When people talk about the 'masculine' respect for reason, objectivity, and cool debate, what they're really thinking of is the culture of the enlightenment. This was indeed quite masculine, but so is religious fundamentalism and tribal warfare. It's only one mode of masculine discourse and most male dominated cultures don't share it.
Eh, that is a strange kind of debate. When feminists say men are not emotional, they usually add "except anger". And that is sort of true - that men are either happy or angry, like, sadness or grief is usually transformed into anger. For example when my mother died, my grief instantly morphed into "OK which doctor fucked it up, whom to sue" mode.
Yeah but it wasn’t the enlightenment because of the exclusion of women, it just happened at a time when women were excluded from fucking everything. And many male enlightenment thinkers were heavily influenced by the women around them that nobody would have published directly.
As with so many things, it depends on what one's definition of "masculine" is. Is it more manly to till the soil, or to rearrange the worldview of millions?
Also, Vance is out here defending those Republican group chats of those young people saying “I love Hitler” and saying it’s just young kids making dumb edgy jokes and we shouldn’t want a country where ‘kids making jokes’ can ruin their life.
But 2 weeks ago he was vouching for young people to lose their jobs if they joked about Charlie Kirk’s death and if you know anyone who has joked about his death, you should call them out and contact their employer (like a Karen btw, complete Karen behaviour despite Conservatards complaining about them). Very funny double standard there.
The sad and pathetic thing about Vance is how he defends anti-Indian racists when his own fucking wife and kids are Indian. I'm not sure this guy is an actual human.
Amusing that liberals criticize Vance for defending someone who makes a racial slur on Social Media, but are silent when Jay Jones a Democrat lawyer running for Attorney General in Virginia actually threatened an opponent and his family.
Hang on. Arif criticizes Vance for having a double standard and now you're criticizing him for not having a double standard. The guy can't win. I don't like the guy, but surely one of these must be an acceptable way to act.
I'm criticising him for not having a heightened sense of protection for his minority wife and children. Nothing to do with a double standard.
To understand Vance one must just understand that he will do whatever he thinks is necessary to fellatiate Trump and show he is the biggest MAGA of all. He'll even throw his own kids under the bus for Trump!
This is an incoherent criticism of Vance. A kid saying “I love Hitler” in the context of today’s hysteria from the Left who actually claim Trump is a modern day Hitler maybe nothing more than irony. These Republicans had a certain expectation of privacy regarding their group chat. My guess is that if we looked at the private conversations of Democrats we would see similar conversations that are equally repugnant.
If you cannot see the difference between this kind of banter between colleagues when there is some expectation of privacy and the very public displays of jubilation and hatred that we witnessed on Social Media after Kirk’s murder, you definitely have a problem with your moral compass.
I have not read the particulars regarding these group chats. However, my contention stands regarding this situation. If we were to have information regarding “group chats” between young Democrats we would find equally reprehensible commentary.
We can also classify the Trump and Elon feud as a “Catfight”. When conservatives used to cry about how if women got into power they’d too gossipy/bitchy and there’d be a ton of catfights, well Trump and Elon have behaved in every single way republicans accused future female politicians of behaving.
When he talks he actually, vividly, reminds me of my grandmother. They are both old New Yorkers, so I'm sure that contributes. But every bit of his style is the same as hers, it's uncanny.
He is, or was, a cross-dresser. I 100% remember reading about someone finding VHS footage of Trump and Giuliani cross-dressing for funsies together. This was when I was a kid in high school, so 20 years ago?
I saw the video of Guiliani cross dressing for comedic purposes, and Trump grabbing his fake boobs, but I don't think Trump ever cross-dressed. Believe me, I would certainly be entertained by the idea of Trump being a secret cross-dresser, but I just don't think it is true.
We’re literally seeing conservative men like Stephen Miller and JD Vance employ the exact same tactics they accused those ‘miserable single cat ladies’ of. Just last week JD Vance tried to sneakily get Destiny arrested and Mike Johnson is using the same gaslighty tactics on Dems about how they’re responsible for the government shutdown.
If cancel culture is really because of ‘feminisation’ then Republican men like Vance, Miller and Johnson seem to be really in touch with their feminine sides.
Vance is one of the most feminine men in the conservative movement, a closeted homosexual with high probability. Miller is more incel-coded, not necessarily feminine but sexless, even though he’s married. If there’s any truth to the Elon Musk cuckolding rumors that proves my point.
Stephen Miller is genuinely spooky character though, that slip up where he said ‘I have the power’ instead of Trump has it was really concerning.
I’ve never considered this because I’m not conspiratorial at all but the idea of Trump secretly being this senile old man that’s being a puppet by these much more twisted characters in Stephen Miller and Mike Johnson is almost a much scarier scenario for me.
This is also what Republicans accused the Biden admin of, with Biden being a puppet, it’s always projected all the way down with Republicans. Every accusation is projection.
Trump is being manipulated behind the scenes. From what I understand you need to personally flatter him as much as possible, and also avoid imitating his style or try to upstage him. Very much similar to some developing world autocrat. Miller probably knows how to flatter him, and probably tries to be the last person to talk to him since Trump also tends to favor that viewpoint.
Yeah, one of the biggest changes Trump has done since his first admin to his second is that he’s replaced every cabinet member with a sycophantic ass kisser that will suck up to him no matter what. He doesn’t want another Mike Pence who would actually defend Democracy before Trump.
You’re so on point with the flattering stuff too, forget this country you see it with Putin too. Anytime Putin flatters him, Trump starts defending Russia again, anytime Zelenskyy compliments Trump, he defends Ukraine again. He’s actually such a man-child.
At this point I’m convinced Hamas could have flattered Trump into becoming Pro-Palestinian and siding against Israel lmfao.
This is how it's always been. Trump positions himself as some kind of godlike figure who cares about the truth and will stand against everything harmful (the "Demonrats" obviously) to defend his base, when really he doesn't care about them at all. In his first term whenever he did something stupid his base would be like "he's just surrounded by bad people!" even though if Trump really was this strong truth seeking figure who would stop at nothing to accomplish what he told his base he would do, then wouldn't just fire them? I mean, he's the president, he has the ability to do that. But no he didn't. And then when he was running for his second term, he was like "yeah I learned and now I'm going to FIRE EVERYONE" but then he just surrounded himself with even worse people. Trump's biggest weakness is that he really doesn't care about anything but flattery. If you say nice things about you, he likes you, if you don't, he doesn't. Trump doesn't even care about his own base if they're constantly worshipping the ground he walks on. A few months ago he literally trashed his own base and called them his "former supporters" because they called him out on the Epstein thing. He has no principles, if someone flatters him, they get in.
This is not conspiratorial - it is widely known that presidents are mostly figureheads. Or most heads of states are. Reagan said his biggest surprise was he was elected President, gave an order and nothing happened. Boris Johnson in the UK as PM ended up suing the NHS that was theoretically working for him, because they refused to follow orders. Did Justin Trudeau ever look anything but a figurehead to you? Textbook empty suit and he does not even hide it much.
This is not conspiratorial - did you ever take democracy seriously? How would a real democracy handle COVID? Obviously it is an aristocratic system.
How democratic it looked like when Joe Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy and the power players ran Harris? Did you notice his wife wore a red dress at election day? Did you notice when Trump won he was beaming with happiness? He really hates the people who forced him to withdraw.
This is not conspiratorial much. This is just that democracy is a dog and pony show and the real power lies elsewhere.
You mean his beard? By the way have you seen the latest scuff on the right between Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley’s groyper son? The far right is increasingly made up of self-hating minorities who want to be white.
You’ve seen those memes comparing Gavin Newsome in high school to Vance? It’s kind of cruel to bring up the past like that but Vance clearly wasn’t that popular in high school.
I think "truth seeking" is masculine coded, but in the same way that "astrophysicist" is masculine coded. If someone is an astrophysicist then they are probably also male, but if you pick some random guy off the street and ask them to work for NASA or whatever, they are almost guaranteed to do a terrible job.
Ultimately, I don't think you can make truth seeking institutions better by consciously excluding women. In fact, the truth seeking ethos requires being open to arguments regardless of who they come from! However, practically speaking, I think the people who will rise to the top of these types of institutions will generally be male, and if that discomforts people enough that they begin practicing some form of affirmative action, I think that can lead to institutional rot.
I guess my point is that I agree with Hanania that masculine vs feminine is not a great way to frame the nature of institutional decay, but I also think rejuvenating these institutions will require skepticism of a lot of feminist rhetoric regarding bias/oppression/equality etc.
That's a great way to put it. The small percentage of people who are good truth seekers tend to be men, but I'm not sure the median man is any better than the median woman.
I think "man" and "masculine" are not equivalent terms. Truth seekers, sometimes called the "gray tribe", have a strangely gender-neutral, unsexed-unsexy feel to them. There aren't a great many Hulk Hogans in science for sure.
At the same time, college graduates, lawyers and doctors are more likely to be women, even though the average woman isn’t smart enough to be a doctor. Judges are supposed to be dispassionate truth seekers.
I was replying to the contention that of people committed to finding truth, most of them are men, since you find those people working in NASA, etc. I disagreed by pointing to a counter example. It’s very important to get things right in medicine, and most doctors are now women.
But isn't that because the educational system today is heavily tilted toward women? There are many more scholarships for girls, teachers grade boys more harshly than girls, boys are more likely to be expelled, etc.
No, that’s totally untrue. And girls have always done better in school, at least in America when most kids started getting some schooling. Girls simply didn’t have the expectation, or the option, to get a higher education.
As I've said before, America's teachers were mostly women by the beginning of the 20th century. Our schools did a pretty good job of teaching truth for a long time after that.
Likely because those women teachers were required to TEACH, rather than indoctrinate. They weren't the administrators of either the curricula, nor the social norms.
Helen isn't arguing in her article that the difference between feminized institutions and masculinized institutions is that the latter care more about truth. She's primarily arguing that feminized institutions have failed in surprisingly tight conjuction with the majority flip. She offers up some explanations, but none of them are as simplistic as you are saying here.
The one I find most resonant is that men are better at compartmentalization. They are better at containing their conflicts to their domains, and therefore are better at institutional conflict generally. The opposite behavior is commonly referred to as "borderline", which is *notably* gendered.
During the Great Awokening, especially its climax during the George Floyd Racial Reckoning, lots of center-left institutions that had ably represented masculine values of rationality over the generations, such as the New York Times, universities, tech companies, etc., went insane due to emotion overwhelming reason.
BPD was formerly considered a “mostly female” thing, but recent work in the field has found that BPD males were wrongly getting funneled toward a “sociopathy” diagnosis instead, and the true numbers for BPD may be closer to 50/50. It’s fiendishly hard to tell whether gender bias exists in the pathology itself, or in the process of diagnosing it, because our only tool for telling the difference is…biased human opinions.
I think the article takes a very short sweep of history though... the post-war era was a period of remarkable consensus and trust in US institutions for a number of reasons. I think there are plenty of criticisms you could make toward CBS in the '60s even though basically everybody watched and trusted it. There just wasn't any ability for criticism to get a broad reach.
And if you go back further than that, objective journalism is maybe 100 years old. Until the 1920s most news outlets were explicitly partisan and had fairly little regard for facts. For whatever your problems with the current medical establishment might be, evidence-based medicine is about 115 years old. For 5,000 years before that we still had doctors, they were just giving people poison. So it's the theory that men are more preternaturally attracted to objective facts is interesting considering men ran institutions with absolutely no empirical support for thousands of years.
>So it's the theory that men are more preternaturally attracted to objective facts
That's not the theory. That's the strawman that Hanania is advancing, but Helen isn't saying much more, at least in this article (it seems like RH is more familiar with this take than this article), than that the current wave of institutional failure seems awfully feminine.
If you just look at medicine she doesn’t even identify a failure she just says medicine has gotten more political… but a field becoming more high achieving is consistent with it being more political! The manhattan project was full of leftists and commies!
The Manhattan Project did contain communists, some of whom engaged in espionage on behalf of the USSR. But that's not the same as the project itself being so politicized that it undermines itself. Groves had control of the project and was not being cowed by his radical underlings.
Not one word said here addresses Andrews's basic point that women's tendency is to care more about relationships than about rules and that this is going to have an impact on institutions that get flooded with women. Not one word. This whole essay is a pathetic exercise in whataboutism. (And quite surprising to me, since I normally regard Richard as the best thing going in political commentary and anaylysis.)
Bringing up Donald Trump to "prove" that men aren't always into strictly following the rules makes about as much sense as would be bringing up Margaret Thatcher to "prove" that women don't always put their feelings first. Neither point needs proving. Both are beside the point of Andrews's essay.
Richard's own analogy shows the problem with his piece:
Person A: "Christian fanatacism can inspire terrorism. Look how some evangelicals murder abortion doctors."
Person B: "Wrong! You neglected to mention Islam!!!"
Helen Andrews presented a theory about Western Civilization and the rule of law. She then decided to do a complete hack job on one side of the political spectrum and ignored everything that contradicted her thesis for partisan reasons. Pointing this out isn’t whataboutism, and I in fact said she was right about some things. But the piece is still partisan hackery.
It seems to me any theory about rule of law regarding feminization/masculinization needs to contend with that men commit something like 80 to 90% of violent crime and the large majority of crime in general.
Hearing a story about a woman involved in a shooting during a rage road incident, or a young girl shooting up a school, or gang activity are unicorn events. And it can't just be explained away as women being physically weaker, because guns are an incredible equalizer and if that was the only thing then we would see *more* women shooting at men as it's more needed for them to use violence (where as men can just use physical strength against women and don't need a gun).
Instead, they opt out of it to begin with.Even across racial lines, black women commit less crime than any race of men.
If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world?
I think that statistic exists because women are less likely to be reported, arrested, and prosecuted than men. For instance, there are a multitude of studies showing that women commit at least as much domestic violence and sexual battery as men, yet their male victims rarely speak out.
Hmm. If your essay is more about Helen Andrews's specific piece than about "the 'feminization' talking point," maybe your title should reflect that.
I'm more interested in theories of culture than talking points. There do seem to be some basic, culture-independent differences between men and women that can have an important impact. This can't be wished away by saying Republicans are all into masculinity and they don't care about truth or the rule of law.
Helen: There's a profound but often overlooked trend that has been slowly undermining the serious institutions of American society over the last half century, with its pace accelerating over the last dozen years.
Richard: How come she's not talking about Trump? Huh? Huh??!!!
Given that the "male" GOP has a total stranglehold on all three branches of government, it would seem that the nightmare fantasy of gynocracy is just that.
So yeah. The omission of any mention of the most powerful man in the world speaks volumes.
There was just an election in 2024. There will be midterms in 2026, and another general election in 2028, at which point Trump will be Constitutionally ineligible. And the trends Helen discussed will still exist.
The trends that Helen discussed are real, and are certainly visible in certain areas (HR, publishing, academia). But "feminization" is certainly nowhere near a hegemony in American culture. The political sphere is male-dominated and will be for the foreseeable future, as will be be the CEOs of the Fortune 100. I can confidently predict that neither party will nominate a woman as a presidential candidate in 2028. The looming specter of gynocracy is itself a form of hysteria.
The trends Helen discussed are not only real, they are more durable than any election. Historical materialism is sensible even if Hegelianism isn't: the technologies which resulted in forager, farmer or industrial workforces are different from the ones we have now. Birth control has enabled women to pursue careers rather than motherhood indefinitely, and society has opened up for them, and not just in "certain areas" (even if they are more interested in some areas than others). The entirely male political systems of the past had to evolve under cultural group selection to produce ones as functional as those we have inherited https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/07/addendum-to-enormous-nutshell-competing-selectors/ With the decline of war (which feminization may well have contributed to), there is less such selection nowadays, but selection is necessary to produce functionality. Some of that still exists in the form of market competition, but many parts of society (including parts that regulate market competition) aren't subject to that. The problem of cultural drift is a large one which over a long enough timescale will doom our culture, and there isn't an obvious way to fix it https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-culture-posts
I think that Richard's point is that men and women both have a tendency to care more about relationships than rules. It just manifests differently. Women care more about making people get along than the truth, while men care more about asserting dominance and loyalty than the truth. Flooding an institution with women won't make it care less about the truth. It will make it care more about harmony than about dominance. It will make it passive aggressive instead of regular agressive.
Dueling is a historical practice that existed far longer than "the MAGAsphere". It took a long time to evolve institutions which enabled people to argue without killing each other, and some societies never evolved that. Women making up a large fraction of those institutions is a relatively recent phenomena and we haven't gone through a similar cultural selection process to ensure they remain functional, which is happening less reliably now that cultural group selection has been relaxed.
Is it really beside the point to note famous woman leaders -- of countries and 'institutions' -- who hardly support Andrews' essentialism? Or just inconvenient? The premises that women 'tend' to 'care more about relationships than about rules', and that they do so to the detriment of 'institutions' such as 'the law', are themselves tendentious. MAGA gals (including the ones now helping run the government) are loudly proclaiming their love of 'the rules', while perverting both law and the truth..just like MAGA guys. Are those ladies bucking 'the trend'?
Andrews is pointing out a supposed “problem” that has been in academia (in every single sphere, actually) since before women gained access. Men have always canceled each other over opinions, over ideas, over disputes; sometimes with words and sometimes with violence. There is no “feminization” problem, it’s just so many people thought women were vastly different from men that them displaying similar behaviors is a shock to the system.
Andrews' piece starts out well -- the thesis that wokeism is simply the outgrowth of the adoption of feminine values by institutions is absolutely valid.
But the more reasonable conclusion is that our political culture has bifurcated into female and male cultures, both of which are dysfunctional in different ways. Richard's point is that neither one of these gendered cultures holds any monopoly on truth, and indeed both have wandered far from truth-seeking as its own value. A properly functioning society (or political party) would pluralistically balance these sets of values. This is not a US-centric phenomenon, either. South Korea is a harbinger of things to come.
By focusing only on the coming nightmare of female supremacy -- a nightmare that's hard to see given the total lock on political control by the male GOP -- Andrews descends into political hackery. If a man had written her piece no one would have taken it seriously.
As I wrote above: "There was just an election in 2024. There will be midterms in 2026, and another general election in 2028, at which point Trump will be Constitutionally ineligible. And the trends Helen discussed will still exist."
People have been writing about feminization long before Andrews, and Tyler Cowen took them seriously enough to blog about them repeatedly. There are multiple pages of his posts at MR: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=%22feminization%22
I don't really believe this. If you look a bit outside the core Western civilization, and it does not have to be a very different culture, just, for example, a Mediterrean one, you see relationships matter for men more than rules, like, they will absolutely hire their nephews and old golfing friends. When I tried to be a salesman in my native Hungary, I was taught the most important part of the job is getting drunk with prospective customers. In fact, should I really believe it is not so for Anglos? What does "old boy's network" mean? Maybe Anglos are just better at hiding it.
I'm a lefty who has spent the last 10 years trying to convince my friends that conservativism isn't just a cover for racism/misogyny/exploitation/whatever. The last year in particular it's felt like parts of the right are determined to lean into all their most unhinged accusations.
I really think the conflict at this point isn't left vs right. It's more like people with any kind of commitment to liberal principles and intellectual integrity, vs various flavors of ideologues and grifters.
I think there is one main feminine archetype, but two very distinct masculine archetypes. There's the classic masculine everyone pictures- hits the gym, gets in fights, very competitive, high libido. But there's also the nerd masculine. Plays strategy video games, loves programming, values the literal truth, gets confused by social situations, can't get laid.
The woke left is feminine. The MAGA right is classic masculine. What we need more of in power is the nerd masculine.
I think Jungian archetypes are bullshit. As are your facile typologies. And I'd say we've had more than our fill of creepy 'nerd masculine' in the last few decade. You've heard of techbros? Musk? Zuckerberg? Theil? Andreasson?
The techbros seem to fall outside your neat categories though. Being a nerd who can't get laid vs a high libido gym bro obviously doesn't make you any more likely to care for the truth.
That's really not true. Those two 'archetypes' are not even remotely in opposition to each other. Plenty of men like sports and fitness and are very competitive and also love strategy games, value the truth and would rather speak it than be popular.
And the idea that the woke left version of feminine behaviour is all that exists just belies all of human history.
Not all that is feminine is woke. But almost all that is woke is feminine.
I picture it as three clusters of personality traits in a big multi-dimensional graph. Yes, there are points outside the clusters- there exist high IQ nerds who love getting in fist fights at biker bars in between DOTA 2 matches. But most people would fall in the clusters, and probably wouldn't deviate from their archetype on more than one or two traits.
It's just my vibe anyway, I don't have data to back this up
I can't exactly prove this, but I don't think partisanship is exactly the explanation here. It seems to be related to a criticism of the left, but more broadly strikes me as some sort of error of association.
Among all people, it is predominant for people to disregard truth and embrace feel-good nonsense, partisan hackery, .etc. The average man and woman both have weak epistemology.
However, for whatever reason (male variability?), among those who have the rare traits (however those come about) for genuine truth-seeking, men are disproportionately represented. As a result, if you look to people who are genuine truth-seeking, you will see a bunch of dudes.
Among this group there is a real and masculine-norm influenced culture, which is the predominant truth-seeking group.
The mistake here is conflating that group with masculine disposition more broadly, and painting them as representative of men, the vast majority of which are not in that group.
(My own belief here that I am shamelessly trying to support is that ideas and their validity are largely independent of individuals, and that good epistemology can be taught to anyone and can manifest in a myriad of ways.)
Truth seeking is gendered in both directions. Yes it's male-coded to think systematically, entertain uncomfortable conclusions, and stand up for what you believe. But truth seeking also means listening to other people's arguments, considering alternative points of view, and deferring to experts when appropriate - all female-coded.
With Manosphere types you get all the masculine truth seeking virtues. They're willing to follow their reasoning to extremely uncomfortable conclusions. But they're really bad at epistemic empathy, leading them to all sorts of wacky beliefs. Similarly, Tucker Carlson doesn't shy away from controversy but refuses to listen to scientists on questions where scientists clearly have a valuable perspective.
Andrews' take is bad, but so is this one. If anyone is interested in the actual structural analysis of this phenomenon, I have written about it (assuming you can bear the thought that a nobody with a small audience may have gotten more of this right than Hanania and Andrews).
Andrews performs a surface-level diagnosis and lacks knowledge of the non-academic/media world. Hanania is a man and cannot see that women in groups are psychologically unlikely to seek the truth because we are punished by other women for doing so. Conformity and lack of truth-seeking go hand in hand, and women are more conformist with each other than men.
You probably are already aware of the work IJ is doing in the area of economic liberty for folks on the “non-elite” side of the credentialing issue: onerous and unnecessary licensing requirements. These are often driven by “trade schools” that lobby legislators to enact “seat time” and other costly certification requirements. But just in case you’re not, here’s a link.
It is pretty clear to me that both women of the radical left and men of the radical right place self-interest over truth. Radical leftist women are responsible for the rise of social constructivist epistemology in academia, that is, the denial of objective reality. If they perceive facts as hurtful and oppressive, they will deny those facts by constructing an alternative fable that they believe advances their interests. For example, many leftist women believe that facts from evolutionary psychology support the oppressive patriarchy, so they make up different facts about the irrelevance of biology in human affairs. Richard has done an excellent job of documenting the denial of objective reality by Trump and MAGA (not that this was a difficult task). Who should we worry about the most? Richard makes a good case for worrying about the radical right. If the legal system does slide toward feminization, favoring mercy above justice, this might result in the non-conviction some people (probably mostly women) who are guilty. But MAGA ignoring both mercy and rule-of-law justice in their attempts to jail their political opponents is downright Soviet Union.
I really like where your headed with this Mr. Johnson but want to push back just a bit. Your observations about ineffective pedagogies hits especially close to home but (and here I might be accused of a bit of misogyny I suppose) aren’t the origins of almost all these wrong ideas in pedagogy the brain farts of truth-seeking men?
Also, I’m not sure I follow you on the evolutionary psychology bit. I thought the left-wing view was more likely to NOT explain undesirable male behavior in evolutionary terms and more likely to explain it as a purely cultural phenomenon. MEN, by the way, do exactly the same thing when a woman proves reluctant to have sex with a virtual stranger about whom she knows next to nothing AND has no physical or personality traits that might signal an ability to beget strong health children or be a good provider. We say (or said, decades ago) “it’s just 2000 years of patriarchy that’s holding you back; c’mon baby, have another drink and live a little.”
Civil pushback is always welcome, Paul, and I appreciate your feedback. You are absolutely correct in suggesting that men, not women, were the origin of the social constructivist epistemology that has been a blight on pedagogy. However, in my opinion, the original statements about the social construction of knowledge from sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann are actually cogent and useful. I wrote an article acknowledging their contribution, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201909/are-all-personality-descriptions-social-constructions . The problem as I see it is with later versions of this viewpoint, especially those forwarded by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who strongly influenced feminist epistemology. Feminists obsessed with the perception that the patriarchy uses language to exert power over women loved Foucault's idea that pronouncements of truth by men are simply efforts to control women. And feminists who desired to change traditional views of women loved Derrida's attack on binary constructs such as man/woman and his critique of natural categories. So, yes, men started it, but women have enthusiastically promoted the thinking of Foucault and Derrida in university curricula.
Concerning your second point, I see now that my choice of words and sentence structure was terrible, completely obscuring what I meant to say, which is actually the same thing that you said. What I meant to say is that leftist women do not believe what we in evolutionary psychology take as facts about the way biology affects the behavior of males and females. Their fear is that if biology underlies sex differences, then differences that they find undesirable (for example, the small number of women in politics, math, and engineering) will never change. So they invented "alternative facts" (actually, not facts at all) about sex differences being determined entirely by cultural conditioning, as you indicated. Their hope is that changing culture will give women more power over their lives. There are several ironies here. One is the use of the binary biology-vs-culture, which are not separate, opposing influences. Another is the false assumption that biology implies the impossibility of change whereas culture can be changed arbitrarily. Again, not true. Development and evolution indicate that biology entails change as well as stability, and the perpetuation of cultural practices shows just how difficult it can be to change society. I address this issue in an article I published, available at https://sites.psu.edu/drj5j/files/2023/07/behavsci-08-00057-1.pdf
I think an excessively feminine culture is bad and an excessively masculine culture is also bad. Men, at their extremes, celebrate cruelty, are overconfident about things that they know little about, and ruin social ecosystems by not upholding norms. An ideal culture would settle somewhere in the middle on the masculine to feminine spectrum, rather than trying to be extremely feminine or extremely masculine.
“Men, at their extremes, celebrate cruelty, are overconfident about things that they know little about, and ruin social ecosystems by not upholding norms.”
Without rejecting your observation—these are actually some of my biggest critiques of modern *womanhood*.
Human evils are gendered and genderless at the same time.
When people talk about the 'masculine' respect for reason, objectivity, and cool debate, what they're really thinking of is the culture of the enlightenment. This was indeed quite masculine, but so is religious fundamentalism and tribal warfare. It's only one mode of masculine discourse and most male dominated cultures don't share it.
Prisons are overflowing with emotional, hypermasculine men.
This is what I've always argued when people say "women are more emotional."
My argument is that men are the more emotional ones. This is why emotional restraint is so prized in males in modern societies.
This is because the danger from an overemotional male greatly exceeds the danger of an overemotional female.
An overemotional female cries and makes a scene. An overemotional male kills someone.
Eh, that is a strange kind of debate. When feminists say men are not emotional, they usually add "except anger". And that is sort of true - that men are either happy or angry, like, sadness or grief is usually transformed into anger. For example when my mother died, my grief instantly morphed into "OK which doctor fucked it up, whom to sue" mode.
This is facile -all females cry, very few men kill someone.
But also, very few men become overemotional.
Perhaps I should have said "an overemotional male punches someone..."
Correct
Yeah but it wasn’t the enlightenment because of the exclusion of women, it just happened at a time when women were excluded from fucking everything. And many male enlightenment thinkers were heavily influenced by the women around them that nobody would have published directly.
Enlightenment thinkers were not masculine compared to the average man of the time (a farmer or tradesmen), or in how they would be perceived today.
As with so many things, it depends on what one's definition of "masculine" is. Is it more manly to till the soil, or to rearrange the worldview of millions?
Also, Vance is out here defending those Republican group chats of those young people saying “I love Hitler” and saying it’s just young kids making dumb edgy jokes and we shouldn’t want a country where ‘kids making jokes’ can ruin their life.
But 2 weeks ago he was vouching for young people to lose their jobs if they joked about Charlie Kirk’s death and if you know anyone who has joked about his death, you should call them out and contact their employer (like a Karen btw, complete Karen behaviour despite Conservatards complaining about them). Very funny double standard there.
Vance is not particularly masculine, either, though he tries hard to imitate it
The sad and pathetic thing about Vance is how he defends anti-Indian racists when his own fucking wife and kids are Indian. I'm not sure this guy is an actual human.
Amusing that liberals criticize Vance for defending someone who makes a racial slur on Social Media, but are silent when Jay Jones a Democrat lawyer running for Attorney General in Virginia actually threatened an opponent and his family.
i am a liberal and jay jones should 100% drop out of the race even if that guarantees a republican win
Could that be because Vance has orders of magnitude more influence than a never-elected political candidate?
That “never elected political candidate” is running to be Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Hang on. Arif criticizes Vance for having a double standard and now you're criticizing him for not having a double standard. The guy can't win. I don't like the guy, but surely one of these must be an acceptable way to act.
I'm criticising him for not having a heightened sense of protection for his minority wife and children. Nothing to do with a double standard.
To understand Vance one must just understand that he will do whatever he thinks is necessary to fellatiate Trump and show he is the biggest MAGA of all. He'll even throw his own kids under the bus for Trump!
That is commitment.
This is an incoherent criticism of Vance. A kid saying “I love Hitler” in the context of today’s hysteria from the Left who actually claim Trump is a modern day Hitler maybe nothing more than irony. These Republicans had a certain expectation of privacy regarding their group chat. My guess is that if we looked at the private conversations of Democrats we would see similar conversations that are equally repugnant.
If you cannot see the difference between this kind of banter between colleagues when there is some expectation of privacy and the very public displays of jubilation and hatred that we witnessed on Social Media after Kirk’s murder, you definitely have a problem with your moral compass.
I don't think anyone here agrees with you.
Not surprising since this thread is dominated by Liberals.
Maybe go find a RW thread then?
Less idiocy to expose there.
You make a good point, but that's not what Vance said. "They're just kids" is an objectively stupid thing to say about a 30-year-old.
I have not read the particulars regarding these group chats. However, my contention stands regarding this situation. If we were to have information regarding “group chats” between young Democrats we would find equally reprehensible commentary.
He's just so emotional, that Vance.
>Of course, this isn’t even addressing the fact that there is a perspective from which you can classify Trump’s behavior as feminine, given
the fact that he routinely behaves like a sassy, bitchy gay man.
We can also classify the Trump and Elon feud as a “Catfight”. When conservatives used to cry about how if women got into power they’d too gossipy/bitchy and there’d be a ton of catfights, well Trump and Elon have behaved in every single way republicans accused future female politicians of behaving.
"The girls are fighting" was in fact a popular meme during their feud.
Whi h pretty much backs up the point being made, doesn't it?
Which point are you referring to?
That being bitchy isnt a great attribute.
There are people on the right who will eventually accuse Trump of acting like a stereotypical black man, once he starts to disappoint them.
There was an analysis of language used by different politicians, and Trump's resembled women more than most men:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/trump-feminine-speaking-style-214391/
When he talks he actually, vividly, reminds me of my grandmother. They are both old New Yorkers, so I'm sure that contributes. But every bit of his style is the same as hers, it's uncanny.
Cartoons Hate Her - a popular humor substacker - has often said that Trump may not be gay or a cross dresser, but in his heart he is a total Queen.
He is, or was, a cross-dresser. I 100% remember reading about someone finding VHS footage of Trump and Giuliani cross-dressing for funsies together. This was when I was a kid in high school, so 20 years ago?
I saw the video of Guiliani cross dressing for comedic purposes, and Trump grabbing his fake boobs, but I don't think Trump ever cross-dressed. Believe me, I would certainly be entertained by the idea of Trump being a secret cross-dresser, but I just don't think it is true.
But I could be wrong?
Hm. My memory could be faulty. Giuliani was def the target, as he was mayor at the time.
>humor
Very generous of you.
Roseanne Barr was all over this years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53A9iVGeP7M
“Feminine” is anything I don’t like and “masculine” is anything that I do. I am very smart and a truth seeker, you see.
#brave
We’re literally seeing conservative men like Stephen Miller and JD Vance employ the exact same tactics they accused those ‘miserable single cat ladies’ of. Just last week JD Vance tried to sneakily get Destiny arrested and Mike Johnson is using the same gaslighty tactics on Dems about how they’re responsible for the government shutdown.
If cancel culture is really because of ‘feminisation’ then Republican men like Vance, Miller and Johnson seem to be really in touch with their feminine sides.
Vance is one of the most feminine men in the conservative movement, a closeted homosexual with high probability. Miller is more incel-coded, not necessarily feminine but sexless, even though he’s married. If there’s any truth to the Elon Musk cuckolding rumors that proves my point.
Stephen Miller is genuinely spooky character though, that slip up where he said ‘I have the power’ instead of Trump has it was really concerning.
I’ve never considered this because I’m not conspiratorial at all but the idea of Trump secretly being this senile old man that’s being a puppet by these much more twisted characters in Stephen Miller and Mike Johnson is almost a much scarier scenario for me.
This is also what Republicans accused the Biden admin of, with Biden being a puppet, it’s always projected all the way down with Republicans. Every accusation is projection.
Trump is being manipulated behind the scenes. From what I understand you need to personally flatter him as much as possible, and also avoid imitating his style or try to upstage him. Very much similar to some developing world autocrat. Miller probably knows how to flatter him, and probably tries to be the last person to talk to him since Trump also tends to favor that viewpoint.
Yeah, one of the biggest changes Trump has done since his first admin to his second is that he’s replaced every cabinet member with a sycophantic ass kisser that will suck up to him no matter what. He doesn’t want another Mike Pence who would actually defend Democracy before Trump.
You’re so on point with the flattering stuff too, forget this country you see it with Putin too. Anytime Putin flatters him, Trump starts defending Russia again, anytime Zelenskyy compliments Trump, he defends Ukraine again. He’s actually such a man-child.
At this point I’m convinced Hamas could have flattered Trump into becoming Pro-Palestinian and siding against Israel lmfao.
This is how it's always been. Trump positions himself as some kind of godlike figure who cares about the truth and will stand against everything harmful (the "Demonrats" obviously) to defend his base, when really he doesn't care about them at all. In his first term whenever he did something stupid his base would be like "he's just surrounded by bad people!" even though if Trump really was this strong truth seeking figure who would stop at nothing to accomplish what he told his base he would do, then wouldn't just fire them? I mean, he's the president, he has the ability to do that. But no he didn't. And then when he was running for his second term, he was like "yeah I learned and now I'm going to FIRE EVERYONE" but then he just surrounded himself with even worse people. Trump's biggest weakness is that he really doesn't care about anything but flattery. If you say nice things about you, he likes you, if you don't, he doesn't. Trump doesn't even care about his own base if they're constantly worshipping the ground he walks on. A few months ago he literally trashed his own base and called them his "former supporters" because they called him out on the Epstein thing. He has no principles, if someone flatters him, they get in.
This is not conspiratorial - it is widely known that presidents are mostly figureheads. Or most heads of states are. Reagan said his biggest surprise was he was elected President, gave an order and nothing happened. Boris Johnson in the UK as PM ended up suing the NHS that was theoretically working for him, because they refused to follow orders. Did Justin Trudeau ever look anything but a figurehead to you? Textbook empty suit and he does not even hide it much.
This is not conspiratorial - did you ever take democracy seriously? How would a real democracy handle COVID? Obviously it is an aristocratic system.
How democratic it looked like when Joe Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy and the power players ran Harris? Did you notice his wife wore a red dress at election day? Did you notice when Trump won he was beaming with happiness? He really hates the people who forced him to withdraw.
This is not conspiratorial much. This is just that democracy is a dog and pony show and the real power lies elsewhere.
I’d honestly just love for JD Vance to ask his right wing and groyper audience what they think of his Indian Wife lmfao.
You mean his beard? By the way have you seen the latest scuff on the right between Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley’s groyper son? The far right is increasingly made up of self-hating minorities who want to be white.
See also, Mike Johnson. I think Trump sees them both as eunuchs
We’re resembling some degenerate late-stage monarchy with scheming court eunuchs (Vance, Miller, Mike Johnson).
I swear JD Vance looks like he's got eyeliner built into his face. The whole circus he did with Zelensky is pure bitchy, feminine behavior.
You’ve seen those memes comparing Gavin Newsome in high school to Vance? It’s kind of cruel to bring up the past like that but Vance clearly wasn’t that popular in high school.
I think "truth seeking" is masculine coded, but in the same way that "astrophysicist" is masculine coded. If someone is an astrophysicist then they are probably also male, but if you pick some random guy off the street and ask them to work for NASA or whatever, they are almost guaranteed to do a terrible job.
Ultimately, I don't think you can make truth seeking institutions better by consciously excluding women. In fact, the truth seeking ethos requires being open to arguments regardless of who they come from! However, practically speaking, I think the people who will rise to the top of these types of institutions will generally be male, and if that discomforts people enough that they begin practicing some form of affirmative action, I think that can lead to institutional rot.
I guess my point is that I agree with Hanania that masculine vs feminine is not a great way to frame the nature of institutional decay, but I also think rejuvenating these institutions will require skepticism of a lot of feminist rhetoric regarding bias/oppression/equality etc.
That's a great way to put it. The small percentage of people who are good truth seekers tend to be men, but I'm not sure the median man is any better than the median woman.
Got any data to back up that point? When I got my PhD most of the people in my class were women. And before you ask yes it was a hard science.
I think "man" and "masculine" are not equivalent terms. Truth seekers, sometimes called the "gray tribe", have a strangely gender-neutral, unsexed-unsexy feel to them. There aren't a great many Hulk Hogans in science for sure.
At the same time, college graduates, lawyers and doctors are more likely to be women, even though the average woman isn’t smart enough to be a doctor. Judges are supposed to be dispassionate truth seekers.
Shockingly the average man is also not smart enough to be a doctor.
That's highly debatable. There are many doctors of average IQ.
I was replying to the contention that of people committed to finding truth, most of them are men, since you find those people working in NASA, etc. I disagreed by pointing to a counter example. It’s very important to get things right in medicine, and most doctors are now women.
…because men have been discriminated against at every step of the process.
What an odd thing to say.
But isn't that because the educational system today is heavily tilted toward women? There are many more scholarships for girls, teachers grade boys more harshly than girls, boys are more likely to be expelled, etc.
No, that’s totally untrue. And girls have always done better in school, at least in America when most kids started getting some schooling. Girls simply didn’t have the expectation, or the option, to get a higher education.
As I've said before, America's teachers were mostly women by the beginning of the 20th century. Our schools did a pretty good job of teaching truth for a long time after that.
Likely because those women teachers were required to TEACH, rather than indoctrinate. They weren't the administrators of either the curricula, nor the social norms.
Helen isn't arguing in her article that the difference between feminized institutions and masculinized institutions is that the latter care more about truth. She's primarily arguing that feminized institutions have failed in surprisingly tight conjuction with the majority flip. She offers up some explanations, but none of them are as simplistic as you are saying here.
The one I find most resonant is that men are better at compartmentalization. They are better at containing their conflicts to their domains, and therefore are better at institutional conflict generally. The opposite behavior is commonly referred to as "borderline", which is *notably* gendered.
Right, well said.
During the Great Awokening, especially its climax during the George Floyd Racial Reckoning, lots of center-left institutions that had ably represented masculine values of rationality over the generations, such as the New York Times, universities, tech companies, etc., went insane due to emotion overwhelming reason.
BPD was formerly considered a “mostly female” thing, but recent work in the field has found that BPD males were wrongly getting funneled toward a “sociopathy” diagnosis instead, and the true numbers for BPD may be closer to 50/50. It’s fiendishly hard to tell whether gender bias exists in the pathology itself, or in the process of diagnosing it, because our only tool for telling the difference is…biased human opinions.
I think the article takes a very short sweep of history though... the post-war era was a period of remarkable consensus and trust in US institutions for a number of reasons. I think there are plenty of criticisms you could make toward CBS in the '60s even though basically everybody watched and trusted it. There just wasn't any ability for criticism to get a broad reach.
And if you go back further than that, objective journalism is maybe 100 years old. Until the 1920s most news outlets were explicitly partisan and had fairly little regard for facts. For whatever your problems with the current medical establishment might be, evidence-based medicine is about 115 years old. For 5,000 years before that we still had doctors, they were just giving people poison. So it's the theory that men are more preternaturally attracted to objective facts is interesting considering men ran institutions with absolutely no empirical support for thousands of years.
>So it's the theory that men are more preternaturally attracted to objective facts
That's not the theory. That's the strawman that Hanania is advancing, but Helen isn't saying much more, at least in this article (it seems like RH is more familiar with this take than this article), than that the current wave of institutional failure seems awfully feminine.
If you just look at medicine she doesn’t even identify a failure she just says medicine has gotten more political… but a field becoming more high achieving is consistent with it being more political! The manhattan project was full of leftists and commies!
The Manhattan Project did contain communists, some of whom engaged in espionage on behalf of the USSR. But that's not the same as the project itself being so politicized that it undermines itself. Groves had control of the project and was not being cowed by his radical underlings.
Not one word said here addresses Andrews's basic point that women's tendency is to care more about relationships than about rules and that this is going to have an impact on institutions that get flooded with women. Not one word. This whole essay is a pathetic exercise in whataboutism. (And quite surprising to me, since I normally regard Richard as the best thing going in political commentary and anaylysis.)
Bringing up Donald Trump to "prove" that men aren't always into strictly following the rules makes about as much sense as would be bringing up Margaret Thatcher to "prove" that women don't always put their feelings first. Neither point needs proving. Both are beside the point of Andrews's essay.
Richard's own analogy shows the problem with his piece:
Person A: "Christian fanatacism can inspire terrorism. Look how some evangelicals murder abortion doctors."
Person B: "Wrong! You neglected to mention Islam!!!"
Person A: "Are you retarded?"
Helen Andrews presented a theory about Western Civilization and the rule of law. She then decided to do a complete hack job on one side of the political spectrum and ignored everything that contradicted her thesis for partisan reasons. Pointing this out isn’t whataboutism, and I in fact said she was right about some things. But the piece is still partisan hackery.
It seems to me any theory about rule of law regarding feminization/masculinization needs to contend with that men commit something like 80 to 90% of violent crime and the large majority of crime in general.
Hearing a story about a woman involved in a shooting during a rage road incident, or a young girl shooting up a school, or gang activity are unicorn events. And it can't just be explained away as women being physically weaker, because guns are an incredible equalizer and if that was the only thing then we would see *more* women shooting at men as it's more needed for them to use violence (where as men can just use physical strength against women and don't need a gun).
Instead, they opt out of it to begin with.Even across racial lines, black women commit less crime than any race of men.
If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world?
Dear god....wtf are u on about here?
I think that statistic exists because women are less likely to be reported, arrested, and prosecuted than men. For instance, there are a multitude of studies showing that women commit at least as much domestic violence and sexual battery as men, yet their male victims rarely speak out.
The rule of law is not the same as whether lawbreakers exist. When lawbreakers are punished, then the rule still exists.
Hmm. If your essay is more about Helen Andrews's specific piece than about "the 'feminization' talking point," maybe your title should reflect that.
I'm more interested in theories of culture than talking points. There do seem to be some basic, culture-independent differences between men and women that can have an important impact. This can't be wished away by saying Republicans are all into masculinity and they don't care about truth or the rule of law.
Helen: There's a profound but often overlooked trend that has been slowly undermining the serious institutions of American society over the last half century, with its pace accelerating over the last dozen years.
Richard: How come she's not talking about Trump? Huh? Huh??!!!
Given that the "male" GOP has a total stranglehold on all three branches of government, it would seem that the nightmare fantasy of gynocracy is just that.
So yeah. The omission of any mention of the most powerful man in the world speaks volumes.
Although women are a majority of voters.
There was just an election in 2024. There will be midterms in 2026, and another general election in 2028, at which point Trump will be Constitutionally ineligible. And the trends Helen discussed will still exist.
The trends that Helen discussed are real, and are certainly visible in certain areas (HR, publishing, academia). But "feminization" is certainly nowhere near a hegemony in American culture. The political sphere is male-dominated and will be for the foreseeable future, as will be be the CEOs of the Fortune 100. I can confidently predict that neither party will nominate a woman as a presidential candidate in 2028. The looming specter of gynocracy is itself a form of hysteria.
"The political sphere is male-dominated"
Most voters are women, and have been for practically all of my 51 years.
The trends Helen discussed are not only real, they are more durable than any election. Historical materialism is sensible even if Hegelianism isn't: the technologies which resulted in forager, farmer or industrial workforces are different from the ones we have now. Birth control has enabled women to pursue careers rather than motherhood indefinitely, and society has opened up for them, and not just in "certain areas" (even if they are more interested in some areas than others). The entirely male political systems of the past had to evolve under cultural group selection to produce ones as functional as those we have inherited https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/07/addendum-to-enormous-nutshell-competing-selectors/ With the decline of war (which feminization may well have contributed to), there is less such selection nowadays, but selection is necessary to produce functionality. Some of that still exists in the form of market competition, but many parts of society (including parts that regulate market competition) aren't subject to that. The problem of cultural drift is a large one which over a long enough timescale will doom our culture, and there isn't an obvious way to fix it https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-culture-posts
"If you’re going to have a framework with broad explanatory power, you need to consider all the evidence that comes in"
President Trump is a pretty big piece of evidence!
I think that Richard's point is that men and women both have a tendency to care more about relationships than rules. It just manifests differently. Women care more about making people get along than the truth, while men care more about asserting dominance and loyalty than the truth. Flooding an institution with women won't make it care less about the truth. It will make it care more about harmony than about dominance. It will make it passive aggressive instead of regular agressive.
Institutions like academia already had restrictions on regular aggression. Scholars were not settling their disputes by killing each other.
I'm not talking about dueling to the death. I'm talking about the kind of in-your-face bullying and loyalty tests like one sees in the MAGAsphere.
Dueling is a historical practice that existed far longer than "the MAGAsphere". It took a long time to evolve institutions which enabled people to argue without killing each other, and some societies never evolved that. Women making up a large fraction of those institutions is a relatively recent phenomena and we haven't gone through a similar cultural selection process to ensure they remain functional, which is happening less reliably now that cultural group selection has been relaxed.
Is it really beside the point to note famous woman leaders -- of countries and 'institutions' -- who hardly support Andrews' essentialism? Or just inconvenient? The premises that women 'tend' to 'care more about relationships than about rules', and that they do so to the detriment of 'institutions' such as 'the law', are themselves tendentious. MAGA gals (including the ones now helping run the government) are loudly proclaiming their love of 'the rules', while perverting both law and the truth..just like MAGA guys. Are those ladies bucking 'the trend'?
Andrews is pointing out a supposed “problem” that has been in academia (in every single sphere, actually) since before women gained access. Men have always canceled each other over opinions, over ideas, over disputes; sometimes with words and sometimes with violence. There is no “feminization” problem, it’s just so many people thought women were vastly different from men that them displaying similar behaviors is a shock to the system.
Andrews' piece starts out well -- the thesis that wokeism is simply the outgrowth of the adoption of feminine values by institutions is absolutely valid.
But the more reasonable conclusion is that our political culture has bifurcated into female and male cultures, both of which are dysfunctional in different ways. Richard's point is that neither one of these gendered cultures holds any monopoly on truth, and indeed both have wandered far from truth-seeking as its own value. A properly functioning society (or political party) would pluralistically balance these sets of values. This is not a US-centric phenomenon, either. South Korea is a harbinger of things to come.
By focusing only on the coming nightmare of female supremacy -- a nightmare that's hard to see given the total lock on political control by the male GOP -- Andrews descends into political hackery. If a man had written her piece no one would have taken it seriously.
As I wrote above: "There was just an election in 2024. There will be midterms in 2026, and another general election in 2028, at which point Trump will be Constitutionally ineligible. And the trends Helen discussed will still exist."
People have been writing about feminization long before Andrews, and Tyler Cowen took them seriously enough to blog about them repeatedly. There are multiple pages of his posts at MR: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=%22feminization%22
I don't really believe this. If you look a bit outside the core Western civilization, and it does not have to be a very different culture, just, for example, a Mediterrean one, you see relationships matter for men more than rules, like, they will absolutely hire their nephews and old golfing friends. When I tried to be a salesman in my native Hungary, I was taught the most important part of the job is getting drunk with prospective customers. In fact, should I really believe it is not so for Anglos? What does "old boy's network" mean? Maybe Anglos are just better at hiding it.
Thank you!
I'm a lefty who has spent the last 10 years trying to convince my friends that conservativism isn't just a cover for racism/misogyny/exploitation/whatever. The last year in particular it's felt like parts of the right are determined to lean into all their most unhinged accusations.
I really think the conflict at this point isn't left vs right. It's more like people with any kind of commitment to liberal principles and intellectual integrity, vs various flavors of ideologues and grifters.
I’ve been saying it for years:
I think the fundamental conflict of the world isn’t left vs. right, woman vs. man, labor vs. capital, race vs. race, or any of those.
I think it’s “narcissists vs. everybody else”.
I think there is one main feminine archetype, but two very distinct masculine archetypes. There's the classic masculine everyone pictures- hits the gym, gets in fights, very competitive, high libido. But there's also the nerd masculine. Plays strategy video games, loves programming, values the literal truth, gets confused by social situations, can't get laid.
The woke left is feminine. The MAGA right is classic masculine. What we need more of in power is the nerd masculine.
I think Jungian archetypes are bullshit. As are your facile typologies. And I'd say we've had more than our fill of creepy 'nerd masculine' in the last few decade. You've heard of techbros? Musk? Zuckerberg? Theil? Andreasson?
You call the archetype bullshit, yet call techbros(basically the same thing) real
Because he’s a truth seeker.
The techbros seem to fall outside your neat categories though. Being a nerd who can't get laid vs a high libido gym bro obviously doesn't make you any more likely to care for the truth.
The traits cluster together. Where causation is coming from, I don't know, but they cluster.
BRC didn't make reference to Jungian theory. Not all archetypes are Jungian.
That's really not true. Those two 'archetypes' are not even remotely in opposition to each other. Plenty of men like sports and fitness and are very competitive and also love strategy games, value the truth and would rather speak it than be popular.
And the idea that the woke left version of feminine behaviour is all that exists just belies all of human history.
Not all that is feminine is woke. But almost all that is woke is feminine.
I picture it as three clusters of personality traits in a big multi-dimensional graph. Yes, there are points outside the clusters- there exist high IQ nerds who love getting in fist fights at biker bars in between DOTA 2 matches. But most people would fall in the clusters, and probably wouldn't deviate from their archetype on more than one or two traits.
It's just my vibe anyway, I don't have data to back this up
I can't exactly prove this, but I don't think partisanship is exactly the explanation here. It seems to be related to a criticism of the left, but more broadly strikes me as some sort of error of association.
Among all people, it is predominant for people to disregard truth and embrace feel-good nonsense, partisan hackery, .etc. The average man and woman both have weak epistemology.
However, for whatever reason (male variability?), among those who have the rare traits (however those come about) for genuine truth-seeking, men are disproportionately represented. As a result, if you look to people who are genuine truth-seeking, you will see a bunch of dudes.
Among this group there is a real and masculine-norm influenced culture, which is the predominant truth-seeking group.
The mistake here is conflating that group with masculine disposition more broadly, and painting them as representative of men, the vast majority of which are not in that group.
(My own belief here that I am shamelessly trying to support is that ideas and their validity are largely independent of individuals, and that good epistemology can be taught to anyone and can manifest in a myriad of ways.)
Truth seeking is gendered in both directions. Yes it's male-coded to think systematically, entertain uncomfortable conclusions, and stand up for what you believe. But truth seeking also means listening to other people's arguments, considering alternative points of view, and deferring to experts when appropriate - all female-coded.
With Manosphere types you get all the masculine truth seeking virtues. They're willing to follow their reasoning to extremely uncomfortable conclusions. But they're really bad at epistemic empathy, leading them to all sorts of wacky beliefs. Similarly, Tucker Carlson doesn't shy away from controversy but refuses to listen to scientists on questions where scientists clearly have a valuable perspective.
Andrews' take is bad, but so is this one. If anyone is interested in the actual structural analysis of this phenomenon, I have written about it (assuming you can bear the thought that a nobody with a small audience may have gotten more of this right than Hanania and Andrews).
Andrews performs a surface-level diagnosis and lacks knowledge of the non-academic/media world. Hanania is a man and cannot see that women in groups are psychologically unlikely to seek the truth because we are punished by other women for doing so. Conformity and lack of truth-seeking go hand in hand, and women are more conformist with each other than men.
https://www.radicallypragmatic.press/p/the-credential-cartel-how-the-professional?r=4ck1z
https://www.radicallypragmatic.press/p/womens-society-debate?r=4ck1z
https://www.radicallypragmatic.press/p/the-feminist-script-for-success-is?r=4ck1z
Thanks for the links Ms. Pandey. Reading you is always eye opening.
I appreciate this very much
Thank you for your comment and link Anuradha.
You probably are already aware of the work IJ is doing in the area of economic liberty for folks on the “non-elite” side of the credentialing issue: onerous and unnecessary licensing requirements. These are often driven by “trade schools” that lobby legislators to enact “seat time” and other costly certification requirements. But just in case you’re not, here’s a link.
https://ij.org/issues/economic-liberty/occupational-licensing/
It is pretty clear to me that both women of the radical left and men of the radical right place self-interest over truth. Radical leftist women are responsible for the rise of social constructivist epistemology in academia, that is, the denial of objective reality. If they perceive facts as hurtful and oppressive, they will deny those facts by constructing an alternative fable that they believe advances their interests. For example, many leftist women believe that facts from evolutionary psychology support the oppressive patriarchy, so they make up different facts about the irrelevance of biology in human affairs. Richard has done an excellent job of documenting the denial of objective reality by Trump and MAGA (not that this was a difficult task). Who should we worry about the most? Richard makes a good case for worrying about the radical right. If the legal system does slide toward feminization, favoring mercy above justice, this might result in the non-conviction some people (probably mostly women) who are guilty. But MAGA ignoring both mercy and rule-of-law justice in their attempts to jail their political opponents is downright Soviet Union.
I really like where your headed with this Mr. Johnson but want to push back just a bit. Your observations about ineffective pedagogies hits especially close to home but (and here I might be accused of a bit of misogyny I suppose) aren’t the origins of almost all these wrong ideas in pedagogy the brain farts of truth-seeking men?
Also, I’m not sure I follow you on the evolutionary psychology bit. I thought the left-wing view was more likely to NOT explain undesirable male behavior in evolutionary terms and more likely to explain it as a purely cultural phenomenon. MEN, by the way, do exactly the same thing when a woman proves reluctant to have sex with a virtual stranger about whom she knows next to nothing AND has no physical or personality traits that might signal an ability to beget strong health children or be a good provider. We say (or said, decades ago) “it’s just 2000 years of patriarchy that’s holding you back; c’mon baby, have another drink and live a little.”
Civil pushback is always welcome, Paul, and I appreciate your feedback. You are absolutely correct in suggesting that men, not women, were the origin of the social constructivist epistemology that has been a blight on pedagogy. However, in my opinion, the original statements about the social construction of knowledge from sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann are actually cogent and useful. I wrote an article acknowledging their contribution, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201909/are-all-personality-descriptions-social-constructions . The problem as I see it is with later versions of this viewpoint, especially those forwarded by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who strongly influenced feminist epistemology. Feminists obsessed with the perception that the patriarchy uses language to exert power over women loved Foucault's idea that pronouncements of truth by men are simply efforts to control women. And feminists who desired to change traditional views of women loved Derrida's attack on binary constructs such as man/woman and his critique of natural categories. So, yes, men started it, but women have enthusiastically promoted the thinking of Foucault and Derrida in university curricula.
Concerning your second point, I see now that my choice of words and sentence structure was terrible, completely obscuring what I meant to say, which is actually the same thing that you said. What I meant to say is that leftist women do not believe what we in evolutionary psychology take as facts about the way biology affects the behavior of males and females. Their fear is that if biology underlies sex differences, then differences that they find undesirable (for example, the small number of women in politics, math, and engineering) will never change. So they invented "alternative facts" (actually, not facts at all) about sex differences being determined entirely by cultural conditioning, as you indicated. Their hope is that changing culture will give women more power over their lives. There are several ironies here. One is the use of the binary biology-vs-culture, which are not separate, opposing influences. Another is the false assumption that biology implies the impossibility of change whereas culture can be changed arbitrarily. Again, not true. Development and evolution indicate that biology entails change as well as stability, and the perpetuation of cultural practices shows just how difficult it can be to change society. I address this issue in an article I published, available at https://sites.psu.edu/drj5j/files/2023/07/behavsci-08-00057-1.pdf
Not to mention that universities have gotten more competitive and rigorous since they admitted women- it’s dramatically harder to get into graduate school, or get a job as a professor, than it was a couple generations ago when the only folks allowed to compete were independently wealthy white men. https://open.substack.com/pub/darbysaxbe/p/are-universities-too-woke-to-exist?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
But the competitiveness could just be because more *people* are competing for those positions.
The job market for managers and above is similarly “more competitive” since they “admitted” women. I’ll read your link and be back …
It's definitely partly because there's a larger pool - but that's generally a good thing when it comes to rigor. Thanks in advance for reading!
More recently, college freshman have roughly the same average IQs as the rest of society, which was not previously the case:
https://bigthink.com/thinking/iq-score-average-college-students/
I think an excessively feminine culture is bad and an excessively masculine culture is also bad. Men, at their extremes, celebrate cruelty, are overconfident about things that they know little about, and ruin social ecosystems by not upholding norms. An ideal culture would settle somewhere in the middle on the masculine to feminine spectrum, rather than trying to be extremely feminine or extremely masculine.
“Men, at their extremes, celebrate cruelty, are overconfident about things that they know little about, and ruin social ecosystems by not upholding norms.”
Without rejecting your observation—these are actually some of my biggest critiques of modern *womanhood*.
Human evils are gendered and genderless at the same time.