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New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women
What freedom? How are you not free?
Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?
(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)
Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?
And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.
We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.
Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)
We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.
It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that some women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.
As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.
Another hopelessly confused feminist who cannot express a coherent thought. Women like her have been indulged, coddled and lied to their whole lives. As you note, almost subconsciously, she senses that something is not adding up (“the lingering shadow “, “performative reverence”, “dimmed”, “faint echo”).
Echoes of the white lies she has been fed, of her incomparable value, of her oppression, and that she can have it all, and do anything men can, and better. The problem is not that she’s elon musk and people value her too much and don’t value ‘her for her’. It’s that people lie to her about how valuable she really is, like an AA hiring panel, or a loving parent.
This argument has to die. Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1. Most rawlsian babies would prefer the male body, it’s the practical choice. Most parents do too. And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women. Women can always be procured. A weapon is as valuable as an incubator. Even more so in the modern world, where the incubators are faulty, and we’re all tools.
More are produced. This does not make them more valuable; more Honda Civics are produced than Porsche 911s, after all. Slightly later in life, it makes them far less valuable.
Both have value. I’m just pushing back against the view that most men have no value while all women have huge, elon musk level value. Usually this theory of value is backed by nothing more than an island hypothetical, with unlimited resources and no enemies.
The usual formulation is that women have value for what they are, and men have value for what they do. This does not give all women huge, Elon Musk level value.
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.
Doing has obvious value, I’m not sure being has value. Valued for being could just be an echo, a reminder of someone’s past, real doing-value, like the late aristocrats who were once warriors.
I don't think the Birkenhead drill only applies if the women in question aren't barren. Of course the value bestowed upon women is ultimately an evolutionary adaptation to the reality that only women can bear children. But in practice, even barren women are still seen as Wonderful™ in a way that NEET men aren't.
The birkenhead drill is not rationally justified, is my point. I doubt it would apply today, and I certainly wouldn’t go along with it if it did. Of course some people may still worship the ground women walk on like they used to worship cows, a sacred tree, or a magical stone.
I wasn't debating whether it was rationally justified. It's simply a fact of human nature that most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm (an urge they do not feel when it comes to male people, or at least not nearly to the same extent), and that this urge does not discriminate on whether the woman in question is capable of bearing children or not. Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties. So your claim that women are only valued for a "doing" (i.e. the ability to bear children) doesn't really seem to describe male psychology accurately.
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