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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.
The maternal instinct for the children is mixed with adoration for murderous, rapey barbarians. Personally, I suspect the second to be stronger than the first, but the first to be more what they talk about. Women love a killer, but which killer they love is a function of their social class and politics.
In the '70's, rich white girls used to form terrorist cells, break black felons out of prison, serve as a harem and follow him into battle against the evil white people, by which they meant assassinating black people.
I'm not sure this makes sense. Many men admire murderous, rapey barbarians too. Right-wing Twitter is full of odes to romanticized Indo-European chariot riders replacing the original populations of Europe and India.
Allegedly, a lot of statue-posters are actually women (I don't remember where I read/saw this, though). If true, this only reinforces JTarrou's point, only with the political valence flipped.
The neo-pagan revival niche within the DR is also heavily female.
Bearded blond guys with deer horns on their heads must be cleaning up... Hang on, I could be that guy!
Pity the deer around here have even more pitiful racks than the women do. Might have to go on a hunting trip out east.
Yup, that's the idea. The men involved are thinking strategically, the women involved connect with it on a totally different level. It really does come down to the Apollonian/Dionysian duality described by Nietzsche. It's why Rationalism is doomed, except to the extent it taps into the Dionysian while pretending it has a basis in rationality...
Imagine EA without the polycules, orgies, or the women. Rationalists cannot escape the Dionysian Force either.
I think that most of the men who admire brutal chariot-riding conquerors are not thinking strategically, they just valorize virile amoral masculine strength for emotional reasons, in many cases I would guess because they feel inadequate as men and feel disconnected from modernity and so they are attracted to an archetype of brutal masculinity that has the extra advantage of pissing off politically mainstream people.
No, it's mostly due to the belief that a renaissance of European identity would require a European religion of some form to replace Christianity. So they look towards the old European gods for inspiration. I have my own criticisms, I think their premise is correct but a "replacement European religion" will be some AI-generated cult rather than a pagan revival (maybe such a cult would borrow a lot of pagan aesthetics). But there is more substance there, they are obviously thinking with more sophistication than you realize. The glorification of the Indo-European chariot riders is not at all far removed from glorification of Greco-Roman civilization, as the latter pantheon was likewise, in essence, a glorification of the Indo-European chariot riders conquering and colonizing the world, imposing civilization onto humanity.
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