Very enlightening conversation with Ancient Problemz. I shared it with my lefty cousin in the hopes that he might be started on a similar journey. Your highlighting with lack of masculinity of men in leftist spaces was particularly resonant with my own experience. None of them work out, and they tend to be either slobs or scrawny manlets. Not joking here: I don’t know a single one who could go 10 rounds with a moderately fit 12 year old. This makes sense since Marx would probably say muscles should be redistributed from the people who worked &out to those who don’t do it, and they’re waiting until they probably believe they’ll get to do that when they get back into power. Maybe they think working out is a violation of whatever CRT thing they’re spouting these days.
The centrality of female versus male qualities in these spaces is also very important. The two Petersons( Dr. Jordan Peterson and Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson) talk a lot about the importance of masculinity and logos in a healthy society. They opened my eyes to the hypocrisy and cruelty of the left. Your analysis reminds me a lot of theirs: did you take any inspiration there?
Anyways, we need more leftists to see the light as you did if for no other reason than the fact that there will be a lot less censorship of opinions that way.
Thank you good sir. I always appreciate hearing from people who sort of sensed something but didn't have the words. I have actually only seen a video or two of Peterson's, but I assume he discusses similar topics. I did see that he was willing to call out feminization, which made it more real for me. I just realized yesterday, actually, that feminism and feminization are different problems. Feminism happens to support feminization, but the PMC was feminized from day 1. The imperatives of managerial capitalism require feminized doublespeak, heavy bureaucracy, and process over outcomes. These trends took hold regardless of women's presence in the workforce, but their presence certainly entrenched them further. Feminism provides the governing logic of managerial capitalism, even if capitalism doesn't strictly need women to run. That said, we need women to be consumers, and their presence in the PMC ensures that they will be uber consumers.
I wish I could say that I think leftists would see the light, but tribalism holds them back as it holds back the MAGA right. It's the same principle at play on both extremes: resistance to reality-testing your beliefs and prioritizing social approval over what's correct or morally upright. If I hadn't been socially ostracized, I might never have seen the light. And actually, if I had been born into a professional-class family, I might never have been so class-conscious and sensitive to status signaling. It was always the basis of my exclusion, so I couldn't help but notice. This has thereby made me extraordinarily sensitive to status games, and seeing those is what sent me over the edge. Finally, what led me to read widely again, as I did in school, was getting off social media. I got off it because of the aforementioned exclusion, realizing that it had impaired my brain. I truly had to give up the idea that I could be socially accepted or even have friends if I were this way. That's a significant price to expect most people to pay, unfortunately. Your cousin building some muscles might go a long way in all this. I felt like a different person once I had some strength, like the muscles were actually the source of confidence rather than anything mental. I wasn't expecting that.
I thoroughly enjoyed your thinking and writing in this article. Very thought provoking.
I have often wondered why the world suddenly went mad for woke discourse and identitarian obsessions. It has been a bit maddening to me that these discussions have replaced the much more useful and established discussions of class dynamics. Identitarianism is totally missing the boat IMO. I attributed the identity shift to some kind of creeping political correctness compounded by everyone being cooped up and online and going mad from lack of social contact during the pandemic (not to mention too much navel gazing). This furthermore being compounded by other trigger events, eg, murders-by-cops against POCs.
Your take on women’s discourse, intellectualism, and group dynamics was a new, eye-opening one for me; for several reasons.
1) I’m a generation ahead of the millennials, and my interactions with your crew are limited to engagement with work colleagues and my son and his male and female friends. Although my son’s crew discuss politics a lot, they seem more grounded in rationality and argumentation.
2) My professional work was in the technology sector and product development, which trends heavily male, logical and fact-based (for the most part), and traffics very little with social identity and politics.
3) I’m married to a woman of Mexican origin, who although very liberal doesn’t move through the world in the way that American women do. Ergo, I’m not exposed to this from her side.
4) I don’t personally follow gender issues in detail, and I absolutely don’t follow (or frankly care that much) about the group dynamics of educated American social-warrior women. Perhaps I should, although I seriously doubt that I’m about to start. ;-)
5) I’m a student of cognitive and social bias, and my lens for viewing these changes to the discourse was a bit of column A & column B. I neither saw nor understood the gender-driving angle. How’s that for cognitive and social biases of my own? :-)))
We recently left the USA, so these discourses don't factor into the culture and lifestyle in our new country. Happy to report that the more traditional issues of class and race are still alive and well here (justifiably so).
At any rate, I still try to keep up on the news and thinking from “home”. Very much appreciate what you did here.
Thank you; I'm glad it gave you something new. I take it your son is from Gen Z? I've heard that Gen Z men tend to be less left-leaning than millennials, but I also assume that his friend circle is mostly men, which would explain the tenor of the discussion. Men seem to be more able to tolerate ideological differences in their friend groups.
I am a LOT happier since I entered a technical profession and frankly, a male-dominated environment. I fit in better, even though you'd expect the opposite, and men seem to respect women who get shit done. I didn't encounter nearly the level of sexism I expected, though sexual harassment is always an occupational hazard. That said, I learned how to deal with it differently when it did happen because I was acting from a place of empowerment, ironically. It seems like what I describe is mostly an affliction of professional-class women, regardless of race. White and Indian-American women are the most effective carriers of the mind virus, and as I said in the conversation, we are the useful idiots of PMC white women. I don't think you need to care about it so much as be attuned to its systemic effects, which people pretend don't exist. Of course, women are the most invested in this pretense. I don't think gender explains all of it; gender plus class explains most of it, though, and the evolutionary lens is particularly important here. For me, that was the missing piece of understanding why things are how they are. Rob Henderson recently said he gets criticized for applying evo psych to too many phenomena, but this stuff isn't random. It's deeply driven by the need to 1) stay alive and 2) reproduce, even if the person in question doesn't plan to reproduce and is in no immediate danger of dying. Millennia of inherited traits can't just be transcended in a mere half-century.
1. I think it was Camile Paglia who pointed out that conservatives are responsible for a disproportionate amount of groundbreaking scholarship, not because they are so much smarter or their ideas are so much better, but because they have to have their facts and logic in order, lest the consensus pounce.
A thespian lemonist of my acquaintance pointed out something similar about gay men being responsible for a disproportionate amount of interesting academic work, while lesbians being responsible for comparatively little. Her theory was because gay men live to bring each other down, while lesbians are afraid to give each other offense.
2. Anyway, taking as given that women's discourse is "wired" as you claim - what does anyone propose to do about it?
1. I have seen this floating in the aether: eventually, thinking women think themselves into conservatism. And I have indeed come to understand the need for conservatism in one's personal life, even if I don't think conservative ideology in US politics is sound. The two are separate, but I think people who are conservative in their lives probably also understand that humans mostly require carrots and sticks to do the right thing, even if there's a small minority that will do the right thing no matter what. Altruism is present among humans, but most humans do not act in accordance with the greater good. Life is too complex to expect it.
2. The only thing that can be done about it is at the micro level; people need to stop being afraid of challenging shitty ideas in the open, especially men. Men and women both need to stop being too scared to say something for fear of being called racist or sexist; that is what the crazies depend on. They depend on people saying nothing so their opinion appears to be the majority one and the overton window narrows. We need to be more willing to lose social ties for speaking the truth. That's what I had to do. I recognize that most people, especially women, may not be able to tolerate this. But that's why men need to stop being silent. More than one man has said he uses my writing as ammunition, but that kind of man should just speak his mind instead of needing me to give him the words. What I hope I'm doing is arming people with arguments.
I try to avoid any ideology, as ideology short circuits critical thinking.
That said, the rules of discourse are different for human males and females. If a woman speaks the Holy P.C. Trinity to a woman "that's racist, sexist and homophobic!" the outcome and consequences are very different if a woman say this to a dude.
Whether this is good or bad is irrelevant. It just is.
Hmm, this is interesting. It’s not my world at all, but given all the talk about the “ideological capture” of the humanities by progressives over the past decades, I’d think that few people would be applying gendered/etc “fax n logic” tropes to the humanities in academia. I’ve yet to become properly acquainted w/her work or postings on here, but @Catherine Liu (class-conscious and identitarianism-skeptical “WOC” humanities scholar) may be just the person to know all about these things.
As a guy, women's communication norms affect not only my relationships with women, but my ability to form friendships with other guys. My boss at the last job I was at was not only respectable, but a guy I could hang out with on weekends. But his girlfriend was uncompromising about certain socio-political ideas and there was no question he would prioritize a long-term serious relationship over a casual friendship.
I guess I'm trying to say please keep speaking the truth. The implications reach farther than you might imagine.
That's really a shame, because I've wondered what is behind men losing their friendships after pairing off. Men not being friends with other women makes perfect sense; why would you want your partner to hang out with other women without you or be close to them? Even if I think it is unfortunate for myself, it makes sense. However, men losing their male friends appears to have two sources: men themselves deciding to pull back, and/or their spouses/partners asking them to. Male friends have confirmed that it is potentially both. Actually, my ex-husband simply had so much social anxiety that he refused to keep in touch with his friends, even though I encouraged it. But then another friend of mine said his ex-wife basically compelled him to end his social life. Some of this can also be caused by children, given how much work they require, even if the man wants to maintain a life, and his wife doesn't care. In the case of your friend, I presume he doesn't actually agree with her about everything but chooses the keep the peace. That aligns with what I've observed among friends as well. It's truly unfortunate, because other men have reported that the women on the left they're with also don't necessarily respect them because of the imperative to hate men. So I don't know where that leaves us; I can't expect men not to pair off with leftist women, but it does have far-reaching implications for society at large that men are being domesticated by leftist ideology.
Thank you for your final exhortation; it reminds me that the effort matters. I've been grinding away for 18 months and it's been yielding fruit because I realized that people seem to use my words to spark discussions in their lives. If that happens, I will have succeeded.
I get a lot of hate but a lot of people seem to really see this and appreciate it so I’ll continue. I even influenced a gen z woman recently to see things differently.
Very enlightening conversation with Ancient Problemz. I shared it with my lefty cousin in the hopes that he might be started on a similar journey. Your highlighting with lack of masculinity of men in leftist spaces was particularly resonant with my own experience. None of them work out, and they tend to be either slobs or scrawny manlets. Not joking here: I don’t know a single one who could go 10 rounds with a moderately fit 12 year old. This makes sense since Marx would probably say muscles should be redistributed from the people who worked &out to those who don’t do it, and they’re waiting until they probably believe they’ll get to do that when they get back into power. Maybe they think working out is a violation of whatever CRT thing they’re spouting these days.
The centrality of female versus male qualities in these spaces is also very important. The two Petersons( Dr. Jordan Peterson and Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson) talk a lot about the importance of masculinity and logos in a healthy society. They opened my eyes to the hypocrisy and cruelty of the left. Your analysis reminds me a lot of theirs: did you take any inspiration there?
Anyways, we need more leftists to see the light as you did if for no other reason than the fact that there will be a lot less censorship of opinions that way.
Thank you good sir. I always appreciate hearing from people who sort of sensed something but didn't have the words. I have actually only seen a video or two of Peterson's, but I assume he discusses similar topics. I did see that he was willing to call out feminization, which made it more real for me. I just realized yesterday, actually, that feminism and feminization are different problems. Feminism happens to support feminization, but the PMC was feminized from day 1. The imperatives of managerial capitalism require feminized doublespeak, heavy bureaucracy, and process over outcomes. These trends took hold regardless of women's presence in the workforce, but their presence certainly entrenched them further. Feminism provides the governing logic of managerial capitalism, even if capitalism doesn't strictly need women to run. That said, we need women to be consumers, and their presence in the PMC ensures that they will be uber consumers.
I wish I could say that I think leftists would see the light, but tribalism holds them back as it holds back the MAGA right. It's the same principle at play on both extremes: resistance to reality-testing your beliefs and prioritizing social approval over what's correct or morally upright. If I hadn't been socially ostracized, I might never have seen the light. And actually, if I had been born into a professional-class family, I might never have been so class-conscious and sensitive to status signaling. It was always the basis of my exclusion, so I couldn't help but notice. This has thereby made me extraordinarily sensitive to status games, and seeing those is what sent me over the edge. Finally, what led me to read widely again, as I did in school, was getting off social media. I got off it because of the aforementioned exclusion, realizing that it had impaired my brain. I truly had to give up the idea that I could be socially accepted or even have friends if I were this way. That's a significant price to expect most people to pay, unfortunately. Your cousin building some muscles might go a long way in all this. I felt like a different person once I had some strength, like the muscles were actually the source of confidence rather than anything mental. I wasn't expecting that.
I thoroughly enjoyed your thinking and writing in this article. Very thought provoking.
I have often wondered why the world suddenly went mad for woke discourse and identitarian obsessions. It has been a bit maddening to me that these discussions have replaced the much more useful and established discussions of class dynamics. Identitarianism is totally missing the boat IMO. I attributed the identity shift to some kind of creeping political correctness compounded by everyone being cooped up and online and going mad from lack of social contact during the pandemic (not to mention too much navel gazing). This furthermore being compounded by other trigger events, eg, murders-by-cops against POCs.
Your take on women’s discourse, intellectualism, and group dynamics was a new, eye-opening one for me; for several reasons.
1) I’m a generation ahead of the millennials, and my interactions with your crew are limited to engagement with work colleagues and my son and his male and female friends. Although my son’s crew discuss politics a lot, they seem more grounded in rationality and argumentation.
2) My professional work was in the technology sector and product development, which trends heavily male, logical and fact-based (for the most part), and traffics very little with social identity and politics.
3) I’m married to a woman of Mexican origin, who although very liberal doesn’t move through the world in the way that American women do. Ergo, I’m not exposed to this from her side.
4) I don’t personally follow gender issues in detail, and I absolutely don’t follow (or frankly care that much) about the group dynamics of educated American social-warrior women. Perhaps I should, although I seriously doubt that I’m about to start. ;-)
5) I’m a student of cognitive and social bias, and my lens for viewing these changes to the discourse was a bit of column A & column B. I neither saw nor understood the gender-driving angle. How’s that for cognitive and social biases of my own? :-)))
We recently left the USA, so these discourses don't factor into the culture and lifestyle in our new country. Happy to report that the more traditional issues of class and race are still alive and well here (justifiably so).
At any rate, I still try to keep up on the news and thinking from “home”. Very much appreciate what you did here.
Thank you; I'm glad it gave you something new. I take it your son is from Gen Z? I've heard that Gen Z men tend to be less left-leaning than millennials, but I also assume that his friend circle is mostly men, which would explain the tenor of the discussion. Men seem to be more able to tolerate ideological differences in their friend groups.
I am a LOT happier since I entered a technical profession and frankly, a male-dominated environment. I fit in better, even though you'd expect the opposite, and men seem to respect women who get shit done. I didn't encounter nearly the level of sexism I expected, though sexual harassment is always an occupational hazard. That said, I learned how to deal with it differently when it did happen because I was acting from a place of empowerment, ironically. It seems like what I describe is mostly an affliction of professional-class women, regardless of race. White and Indian-American women are the most effective carriers of the mind virus, and as I said in the conversation, we are the useful idiots of PMC white women. I don't think you need to care about it so much as be attuned to its systemic effects, which people pretend don't exist. Of course, women are the most invested in this pretense. I don't think gender explains all of it; gender plus class explains most of it, though, and the evolutionary lens is particularly important here. For me, that was the missing piece of understanding why things are how they are. Rob Henderson recently said he gets criticized for applying evo psych to too many phenomena, but this stuff isn't random. It's deeply driven by the need to 1) stay alive and 2) reproduce, even if the person in question doesn't plan to reproduce and is in no immediate danger of dying. Millennia of inherited traits can't just be transcended in a mere half-century.
1. I think it was Camile Paglia who pointed out that conservatives are responsible for a disproportionate amount of groundbreaking scholarship, not because they are so much smarter or their ideas are so much better, but because they have to have their facts and logic in order, lest the consensus pounce.
A thespian lemonist of my acquaintance pointed out something similar about gay men being responsible for a disproportionate amount of interesting academic work, while lesbians being responsible for comparatively little. Her theory was because gay men live to bring each other down, while lesbians are afraid to give each other offense.
2. Anyway, taking as given that women's discourse is "wired" as you claim - what does anyone propose to do about it?
1. I have seen this floating in the aether: eventually, thinking women think themselves into conservatism. And I have indeed come to understand the need for conservatism in one's personal life, even if I don't think conservative ideology in US politics is sound. The two are separate, but I think people who are conservative in their lives probably also understand that humans mostly require carrots and sticks to do the right thing, even if there's a small minority that will do the right thing no matter what. Altruism is present among humans, but most humans do not act in accordance with the greater good. Life is too complex to expect it.
2. The only thing that can be done about it is at the micro level; people need to stop being afraid of challenging shitty ideas in the open, especially men. Men and women both need to stop being too scared to say something for fear of being called racist or sexist; that is what the crazies depend on. They depend on people saying nothing so their opinion appears to be the majority one and the overton window narrows. We need to be more willing to lose social ties for speaking the truth. That's what I had to do. I recognize that most people, especially women, may not be able to tolerate this. But that's why men need to stop being silent. More than one man has said he uses my writing as ammunition, but that kind of man should just speak his mind instead of needing me to give him the words. What I hope I'm doing is arming people with arguments.
I try to avoid any ideology, as ideology short circuits critical thinking.
That said, the rules of discourse are different for human males and females. If a woman speaks the Holy P.C. Trinity to a woman "that's racist, sexist and homophobic!" the outcome and consequences are very different if a woman say this to a dude.
Whether this is good or bad is irrelevant. It just is.
Are we talking STEM or humanities (re: both Paglia’s assertion and gay men vs lesbians)?
I suspect the humanities. Axtually, thinking back, the thespian might have been bi.
Hmm, this is interesting. It’s not my world at all, but given all the talk about the “ideological capture” of the humanities by progressives over the past decades, I’d think that few people would be applying gendered/etc “fax n logic” tropes to the humanities in academia. I’ve yet to become properly acquainted w/her work or postings on here, but @Catherine Liu (class-conscious and identitarianism-skeptical “WOC” humanities scholar) may be just the person to know all about these things.
I’m familiar with her, but I didnt fully get your comment. What’s wrong with expecting liberal arts to be taught emphasizing logic and reason?
As a guy, women's communication norms affect not only my relationships with women, but my ability to form friendships with other guys. My boss at the last job I was at was not only respectable, but a guy I could hang out with on weekends. But his girlfriend was uncompromising about certain socio-political ideas and there was no question he would prioritize a long-term serious relationship over a casual friendship.
I guess I'm trying to say please keep speaking the truth. The implications reach farther than you might imagine.
That's really a shame, because I've wondered what is behind men losing their friendships after pairing off. Men not being friends with other women makes perfect sense; why would you want your partner to hang out with other women without you or be close to them? Even if I think it is unfortunate for myself, it makes sense. However, men losing their male friends appears to have two sources: men themselves deciding to pull back, and/or their spouses/partners asking them to. Male friends have confirmed that it is potentially both. Actually, my ex-husband simply had so much social anxiety that he refused to keep in touch with his friends, even though I encouraged it. But then another friend of mine said his ex-wife basically compelled him to end his social life. Some of this can also be caused by children, given how much work they require, even if the man wants to maintain a life, and his wife doesn't care. In the case of your friend, I presume he doesn't actually agree with her about everything but chooses the keep the peace. That aligns with what I've observed among friends as well. It's truly unfortunate, because other men have reported that the women on the left they're with also don't necessarily respect them because of the imperative to hate men. So I don't know where that leaves us; I can't expect men not to pair off with leftist women, but it does have far-reaching implications for society at large that men are being domesticated by leftist ideology.
Thank you for your final exhortation; it reminds me that the effort matters. I've been grinding away for 18 months and it's been yielding fruit because I realized that people seem to use my words to spark discussions in their lives. If that happens, I will have succeeded.
I get a lot of hate but a lot of people seem to really see this and appreciate it so I’ll continue. I even influenced a gen z woman recently to see things differently.
Mondel Minorities? Model Minorities?
thanks for the heads up