Interesting insights. I have a forthcoming essay on Toxic Empathy and I've linked in this essay in the footnotes (yes, ironic given your footnote comment 😆)
By most people's standards I have too much personal experience with women. And especially in the last 5-10 years I've been unable to stomach reading anything from the mainstream press - the language from the mostly female journalists is exactly the same as when women are trying to manipulate you to get something or other. Whether it's even deliberate and conscious or not I don't know and it doesn't matter.
But it's quite flagrant, while at the same time not just tactically but strategically corrosive: credentialism gives the illusion that terminology established in the language game of that domain is the proper and polite set of concepts to use. In the modern knowledge economy of snappy zinger takes and sarcastic memes, the presentation of the requisite distinct semantics of analysis necessary for good faith consideration of contemporary phenomena then carries the social aesthetics of being jarring and uncouth.
There's something called 'Integral Theory', created by Ken Wilbur. He organizes moral impulses and behaviors into 6 levels, with the top being a full understanding of the complexity of the world and the needs of others PLUS a strong and self-directed and consistent ethical instinct.
Controversially, some of the people who use his model claim that men usually top out at level 4: rules/rigid norms/law & order. Women usually top out at level 3: being nice to everybody.
The idea is that (overt) niceness (and appearing to be nice) as a primary impulse is wonderful when raising children and dealing with the in-group but it can lead a group badly astray when it's applied to public policy or criminal justice or foreign affairs. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the rot and dysfunction in our politics and institutions originates in this idea that niceness is more important than rules, and more important than truth. It's a moral intuition, and so it's no amenable to change by argument.
Women may have sneakier ways of aggressing against enemies and rivals, and they may struggle with direct and difficult conversations more than men (on average), but it could also be that feminine group moral instincts are poorly suited for settings outside of the intimate group and community.
I'm sure academia and the legacy media will begin exploring and debating these possibilities in a fair and vigorous way any day now.
Absolutely, you're on the money as usual. The reason female coded spaces can't tolerate dissent is that it's not nice or polite, as the truth never is. Especially honesty from someone like me about when we've been mistreated, even though there's a stated concern about the mistreatment of women. Women often cannot tolerate their self concept as nice being attacked by someone who's been hurt by them, so it's justified away. That right there is moral rot because your self concept becomes more important than how you actually treated someone, and this metastasized into cancel culture. And yes, feminine moral instincts are maladaptive for anything other than communal child rearing. It's not that individual women can't transcend this, and many do, as I've met on substack. But groups of women or a female dominated group will regress toward the mean of being nice over being truthful.
I’ve always found it funny when some feminists say war is a man’s game. That men are primitive because they throw punches, while women use words.
With male bullies, there’s a strange satisfaction in beating them. Win the exchange and they know they’ve been beaten. Sometimes, they even respect you for it. I love these kinds of stories because the underdog always has a chance of winning.
But with female bullies, it’s different. It’s not about proving who is the alpha. You’re expected to soften your edge and play nice. Even if you say something perfectly disarming to prove your value to the group, it’s not a win. No one in the group cares about character development. They're more like sirens pretending to have a warrior ethos—luring their enemies in with charm and beauty, only to drown them once they're in too deep.
And yet it seems men are the less primitive ones when it comes to organizing toward a shared goal. I’ve been thinking a lot about how stagnant organizations are afflicted with risk aversion, that may come from both men and women, but is nevertheless a feminized tendency. The suppression of competition among women is definitely part of what’s holding orgs back, and I imagine this is pronounced in the NGO world.
I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately too. One thing that stands out personally is how the agile framework was built on the idea of taking small, calculated risks that are easy to course-correct but significantly accelerate progress. And in contrast, waterfall frameworks were created in a time when leadership didn’t fully recognize the value of input from all tiers of a team.
Now, especially in the NGO world, there’s a growing push to move away from waterfall in all industries, not just big tech and startups so government programs can run like Apple stores. But it’s met with intense resistance from those who insist on having the final say, even when their input doesn’t substantively move the mission forward. In my experience, the biggest blockers tend to be those most invested in status, not impact.
Working in product, it’s the bane of my existence to see how much this costs—not just in budget, but in lost momentum. Decisions stall, innovations get delayed, and the mission suffers. It’s not always women who do this, but since many of them dominate NGOs, it drives this kind of gatekeeping that turns into the echo chambers we all know and love.
Perhaps women would be equally as physically violent as men, if we were endowed with the same strength. Since we don't have that prowess, the only way we can control our territory is through relational aggression. Good post as usual.
As a meta, I enjoy that you are linking older pieces you've already written throughout, in a way that seamlessly integrates. I like that you end on 4 clear principles, the latter 2 which especially speak to me.
I find evolutionary reasons for things to be rather shaky. Take physical structures, something that is relatively easy to fossilize, so we have a depth of knowledge about how organisms evolve over time. We still are learning new things about physical structures and how they are used *in currently living animals*.
Now, we can see a clear transition from different species of, for example, whale and speculate on how and why certain structures evolved. But, even then, we have no real way of knowing the truth.
So, how can we determine how and why *behaviours* evolved? A habit cannot fossilize, you can't find the impression of a personality, or a detailed record of how conflict was avoided, suppressed, egged on, or forgotten. At best, it is slightly more informed guessing.
I'm not arguing about any of the current observations of human social activity, but I am disputing how anyone could know the reason why hunter-gatherer societies did X or Y, because we don't know *if* hunter-gather societies did X or Y.
Women wouldn't be able to more emotionally manipulative if they weren't more emotionally intelligent. Emotionally intelligence is neither good nor bad, but it can be used for either.
"Every aspect of my life improved when I stopped conforming and caring about what women think." - the secret to happiness. One must instead watch what they do. Women will often lie about what they think, too.
Once I realized that my revealed and stated preferences were out of sync, all of the false consciousness washed away. That contradiction is at the heart of so much dysfunction. The most obvious being that women prefer masculine and dominant men on average but have demonized those traits in their stated preferences.
In a well functioning society, female norm-policing can be helpful. Men tend to be very explicit about competition & conflict, so the social mechanisms for keeping this healthy are also very explicit. Women tend to be more subjective & covert, so the social mechanisms are similar
Generally, men look forward & backward and women look sideways. A man’s first questions are “what is right?” and “Does it advance our goals?”. A woman’s is “What will other people think?”. This tendency leads women to be effective at organisation and poor at leadership
The feminisation of society is analogous to a gathering where everyone is well looked after and comfortable and well fed but no one is actually flying the plane
It's not that norms should never be policed, but in our case the wrong ones are being enforced: being polite and nice over the actual truth of how things work and how we treat others. And I agree, I've seen that men tend to be more concerned with truth seeking and debate each other more easily. Women very often cannot handle debate (save for the rare ones that I've found here). We have evolved to be concerned with what other women think because of the need to compete covertly. This means we're just going to have a harder time breaking with the pack in the name of seeking truth. I suspect this has a lot to do with the corporate dysfunction I've seen in my career too.
Thanks for writing this. Liberal education did not properly prepare me for the world and after trying my best to go along with it I would always end up rebelling against the indoctrination. On the bright side this conflict resulted in questioning reality on a deeper level, plus I accumulated valuable working class skills thanks to lack of career advancement.
Kudos for combining your insights with religious philosophy. You instantly became one of my favorite accounts just now.
Thank so much for the kind words. I feel you regarding your experience climbing through the classes. I too think my hourly wage jobs taught me about people in a way my professional jobs haven't. I do think my liberal education was a net good for me because now I can synthesize across disciplines and actually do philosophy, but I also haven't stopped reading the way I did in graduate school and being outside of academia makes heretical conclusions easier. I plan to go deeper into Indian philosophy soon so ty for that validation.
I have a vision of Anuradha delivering a version of this in a commencement graduation speech for the college of humanities at Columbia.
"Academia no longer uncovers truth but polices it. Open your eyes. Recognize the patterns. Trust your reason."
I see a level of mind corruption that has occurred within the mission of higher learning that instead of truly preparing female students for their entry into the merit-governed economy, our modern hunter-gatherer system if you will, it plants a larger seed of vulnerable narcissism, a passive-aggressive victim mindset, that is then amplified in groupthink by the tech nerds and their social media filtering algorithms. Instead of launching into the economy and learning the lessons of merit-based competition (i.e. learning to control your emotions, learn to forge and maintain productive relationships, and demonstrating strong performance delivering outcomes), any setback or failure requires targeting someone else to blame... with white males as the favorite target.
The social media algorithms amply this resistance to accepting the needed life lessons... to cause a digging in of heels blaming the patriarchy for causing a purposeful mismatch... a blocking of females from getting what they want... a falsehood as the meritocracy of life developed and refined itself over decades of trial-and-error testing prior to the rise of female dominance.
The female mind corruption is also fed by itself... with smaller families... more single child households... more females as heads of household usurping the fathers-child part of childhood development. The mother, because of her biology and evolutionary phycology, is more protective, tending to parent with more unconditional love... often resistant to required discipline for misbehavior. This creates a little narcissistic monster that believes she is a demi-God incapable of being wrong and expecting constant praise and adoration.
I have two sons, but if having had a daughter, I would have worked on developing the resilience, self-confidence and, most importantly, the skill of self-awareness, to absolutely eliminate any tendency toward a victim mindset.
The absence of logos and of men in the life of women has been a net negative, because there's no one to challenge us. Without integrating the two, my brain naturally tended toward interiority and entropy of emotions. It wasn't even that I needed a man literally to help me do that, but my partner did hold up a mirror and weirdly enough we both encouraged masculine traits in each other. I have to reach for that leadership ability and directness out in life, and my interior life is foremost about seeking truth and controlling my reactions. I couldn't have done that without philosophy, but these timeless concepts have been 1) rendered incoherent by philosophy departments and 2) aren't necessarily useful for women because we have the evolved need to care what other women think. The social cost of not doing so is high, and of course women are terrified of losing their friends. So the punishment of 'masculine' coded traits is part of the problem.
What is that common saying "women need adoration and men need admiration"?
If a woman I would be miffed at that, but based on my observations of life I do see this. I see it as a challenge in a lot of females I have worked with through the years as craving both when both tended to be at conflict with each other.
Certainly, I see men that crave adoration too... and frankly, they are often divorced men.
But there is a bigger challenge for females in general in the propensity for independence to be considered threatening and the female hive works to defeat that independence. Males tend to promote and reward independence.
You can see this at work in the NBA vs the WNBA. Caitlin Clark has come in and dominated in the WNBA... increasing interest, ticket sales and viewership for the entire league, and yet other team members have voiced their displeasure of the attention she gets... claiming racism and all sorts of terrible claims.
Now, in the NBA the players generally all acknowledge and applaud the top performers and only strive to do as well or better.
I don't think females that are independent top performers are so much demonstrating male traits as they are made lonely in the female hive and thus find themselves more at ease in the male hive.
Interesting insights. I have a forthcoming essay on Toxic Empathy and I've linked in this essay in the footnotes (yes, ironic given your footnote comment 😆)
By most people's standards I have too much personal experience with women. And especially in the last 5-10 years I've been unable to stomach reading anything from the mainstream press - the language from the mostly female journalists is exactly the same as when women are trying to manipulate you to get something or other. Whether it's even deliberate and conscious or not I don't know and it doesn't matter.
But it's quite flagrant, while at the same time not just tactically but strategically corrosive: credentialism gives the illusion that terminology established in the language game of that domain is the proper and polite set of concepts to use. In the modern knowledge economy of snappy zinger takes and sarcastic memes, the presentation of the requisite distinct semantics of analysis necessary for good faith consideration of contemporary phenomena then carries the social aesthetics of being jarring and uncouth.
There's something called 'Integral Theory', created by Ken Wilbur. He organizes moral impulses and behaviors into 6 levels, with the top being a full understanding of the complexity of the world and the needs of others PLUS a strong and self-directed and consistent ethical instinct.
Controversially, some of the people who use his model claim that men usually top out at level 4: rules/rigid norms/law & order. Women usually top out at level 3: being nice to everybody.
The idea is that (overt) niceness (and appearing to be nice) as a primary impulse is wonderful when raising children and dealing with the in-group but it can lead a group badly astray when it's applied to public policy or criminal justice or foreign affairs. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the rot and dysfunction in our politics and institutions originates in this idea that niceness is more important than rules, and more important than truth. It's a moral intuition, and so it's no amenable to change by argument.
Women may have sneakier ways of aggressing against enemies and rivals, and they may struggle with direct and difficult conversations more than men (on average), but it could also be that feminine group moral instincts are poorly suited for settings outside of the intimate group and community.
I'm sure academia and the legacy media will begin exploring and debating these possibilities in a fair and vigorous way any day now.
Absolutely, you're on the money as usual. The reason female coded spaces can't tolerate dissent is that it's not nice or polite, as the truth never is. Especially honesty from someone like me about when we've been mistreated, even though there's a stated concern about the mistreatment of women. Women often cannot tolerate their self concept as nice being attacked by someone who's been hurt by them, so it's justified away. That right there is moral rot because your self concept becomes more important than how you actually treated someone, and this metastasized into cancel culture. And yes, feminine moral instincts are maladaptive for anything other than communal child rearing. It's not that individual women can't transcend this, and many do, as I've met on substack. But groups of women or a female dominated group will regress toward the mean of being nice over being truthful.
So much to think about here. Thanks so much for writing it.
I’ve always found it funny when some feminists say war is a man’s game. That men are primitive because they throw punches, while women use words.
With male bullies, there’s a strange satisfaction in beating them. Win the exchange and they know they’ve been beaten. Sometimes, they even respect you for it. I love these kinds of stories because the underdog always has a chance of winning.
But with female bullies, it’s different. It’s not about proving who is the alpha. You’re expected to soften your edge and play nice. Even if you say something perfectly disarming to prove your value to the group, it’s not a win. No one in the group cares about character development. They're more like sirens pretending to have a warrior ethos—luring their enemies in with charm and beauty, only to drown them once they're in too deep.
And yet it seems men are the less primitive ones when it comes to organizing toward a shared goal. I’ve been thinking a lot about how stagnant organizations are afflicted with risk aversion, that may come from both men and women, but is nevertheless a feminized tendency. The suppression of competition among women is definitely part of what’s holding orgs back, and I imagine this is pronounced in the NGO world.
I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately too. One thing that stands out personally is how the agile framework was built on the idea of taking small, calculated risks that are easy to course-correct but significantly accelerate progress. And in contrast, waterfall frameworks were created in a time when leadership didn’t fully recognize the value of input from all tiers of a team.
Now, especially in the NGO world, there’s a growing push to move away from waterfall in all industries, not just big tech and startups so government programs can run like Apple stores. But it’s met with intense resistance from those who insist on having the final say, even when their input doesn’t substantively move the mission forward. In my experience, the biggest blockers tend to be those most invested in status, not impact.
Working in product, it’s the bane of my existence to see how much this costs—not just in budget, but in lost momentum. Decisions stall, innovations get delayed, and the mission suffers. It’s not always women who do this, but since many of them dominate NGOs, it drives this kind of gatekeeping that turns into the echo chambers we all know and love.
I believe it was H.L. Mencken who said “A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate each other.”
Perhaps women would be equally as physically violent as men, if we were endowed with the same strength. Since we don't have that prowess, the only way we can control our territory is through relational aggression. Good post as usual.
As a meta, I enjoy that you are linking older pieces you've already written throughout, in a way that seamlessly integrates. I like that you end on 4 clear principles, the latter 2 which especially speak to me.
Looks like men and women could be what we appear to be, two struggling halves of a single striving whole, not the same but not so different either.
I find evolutionary reasons for things to be rather shaky. Take physical structures, something that is relatively easy to fossilize, so we have a depth of knowledge about how organisms evolve over time. We still are learning new things about physical structures and how they are used *in currently living animals*.
Now, we can see a clear transition from different species of, for example, whale and speculate on how and why certain structures evolved. But, even then, we have no real way of knowing the truth.
So, how can we determine how and why *behaviours* evolved? A habit cannot fossilize, you can't find the impression of a personality, or a detailed record of how conflict was avoided, suppressed, egged on, or forgotten. At best, it is slightly more informed guessing.
I'm not arguing about any of the current observations of human social activity, but I am disputing how anyone could know the reason why hunter-gatherer societies did X or Y, because we don't know *if* hunter-gather societies did X or Y.
Women wouldn't be able to more emotionally manipulative if they weren't more emotionally intelligent. Emotionally intelligence is neither good nor bad, but it can be used for either.
"Every aspect of my life improved when I stopped conforming and caring about what women think." - the secret to happiness. One must instead watch what they do. Women will often lie about what they think, too.
Once I realized that my revealed and stated preferences were out of sync, all of the false consciousness washed away. That contradiction is at the heart of so much dysfunction. The most obvious being that women prefer masculine and dominant men on average but have demonized those traits in their stated preferences.
I just had this conversation with four Karen's. My wife would say, "know your audience." Cognitive dissonance is real. I narrowly escaped violence.
In a well functioning society, female norm-policing can be helpful. Men tend to be very explicit about competition & conflict, so the social mechanisms for keeping this healthy are also very explicit. Women tend to be more subjective & covert, so the social mechanisms are similar
Generally, men look forward & backward and women look sideways. A man’s first questions are “what is right?” and “Does it advance our goals?”. A woman’s is “What will other people think?”. This tendency leads women to be effective at organisation and poor at leadership
The feminisation of society is analogous to a gathering where everyone is well looked after and comfortable and well fed but no one is actually flying the plane
It's not that norms should never be policed, but in our case the wrong ones are being enforced: being polite and nice over the actual truth of how things work and how we treat others. And I agree, I've seen that men tend to be more concerned with truth seeking and debate each other more easily. Women very often cannot handle debate (save for the rare ones that I've found here). We have evolved to be concerned with what other women think because of the need to compete covertly. This means we're just going to have a harder time breaking with the pack in the name of seeking truth. I suspect this has a lot to do with the corporate dysfunction I've seen in my career too.
In other words... Don't put the cat on a pedestal?
Also, the cat pass is real.
You know what I mean.
Thanks for writing this. Liberal education did not properly prepare me for the world and after trying my best to go along with it I would always end up rebelling against the indoctrination. On the bright side this conflict resulted in questioning reality on a deeper level, plus I accumulated valuable working class skills thanks to lack of career advancement.
Kudos for combining your insights with religious philosophy. You instantly became one of my favorite accounts just now.
Thank so much for the kind words. I feel you regarding your experience climbing through the classes. I too think my hourly wage jobs taught me about people in a way my professional jobs haven't. I do think my liberal education was a net good for me because now I can synthesize across disciplines and actually do philosophy, but I also haven't stopped reading the way I did in graduate school and being outside of academia makes heretical conclusions easier. I plan to go deeper into Indian philosophy soon so ty for that validation.
I have a vision of Anuradha delivering a version of this in a commencement graduation speech for the college of humanities at Columbia.
"Academia no longer uncovers truth but polices it. Open your eyes. Recognize the patterns. Trust your reason."
I see a level of mind corruption that has occurred within the mission of higher learning that instead of truly preparing female students for their entry into the merit-governed economy, our modern hunter-gatherer system if you will, it plants a larger seed of vulnerable narcissism, a passive-aggressive victim mindset, that is then amplified in groupthink by the tech nerds and their social media filtering algorithms. Instead of launching into the economy and learning the lessons of merit-based competition (i.e. learning to control your emotions, learn to forge and maintain productive relationships, and demonstrating strong performance delivering outcomes), any setback or failure requires targeting someone else to blame... with white males as the favorite target.
The social media algorithms amply this resistance to accepting the needed life lessons... to cause a digging in of heels blaming the patriarchy for causing a purposeful mismatch... a blocking of females from getting what they want... a falsehood as the meritocracy of life developed and refined itself over decades of trial-and-error testing prior to the rise of female dominance.
The female mind corruption is also fed by itself... with smaller families... more single child households... more females as heads of household usurping the fathers-child part of childhood development. The mother, because of her biology and evolutionary phycology, is more protective, tending to parent with more unconditional love... often resistant to required discipline for misbehavior. This creates a little narcissistic monster that believes she is a demi-God incapable of being wrong and expecting constant praise and adoration.
I have two sons, but if having had a daughter, I would have worked on developing the resilience, self-confidence and, most importantly, the skill of self-awareness, to absolutely eliminate any tendency toward a victim mindset.
The absence of logos and of men in the life of women has been a net negative, because there's no one to challenge us. Without integrating the two, my brain naturally tended toward interiority and entropy of emotions. It wasn't even that I needed a man literally to help me do that, but my partner did hold up a mirror and weirdly enough we both encouraged masculine traits in each other. I have to reach for that leadership ability and directness out in life, and my interior life is foremost about seeking truth and controlling my reactions. I couldn't have done that without philosophy, but these timeless concepts have been 1) rendered incoherent by philosophy departments and 2) aren't necessarily useful for women because we have the evolved need to care what other women think. The social cost of not doing so is high, and of course women are terrified of losing their friends. So the punishment of 'masculine' coded traits is part of the problem.
What is that common saying "women need adoration and men need admiration"?
If a woman I would be miffed at that, but based on my observations of life I do see this. I see it as a challenge in a lot of females I have worked with through the years as craving both when both tended to be at conflict with each other.
Certainly, I see men that crave adoration too... and frankly, they are often divorced men.
But there is a bigger challenge for females in general in the propensity for independence to be considered threatening and the female hive works to defeat that independence. Males tend to promote and reward independence.
You can see this at work in the NBA vs the WNBA. Caitlin Clark has come in and dominated in the WNBA... increasing interest, ticket sales and viewership for the entire league, and yet other team members have voiced their displeasure of the attention she gets... claiming racism and all sorts of terrible claims.
Now, in the NBA the players generally all acknowledge and applaud the top performers and only strive to do as well or better.
I don't think females that are independent top performers are so much demonstrating male traits as they are made lonely in the female hive and thus find themselves more at ease in the male hive.