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New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women
What freedom? How are you not free?
Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?
(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)
Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?
And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.
We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.
Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)
We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.
It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that some women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.
As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.
This is something that is far more blessing than curse; a member of the aristocracy may chafe at the fact that their inherent social standing is all they will be known for, but it's sure better than being the serf that finds themselves without much value by default and who will need to scrape and bleed if they want to reach even a fraction of that. This dynamic shows up in the relations between the sexes as well, even in symbolic ways. Hell, women's clothing is skewed far more towards that of the aristocracy than men's clothing is; many items of male fashion evoke utility and/or discipline in some way (even male formalwear derives from military uniform), whereas many female fashions are expensive, throwaway fripperies which embody the idea that status is earned through not having to display utility, and being able to attain resources without having to dirty your hands by doing hard work.
Really there's a grand irony here that I think puts the lie to the idea that women would want to be treated like men: The only reason why women can even complain about that is because of that inherent value. The only reason why anyone even listens to these complaints in the first place is because they are women, and people feel their needs should be catered to and that their complaints carry more weight than that of the male sex. It is okay if women consume resources; they are the appropriate beneficiaries of help, and attending to their complaints is a worthwhile use of others' labour. The same is not true for men. Even the people making complaints along the lines that women can never stop being seen as women often self-consciously capitalise on the fact that they are either female or acting on behalf of women to give their point more weight.
If we are to start treating women like men (something I fully support, by the way, PLEASE actually start doing this), the answer to this complaint should be "suck it up, buttercup, and deal with it". The fact that it is not, and that women expect people to actually take these complaints seriously and spend time, resources and effort dealing with the supposed problem, tells you everything you need to know. Nobody, not even the women making these protestations, truly want women to be treated like men. So many women have been spoiled with this pernicious and unrealistic idea that tradeoffs are not or should not be a thing, that they can "have it all" - but the reality is that they can't, and that results in them never being happy and treating equality like a buffet where they can just pick the parts of the bargain they like while leaving behind everything they don't (so, the last century or two of gender activism). Try as you might to force reality to conform to that fanciful ideal, that's not how anything works.
When will you learn.
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This seems like a lot of words to say "Islam is right about women". Maybe the Burka is the way to make the glow invisible? If women really wanted that, there is the solution. Why don't they use it? Probably because they actually like the myriad of advantages they get from the glow more than they dislike being seen as women first. I'm convinced that nothing would be more painful for women to just be treated like men all the time. Women, as is tradition, want to have their cake and eat it.
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I don't know, she seemed pretty clear to me. Here's the key passage that answers your specific question:
Regardless of norms in the family or on dates, earlier-wave feminists wanted to not be judged by their gender in the marketplace, in professional and political life. The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The author seems to be arguing that the modern left has replaced that interaction with "hey, diversity points!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth." Either way, the individual woman is reduced to a passive carrier of purely instrumental value for somebody else, and (critically) not in ways she herself chosen. She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points, neither of which redound to her personal credit or are in her control. That's what I take to be her point about self-authorship still being out of reach.
Yes, this matches how I read her argument. Although re: the intrinsic value of the male body... this is something I never quite understood about the whole female-privilege "men have to be human doings, women get to be human beings" meme. If a man longs to be passively valued for the fuckable parts of his body, by people he doesn't especially want to fuck, it seems like that should be trivially achievable by hanging out in more gay men's spaces. I'd imagine a comparable range of male body types would be admired there, and pretty young men could get nearly the same mileage a pretty young woman could get. Maybe the target audience is not quite as large, but there are easily identified locales where you'd have solid odds of finding someone appreciative. In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
The fact that it's always engineers, and not lawyers or salespeople or other such professions filled with actual bros, gives away the fact that no, it isn't this. This is a narrative with no factual backing.
I mean, I chose engineering because it's an area where genuine technical ability/ technically excellent work exists, and because it draws personality types (both male and female) who tend to get excited about the material work itself and who want to use their technical ability to do a good job. Also because I have first- and second-hand personal experience of adjacent things happening.
Sales and similar bro-professions seem much more like jobs where persuasion through performing a social role is the whole point, so it's hard to imagine someone complaining about their externally-imposed social role getting in the way of their good work. I know a realtor who works her augmented breasts very effectively as part of her job, and she doesn't seem upset about it at all, any more than the local car salesman who leans into stereotypes with his down-home aw-shucks accent. But maybe I'm being unfair to sales, and actually there is a lot of technical subtlety there as well, who knows?
There's real technical ability in lawyering and banking too, but it's always engineering that gets singled out for treating women wrong. Somehow or another (male) engineers are the worst of the worst in terms of oppressing women.
Or... the narrative is completely wrong. Engineering gets singled out because women prefer the bros to the nerds.
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It's a good question!
So, this is something that happens from time to time, straight men going into various types of gay spaces for attention and validation. And I have occasionally heard a few straight men say they wish they were gay, because it seems like it would be easier. But obviously for the majority of straight men, these are hard limits, they would never even think about going there.
My whole post was basically about how the whole "intrinsic value" thing has both good aspects and bad aspects. It's not a panacea (but it's not a uniquely awful tragedy either). So a man who thought that getting lots of free sexual attention would somehow solve his problems would be making the same mistake as the overly-bitter feminist who imagines that men have access to a special level of existential authenticity that she is forbidden.
What breaks the symmetry in your example is the fact that straight women do, actually, find at least some men attractive some of the time. Some of the attention she gets throughout her life will be from creepy undesirables. But some of it will be from men who are genuinely attractive, and who she may be attracted to in turn, and who she may judge to be good romantic partners. Drawbacks, but also benefits; thinking about the whole dynamic over the course of a lifetime, rather than just one night at the club. A straight man getting attention from gay men has a zero percent chance of ever finding any of the potential suitors desirable, which obviously puts a different spin on the experience. It's the difference between "lots of people want something of value from me, and some of them may be able to pay a fair price" and "lots of people want something of value from me, and none of them will be able to pay a fair price".
Thanks, that's a fascinating bit of anthropology right there! Wish I could read a thorough firsthand account by a straight guy who's tried it: the male experience of unreciprocated male sexual attention is really intriguing to me.
The tricky part there is that there's notoriously no reliable way to convert male sexual interest to male romantic attachment, and in fact the former sometimes seems to operate at the expense of the latter (see: madonna/whore, "she put out too soon," etc.). Very inexperienced girls often do have a pleasant few months of mistaking sexual demand for actual social capital, but there's inevitably a rude awakening, and I suspect most hot women could tell you the painful story of when it happened to them.
Interestingly, in cishet girl lore, there's a coping fantasy about a particular kind of female physicality, distinct from the normal T&A variety, that somehow connects up with a woman's soul and channels male physical attraction into magical emotional intimacy and commitment. You can see it in Disney films and romance novels, where the hero absolutely never starts by noticing the protagonist's bouncing breasts, but may be magnetically drawn to something spiritual and ineffable about her hair or eyes or posture, which turns out to express some deeply unique feature of her personal character. I think the average-demisexual woman, if surrounded by men who find her beautiful in that way, would indeed be in the enviable position you describe, where she has only to wait for the right candidate to close the bargain. But unless she's 15 or has serious daddy issues, the average woman surrounded by men ogling her tits knows that she's about 180 degrees from being in that position, and if anything is depressingly farther than ever from pair-bonding with anyone willing to "pay a fair price," as you put it.
I would probably get accused of lying for saying this, but while I certainly don't lack attraction for a woman's curves, the physical feature that makes me feel deep attraction to someone is their facial features. I don't know about "spiritual and ineffable," but a warm smile and deep, thoughtful eyes make my heart melt, and a connection of shared vulnerability gives me butterflies in the chest. Someone once told me I made her "feel like I'm in a romance novel," because I talk that way, and similar statements have been made by other people I've dated. But I'm also well aware my romantic orientation is not typical for men, and I have no clue how I ended up with those feelings. It's one of the biggest mysteries for me.
That said, I would not describe myself as "demisexual," and I have the hardware and software for immediate sexual interest. It's just not something I particularly like acting on, and never have. For me, the romantic and sexual attraction have to happen together -- typically, if I find someone romantically attractive, they have a warm smile or seem smart and kind and radiant, I'll find them sexually attractive at the same time. I will admit that a passionate love affair in which sex occurs early has its attraction. But only because it would mean the passion is so strong and intense that we found ourselves unable to control the sexual tension -- which is remarkably similar to the sexual fantasies that women will sometimes admit to.
I can also find people sexually but not romantically attractive, though that's almost always because they have some personality flaw that I find repugnant and I see no vulnerability to which I can relate. If I find you attractive, and you find me attractive, I will find myself staring into your eyes or fantasizing about what it feels like to hold you close or whether it would feel like being in a whirlwind to kiss you, probably more than I will fantasize about what sex with you would be like. My own experience is that sex fueled by passion is just massively more pleasurable, even in raw, hedonistic terms, than sex divorced from it. It's just hotter.
All that being said -- the male complaint is that men with this attitude are often more shy and reserved, and oftentimes get passed over or not romantically noticed by women. And when they do get noticed, the things they say and do that demonstrate their strong romantic orientation are often seen as fake or dissembling, precisely because men try to fake it to play women. And the orientation is so rare among men that I'm not sure most people believe it even exists. I just don't know why my psychology on this is so unusual, or how I ended up there.
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I mean, I think the missing ingredient is that straight men do not want to be sexually harassed by other men. They pay good money for it from female sex workers, but not from other men.
Nobody really envies cute young secretaries with creepy gross old bosses.
Yes, but that was the whole point of the comment you were replying to. “You think being able to get sexual attention from men (many of whom will in fact be gross and old) is so great? Well, how would YOU like some male sexual attention?”
Sûre, my point was men already know about this- there’s already a trope about some butch undesirable brunhilda who won’t take no for an answer in entertainment(usually played for laughs, admittedly).
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As far as I can say she does, in fact, get to say this. Literally what is standing in her way? Who will contradict her claim?
People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations. For most people, a pet cat that decided it loved playing catch-the-Frisbee would just be a fucked-up and confusing pet, even if it was really good at Frisbee. Because Frisbee time is what you want from your dog, not from your cat.
What people want from the office hot girl is cute mannerisms, new outfits, and opportunities to flatter her (and smugly affirm your own superiority) by overpraising her work. Nobody expects actual valid professional ideas from the office hot girl, and if she volunteered any, she almost certainly wouldn't get genuine interest or constructive critique. Similarly, what pro-DEI people want from their diverse colleague is fierceness and funkiness, unusual hair and activist politics, and the opportunity to appear younger and more hip by ostentatiously approving of her. Nobody expects or wants actual good work ideas from that person, either, and they would almost certainly be confused and annoyed if they bothered to listen in the first place.
Solid professional ideas are what you expect from Bob down the hall who is neither a hot dateable woman engineer nor a brave diverse woman engineer, but just an engineer. So everyone listens seriously to Bob's engineering ideas, hopes they will be good, and is pleased with Bob when he meets those expectations.
(When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest. Same with the strong diverse woman engineer if a more fashionable political category turns up. This is why women like the one who wrote the OP's article seek permission to be Bob instead.)
I realise I'm replying quite late (got here for the Quality Contributions thread) but I don't think this is the case. There are plenty of studies that show that gendered opionions (both positive and negative) neutralise with age. Older women are treated like men. Not worse than men, the same as men.
TLDR: Women are wonderful, until they get old, at which point they lose the benefits of their femininity and get treated like men. At no point are they treated worse than men.
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I don't know what to tell you except for: not they don't. Like, where did you get this idea? The world you describe is completely alien to me anecdotally, and if you push me I could probably even justify it academically. As far as I can tell people like to engage in some of the old Noticing, but the moment your break a pattern in a visible way, they reassess you individually. I'd sooner believe in actual misogyny-driven patriarchy, than I would in a bespoke expectations-driven "implicit bias" system.
Even what you say about the cat sounds deranged to me. I aged out of caring about it, but a pet like this would be... well, I think the kids these days would call it "a cure for the male loneliness epidemic".
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This strikes me as a just so story and maybe a bit limited to engineering. I don't think marketing or law departments work like that. In many marketing departments these days it's a majority hot women at least on the less senior levels.
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Other people may be thinking unflattering things in their heads.
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The author's concept of freedom is, in my reading, that there be no arbitrary obstacles or burdens regarding her ascent to ... whatever her actual objective is ... strictly on the basis of factors she never chose and cannot control, eg. her sex. This is, in a certain light, a very relatable objective, with a visceral emotional appeal anyone can feel. Achieving such a society is impossible, we all understand that, too (the article might as well be headlined "Neither Side Even Tries to Offer Women the Impossible"), but beyond that there is a certain self-pity to it. Obstacles are to be overcome, and burdens to be shed; people do it all the time, literally every day. And when we consider society's inequalities between groups, well, dwelling upon the problems of women -- present these days at every income stratus, in basically every corridor of power -- seems again a bit self-involved. Relative to the poor, relative to many visual minorities ... why would society start with femaleness?
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Which strikes me as an intrinsically quixotic goal. As you note yourself, even the richest man on earth can't stop people making jokes about his drug problems. Even the leader of the free world can't stop people making jokes about his tiny hands, as much as he'd obviously like to. Even literal authoritarian dictators like Xi Jinping can't stop people sharing Winnie the Pooh memes via WeChat. When I see trans women in floods of tears and rending their hair about how strangers don't see them the way they (want to) see themselves, all I can think is - buddy, join the club.
I think this is a new definition and as you point out a bit of a futile goal. I thought most people learned as teenagers they can’t control how they’re perceived and develop an internal sense of self but this fallacy seems to run rampant these days.
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Hm, does Compact have any links to the German magazine of the same name?
Most progress for women's causes came from what one would broadly call the left. The US suffrage movement has its roots in the abolition movement. Or consider the perspective on women by two extremist ideologies, fascism (extreme right) and communism (extreme left, after a fashion). In fascism, women are principally breeders to make new soldiers. Sure, they get honored if they are prolific breeders, but that was all, otherwise being a stenographer for some Obersturmbannfuehrer was as cllose as women got to power. Not a single woman in the whole Nazi Reichstag, from what I can tell. By contrast, the Soviets at least had the tiniest bit of sympathy for women, whose struggle resembled the struggle of the working class at least a bit. Of course, women's rights were not a big political agenda, but at least there was no principled opposition to women serving in the party, even though it remained strongly male-dominated.
I think no matter where you look, suffrage, birth control, abortion rights, protection from marital rape, the broad left was generally a (sometimes lukewarm) ally to women's rights while the right generally tried to keep the status of 1900.
The woke coalition, black/minority rights/grievances, women's rights/grievances, LGBT rights makes sense from a strategic point of view. The TERF's horror of a trans person using a women's bathroom are not worth blowing up the coalition over.
The Democrats have lost the last two elections in part because they backed unpopular female presidential candidates, while the Republicans got the women Dobbs, and yet somehow the left is throwing the women under the bus?
Sure, being a woman after the sexual revolution is not all sunflowers and unicorn farts, because the most attractive man willing to have a situationship with you is unlikely be willing to settle down with you if that is what you want, but compared to the time when marriage was for life it is a fucking picnic in the park. "So you marry a guy, and that basically means he owns you. He can beat you up or rape you if he feels like it, so better have a living male relative when he goes overboard. He is the head of the household and might be able to deny you getting a job or contraceptives. He is as stuck in the marriage as you are, but I am sure it will all turn out fine. Also, while you are still unmarried, guys will try to seduce you and then escape before they are subjected to a shotgun wedding. If you have sex with any of them, you are damaged goods, a fallen woman, a harlot and your prospects for a good marriage decline dramatically. Oh, and if anyone knocks outside marriage, your family might disown you, but you can always turn to sex work to feed your baby, no worries."
I think there might be some revision in this statement. My understanding is that as late as the 60s the feminist vote was kinda up for grabs between republicans and democrats.
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I don’t think so, no. Although funny enough, the name “Compact” comes from the idea of a “new compact” between left and right. Social conservatism and economic socialism. One might say that it’s rather… third positionist. (Although in practice most of their takes are very basic bitch and milquetoast.)
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Incredible that the author simultaneously wants the deconstruction of women's social roles but is also a TERF. Sorry! Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex! To be clear, I think this a good and desirable thing but it is equally clear to me that it is trans people and their allies that are doing the most to bring this world about. Directly challenging the association between biology and certain forms of social relation. "Leftists don't want to emancipate women because they don't see the necessary connection between biology and womanhood!" The piece is full of contradictions like this.
Leftist women don't want to emancipate women because they do see the necessary connection between gender and privilege brought on by scarcity.
Going all the way would remove that, and they have a pretty good thing going (this is why I see this kind of 'leftism' as a fundamentally conservative privilege-preserving movement at society's general expense).
The problem with freeing and protecting women from men is that you must also free and protect women from women. And until the women who want freedom understand the actual threat (and the women worthy of freedom do understand this; the propaganda about men being the real evil exists specifically to confuse these women about this issue, it's not actually intended for men) they'll make no progress in that area.
Huh?
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This seems the opposite of the mainstream trans appeal? It's mostly not gender abolitionists because the desire to transition from one gender to another reifies rather then minimizes gender differences. If men and women are to be treated the same then what exactly are trans women asking for?
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The standard TERF position for decades has been that sex is a biological reality, but gender should be abolished. The unique vulnerability of female bodies as compared to male bodies necessitates certain accommodations like female-only spaces, but most aspects of “gender roles” can and should be done away with. You could argue that this is a fine line to walk, but I at least think it’s internally consistent.
This of course ignores that "gender roles" exist to protect women due to the "unique vulnerability of female bodies". The actual TERF position is thus that women shouldn't have to suffer restrictions due to this unique vulnerability and the restrictions, ie "gender roles", should fall primarily or exclusively on men.
Well, the actual, true, final TERF position is that women should live in lesbian communes and men should go fuck off in a ditch somewhere.
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My understanding of gender-critical feminists/TERFs etc. is that they chafe against the ancillary gender roles and social expectations assigned to female people by virtue of their biology, pointing out that the fact they're female doesn't imply that they should be expected to be good at cooking, shouldn't be expected to stay home and look after the children, shouldn't be expected to wear skirts and pink clothing.
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
Another way of framing it is that radical feminists think that, when assessing a person's identity and the role they should play, our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics. Per the OP, they would rather be seen as e.g. a scientist first and a woman second, rather than as a woman first and a scientist second. All well and good. But there's no conflict between asserting that our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics when assessing people's identities, and recognising that acknowledging the reality of immutable biological traits is still necessary and unavoidable. Outside of gender medicine, virtually all of the major flashpoints in the trans culture war are domains in which immutable biological traits are obviously more germane to the discussion than individual characteristics: when it comes to one's likelihood of committing a sexual assault, being male (or not) has far more predictive power than basically any other trait; in most tests of strength, speed and/or stamina, virtually any male person will have an insurmountable competitive advantage over any female person (despite your repeated claims to the contrary). It's like the radical feminists are saying "our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits" and the trans activists are saying "yeah, we shouldn't acknowledge biology at all!" and the radical feminists are like "no, just because our society places too much of an emphasis on biology doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all". Just because you're a libertarian who thinks that there are too many laws doesn't mean you want to abolish the prohibition on murder. There is a happy medium between "excessive emphasis on immutable biological traits" and "denying that immutable biological traits matter at all, in favour of self-identification above all else".
This is somewhat right, but misses that there's a weird way they are able to internally square the circle, even though it's externally baffling. And that is that gender has a near-infinite number of possible meanings and takes on whichever actual meaning it needs to at the moment. Skirts and liking pink are part of the female gender role, but not necessarily because not all women like them, and some men like them. Wanting to cut off your dick is a sign that you are trans, but not all trans people want to change their body. I've even brought up the point that "if sex is your body and gender is your mind, why is getting surgery called "gender affirmation surgery" if it's changing your body?" and was told that breasts are "gendered." Which is ironic when you consider that they often complain that "woke" means too many things.
There's gender identity, gender expression, gender performance, etc. and new permutations will be added as needed. Simply put, they want society to not impose patterns onto people. They want people to be able to choose any number of these and impose society to engage with these in whatever way the individual wants, and without any of the negative impositions.
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Well, yes. The RF stands for "Radical Feminist", lest we forget.
The TERF position is that the treatment of "woman" as a salient category based on societal attitudes and cultural roles rather than one based on sex necessarily reinforces those roles and attitudes. Thus saying that a male is a woman is at best meaningless and at worst actively harming the cause of feminism.
It's not my position, but it seems to be a self-consistent one.
I don't think the TERF would agree.
By analogy: Alice wants to abolish religion in general but the Catholic church in particular. Bob wants to pass a law affirming that those born Protestant are allowed to identify as Catholic if they'd like. Do you understand why Alice would be upset with such a law?
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I’m not convinced you can treat people differently on the basis of any hard to change property. Human society values roles and creates hierarchy or several. My physical appearance marks me out as a member of dozens of such groups whether or not we want this to be true. I’m female, im white, im American, im working class, im Christian. All of these things a person can find out quite quickly simply by looking at me, and they do and will always color how im expected to behave, the places I can go, and so on.
I'm not sure how one would find out you are Christian "simply by looking at you".
Or American. It's not an ethnicity, and even Native Americans can be ambiguous.
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I agree that this is currently true, but it seems far from clear this is inevitably true. In different times and places people with the same characteristics you describe have been treated very differently. It does not seem likely to me that we happen to have stumbled on the way such people will be treated forever more in our present time or place.
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I was thinking the other day about how it might feel very similar to being the heir of a big company or empire or something where you’re forever living in the shadow of something you didn’t do or earn. Your so-and-so’s heir is the most important thing about you no matter what you do.
This obviously could be nice but also feel like a prison.
Then contrast with a street urchin analogy for guys where there is only what you do.
They both have their own kinda of freedom and own kinds of stifling. It makes sense for there to be some degree of envying the other.
This is an odd framing: that heir has a (great great...) grandfather as well as grandmother. There is only one of you and (potentially) many of your progeny, so it's overwhelmingly likely that the most important thing about any given man will be his children too. And a woman (or a man) can trivially escape this 'shadow' by not having children, which is in the modern day very much an option.
I suppose the distinction is meant to be that women invest more in their children? Or that that investment has more of an impact? Or are less likely to be important otherwise?
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All of this navel gazing makes sense when you realize that the authors want the freedom of the tyranny of the human biological condition: which, barring incredible advances of technology, is impossible.
They were born in a woman's body. It sucks in some ways and is great in others. Get over it. Being a man also sucks in different but not wholly alien ways.
They should stop whining. The world isn't fair, and trying to make it fair to satisfy their neurosis is impossible. It's out of their control in a fundamental way that can never be remedied. For God's sake, if there something to be stoic about, this is it.
Sometimes I think we should bring "back" the likely fictional "Rule of Thumb". Have minders in the street with rods. And not unlike how a slave rode behind Caesar during his Triumph, repeating in his ear "Remember you too are mortal", if they hear anyone neurotically bitching at the cafe, over brunch, at the bar, they run up and start striking them across their back and shoulders shouting "Perfect is the enemy of good!!".
Maybe the beatings should continue until morale improves.
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I dunno, we've freed ourselves from the tyranny of having to till the soil or gather firewood.
Yes, the world isn't fair and stoicism is probably the best overall frame, but it's not a justification for this extreme of helplessness. What's even more true is that, as of say, 1890, the social technology required to make the female experience suck less was already becoming possible. Whatever one says about the excesses of modern feminism, it's a sight better than 130 years ago.
Maybe some people need to hear the message that they can't make everything perfectly fair in some utopian pipe dream. But anglo culture still has a base disposition that, while not at all utopian, is still fundamentally optimistic.
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Why aren't these women celebrating the freedom of hiding their gender? I don't see any think pieces on how freeing it is to post PRs under a genderless username, or to shitpost on X as a genderless anon.
Right. Being able to post on here during COVID was more freeing that having no outlet, but it would still have felt much better to be able to speak publicly.
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Such concerns over women leaning left despite trans-issues (that is, transwomen issues, because almost no one cares about transmen choosing to live life on a higher difficulty setting) has the vibe of "Democrats Are the Real Racists."
I've commented before there is many a horseshoe and overlap between progressives and mainstream conservatives with regard to women's Wonderfulness when it comes to restricting male freedoms and protections to maintain and/or expand female freedoms and protections.
To the extent conservative maps to Republican in countries like the US—and progressive to Democrats—progressives have, relatively-speaking, concrete things to offer women that conservatives don't. Examples that include, but are not limited to, income/wealth transfers and affirmative action ("DEI") come to mind. I say "relatively" because mainstream conservatives are largely but progressives driving the speed limit RE: Women and non-Asian minority Lives Mattering More. They just sometimes haggle over the degree.
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Another hopelessly confused feminist who cannot express a coherent thought. Women like her have been indulged, coddled and lied to their whole lives. As you note, almost subconsciously, she senses that something is not adding up (“the lingering shadow “, “performative reverence”, “dimmed”, “faint echo”).
Echoes of the white lies she has been fed, of her incomparable value, of her oppression, and that she can have it all, and do anything men can, and better. The problem is not that she’s elon musk and people value her too much and don’t value ‘her for her’. It’s that people lie to her about how valuable she really is, like an AA hiring panel, or a loving parent.
This argument has to die. Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1. Most rawlsian babies would prefer the male body, it’s the practical choice. Most parents do too. And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women. Women can always be procured. A weapon is as valuable as an incubator. Even more so in the modern world, where the incubators are faulty, and we’re all tools.
It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle. I used to teach this as an excellent example of how individual selection trumps group selection.
Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter. By the 5th generation it is already 9.5x the population and 4x the men! And if you preference fighting age (younger) men, it's even higher.
It's not even close. The only reason that this doesn't work is that in the former group (at 25/75), genes that preference males (even a tiny bit, like 30/70) would be massively selected for (since each male has 3x more offspring) and so each generation is nudged back towards 50/50. If everyone could agree not to do that, they'd all be better off, but genes are selfish and so here we are.
This is an often cited fact, but it hides more than it shows. Historically women had lower life expectancy compared to men thanks to horrible death rate during child birth. Yes, they may have managed to reproduce - but so what. It was their family, mostly males who took care of now motherless children. Without men these children would not survive.
This is afaik in artifact of excluding violent deaths in the statistics, not the reality on the ground. Obviously it is silly to exclude violent deaths but include childbirth if you want to understand the differences in life expectancy between men and women, yet it is all to common. See for example this letter in the journal of the royal society of medicine.
In many known societies, males had far higher violent deaths rates, to such a degree that adult women would frequently outnumber adult men. For a particularly extreme example see the paraguyan triple war, at the end of which women outnumbered men 10:1. Only in long peace times you would have higher life expectancy for men. This also isn't just due to large-scale wars with modern weapons in the more developed societies; hunter gatherers often have even higher violent deaths rates "just" due to skirmishes.
Obviously we do not really have reliable data of actual life expectancy for most of history, but I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the ancestor statistic is a simple result of enough men dying a violent death sufficiently early so that the 2:1 is simply the gender ratio in the adult population.
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This is only true if your Rome is a paradise with exponential growth. If you have limited resources, then allocating them to making babies you can not feed is not a winning strategy.
(I would expect that in reality, things would be messy and complicated. Being able to bounce back more quickly after a non-fatal disaster is certainly an advantage, but so is having a higher fraction of your population (which is capped by food supply) on the battlefield.)
Another consideration is that in some societies, males had a big advantage in acquiring food, e.g. hunting mammoths or back-breaking agriculture.
Of course, in a species where the 25/75 ratio was magically fixed, sexual dimorphism would decrease as women find themselves in situations where their best genetic strategy is mammoth-hunting or cattle-raiding. So you end up with an androgynous population which can make a lot of babies when times are good, but in which in typical times, the average woman would have 1.33 kids which survive to reproduce, and spend most of her fertile life-span on toiling in the fields to feed them or stab some other woman to death so her own kids can thrive in a world of limited resources.
Indeed. In the fully Malthusian limit the sex ratio becomes much less important -- and as you say, maybe it's better to have a large fraction able to fight your neighbors.
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Complete non sequitur.
Your statement is a vague, theoretical, general principle that most species tend towards a 50/50 ratio. Mine is the actual sex ratio of humans, which slightly favours males. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory. Mine is just more precise and empirically supported.
I already decried this reasoning in this thread. You’re assuming infinite resources like it’s a bacterial culture. And Romulus was a reference to the rape of the sabines, where the male-skewed romans just stole women from their neighbours. The only 25% men tribe would get overrun quickly.
“Behold, I will now prove the undeniable superiority of women:
Imagine you’re on an island. There’s no war to be fought, ever. No work to be done, either. Not even a jar to open. All there is to do on this magical island is to go shopping. And the goal is to produce as many babies as possible. Would you prefer 100 men and 1 woman or 1 man and 100 women? Checkmate.”
You know that it’s men who pay for access to women’s bodies, rather than the other way around, right?
Revealed preferences, look at what people do not what they say, etc.
Men appear to enjoy sex more than women. How this factoid relates to this discussion I do not know. Unless.... you're saying that the ubiquitous island scenario is just a harem fantasy concocted by horny men and they don't have a serious opinion on this?
Yes, and why do you think that is? It’s not just a random coincidence. It’s rooted in the fact that a man’s reproductive resources are very cheap and a woman’s are very scarce.
Just because a man produces, by my count, 5 billion more gametes per month than a woman, and so his gametes are slightly less valuable individually, does not make a man fundamentally less valuable than a woman.
Well, y’know, it actually does! Every social practice that humans have ever engaged in throughout history has confirmed this fact.
So a man has to find something with which to supplement his value. This is no Herculean task, the barrier is very much intended to be surmountable. There are many types of goods and labors that men exchange for access to women’s bodies. But the point is that he has to find something; he’s not born with it.
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More are produced. This does not make them more valuable; more Honda Civics are produced than Porsche 911s, after all. Slightly later in life, it makes them far less valuable.
Both have value. I’m just pushing back against the view that most men have no value while all women have huge, elon musk level value. Usually this theory of value is backed by nothing more than an island hypothetical, with unlimited resources and no enemies.
The usual formulation is that women have value for what they are, and men have value for what they do. This does not give all women huge, Elon Musk level value.
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.
Doing has obvious value, I’m not sure being has value. Valued for being could just be an echo, a reminder of someone’s past, real doing-value, like the late aristocrats who were once warriors.
No, they are not. That may be the reason for the impulse, but they get the value regardless of whether they produce children.
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I don't think the Birkenhead drill only applies if the women in question aren't barren. Of course the value bestowed upon women is ultimately an evolutionary adaptation to the reality that only women can bear children. But in practice, even barren women are still seen as Wonderful™ in a way that NEET men aren't.
The birkenhead drill is not rationally justified, is my point. I doubt it would apply today, and I certainly wouldn’t go along with it if it did. Of course some people may still worship the ground women walk on like they used to worship cows, a sacred tree, or a magical stone.
I wasn't debating whether it was rationally justified. It's simply a fact of human nature that most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm (an urge they do not feel when it comes to male people, or at least not nearly to the same extent), and that this urge does not discriminate on whether the woman in question is capable of bearing children or not. Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties. So your claim that women are only valued for a "doing" (i.e. the ability to bear children) doesn't really seem to describe male psychology accurately.
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I said it was a "heavily attenuated" version of that. It was just an analogy, not meant to be taken literally.
That’s the definition of an analogy. You did say the female body is one of the most valuable possessions on earth. Your thesis is that her high value makes her insecure. I think it is the gulf between her appraisal of her own value, which is externally reinforced, and her actual, lower, value.
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From wikipedia:
The same factors that apply to language may apply to politics.
Another explanation could be that working-class women are more likely to hold public-facing or customer service jobs that require one to present in a certain manner, while men are more likely to do blue collar work where they only have to communicate with their coworkers.
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This suggests that the problem will self-extinguish as pillarization results in parallel status hierarchies in red and blue America.
What makes you think pillarization will happen — or, more specifically, that "blue America" will tolerate the existence of a parallel "red" hierarchy?
Because it’s already happening and blue America has neither the consistent control nor the willingness to put in the work to stop it.
"[Citation needed]" as they say
I very much disagree with this — I think it's but a matter of time until they come down hard on this sort of thing.
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I originally thought "emancipation" was just acting as a floating signifier, an applause light. But she actually does define it and her form of "freedom" in a few places, if not in terms that are very concrete themselves.
But the first and last of these are impossible, and for a feminist, self contradictory. One might reasonably imagine a world where skin color failed to matter aside from one's household sunscreen budget, but a world in which one's sex doesn't matter is not one populated with humans. And to be a feminist is to be concerned with the interests of women, politically.
The second is also impossible for most. At the trivial level, one must eat and drink, one must obtain protection from the elements, and one has no choice about that. Further, one's role is limited by both social and biological realities. Oddly she scorns the people who deny this the hardest -- the trans activists.
So, she seems to be asking for something impossible and which men also don't have. It is no surprise she is disappointed.
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The lindy way for high status men to do this is to enter a monastery(and honestly, while I'm not expecting Elon to do this, it'd be the least surprising tech billionaire). This option is also open to women; both Christian and Buddhist monasteries have convents to go with them.
I wonder if some of the rise in transmen isn't mediated by trying to find a secular alternative to this phenomenon.
Maybe autistic girls who really have trouble succeeding as women, find it far easier to be a short guy than to continue living with the weight of expectations of womanhood. The fact that surgeries and hormones "destroy their body" ends up being a benefit, not a drawback.
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I agree with some of your points, but I'm not sure if I fully agree here.
While the idea that "men do, women are" is accepted as a truism in some online circles, and I even think there are probably evopsych forces pushing in that direction, I think there are plenty of women who find fulfilling communities, hobbies, etc. where the fact that they are the "scarce resource" in reproduction isn't really that relevant one way or another.
Consider Youtube channels like this one for scrapbooking, or this one for miniatures. Both women are just disembodied hands, and yet I know people like my mom (who does scrapbooking and homemade cards) and an older family friend of ours (who made elaborate miniature dollhouses when her health was better) love these kinds of channels, watching them obsessively for ideas to try out.
I also have several lesbian friends, and they tend to have crafty hobbies that they love. One (whose day job is as a web developer) is an amazing seamstress, and has won cosplay contest awards for historical accuracy (due to her obsessively deep diving into Chinese clothing history for a costume she did.) One loves crochet and once made dozens of crochet stuffed animals (including several quite large ones) to give away for a party. Both of them seem to be pretty satisfied with their lot in life, most of the time, and neither their professions nor their hobbies seem to be affected very much by the fact that they're the scarce resource biologically.
Now, I grant that all of these are female-dominated hobbies that probably appeal to a "people-oriented" personality more, but it really isn't that hard in the modern day to have a friend group consisting of almost no straight guys, which has the practical effect of reducing the salience of being the scarce resource biologically to practically zero.
I mean if you’re doing a female centric hobby and your video content is mostly watched by other women, you might be able to get by with doing that, but even “disembodied hands” videoed will read “woman! Who happens to do X hobby,” when the audience contains more men. Even their voice over the internet, or a chosen screen name in gaming and they become a Woman and thus get treated like an object of desire rather than “just another dude playing an online game.”
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I tend to agree with this. I think also that in any case, “freedom” is more of a marketing strategy than a reality. No one is actually free, or at least anyone who is actually “free” lives naked in the woods somewhere. If you are powerful, you are unfree because the wolves and the jackals hunger for your position and any show of weakness is at least a road to losing power. The weak are not free either as they need protection from the strong and they need to survive in the world the powerful created. The rich need you to make them richer, but if you want to eat, you’ll have to do whatever your bosses want.
But I think in answer to the question, a lot of position-jealousy is that people tend to over estimate other people’s benefits while discounting their costs. So a woman who thinks men have more freedom than they do see things like more interesting work, being able to go out and golf on weekends, or whatever. What they don’t see is the work behind it, the stress of needing to chase after promotions to things they don’t really get the luxury of thinking about whether they even want the next job, or even enjoy the work they do because they have to feed, house and clothe the family. When you see the benefits but not the cost, you think they have a good deal. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has a lot of cool cars, multiple palaces, jets, and goes on lots of vacations. Of course, he has the sole responsibility of running Saudi Arabia, and fighting jihadists and trying to thread the needle on trading with rich Jews in Israel while not pissing off the good Muslims supporting Palestinian people. The people who think those on benefits have it easy have never had to live in poverty.
Yeah, as a child of upper middle class parents, it was a bit of a system shock years ago when I truly grokked that people had radically different backgrounds.
My college girlfriend broke down crying when she first saw my childhood home, because I "lived in a mansion" (I didn't) while her parents had been forced to sell her childhood home because they couldn't afford it, and one of the members of my Esperanto club was the first disabled man I ever interacted with at length and it was kind of heartbreaking seeing the squalor a person my age could live in even with supportive friends and family and disability payments.
I think those kind of scenarios are actually rarer than people think. It almost codes to me that your college GF was not the same race/ethnicity as you because of that kind of gap. People rarely end up in college without having traversed some part of the middle class, and if you did, you are exposed to all or almost all the tiers of the middle class. My parents, when I was born, were lower, by the time my youngest sibling graduated HS, upper. Even while we were still lower, I had seen UMC houses and they were clearly not mansions. I had seen mansions, that is what Michael Jordan owned.
What is actually a common jarring experience for lots of people is when there is a talented family of people who live in a bad or even mediocre place. Like say you are a law student at a T14 school and you meet a guy at that school and he tells you his sister is currently on full ride scholarship to Michigan and his brother is going to Wharton. Most people assume this guy came from UMC at a minimum. But sometimes they come from some random rank 100 school in West Virginia and their dad is like a railroad switchman or some general store owner/operator. Such cases now are becoming incredibly rare because of things like Affirmative Action in college admissions and other "standardization" (which of course actually excludes actual standards like SATs and LSATs) procedures, but they still happen from time to time. Bell Labs at its peak was populated by many such people, and I had opposing counsel in a case recently who I basically described, with minor anonymization added.
She was white-passing Hispanic. She had a scholarship, and was living for free in the house of a Christian couple that let underprivileged youth sleep in their spare rooms while she went to school. Her parents were working, but were too far away from the school and not in a financial position to really help her pay for things.
To be fair to her, I don't think she literally thought my childhood house was a mansion. I just think that she went from a precarious lower middle class in a cramped one-story house, to basically homeless, and something about the "unfairness" of that hit her when she saw the way I grew up.
I'm sure you're right that it is relatively rare, but my stint working as a home caregiver for the eldery also showed me a lot of sad tales. Old people with mobility issues or parkinson's who don't really have a lot going for them: They can't do their hobbies because of their broken bodies and deteriorating minds, their kids or grandkids have often cut them off and live far away, and they just get ferried from doctor's appointments to physical therapy until they die a slow, sad lingering death. It is hard when you're someone's only lifeline, and you're only there because you're being paid far too little for the amount of shit you're putting up with.
This is why "noticing" and hunches are informative. What we actually have is a Hispanic girl at a school that probably is a reach school for an equally talented white kid, and certainly not one where they get a scholarship. She's a fish out of water by design of the admissions office who wanted to fill out some numbers that make them feel good.
I am sadly well aware of this line of work because of the large number of criminals and scammers who go into the work. For the hard workers it is indeed a tough row to hoe. But its also full of abuse by just people exploiting the government.
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