E

very day, more than 500 newspapers publish “Hints from Heloise.” The column, stuffed with practical household advice about everything from stain removal to saving money, has been in syndication since 1961. It was launched at a time when running a household was considered a full-time profession (the tombstone of the original Heloise, who died in 1977, reads, “Every Housewife’s Friend”). But the column isn’t a throwback. It has endured for more than a half-century because it continues to offer people useful advice and information about their everyday concerns even as times have changed dramatically.

I was reminded of Heloise when I learned that the New York Times recently appointed a “gender editor” to oversee the newspaper’s coverage of…well, of just about everything, evidently. The press release announcing the appointment of Jessica Bennett described her as leading a “multi-pronged initiative” that includes “pushing forward research into how tone, storyform, subjects, sources, and other elements of the report affect women’s consumption of it, and evangelizing best practices around the newsroom.” Indeed, the Times is going all-in on gender. Reporter Susan Chira was named “senior gender correspondent,” and the newspaper also created a gender editor for the op-ed page as well as another director of an internal Times Gender Initiative.

In an interview with Teen Vogue, Bennett described her approach: “To me, what gender issues means is not simply coverage of feminism or issues related to women’s rights. Though of course that is important, and we’re committed to approaching those issues and approaching them from an intersectional lens.… So whether that means stories about gender identity, or sexuality, or masculinity, or race and class and how that plays into gender identity, or simply the subjects that the Times already covers—politics, international affairs, science, health.” In short: everything.

In theory, the appeal of a “gender editor” is that she promises to help us navigate these revolutionary yet confusing times; in an interview with WNYC Radio’s “The Takeaway,” Bennett said as much, noting how the #metoo moment “feels like a tsunami” (she later added that it was also an “avalanche” and a “hurricane”). “There seems to be no end in sight,” she said, describing the flood of accusations and outings of harassers and sexual predators. “There is a sense of being overwhelmed.” Her message—echoed by others among this new breed of “woke” cultural-guidance counselors—is: Trust us! We will tell you what to think and how to behave in these turbulent times.

Unfortunately, this new crop of intersectional Heloises do not inspire confidence, and their advice is more likely to come in the form of a shove rather than a hint.

In making its announcement about the appointment of Bennett, the Times praised her “compelling contributions” to the newspaper not on hard-hitting subjects such as sexual harassment or the wage gap, but for op-eds on topics such as “resting bitch face.” It also cited her book, Feminist Fight Club, an illustrated guide targeted to millennials and stuffed full of advice such as “carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” The book also offers hipsterish guidance on how to avoid male workplace types such as “the Manterrupter,” the “Bropriator,” and the “Menstruhater,” among others, and urges its (presumably female) readers to embrace something called “Vagffirmative Action.” Reviewing the book for Slate, Laura Kipnis wrote, “Reading this book felt like clawing my way through snowdrifts of saccharine. My brain felt gooey afterward.” Saccharine stereotyping of men seems not to bother the Times; the press release announcing Bennett’s hire linked to a “Feminist Mortal Kombat video” she made to promote Feminist Fight Club that’s worth watching if you’re wondering about the seriousness with which Bennett approaches workplace interactions between the sexes.

If the mission of the gender editor is to better clarify readers’ thinking about complicated issues related to sex, Bennett’s tenure thus far has not been a success. In a piece published in November on sexual harassment in the post–Harvey Weinstein era, Bennett wrote at length about Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas (never once noting for the record the inconsistencies in Hill’s testimony or the fact that Thomas denied the charges) while only briefly mentioning Paula Jones’s accusations about liberal men like former President Bill Clinton (to say nothing of Clinton’s many other accusers).

Muddled and dangerous thinking was also on display in another recent essay Bennett wrote for the Times, “When ‘Yes’ Is Easier Than ‘No,’” wherein she suggests that “cultural expectations” about how women should act mean that they sometimes have sex when they don’t really want to—and thus even consensual sex should be suspect. “Our idea of what we want—of our own desire—is linked to what we think we’re supposed to want,” Bennett writes, “with what society tells us we should want. And most of what society tells us—when it comes to women and sex, anyway—is wrapped in dangerously outdated gender norms.”

“Society” tells me I should buy $500 stiletto heels, too, but I know that if I can’t afford them, I shouldn’t buy them. (I learned that from Heloise!) “But what about a woman who doesn’t feel that she can speak up because of cultural expectations?” Bennett asks. “Should that woman be considered unable to consent too?”

For a gender editor, Bennett seems deeply confused about what consensual sex is. Consent is a yes-or-no question, not an existential one. It means a man and a woman mutually agree to have sex. It doesn’t mean a woman says yes, later regrets the encounter, and then claims the man should have understood that “cultural expectations” made her say yes when she meant no. Bennett’s attempt to blame cultural expectations or outdated gender norms for women’s poor decisions regarding sex doesn’t grant women some newfound insight or power; it effectively turns them into children incapable of standing up for themselves and setting clear boundaries about what they are and aren’t willing to do. It also implies that we should criminalize a fairly wide range of normal sexual behavior (or “problematize” it to the point of effectively rendering it obsolete). Would Bennett have us trade the nondisclosure agreements of the pre-Weinstein era for elaborate consent documents (or telepaths) that ostensibly protect women who might not trust their own decision-making powers?

None of this would matter if the portfolio granted to a “gender editor” weren’t so vast, practically inviting the kind of mission creep that could easily morph into politically correct censorship. “We’re thinking about this really holistically,” Bennett told Teen Vogue. “It’s about the type of coverage, and at times, elevating some of the underrepresented voices. It’s also about looking at our own report [sic] critically and thinking about tone, and subtle language things, and the visual displays of stories, and bylines and sources.” Rigorously monitoring “subtle language things” or counting up the number of female sources and bylines to achieve gender parity doesn’t sound so benign given the ideological agendas of those enforcing the practices.

The Times is not alone in embracing enforcers for our new “woke” age. New York magazine recently profiled Dhonielle Clayton, who works in “the booming business of sensitivity reading.” Sensitivity readers are basically freelance barometers for political correctness; they are hired to read drafts of books and offer suggestions to writers about their portrayal of characters (usually racial minorities) or storylines, ostensibly to encourage “authenticity” in the final book. Clayton, who is black, has many “unhappy memories of reading” as a child because of the absence of black characters in books. “I was reading everything looking for myself,” she told New York. “I didn’t get it.”

Did no one tell her that reading—particularly reading fiction—is a unique opportunity to gain insight into people who aren’t like yourself? Today, however, an increasing number of books for children and young adults do feature nonwhite characters; but, as Clayton complains, too many of those books are still being written by nonblack people.

Ms. Clayton clearly has strong (and rather condescending) feelings about people who try to write fiction about anyone who isn’t exactly like themselves. “The same canned answer always comes back” from nonblack writers who write a black character, she told New York. “This character just walked into my head fully formed.” And she harbors strong resentment about nonblack writers who get their work published. “Them writing a story about a black kid prevents me from writing one,” she told New York, “because when I show up with my manuscript, the publisher tells me that the position is filled.”

Professional sensitivity readers like Ms. Clayton downplay their roles as censors. “I’m not the diversity police officer, policing non-marginalized people,” she says. And yet, objecting to a Times story that suggested sensitivity readers are practicing a form of censorship, Clayton tweeted, “The reason I’ve done over 35 sensitivity reads this year alone is b/c publishers aren’t hiring black content creators but everyone wants to write about black people.”

Publishers aren’t the only ones embracing internal wardens of wokeness. In December, the New York Times reported on an effort by business-school professors to be more enlightened in their teaching approach, with some universities offering au courant classes on “Uber and ‘bro’ culture,” and sexual harassment. The Forte Foundation, which promotes women in business, now offers a downloadable “tool kit” for men in business school called “Men as Allies,” which encourages men to form “Manbassador” programs at their schools (Dartmouth, Columbia, and Harvard have them). Such programs are designed to host events, encourage “role-playing scenarios about sensitive situations,” and even “encourage men in your MBA program to sign and pledge their support of gender equality” by affixing their names to the Men as Allies pledge. As Alen Amini, a founder of Dartmouth’s Manbassador program, told the Times, he is “making sure that as men we’re very aware of some of the privileges we’re afforded simply because of gender.”

The policing of privilege is nothing new on campus, of course. As the Wall Street Journal noted recently, some ideological campus warriors have even declared war on civility itself. Two Iowa professors recently argued, “Civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm” and attacked what they call “whiteness-informed civility.” What does this look like in practice? During a 2014 collegiate debate final, two students “sidestepped the nominal resolution, which had to do with restricting a president’s war powers, in order to argue that war ‘should not be waged against n—as.’”

Like many zealous crusaders, today’s woke warriors see problems wherever they look. “I think it’s everywhere, but I also think it’s one of those things that we don’t necessarily see,” Bennett told Teen Vogue about gender issues. Hence the need for a mandarin class of woke monitors to guide us toward a more enlightened future. They aren’t acting as censors in the traditional sense—they’re not strategically placing a fig leaf over the naughty bits of a statue. Rather, they look at the statue and want to smash it because it was sculpted by a cis-gender white man. “A gender editor exists because media was created by and for white men,” Bennett told WNYC.

But a world of gender editors and “manbassadors” means a world focused on stories about gender (or race or whatever the identity du jour is) and fewer discussions of what it means to build a common culture with agreed-upon norms (like acknowledgment of some standards of civility and consent). And all too often in these stories, women and minorities are portrayed as victims or martyrs; the news becomes a never-ending story of resistance and activism. Getting along doesn’t sell.

Pitched as helpful representatives of their race or sex, an on-call conscience for an age that wants to fix its racist and sexist ways, this new crop of woke warriors will likely end up a permanent bureaucratic enforcement mechanism for identity politics. “I’ve been joking that I will be successful when my job is no longer needed,” Bennett told WNYC. If that’s true, then the joke is on us.