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I am convinced that the Sex Divide is the greatest political engine of today, and that a big chunk of the culture war is based on the existance of this divide, and the inability of society to understand that political differences between males and females have an enormous biological basis.
After I finally understood this concept, I began to "notice", being always passionate about politics and speaking about it, that the discourses and the nature of the topic I discussed with people were and are heavily genderized.
Having a political or cultural discussion with a female is, in general, radically different from having one with a male, not only regarding the topics of interests per se (males more interested in economics or raw politics, female more interested in immigration, equality or similar topics), but also regarding "how" to approach a discussion.
I feel way more free talking with males, because I always had the impression, confirmed 95% of the times, that I can be more open and direct with what I felt without receiving a backslash, that can be personal (simply the person screaming at you or hating you) or social (person beginning to talk with other people in your social network) (NB: I am not American and I do not live in a very polarized society). Apart from the political extremists and activists that you can meet, the following things happened often:
Me and the other male have a disagreement, that can be harsh or about an hot topic, but that resolve itself in a shake of hand.
We disagree on a lot of topic, but also agree on other ones, making the discussion constructive in itself.
I discover that the other male have a lot of, uh, hidden opinions that he does not reveal in his network, often because of female backslash.
In general, I love to talk about politics or culture with other middle or low class males, because I always "received" something in exchange after the discussion, something that can be a new reflection on a topic, an earnest discovering of new knowledge, or simply understanding more some concepts.
Meanwhile, apart from a selected group of very close female friends and a selected other few, almost all the discussion with females ended with a disaster. In spite of me trying to move in a different manner, being more gentle and less direct, and understanding that I need to adapt to other people when I talk about something, the discussions simply does not start well and end well. What happens is:
We have a disagreement, and at this point the discussion or close itself ("It is useless to continue, why we should?") or degenerate in a very uncomfortable discussion where the woman put herself as an emotional victim of what we are talking about.
If the discussion does not degenerate but continues, it is always redirected to morality or feeling or about a generic "natural law". At this point if I try to redirect the discussion negating the opposing point (I do not agree with your morality or I do not care about this morality) it simply degenerate again in a morality context, where your worth as individual is put on a public pedestal.
The result of all of this, after years of experience... is that I do not talk about these kind of topics with women anymore, apart from a selected few. When I have this kind of conversation I always strive for earning something, that can be knowledge, human connection or shared experiences. Why doing these with women, when the things that you can earn are statistically negative?
Adding to what I said, I also need to mention that, after lowering down the kind of topics and approaches that I have with women, both my dating life and romantic life radically improved. I do not know if it is a coincidence or not.
You see the dynamic in any online forum that is still pseudonymous (such as this one). Even though we can all guess based on general demographic surveys that 85% of the forum, at least, is male, one can't confirm the gender of any particular poster beyond their own representations.
As soon as you enable users to present as a particular gender (all the moreso if you let them add photos) that all goes out the window.
On a side note, this is also tying into my experience of becoming quietly convinced that the inability of society to 'rein in' female sexuality in a healthy way contributes to almost every form of social dysfunction we observe.
Note I'm not saying this is the ONLY condition for dysfunction (plenty of dysfunctional societies which heavily police female sexuality, cf. Iran) but just a seemingly major factor that contributes to dysfunction in the long run.
But as soon as you start letting attractive people leverage their attractiveness to gain popularity, you necessarily compromise the basic factor that allows people to engage in conversation on a 'neutral' playing field. That invites all the rest of the problems inherent to human social group dynamics.
Just say no.
Depending on the specific object-level claims being made, I might agree with parts of this, but I'm going to push back slightly here.
I think there are a lot of ways that the sexual revolution screwed over both men and women.
Whatever other issues the paternalistic approach to women had in the past, it almost certainly limited the number of vectors of attack from men. If all coed college parties have chaperones, then the risk of a woman being raped on a college campus is almost certainly lower than the modern anarchy of college party culture. This is not to suggest that chaperoning was always successful at protecting the people involved, but my intuition is that when society put more of the burden on men to protect women from other men, women were safer in a number of contexts than they are now. Now, we give women all of the legal freedom of men, but they still take on most of the risks of sex and are thus more vulnerable than they were before.
There are no solutions, only trade offs.
I am sure there were trade offs we made when we decided that society should have the shape that it does today. Porn is freely made and shared online, porn-adjacent professions like Twitch pool streamers exist in "kid-friendly" spaces, and even though fewer people are having sex, the general attitude is a permissive one. All of these things come with trade offs for men and women. Men slowly learn the lesson to never give money to begging women - basically, reality slowly burns the simp out of them, but there are new foolish young men born every minute. Women learn that they have value in society and on the dating market, but that the value is of a very limited and proscribed sort.
However, I don't necessarily think that the trade offs we have made are more bad than good. Society certainly looks different than it did in the more paternalistic, puritan past. Rich people are more shielded from the consequences of sexual license and hedonism than the poor - as it has always been. But I think we should seriously consider whether making people more miserable in exchange for freedom is worth it. Certainly, a strict utilitarian might say "we crunched the numbers and traditionalism is the better overall system", but not everyone is a strict utilitarian and if we value human flourishing more than simple pleasure it might be the case that our system empowers more people to flourish, even as it factually causes more suffering than other ways of arranging society that make different trade-offs on the freedom-risk spectrum.
It seems almost axiomatic to me that women would be safer, ceteris paribus, if they have a male who has an extremely vested interest in her wellbeing in the vicinity to provide some physical security.
Husband, brother, father, whatever.
I think the 'tradeoff' in this case is mostly that having intimidating male relatives scares off some potential suitors who might be otherwise compatible. Note that this is, arguably, a factor that reigns in/polices MALE sexuality!
Right, and we're seeing some interesting tradeoffs result from new technology making life 'easier.'
We have more access to cheap, healthy food than ever before, and obesity has become more prevalent than ever before, with various implications for human health and flourishing. This seems like something worth noticing, commenting upon, discussing, and maybe 'fixing.'
We have way more access to safe, 'consequence free' (not counting the emotional component) and pleasure-oriented sex than ever before and yet many people seem less satisfied with their romantic relationships and there seems to be more intersex strife than ever before. This seems like something worth noticing, commenting upon, discussing, and maybe 'fixing.'
It's not inherently an argument that we must go back to traditional ways of doing things... but I think we shouldn't be afraid to say "hey we made some progress in many areas but there have been some unforeseen effects that have arisen." The default assumption should not be that all progress is inherently good.
Do we really? Then why is every generation having less of it, and people taking longer to lose their virginities? Why are the most developed countries the most sexless?
Yeah, this reminds me of an old joke which I will shamelessly steal:
Everyone loves the idea of being a free spirit. Free to do whatever you like. That's the image sold by the media too about the liberal world and many liberals value this image. The old suffocating religious strictures were supposed to dissolve and we'd all be having guilt-free sex.
But what we've actually learned is that the sexual marketplace is like the other one; inequity proliferates, except perhaps even worse because "redistribution" is practically much harder.
The average male especially would probably benefit more from having a long-term marriage, sex-wise, but everyone is fantasizing about "freedoms" most of them will never practically get to exercise that much.
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Why are the people injecting chemical happiness into their arms so consistently among the least-happy people in society? Why has the invention and proliferation of cheap, ubiquitous chemical happiness coincided with a general decline in overall happiness?
The world wonders.
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How do we know that there has been a general decline in overall happiness over the period you have in mind?
I could point to surveys of self-reported happiness, rates of substance abuse, mental illness, suicide, crime, divorce rates.... but generally, I'm skeptical that there's actually a way to determine the answer to this question in any sort of rigorous fashion. If you see it, you see it. If not, feel free to dismiss the above argument out of hand. After all, "I'm happy. I'm happy every day."
Yeah, I don't want to be annoying about asking for evidence about these things, but I haven't seen a partic vivid trajectory personally except for unhappiness having to do with recent Covid issues of course. I just don't attach much weight to this personal impression given that I am in a relatively well-off context.
I do think one can easily support claims about general unhappiness in terms of objective statistics for 'obviously bad things that make people unhappy', like poverty, drugs, crime, etc (although it is tricky with regard to people taking say, happiness drugs, as they could have been unhappy before and just not taken drugs, when there is a recent pervasive marketing of them). Maybe there are indicators one can find elsewhere in culture, media that more unhappy people are liable to consume to see their feelings reflected back at them.
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I think the truly happy, CONTENT people are harder to detect because they're just out there enjoying life and not complaining.
But the rates of drug abuse, suicide, and all the other ills you mentioned are really hard to ignore as social red flags.
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I didn't say otherwise, I am also asking these questions.
There's access in the sense that the tools and understanding and opportunities to engage in the casual sex with minimal risk are ubuiquitous. It is counter-intuitive that people wouldn't be exploiting this access.
But the apparent slump in younger people actually having sex is one of those weird side effects I'm curious about.
Isn't this just young males having less of it and females having equal or more than before while sharing an ever decreasing number of "desirable" partners?. I think this is the case at least in the US dating Market.
I've seen statistics that reflect young people of both sexes having less sex, though if I recall correctly it is the males who report having less sex than they would like to have.
https://www.aei.org/articles/more-faith-less-sex-why-are-so-many-unmarried-young-adults-not-having-sex/
https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5057/vshow
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