The intellectual poverty of women's society

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

Aug 24, 2025

This argument concerns the structural patterns of women’s discourse, rather than 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.

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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.

III. How female speech norms are hostile to wisdom

Knowledge and wisdom cannot foment where debate is banished. Women’s spaces are, therefore, reflexively anti-wisdom. Individual women in them may be wise, but the spaces are ruled by the lowest common denominator. Wisdom requires sharpening your knowledge, practicing discernment, and most importantly, acknowledging openly when you’re wrong. In practice, men are far more comfortable doing so despite the narrative. Their being less generally driven by emotion allows for this, which is why I bristle when I hear men should be more openly emotional.

Spaces ruled by progressive women structurally cannot tolerate truth because it often goes against ideology. Conversations produce political outcomes, not the other way around. Our society has been smothered by the rules of feminized discourse, which hold women back from becoming full humans and create a truth barrier between us and men. Men are simply more likely to want to discuss with me what’s actually happening because they see it too. But they’ve been silenced by women collectively imposing norms of acceptable discourse, whether consciously or not. This is not social progress but regression.

Our politics are broken because they’re based on the relational style of women: subjectivity and emotions over logical reasoning. And in case it was not clear, I think objective truths are reachable. Women’s relational style is the official norm enforcement regime in institutions like media, academia, non-profits, and government. Increasingly, women set the social norms for corporations and their output. This is a panopticon of social control we can’t fight overtly because it’s enforced in everyday interactions. I’m sure the men reading this have seen their workplaces overtaken by unspoken rules of speech and wondered how and why it happened. This is why.

Feminine relational-emotional speech norms cannot be the foundation of a functioning society. Logical reasoning must rule the public sphere, or we won’t ever escape our current malaise. It’s no accident that Democrats are the party that can’t seem to build anything new and are stuck in maintenance mode. Life seems to be a series of meetings and processes with poor outcomes.

When women try to argue that we don’t have power, I can’t help but chuckle. Everywhere I turn, we’re imposing our own preferences for emotionality onto the social context. While we need to experience emotions and use them as data, emotions do not determine truth.

Feminist philosophy claims emotions are a way of knowing, which betrays their hostility to being challenged based on objective truth claims. If you can dismiss rationality as toxic masculinity, you never have to learn to defend your ideas. This is where we get the insult ‘logicbro,’ so deftly deployed in daily internet arguments.

IV. Truth suppression in action

I’ve obliquely referred to a ‘writing’ group I was in that privileged comfort, therapeutic language, and emotional bonding over rigorous truth seeking. The conditions for my ejection, however, were set from the beginning, because the woman who ultimately removed me from the group began trying to bond with me by pointing out my engagement on Substack and complimenting my writing.

This woman also tried to extract vulnerabilities from me to assure mutual destruction, as I noted women often do above. I happened to have the largest and most engaged audience in that group, but I wasn’t using that as a means of status assertion because that just isn’t how I move about the world. I chase excellence instead because status has been a trap for me. It’s led me to chase the wrong goals in the past.

I was ultimately ejected because of a conflict with another woman over her behavior in controlling a meetup the group was trying to plan (never addressed directly, of course). But the situation was illustrative because the stage of the conflict was actually set in the very beginning when I brought up the problems with DEI, trying naively to engender discussion in the group chat. But the default ideological mode of groups of millennials these days is leftism, backed up by whatever identity labels one has. My going against the social incentives for an Indian-American woman was the ultimate unforgivable sin for this group, so the Korean-American woman kicked me out.5 I mention her race to illustrate that I wasn’t just betraying women, but also women of color. That’s an even bigger sin.

V. Where we go from here: truth requires defense

The solution here should be self-evident: women need to become more comfortable with debate, which would be us transcending our biologically reinforced inclinations through a different socialization pattern. This is my cross to bear, especially. Our discourse is poor because challenge is absent both online and in life. The dialectical reasoning process required to move society forward is entirely missing from our spaces. But why wouldn’t women who consider themselves empowered want to be challenged?

Intellectual prowess unleashed should be a type of empowerment women chase. First-wave feminists wanted to participate in public life as rational beings equivalent to men. But this requires fighting our biologically reinforced preconditions of status seeking over truth seeking. The denial of uncomfortable truths in these sorts of spaces preserves women’s more natural inclination for hierarchy through symbolic status signaling.

Hierarchies form in groups of women, but they’re never based on intellectual ability and can’t be named. In fact, if men in mixed-gender groups single out a woman for being a formidable thinker, that’s an invitation for the women to ostracize her (again, speaking from experience). What I’ve laid out isn’t easily transcended, which is why it seems to fall on women like me to create the conditions for intellectual exchange by pushing back. I struggle, but I’ve resolved to do it more often in mixed-gender groups. Other women who understand the depth of the problem can also do the same, though I know it’s difficult to gather the courage because there’s an immediate drop in the temperature.

Men, too, can do something here to back up women who dare to buck the group by supporting them publicly. The range of acceptable discourse has narrowed precisely because most people in these spaces think they’re the only ones who disagree, when that’s almost never the case. But fear of social ostracism from the women who depend on being unchallenged shouldn’t hold us back. Our politics are broken in no small part due to the law of intellectual entropy in women’s discourse, and fixing them therefore requires more than arguing about the symptoms, like most of what passes as discourse.

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