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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 seems like an oddly idealistic narrative of the origins of female franchise. I'd understood that early votes-for-women initiatives in the US were aimed at preserving the political power of the (gender-balanced) elite classes in the face of growing (mostly male) immigrant populations? I'm less familiar with the history of the vote in the UK, but given that many landholding women had local suffrage long before, which was removed with the expansion of male suffrage at the start of the 19th century, I presume most of those developments were similarly driven by cynical power-consolidation politics rather than by honest persuasion changing hearts.
Power is power. There is no interesting scenario "oooh what if Group A was more violent but Group B had more members, and they realized their interests were opposed, who would win" because both numbers and capacity for effective violence are just forms of power, and by definition the most powerful group has already won-- is, in fact, the group orchestrating the conflict, defining the teams and making it permissible to think about the opposition of interests in the first place.
As regards the gender gap in political affiliation, the actual power-holders are clearly not the anxious Millennial women who dutifully parrot the ACAB memes that turn up on their Instagram feeds; they're the mixed-gender, likely majority-male Instagram board and leadership, plus all the others of their class, who decided for obscure reasons of their own that those memes were fine and dandy to boost in feeds in the first place, then to bake into the rest of our tech-driven reality. Those are the folks to watch, and if 4chan ever does go to real-life war against the Emilies, it'll be when those people decide it would be a convenient development, not a moment before. But I tend to agree with the person upthread who said that this line of thinking is mostly an excuse to fantasize impotently about punishing the people who won't sleep with them.
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