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.
It is pathological that we experiment with every chemical blend possible attempting to generate a template of inherited moral superiority relating to sex and gender. How do you create a mix of matter outside of your own control that fulfills a personal spiritual task? It's like trying to build a sandcastle at the bottom of the ocean and getting upset it's not a beautiful, permanent structure. Perhaps that's because its pitch black down there, dangerous, and the sandcastle keeps washing away because its dyed sugar. Instead, we are meant to build with those on the land with materials suited for the terrain and task. Not stay underwater blaming each other why it sucks living in a dark underwater sugarcastle and fighting a war to sweeten an ocean of salt.
This is beautifully put. And as James said above, this is because being nice is valued above being morally upright and being accountable for one's actions and their impact on the social good and on individual others. Being nice and polite (which women excel at for clear reasons) cannot be a moral foundation - it is sand. Truth must be foundation, but we've rendered truth incoherent and subjective.
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.
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.
this is the best essay on the subject i've ever read. let's get married
If only I wasn’t engaged lol. Thank you, and for being a paid subscriber. Much appreciated.
i am not. is it telling you i am?
No actually you’re not, that was me misreading someone else’s. Sorry!
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.
It is pathological that we experiment with every chemical blend possible attempting to generate a template of inherited moral superiority relating to sex and gender. How do you create a mix of matter outside of your own control that fulfills a personal spiritual task? It's like trying to build a sandcastle at the bottom of the ocean and getting upset it's not a beautiful, permanent structure. Perhaps that's because its pitch black down there, dangerous, and the sandcastle keeps washing away because its dyed sugar. Instead, we are meant to build with those on the land with materials suited for the terrain and task. Not stay underwater blaming each other why it sucks living in a dark underwater sugarcastle and fighting a war to sweeten an ocean of salt.
This is beautifully put. And as James said above, this is because being nice is valued above being morally upright and being accountable for one's actions and their impact on the social good and on individual others. Being nice and polite (which women excel at for clear reasons) cannot be a moral foundation - it is sand. Truth must be foundation, but we've rendered truth incoherent and subjective.
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.