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Notes -
I recently saw a provocative bit of 4chan greentext concerning politics and gender. I'll reproduce it here as follow -
As far as analysis goes, this is obviously not especially sophisticated or historically grounded. However, it does pose an interesting problem, which is perhaps better framed in more general terms, since it applies as much to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe as it does men and women.
Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?
It seems to me that it's not trivial that it's unsustainable. In particular, a sustainable model might involve the following: (i) the ongoing costs to Group A of Exemplavania being run by Group B are low. (ii) the one-off costs of Group A enacting a violent revolution to enfranchise their own power are high. (iii) all members of the polity do some form of temporal discounting. In this case, members of Group A might rationally conclude that it's not worth the hassle of an uprising.
Nonetheless, I do worry a bit that political polarisation along gender lines is unsustainable. Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1. Insofar as women's political tendencies remained broadly aligned with a large proportion of men (or powerful enough men), as they have done more or less until now, this arrangement seems pretty stable. However, if we see continued political polarisation along gender lines, as we've seen in South Korea for example, and this leads to political outcomes that are strongly disfavoured by a large majority of men, then at some point the decision to enfranchise women may be in jeopardy.
Curious what others think!
This might be uncharitable of me, but after extensive experience with 4chan I suspect that the greentext, at bottom, is just the common 4chan theme of "I wish I could just use force to get women to have sex with me", but dressed up in an intellectual argument.
Notice that the author jumps immediately to the idea of war and never thinks about a much less violent way in which men could potentially persuade women to shift their politics. Which would be to simply deny women male assistance unless they have shown that their politics are friendly to men. No giving or selling of goods or services to women if they seem to have anti-male politics. Of course, in the US that would be illegal for a business to do due to various laws and how those laws are interpreted in practice. My understanding is that it is technically legal for a business to refuse service due to a political disagreement, but in practice it is hard to imagine such a decision being ruled legal if it overwhelmingly affected women. But it is much easier for me to imagine men flouting those laws in mass than it is to imagine men literally going to war against the woman-coded side.
I doubt either would happen, though. I think that it is hard for most men outside of a small group of true misogynists to really truly and deeply hate a woman for her politics unless she directly screws you over in some way. If she is your family member, it is hard because she is family. If she is a lover, it is hard because she is a lover. If she is just some random woman, it is hard because women are not as intimidating as men and so they don't push the deep-seated buttons that make a man want to deeply resist the other side.
It is a strange situation because it is true that many women vote for policies that are objectively bad for me, even to the point of endangering my life. Such as soft-on-crime policies. And that is very bad. Yet despite the fact that I know several women who very much are hard-core Democratic supporters, it is hard for me to really feel personally angry at them for it. Instead I generally just feel that they are being naive or stupid, or that they are letting their views about things like abortion override other factors, and I feel that I want to persuade them, not coerce them, into looking at things differently.
I guess in some ways that is a good thing for the same reason as why it is a good thing to not rage at your family and friends over political disagreements. I don't know. Maybe I should be angry at them for voting for policies that I consider total shit. Not sure what that would help, though. Some man being openly angry at them would do the very opposite of moving them closer to my politics. And in any case, while in some cases these women are quite vehement at disagreeing with my politics, I would not say that they have ever done it in an angry way. Just in a vehement way. I have had a few women actually get openly angry at my politics in the past, but their number is relatively small compared to the number of all the women that I have disagreed with about politics. And I have had men get openly angry at my politics in the past too, as I myself also have with others.
This all reminds me of the famous quote, "Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy."
Don't get me wrong, I probably do have a breaking point. If like 90% of all women voted to literally open up all the prisons and then put a reparations tax on men for centuries of patriarchy, at that point I am pretty sure that I would just pull a reverse Lysistrata and stop fraternizing with the vast majority of them. There is such a thing as too much. I am not there at the moment though. And I am lucky enough that at least the women I am close with are either politically moderate like me or are hard-core Democrats but are capable of having a conversation with me about politics without yelling.
I am reminded a bit of that one Spike Lee movie where Chicago women said they’d strike from having sex with men until they stopped killing each other with guns. Never actually watched the movie and have no idea what a 4channer would think about it but did want to mention that yeah, the idea of gender relations and withholding crossing with politics isn’t exclusively a right wing thing.
Spike Lee wrote Lysistrata? Huh, so he did.
The Lee version doesn't work because too many women find violent criminals sexy. I expect the Ancient Greek version wouldn't work for similar reasons; the married women may not like war but the unmarried ones like warriors.
Ancient Greek women did not choose their sexual partners and the Ancient Greek mind literally could not comprehend the possibility; that’s why lysistrata was a satire.
Humm.....perhaps the high born didn't choose their husbands but a lot of women in the greek world certainly chose who they slept with. Divorce was also an accepted remedy for a bad marriage in athens. There is little known about romance and marriages in the lower classes of the time.
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