Times described the UCLA scene in the days preceding the April 20 melee. Pro-Palestinian students used wooden pallets, trash cans, and metal barricades to block the path from a central plaza on campus to the encampment. If a suspected pro-Israel student came near, the demonstrators alerted allies by yelling, “Zionist! Zionist!” and refused him entry. Eventually, wristbands were provided for the in-group to show to appointed guards so that they could be distinguished from the undesirables—that is, the Zionists, who had to find an alternate route. Columbia protesters used a similar approach. In a well-publicized instance, one announced, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” The intruders were then told, “We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to destruct [sic] our community.”
The large presence of women made the absurd demand for privacy in an outdoor public space in the middle of one of the busiest cities on the planet only somewhat more comprehensible; people tend to expect more protection for women, for reasons that will become clear. Still, the tactic proved effective for three reasons. The protesters could, first, directly assert their ownership of university space; second, humiliate pro-Israel Jews; and third, keep the support of faculty and the broader public, who might turn against them if any blood were shed. That the protesters accomplished all this without physical violence is testimony to women’s ability to wield soft power. A short time later, a splinter group of mostly male demonstrators reverted to the 1960s (male) approach, breaking windows, pushing through doors, and scuffling with maintenance workers to occupy the university’s Hamilton Hall. The hard-power tactics were counterproductive, giving the administration the excuse it believed it needed to call in the cops.
Unlike males who might cross their arms across their chests, jut out their chins, or flare their nostrils when fixing for a fight, women sometimes hide their aggression behind a mask of civility—maybe a tight smile or a stiffly polite comment. A video of an incident during the protests at the University of Washington provides an example. A few students holding an Israeli flag argue with a larger group of anti-Israel protesters blocking their way. A small, soft-spoken woman enters and, with the cool authority of a veteran teacher warning her naughty fourth-graders to behave, says to the Jewish students, “I’m going to ask you not to yell.” She suggests that the Jews take a different route to avoid confrontation. She continues, “I think you want to walk that way [meaning down the path her allies are blocking] because it’s antagonistic.” The men feel checkmated. Do they point out her hypocrisy: She thinks they’re the antagonistic ones? Should they push her aside? Walk off with heads down? Just in case they didn’t do the right thing—retreat—a group of large men, faces partially obscured by keffiyehs and chests puffed out, appear and encircle the Jews, who, by contrast, don’t look like candidates for the football team. The encounter was “peaceful,” perhaps, but the gender dynamics bristled with psyop belligerence. A woman making a show of being a caring, civil person masks her own hostility by projecting it onto others. And just in case her targets figure out her passive-aggressive game and try something, she calls in male protection.
The soft power of social exclusion wasn’t the only familiar female tactic common at the campus protests. Women also relied on “safetyism” and often exaggerated harms. Columbia School of Social Work’s Layla Saliba, quoted repeatedly in the press, claimed to have suffered a “chemical weapon” attack after counterprotesters pranked her by spraying make-believe “skunk spray” in her vicinity. (The School of Social Work, whose students were well represented at the protests, is 88 percent female.)
Several viral moments from the demonstrations also capture this dynamic. Asked why student activists wanted to keep Zionists out of their encampments, a UCLA art history major responded, “Our top priority isn’t people’s freedom of movement. It is keeping people in our encampments physically and emotionally safe.” A Columbia grad-student spokesperson, Johannah King-Slutzky, notoriously demanded food and water for the Hamilton Hall occupiers. Responding to a reporter who asked why the university should support trespassers, she retorted, “Do [administrators] want their students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill?” It was a matter of “basic humanitarian aid,” she complained, ludicrously. One leader of the University of Pennsylvania encampments, Eliana Atienza—daughter of a Philippine television celebrity father and a Wharton-educated mother who founded the most expensive private school in the island nation—tweeted that Penn had left her “houseless.” She went on: “This is their weapon. So disappointed to be attending an institution that resorts to administrative violence.”
Yet it’s worth remembering that women have reason to exaggerate dangers and embrace safetyism. Societies have always needed to adapt to the biological reality that women are the smaller and weaker sex and bear the children necessary for group survival. Protections for the weaker sex have taken various forms, from the hunting and gathering division of labor to medieval chivalric rules to the “women and children first” moral code that left otherwise cold-blooded captains of industry standing on the Titanic’s deck, watching stoically as their wives and children rowed to safety as they went down with the ship. Even today, when women can serve in the military, they rarely get assigned to combat roles. Nor will you find many women toiling in the most dangerous civilian jobs, such as oil drilling or logging. Whenever Gazan casualty figures are cited, the numbers of women and children get singled out. This emphasis has propagandistic advantages, offering seeming evidence of Israeli brutality and Gazan innocence, but it also reflects enduring and socially valuable instincts of protectiveness toward the vulnerable.
Modern economies complicate those instincts. To get ahead, women must compete aggressively in the classroom and workplace. Toughness is an advantageous trait in this context—hence the popularity of female boxing classes and sweat-drenched gym workouts. Contemporary social-justice thinking, however, gives women a new route to protections similar to those they could count on in the past. Instead of deserving special respect because of their relative physical frailty, on this view, women should be safeguarded because they’re historically victims of male violence, coercion, and sexism. In an insightful essay on this topic, Richard Hanania writes, “For all our talk of equality, our culture treats violence, incivility, and aggression towards women much more seriously than the same towards men.” That’s one reason why the University of Washington men marching with an Israeli flag found themselves paralyzed by a female peer.
Male restraint of this sort may be necessary in a civilized society, but it can also enable a bullying strain of female hyper-emotionalism. At a June protest, a young keffiyeh-clad woman gave a remarkable display caught on video, a screaming tirade that lasted several minutes. Eyes popping, she screeched repeatedly about the “lies” Israelis had told about rapes on October 7. When a counterprotester asked if she supported Hamas, she shouted louder yet, “Yes, I support Hamas! I am Hamas!” Of course, most women don’t let themselves get so wild, and cooler heads escorted the frenzied protester away. In general, college students have been well trained in the art of bourgeois self-control; how else could they have passed muster with admissions officers? But some young women like this one have come to view anger as a way to show their toughness and to unnerve men, who can’t respond in kind. Because men are stronger, their anger could register as a genuine threat.
It’s striking how often the female protesters, whose compassion for Gazans brought them to the fray, divert attention to their own distress. At UCLA, protesters banned bananas because a woman participant claimed a “potentially fatal” banana allergy. When counterprotesters mocked her by waving bananas around, a female supporter compared them to “settlers waving machine guns.” (A fatal allergy to bananas appears almost unknown, and in any case, you would have to eat one to trigger it.) Or look at the TikTok feed of Barnard freshman Marie Adele Grosso. In one posting, she sobs as she recounts the story of her arrest. “Even as a kid, I’ve never hit or harmed an animal or other human in my life,” she says, sniffling and wiping her eyes. “The lack of care on our campuses is abhorrent.” In another clip, she says in her whispery voice, “I very rarely get angry, but I’m furious.” She continues in this vein, as she—and I wish I were making this up—applies concealer, mascara, lipstick, and a finishing spray to her face. Those unfamiliar with TikTok should know that cosmetic tutorials are immensely popular on social media. If creators attract enough followers, companies will send them free samples and perhaps even offer partnership deals. No doubt the Ayatollah would be horrified to have deemed this capitalist decadence on the “right side of history,” even if the makeup aficionado is an anti-Israel ally.
Why would Gen Z college women like Grosso, who have “never hit or harmed” anyone in their lives, align themselves with Hamas, a terror group so proud of its capacity for sadistic rape and murder that it filmed some of its October 7 atrocities to share with the world? It’s entirely legitimate for observers to feel distraught over the deaths of so many Gazans, but why would that distress lead a Columbia student to want to hold a sign with an arrow pointing at pro-Israel demonstrators that reads, “Al-Qassam’s next targets”? You’d think that the horror of suicide bombings, to which Palestinian terrorists were partial during the Second Intifada, would stop women who pride themselves on their compassion from chanting, “There is only one solution, Intifada revolution.” But no, it did not.
One distinct possibility is that they don’t know anything about the suicide bombings or Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades. Some had zero clue why they were demonstrating and what, exactly, their university had to do with a war in the Middle East. In general, say researchers, women know less about politics and world affairs than men do, but in the protesters’ case, ignorance seems gender-neutral: male demonstrators were also unclear about what river and sea they were shouting about. Both sexes were also remiss in their studies of Islamic attitudes toward homosexuality. How else to make sense of inexplicable signs reading “Dykes 4 Divest” and “Gays for Palestine”?
Ignorance, maybe. But social-justice logic, especially the idea of decolonization, helps resolve women’s cognitive dissonance between acceptance of anti-Israel violence, on the one hand, and antipathy to all manner of harm, real or imagined, on the other. “Violence is [colonialism’s] natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence,” the French guru on the subject, Frantz Fanon, explained. Few of the campus demonstrators likely had read Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, but they doubtless had absorbed its vision in their classes and at teach-ins on manicured campus lawns. They understood, that is, that white men had oppressed nonwhites, and that this should absolve the oppressed of guilt for any action, no matter how abhorrent. Victims are by definition innocents, and here, the Palestinians were the victims. “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays?,” as one viral tweet snarked in January.
Reinforcing women’s rhetorical embrace of violence was what one could call the Woodstock factor. Baby boomers might have been the first to thrill to a generational coming together of shared passion, but it’s now a campus tradition, especially in the springtime, when the weather warms and the semester draws to a close. The words community and solidarity rang out through the encampments. The young, so tied to their personal laptops and enmeshed in social-media bubbles, may have found the fresh air and group intimacy inspiring. Internet junkies sometimes talk about needing to escape the prison of their screens and “touch grass”—that is, experience real, as opposed to virtual, life. The encampments offered a chance to do that. It’s worth adding that young women seem especially vulnerable to social contagion, whether it’s cults or Taylor Swift concerts. That the protests made them feel they had a moral purpose—and what could be more moral than opposing “genocide”?—added to the exhilaration.
Available data for American campuses suggest that Muslims rarely make up more than 3 percent of the student population at particular schools. Yet Muslim women had a noticeably large presence at the protests. By social-justice logic, Muslim women are the most victimized of victims, ennobled by a triple oppression—misogyny, Islamophobia, and colonial subjugation. Non-Muslim protesters paid them homage, abandoning their former disgust with cultural appropriation. In fact, the protests were a festival of such appropriation. Countless students wore keffiyehs—though, given that only one small factory making the Arab scarves remains in the Palestinian territories, these were probably churned out by Chinese factories and delivered overnight via their parents’ Amazon Prime accounts. (The Babylon Bee mocked the protesters by imagining Uighur slaves staffing the factories, a distinct possibility.) At Columbia, several white female students knelt on the encampment lawn to pray to Allah with the Muslims, their heads covered; they remained separate from male supplicants, as Muslim women are generally expected to do. At a Rutgers workshop, female students learned tatreez, a Palestinian embroidery, taught by an older Palestinian woman.
Elevated by their victim status, Muslim women students were perhaps even more adept at disguising aggression behind emotional manipulation and safetyism than their American sisters. The most widely reported example occurred at a Berkeley Law School dinner honoring first-year students at dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home. An uninvited graduating student, Malak Afaneh, turned up, offered a brief prayer in Arabic, and began lecturing guests about the law school’s indifference to Gazan suffering, using a microphone she had sneaked into the event under her jilbab. Catherine Fisk, a law professor and the dean’s wife, repeatedly asked her to stop, reminding Afaneh that this was their home, not a public forum. When Afaneh refused, Fisk tried to take her microphone away. Later, Afaneh accused Fisk of “assaulting” her. The local Council on American–Islamic Relations got involved, deeming Fisk’s actions “an apparent act of Islamophobia.” Luckily, Chemerinsky, a prominent First Amendment scholar who begged Afaneh to stop abusing his and his wife’s hospitality, kept some physical distance. If he, a white Jewish male, had come too close to the “proud Muslim . . . survivor,” as Afaneh describes herself, he would have been caught in a symbolic battle he was sure to lose. Afaneh’s supporters have demanded that both Chemerinsky and Fisk resign.
Women like Afaneh, with close ties to the Middle East, surely know what social justice–intoxicated American students do not: their status, safety, and freedom to express themselves in the West far exceed anything they could expect in the former colonies they were chanting about. In Gaza, under Hamas rule, honor killings, child marriage, and marital rape are not prosecuted. The unpunished crimes committed against women in the Islamic republic of Iran, Hamas’s close patron, include “extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution,” according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Muslim women in most Middle Eastern societies don’t cover their hair because it’s a way to express their chosen identity; they do it because they have to. Showing your hair in front of unrelated men is haram—immoral. And they don’t demonstrate against the authorities who enforce rules like these unless they are willing to be shamed, beaten, jailed, or even, as with Iran’s Mahsa Amini, murdered.
The Mars–Venus divide in modes of aggression revealed at the protests is no simple evolutionary psychology curiosity. It has grave implications for university admission policies, curricular decisions, difficult debates, and, more generally, the pursuit of knowledge that is supposed to be the mission of these institutions. One final example from way back in 2009—when Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, spoke to a small seminar of prominent women scientists—should suffice to give a sense of the dead end we are reaching. The topic at hand was the dearth of women at the highest level in STEM fields. Summers offered several speculative answers. One possible theory was that there could be more variability in scientific ability among men, meaning more men were at both extremes on the bell curve—the least able and most able. “I’m here to provoke you,” Summers said, attempting to jolly the audience into lively debate. No chance of that. Men, especially alphas like Summers, enjoy direct confrontation and competition, but women shy from debates that might be challenging for those whom they believe to be weak or powerless. If there were some attendees willing to engage, they were silenced by the loudest and most emotional women, a not uncommon dynamic during debates on controversial matters. One professor simply walked out of the discussion. “I just couldn’t breathe,” she said, “because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” Another who did remain announced that she was ready to “speak truth to power,” referring to President Summers. Yet Summers, head of the most prominent university in the country, if not the world, would be forced to resign in part because he had supposedly insulted the women scientists during this incident.
It’s a lesson university women and men need to understand: power can hide in unlikely places.
Top Photo: Many pro-Palestinian demonstrators seem poorly informed, at best, and they often divert attention to their own distress. (Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo)
