The intellectual poverty of women's society

Truth seeking and emotional-relational speech norms cannot co-exist

This argument is about the structural patterns of women’s discourse, rather than about every single woman. What I lay out here has also not been ‘studied’ for obvious reasons, although I have included some citations nonetheless. But let’s be real, the replication crisis of academic research means we have no way of knowing if a finding is still true even if I used it. Until the rise of credentialist managerialism, we relied on our own faculties and pattern recognition to discern things rather than outsourcing our thinking to individuals invested in ignoring ideologically inconvenient findings, such as the theory I’ve laid out here.

I had the comments off, but my readers convinced me to turn them on. However, they can only be enabled for paid subscribers on a paid post. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you are welcome to comment in the subscriber chat, which is open to all, write a note, or write a long-form rebuttal. I do love hearing from you and will turn them back on after I’ve decluttered my brain. Finally, I will be taking a month-long break to focus on starting a new job and other hobbies I’ve neglected, and will return in October.

Thank you again for the gift of your attention and support in a noisy world.

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In a room full of strangers, I find a man to speak with because the rules of engagement are clear. I’m likely to get a default leftist political view thrown in my face in the first five minutes from a woman in any major city. I can connect with men in the realm of ideas, while I rarely find this to be true among women because of our dominant relational style. Even with the women I know able to think abstractly, we tend to default to relational and emotional topics with each other because they’re safe, and no one can challenge them. They’re not ideas, but a series of reports about things that happened to us or people we know.

Women spend an inordinate amount of time dissecting their own problems and those of others with their friends. This has a twofold function: not rocking the boat to raise children in a group (prehistorically) and giving each other ammunition for mutually assured destruction in the event of the friendship breaking up.¹ This is our context for considering the women’s social norms and their effect on political outcomes.

I. Regression to the mean is inevitable: status over truth

I recently had an evening with a small group of creative people in Austin, split evenly along gender lines. But as I’ve explored before, the default mode of mixed gender groups is deference to the most vulnerable and emotionally oriented woman in the group. There is a regression to the mean; in mixed gender groups, abstract thoughts and debate are banished in the name of politeness. Of course, in a room of creative class people, everyone will say they want debate to signal the openness that this class values so much. But they don’t actually practice openness to new ideas. Indeed, women are almost entirely unlikely to test ideas in a social setting to reach the truth because reports about people and relationships dominate our conversations.² That’s like nails on a chalkboard for me.

This isn’t just about a fear women tend to have of being wrong, but also about the reflexive tendency to preserve social cohesion and build consensus. Debate inherently destabilizes consensus, and the dialectical method cannot be harmonious. Truth-seeking always becomes the bottom concern in both co-ed and women’s spaces unless more than one person elevates it as primary. The default mode of such spaces ends up therapeutic, which is why I point it out so much these days. Usually, I’m impelled to be the disturber of the peace, but that evening, I wasn’t courageous enough to tell the other woman of color in the room she was wrong.

Everyone went around the room initially sharing something about themselves and giving the group a question to ponder.³ Every woman was long-winded (disrespectful of the group’s time) and asked questions about specific relational or emotional phenomena (a sub-par use of the forum).

As women often do in my social circles these days, one said she wanted to know people’s opinions about “everything going on in the world” because she “wants to understand different perspectives.” When a woman says this, she’s talking about how much she hates Trump and can’t fathom why anyone voted for him, but she says it obliquely to signal open-mindedness and perform professional class manners. This kind of woman says she wants to debate ideas, but in practice, she wants a chance to assert hers as superior and morally righteous.

Everyone knew this, so no one bothered actually having the conversation. Men knew there was nothing good that could come of it, and I was likely the only woman who disagreed. There was one Trump voter in the room whom I knew, and he later said he kept seeing my eyebrows give away my actual opinion.⁴ Neither of us said anything because we both knew better.

The woman of color said that this group of people was an example of a debate society, while she, in practice, monopolized the conversation and kept it in vague emotional-relational territory. She revealed herself as highly concerned with representation, but she was exclusionary in her need to constantly interject and hold court in a room of twelve people. She had a soliloquy for half an hour (I was watching the clock) while we were all going around the room answering a specific question. She saw nothing wrong with this behavior when the host politely called her out. I wish I had redirected the conversation or challenged her or any other woman over the course of four hours, but I was a coward.

II. Women’s intellect suffers from banishing debate

And this leaves us with the structural problem with female social norms: they stifle both truth and debate, and as a result keep women less informed and sharp than we might otherwise be. The smothering of critical thinking in groups of women turns debate into something only allowed in male spaces, which is irrational and holds women back. In my life, I’ve not seen truth-seeking be the primary concern in a single coed or women’s group. Only when I’m the only woman in the room is it possible for me to be engaged as I prefer. This also isn’t a question of women being uncomfortable debating in front of men. They just tend not to value it. I’ve seen women socially be more comfortable debating men than other women. Whenever I try, the discomfort is palpable.

Women’s resistance to sharpening our ideas through debate is a root cause of our political malaise. Longtime readers know that theories from women’s studies departments are the foundation of what we call ‘wokeness’ today, and women are the primary enforcers of the identitarian leftist ideologies that have replaced classical liberalism among the educated class. And these irrational beliefs about sacred victims and the holiness of identity are born in exactly the social context I describe: spaces unable to tolerate debate and rational exchange, ruled by status games and emotional vulnerability theater.