This is spot on! I am a woman who left the US and was an expat from 2017-2024, moved back to Texas and like... wtf is happening
You can tell immediately if a man is conservative or liberal by if he wants to hug or shake hands
Millennial men have lost the ability to talk shop with a woman (I am in the energy industry) – Gen X is still ok
If you don’t dress feminine enough in certain social settings you are ostracized by other women (not sending my second kid to the same posh mother’s day out my first went to because of this)
Social dynamics are still the same 1:1 or with one other couple – it’s group dynamics that have shifted
The moment somebody realizes they can have an authentic conversation with you the walls come down incredible fast – I think there is a lot of loneliness out there, across the political spectrum?
I'm curious what this means to you, Gen X talking shop vs. Millennials. I've been at a small company with the same small team for a long time now, so I don't have a feel for how this has changed, but my own industry seems to employ a lot more women today than even when I started, let alone when the Xers started. Which would make me think the younger gens would have more comfort with it.
Three generations ago, the kind of norms you're saying liberals have would've been characteristic of traditional churchgoing conservatives instead. Of course, back then all the PMCs (professional and managerial classes) would've been regularly churchgoing mainline Protestants. Today, they're all liberals. So the liberal behaviors are in reality merely how PMCs behave. The only change is that the PMCs abandoned mainline Protestantism and adopted the Church of Woke as their new religion.
The fact that being demure and mild-mannered and conservatively (not in the political sense) dressed is now a sign of likely being a liberal is very strange. (To be sure, in coalition with those with purple hair and nose rings and air of constant anger.)
Not strange at all to anyone who's not an old fogey. Low-class, ignorant, ill-mannered, uncouth Trump/MAGA has turned the well-educated upper-middle professional classes blue. In case you haven't noticed, the GOP isn't Mitt Romney's party anymore.
It is strange that that happened! But actually I would go further than you by saying that it was building on pre-existing tendencies that were very much present pre-Trump. Look at Fox News under Ailes.
But this is a global change. Got a gym in London and the toughest dudes are not in favour of Labour.
I think the change is the other way around - the whole working class socialist revolution Che Guevera thing just went out of fashion with the left, students with red socialist flags suddenly looked stupid, and they were always professionals and intellectuals and at some point they were willing to admit it openly.
That said, I did today see a series of posts on Twitter at which women at a pro-life event who gave tiny glimpses of bare shoulders were derided as whores/prostitutes/OnlyFans (all actual terms used), so who knows what the hardcore right really wants? Probably all posts were from Trumpers, but I guess not of the same kind that Hanania talked to.
No bad. I look at old time conservatives and they are so "priestly". Religious Mama's Good Boy, i.e. relatively low testosterone-related traits, high agreeableness. Similarly, back then progressives were still roleplaying at the Che Guevara type tough-ass rebel. The change happened around when progressives dropped all their working-class socialist pretensions, which were fake anyway, and showed their true colors as the college people.
I think many don't realize that regular attendance at worship and scrupulously following religious prescriptions and rituals is as much a marker of high conscientiousness as it is of high religiosity. And high conscientiousness is a very characteristic trait of the PMC and petit bourgeoisie who have historically been the most religious segment of the population (and still are outside the West) while the working classes were significantly lazier and behaved in a much less morally correct manner.
I would also say that the socially-stifled, buttoned-up feel of many liberals often (inadvertently) undercuts their strongest points for no other reason than the fact that persusasion is tightly tied to likability.
My wife read this piece and immediately said of the photo: "I think that conservative chick hooked up with someone the night before and took the wrong name tag in the morning hungover scramble to get conference ready."
I'm a conservative, but I was briefly in the oil business in Texas, and I recognize the "DC conservative" type of woman you describe here as the sort of saleswoman that vendors would try to use to get business from me. I never cared for it. I remember trying to use various techniques to make sure they kept their distance from me at conferences.
I find it interesting that conservative women, who I will guess are also likely to claim to be Christians, are the ones flirting and flaunting their bodies. That is so not Christian. Conservatives, men and women, are also the ones often against sex education and against abortion. They are so contrary.
Modern conservatives are generally quite irreligious. The influence of traditional Christianity on their behavior is very weak. They only (ab)use Christianity as a component of American nationalism. It is commonly joked that conservatives are the liberals of a generation prior. In this case it is absolutely correct. Today's conservatives have fully internalized the Sexual Revolution and celebrate it.
Conservatives who go to conferences like this aren't religious at all. At most, they give lip service to religious conservatives. Religious conservatives have their own culture and their own conferences.
The union of movement conservatives and religious conservatives is purely a marriage of convenience at this point.
I wouldn't take people in DC power circles as indicative of the broader population.
I'm an evangelical, and in evangelical circles in the real world, it's often cited as a common problem that women raised in the church are TOO demure compared to worldly women; they don't flirt or otherwise offer any indication of interest to men that they're interested in, which leads to those men passing them over.
YMMV but it very commonly doesn't look that way on the ground.
I can't recall all of Ryan Burge's data here but my general sense is:
(1) Young women are more likely to attend church at a particular level of belief. This is probably related to women's greater conscientiousness. The median woman is better than the median man at rolling out of bed and showing up somewhere. Framed alternatively, women tend more towards the extremes of never-attending and weekly-attending.
(2) Young men are more likely to attend more liturgical forms of worship (RCC, EO, Anglican) than women, leaving mainstream evangelicalism more female-weighted than Christianity as a whole.
(3) There's a lot of regional variation. A contact in NYC tells me evangelical churches there lean pretty heavily male. Impossible to find a wife but there's a solid community of highly marriageable men. Here in the South, it's very different.
(4) Even if you're in an environment where you're structurally favored in the marriage market, game is still important. A woman who has zero game is more likely to find that she can't draw a man that's acceptable to her and so she remains unmarried.
If she isn't flirting with him, she isn't giving him the green light to continue talking with her. And if he continues without a green light, he risks a visit to HR or the police. And if you get that stain once, you don't ever get it off.
From Richard's writing, I think this is a mostly younger cohort that he's describing, so they are less likely to be Christian than prior conservatives, or at least less likely to actually attend church.
Conservatives rightfully complain about liberal sexual degeneracy but conservative women are the ones dressing like sluts at professional events. Quite ironic.
Both sides are hypocrites just in opposite directions. Red Families V. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture by Cahn Naomi and June Carbone (2010) had already identified the phenomenon 15 years ago.
They’re really not. Students at more elite colleges are more likely to be virgins than less-educated students. Also these days the college educated vote has shifted to the Democrats.
Not really when you accept that some people are simply more hypocritical than others (just like some people are more honest than others, some people are smarter than others, etc.)
It makes sense. A lady in the streets and a whore in the sheets.
Professional events are where they might find a husband. Ambitious, strong and capable men. Liberal men for socialism and laziness, they aren't future husbands. Women flirt with and date rich men.
Do you bring money to a coffee shop that has nothing for you?
Flirting and flaunting are healthy behaviours. It is sane to be male and to be female. Adam and Eve, if you've heard of it. The bull and the cow. And the arguments against the bad joke that is 'sex education'. Arguments against abortion are simple. When you make an effort.
Christians who believe that babies and marriage are holy sacraments study reproduction and health, i.e. sex, more than any liberal. The men and women with higher salaries know more about work. There is nothing contrarian about performing better than liberals. Follow the patterns, and you'll perform more. In being male or female, in getting laid and making money.
It all makes sense when you realize that some folks are simply more hypocritical than others. Especially those who grew up in more socially restrictive environments. I'm not Christian and never went to church, but a good friend of mine who isn't religious now but had religious parents said church was always a great place to hook up with some of the freakiest gals.
There's an implicit hint of ethnogenesis in your anthropological observations. In your AI generated image, the liberal woman looks more *European*, as in German, or Czech, or French. The women on the right looks more British or Irish. This is reflected in voting data: Anglo Americans are more conservative than continentally-descended Americans. There's a sense in which liberal American women feel closer to a European than to a conservative American. These political performances are transnational.
Yeah, interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense, and there’s data for it. Anglo-Protestant populations (esp. those with Scotch-Irish or Southern roots) tend to lean more conservative and hierarchical. German, Jewish, and Scandinavian-descended populations lean more liberal and more tied to community values/labor politics. It matches historical trends in settlement and differences in communal norms (e.g., hierarchy and honor vs. egalitarianism and intellectualism).
Cultures with clear gender roles and status signaling tend to emphasize beauty more, and Anglo/Southern Protestant fits that mold (also sometimes Catholic Latin American). Liberal spaces, esp those influenced by Northern European or Jewish-American norms, tend to put more value on intellectual/moral seriousness and tendency to minimize overt femininity or status aesthetics.
So yeah, I now wonder how much of political performance today may stem from the inherited regional-cultural trends/codes. I’m not 100% sure if that constitutes ethnogenesis but there’s definitely a pattern.
Likely because a heavy percent of Anglo-Americans are Scots-Irish/Northern Brits who's culture originated in the tribal lawless borderlands of Scotland and England. They have a lot in common with other socially conservative honor-based tribal societies that formed in lawless areas (Sicilians, Saudis, etc.) New England descendents of Puritans are as or more liberal as those who descended from cultures from more civilized areas (most of continental Europe).
Yes, the old WASPs are basically the core of the contemporary Democratic Party. They are its priests and its activist beating heart.
The Republicans are a melange of factions, one of which is certainly the Scotch Irish hillbillies who dominate Appalachia. But there are Mountain West libertarians, California techno-libertarians, Old South cavaliers and others as well.
The Greater Appalachians and Deep Southerners are the beating heart of the current MAGA GOP. Take out the southerners and the rest of the US is essentially Canada. BTW, CA techno-libertarians overrate themselves and don't actually drive any bus. In other words, they are the chumps. You think they want to cut back on H1B visas?
The woman on the right also looks Eastern European. I think you mean Western Europeans when you say European. When they travel to Eastern Europe and look in a bathroom cupboard, they are astonished how much makeup Eastern European women have. Eastern Europeans have a joke that when you travel around and the cows look better than the women, you know you are in The Netherlands.
I get the impression that these associations are more transient than they seem at any moment, rather than reflective of an enduring stratification. I think of Ernest Hemingway as a prototypical ‘macho leftist’ of the mid 20th century, not at all uncommon back then. Even as recently as the 1990s, liberal movies depicted liberal men as very masculine - eg Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in A Few Good Men and Crimson Tide, respectively - mainly differentiated from their conservative antagonists not by being less manly but by being coolly rational while conservatives were just hotheads. Maybe some old timers can comment on how much or little these gender differences between tribes have actually changed in the last 50 years, seems fairly recent to me though.
It does feel like a lot of this is part of the GOP being remade in the image of Trump. Conservative Christian values have been sidelined in favour of the secular sleaziness of Trump. There are still plenty of conservative Christians in the voter base, but the center of gravity in elite circles is now focused on Trump's style of behavior and personality.
As for the movies though, Tom Cruise is pretty definitively less conventionally macho than his adversary played by Jack Nicholson in a Few Good Men though. Not that he's shown as a totally effeminate wimp, but part of the conflict between the characters is that Nicholson's Col. Jessup sees himself as a real manly man who risks his life and takes difficult decisions to protect America, even if that does include hazing and bullying leading to the deaths of the less capable and manly American soldiers, and he sees Kaffee as a spoiled college boy lawyer who's just an annoying pencil pusher that never had to face real combat or danger. He's not as tough or many as Jessup, but he is more clever and collected and ultimately that's what let's him win, as Jessup's pride and hot headedness is his own downfall.
No, it is not. For instance The Redpill predates Trump by 10 years. It is just that at first they were not politically active.
Ultimately change always comes from above, and I think it is more like that the left first abandoned their working-class socialist revolution Che Guevara with a red flag things. They were always professionals and intellectuals, but at some point they were willing to actually admit it. So the right moved into the working-class space.
I mean, the inverse is also definitely true. A lot of liberal women would find it extremely restricting and degrading to have to get dolled up, show off cleavage, and flirt with men they are not attracted to just so they can do their job in politics.
You mean that less masculine men often treat women worse, despite their relatively harmless looks and usually conflict-avoidant, high-agreeable behaviour? I have toyed with this idea before but never saw real evidence either way.
Correct. Predators need to develop a presentation of harmlessness. Good, patient and kind people need to show a presentation of danger.
Look at decent policemen, firemen and doctors. They are masculine. The men in sports know how to be tough and to be kind to their weaker friends. They can be dangerous, but they choose to be harmless to their friends. To fellows. They choose to protect women. The big, strong and reliable men can choose.
And look at the tiny-armed left. They are alone. They'll do anything, including the disgusting and the illegal, to keep anyone from leaving them. Anything but being good, reliable and strong. Because that would be self-sacrificial.
This is a really insightful commentary, but ironically, it affirms the value of the 'project' of gender studies etc. that remains (as far as I know) one of your main contentions with 'the left'.
The topic is worth a blog post. An entire field of scholarship? Probably not, especially if it’s politicized and draws people with blank slatist commitments.
It absolutely needs a field of study, just not in the "gender norms are bad" sense. The problem with that field is that they do not investigate things neutral, just assume everything traditional is bad.
True, rather than being a distinct field, it's best kept as an interdisciplinary topic that can be approached via history, anthropology, neuroscience, etc.
Of the Gender Studies Academics are there some who specialize in men? I don’t mean women’s advocates who criticize men but true men’s researchers. I would think that field would be about 50/50. I am thinking of Richard Reeves types. Maybe even some Masculinists?
> While not engaging in ostentatious displays of femininity, liberal women will sometimes drop these hints that subtly remind you they are still women. She might have a pixie haircut and thick glasses on, but will find a way to mention that she likes baking or the color pink. I’ve noticed that liberal women like to discuss how their sons are more aggressive than their daughters, which is the opposite of what must go on in the imaginations of many conservatives who probably picture them all bragging about their children being trans. I think that this stuff is a way to create a little room for gender expression in an environment in which feminist norms and HR culture push towards androgyny.
That sounds like it may be less purposeful, and more just that the lives of women are the lives of women. Women often spend a lot of time baking or enjoying interior decorating with a colour theme or other things that are female stereotypes for a reason. When you make small talk, you talk about things you do a lot, unless for some reason you're purposefully trying to downplay those things for some reason.
If the conservative women didn't talk about baking or loving the colour pink, my guess is that it's them purposefully not bringing it up instead of liberals purposefully bringing it up. Maybe the conservative women expected the conservative men to especially not care about stereotypical female hobbies, or felt that presenting as *too* feminine would make them not be taken seriously.
But I wasn't there, this is fairly unfounded speculation extrapolating from my own life.
And scrapbooking. Doesn't seem like it would be a gendered hobby - it's just an extension of the collage projects we had to make in elementary school. But I've never heard of a male scrapbooker.
As a man you will never see this but competition on looks is as important among liberal women as conservatives. That exists regardless - women have been incentivized to compete on looks for millennia. The form it takes among liberals is different because ideology requires it to be under the surface, never acknowledged. The value placed on looks is the same, but feminism requires the competition be downplayed or denied altogether. It’s why everyone is so careful to not ever look like they’re trying to dress sexy but still wanting attention for being hot.
Absolutely nailed it. There might be pressure to "dress down" and appear like you aren't trying, but women will still have styled hair (loose curls to look effortless), "no make up makeup" looks and maintain a lean physique.
The pandemic was a huge lesson in how various people respond to extreme, prolonged stress. Since then, I have noticed that the two parties have realigned around the two major categories of stress response I saw in 2020. Democrats have become the party of anxiety, Republicans the party of anger.
TheRedpill predates that by 12 years. The difference is that back then they were apolitical. Back then the political was not so personal... you could be super masculine and yet a socialist worker. Now not anymore. I see this as the biggest shift, that how the political got so very personal. Like Hulk Hogan could have been the biggest socialist in the world, 2010+ lefties would not have him around because to them he just looked ridiculous.
Does not really worth the time. It is theory that women like the Hulk Hogan type alpha male. The answer is some do and some don't. But then it just "evolved" into a generic "be a barbarian pirate" alpha-posturing.
Interesting that you missed it. Because today 8 days old kids are saying "I am sigma" (meaning not timid, or special, or unique, not afraid to be myself) and that is TRP terminology.
In their personal and professional lives, most likely yes, these days. The Dems are essentially upper-middle-class Tories at this point while the Trumpist/MAGA GOP is akin to Le Pen's National Rally/Front and Germany's AfD.
Having recently read the Psmiths on Fussell's book on class (see here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/joint-review-class-by-paul-fussell), I think I finally get your point about Elite Human Capital. By EHC, you really just mean "upper-middle-class", and the whole schtick is a point about social class differences. *That* actually makes sense. By the way, if you disagree with this, you should modify your thesis to make it about this, since it better models reality.
Modern large-scale studies (using datasets like NLSY in the U.S. and similar European panels) continue to find robust SES–IQ links.
Neuroscience work suggests that poverty and chronic stress can affect brain development, especially in areas tied to executive function.
Policy-oriented research often looks at how early childhood interventions (e.g., Head Start, high-quality preschool) can mitigate SES-related IQ differences.
5. Interpretation and Debate
Unlike sex or race, class is explicitly recognized as both a cause and consequence of IQ levels.
Most researchers accept that SES differences in IQ are substantially environmental, though the extent of genetic mediation remains debated.
A common framing today is gene–environment interaction: genetic potentials for IQ expression are more fully realized in high-SES environments than in deprived ones.
I renewed my paid subscription basically so that I could comment on how spot-on this post is. I especially appreciated the following:
"Conservatives fundamentally get human nature and are more in tune with it, but tend to indulge in their instincts and act like idiots. Liberals are thoughtful and polite but place a high priority on emotional safety and avoiding dangerous or uncomfortable situations . . . ."
This morning I was surprised to read that one factor in the decision to withdraw the nomination of E.J. Antoni is that he once mentioned the the hypothesis that male IQ scores are more variable than female IQ scores. As always in science, the hypothesis has been debated, but it is a serious hypothesis backed by data, and, in my opinion, probably correct. This looks like another example of some people not getting (male and female) human nature, if they are indeed rejecting Antoni for holding this view.
Agreed. A candidate has to be pretty bad for Trump to withdraw his nomination. I'm just pissed about people dinging him for espousing a scientific claim that they did not like.
This is spot on! I am a woman who left the US and was an expat from 2017-2024, moved back to Texas and like... wtf is happening
You can tell immediately if a man is conservative or liberal by if he wants to hug or shake hands
Millennial men have lost the ability to talk shop with a woman (I am in the energy industry) – Gen X is still ok
If you don’t dress feminine enough in certain social settings you are ostracized by other women (not sending my second kid to the same posh mother’s day out my first went to because of this)
Social dynamics are still the same 1:1 or with one other couple – it’s group dynamics that have shifted
The moment somebody realizes they can have an authentic conversation with you the walls come down incredible fast – I think there is a lot of loneliness out there, across the political spectrum?
I'm curious what this means to you, Gen X talking shop vs. Millennials. I've been at a small company with the same small team for a long time now, so I don't have a feel for how this has changed, but my own industry seems to employ a lot more women today than even when I started, let alone when the Xers started. Which would make me think the younger gens would have more comfort with it.
Three generations ago, the kind of norms you're saying liberals have would've been characteristic of traditional churchgoing conservatives instead. Of course, back then all the PMCs (professional and managerial classes) would've been regularly churchgoing mainline Protestants. Today, they're all liberals. So the liberal behaviors are in reality merely how PMCs behave. The only change is that the PMCs abandoned mainline Protestantism and adopted the Church of Woke as their new religion.
The fact that being demure and mild-mannered and conservatively (not in the political sense) dressed is now a sign of likely being a liberal is very strange. (To be sure, in coalition with those with purple hair and nose rings and air of constant anger.)
Not strange at all to anyone who's not an old fogey. Low-class, ignorant, ill-mannered, uncouth Trump/MAGA has turned the well-educated upper-middle professional classes blue. In case you haven't noticed, the GOP isn't Mitt Romney's party anymore.
It is strange that that happened! But actually I would go further than you by saying that it was building on pre-existing tendencies that were very much present pre-Trump. Look at Fox News under Ailes.
It started earlier with lowbrow talk radio.
But this is a global change. Got a gym in London and the toughest dudes are not in favour of Labour.
I think the change is the other way around - the whole working class socialist revolution Che Guevera thing just went out of fashion with the left, students with red socialist flags suddenly looked stupid, and they were always professionals and intellectuals and at some point they were willing to admit it openly.
The phrase "small but vocal minority" comes to mind.
The "purple hair and nose rings" crowd is to the left what the "Latin Mass and 10 kids crowd" is to the right.
Depends, depends. Age-related. With 20 years old college students more mainstream.
That said, I did today see a series of posts on Twitter at which women at a pro-life event who gave tiny glimpses of bare shoulders were derided as whores/prostitutes/OnlyFans (all actual terms used), so who knows what the hardcore right really wants? Probably all posts were from Trumpers, but I guess not of the same kind that Hanania talked to.
Pro-life religious conservatives are a declining part of the Republican coalition. They are in a self-isolating spiral.
This is exactly the dynamic I wrote about there: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/more-christian-than-the-christians/
Thanks for this, looks great. And I see you cite Kaufmann, whose article on the sociology of wokeness I greatly enjoyed.
What is this “Church of Woke”? Does it have a local parish I can attend?
Go to any mainline Protestant or Unitarian Universalist church.
You need mental help but reactionaries like you never do that. Instead you take it out on society.
Lol, what's with the sudden unhinged vehemence?
No bad. I look at old time conservatives and they are so "priestly". Religious Mama's Good Boy, i.e. relatively low testosterone-related traits, high agreeableness. Similarly, back then progressives were still roleplaying at the Che Guevara type tough-ass rebel. The change happened around when progressives dropped all their working-class socialist pretensions, which were fake anyway, and showed their true colors as the college people.
I think many don't realize that regular attendance at worship and scrupulously following religious prescriptions and rituals is as much a marker of high conscientiousness as it is of high religiosity. And high conscientiousness is a very characteristic trait of the PMC and petit bourgeoisie who have historically been the most religious segment of the population (and still are outside the West) while the working classes were significantly lazier and behaved in a much less morally correct manner.
All is a massive exaggeration. You’d need to go back 5 plus generations to mitigate against Catholic and irreligious tendencies.
I would also say that the socially-stifled, buttoned-up feel of many liberals often (inadvertently) undercuts their strongest points for no other reason than the fact that persusasion is tightly tied to likability.
My wife read this piece and immediately said of the photo: "I think that conservative chick hooked up with someone the night before and took the wrong name tag in the morning hungover scramble to get conference ready."
Always funny when AI doesn't really know what it's doing
I'm a conservative, but I was briefly in the oil business in Texas, and I recognize the "DC conservative" type of woman you describe here as the sort of saleswoman that vendors would try to use to get business from me. I never cared for it. I remember trying to use various techniques to make sure they kept their distance from me at conferences.
I find it interesting that conservative women, who I will guess are also likely to claim to be Christians, are the ones flirting and flaunting their bodies. That is so not Christian. Conservatives, men and women, are also the ones often against sex education and against abortion. They are so contrary.
Modern conservatives are generally quite irreligious. The influence of traditional Christianity on their behavior is very weak. They only (ab)use Christianity as a component of American nationalism. It is commonly joked that conservatives are the liberals of a generation prior. In this case it is absolutely correct. Today's conservatives have fully internalized the Sexual Revolution and celebrate it.
Conservatives who go to conferences like this aren't religious at all. At most, they give lip service to religious conservatives. Religious conservatives have their own culture and their own conferences.
The union of movement conservatives and religious conservatives is purely a marriage of convenience at this point.
I wouldn't take people in DC power circles as indicative of the broader population.
I'm an evangelical, and in evangelical circles in the real world, it's often cited as a common problem that women raised in the church are TOO demure compared to worldly women; they don't flirt or otherwise offer any indication of interest to men that they're interested in, which leads to those men passing them over.
But shouldn’t it be easier for evangelical women to date in the church because there are more young men compared to young women that are evangelical?
YMMV but it very commonly doesn't look that way on the ground.
I can't recall all of Ryan Burge's data here but my general sense is:
(1) Young women are more likely to attend church at a particular level of belief. This is probably related to women's greater conscientiousness. The median woman is better than the median man at rolling out of bed and showing up somewhere. Framed alternatively, women tend more towards the extremes of never-attending and weekly-attending.
(2) Young men are more likely to attend more liturgical forms of worship (RCC, EO, Anglican) than women, leaving mainstream evangelicalism more female-weighted than Christianity as a whole.
(3) There's a lot of regional variation. A contact in NYC tells me evangelical churches there lean pretty heavily male. Impossible to find a wife but there's a solid community of highly marriageable men. Here in the South, it's very different.
(4) Even if you're in an environment where you're structurally favored in the marriage market, game is still important. A woman who has zero game is more likely to find that she can't draw a man that's acceptable to her and so she remains unmarried.
If she isn't flirting with him, she isn't giving him the green light to continue talking with her. And if he continues without a green light, he risks a visit to HR or the police. And if you get that stain once, you don't ever get it off.
From Richard's writing, I think this is a mostly younger cohort that he's describing, so they are less likely to be Christian than prior conservatives, or at least less likely to actually attend church.
Conservatives rightfully complain about liberal sexual degeneracy but conservative women are the ones dressing like sluts at professional events. Quite ironic.
Almost makes you wonder if the liberals aren't actually that degenerate
Both sides are hypocrites just in opposite directions. Red Families V. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture by Cahn Naomi and June Carbone (2010) had already identified the phenomenon 15 years ago.
Conservatives have premarital sex, marry, cheat, and divorce all the time, while condemning all of these things.
White PMC liberals embrace "sexual freedom" while using that freedom to have very little sex, especially outside of long term relationships.
They’re really not. Students at more elite colleges are more likely to be virgins than less-educated students. Also these days the college educated vote has shifted to the Democrats.
Not really when you accept that some people are simply more hypocritical than others (just like some people are more honest than others, some people are smarter than others, etc.)
It makes sense. A lady in the streets and a whore in the sheets.
Professional events are where they might find a husband. Ambitious, strong and capable men. Liberal men for socialism and laziness, they aren't future husbands. Women flirt with and date rich men.
Do you bring money to a coffee shop that has nothing for you?
If a woman dresses like a slut in public she ain't no lady.
Why would a conservative man want a woman who dresses like rape bait in public?
It's an expression. Figurative. Metaphor. Abstraction. Not literal.
Be demure all the time. Except when you're with the one man.
Conservative women dressing like public rape bait is demure to you?
Read what I wrote. Make an effort to grasp it before you reply.
This is entirely a Trump-era phenomenon. You didn’t see women like this campaigning for Mitt Romney.
Flirting and flaunting are healthy behaviours. It is sane to be male and to be female. Adam and Eve, if you've heard of it. The bull and the cow. And the arguments against the bad joke that is 'sex education'. Arguments against abortion are simple. When you make an effort.
Christians who believe that babies and marriage are holy sacraments study reproduction and health, i.e. sex, more than any liberal. The men and women with higher salaries know more about work. There is nothing contrarian about performing better than liberals. Follow the patterns, and you'll perform more. In being male or female, in getting laid and making money.
It all makes sense when you realize that some folks are simply more hypocritical than others. Especially those who grew up in more socially restrictive environments. I'm not Christian and never went to church, but a good friend of mine who isn't religious now but had religious parents said church was always a great place to hook up with some of the freakiest gals.
There's an implicit hint of ethnogenesis in your anthropological observations. In your AI generated image, the liberal woman looks more *European*, as in German, or Czech, or French. The women on the right looks more British or Irish. This is reflected in voting data: Anglo Americans are more conservative than continentally-descended Americans. There's a sense in which liberal American women feel closer to a European than to a conservative American. These political performances are transnational.
Yeah, interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense, and there’s data for it. Anglo-Protestant populations (esp. those with Scotch-Irish or Southern roots) tend to lean more conservative and hierarchical. German, Jewish, and Scandinavian-descended populations lean more liberal and more tied to community values/labor politics. It matches historical trends in settlement and differences in communal norms (e.g., hierarchy and honor vs. egalitarianism and intellectualism).
Cultures with clear gender roles and status signaling tend to emphasize beauty more, and Anglo/Southern Protestant fits that mold (also sometimes Catholic Latin American). Liberal spaces, esp those influenced by Northern European or Jewish-American norms, tend to put more value on intellectual/moral seriousness and tendency to minimize overt femininity or status aesthetics.
So yeah, I now wonder how much of political performance today may stem from the inherited regional-cultural trends/codes. I’m not 100% sure if that constitutes ethnogenesis but there’s definitely a pattern.
Likely because a heavy percent of Anglo-Americans are Scots-Irish/Northern Brits who's culture originated in the tribal lawless borderlands of Scotland and England. They have a lot in common with other socially conservative honor-based tribal societies that formed in lawless areas (Sicilians, Saudis, etc.) New England descendents of Puritans are as or more liberal as those who descended from cultures from more civilized areas (most of continental Europe).
Yes, the old WASPs are basically the core of the contemporary Democratic Party. They are its priests and its activist beating heart.
The Republicans are a melange of factions, one of which is certainly the Scotch Irish hillbillies who dominate Appalachia. But there are Mountain West libertarians, California techno-libertarians, Old South cavaliers and others as well.
The Greater Appalachians and Deep Southerners are the beating heart of the current MAGA GOP. Take out the southerners and the rest of the US is essentially Canada. BTW, CA techno-libertarians overrate themselves and don't actually drive any bus. In other words, they are the chumps. You think they want to cut back on H1B visas?
The woman on the right also looks Eastern European. I think you mean Western Europeans when you say European. When they travel to Eastern Europe and look in a bathroom cupboard, they are astonished how much makeup Eastern European women have. Eastern Europeans have a joke that when you travel around and the cows look better than the women, you know you are in The Netherlands.
That's AI?? I thought that was a real photo from the conference.
I get the impression that these associations are more transient than they seem at any moment, rather than reflective of an enduring stratification. I think of Ernest Hemingway as a prototypical ‘macho leftist’ of the mid 20th century, not at all uncommon back then. Even as recently as the 1990s, liberal movies depicted liberal men as very masculine - eg Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in A Few Good Men and Crimson Tide, respectively - mainly differentiated from their conservative antagonists not by being less manly but by being coolly rational while conservatives were just hotheads. Maybe some old timers can comment on how much or little these gender differences between tribes have actually changed in the last 50 years, seems fairly recent to me though.
It does feel like a lot of this is part of the GOP being remade in the image of Trump. Conservative Christian values have been sidelined in favour of the secular sleaziness of Trump. There are still plenty of conservative Christians in the voter base, but the center of gravity in elite circles is now focused on Trump's style of behavior and personality.
As for the movies though, Tom Cruise is pretty definitively less conventionally macho than his adversary played by Jack Nicholson in a Few Good Men though. Not that he's shown as a totally effeminate wimp, but part of the conflict between the characters is that Nicholson's Col. Jessup sees himself as a real manly man who risks his life and takes difficult decisions to protect America, even if that does include hazing and bullying leading to the deaths of the less capable and manly American soldiers, and he sees Kaffee as a spoiled college boy lawyer who's just an annoying pencil pusher that never had to face real combat or danger. He's not as tough or many as Jessup, but he is more clever and collected and ultimately that's what let's him win, as Jessup's pride and hot headedness is his own downfall.
No, it is not. For instance The Redpill predates Trump by 10 years. It is just that at first they were not politically active.
Ultimately change always comes from above, and I think it is more like that the left first abandoned their working-class socialist revolution Che Guevara with a red flag things. They were always professionals and intellectuals, but at some point they were willing to actually admit it. So the right moved into the working-class space.
Yeah, these observations are fun, but I think it literally is just fashion.
Mike Pence circa 2016 doesn't seem like he'd fit in.
In case you haven't noticed, the GOP isn't exactly the party of the Mike Pence/Mitt Romneys of the country any more.
I agree that they're no longer fashionable.
Growing up, I never imagined I'd read the phrase "would probably find liberal norms stifling."
That's where liberals went wrong. They went from being about social freedom to being the HR department.
The hectoring and scolding?
I mean, the inverse is also definitely true. A lot of liberal women would find it extremely restricting and degrading to have to get dolled up, show off cleavage, and flirt with men they are not attracted to just so they can do their job in politics.
So the problem is the liberal males. Conservative men can be around dolled up, good-looking women without provoking HR or the police.
You mean that less masculine men often treat women worse, despite their relatively harmless looks and usually conflict-avoidant, high-agreeable behaviour? I have toyed with this idea before but never saw real evidence either way.
Correct. Predators need to develop a presentation of harmlessness. Good, patient and kind people need to show a presentation of danger.
Look at decent policemen, firemen and doctors. They are masculine. The men in sports know how to be tough and to be kind to their weaker friends. They can be dangerous, but they choose to be harmless to their friends. To fellows. They choose to protect women. The big, strong and reliable men can choose.
And look at the tiny-armed left. They are alone. They'll do anything, including the disgusting and the illegal, to keep anyone from leaving them. Anything but being good, reliable and strong. Because that would be self-sacrificial.
Right, but the other side isn’t called "liberal"
This is a really insightful commentary, but ironically, it affirms the value of the 'project' of gender studies etc. that remains (as far as I know) one of your main contentions with 'the left'.
Sexual Personae made real in politics
The topic is worth a blog post. An entire field of scholarship? Probably not, especially if it’s politicized and draws people with blank slatist commitments.
It absolutely needs a field of study, just not in the "gender norms are bad" sense. The problem with that field is that they do not investigate things neutral, just assume everything traditional is bad.
True, rather than being a distinct field, it's best kept as an interdisciplinary topic that can be approached via history, anthropology, neuroscience, etc.
Of the Gender Studies Academics are there some who specialize in men? I don’t mean women’s advocates who criticize men but true men’s researchers. I would think that field would be about 50/50. I am thinking of Richard Reeves types. Maybe even some Masculinists?
> While not engaging in ostentatious displays of femininity, liberal women will sometimes drop these hints that subtly remind you they are still women. She might have a pixie haircut and thick glasses on, but will find a way to mention that she likes baking or the color pink. I’ve noticed that liberal women like to discuss how their sons are more aggressive than their daughters, which is the opposite of what must go on in the imaginations of many conservatives who probably picture them all bragging about their children being trans. I think that this stuff is a way to create a little room for gender expression in an environment in which feminist norms and HR culture push towards androgyny.
That sounds like it may be less purposeful, and more just that the lives of women are the lives of women. Women often spend a lot of time baking or enjoying interior decorating with a colour theme or other things that are female stereotypes for a reason. When you make small talk, you talk about things you do a lot, unless for some reason you're purposefully trying to downplay those things for some reason.
If the conservative women didn't talk about baking or loving the colour pink, my guess is that it's them purposefully not bringing it up instead of liberals purposefully bringing it up. Maybe the conservative women expected the conservative men to especially not care about stereotypical female hobbies, or felt that presenting as *too* feminine would make them not be taken seriously.
But I wasn't there, this is fairly unfounded speculation extrapolating from my own life.
I vleiende it is more normalized to figure female coded subjects in mixed gender spaces along liberals.
And scrapbooking. Doesn't seem like it would be a gendered hobby - it's just an extension of the collage projects we had to make in elementary school. But I've never heard of a male scrapbooker.
As a man you will never see this but competition on looks is as important among liberal women as conservatives. That exists regardless - women have been incentivized to compete on looks for millennia. The form it takes among liberals is different because ideology requires it to be under the surface, never acknowledged. The value placed on looks is the same, but feminism requires the competition be downplayed or denied altogether. It’s why everyone is so careful to not ever look like they’re trying to dress sexy but still wanting attention for being hot.
Absolutely nailed it. There might be pressure to "dress down" and appear like you aren't trying, but women will still have styled hair (loose curls to look effortless), "no make up makeup" looks and maintain a lean physique.
The pandemic was a huge lesson in how various people respond to extreme, prolonged stress. Since then, I have noticed that the two parties have realigned around the two major categories of stress response I saw in 2020. Democrats have become the party of anxiety, Republicans the party of anger.
TheRedpill predates that by 12 years. The difference is that back then they were apolitical. Back then the political was not so personal... you could be super masculine and yet a socialist worker. Now not anymore. I see this as the biggest shift, that how the political got so very personal. Like Hulk Hogan could have been the biggest socialist in the world, 2010+ lefties would not have him around because to them he just looked ridiculous.
Interesting. I hadn’t heard of The Red Pill before. I’ll have to give it a watch.
Does not really worth the time. It is theory that women like the Hulk Hogan type alpha male. The answer is some do and some don't. But then it just "evolved" into a generic "be a barbarian pirate" alpha-posturing.
Interesting that you missed it. Because today 8 days old kids are saying "I am sigma" (meaning not timid, or special, or unique, not afraid to be myself) and that is TRP terminology.
Not so surprising I missed it; not much doesn’t get by me. ;)
So liberal women are actually conservative and conservative women are actually liberal.
In their personal and professional lives, most likely yes, these days. The Dems are essentially upper-middle-class Tories at this point while the Trumpist/MAGA GOP is akin to Le Pen's National Rally/Front and Germany's AfD.
Having recently read the Psmiths on Fussell's book on class (see here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/joint-review-class-by-paul-fussell), I think I finally get your point about Elite Human Capital. By EHC, you really just mean "upper-middle-class", and the whole schtick is a point about social class differences. *That* actually makes sense. By the way, if you disagree with this, you should modify your thesis to make it about this, since it better models reality.
ChatGPT sayeth:
4. Contemporary Research
Modern large-scale studies (using datasets like NLSY in the U.S. and similar European panels) continue to find robust SES–IQ links.
Neuroscience work suggests that poverty and chronic stress can affect brain development, especially in areas tied to executive function.
Policy-oriented research often looks at how early childhood interventions (e.g., Head Start, high-quality preschool) can mitigate SES-related IQ differences.
5. Interpretation and Debate
Unlike sex or race, class is explicitly recognized as both a cause and consequence of IQ levels.
Most researchers accept that SES differences in IQ are substantially environmental, though the extent of genetic mediation remains debated.
A common framing today is gene–environment interaction: genetic potentials for IQ expression are more fully realized in high-SES environments than in deprived ones.
So you're both right!
I renewed my paid subscription basically so that I could comment on how spot-on this post is. I especially appreciated the following:
"Conservatives fundamentally get human nature and are more in tune with it, but tend to indulge in their instincts and act like idiots. Liberals are thoughtful and polite but place a high priority on emotional safety and avoiding dangerous or uncomfortable situations . . . ."
This morning I was surprised to read that one factor in the decision to withdraw the nomination of E.J. Antoni is that he once mentioned the the hypothesis that male IQ scores are more variable than female IQ scores. As always in science, the hypothesis has been debated, but it is a serious hypothesis backed by data, and, in my opinion, probably correct. This looks like another example of some people not getting (male and female) human nature, if they are indeed rejecting Antoni for holding this view.
From what I can gather, that's the least of Antoni's problems.
Agreed. A candidate has to be pretty bad for Trump to withdraw his nomination. I'm just pissed about people dinging him for espousing a scientific claim that they did not like.