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Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)
I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.
The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.
Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.
For me the question rotates around two different forces;
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
I've experienced much the same, most of the really active Palestine posters are women. Maybe a part of the explanation is this poem from the 70s that the local ones like to quote (translated by me from Finnish):
When someone has been born a mother
Who has once been born as a mother,
is a mother to all children,
and all the children of the world
she has held to her chest.
And the cry of the children of the world,
she has started to hear in her ears,
as all the children of the world,
speak with her own child's mouth.
This particular war has really featured a lot of pictures of dead or seriously hurt Palestinian children and babies. If you're even vaguely affliated to lefty people on social media you'll be bombarded with dozens of them every week unless you start hiding or blocking. I'm not particularly emotional (well, duh, I post here), but some of them really get to me, too. They must be playing a particularly merry havoc on maternal instincts, even with women who don't have kids themselves.
One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.
It's compounded by social network effects, of course.
Thanks for the poem and the translation.
Yes, it looks like something that we as civilization have not yet understood, and maybe we knew but we have forgotten, is the different moral framework of women in comparison to men. We notice it now way more because women has enormous political power, and this translates to a change in ethics in our political and cultural class.
From a political perspective, it makes very hard to dislodsge young women and the left, because, by nature, the modern left is based on the oppressor/oppressed moral framework. The only thing you can use it to introduce another oppressor/oppressed moral framework that is stronger.
It also make me think how the liberal civilization will fare in the future if we adopt women's moral framework, especially on foreign policy. And I think here there is a case of "wokes more correct than the mainstream" when they say that Imperialism is born from the Patriarchy.
The thing is, though, as I will not tire of mentioning, is that "left votes for women" is a very recent concept. In most European countries, until the 80s, the left voted for conservative parties more than the left-wing ones - there might have been a fair few more countries within the Eastern sphere if it hadn't been for women's suffrage! - and in UK the women voted more for Tories until 2017.
Most oppressor/oppressed frameworks that we have had already been introduced to politics before the 80s, of course, and a huge amount of men sympathized with the one that has had the most political strength by far - "we are workers, the bosses are taking from us, let's get ours". What really changed was the loss of strength of Christianity as the main, or one of the main, political frameworks behind conservative thought, particularly with its pro-maternal themes.
I wonder if declining fertility/maternity among women have a role to play here. Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring. By contrast, if you're 35 and childless, you don't have a proximal locus for it. Instead, it might be channeled into forms of high-visibility compassion-driven benevolence (no! not like that!) of the kind that progressivism strongly seeks to identify itself with.
There's something to this. Most unmarried men, married men and married women vote Republican. Most unmarried women vote Democrat.
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