If you read books and your friend listens to books and calls it reading, you’re going to have a superior set of cognitive habits that will get you further in life. There’s no study for this, but the logic would follow if you accept that reading is a more difficult activity than listening. None of the studies and arguments from Harvard and the like refute this argument.

I’m not talking about comprehension, so let’s get that out of the way. This is about the long-term effects and advantages of reading compared to largely passive intake of content via audio. I’m also not talking about whether you can write back what you heard or take a test on it; that is not the definition of intellectual ability, though the credentialed seem to think so.

To claim intellectual ability, you must be able to analyze and synthesize ideas and concepts, not merely absorb and regurgitate a narrative-driven book.

No doubt the fact that a woman (and Indian) is saying this will immediately piss several of you off. Be my guest.

Intellect has a definition, and without standards, it simply doesn’t exist. Maybe this is the true source of my rage about this particular topic — the people insisting the two acts are identical are implying that standards are immoral, and intellect isn’t tangible. Now, if your argument is that “everyone is differently smart”, then I have nothing for you. We’re at an impasse.

I’m not saying one should never listen to a book. But don’t call it reading. You are not reading. The act is distinct. Nor am I talking about the category of books that require following a story. I’m talking about books that center on ideas and abstract concepts.

The reaction is really about people feeling attacked by the implication that their habits are intellectually lazy, despite all the credentials they hold.

I am making an argument about behavior, not someone’s moral worth. Inevitably, I was called ableist and elitist several times by people who didn’t read carefully. If I were saying that people listening to books are morally inferior, then the charge would be warranted. If I had argued that truly cognitively disabled people who can’t read shouldn’t listen to books, then sure, I’d be ableist. But that’s a lazy charge that mostly white women who can read lobbed at me (minus one coconut-flavored Aakash) because it’s the only tool they have to shut down my argument.1

Those people are cosplaying intellectualism, wanting the disciplined identity without putting in the work. Discipline leads to substance, which is the foundation of a good life, which is yet another argument that I shouldn’t have to make. But the credentialed class, guardians of knowledge, hate being held to standards.

The most active people on Substack are likeliest to have degrees. Degree holders are likeliest to have time to read and, therefore, to have listened to the book for convenience while multitasking and commuting to their white-collar jobs.

These people could read the book and chose not to. Fine, listen to the book. But the two aren’t the same, and claiming otherwise is equating your laziness with my effort.

Perhaps the consternation underneath is that I’m making a judgment, and the credentialed find independent judgment so threatening that they outsource it to LLMs.

Intellectual laziness is justified by more intellectual laziness

I will first dismantle the various studies that were supposed to falsify my thesis. The most recent is from the Harvard Gazette. The load-bearing paragraphs:

Readers should reflect on their choices by focusing on the purpose of their reading, said Alessandra Seiter, community engagement librarian at the Harvard Kennedy School. Some might favor print text because it helps them absorb information better, and others might prefer audiobooks because they allow them to multitask and save time (emphasis mine).

There are clear practical implications, said Alex Hodges, director of the Monroe C. Gutman Library at the Graduate School of Education. Print texts offer readers the chance to highlight passages or write notes that might help them retain information better, Hodges said. Audiobooks, on the other hand, may impart a more relaxed experience.

Laura Sherriff, librarian for the Cabot Science, Fine Arts, and Lamont libraries, would like to remove the stigma around audiobooks. In her former life working at a bookstore, she saw kids starting out with “Harry Potter” audiobooks and coming back to buy the print books. “It was their gateway to reading,” she said.

They make my argument for me. Audiobooks allow one to multitask and save time, which can only mean that audiobooks require less attention and, therefore, are an inferior method for information absorption. The second passage admits audiobooks are a ‘more relaxed experience’, which can only imply that it’s easier than reading a book. Or, we need to argue about whether ‘relaxed’ means ‘less difficult.’ In that case, I have nothing for you either.

Finally, the line about Harry Potter suggests that audio can serve as a gateway to the more effortful activity of reading the actual book.

That Harvard Gazette article links to this NPR article, which centers on the claim that forty percent of Americans think listening doesn’t count as reading.

NEWELL: It’s older people over age 65, it’s men, and it’s those without a four-year degree that are more likely to say that listening to audiobooks isn’t a form of reading.

So they’re saying that the uncredentialed rubes who would have had to make time to read books are claiming their effort is superior to that of those who listen. And the addition of over 65 and men is the nail in the coffin of the argument — the person making the argument discredits it by the logic of credentialed white people.

There’s no data on this, but I bet there’s an ideological division, and that conservatives are likeliest to agree with me. But again, that would be used to discredit the argument without engaging it.

LIMBONG: All right, so that’s the polling, but what does the science say? Beth Rogowsky is a professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania who studies auditory and visual learning styles. In 2016, she co-authored a study of adults comparing comprehension rates between listening to an audiobook and reading on an e-reader, like a Kindle.

BETH ROGOWSKY: We found that there was no significant difference between reading a book using a Kindle or listening to a book or doing both - listening and reading simultaneously.

LIMBONG: In other words, participants retained pretty much the same amount of information whether they read a book or listened to it.

ROGOWSKY: Which is exciting news for people who join a book club but want to be able to fold laundry while they’re reading the book (emphasis mine).

Exciting news for those who want to socially justify taking shortcuts.

BUT THEN:

LIMBONG: There’s a big but here - the study was done using adults who knew how to read. Rogowsky’s done some further research looking at school-aged kids and learning styles and found that self-described auditory learners scored worse on comprehension rates across the board. That is, they did worse understanding and recalling information that they read and listened to (emphasis mine).

ROGOWSKY: That really leads you to believe that when you are learning to read, you really need to have the experience reading. When we tailor to a student’s learning style and we’re just giving them auditory formats, we are not reinforcing the reading skills that are so essential to becoming a proficient reader.

So, at the end of this conversation with Ari Shapiro, they’ve landed on the idea that children who can’t yet read need to wrestle with the book to comprehend it, and that listening yields inferior comprehension.

Now, let’s consider this study funded by fucking Audible on which Rogowsky, quoted above, is the first author.2 This is a press release with footnotes disguised as rigor to launder intellectual laziness.

No conflicts of interest, apparently.

This study has been cited 121 times in academic papers, and who knows how many times by people wanting desperately to believe that reading and listening are the same. No such comfort.

This ‘study’ tested narrative recall among 121 adults from NYC-area coffee shops with degrees (for real) about Unbroken, which is narrative non-fiction, not a book about ideas. Further, this is a confounding study because, as we saw above, there’s no evidence that the two activities are identical for children learning to read, which matters more than the cognitive shortcuts adults want validated.

From the method section:

This text was chosen because it was a fact-based text in the context of a story. The total content contained 3,184 words. Forty eight multiple-choice questions were designed to assess the participants’ recollection of the two aforementioned passages.

The rigor is laughable.

None of the above falsifies my argument, which stands until proven incorrect. No such longitudinal study exists. Until it does, this argument is valid.

If reading and listening produce the same mind, and therefore can be claimed as the same act, then words have no meaning.

That the more difficult activity leads to compounding advantage is accepted in every other area requiring demonstrable skill, yet denied in this one, because this argument is actually about social status claims, not reading.

Writing my way out

You know when you meet someone who’s wrestled with difficult texts. They speak at a different register, have a wider vocabulary, and say more interesting things.

Neil Postman describes the effort required to read a book in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that the medium of information intake determines 1) the possible truths communicable and 2) reshapes the mind of the consumer.

Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You are required…to remain more or less immobile ofr a fairly long time. […] The printing press makes rather stringent demands on our bodies as well as our minds. […] You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the leters on the page. […] …you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity (emphasis mine).3

The typographic mind that Postman describes enables the exercise of reason, which is why we have nice things.

The people angry at me are not blind, dyslexic, or otherwise disabled. They’re largely credentialed white people who don’t like someone with my profile saying she worked harder and got better results, because that invalidates their political framework.

That framework is why standards are eroding throughout society. Credentialed white people are made uneasy by Indian-Americans (or any person of color) beating them at their own game.4 They say they want social mobility, but they also know that competition is real and who’s winning.

I came from nothing. I had no books in my house, my parents didn’t speak English well enough to read to me, nor did they read at all, though they are literate. I come from a generationally poor, anti-intellectual family in which critical thinking was not merely discouraged, but punished.

My mother broke the spine of my first-edition copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire because she was angry that I was reading so much, socially withdrawn. The people of my mother’s ethnolinguistic group are a particularly loud type. I was quiet and shy, unacceptable.

I was either on AIM, doing Herculean amounts of schoolwork5, or reading Harry Potter fanfiction (I know).

Not only were the girls in my mother’s family discouraged from education, but my father didn’t graduate from high school. My mother, despite earning a degree in India, is among the least intellectual people in my extended family, which is saying something.

I am a loner. In childhood, this was a physical condition, in that I had no friends and was excluded by those I thought were actually friends. In adulthood, it’s a kind of metaphorical loneliness despite having friends.

Reading and writing weren’t just an escape from the chaos at home and loneliness at school. I knew that the way into the world from which my classmates largely came was to develop my intellect, and reading was the vehicle.

Through wide reading, I developed my writing ability, and now both practices give me compounding advantages in my career and in enabling conceptual syntheses for this work. I can take authors’ arguments further and fix shitty data because of the same core skill: pattern recognition honed across disciplines and subjects.

I wrote my way out. I’ve written before about how I see Alexander Hamilton as a kindred spirit in this, who wrote himself into history. He was an autodidact, constantly reading and writing. His personal behavior notwithstanding, I admire him for this reason. He pulled himself into the elite through sustained effort. He is what Postman called the typographic mind, forged in the golden age of literacy.

I didn’t read at all for a decade after graduate school, until I was thirty-two. My attention span was too addled by the phone, and it’s no coincidence that my depression, anxiety, and interpersonal skills were at their worst.

My skill acquisition was compounded only after I developed a reading habit for the first time as an adult. I couldn’t focus long enough to accomplish anything meaningful or push forward.

Now, I read equally difficult books as I did in graduate school, but I actually absorb them, because I’m not addicted to social media as I was then. My knowledge from voluntary, difficult reading is far wider than what I’d have developed by getting another credential, so my pool of available ideas is wider.

The people already born into the credentialed class grew up with books, with parents who read to them, who cared and listened, and with the assumption of college attendance. While my parents wanted me to become more educated than they were, they also didn’t know the first thing about navigating the world of magnet schools and college admissions.

I not only got to college through reading but also basically parented myself, which led to writing. The books provided solace to an otherwise depressed kid who knew that bootstrapping had to happen, and her intellect was the instrument.

For those wondering why I care so much about people claiming they’ve read a book when they haven’t, it’s because lying about the effort to accrue status is offensive to me. I worked harder by reading difficult books and even getting that now-meaningless advanced credential. And this is why I don’t lead with credentials in my writing — it’s another form of intellectual laziness, not to mention an implicit appeal to authority.

Only credentialed people have the luxury of criticizing the bootstrapping mentality more commonly found among the working class, because they already have what we want — a comfortable life. My typographic mind wasn’t a given. It was developed by getting lost in the library in pursuit of a better life.

White people love oral cultures

Finally, we address the vague objections about oral cultures. Those comments weren’t making a true argument; instead, they were gesturing toward cultures considered oppressed, with oral traditions, as some kind of falsification of my argument.

I believe the intention was to argue that I’m discounting cultures that transmitted knowledge orally by arguing that listening is cognitively inferior. The two are unrelated, but oral traditions and native cultures allow progressives to claim that I’m asserting a Western cultural bias with my argument for the written word over the spoken.

White people seem to positively fetishize the spoken word, even though the printing press democratized knowledge and made popular uprisings possible, like the American Revolution. I don’t talk a lot about white people these days, but the comments on the initial argument with these objections were all from white people, almost all women. There’s something there.

I come from a civilization with the longest unbroken oral tradition. All Indic texts were recited exclusively before English and German scholars translated the Sanskrit. They weren’t accessible to all; learning them required extraordinary cognitive effort, not only to memorize but also to recite correctly. To transmit a text in ancient Indic society, one had to not only be a male brahmin but also spend decades learning before one was qualified to transmit the knowledge.

Oral traditions are the opposite of the passive consumption enabled by audiobooks. They arguably require more effort than reading the text itself. The objections I got about oral cultures were imprecise, betraying a lack of knowledge.

The attention spans of knowledge consumers in these societies were far longer than ours today. The proliferation of audiobooks is related to the collapse in attention span caused by phones. The problem raised is that the credentialed still want an intellectual identity despite lacking the attention span to read. Hence, the consternation about audiobooks and the desperate need to prove they’re equivalent to reading.

I come from a culture built on oral transmission of knowledge, but I made something of myself because of the printing press. Anyone who ever got somewhere in life did it through effort, not shortcuts. No one became an expert on a topic by listening to podcasts and books while doing the dishes.

The credentialed class’s legitimacy rests on the monopoly over knowledge production, and yet they utterly disrespect the process by which knowledge is acquired. They launder corporate interests through studies funded by taxpayers. They also devalue their own product by claiming absurdities like the one I dismantled here.

This is a microcosmic example of why the credentialed class is facing a legitimacy crisis. In an effort to save what they control, they’ve devalued it by removing standards and deeming discipline oppressive. The same mechanism I’ve been writing about for years shows up in this manufactured debate about the hierarchy of effort: that convenience is desirable and that standards are oppressive because they create a hierarchy of intellect. Yet, the people they claim to care about want to preserve standards because exceeding them afforded a better life.

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Most people derive their identities from institutional or group membership — careers and social lives are nothing without them.

And that’s fine, though it makes identity contingent on continued membership. What happens when those sources of identity fall away? I’ve been figuring that out for probably the last five years.

Peter Turchin’s thesis of elite overproduction is appearing everywhere these days, but here’s what those people aren’t saying: the downwardly mobile elites this time will be skill-poor and credential-rich single women who have little recourse but to demand that society make up for their skill deficits.

This will be far worse than Occupy Wall Street, which Musa Al-Gharbi argued was an expression of elite frustration at people above, because there were far fewer positions to achieve their aspirations than there were people who wanted those jobs. This time, it will be women who feel entitled to the lifestyles they already have, and there’s a vast difference between those who expected a certain lifestyle without having experienced it and those who experienced and then lost it.

Thorstein Veblen also predicted this in his description of the consumption habits of elites, right below the aristocrats, in Theory of the Leisure Class. Professional elites need to signal their aspirations to join the aristocratic class through consumption. If they’re women, they need enough income to sustain their competition with other women of their class. There will be far fewer who can do so, compounding the sense of loss of status.

Merit doesn’t matter — I learned this, finally, at 38

The messages women get not only encourage them to remain trapped in institutions that will never reward them but also create the illusion that more credentials will help them advance. Credentials have never been more of a waste of time and money.

It has never been more important in the history of women’s labor participation for us to snap out of our deference to institutions.

They will never be meritorious, and they will extract competent women’s cognitive and emotional labor for as long as we let them.

I know several technical women who haven’t realized their potential due to structural biases that no DEI program can remedy or recognize. Nor can we see the true problem through the feminist frame for professional work.

The trend has been that women cluster in skill-poor areas, and tend to have placed their faith in credentials. I say this knowing women who are about to be middle-aged and have hit a career ceiling, who might think that credentials are the best way to ‘reskill’.

As for institutions, I have finally had to accept that merit will never matter and can work against me, especially when paired with insufficient social deference to the institution itself. Many women eventually hit a ceiling as I have.

My meltdown stemmed from the realization that I’m capable of so much more than I’ve been able to do.

The reason is twofold: my true skills are illegible to institutions because they can’t be measured or credentialed, and because the current technological moment calls precisely for those skills.

My judgment has never been more valuable, and never less socially desired. I’ve written before that in the age of AI, we’ve handed over our judgment faculties to machines in the moment they’re needed most. This is also a time when the competent woman with sound judgment is poised to reap disproportionate rewards, even as the culture tells us the opposite.

For the love of god, don’t go to business school

Unless there’s ample evidence that the credential is the only path into an area with sustained demand for that skill, this is a bad idea. Business school is definitely inadvisable. Certificates are also inadvisable. An example of an exception: a friend who has spent her career in the nonprofit space and has three kids is reskilling in medical physics, a field that requires her to earn a degree. But the area will sustain long-term demand, making the credential a defensible choice with potential ROI.

Does your path have ROI? That’s question one, obnoxious and corporate as it sounds.

Credentials don’t open doors as we think, and the current crisis of higher education should make us pause before signing up for another. Despite the ceiling, I’ve been gathering skills over the past decade that will help now that generalists are poised to gain disproportionately from labor market restructuring.

Placing this much stock in credentials made a modicum of sense when jobs were fully gated behind them (though they shouldn’t have been). Credentials now have diminishing returns because their requirement is indefensible. What is defensible: a demonstration of technical skills along with LLM tool fluency. This has basically become non-negotiable, and I know many women in adjacent fields who have successfully reskilled, like in product management and UX. But this isn’t a rule. I know one woman who took an AI engineering course, is working in a new area of AI dev, and turned her entire life around. I admire her greatly, and you should read ’s writing.

There are three types of women in this moment. Most don’t have analytical skills or aren’t exercising them. Those who do are finding the right outlets to make those skills apparent, often outside standard institutions, and taking risks. There are also those with analytical skills who haven’t found the correct path.

But women like me, who already have an analytical inclination and emotional intelligence,1 are even better poised than most men to exploit the current moment. The catch is that we also have to tolerate the risk of existing outside the institutions from which we once derived our identities.

We have started to see arguments that soft skills are even more important than they were, but that’s not the full story. Soft skills have always been important, but their value depends on what they’re paired with. Those who have gotten by on soft skills — areas disproportionately filled with women — no longer will, because symbolic capital can’t be the basis of career capital anymore. Those with applied analytical skills and people skills will thrive.

This is a weird fucking time.

Think of the women in marketing, for example — that area is highly concentrated with women, and many have in-demand skills because everything is advertising. But many more skate by on process-focused jobs, as I saw when I worked in marketing. In my experience in that area, there was a vanishingly small number of women who could use complex tools and reason about data. I’ve mentored some of these women to go further. I got here, ironically, by reasoning really fucking well about data without any formal training. It’s possible to do, and it’s just recognizing patterns.

Women in dual-income partnerships with men possessing skills will also be fine, even if they have to take a step down in their careers. This is the moment that will test the feminist conception of egalitarianism within a relationship. I suspect we will have far more women in dual-income households who are out of work or underemployed. Many of them will not have children to occupy them, creating more time to stew in resentment. Things will get far worse before they get better for upper-middle-class women as a whole.

Technical skills aren’t just coding languages.

Also, let’s stop fetishizing data.

The illegibility that traps many women in institutional misery was the same that I lived through these last three years since I entered consulting. Despite being specialized in orchestrating the movement of data through systems, I had avoided work involving query construction for its movement. I was incentivized and pressured to give it to cheaper developers because it would take me longer.

Turns out the opposite.

Though I’ve been miserable daily, I’ve never had as accomplished a year as the past twelve months. I nevertheless burned myself out thinking that if only I could achieve enough, I’d be accepted at work.

I can claim to be a data architect and a technical architect in the Salesforce world2. I am also very good at selling technical solutions despite internal turmoil, which has led to the most complex technical projects I’ve yet had to do, even as I worked through daily tears. There was something deeply satisfying in the work, which is how I know I’m meant to do it. It’s not as simple as corporations being evil or capitalism sucking. The work can still be satisfying.

The technical skill here isn’t SQL, but the ability to analyze data at all, knowing what shape it needs to be in versus what it is, and constructing the logic to get there.

Technical skills are logical skills, but we’ve been thinking of them merely as the acquisition of coding languages. But those languages follow a pattern that requires creating logical statements using that particular syntax. The language itself isn’t the skill, and in the AI age, we ought to evolve what we consider ‘technical skills’.

Data is also as biased as humans inferring patterns of behavior about groups — it reflects the stereotypes of what the people in the org think is valuable. We just like to pretend it’s neutral and an objective representation of reality because it’s derived from a table. The papers people think make an argument more legitimate are the same: humans are biased in what they collect as rows in the tables analyzed in those papers. Those biases are not only personal, but institutional, and create the fucked up data that organizations buy my labor to fix.

These last two months, I willed much shitty data into coherence under impossible conditions. This was a truly fucked up thing to have to do because of the lack of identifiers and primary keys. This was also the period when I walked manically around the park, talking to myself.

I hope more than ten people can understand that particular frustration. Businesses worship data, to make those “data-driven decisions”, which is an idiotic professional class expression of what in regular English would be an ‘informed decision’. But even that term implies that, otherwise, people would make uninformed decisions without spreadsheets, which is just silly.

During this period, however, I also realized that, as a woman in a technical role who doesn’t adhere to the social script assigned to me, I’m always going to struggle.3 It’s not the function that causes the friction, but my colleagues’ social experience of me. Ironically, my personality is what allows me to run a team, sell, and deliver the work. I enjoy finding diamonds in the rough. I have an absolute fetish for elegant systems and structures, and it’s why my writing is about patterns. The earliest pattern recognition skill I honed was about people.

Those abilities are responsible for where I am in life, and the sad thing is that institutions can’t see it in anyone, not just me. Because it’s illegible. What institutions can’t measure doesn’t exist.

Therefore, not only do people with strong abilities across domains get overlooked, but women, in particular, struggle to have their analytical abilities recognized.4 My ability to think in systems can’t be measured, so it goes unnoticed, and I intellectually suffocate.

Depression isn’t an identity, though when I was a feminist, I almost made it mine. And I see many women around me struggling with similar mental health issues, sometimes stemming from similar realizations to the above.

In such a time, regardless of sex, structurelessness is the enemy. If you are going through something similar, the pull to just wallow in it and disappear from people’s lives is strong. I’m reading and writing instead, and making a great effort to spend more time with women, especially those I’ve met recently. This is because female friendship offers women something that no man, partner, or friend can.

There’s an emotional closeness between women that only exists in that space, even if groups of women don’t accept me. I can’t withdraw, and I can’t succumb to depression-induced nihilism. On the one hand, I recognize that no one cares about me in the abstract, but on the other, people do. Those you invest time in who do the same for you — those people do care, even if I struggle to reach out to them in times like this.

Important subscriber updates

I’ll be using Substack exclusively as an emailing platform, and am going to fully disengage from the feedback loop of comments and notes. I’ve been grateful to grow as I have, in no small part because you discovered me through social media interactions, but now I need to ask for your help to reach further without relying on it.

I will also start publishing on Wednesdays in addition to Sundays starting next week. Also, thank you to those who have come to my recent livestreams.

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You may have noticed that my writing is highly concerned with female intrasexual competition. This might seem like a concern with feminism, but that ideology is orthogonal to the analytical object. Feminism is merely a cover for the behavior, thereby prohibiting discussion of the phenomenon altogether. People really have trouble believing that women compete at all, which is why the conflict is carried out like guerrilla warfare — it’s always deniable.

The topic and the fact of my writing at all are related, and I hadn’t realized that this essay was underneath them all.

I couldn’t be included or otherwise considered attractive in the world, because beauty is classed, and as I have written about at length, that was never available.

The strangest realization of all has been that men are more objective evaluators of beauty because their motivations are, in a sense, more honorable than those of women. This is because women compete with one another for status and attention, and male attention is a status currency. I argued this in a series on the male gaze:

1. The gaze is currency among women, both in person and online, but especially online

2. Women also bolster their status based on the status of who gives them attention, which is why accusations of malevolence accompany the event of a man evaluating a woman visually

3. The gaze is a reason given to police other women, basically calling them a pick-me.

Being the object of female sabotage throughout my life has made me highly sensitive to its operation, and the attribute of plausible deniability may even be at the root of my depression. When reality doesn’t align with people’s stated behaviors, or when they get away with being horrible, a foundational moral wound is reopened.

My mother got away with abuse, my grandmother with lifelong sexist treatment of the girls in the family, the girls who mocked me but pretended to be friends, and the women who destroyed my standing at multiple workplaces.

All of these have the same underlying cause — status competition among women.

This tendency is shown by how girls are more likely to gang up and socially punish girls who are more attractive or who display competence. This has a dual purpose: getting the girl to dampen her intellect to fly under the radar and to erode her self-esteem.

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I recently reread Troubled by , followed it with The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney, and finished with The Other Wes Moore by the current governor of Maryland, Wes Moore. I picked up Kearney to understand the data behind the moving personal narrative Henderson wrote, and Wes Moore provided a different, and incomplete, picture of what leads men down the wrong path.

My post on Troubled was one of my first attempts at public writing, but this time it is founded on structural analysis I’ve done on feminism, credentialism, and managerial capitalism, the trifecta of elite control and the source of the rigged system to which we are now reacting.

Wes Moore’s book is about the differential outcomes between himself and another Wes Moore, who ended up in prison for murder, while the author Moore climbed to the elite echelon. We have three authors with different levels of institutional membership, which colors the writing and conclusions as we would expect.

There was something in Troubled that stirred me. Perhaps it was that Henderson’s writing gave me permission to critique the elites he was indicting, as I had been ejected from precisely those spaces for insufficient deference to various luxury beliefs. It has been a formative book for me. We all have writers who influenced us, and he is one of my strongest.

Both Henderson and Kearney stopped short of naming women as agents in the story, though I think Kearney’s omission is far more consequential — she’s an economist wading into the thorny question of family structure and children’s outcomes, but never questions the choices leading there. This requires tip-toeing around elite orthodoxy in a way Henderson was not compelled to do, because he’s outside the mainstream academy and not beholden to the same pressures as Kearney. Henderson would understandably not indict feminization because it’s easy to dismiss a man as misogynistic.

I, however, have not had any such scruples as longtime readers know.

Incentives and tradeoffs reveal the eventual results of choices within any system

I am fully outside all these institutions, and I wade into this topic often because it’s a hidden dimension of many intractable social problems. I have said before that female agency cannot be located in women’s outcomes because of the moral prohibition on examining our individual choices, and these two excellent texts can be extended to do so. Further, Kearney is a woman, so she must not be seen blaming feminism or female-driven social norm changes for any negative outcome. This hampers her analysis such that she cannot actually name the luxury beliefs that led to broken families and wayward, miserable children.

This points to a larger problem within elite discourse — the studious ignorance of incentives and tradeoffs when considering any thorny social problem. All humans respond to incentives regardless of class, but the educated class person doesn’t consider this because we’d have to confront that we aren’t ‘enlightened’.

We imagine our education led us to act indifferently to incentives, unlike rats in an experiment. We also often cannot accept that every decision involves a trade-off, because it means acknowledging that one’s choices are naturally limited.

Modern society has duped us into thinking endless choice is liberation, such that tradeoffs don’t even enter our minds. astutely said that there is a god, and his name is ‘Tradeoff’, which has stuck in my mind, like Henderson’s luxury beliefs.

Kearney begins by examining the lion’s share of single-parent households — those led by a single mother. To even examine the outcomes of children raised by single mothers is radioactive among the educated class because the choices women make are beyond reproach.

It’s nigh-impossible to criticize any choice a woman makes because of the assumption of moral innocence and disempowerment. Thus, a choice with negative consequences is always excusable as the result of oppression. This is how feminism disempowers women by preaching empowerment, because we never have to really own our choices, and we always have downside protection.

In addition to the decoupling of marriage and children, marriage became a capstone after achieving stability rather than a vehicle for it, as it has historically been. This is another innovation of the countercultural period. As women delayed childbearing for education and careers, marriage became an achievement rather than a requirement.

This belief also trickled down to working-class women, who now see marriage as optional, even as the majority of college-educated women with children married first. Elites’ stated conceptions of marriage changed even as their behavior remained traditional, but the working class took these conceptions seriously and suffered for it. Tradition may be repulsive to the educated class, but the erosion of those norms has been devastating overall to everyone else.

To Kearney’s credit, in particular, are her chapters on the effect of absent fathers and the collapse in the working-class marriage market. We saw college-educated men rise in status, while society devalued working-class men and their occupations. This leads to fewer men in the marriage pool, a tragedy many writers trace to the culture of the elite, as in Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites.

Wes Moore and the refusal to draw conclusions threatening luxury beliefs

Wes Moore is the furthest inside elite institutions, which creates the incentive to protect them. At the time of writing, 2010, he was climbing and riding the Obama wave, wherein we thought racism was over. It reads like the triumph of the post-racial society we imagined back then. He barely mentions racism as a factor, which was emblematic of the times.

Moore’s story is striking because he refuses to draw any conclusions from the divergence between his life and the other Wes’s. The author Moore is an elite, a shining example of black bourgeois achievement that papers over the structural issues affecting the rest of the black population. I’ve long thought that ‘representation’ serves individual ambition while dressing up as popular advancement of a group. The group doesn’t benefit, but the narrative persists, and select people from minority groups are elevated to preserve the fiction that the system is meritocratic.

The author’s parents were Jamaican immigrants, while the imprisoned Wes was presumably not an immigrant. Culture matters, and a luxury belief dear to the educated is that the broader culture that shapes parents’ actions and beliefs is more responsible for outcomes than structural forces, or can overcome them. I, and plenty of other working-class South and East Asian children of immigrants, are examples, but we have to be explained away because our success is inconvenient. Hilariously enough, Henderson is presumed to have ‘Asian privilege’ of ‘white adjacency’ at Yale by…white kids. This has also happened to me.

The author Wes was sent to military school at the first signs of trouble. This is reminiscent of Henderson, though he realized that something had to change and entered the military as an adult. Boys clearly need structured environments early in life to not become forces of destruction, as Henderson also observes about this period of his life. Joyce Benenson’s research inWarriors and Worriers also supports the idea that boys cannot only be raised by mothers, as Moore and Henderson’s stories confirm. Boys try from an early age to get as far as possible from their mothers and other adult women, while girls generally do the opposite.

Without going too far into details about Moore for those unfamiliar, the arc is that Wes’s father died early, while Wes’s imprisoned father abandoned him. The successful Wes had an early intervention, while the other Wes’s mother ignored the signs of trouble until it was too late. One was raised in a culture in which premarital pregnancy is discouraged, while another saw it normalized. The throughline in the other Wes’s story is women not choosing husband material and getting pregnant as teenagers. This is the unsayable.

Henderson was disappointed by both men and women in his life, and it’s painful as a reader to see that two fathers abandoned him. His birth mother is the most striking part of his story, given how horrendous his early childhood was with her. This is a thorny aspect to explore, because she clearly was not ready or able to care for a child, like many women who have children with men who are bad husband material. The world, however, is better off for having him.

The incarcerated Wes Moore’s story shows the difficulty of emerging from a cycle of poverty. The author Wes can’t even pinpoint the discipline instilled by his mother as a causal factor in their divergent trajectories, which is wild. I will detail what I think is a main but unexamined cause of the cycle of poverty in the next installment — women’s choices that are irrational in the collective sense but seem rational in the moment to individuals.

Moore’s non-answer about the difference in outcomes between the two is difficult to sit with, and I suspect analysis of the mechanisms is absent because it would threaten the luxury beliefs that dominate his context. Moore was climbing in the world at the time of writing, and the book’s non-conclusion ensured no ruffling of feathers.

Conclusion: male status collapse and feminization

Liberal democratic societies did something revolutionary, usually unacknowledged, in giving ordinary men a path to dignity and even prosperity. Low-status men have historically been treated as expendable by governments and monarchs, and the broad working class could not aspire to a comfortable life. Social mobility is a drastic innovation possible only in a liberal democracy, though Christopher Lasch has argued that it was a salve for the masses, allowing them to continue trusting a system that was never democratic. That gives me pause, though I benefited from that system.

Mid-twentieth-century America was stable in no small part because the majority of men had a path to flourishing, and the Black middle class expanded in the same period despite persistent segregation. We can see today that the instability of men as a class and the scant paths to social status have had strong political consequences. This collapse of status for men means fewer marriageable ones, leading many women to choose the fathers of their children less carefully than they otherwise might.

This is particularly true of educated women because we fashion ourselves as maximally liberated, so that constraints on our choices feel like oppression. I was also once unable to accept that my decisions and beliefs might have had negative consequences I didn’t foresee.

Accepting that my choices are constrained and seeing the incentives within a system has been a true liberation for me. The story of collapsing marriage rates is partially about our ignorance of incentives and tradeoffs, and especially the fact that women respond to perverse incentives with questionable choices, like men also might. We just can’t talk about it.

I always knew college was the way out of chaos. Culture and norms matter as much as the feminist and professional class frame requires denial (and here, I mean feminism as the source ideology for college-educated people).

I said long before Helen Andrews that feminist theory is the intellectual fountainhead of what we call woke beliefs, that elite leftist culture has feminized institutions, and that women are the primary drivers of this process. The conversation about feminization consistently leaves class out of the analysis, and this is intentional. Compact cannot confront its professional-managerial-class readers with a mirror.

Henderson’s memoir, paired with Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind and The Righteous Mind, led me to what seemed obvious: that professional-class liberal women, in particular, have a disempowering set of beliefs that have fomented within all the culture-creating institutions. I’ve written some version of this for two years because I suppose the gender wars are actually Hindu. Irony of ironies: I’ve used mostly male authors to reach conclusions about feminization, and none of them went there explicitly, which is one reason the wars remain. Men are structurally unable to comment.

But, this can be taken further: they’re Hindu not only because they don’t die, but because neither side has learned the requisite lessons. The culture cannot change because of incentives and tradeoffs, and so I find myself here again. Unable to let go. Maybe I haven’t learned the lessons either, but my writerly self was born out of the ashes of a woman who had swallowed the scripts of disempowerment.

Henderson’s narrative about his time at Yale seemed to imply that women are the true source of luxury beliefs through his examples — the Yale Halloween costume debacle, for example — but I’ve noticed that he generally avoids feminism as a subject. This makes sense for his position. He has analyzed female intra-sexual competition much more frequently in the past year, which I have appreciated. That’s why I write — I am both more insulated when I say it, but also an easier target for women who would police women like me stepping out of the feminist consensus. However, I’ve been policed for the past two years and thrived. A different life bolstered by more empowering beliefs is possible, and it doesn’t emerge from modern feminism.

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I’m at a dinner party (because I’m at that age) and someone brings up the Israeli-Palestinian war, or Iran, or Trump, or immigration, and I feel the air shift. Do they expect me to have an opinion? Do I even know enough to have one? What’s the correct one that will signal that I’m with the group? Shit, have I read an article on this? Which is the correct name to drop for authority? Everyone does this calculation.

I don’t blame anyone for going through that calculation before speaking. You are implicitly expected to affirm the group consensus, even if you don’t privately believe it. If the room is majority women, the stakes suddenly become even higher.

The dominant position among millennials, at least, is that we should consume the news because we’re all expected to have an opinion on every topic. Culture and social expectations exist amorphously outside ourselves — and implicitly, because people expect an opinion, you must have one.

Reading the news is deemed a requirement to be ‘informed’ and ‘educated.’ I live in Austin, surrounded mostly by people who think this. It is, for all its progressive packaging, a startlingly conservative position.

I’ve asked people why they bother reading the news. The answer is always some variant of “it’s important to be informed and educated about issues in the world that affect us.”

I don’t consume the news in any form. The charge that I face from liberals in particular is that it’s ‘privileged’ and ‘elitist’ to not care about the news, because it indicates you’re safe enough that it doesn’t affect you.

This is the actual position underneath: it is morally unacceptable for a person to choose mental quiet and not consume what is essentially entertainment in the service of signaling the correct opinions socially.

What this position doesn’t consider: the people who are most affected materially by the contents of the ‘news’ don’t have the time or space to consume it, because they’re too busy surviving.

Even if those affected were attentive, not one of us could do anything. So why widen one’s field of concern to the entire world and become paralyzed? This imperative to ‘be informed’ is actually a call to emotionally overload yourself, and implicitly requires a person to consume the output of advertising platforms.

I know from experience that voicing a dissenting opinion during what people feel is a perpetual emergency invites only coldness. One creates distance only by engaging in an argument.

The people claiming that everyone expects you to have an opinion overlook that you must also have the morally correct opinion that conforms to the group’s. Given that these sorts of conversations happen at social gatherings, it follows that no one’s trying to have a debate (except maybe me, and that’s why I’m not often invited to parties).1

I was part of a leftist fringe that not only controls the Democratic party’s direction but also was behind much of the moral shaming that dominated the 2010s over problematic opinions. I was among those doing the shaming because it was an easy way to externalize the shame I felt inside over many things: my mental health, heavy internet use, and my lack of actual capital.2

Being on the online left was the apotheosis of social performance, my era of conformity in exchange for belonging. I thought we were constructing unique identities on an advertising platform. And this fringe is actually visible out and about in Austin, which has attracted the most leftist people in the region due to its liberal reputation.

For those lacking material capital, dissenting opinions are far more socially costly. In an era of overproduced elites, rectitude3 is essential to accruing status, especially for credentialed women. We (including me) followed the script millennial feminism handed us, and many of us are deeply unhappy for doing so.

I suspect, and life has borne out, that women in particular hold ourselves to these expectations of having opinions not to get at the truth, but to signal social alignment with the correct positions that confer the most moral capital, that we might turn into tangible capital.

Regardless of sex, however, in practice, people don’t actually express dissenting opinions even when asked. The only acceptable opinion must fall within the boundaries set by the group, even if no conversation has occurred about what’s acceptable.

I didn’t learn to examine my bad choices until I hit the bottom and worked my way back up, choosing to conserve my attention and focus. Many of us feel unable to focus for long enough to do something difficult, though I know many want to. It’s a constant nag for a non-zero amount of you, and for me, always, even now.

I won’t lie, opting out of this performance of intellect is costly.4 I’m only writing this because I paid for it.5 One thing we don’t discuss enough is tradeoffs — they’re annoyingly present, always. But the position that opting out of news consumption is elitist hides an implicit classed assumption: that educated people ‘knowing’ about the world and its ills means we can save it. Yet, most of us don’t have a single friend without a degree.

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When a person asserts a conclusion that hasn’t been institutionally stamped with a study, the easiest, most pedestrian epistemic move is to say, ‘that’s just anecdotal. This is intellectual laziness coded as sophistication, and is one of the easiest straw man arguments.

Furthermore, intellectual authority asserted by a woman is read as a status threat to both men and women of any political persuasion. Feminists don’t actually address this — everything other than this, because asserting that intellectually dominant women exist would be to admit that there is a hierarchy of intelligence. And women’s society requires the pretense that we’re all the same, equally smart, equally beautiful.

So men unwittingly or knowingly perpetuate this paradigm because they, too, feel a status threat, and because men learn the same things about women’s social roles as I did. Women are criticized for tone, certitude in claims, and the assertion of intellectual independence, not their arguments.

A woman is primarily evaluated socially, even if she’s doing intellectual work.

Last week, I argued that judgment has been socially devalued at the very moment it is most needed, as LLMs complete the process of cognitive atrophy that the educated class has brought upon itself.

They’ve done so by socially punishing anyone daring to assert a principle without institutional approval; presumably, they require at least five citations to believe you. Nothing can be known without a study, and everything is anecdotal until a controlled experiment validates it.

Cosmetic procedures are for women to compete with women, not for men. Makeup is also largely for the same purpose. Nails, shoe collections, elaborate clothes, frozen muscles in the face: these are claimed as requirements to attract men, but they’re actually for intrasexual competition among women. Women judge each other’s appearances more harshly than men.

How do I know? 38 years of living in which I refused to do these things, and the marketplace, as it were, rewarded me for it. It truly is glorious to win by not actually trying — they mocked me relentlessly when I was younger so the satisfaction of having better skin is strong. And no, “natural makeup” also isn’t required. It’s a thing because the beauty industrial complex wants our money. And then we wonder why we have less money than men.

And so Ethan the Fake Hippie makes my point better than I could have.

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I began this series of arguments with the assertion that listening to a book and reading are distinct acts that shouldn’t be conflated, and that conflating them is a laundering of prestige. The effort spent reading is the point. It matters not whether your recall is the same; your engagement with the ideas will be of lesser quality because the audio medium nearly eliminates friction. From this, we move to the structural mechanism that leads people to claim that there is no difference in the effect of two distinct methods of information intake. This condition also explains phenomena such as the attractiveness of the Blank Slate theory in psychology and why you can’t tell your friends they might want to change course for a better life.

The professional-knowledge-managerial class has decided effortless existence is the good life, leaving no room to make it meaningful — meaning requires effort to cultivate. And to seed one’s garden with the correct ideas requires discernment, or judgment. I prefer to use the latter term precisely because it’s loaded (the PMC loves its euphemisms that lessen the weight of — what else? — judgment).

However, the professional-knowledge class has made judgment socially radioactive. This is a structural condition born of several factors, chief among which is the moralization of observation and pattern recognition.

Observation of behavioral patterns, in particular, forms the basis of our judgment about people and our social context. These are core human faculties on which reasoning is based — the ability to extract generalizations from seemingly unrelated phenomena and to build mental models that can be updated with experience. This means human pattern recognition ability is crucial to designing a good life, which is the accumulated result of small decisions with compounding effects.

Patterns are how we understand the world, yet seeing them is disallowed

Given unfamiliar situations daily, we use prior experience to infer the answer even if we haven’t encountered that exact problem. This is a practice of inductive reasoning. We will never encounter identical social situations, but discerning patterns of behavior is crucial for social survival in unfamiliar contexts. This is judgment — facing incomplete information but acting anyway.

Patterns we see with our own eyes are more descriptive of reality than an institutionally blessed study, and should be the basis of our judgments. We will never have all the data, and that’s why our brains evolved to make decisions without all the evidence. Yet, this process is moralized by the professional class such that people have stopped trusting their own reasoning faculties.

We are willing to judge a situation based on the probability of a given result, but we don’t see it that way consciously. We do this daily, multiple times. Yet, in practice at work and among ourselves, we think exercising judgment is potentially harmful and biased. We judge probabilities using heuristics, and some lead to cognitive biases. But we give people a pass on the availability bias and several others, just not their judgment about behavior.

The concept of bias refers to factors that appear irrelevant to the merit of the choices. This is the clinical definition, which has ballooned to include the observation of group-level behaviors. First, stereotypes have been largely proven true at the population level, which people in this class don’t generally know and wouldn’t accept.1 The problem arises when population-level statistics determine how one treats an individual in that group, even though the brain has evolved to update mental models in response to new information. We just don’t trust ourselves to actually do so, and especially not the ‘uneducated’, because the danger of bias is located in a lack of credentials.

We are biased some of the time, but that doesn’t mean the actions resulting from the bias are necessarily irrational. What if they’re self-protective and discerning? No one would call a woman problematic for assuming a physical threat when walking alone at night, for example. Bias is generally fine for people in protected groups, just not when they’re unflattering to those groups.

The professional class is obsessed with eliminating cognitive biases — they see humans both as blank slates and as fundamentally prone to bias.2 We would rather strip judgment from humans and assign it to LLMs, which we imagine we can control bias within.

Judgment was already eroded by social media because it requires people to step outside their emotions and assess the situation with reason. With the obsession over eliminating one kind of bias, the arbitrary judgment of someone based on race or sex stereotypes, they’ve introduced another bias - one against those who exercise judgment without a concern for its social implications. Truth is often socially inconvenient.

If pattern recognition is moralized, judgment becomes philosophically impossible. And without judgment, there is no human agency.

Judgment in institutions & the consequences of moralizing it

Individual judgment has never been more valuable in institutions, yet never less socially valued. We moralize human judgment and outsource it to LLMs, which cannot judge or make truth claims. This is entirely the opposite of how we should comport ourselves. We’re so afraid of human bias that we trust a model trained on text about behavior that’s actually downstream of the experience, making the text only as good as the producer’s interpretation of others.

A researcher is driven by incentives and trade-offs no differently from a layperson, meaning a study of behavior is no more trustworthy than a human gathering data on that phenomenon, because we can’t know what trade-offs were made or who funded the research.

A model created on vast amounts of human-generated text downstream of human observation cannot be more correct about how people behave than a human. Therefore, an attentive person without credentials or institutional incentives may be observing reality more accurately than a credentialed person. This is an epistemic position about the process of knowledge production, and the demand for citations in such cases illustrates the problem I diagnose.

Academia and related knowledge-producing bodies claim a monopoly on expertise, thus on judgment. At the same time, activism has become the chief concern of much if not most scholarship outside the hard sciences. This simultaneous claim of a monopoly on judgment and its evacuation in the name of progressivism becomes dangerous in institutions that produce knowledge and, therefore, make truth claims.

The people in these institutions actually resist exercising judgment – look at any academic paper or book, and claims will be buried in hedging to ensure none is stated strongly enough to invite falsification. This is applicable to the social sciences and even to biology.

Gender ideology is only the most recent example of this. We were told for a decade plus that gender was both mutable and immutable, depending on the situation. The enduring social function of the Blank Slate theory, which dominates the professional class’s understanding of behavior, has no empirical backing, yet abandoning that framework, even among academics, would invite sanction from the institution and from students who don’t want to hear the uncomfortable but true.

The demand for high-fidelity truth is the death of reasoning

The PMC has come to require high-fidelity truth rather than provisional conclusions as the basis for reasoning and discernment. This requirement stops truth-seeking in its tracks because no one can evaluate every possibility or member of the group before concluding x.

For example, I was standing in line at some conference with a bunch of male engineers, including one from Google.3 They were waxing poetic about how, through the Objectives & Key Results framework, YouTube increased users’ total watch time, as though this were an impressive feat rather than a depressing statistic.4

I chimed in, saying that what we choose to measure as corporate workers often has adverse social effects – the increase in YouTube watch time has had negative effects on society because consuming short videos fragments attention. They instead questioned how I could know what’s bad for society, collapsing judgment into relativism. They have forbidden intellectual independence because they have moralized pattern recognition and, therefore, judgment. The Google engineer was affronted.

Therefore, judgment becomes cruel unless based on high-fidelity truth, which is unreachable because we cannot know about every instance of a phenomenon. This means our muscle atrophies. According to the PMC, if a judgment is based on anything other than high-fidelity truth, it is harmful. Thus, judgment can never be exercised for the risk of appearing biased.

Judgment invites accountability

We’ve collectively chosen comfort over growth, so moralized judgment requires creating or naming a hierarchy of ideas. Some have better life outcomes than others because of their choices, and we all know this. We also know that openly saying some actions lead to worse outcomes is deemed socially cruel, so we don’t. People remain small because social feedback is cut off.

Judgment means accountability for how your life turned out, so perhaps when a therapist told me not to judge myself, she wasn’t helping me see how to solve the problem. Accountability becomes impossible when judgment is moralized; if you can’t change course based on bad outcomes, growth is impossible. Growth comes when we see that x is a better way of living than y. You have to, frankly, judge your own behavior to change course.

For example, I’ve written that the feminist script for success emphasizes compliance at the expense of cultivating rare and valuable skills. Time has proven me correct, because LLM-driven layoffs have disproportionately affected women concentrated in easily automated functions.5 This is a result of career choices women tend to make, rather than targeting them, but the outcome is identical. Women’s judgment, in particular, has been moralized away by other women to keep us collectively small, so no one may rise above any other, a comfortable mediocrity.

Judgment also implies that some see more clearly than others, which is often interpreted as a status threat because it suggests that the person deems everyone else morally inferior. But without judgment, responsibility is diffuse, and nothing is built because people are too afraid of the social cost.

The outsourcing of judgment

LLMs are consensus-production machines — they hide the exercise of human agency, and then prevent it.

The PMC wants to outlaw thinking and hand it over to a pattern-generation machine, which they seem to think is a pattern-recognition-and-judgment machine. That we don’t know what LLMs were trained on is a feature. Think about how an LLM talks to you. It tries to soften and hedge everything the moment you get too close to certitude, especially if that thing is socially dangerous to acknowledge and requires pattern processing about human behavior.

Institutions thus devalue judgment through LLMs, even as they rely on human judgment to evaluate LLM output. The problem is, judgment can’t be measured. It prevents disasters, so we don’t reward people for it, even if they’re responsible for a better outcome through their judgment rather than their credentials.

If agency requires the exercise of judgment, and we’ve made its exercise socially risky, then we’ve necessarily let our agency erode. Life is now more about feeling than reasoning, even though humans have built civilization through reason. Emotion enriches life, but doesn’t build it.

We’ve deemed judgment suspect when humans exercise it, because it can make someone feel inferior for being wrong. The cost is a weakening of that muscle as we hand agency itself over to LLMs

Delegitimizing judgment via technology and credentials is a seizure of agency from individuals, which, paradoxically, undermines those very institutions when they can’t see the truth any longer.

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00:00 Why Reading Matters
01:32 Audiobooks vs Print
04:38 Postman and Media Shapes Thought
08:25 From Print to TV to Phone
13:31 Writing, Plato, and Truth
18:13 Media as Epistemology
21:26 Studies as truth tokens and shallow thinking
24:19 Memes and resonance
28:26 Rhetoric and print culture
47:58 Intelligence has a definition, and not all learning styles are equal
54:22 Credentials vs Thinking
55:18 Print to TV Epistemology
57:15 What happens when reading habits degrade
01:00:17 Typographic America Origins
01:16:06 Lincoln-Douglas debates, rhetoric and oral transmission of ideas
01:23:24 Why reading trains reason
01:26:56 LLMs and Fake Truth
01:33:26 Visual Memes vs Ideas
01:36:51 Rationality under attack
01:43:28 Wrap Up and Next Week

Edit: here is part 2, addressing many critiques of part 1 and of this note.

Today, I want to demolish the socially convenient lie that hearing a book is equivalent to reading it. This builds toward a larger argument I’ll unfold this month, which the audio/reading debate is a microcosm of.

This isn’t about the medium. When people argue about this, they’re usually saying something like, “I retain the facts just fine,” and some studies show that narrative retention is the same. But that is beside the point. The retention of facts doesn’t shape the mind, but rather the application of ideas does. My contention is about the absorption of ideas. We are a society uniquely founded on the power of Enlightenment principles, the foremost of which is that man can self-govern through his individual reasoning. We rebelled against authoritarianism because print culture enabled long-form political reasoning.

Alexander Hamilton, whose biography I’ve been rereading, is a shining example of what Neil Postman called the typographic mind. America was founded on this type of mind. Our founding documents took on a sacred character because we were committed to procedural liberalism and eliminating the threat of government coercion through reasoned judgment. These ideas spread through print and could not have any other way because they required a citizenry capable of following a long and complex chain of argumentation and holding contradictions without resolution.

Hamilton is the chief architect of the U.S. government, and his rise would be improbable today. He came from the Caribbean and rose meritoriously because he read voraciously and wrote constantly — he did, in fact, as the musical said, write basically every second he was alive. This brilliant mind, shaped by wide reading and writing, could not have architected the government without sustained intellectual activity. All the Founding Fathers wrote, but Hamilton wrote himself into history and wrote the government into existence by sheer force of will. His writing is representative of his high level of agency, because writing is itself an expression of will. You are asserting your ideas with confidence. My confident tone is precisely what agitates some. Agency and judgment stem from effortful engagement with ideas and deciding what to keep and discard.

The act of reading forces you into a dialectic with the author’s mind. You are engaging, stopping, rereading, thinking about the claims, and connecting the ideas to other ones you’ve read. My mind would be hollow without all of the effortful reading, margin-writing, and synthesizing I’ve done. I have this wonderful life because I spent years reading before I wrote anything publicly. I spent the last two months reading Orwell and Huxley and revisiting Postman multiple times in between. There is something so satisfying about reading a difficult text, having a conversation with the author, and then pacing and synthesizing it, talking to myself like a crazy person, usually in public.

The claim that reading and hearing a book, especially one about ideas, are identical acts imply that watching a movie and reading a novel are the same, or that watching someone lift weights and lifting weights are indistinct. You simply are not applying the same effort to listen to a book because the medium lowers the default cognitive friction of the activity. While both activate the language processing centers of the brain, reading requires visual decoding, holding things in working memory, and stopping to truly digest before you move on, because you’ll realize you’ve moved your eyes across the page but not absorbed anything. Hearing does not demand that.

Hearing a book takes away the friction of visually decoding and processing. While listening, you are going at the narrative pace of the author. Some may claim they stop and take notes, but this isn’t the default behavior the medium encourages. There’s a reason the author wrote the book rather than merely narrating it and releasing it only on audio. Friction is the point of reading. There is no difficulty without friction, making the argument absurd on its face if one considers what ‘difficult’ might mean.

Our insistence on collapsing the distinction between the two is a tendency evident in many areas: we want the identity of being a disciplined person without the effort to cultivate it. I hosted a discussion on Brave New World a few weeks ago, and the idea of doing hard things came up because the World State is one in which people are conditioned against difficulty. The removal of friction is the point, because it makes the population easy to control. The people in the room were clearly aware that they weren’t doing hard things, and that a good life requires doing something difficult even if you’re not world-renowned at it. The good life requires working toward mastery of something, whether in your professional life or in some other craft. You need to introduce meaningful friction into the process.

The fact that the burden of proof is on me to prove that hearing and reading are distinct, rather than on those who are collapsing the distinction between the two, says something. We treat effort hierarchies as illegitimate unless they can be empirically proven beyond doubt (do you have a study for that?). We punish those who put in more effort by calling them elitist or ableist (two charges I am sure to receive). I have to downplay the fact that I read many difficult texts because it’s considered haughty to insist that hearing and reading aren’t the same. I’m creating a hierarchy of effort, which the professional class generally doesn’t like.

They are confronted by the fact that they’re not doing the thing they claim to be doing. The social signals are all scrambled: you can signal seriousness by putting in less effort. So why would anyone put in more effort privately if the payoff is the same? And the payoff is identical because we have made it socially acceptable to collapse the distinction between listening and reading, or generally between two activities requiring differential effort.

People know that reading is indicative of intellectual capability, and they want the social prestige without actually cultivating discipline, which is offensive to those who did so. This is prestige laundering, which we love doing in a society that’s forgotten how to think deeply, lulled into submission by convenience.

So read a book. If you really want to listen to them, fine — but don’t say you’re reading. You are listening to a podcast. If you actually want to absorb ideas on a deep level, you need to read the book. It is better for you to struggle with the text than to hear the contents, because the effort is the point, not the contents. People who collapse the distinction insist that because the content is the same, there is no difference in the act.

Next week, we’ll go deeper into the mechanism that led to this distinction collapsing, because it is simply a microcosm of a larger problem that Postman diagnosed at length: we can no longer think deeply or evaluate truth claims because our dominant media preclude what can be claimed as true. The typographic mind is nearly extinct, to our collective detriment. So if you read books, shout it from the rooftops. If you don’t, put your phone away and start. Intellect isn’t about credentials or the recitation of facts. You must wrestle with ideas if you’re going to claim intellectual ability.

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Subscriber update

I’m taking a two-month break to quiet my mind and allow ideas to percolate uninterrupted. I have paused subscription billing for the duration because the business model creates pressure to produce. I’ve closed the gender chapter of my writing journey because it’s led me to the next thing — epistemology. It was never about gender at the bottom, but the incentives in institutions and groups that produce the suppression of truth. I had to work through gender as a lens to understand my relationship with reason and emotion, and I’ve succeeded.

All online platforms degrade thought

The incentive for any communication platform, including Substack, is to maximize usage, which means to monopolize attention. I don’t consider Substack as problematic as visual platforms, because long-form writing isn’t as addictive as short videos, and there’s a higher bar to building an audience as a writer. Nevertheless, it has similar problems because one is forced to become an influencer rather than an intellectual.

The bar for an influencer is their ability to stoke emotions and/or attract the attention of the opposite sex. Visual media platforms fragment attention, but the imperative to regularly publish on a platform like this fragments one’s thinking. Several ideas are running in the background, and a book is bursting out of me. I can’t fully develop ideas or write that book while I’m producing essays for a platform designed for immediate feedback.

Substack isn’t good for serious idea writers. To produce writing that will matter in five years, deep thought and attention to the craft are required, while Substack’s incentive is to publish on a schedule and gather likes. Any platform that rewards engagement will eventually degrade the ideas. I'm fortunate to have thoughtful readers who leave intelligent, substantive comments, and I want you all to know that people frequently remark on this in real life. What we have here is special, at the risk of sounding earnest.

I also have highly aligned readers, even if I don’t have much actual reach, but therein lies the problem: Substack doesn’t reward writing or ideas at all, but engagement the writing elicits through button clicks. This indirectly degrades my quality of thought because I respond to incentives like everyone else. I predict that when I come back with an essay about how we define truth, it will be far less popular than my gender studies work because it requires abstract thought — most people have let that muscle atrophy in the age of comfort, or never developed it due to social punishment.1

wrote recently about being a writer in the age of the influencer, and I was forced to fully face what I knew already — the Internet's medium debases thought and language, making truth impossible to reach.

Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that the medium determines the possible truth claims it can deliver, and thus, visual media distort truth because they reward performance rather than depth. Incentives also shape what is considered true. Similarly, writers today are forced to be influencers if they want reach, which eventually leads to the sacrifice of quality. This is because you truly get the audience you deserve.

I’ve tried these past two years to write seriously, relentlessly improve my craft, and develop original ideas. I’ve been resisting the incentive structure mightily, and that’s given me the audience I deserve: actually intelligent people who consider reason the foundation of a good life and hold contradictions without collapsing.

Not everyone is qualified to comment

Until the internet age, a layperson could only give a writer feedback by sending a letter to the editor, and the editor had to filter them for quality. We’ve lost all mechanisms to filter feedback. A person can ignore my argument, use ad hominem, put the onus on me to repeatedly prove myself, and, when I refuse, claim I’m shrinking from debate. Not everyone commenting with a challenge is entitled to a debate.

This happens to me frequently and metastasized last month. The charge was led by a credentialed female academic. Even ostensibly serious people can’t or won’t resist the incentive to climb by cutting someone else down, and gender amplifies the status game.

I was actually afraid to write under my real name for the first year and a half, but it was the right decision to claim authorship. It forced me to use my plan of not engaging or apologizing, and it actually worked. Several of you argued for me, especially , for whose support and friendship I am grateful.

I considered referring to this pile-on, and I’m sure at least one person will think it’s rude to do so, as though the person bullied is the problem for naming it. I’m not a victim, though I’m also not obligated to protect people who attacked my character. This imperative to be ‘professional’ is how soft control flies under the radar. Experiencing my first social media mob confirmed that platform incentives distract from the development of ideas and encourage shallowness. This is a feature of writing online.

Virality and vanity

I’ve written about how social media hijacks women’s status drive to encourage vanity, because (male) attention is currency for us. I force myself to confront my flaws, and vanity is the biggest. It’s not the compulsive usage of the app; that is downstream of the conceit that’s fed every time I open something, including Substack. I stopped using Instagram because it encouraged an obsession with my appearance for the camera’s gaze, and Substack encourages vanity about my intellect. I know that something must change if I’m to continue writing without debasing myself inadvertently at the altar of attention. I am strongly considering moving to a platform without social media features on my return (there’s a poll at the bottom).

I went on a podcast a couple of weeks ago, and the host posted several clips of the conversation on Instagram, which I rarely check. One video actually went viral this week, and I felt the vanity activate automatically. What I said wasn’t particularly deep, just naming a contradiction between women’s revealed and stated preferences. It apparently elicited strong emotions, like some of my essays have, judging from the metrics, but no essay of mine will attract as many eyeballs as a video. This is again a feature of writing online, because people are often accustomed to shallowness. But this video wasn’t satisfying like writing a strong essay that elicited thoughtful comments. Virality is a poor substitute for true mastery that requires discipline. And this risk of vanity is precisely why I don’t create videos, even though that’s the next logical step for a writer in the age of the influencer.

The male gaze and me

I inadvertently subjected myself to the male gaze, but not visually. I also don’t think there’s actually a male gaze; it's just time-bound attention from individual men. The attention can be physical or virtual. Each kind encourages distinct forms of self-surveillance. Attention from women encourages hedging, softening, and a concern with how my words might be misinterpreted to insult someone. Attention from men encourages both narcissism and hyper-self-awareness in an attempt to remain self-possessed. Male attention has destabilized me before, and I have inadvertently subjected myself to it by writing here about topics men happen to care about.

I’m aware that my most active and engaged readers are men, while women are more likely to read silently because the social cost of agreement is higher. This creates the impression of being metaphysically surrounded by men, which elicits the same level of self-consciousness as if a man were actually looking at me.

In my corner of Substack, the sex of the active audience and of the author is generally the same. I’m not upset or criticizing the men in my audience; this is a personal problem. Men are distracting, and being a woman who prefers friendship with men requires maintenance of strong physical and mental boundaries, regardless of the other person’s intentions. I wouldn’t likely feel this if I weren’t writing on a medium that encourages immediate, public feedback.

Sitting with Orwell

I joined The Rosedale Society in Austin last year, and in the mere six months since, I’ve produced my best writing. built a community for writers that’s only growing because there’s surprisingly nothing similar in this city. I’m happy to report that I’ve made intellectual friends there, including Zac. Now, I’m going to help turn it into a place built on adversarial reasoning rather than belonging. The creative class collectively doesn’t engage with truth claims in no small part because truth is considered rude. Adversarial truth-seeking doesn’t flatter; it reveals a hierarchy of reasoning ability. The Rosedale Society is a vast improvement over other writing groups I’ve joined, which were actually therapy groups. If truth-seeking isn’t made the explicit purpose of a group, it will invariably slide toward comfort and consensus.

I’m leading a discussion on 1984 next month, so I’ve read it for the first time. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a decade, but I have learned lately that I will only read books when I’ve done the intellectual work required to digest them. I’ve dipped my toe into epistemology in the past months, and Orwell helped me weave disparate threads together at the right moment. I’m even more surprised this happened through fiction. Oceania isn’t about fascism or mere totalitarianism. It’s about the epistemic closure2 of the knowledge class3, though they would claim it’s about the groups they happen to dislike.

Orwell wrote in his essay “Why I Write” that he wanted to expose lies and make political prose beautiful. In “Politics and the English Language,” he exhorts us to write clearly, because clarity is the basis of political action. The obfuscation that’s trained into us through higher education stops truth claims in their tracks. Caveats and hedging don’t produce truth, but compliance. He also reminded me of the principles of writing I already followed unconsciously with intermittent success:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Clarity in our culture is read as aggressive and wrong simply because sentences don’t apologize for themselves. Read any academic treatise, and you may notice that sentences are often nonsensical. This is intentional because you practically can’t refute vague sentences and imprecise arguments.

I close by asking you to create opportunities for discomfort in your life, particularly to face difficult truths about yourself; you will be more resilient on the other side. I look forward to sharing the fruits of this break with you.

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You can catch up on parts one and two of this series, though each installment can be read alone.

The gaze as male control

I grew up in generational poverty, though my parents can claim to have achieved the American dream relative to where they came from. I, too, have climbed above their station. Considering their lack of degree and valuable skills (beyond cooking), my own position seems improbable. Intertwined with my story is the promise of feminism, which I later learned was reserved for elite women. For my mother, America was a place to start over after divorcing a man she was compelled to marry. But in examining my entanglement with patriarchy through my family, I wish to complicate the picture of assumed male social control. My experiences growing up in a country affording women endless choices, with a family that coerced choices domestically, showed me both the false promises of feminism and gradations of patriarchal control. This is why I insist America isn’t a patriarchy — I’ve seen true patriarchy constrain women’s choices. In America, women expect to self-determine. Crucially, however, that’s the result of liberal democracy, not feminism, though that’s a different essay.

The year before the horrific rape in 2012 that broke open this depressing reality for women in India, I traveled by overnight train through the same region in which the rape and murder happened to visit family. There were four middle-class-looking men in my compartment. I didn’t realize at twenty-three the risk I was taking, but I could have died that night. In India, women assume that men will undress them with their eyes while walking on the street. Patriarchy meaningfully constrains women’s movement and choices in India, which is my standard for assessing its presence. In the United States, my choices and movement aren’t constrained by considerations of men.

I come from a culture in which misogyny and sexualization are common and accepted. Having spent significant time in India with and without family, I can share that women are literally ogled and catcalled on the street, the colloquial term being ‘eve-teasing’. That sounds innocent, but a woman should fear for her safety from men out in public because India is one of the least safe countries for women. Its sexual violence statistics are depressed because women are also less likely to report it there in comparison to America. Official statistics cannot quite capture the problem; you must experience it. And any woman in India knows going out alone at night is inadvisable. The male gaze controls women’s movement in India, and only there have I experienced fear of men in public.

Unwanted male attention is normalized in Indian culture in a way that would be considered problematic here. I invite white women who think we live in a patriarchy to go east. This is an acceptable and even necessary definition of the gaze because it can serve as a control mechanism in a truly patriarchal context. Patriarchy, similarly, must be defined before we claim that we live in one.

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The gaze as a tool of female intrasexual competition

Women judge each other based on sexual behavior, so to a certain extent, being a woman is also about policing other women’s sexuality; this is well documented in evolutionary psychology. Everyone knows, however, where they and others stand in the beauty hierarchy regardless of what’s publicly asserted. The assertion is required so other women don’t exclude you, even if you know it’s false. Being a woman is also about lying to yourself and others about your true motives to maintain your self-concept as morally innocent.

However, the gaze in its feminist denotation applied to the white man is both a female fantasy and a tool of bourgeois social control for female rivals who get male attention. Bourgeois women can use this to not only delegitimize their rivals for receiving male attention but also discipline men by accusing them of objectification. They can thus maintain their place in the hidden female hierarchy, which is determined based on the male gaze, specifically the volume of attention a woman gets in real life and online. The men's status matters not in this case; attention is a commodity. Are we being commodified, or are we commodifying men and ourselves?

The goal is to dampen any signals an attractive woman gets from a high-status man and then moralize that attention as a betrayal of the sisterhood. It was a status preservation move, for example, for girls to mock me in my first year of college because men they deemed unattractive had a crush on me. So they were policing the attention of low-value men for another woman because they know it’s a signal of value regardless of the source — a form of intrasexual competition.

I learned that I was unattractive because of this mockery, while the sexual marketplace was sending me different signals. I didn’t have a first boyfriend until I was twenty. As you can imagine, this lack of attention until later in life and the dampening of earlier signals fucked with my self-esteem. I suppose you can say that I’m weak for this, but it’s worse for a woman to think she’s utterly undesirable than to get an equivalent amount of attention as the women around her.

In another instance of female competition and social control, my first boyfriend (lasting three months) was the ex of a girl in my extended social network. She and I were not friends, but perhaps she truly believed we were. She had broken up with him, to boot, months earlier. When she found out we were dating, she called me, and I stood there mute while she yelled. She then ensured my social isolation, so that I was not invited to gatherings where she was present. Our overlapping friends chose her, and most of the men went along. I remain grateful for the handful of men who didn’t care, but I could never be part of a male group; I've always been on the outside of both men and women.

The gaze is present as a control mechanism in professional life when a woman is said to have advanced because she’s pretty. While beauty can help make an initial impression, incompetence eventually comes to light. A woman is deemed a ‘pick-me’ for getting attention, regardless of whether she’s trying, as I experienced just last week here. These are both examples of the same principle and incentive structure — neutralize one’s sexual competition.

If women do openly try to get male attention, they’re pathetic traitors to the sisterhood in a predictable remonstration based on female competitive tendencies. But perhaps the most insidious form of intrasexual competitive suppression is the widespread notion that women are being pressured to couple up when they’d rather be single. This, I suspect, is a case of preference falsification to dampen competition.

The gaze as a tool of matriarchal control

The treatment from these female ‘friends’ and my mother led to bad sexual decisions later on, though I recognize those decisions were my own. When I was a child, the gaze was always already directed at me by my mother and, occasionally, by her mother, who policed my appearance to ensure I wasn’t trying to attract boys.

While I have long been against policing and thereby sexualizing girls, I nevertheless understand that adult men sexualize girls before they may even realize it. It was my mother’s job to protect me from potential sexual contact. Child sexual abuse is rampant in Indian families because there’s such a silence enforced on victims. The family’s reputation becomes more important than the child’s physical safety. This is because Indian culture is highly hierarchical and collectivist. I’m pretty sure my own mother was abused by men in her family as a girl, which is why she was so vigilant and overbearing.

As a child, my mother in particular policed my clothing and associations so I couldn’t be friends with boys, nor could I wear tank tops or shorts. Even ankle socks weren’t allowed. I seized my freedom from her, and she told herself the story that she’s liberal as a post-hoc justification.

In hindsight, I understand why I was policed. That said, it still feels like the attention of lecherous men is made the problem of young girls. On the other hand, as a middle-aged woman, I feel as though young girls are dressing and acting like adult women, and mothers in particular have become highly permissive in this regard because there’s been such a strong reaction to shaming that was prevalent in decades past. But the answer to victim shaming isn’t to then go in the opposite direction and encourage one’s daughter to lean into her sexuality in elementary or middle school. If I had a daughter, I’d be constantly concerned about her clothing, too, and would probably find myself in my mother’s position. I suppose all women really do turn into their mothers.

Next week, I will dive into the male gaze as a tool of patriarchal control in my extended family, using Hindu-Indian culture as a case study.

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Like any woman, I’ve experienced unwanted male attention. I can’t stop a man from evaluating, but I don’t have to react or acknowledge. And the indifference takes Herculean effort to cultivate. The gaze acted on me because I allowed it, and it destabilized my life in my twenties. The literal act of a man evaluating and then being attentive cannot be allowed to derail me, especially in this particular lane I now occupy. But, I also will not hold men morally culpable for harming me because they looked. A loud contingent of women claimed that looking itself was harmful, not unlike the expansion of violence to include words.

The male gaze is demonized, but the most feminist women fear losing it. They will decry sexual objectification, but then lament not having a man. They will say they like the absence of men ogling them, so they don’t maintain their appearance and eschew femininity. But then they’re sad they don’t have a man. Of course, they will want a wealthy one so they can stop working. These are conversations I’ve had recently with women in person.

The gaze can be destabilizing, but if we want to pair off, it’s counterproductive to pathologize men for looking. Scott Galloway, for all his milquetoast defenses of masculinity, states correctly that male sexual desire has been pathologized. What he does not dare say is that a subset of women pathologized it and transmitted those norms to their children, and this is the message I got growing up from the media: men objectify women, and it’s always an act of evil, one step away from rape. But also, buy this thing we’re selling you because the advertiser’s gaze is fine.

Women crave the gaze — from high-status men.

An example of feminist assumptions about the gaze is the following paper: “Exploring Women’s Embodied Experiences of ‘The Gaze’ in a Mixed-Gendered UK Gym.”1 The author invokes Laura Mulvey’s authoritative definition of the male gaze:

According to the Gaze Theory—as described by Mulvey—women have the ‘to-be-looked-atness’ characteristic. The gaze is directed at the female body, commonly by a male and it actively projects the man’s fantasy upon the women’s body. Within this relationship, women are both an object to be gazed at and a showpiece to be displayed. The ‘gaze’ can be defined as ‘the act of observation on the one hand and internalisation on the other’. The ‘male gaze’ is frequently used among feminists who argue that the role of a female is purely for the sexual objectification of a male spectator. For Mulvey, gazes can be determined as rational, voyeuristic, sadistic, controlling and controlled.

First, let’s contextualize Mulvey and her coinage. She wrote “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” about classic Hollywood film,2 and the notion has since escaped and expanded, as have so many other critical theoretical concepts. The gaze is now taken to mean patriarchy’s omnipresent scrutiny and control, while Mulvey originated it in a narrow context. The gaze metastasized because feminist theory needed a universal explanatory frame for women’s dissatisfaction, and male desire was the easiest target.

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I contend that the gaze-as-sexualized-control is a feminist construction that women in the professional class internalized. It has little or nothing to do with an individual man’s attention. The gaze describes the professional class female fantasy of male attention, by which they are simultaneously disgusted and which they crave.

The female status hierarchy is predicated upon (high-status) male attention. We want it and hate ourselves for it. Women in the professional class often say men approaching them in the grocery store are creeps. But, they would be glad for a man they perceive as high-status to do so. Calling men creeps becomes a class sorting mechanism disguised as self-protection.

The act of a man looking at a woman is always already sexualized, precluding the possibility that a man may just be observing a woman without sexualizing her. The act of observation is collapsed with sexualization, but not every man who looks at a woman is doing the latter. The gaze is about evaluation in either context, though it is presumed to be dominating. Women’s revealed preferences, however, are for dominant men even as they say they want sensitive and egalitarian ones.3

On the other hand, let us consider the female evaluation of male mating potential. A woman doesn’t just consider the man’s physicality but trains her gaze on his entire life. He is also subject to the exact arbitrary requirements, like height, that women say men have. She must determine if he’ll be a protector and provider even as she might consider these concepts to be patriarchal control (or not see the cognitive dissonance at all). A man in a room full of professionals is evaluated by his clothing and presentation more than by his actual body. This is how wealthy, unattractive men attract a parade of young women. Those same women will be burned when that man invariably cheats because he always has options.

The female gaze evaluates men’s whole lives, not just their bodies.

The expectations a woman has of a man in the dating process often far exceed the expectations of the man. The female gaze is far more ruthless, and any woman would admit it because it evaluates both a man’s physicality and his life. The difference is that male physical preferences are moralized as evil, while female physical preferences are just fine.

I contend that we shouldn’t moralize mate preferences, which both the femosphere and manosphere do in the name of status defense. The issue is that men cannot ever be morally innocent in the feminist context. They are always already oppressive, while women can moralize mate preferences because we monopolize moral authority. We can never be wrong.

The problem is not that women evaluate men’s whole lives. Instead, the collapse in marriage and skyrocketing loneliness can be traced back to demonizing men for looking at and approaching women. They stopped, yet most women still expect men to make the first move.

Demonizing the gaze had a predictable outcome.

The male gaze is less discernible now because men have withdrawn into entirely separate social worlds. Overall, I’ve noticed that men and women aren’t socializing with each other in real life. Look no further than the New York Times for a lament about men disappearing. And because men have withdrawn, competition for their attention is even fiercer than before, but it’s all underground. We may never admit we actually want it because merely desiring a partner is now mocked online.

Women also want to ensure that their rivals do not receive any male attention, high or low status, because attention for a woman is a signal of her value. I will share a personal story about this in the next installment about the gaze as a disciplinary tool in female intrasexual competition.

Though I know being a woman today is often about endlessly chasing youth and the associated beauty standards, meaning it’s also about coveting and fearing the loss of men's attention. It’s this trap I’ve worked so hard to avoid since I left feminism behind and started chasing truth.

In the next installment, I will explain the gaze’s function as a tool of intrasexual discipline for women. We use it to delegitimize rivals and maintain hierarchy among ourselves.

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, and I spoke last week. We kept converging on themes I’ll elaborate on below, but we all agree that feminization isn’t biologically determined, nor is it about the number of women in an institution. Here is part two of my commentary on feminization as an institutional phenomenon since the conversation blew up. I’ve been writing about feminization for the better part of two years across many dimensions. By the time it blew up last month, I had constructed a theory drawing on several disciplines. It still strikes that the conversation remains at a low register, perhaps predictably. This encapsulates several other threads I’ve elaborated on this year, and I’ve linked the longer arguments in separate essays interspersed.

I. Managerial capitalism as feminization

Managerial capitalism is the system that replaced family-owned enterprises. The owners of capital no longer control the operation. Salaried managers decide on the most efficient allocation of resources to produce goods for which demand must be created. Industrial and technological scaling created mass affluence, which in turn required managerial coordination beyond the capacity of owner-operators. Once affluence rose, production outpaced natural demand, making demand creation essential to absorb output.

Managerial capitalism fused with desire creation because mass production required continually generating consumer wants — the law of supply and demand appears natural, but doesn’t consider whether the demand is based on needs or desires. Desire creation and affluence are conditions of feminization under which discipline erodes. That is feminization in action — women did not bring it about. The earliest advertisers and managers of the new order were men.

II. Affluence and emotional governance

Affluence created expectations and heightened awareness of relative status, which forced production into perpetual overdrive. This created a new imperative: institutions now had to manage emotions and maximize comfort—both physical and psychological—to preserve the conditions for consumption. We amuse ourselves to death because discipline—the precondition for a meaningful life—has been eroded.

This manifested in my life through depression and my inability to emerge. I didn’t understand that fulfilling my desires at all times was a source of my misery. Discipline isn’t about denial or suppressing emotions but the ability to discern the best path for oneself amid temptations.

III. Credentialism & status competition

The rise of large-scale corporations created a demand for credentialed administrative and technical roles. It began with medicine and engineering, then expanded until credentialed professionals governed even those in physical trades. In early corporations that produced physical products, engineers and financial managers rose to the top of the professional class. When knowledge work became the primary corporate output, universities mass-produced aspiring elites that society could not absorb.

IV. Feminization defined

Feminization is a system of behavioral norms that institutions adopt, not the behavior of women. Feminine behavior is personal while feminization is institutional.

Men can also adopt and encourage such norms, and women might also resist them. You probably know other women who are feminine but nevertheless resist feminization. Feminization is a behavioral operating system that has fused with managerial capitalism to create an affluent society allergic to truth.

V. Elite overproduction & feminized competition

Elite overproduction intensifies feminization. As competition for status intensified, the elite's competitive mode morphed. Competition shifted from overt to covert; hierarchy was moralized even as it remained unavoidable; and perception management became paramount. The adage “perception is reality” is the essence of the feminized operating system.

The masculine and feminine modes of competition undertaken in groups are mirrored in institutions, but therein become disconnected from the original groups.

The dominant competitive mode in modern institutions is feminine-coded, which gives women a natural advantage within it. This is feminized competition, but it isn’t limited to women. Conversely, women resisting this mode exist, though they’re in the minority. This feminized mode suppresses original thinkers of both sexes, making genuine meritocracy impossible. The question is whether workplaces were tilted toward feminized competition before or after the gender tipping point. In fact, feminization of institutions predated women’s mass entry to the workforce and is more closely tied to rising affluence, intensified competition for professional jobs, and rapid technological advancement.

VI. The conditions required for truth

Truth can only flourish under open, hierarchical, merit-based competition. Historically, men were incentivized toward competition and women toward cooperation, so these competitive modes map onto their group behavior. But it is crucial to note that these are not biologically determined, but the results of incentives over millennia. Incentives govern human behavior, yet many refuse to acknowledge this because it feels immoral to admit we act in our own interest within a competitive society.

It should be a precondition of public influence to be able to compete openly and argue logically. Social coercion has become the default instead. Unfortunately, the prevalence of social control within the feminist context has made this sort of control female-coded. Social control cannot be the basis of power in a functioning society, though it does become the case in an affluent one. Competition is also denied and discouraged, even as you are forced into it — another hallmark of a society unable to allocate status meritoriously.

One reader objected to a recent line of argument in which I illustrated masculine and feminine archetypal traits using the Indic examples of purusha and prakriti. He argued there’s no empirical proof that they exist, yet you can see them everywhere in nature. These concepts cannot be validated through that narrow empirical lens, despite the professional class treating empiricism as the sole standard of legitimacy. I’m not against experimentation and hypothetical testing, but these concepts can’t be proven through that mundane lens.

The male and female competitive modes reflect the archetypal masculine and feminine qualities found in all people. Most women I know tend toward feminine traits, but I know several women who’d be described as ‘masculine’ in inner orientation. I view autonomous and independent people, regardless of sex, as ontologically masculine because their orientation is outward, they openly compete, and aren’t afraid of risking their status. The feminine orientation prioritizes consensus and belonging, but when taken to extremes, it sacrifices agency. Women’s society isn’t for me, because most women prefer this mode of being in the world. I’m grateful for the women in my life with a masculine orientation, and I can appreciate what it cost them socially among women.

Ultimately, feminized institutions break the dialectical process required to reach truth. The correct solution to a problem can only emerge when ideas are sharpened, but the feminized competitive mode prevents this through social punishment of independent thought. This is precisely what I can’t swallow, so I write. Standards become impossible to uphold, and ‘personal truth,’ or perception, becomes reality.

I take writing for you more seriously than my career. I began because I needed to say the things that are plain, but few are willing to say. I also write under my real name because you all made me unafraid of the risk. If I have put words to what you feel (or gave you ammunition for your arguments), please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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For the past year, I’ve been circling feminization as a phenomenon. I’m not the first one to consider it, and the weakest arguments have now exploded around it to the detriment of the conversation we desperately need to have. It’s not about liberals or conservatives, nor is it about women, morally speaking. This isn’t the length of my usual essays because I want you to sit with just this idea for now.

I’m here to give you the incentive structure and mechanism by which institutions stopped seeking truth and began enforcing safety, consensus, and harmony. This isn’t about a gender tipping point, nor does it mean we kick women out of institutions to revert them.

It is simple, dangerous, and explains something no one has been willing to say out loud: feminization does not begin in institutions. It begins in the interpersonal sphere and then escapes into the public sphere, where it is encoded as managerial culture.

Women’s speech norms are the root cause of the erosion of truth in public life. What seems harmless is corrosive, and we can’t name it because we can’t name women as agents of their lives. Men accommodate this style of communication in institutions. It’s easy to dismiss my argument as “blaming women”. I’m not saying that all women are responsible for the erosion of truth, but that institutional culture is downstream of interpersonal behavioral norms. And the default norms for the professional class are those of women. This is a structural argument. I also argue that women are moral agents, and we ought to stop seeing them as morally innocent of all social phenomena.

Women’s society is intellectually poor

The intellectual poverty of women’s society is the structural privileging of consensus and harmony over debate and the testing of truth claims. The bond is emotional, not rational. Intellectual display, in fact, is unwelcome in the female social space. This isn’t because every woman is individually opposed to it, but because of social incentives and enforcement by a minority of women who can’t compete but want power anyway.

The pattern is structural, not about individual pathologies. Despite these disclaimers, it remains dangerous to argue that women have group incentives to infantilize each other in the name of obscuring the intellectual hierarchy among ourselves. We don’t realize that it’s happening or why we’re doing it because it’s the default.

How feminization begins interpersonally

The feminization of institutions begins at the micro-interpersonal scale. Women’s speech norms demand hedging, softness, and actual baby-talk. Feminist academics and writers call this women’s relational talk and excuse it as harmless, and then ask why anyone dared to notice and question it. The incentive for the diminution required in female space stems from competitive suppression. In groups, women default to this mode of speech, which purposely lacks substance, for that would require a hierarchy of ideas and would expose that some women are simply more intelligent than others. Denial of variance in intellect among women is also related to the denial of sex differences.

The emptiness of the conversation is by design to limit any single woman from challenging the rest to do better or be more intelligent. I am told that not all friendships need to be deep, yet 95% of my female friendships are based on shallow conversation about people and events, and shared activities. This is, again, by design.

Speech norms and status preservation

These speech norms require passive voice, conflict avoidance, opacity, emotion, and safety to produce the harmony and consensus on which female friendships are usually based. Accountability in such a scenario becomes impossible because it requires clarity.

These speech norms seem harmless when confined to social spaces, but they serve a specific status-preservation requirement: if some women are explicitly more articulate, precise, or correct than others, then the plausibly deniable female hierarchy destabilizes. This must not be allowed, or it would undermine the feminist consensus that men are threatened by women’s intellect and that they hold us back unfairly.

What comes next

Next week, I will elaborate on this line of argument to explain the reasons behind the speech norms and how they escaped the lab into the workplace. For now, here are my two cornerstone essays on the topic, published earlier this year.

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I’m calling us Hindus because American-born Hindus like us aren’t Indian. Hindu is also an imperfect term, but it’s more accurate than calling us all Indians, because we’re not.

🎙️Episode Breakdown

00:00 – 05:00 | Setting the table

• Regionalism inside Hinduism — TamBrahm vs Gujarati Brahmin vs the UP village priest.

• The diaspora’s changing regional nature.

• How the Indian tech diaspora is a historical accident of immigration law, and what Silicon Valley would look like without Indians.

05:00 – 10:00 | Diaspora class formation

• Our Indian ancestral backgrounds — Tam Bram for Rajeev, UP-Gujju mix for me.

• How Google became the finishing school of the professional class.

• Recruiting, HR, and the symbolic labor economy inside tech.

• The distinction between project vs program management and why process-worship is feminized.

10:00 – 15:00 | Feminization, process, and control

• “Process for the sake of process” as a feminine pathology.

• Indians as the most status-obsessed managers on earth.

• How the diaspora mirrors professional-class anxieties while triggering white ones.

• Why Indian success provokes resentment — the optics of outperforming your ideological patrons.

15:00 – 20:00 | ABCDs and assimilation

• ABCD = American-Born Confused Desi — the diaspora’s self-own.

• Why American-raised Hindus aren’t considered “real Indians.”

• Guilt as a class marker: success must be laundered through performative politics.

• Women perform leftism; men perform libertarian tech-brohood.

20:00 – 25:00 | Gender and rebellion

• Indian-American women raised conservatively, trained in classical dance, embodying Hinduism literally.

• Leftism as rebellion against patriarchy + a bid for white professional approval.

• White adjacency through money and credentials.

• How Indian men assimilate by worshipping Elon instead of Kali.

25:00 – 30:00 | Assimilation, authenticity, and faith

• The impossible balance between Tamil piety at home and American identity outside.

• Upanayana as a Hindu bar mitzvah; girls excluded from knowledge.

• The inversion of Brahmin values — spiritual lineage turned materialist.

• Why Hindu Americans will never be fully “American.”

30:00 – 35:00 | Status anxiety on both sides

• America’s racial axis (white/black) leaves Indians unclassifiable.

• Sports, food, and cultural codes as barriers to belonging.

• Triggering white discomfort by outperforming them economically.

• How we became the overachievers everyone needs but nobody wants to see win.

35:00 – 40:00 | Co-opted goddesses and liberal rituals

• Kali as a feminist mascot during #MeToo.

• Shakti reduced to “girlboss energy.”

• Hillary Clinton as the secular Devi of the diaspora auntie class.

• The Western rebranding of Hindu metaphysics into therapy and décor.

40:00 – 45:00 | The metaphysics beneath the memes

• I explain Shakti as the life-force principle — not domination, but creation.

• Shiva + Shakti as consciousness + energy, not man + woman.

• Discernment (viveka) as moral clarity, not judgment.

• Bhakti as emotional intelligence before Silicon Valley made it an app.

45:00 – end | What’s been inverted

• How modern Brahmins worship wealth instead of wisdom.

• How Hindu imagery props up Western guilt instead of dissolving it.

• The diaspora as a case study in feminization, status anxiety, and metaphysical confusion.

• Why Bhakti remains the truest technology of all: surrender that isn’t submission.

Everyone is suddenly talking about feminization, but they’re discussing the wrong layer. Feminization has been attributed to women dominating the workplace, but it’s not actually about women, nor is it merely about work.

When I speak about it, I refer to metaphysical poles that characterize our reality. We all have the masculine and feminine principles in us, but they are not tied to sex or gender per se. The ancients used gender as a metaphor for these poles. Institutional feminization isn’t about the dominance of women — it was happening far prior to their entry to the white collar workforce. Credentialism and managerialism are two illustrations.

The current conversation is stuck at the wrong layer, as discourse is these days. I will excavate feminization as a metaphorical descriptor for the tilting of our institutions toward ensuring comfort at the expense of freedom to pursue truth wherever it leads.

Many people have noticed that affective management has replaced truth-seeking, but they misidentify women as the cause. Women just happen to be the best guardians of feminized norms and usually reflect metaphysically feminine qualities. But feminine qualities exist separately from the female sex.

Feminization is the transformation of institutions under affluence and managerialism toward affect over truth as the highest good. We have a professional class running those institutions, obsessed with preventing offense rather than defending the unpopular truth. This is why I write.

II. From material scarcity to emotion management

This turn toward emotion management was inevitable once material scarcity was resolved through efficient resource allocation in the age of managerial capitalism. This mode of organizing economic life not only gave rise to the professional middle class but also cemented them as the guardians of expertise. Their authority over knowledge is based on prestige markers, and credentialism is a hallmark of the feminized elevation of the symbolic over the material.

Affective management is the new raison d’être of institutions under the guise of ever-increasing material production. When survival is no longer the goal of social organization, the management of feelings becomes the aim. The regulation of tone, comfort, and belonging flows from this. Women are well-suited to this aim because of our evolved tendency to maintain consensus and social harmony.

Commentators on feminization have stopped at the literal and have not bothered to analyze the structural conditions underlying. Masculine and feminine tendencies live within all of us. We tend toward one pole or the other, and we’ve fallen out of balance within, causing chaos without.

The denial of sex differences, as I’ve outlined before, is perhaps the most obvious evidence of this process. But note that the blank slate theory is an effect of feminization, not a cause. The prohibition in the academy against even discussing sex differences in several disciplines is an example of feminization, but the institutional inclination is to avoid uncomfortable truths about women’s behavioral tendencies in groups. We now have whole disciplines operating from the axiom that sex differences are constructed, even though there’s no empirical evidence. That is the feminization of knowledge.1

III. Feminization isn’t caused by women, but we’re well-adapted

Women happen to be well adapted to a feminized environment. Such environments:

1. Avoid conflict at all costs if it means sparing feelings.

2. Enforce emotional management regimes through bureaucratic control. This is where we often hear about HR, but it should be noted that HR is effective because women are better at enforcing these regimes than men.

3. Socially enforced silence around conclusions that threaten the professional class’s moral authority. An example is upholding credentialism even if it hurts the very people DEI claims to support.

4. Obscuring emotional control in the language of care.

5. Precluding the correction of injustice by blaming the victim for their condition.

Our understanding of reality is increasingly mediated by the need to manage emotions rather than accept truths that lead us to question our own self-concept. Being seen as a good person is more important than doing the right thing. The symbolic is divorced from the material.

IV. The metaphysical masculine and feminine

The feminine principle is creative, receptive, nurturing, entropic, and emotional — the ineffable. The masculine principle is ordering, penetrating, disciplining, structuring, and logical. This duality is the bedrock of our material reality, even as a few of you have probably dismissed this argument as essentialist and binary. I take pains to emphasize that I’m talking about the nature of reality, not sex-typical behavior. Men and women illustrate these inclinations, but this polarity is built into nature independently of how it manifests in humans.

The Indic metaphor for this duality is purusha and prakriti. These terms are roughly translated to ‘man’ and ‘nature,’ but they’re not referring to humans.2 Purusha is pure consciousness, logos, and form. Purusha is symbolized by Shiva, whose manifestation in life is aniconic, represented by a lingam. This translates to ‘phallus,’ but it’s not literally about Shiva being a phallus.3 Once again, people map sex onto the metaphysical symbol of the phallus as the masculine. But formed around Shiva is the yoni, symbolic of the feminine principle of reception. The Shiva lingam represents the union of consciousness and nature.

Prakriti is an entropic material reality that cannot have form without purusha. Logos provides the structure for eros to have meaning; our reasoning and emotive faculties must be in balance. Institutions have reinforced this tendency while also suppressing negative emotions about the privileging of affect over order. Women like me are particularly ill-suited to such environments because we have integrated the bipolar energies. We’re repelled by the smothering of reality under affective management, as are many men. This is why, I suspect, you’re here reading this.

V. Feminization as an institutional condition

Under feminized management, accountability is replaced with social performance. When I’m at work, I know that I can’t actually say anything to a person who dropped the ball or is behaving badly. The act of naming it is aggressive, and holding someone accountable becomes impossible. We’re told “that’s unproductive,” even though low performers drag everyone down. But those people can perform vulnerability and completely escape scrutiny for inferior work because of enforced positivity, results be damned. This is explained as a need for professionalism, which is feminized norms made default — conflict avoidance at all costs.

Mediocrity, therefore, is tacitly enforced, since excellent people can’t even show resentment at having to carry the load. This mechanism of control can be deployed by and aimed toward either sex. Women happen to have emotionally managed me into compliance more often than men by asking me to “be softer,” because only women can get away with saying that to each other.4

Psychological safety sounds like a nice concept intended to create the conditions for excellent people to create something new. In practice, psychological safety is for the insecure, emotional majority to tamp down dissent. The one questioning the process becomes the problem, not the inefficiencies the process introduced.5

Group therapy, similarly, isn’t about everyone ‘taking up space’ but about protecting the right of the most vulnerable person in the room to set the standard for acceptable expression. It’s why my structural analysis of pain is unwelcome in the therapy room. When I was in risk-averse, feminized work contexts, questioning any process was offensive to the emotional consensus managers around me, usually marketers and project managers.

Niceness and safety become the highest goods over results and risk-taking when work is feminized. Nothing new was built without risk, nor were any paradigms shifted. Yet, many institutions with the resources to move us forward are obsessed with managing perception instead. Men are, on average, more risk-tolerant than women, but aversion is an institutional condition regardless of who occupies them. Men can be as risk-averse and intolerant of discomfort as women.

VI. The material and historical base of feminization

In The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith argues that the elimination of material scarcity led to production to maintain employment levels and economic growth. It’s why the four-hour workweek will never be. Economists saw production as the result of consumer needs, but these wants are created by production itself — the process that satisfies them.6 From this condition arose the desire-creation industry — marketing. We’re surrounded by marketing, and so we stopped noticing. Affluence is the bedrock of feminization.

Managerial capitalism arose to coordinate large-scale production and resource allocation, which both led to predictable outputs but also created the urgency to generate demand for goods at the same (ish) rate they are produced. If this process is imbalanced, you either get inflation or depression. Thus, managers had to maintain equilibrium, which required effective control of demand levers. I’m rewatching Mad Men, and I’m reminded that the advertising industry was feminized from the beginning, even though men controlled it.

Once desire determined our actions, the professional class became moral managers. Desire fulfillment became a moral good, framing consumption as empowerment for women. But women’s susceptibility to marketing is also beside the point; desire is metaphysically feminine, and feminization is society organizing around its fulfillment rather than developing discernment.

VII. Conclusion: the bipolar internal condition

Women didn’t cause feminization, nor can it be solved by (unrealistically) changing the gender composition of institutions. The rejection of truth-seeking in favor of consensus is the inevitable condition of an affluent society. The privileging of affect over reason is the default unless we’re constantly vigilant.7 I frequently emphasize discipline and discernment over emotional indulgence, but it’s also a reminder to myself.

The process notwithstanding, the feminine principle is not inferior. There is no beauty without eros, and the masculine alone is sterile and inert. Purusha needs prakriti. The feminist narrative, however, has led legions of women to believe we don’t need men but for sperm (if we want a child, which many of us don’t). That narrative and the labeling of masculinity as toxic have been consequential, not merely memes.

The problem isn’t just that men were rendered superfluous, but also the devaluing of the masculine principle overall. We’ve accused men of toxicity, and I did for decades because I had terrible examples in my family. What I now understand is that abusive men also tilt toward the (dysfunctional) feminine; they can’t maintain equilibrium or structure. But the difference between them and women is their proclivity to violence.

Emotions are certainly crucial to a life well lived, but we seem to have forgotten the need to integrate the masculine and feminine principles within ourselves. Women may need to spend more effort on discerning what’s true from what is felt, and men may need to work harder to be emotionally attuned.

The condition of institutions is downstream of integrating the two poles within us. Institutions won’t change by merely asserting the primacy of truth over affect, because the precondition is that humans value truth more. Calling for a liberal commitment to reason, therefore, is naive. So it is left to those of us who see clearly to create new institutions to defend the unpopular truth against the affective managerial order.

P.S. If this resonated, please share it with a friend. I’ve been writing about feminization for almost a year, but it doesn’t matter if no one knows. And thank you to those who have been sharing — it means the world.

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I’m explaining this minimally because I want to know what you all think it means. What am I missing? What’s unclear? What other diagrams should I make?

If you use this yourself, I would appreciate a citation.

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Part 1: Interior Freedom

Freedom Through Responsibility

Freedom is meaningless without self-governance.

Every version of feminism has sold women the promise of freedom from constraints, wherein responsibility becomes a shackle. It’s why we resist taking accountability for how we hurt other women, in particular, and always have the excuse of patriarchy. I write this because I was once such a woman, and miserable. My depression lasted for fifteen years precisely because I was never encouraged to be accountable for my outcomes. Yes, my family traumatized me, but I chose to be a victim. Resilience and responsibility go hand in hand.

As with therapy’s promise of validation, we expect our friends to validate everything we do. We therefore remain childlike in our decision-making, even as we demand equal participation in public life.

I once had an insatiable need to be right, all the time. That desire corrodes relationships because the other person has to walk on eggshells around you. Everyone is wrong sometimes, but most women have convinced themselves that we cannot be, and anyone saying so is either sexist or mean. That is no way to cultivate a resilient psyche.

Feminism’s moral inversion has valorized victimhood, wherein seizure of agency is punished most by other women. We get social currency among women for performing victimhood (especially women of color) so we think we are actually victims. I chose to stop seeing white people as the source of all my problems. I was, in fact, participating in the bourgeois class project of opportunity hoarding in the name of justice.

I learned from various philosophical traditions that true freedom stems from discipline, and freedom from constraint is a type of shackle. This false model of freedom had me chasing the ephemeral.

From discipline stems self-containment, and from self-containment comes moksha, or true liberation, in this life. Discipline is a kind of yogic heat. Those who do whatever they want at any given moment are simply leaking energy rather than designing a good life.

Postfeminism is the pursuit of discipline and the acceptance of responsibility as a means to true freedom.

Truth Through Discernment

Clarity of thought is rebellion these days.

We’ve become intellectually lazy by outsourcing our thinking to algorithms. Feminism and social media, in particular, have mixed to convince us that truths are determined through social performance — that is the logical endpoint of claiming that the oppressed can access truth in a way others cannot. This confers moral authority on those who may not have the character to bear it. This is outsourcing one’s judgment to identity labels, and those labels are inseparable from the algorithms that created them. Feminism of today is inseparable from the process of creating oneself online, and that self is hollow. The phone has turned us into automatons spouting thought-terminating cliches.

We’ve also stopped reading now that we can get the morally correct opinion from TikTok and Instagram. The most significant change I made in my journey was to break up with the phone and read deeply again. We no longer have focus, so we lack the discipline to cultivate mastery or undertake anything truly challenging. We’ve been convinced that a frictionless life is a desirable one.

If we’re going to have a socially consequential opinion, we should be reading deeply about that subject. After spending two years reading only, all my previously held opinions changed because I was forced to think about what is true versus what my peers insisted was true. There is no substitute for reading if you want to cultivate depth; not audiobooks, not podcasts.

Humans’ nature is to believe that which will garner social belonging, and women are no exception. Arriving at truth requires the individual to wrestle with ideas and apply reason to their experiences. This is the dialectical process in action, resolving contradictions between seemingly intractable positions. Women have been taught that logic is sexist and reasoning is a male way of knowing that somehow subordinates emotion. But emotion is simply not how we get at truth, though feminism taught me otherwise. We refuse to examine our positions because we’re terrified of what other women will think of us.

Truth through discernment requires the willingness to reject the socially accepted position and stand alone. Sometimes, reasoning leads to places others refuse to follow because they can’t get past the implication for their self-concept.

I had to let go of the need to fit in with women to fully exercise my reasoning ability. I thought I would be unhappy, but I’ve never been more satisfied with life.

Everyone is wrong sometimes, including women. Postfeminism is choosing truth over belonging.

Part 2: Womanhood

Autonomy Through Embodiment

Feminist thought has foisted all manner of irrational ideas on society: that males and females are interchangeable, that males can literally become females, and that biological sex is a social construct rather than an observable reality. In doing so, we’ve denied the truth of natural selection and sexual dimorphism that is observed in all other species. Sex isn’t a spectrum, and how one chooses to self-present doesn’t literally change one’s sex. I’ve not historically stated this with such force, but it must be said because the denial of dimorphism is perhaps the basis of the professional class’s claim to moral authority. To deny sex as a material reality is asserting theology without a god.

Men and women are different, and this fact doesn’t make me a victim, nor does it imply that men are better. Postfeminism accepts this difference and doesn’t feel threatened by material truths. Equality need not mean sameness, though feminism taught me that there can be no other definition. The acceptance of men and women as different actually liberated me; the feminist insistence on sameness was a mental prison.

Sex is another context in which we’ve been sold liberation, but that’s come to mean freedom from regret. I’ve regretted several sexual encounters in my youth, but feminism taught me I can easily blame the man even if no one was coercing me. I just let sex happen, another result of absent discipline.

I learned to hate my own femininity as oppressive false consciousness. I thought it made me weak and traditional. Feminine appearance has become superficially limited to what women think men like, while we also police each other’s dispositions. Swaths of females have decided they’re not women because they get either too much or insufficient male attention. We’ve let femininity shrink to the contours of the male gaze.

“Pick-me” is one such tool of social discipline to suppress intrasexual competition and lead other women to question their self-concept. It does not occur to many that perhaps some women are simply more male-typical in personality expression, but aren’t doing it for male attention. If a woman receives male attention, it’s often treated as her moral failing, even though that attention is currency among women and a basis for the status hierarchy.

Postfeminism is the acceptance of material reality and not policing other women’s femininity. Masculinity is not the enemy.

Part 3: Public Life

Virtue Through Competition

Feminism taught me that competition is masculine and, therefore, sexist. Competition is often framed in opposition to cooperation, leading to enforced consensus. This prevents the competition of ideas, leaving women’s society structurally intellectually impoverished. I know some of you don’t believe that feminism could be responsible for the suppression of critical thought.

Many, if not most, women see intellectual challenges from other women as rude personal attacks. They refuse men’s attempts at debate by deploying accusations of sexism. ‘Logicbro’ emerged as an insult during the internet feminist wave as a means to evade scrutiny for illogical stances. Critical thinking is structurally smothered among women because of feminist insistence that we not betray the sisterhood.

Resistance to competition also leads status-protective women to hold back excellent ones. If competition is sexist, then no woman can ever be better at anything than others. We see this once again in our evolved tendencies: women have adapted to compete covertly, never overtly. Because the competition isn’t open, anyone can sabotage others regardless of actual ability. This corrodes the concept of merit itself, and we see this happening throughout society.

Findings in evolutionary biology confirm that women know, from an early age, that they can’t visibly outperform their female peers without risking being cast out. I have experienced covert sabotage from women whose ideas I dared to question at work. They cynically deploy sexism as a shield against critique from men. Those women are far more numerous than those who are actually competent, because only a minority of people who put in the work can excel. We know from broader trends that most women have outsourced their thinking to social media and other women, and therefore lack the focus to develop mastery. One woman’s excellence is another woman’s source of envy, so those of us who put in the work have to downplay our achievements.

Suppression of competition corrodes not only individual ability but also corrupts institutions. No competitive arena is perfect, but that isn’t a license to dismiss competition itself as sexist. One’s ability to compete reveals their character and discipline. I was deeply depressed when I worked in female-dominated environments built on competitive suppression, and it’s no accident my mental health improved after I entered an openly competitive arena dominated by men.

The postfeminist path requires us to earn our standing in the world. Men owe us nothing.

Renewal Through Competence

Enforcement of female solidarity precludes excellence in institutions and individuals. The illusion of equal abilities in all women is perpetuated through credentialism, which prioritizes paper credentials over actual skills. Dependence on credentials is a trap if a woman wants to get somewhere in her career — a false promise of status predicated on rule enforcement.

If women want economic independence from men, as feminism sells, we must chase skills instead of credentials. School teaches compliance, while life calls for selective rule-breaking. I broke all the rules I was handed about being a woman, which was my path to a good life.

Women have been the enforcers of norms and rules throughout human history, but this tendency corrupts institutions that should be built on competence. Instead, women measure each other by social conformity, leading men to withdraw from them at work and in life. Why would men subject themselves to our stifling social rules and invite us into their networks?

Through feminism, we demanded entry into male-built institutions. As the managerial class expanded throughout the twentieth century, credentials and competitive gatekeeping became effective means of excluding the lower classes. Status today is determined by managed outcomes, not ability; both men and women can achieve success through compliance rather than skill.

Before demanding parity with men who developed rare skills (e.g., the demand for parity in technical jobs), we must interrogate if we developed the competence. I’ve learned from experience that skill becomes undeniable after a certain point, but women are often the ones who refuse to notice competence in other women. The hardest I’ve ever worked to prove myself was to other women.

Demands for status based on arbitrary physical characteristics breed institutional corruption, because the polity loses trust. We’ve seen this happen throughout our society, and particularly at universities and in large corporations. I once built and enforced the diversity industrial complex at various workplaces, and I later saw how I was using my ethnicity to gain social currency instead of developing rare and valuable skills.

Postfeminism in institutions is elevating competence over status markers as the basis of membership.

Conclusion

To build a healthy society, the polity must believe that elites are seeking truth and can admit when they’re wrong. We have a safety-first elite structurally incapable of admitting fault, and this is a wellspring of our social malaise. Because women often resist admitting they were wrong, they are also a significant factor in the collapse of institutions and the erosion of trust. While it’s not only women who are responsible, our tendencies in groups significantly contribute to the rot. When I was denying observable reality to assert my victimhood, I was contributing to the erosion of truth in society. Now I write in no small part to repair the decade-plus of damage I inflicted.

Renewal follows accountability.

Naturally, I expect drive-by bad-faith readings. If you’re about to leave that kind of comment, please know that I will delete it. I do, however, invite reasoned disagreement.

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I. Introduction

The denial of sex-based and evolutionarily determined differences is the foundational lie of the professional managerial class. I’m aware that I can be accused of “biological determinism,” but that rebuttal is lazy - sex differences found across cultures in average behaviors shape outcomes, though the PMC insists that they’re the result of discrimination.

Not only does the PMC writ large need this to be true for its class project, but women also need this to be true to justify their credential-based dominance of whole sectors of the economy. It’s also the basis of the claim that women are underrepresented in technical roles because of stereotype threat — that men assume they can’t do it, so they decide there’s no point in trying. This is again a way to pretend that outcomes have nothing to do with one’s choices or abilities.

II. The zombie lie: all sex differences are “socialized” and the denial of evolution

We’ve all been in social settings where at least one woman will flippantly state that all differences between men and women are socialized. There’s never been empirical evidence to back this.

This zombie lie came out of women’s studies departments in the 80s and 90s and spread like a virus among professional-class women. The socialization theory is a bastardization of John Locke’s idea that we are born blank slates. However, Locke made this claim before the advent of the modern scientific method and before Darwin’s theories of natural selection, which shape animal behavior.

Behavior is shaped by both nature and socialization, but most of our traits are inherited, including physical, mental, and emotional characteristics. Environment matters, but genes shape behavior, as many twin studies have shown. Ironically, the same people who deny biologically based sex differences also push epigenetics, which posits that trauma is passed down over generations, to explain modern disparities between groups.

The denial of sex differences is a denial of truth seeking principles. When the religious right attacked evolution, the left claimed to defend science. Yet, professional class women need evolution declared false to justify demands for parity in areas to which many are unsuited by innate ability.

This denial also erases variance among women. Female excellence is pathologized: outliers are called pick-mes seeking male attention or dismissed as aberrant. Some women are wired to be highly analytical, like several of my readers, and are not neurodivergent because of it. Neurodivergence is asserted as a deviation from a curve, but the term is used to flatten differences as meaningless. Anyone can claim to be neurodivergent. There is no barometer, and that is the point.

I have worked with women in analytical roles who bully others into acquiescing to idiocy by claiming sexism when questioned. I’ve been told I’m neurodivergent when I wrote about the intellectual poverty of women’s society, as though I am broken. But calling me neurodivergent is an admission that most women prefer social-relational talk to abstraction, proving my point about natural differences among women.

III. Hierarchies are inevitable, but some are built on lies

What happens when you build modern society on a lie?

Managerial capitalism is a reorganization of economic activity centered on expertise, efficiency, and bureaucracy. Its expansion required women to enter the workforce. Betty Friedan was not describing liberation so much as reacting to managerial capital’s demand for more white-collar labor. The entire project rests on the fiction of interchangeability: if men are not graduating in sufficient numbers for credential-gated jobs, women can fill the gap.

The managerial state cannot function without hierarchies. It replaced older hierarchies of ability with new ones based on credentials and victimhood. These are the hierarchies feminism has both created and obscured.

Women have competed covertly for millennia. We pretend all women are equal while knowing where we fall in the pecking order. In the workplace, this competition manifests as credentialism and compliance, enforced through extensive bureaucracy and arbitrary requirements. Status games are introduced under the guise of meritocracy. Feminism is an adaptive rationalization of an ingrained behavior.

Feminism also created a hierarchy of victimhood. Men are placed at the bottom, and white women float to the top while gesturing at centering women of color. This is called the progressive stack. The more oppressed one is, the more moral authority they carry. They cannot be questioned. This hierarchy of victimhood is a feature, not a bug. It is necessary for the professional managerial class to maintain moral authority and justify its social engineering.

IV. Statistical illiteracy is normal for the PMC

Most people struggle to interpret distributions, probability, and variance. The PMC treats these concepts as justifications for bigotry. The ostensibly educated class is largely statistically illiterate, which is inexcusable for people claiming to be experts.

Abilities are not evenly distributed. Many normal distribution curves for behaviors and traits are well-documented across cultures. Analytical ability, conscientiousness, and openness all tend to follow distribution curves, rather than being flat lines. To deny this is to deny statistical principles.

Critics sometimes counter that masculine and feminine curves largely overlap. That is true, but the crucial distinction is this: there are more men at the extremes of analytical ability than women. There are many men who are less intelligent than the average woman, but also many who surpass her. Feminism cannot admit this.

From one of the most cited papers on sex differences:

Finally, the omnipresent claim that sex differences in mathematics result from early socialization (i.e., parents and teachers inculcating a “math is for boys” attitude) fails empirical scrutiny. One cannot assert that socialization causes girls to opt out of math and science when girls take as many math and science courses as boys in grades K–12, achieve higher grades in them, and major in college math in roughly equal numbers to males. Moreover, survey evidence of parental attitudes and behaviors undermines the socialization argument, at least for recent cohorts (Ceci & Williams, 2010).

Ceci SJ, Williams WM. Sex Differences in Math-Intensive Fields. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2010 Oct 1;19(5):275-279. doi: 10.1177/0963721410383241. PMID: 21152367; PMCID: PMC2997703.

The very existence of analytically exceptional women must be explained away as an aberration in the name of sisterhood. Women who succeed in technical fields are often overlooked or treated as statistical anomalies, rather than examples of variance.

If statistical variance is accepted, equality of outcome is impossible. This is why variance is denied: acceptance would undermine PMC authority and the institutions built on engineered equality. If variance is real, natural hierarchies are inevitable. Hierarchies based on ability cannot be reconciled with feminism’s egalitarian claims.

Life outcomes cannot be reduced to a single variable of discrimination. Attitudes are self-reported and cannot be measured. Scientific rigor demands controlling for multiple variables to separate correlation from causation. The professional class’s reliance on single-variable explanations is not analysis but blindness to probability. It leaves no room for pattern recognition, which requires probabilistic thinking. Ironically, the current wave of technological disruption is founded on probability.

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For paid subscribers: deep cuts

Analytical ability matters; credentialism is a form of female hierarchy, and how I came to succeed.

V. Analytical ability as civilizational glue

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