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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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How about some man-bashing to start your weekend, fresh from Korea?

My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net. Feminism used to be the huge culture war wedge back in the early years of the great awokening (2012-2017 or so). It kind of just deflated as people moved to talking about race instead, but none of the issues were ever really resolved, so there's a decent chance it could make a resurgence.

My best insight into Korean gender dynamics came from this AAQC a while back, which might be worth reading for background.

Here's the article:

No Sex, No Dating, No Babies, No Marriage: How the 4B Movement Could Change America

When I sit down at a bar in Brooklyn with my cousin — a recent college grad from Korea who is visiting America for the first time — I have one burning question: How’s your love life? She keeps her ballcap pushed down low and presses her lips into a tight line.

“I’m not interested,” she says. “I just don’t trust men. You don’t know what they’re thinking these days — whether they’re one of the guys with misogynistic thoughts. It’s so normalized. Why would I even risk it?” she says.

She does not want to date. She feels no need to get married. Her ideal life is to form a tight-knit community with other single women. “It’s not just me,” she says. “All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.”

My cousin and her friends are not alone. Across Korea, young women are swearing off men, influenced by the 4B movement, a radical feminist campaign that originated in Korea in the late 2010s. The four Bs stand for bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-chulsan (no birthing) and bi-sex (no sex).

The movement formed in response to growing gender inequality and violence against women: Korea has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the world, and brutal murders of women — in subway stations, on rooftops and in their own homes, often at the hands of men they were dating — headline news shows daily. Amid so much political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the only way to make women safe — and convince society to take their safety seriously — is to swear off men altogether until something changes.

And now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, 4B is going viral on U.S. social media among women who are furious with the men who helped the former president clinch a win. On TikTok alone, top videos have gained millions of views, and one widely shared tweet about the 4B movement post-election now has 450,000 likes and 21 million views at time of writing.

It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — just look at the “your body, my choice” comments by men online — similar to what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this kind of feminist reaction could take hold. And even if women don’t explicitly take on the 4B label en masse, the movement’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the conversation in the first place, could have a major impact not just on American politics, but on American life overall — just as it has in Korea.

Think of the movement as a labor strike, says Soha, a Korean feminist who provided only her online nickname for fear of being harassed for supporting feminism. She says it’s about rejecting the additional work women put in to appeal to men, maintain a household and follow patriarchal values — the kind of work that is more widespread in South Korea’s more socially conservative society. It’s the type of labor all women can identify with and push back against with one powerful voice. Many women eschew the 4B label, often in fear of harassment, but still live by its principles. My cousin describes it as an act of survival, a way to shield women from rapidly rising violence, avoid toxic conversations with misogynistic men and resist an anti-feminist government that is actively trying to roll back women’s rights.

Just as gender has become a political predictor in Korea, it’s shaping elections in the United States. The turnout demographics from the U.S. presidential election are still being sorted out, but a few things are crystal clear. The Republican ticket used male identity and gender grievances as a successful political tool, courting the “bro” vote and attributing Kamala Harris’ success to her identity. Young men helped Donald Trump win the election. Many young women are distraught. It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism. An NBC News poll found that 57 percent of women backed Harris, compared to 40 percent of men — with women sprinting to the left while men flirt with the right.

Some U.S. women are seeking both revenge and relief from the consequences of a Republican trifecta, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a broader cultural acceptance of sexist rhetoric. For some online, the answer is right in front of them: the 4B movement from South Korea.

Like the U.S., South Korea’s gender divide played a striking role in South Korea’s most recent presidential election. Yoon Suk Yeol, then the conservative candidate, secured a victory in 2022 by catering to young men who felt left behind during a rapid push for gender equality, especially after the country’s #MeToo reckoning in 2018 tanked the careers of several actors and politicians. Young men cheered on Yoon’s declarations of being an “anti-feminist,” saying that “structural discrimination based on gender” does not exist, despite the fact that the country regularly ranks near the bottom in the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index. To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers. From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise. Many American women fear the same could happen here.

4B messaging is already echoing on U.S. social media. One X user advertises the 4B movement as a way to “take control of your life under him.” Another user writes, “We need to start considering the 4B movement … We can’t let these men have the last laugh … we need to bite back.” One TikToker has posted she’s joining the 4B movement after breaking up with her Republican boyfriend.

“When I saw the movement go viral in the U.S., I thought, even U.S. women must be at their limit,” says Yeonhwa Gong, a Korean 4B follower who has written on the topic. “But I don’t feel too bad that it has come to this point — if anything, I think of it as a necessary action that had been pushed back for a while and is now finally happening.”

For women who adopt the 4B mindset, not even men who claim to be on the same political spectrum can provide a safe space. With so many men opposing feminism, and even a video on how pro-Trump men could hide their political beliefs from the women they date going viral, how do you know if he’s telling the truth? “A lot of women are just tired of men, and worrying about ‘what if?’” my cousin told me. “I had thought at some point I’d want to find a good man, no matter how hard that would be. At this point now though, I don’t feel that need.”

The 4B movement might seem too radical to get far in the U.S., but the fact that it’s gained traction suggests that at least a number of young women feel more vulnerable since the reelection of Donald Trump than they did before it. The 4B discourse in the U.S. “prompts us to reflect on how much society has taken for granted or overlooked the rights and the freedoms that women rightly deserve,” says Hyejin Jeon, a University of Maryland doctorate student from Korea who is currently analyzing her country’s feminism movements.

If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness. Politicians could take advantage of the divide for their own gains, leaning harder into gender-divide politics, and even outright sexist rhetoric. And even women may turn against one another; American women are already arguing about the inclusivity of the movement, with some saying that women with male partners have no part in 4B. Such discourse has long fractured feminist groups in Korea, according to Minyoung Moon, a Clemson University lecturer who published a report about the backlash against feminism in South Korea. Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.

And then there’s the danger of backlash from the right. “The long-term effect I see is very negative, because they chose the radical strategy, giving men and anti-feminists reason to hate them even more,” Moon says. “And when I look at the 4B movement … on YouTube, I already see the conservative party people bashing against liberal women.”

Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.

“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.

There's some battle of the sexes going on, but 44% of women still voted for Trump, and an actual majority of white women. The very active pro-life organizations that are out running crisis pregnancy centers, right to life dinners, and petitions for heartbeat lives are largely supported by women.

(unedited, meandering thoughts)

Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers. There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and "re-parenting" themselves at 35. I've heard from acquaintances about their mothers gently nudging them about how if they want a family, now is the time to do it, they're in their 30s, there won't be another chance -- and the women getting frustrated and offended about that. Why are Korean mothers in law so demanding? It sounds like they've had hard lives, but also they're not stupid, and should have noticed their bad reputation, and that they're scaring the younger women. From the thread below, LLL has been important partly because mothers stay out of their daughters' business when it comes to childbirth and feeding of infants, though sometimes they step in to babysit every now and again.

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where they were talking about the female archetype with Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and how the Mother and Crone archetypes are currently rather broken. There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose. Perhaps this is related to the trivializing of women's work and running the household. I was reading the other day about Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint because she was well loved, a good midwife, and was always making warm clothing to give to people. They talk about people in the other villages wearing socks and mittens she made for them, and how happy they were about it. George MacDonald is a lovely writer, who's books are full of very old but still lively grandmothers and great grandmothers at their spinning wheel. Sometimes they spin wool, or magical thread that will let the adventurers always find their way home. He said he remembered going to his grandmother's little cottage, where she was always spinning, back when that was important and necessary work, and loved the sound of the spinning wheel, and the stories of his grandmother. My godmother knitted me a huge wool scarf that I would wrap up to my nose when the cold winter winds blew, for years. I moved a few times with only a suitcase since then, but it was the coziest scarf I've ever warn, with both wool and effort.

It's nice that I can just order a totally adequate coat online for less than four hours of labor and have it delivered to my house, where my dishwasher and laundry machine are running in the background. But despite quite a lot of training in home economics sorts of tasks, I don't make much of anything, because it feels redundant. Many of the women in my community make art, and sometimes I go to the local gallery, or the studio tour. It's nice to paint the hills, or "work with printed textures" or whatever, but it seems disconnected and trivial, like it's a visual expression of a crisis of meaning. The whole lifestyle of sending a six week old baby to daycare so you can go file papers in an office to pay the mortgage in the neighborhood with the adequate schools so that your daughter can get a college degree so that she can send her newborn infant to daycare while she sends emails thing is... not ideal. And then you retire and go to workshops where you paint the hills or make abstract acrylic collages or something, and babysit the grandkids a couple of times a year, if you're fortunate enough to have any grandkids. It sounds a lot worse in S Korea. You work in some dull office all day to send your kid to cram school at night so that she can go to college to get a job that lets her send her kid to cram school. Nobody receives love and recognition for vacuuming her mother in law's house every day.

Maybe I'll take my kids to church tomorrow. Apparently they had a tamale making event today, and a potluck tomorrow. They built a new building, with a metal dome that's still under construction, and it looks rather nice. Someone is hand carving an iconostasis.

I think you're right that there's some important impact from the decline of embodied competence (material, social, physical) as a personal quality that people aspire to. In a society where people need to do more to survive on a daily basis, there's more value from the kind of deep, optimized knowledge you accrue through pure repeated experience; and that feels like a natural factor in making people respect their parents enough to want to become them, in a household/family setting that's similar to the one where they excelled. I definitely consult my mother regularly on workplace relations, etiquette, domestic stuff, child/husband/friend psychology, and various adulting skills, in addition to her professional areas of expertise, and I similarly pay attention to other women and men of her generation as models for social technologies and ways of being that I feel like we're in danger of losing. I expect it will be unpleasant to become a crone when it's my turn, but I don't think I'd trade the abilities and understanding I will have gained along the way.

If that kind of respect for experience is on the wane, I wonder how much of it is (a) the devaluation/ demystification of knowledge in general with the rise of the Internet; and (b) the massive Dunning-Krugerization and loss of intellectual humility that the culture has undergone as a result. But also, the high-status life narratives these days seem much more consumption-oriented than production-oriented, so maybe people don't particularly know or care whether they're good at anything.

Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint

As of last year, this includes the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America. I'm not sure if all the proper preparations and rite have taken place yet, but soon (if not already) she'll be considered a saint by the Orthodox Church more generally.

They exhumed her body this weekend, that’s why I was reading about her, but I’m not quite sure how it works.

One issue is grandmas getting older. At the more extreme end but probably not incredibly uncommon in the past a grandma could be in her low 30's certainly 40's. My mom, who is now a grandmother to my toddler is in her early 70's.

That does seem like an issue. In my own family, it seems like grandparents are getting too old to safely lift babies and toddlers right when I have them. We've had kids in late 20s/early 30s.

There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose.

To be fair i think this goes for men too. I don't think this has to do with denigration of women's work or anything but with the very extended retirement and generally privileged existence of a good portion of the current generation of "elderly". The retirement, where people are protected from a lot of current hardships through various policies such as Medicare, inflation protected pensions or the abolishment of property tax (while simultaneously massively benefiting from their inflated value) leads to a sort of reversed and very prolonged adolescence where slightly diminished but perfectly capable people mentally, socially and spiritually degenerate through disassociation from the economy and purpose in general. Being a reality divorced leech isn't very admirable, regardless of age.

Men aren't protected from this much more than women, even if they often retire a bit later and aren't stay at home moms with kids in school.

People who keep working usually are worthy of respect though and I do respect most of my seniors at work, men and women. There are a few retired people I respect, they are almost always very active with helping out caring for their grandchildren, but can also be active in some kind of local charitable organisation.

Maybe there is something to that.

I liked my grandmother better, because she stayed and raised my mom and siblings while my grandfather moved to another state and didn't communicate with or visit them. My grandmother had everyone over for all the holidays, and it was nice. But she never babysat us, even for an hour, and that was probably stressful for my parents. I think she inherited money and didn't work, other than raising children. My other grandfather died when I was a baby, and we visited my other grandmother and stayed at her house, which was at least nice. I don't think she ever worked while I knew her, and she was fine, but I got the impression she mostly watched game shows and walked around the neighborhood once a day. The TV was never off at her house. I suppose my family made me feel neutral toward having children.

A couple of people in the thread brought up Korean mothers in law specifically, as being demanding and expecting their daughters in law to serve them, which seems interesting in a context where marriage and childbirth are very low. I would guess that they had to work for their husband's family when they were younger, and expect it to be paid back, but were less likely to work an 8 - 5 kind of job outside the home? I don't know what the actual facts are, not being very familiar with Korean culture.

I bonded with my own grandfather hunting, and fishing, and when school was out by helping him with various tool-related tasks he wasn't too old for. I legitimately don't know what non-redneck grandfathers do with their grandsons.

My grandfather taught me to solve chess puzzles with him from old magazines, kicked a soccer ball and threw a baseball with me, took me to the local small community college's football games and tried to explain what was going on (in retrospect he failed mostly because the gameplay was so sloppy it defied normal football analysis). Took me to local small-town orchestra concerts, went on small hikes in the hills, etc., talked with me about my favorite books, dinosaurs, etc.

Plenty of people do much the same even if they're urban white collar people, like my father for instance.

My father in-law doesn't like that kind of stuff though and does things like taking them to soccer games, museums and going swimming.

Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers.

A phenomenon I didn’t even know existed. Where can we learn more?

For the extreme example, /r/raisedbyborderlines. It's actually kind of a fascinating place in that the median poster there is from an oddly niche demographic: They're usually the daughter (in an otherwise male-dominated website), almost always consider themselves the scapegoat child (and their brother the golden child who usually remained enmeshed with the mother and is thus some variety of emotionally stunted), and have a spineless father who remained married to their mother (when BPD isn't usually correlated with long-lasting marriages).

Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.

How much of this is two neurotic people being neurotic and bouncing off of each other? I don't always trust neurotics perception of reality.

Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.

Do you know where I can read up on this?

Check out Out of the FOG, it's got a lot of good info on personality disorders, associated behaviors, and best ways to preserve oneself. If you're interested specifically in Borderline mothers, I'd highly recommend reading Understanding the Borderline Mother which is, of course, out of print and relatively expensive. AFAIK it's pretty much the reference material on how BPD presents to children and spouses, regardless of sex.

Source: my mother is BPD as are many women on her side of the family.

I may be falling prey to Google being a fairly lousy search engine these days, but that was my experience when researching it as a teenager/younger adult. In fact, the first time I read about BPD was when reading about high-conflict divorces (because I was still a teenager stuck in the middle of one). Search for "son of borderline mother" versus "daughter of borderline mother" and you'll get more results for the latter. Search for "borderline ex-wife" and you'll get more material than either of the first two. That may just reflect there being more stuff out there about abusive/crazy spouses than parents.

It kind of makes sense. BPD is more common in women (to roughly the same extent that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common in men), so it's unlikely that women are going to wind up in a closer relationship with someone suffering from that condition than that with their mother, while adult men are more likely to encounter BPD in the setting of a romantic relationship (which at that point will be a far more acute crisis than past mommy issues).

As for the disorder itself, This and in particular this are about the two best blog-length posts I've seen on the subject.

Scott also has a good essay about BPD https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/

Has no one ever told Scott about color contrast best practices? That's not even close to a pleasant reading experience.

An interesting article. Comparing this to Astral Codex, I can’t help wondering if Lorien is where Scott has been investing the majority of his time and intellect.

I think he’s mostly played out on normal essays. I could pretty much boil his late output down to EA is good, AI is not so good, and Everything is Fine. I don’t demand constant contrarianism for the sake of it but there’s a self-satisfaction bordering on incuriosity in his recent stuff that I don’t like much. Moving to California seems like it was good for his life but bad for his brain.

I don't know where you can read more on it, but I can provide more evidence in that direction.

From my experiences, the Cluster B disorders tend to fall out (roughly) in this fashion.

Antisocial - male dominated (used to be called sociopathy). Tends towards anger as it's primary emotion. Borderline - female dominated (I've heard it called, derogatorily, "crazy bitch disease"). Tends towards fear of abandonment. Histrionic - slightly female biased. Doesn't get a lot of media attention (think of like, the mothers of child stars). Tends towards performative actions (my mother, who fell into this bucket, would run away from home every Christmas and make the whole family persuade her to return). Narcissistic - male biased. Extreme selfishness which is expressed as unending need.

Edit: I just realized all of the above sound extremely similar, so let me provide an example.

If you were, for example, trying to go out for an evening:

  1. Someone with Antisocial personality disorder would say it's fine, but would break something (or someone) to force you to stay.
  2. Someone with Borderline personality disorder would hurt themselves, or send increasingly scary messages indicating that they are going to until you stay.
  3. Someone with Histronic personality disorder would make a huge fuss about you leaving, and how much they do for you (and may pack up everything and leave, or sell all your stuff, or whatever).
  4. Someone with Narcissistic personality disorder would tell you that you cannot, and tell you how much you are hurting them until you return.

All of the above fall into cluster B behaviors, so it's not like they're exclusive to one or another; it just tends to be the predominant form of expression.

For reading purposes I'd recommend just looking at DSM criteria or searching pubmed and finding what seems to be a reasonable review article.

Correctly making these diagnosis can be hard, and many cases seem obvious but aren't. While Borderline (BPD) is more common in women we find that Antisocial (ASPD) is over-diagnosed in men (not all criminals have it but...) and under-diagnosed in women. Borderline is the opposite (just because this dude murdered someone doesn't mean he isn't borderline). People with disordered personality who hurt people almost always get an ASPD diagnosis but people with severe BPD often hurt others. Impulsivity is a cardinal symptom in both (contra organized serial killer stereotypes). Often the dx just gets thrown out on gender lines, which is sometimes accurate but not always.

ASPD can be thought of us being a fucking asshole in mild to moderate cases and evil in moderate to severe cases (as demonstrated by disregard for the rights of others).

People with BPD in contrast care too much about others to some extent. There's been an attempt to rebrand it as "Emotional Dysregulation Disorder" which is instructive. Impulsive, passionate, lots of relationships that end abruptly, things like "I LOVE YOU, I HATE YOU" (splitting). For most they'll pattern match to a moody teenager, but in an adult body.

This is also a core part of what Cluster-B disorders often are, over expression of immature coping mechanisms aka acting like a kid. Also one of the reasons why they often burn off with age.

Severe borderline looks like psychosis (inability to determine what's real) and that's what the border in borderline is named for. There's an attendant identity instability which sometimes leads to being trans. Severe antisocial is lizard people types.

Histrionic is less interesting, you can call it stereotypical energetic Italian disorder if you like and wouldn't be too far off.

Narcissistic is simple at a basic level - Trump often gets accused of this (although I'm not sure I buy that). It gets pretty complicated if you look deeper though, most mass shooters are a subtype of this and not ASPD.

People often overweight anger in antisocials, it is often present but the lack of emotion is frequently more startling - lack of remorse, lack of respect for others, lack of love for partners). Often violence, anger, and intimidation happen because they are cheat codes towards getting whatever utility they are seeking, not because of investment leading to anger.

Most mental health conditions have heritable elements and we suspect that ASPD and BPD are two-hit situations (lived experience and genetic predisposition). Raisedby types may have it themselves, and failing that some shit happens with mothers and daughters - boys will just leave or pushback physically and be able to protect themselves, would be my guess.

In contrast crazy bitch exes are of interest to men because a lot of borderline traits are desirable (most stereotypical: abundant, quality sexual activity) and unlike mothers, exes can be more easily a legal or financial threat.

Uhhh that rambling went on longer than I thought it would, sorry. Everything I said is shortcuts/oversimplification.