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Where do you see the Gender War going?
My Definition of the Gender War.
There are many fronts in the Culture War that can be more or less described as a 'Gender War'.
Front 1: Which pronouns to use? Does "gender even exist?
Front 2: Is Western society a "patriarchy"?
Front 3: Is Masculinity Toxic?
Front 4: "Incels".
This post is about Front 4. Growing male sexlessness. I am not going to make much of an empirical argument but more of a rhetorical one.
So what if men are having less sex?
A large enough contingency of young men not having sexual partners is almost always a precursor for political and social instability. All that excess energy needs to be directed somewhere (work to provide for the wife and kids), if it isn't it usually boils over towards the rest of society as men seek out more violent and high-risk avenues to gain social status let that be joining gangs or starting political revolutions.
Moreover, young men are the most productive demographic in society in just about every domain. If a large enough percentage of them don't see any reason/reward for working hard, they just won't.
It's getting worse.
A growing number of men not having sex is a canary in the coal mine. That whatever was holding the socioeconomic fabric together is deteriorating. Let that be worsening economic conditions (we got plenty of that), worsening economic inequality (plenty of that as well), or just worsening social institutions (Online dating is the plurality method of how heterosexual couples met., It's growing rapidly.).
The cultural wind is blowing
Not only that but the two sexes resenting each other is mainstream. As I was growing up in the early 2000s there were 'boys vs girls' conversations. But those conversations were light-hearted and there were no hard feelings.
Nowadays browsing through social media comment sections and talking to other young guys. The tensions are much higher. I see normies spouting black pill talking points all over Instagram and TikTok. And that seems to be the majority ideology. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s and even the 2010s were the majority consensus amongst men could have been described as 'RedPill' or 'BluePill'.
If you want an example of the above, Read the comments of this video (Videos like this are an entire genre among zoomers). You can feel the tension in the comments. To me, it's obvious this girl is joking, even if the joke isn't all that funny or whatever. The comments don't suggest most people viewed it as such, the men are on edge. I'd wager they wouldn't have reacted like this a decade ago. Another interesting phenomenon is that unattractive girls produce content like this imitating the attractive ones who can actually get away with it and just end up sinking the sanity waterline further as young naive men peers who know her think "wait I can't even this this bitch?" and the women gas up their egos without being able to back it up.
I mean Andrew Tate is actually popular FFS! I have had so many of my normie friends and acquaintances ask me about what I think of Andrew Tate, and most of them say the same thing. "He's got a point, I agree with a large part of what he says". The man is a clown, he's a comedian in my eyes. The fact his rhetoric resonates with men despite all else is a testament to the times we are living in.
On the female side of the aisle, it seems like they are doubling down too. They will just make more TikTok videos like the one I linked above.
Where do I see all this going?
Increasing political and social tension. More fringe political parties are elected, and how that happens will be left as an exercise for the leader.
One can make the argument that countries like Japan and South Korea are already further along the line of atomization and sexlessness (their TFR is atrocious!).
I don't think East Asian countries with the rice farming optimized culture (and genetic predisposition against inhibition, extremely interesting but I can't find the link) are good proxies to model the rest of the world after.
India might be a candidate they have a Front 4 gender war as well, arranged marriage puts a damper but Hindu Nationalism is clearly on the rise.
It seems that we are in the perfect storm for worsening Gender relations. Economic struggles, increasing OLD (that comes with a massive amount of its own problems) app usage, increasing atomization, recommendation algorithms primarily suggesting media that lowers the sanity line (rage bait of the likes made by Ms Andrea Subotic), gender confusion, Males being vilified for???, Women specific AA, all of them compounding on each other...
A few choice cuts from the English Anti-Suffragist platform.
Every time this brand of gender-relations pessimism comes up, I have the same incredulous reaction, and I think it comes down to one underlying sentiment:
We have seen this one before. The anti-suffragists were sure voting would tear apart a fragile equilibrium between the sexes. They asserted the existing division of manual and domestic labor was not only stable, but optimal, and any changes would be disastrous for the State. If TFR data was available in 1910, I imagine it would have been quite the talking point, but without it, they could only mutter about “taxing of energies.” Their confidence was preserved for posterity on the public record, not just in the ephemera of YouTube comments.
So when you suggest that this time, TikTok is going to do what the assembly line could not, that influencers are more reflective of a culture than yellow journalism, that our economic circumstances are more stressful than two World Wars and a Great Depression? I remain skeptical. The fabric of society isn’t as fragile as you think.
Suffrage did though. Gender relations are permanently changed, no one can come up with a way to combine liberated women and high TFR(and even if the selection hypothesis is true, it appears to just be selecting for women who choose ‘babies’ over ‘liberation’), and the male labor force participation rate did drop and no one knows how to raise it again.
Is it possible that there’s alternative reasons? Yes, but suffrage was an inflection point.
Do you really think, though, that doing away with votes for women is going to make the pendulum swing back? The kind of rainbow hair dye septum-pierced college activist types are possibly not voting, but that doesn't stop them setting up all kinds of campaigns. Would AOC go back to the kitchen (or cocktail bar) if she couldn't be elected and couldn't even vote?
Yeah, women have to take responsibility for what happened, but so do men. The Sexual Revolution was something both sexes wanted; men wanted it for 'free love' where they wouldn't have to marry a chick just to fuck her, wouldn't have to run the risk of a kid they'd have to support (because yay contraception and later on abortion), and they'd be able to play the field, sow their wild oats, and not be held back or tied down by boring suburban domesticity with a wife and kids. Women wanted it because hey, women get horny too, they didn't want marriage and kids off the bat either, and they were being told they should aspire to have the same freedoms as men did in all aspects of their live.
Don't marry without trying out the goods first, how can you be sure you'll have a happy marriage if you find out you're not sexually compatible? Without living together, how will you know that you'll get on together? And only one sexual partner in your entire life? You'll regret this later on, you'll be resentful about missing out on all the great experiences you could have had. And men and women will understand each other better, be more friendly, once they are all frank and open about sex and there are no more taboos or restrictions.
At some stage in their lives, everyone is young and horny and wants fun without strings or complications, and they think everyone else is having all the fun, and they're reading magazines and newspaper articles and seeing movies and TV shows about all the great, fun, non-vanilla non-missionary sex everyone else is having, you could be having that too. Then they bump into reality (not everybody gets to have that) and they are resentful, because they were promised this! They were told that love and romance and sex were the greatest pleasures and the most important things in life, and they deserved it all!
How many 20 year old men really want to get married, settle down, and start a family at that age? How many women? I would wager not very many, because this is the modern world we live in now. Get an education first. Get a good job. Get that career. Make something of yourself before even thinking of permanent relationships. But also have a long-term relationship, because only losers can't get a partner. Contradictory messaging, and no recognition of the hard truth that some people will never have that, no matter how they want it, because they're too ugly or too weird or they are misfits in some way. They don't even have to be "crazy homeless on the streets" level, but some people are fat or short or plain or have odd interests or are socially inept because of personality disorders (very mild ones) and all the coaching in the world and advice about "dress better, eat healthy, lift!" is not going to get them what they want. Men and women both.
I don't think 20 year olds should be getting married, but neither do I think 12 year olds should even be thinking of boyfriends/girlfriends and dating. But we have to teach them all about it, because of course they'll be having sex, because that's our modern world and there's no such thing as "no, you're too young and I have the authority to stop you". Or at least, that's the argument from the great liberal campaign to give everyone freedoms and rights and happiness.
Well, yes, it probably would. I think the folks who unironically want to revoke women's suffrage are entirely correct that it did, and continues to, radically alter society.
Whether this is a good thing or not is a matter of perspective. But we'd definitely be less liberal and very much less woke without the women's vote.
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