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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!
It's a poor analysis, as you say, because elections are not "proxies for war." Democracy wasn't invented as an alternative to war, and obviously democracies have not resulted in the end of war. Minorities having disproportionate electoral power is a problem in a lot of electoral systems; we've debated this here quite a lot. But the 4chan argument is just another iteration of the very unsophisticated premise we see repeated here all the time: "Women are weaker than men, therefore men should control women."
The increasing hostility between the sexes is certainly a problem, but to believe that the solution is for women to accept a subordinate role without political autonomy requires believing either (a) that women could be persuaded to accept this or (b) persuading men to revert to treating women as property. If we had an apocalypse or something it would undoubtedly be a pretty rough time for women (which is why @KulakRevolt is so popular with certain types of people), but short of that, you aren't going to persuade most men, and certainly not most women, that giving women rights was a mistake.
I don't foresee the South Korean government deciding that the solution to plummeting birth rates is to take away women's voting rights or institute some sort of YA dystopian regime. It's certainly not going to happen here. I think all the trads and redpillers predicting some sort of End of Feminism are wishcasting, and they are just as ridiculous as the feminists gloomcasting in the other direction by calling every pushback against feminism an attempt to implement the Handmaid's Tale.
It's generally true though that whenever civil wars are terminated through compromise and mutual agreement, it always entails armed groups disarming themselves, renouncing political violence and transforming into political parties, under the strict understanding that the other side will not try dissolving these parties through other means. So I think the analysis does have some legs to stand on in that respect.
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