Aapje58
17d ago
I suspect a difference now is that working class on up to even PMC women have a lot more negative experiences with men than in the past,
Historically, we see that (proto)-feminism became popular first with higher-class women, who had a far easier life than working class and farmer class women who didn't seem to be into feminism all that much. The mass adoption of feminism seems to correlate with industrial inventions & changes hollowing out the female gender role, also suggesting that boredom was a bigger motivator than feelings of oppression.
In modern times 'we' have unleashed the chads, which means that those chads can hurt many more women, which many of those women then generalize to all men (encouraged by feminist messaging that most men are under the spell of the patriarchy and thus about equally bad).
Underclass women have always had a horrible time almost by definition
But they tend to end up with underclass men who also have a horrible time and we can easily observe that feminists almost never even acknowledge those experiences, let alone hold them up as a goal for women to achieve.
Aapje58
18d ago
My issue is, as I said, with modern incels and incel-adjacents who say things like "If a woman won't be led, she won't be fed."
How is that relevant when there are a ton of men (and women) complaining about being unable to find a partner, who don't say those kind of things? Aren't you just focusing on what you consider aesthetically displeasing (and is most likely downstream of the cause(s)), and by doing so talking past people who want to discuss the actual issue?
Here on the Motte, some of them have a fondness for saying things like "maybe we should use what worked for 5000 years..." and if you read what they are proposing, it's basically that.
Aren't you violating the rules now by straw-manning people? Crowstep nor Faceh seem to suggest to use the threat of starvation. It seems pretty clear to me that the system Faceh describes curtails the choices of both men and women. Ignoring that first part by pretending that only women's choices would be limited, and then also framing that curtailing in an unreasonable way, suggests that you are incapable or unwilling to actually debate the real beliefs of the other person.
The entire 'settle or starve'-framing is completely absurd anyway, since in traditional cultures, women are or would be fed by her parents until marriage, or by the church. In those relatively poor cultures, the parents would want the daughter to marry early to offload the burden of providing from the parents to the husband. That starvation/severe poverty was a possibility was not by design. It was a consequence of food being expensive in the past and governments being poor, so they couldn't have welfare like today, nor have parents take care of their children for a very long period in most cases.
I think that one of the reasons for the decline of traditional marriage is that modern wealth has reduced the benefits of marriage, not just to the people themselves, but also to their parents and society as a whole. So the social pressure has declined.
However, if the resulting behavior is actually very bad for most people, then isn't it a fair suggestion to try to restore that behavior? If you want to discuss the mechanisms to do so, wouldn't it be better to ask people what they propose, rather than accusing them of making proposals that they never actually did propose?
Because for some groups it gets rewarded with status, attention, accommodations and money. So of course people seek those things.
And the loss of stoicism (which of course is 'toxic masculinity') causes people to be less respected for accepting that bad things happened to them, without demanding compensation in some way. So people no longer get pushed away from a victim mentality by shaming, and get pulled towards it with rewards.
Yet both the capriciousness and unfairness of who gets rewarded and how much, logically results in everyone feeling hard done by, even those groups with great victim privileges. Because there is always a group who (temporarily) gets more status, attention, accommodations and money.
Have you considered that many people may simply feel extremely dissatisfied with modern society, but have not been handed a narrative that correctly explains why they feel this way, so they latch on to whatever narrative floats around.
However, then those feelings are still real and they do matter. You cannot reason away feelings. If things in society create an increase in bad feelings, then this is an issue, even/especially if we don't know where these feelings come from.
Funnily, all of your examples are not cases where things are actually getting better over time, but your 'good news' is merely that things are getting worse, but not as much as some people are claiming. We have more data centers, which is a reflecting of the online world taking over, with many major downsides (including that the online world itself is enshittifying), but it takes a bit less resources than some thought. Yay? Autism is on the rise, but we have no clue why or how to fix it. We just know that we can't address the issue by going after vaccines. Yay? Migration issues are making people unhappy all over the world, but the minorities don't get shot by the police all that often compared to how often they kill each other. Yay? There is a huge rise in trans identification, including for young kids, who get experimented on medically, but things have not deteriorated so far that furries get medicalized. Yay?
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