site banner
PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   27228 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

Some excerpts:

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.

Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981). A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.

And we wonder why men are dropping out of the workforce/university...

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?

I found the whole essay quite interesting and also somewhat obvious in that 'oh I should've realized this and put it together before' sense. I read somewhere else on twitter that you could track the origins of civil rights/student activism to women gaining full entry to universities in America, as opposed to just chaperoned/'no picnicking out together' kind of limited access. Deans and admin no longer felt they could punish and control like when it was a male environment, plus young men behave very differently when there are sexually available women around. So there's also a potential element of weakened suppression due to fear of female tears and young men simping for women, along with the long-term demographic change element.

Though I suspect it may be more multi-factorial than that, with the youth bulge and a gradual weakening of the old order. A man had to make the decision to let women into universities after all.

I also find Helen Andrews refreshing in that she's not stuck in the 'look at me I'm a woman who's prepared to be anti-feminist, I'm looking for applause and clicks' mould, she makes the reasons behind her article quite clear:

Because, after all, I am not just a woman. I am also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions, who will find it hard to flourish if society becomes more conflict-averse and consensus-driven. I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world. I am—we all are—dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.

Another idea that occurred to me is that the committee that drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife. The UN Declaration of Human Rights was instrumental in establishing what we now understand as progressivism. That piece of international law, (really the origin of 'international law' as we understand it today, beyond just the customary law of embassies) directly led to the Refugee Convention of 1951 that has proven quite troublesome for Europe's migrant crisis, it introduced the principle of non-refoulement. It also inspired the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965):

Each State Party undertakes to encourage, where appropriate, integrationist multiracial organizations and movements and other means of eliminating barriers between races

Shall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination

Sounds pretty woke! Note that states don't necessarily follow through on international law or sign up with it fully in the first place: Israel, America, Russia and so on routinely ignore these kinds of bodies in the foreign policy sphere. The Conventions and Committees are feminine in a certain sense in that they can be ignored without fear of violence, unlike an army of men. Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.

To some extent international law could be considered an early feminized field, or perhaps it was born female. Are there any other feminized fields we can easily think of? Therapists, HR and school teachers come to mind, though that seems more recent.

Putting women in law and medicine is also dumb for another reason, which is that you force the most intelligent women to have a lower TFR than they otherwise might have. And you force them into a dysgenic and unhealthy motherhood environment, because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.

Also, it seems to me that women just don’t think up interesting ideas at the same rate men do. As someone who ravenuously pursues interesting ideas and thoughts (as I imagine many themotte users do as well), about 99% of interesting ideas I read are produced by men. And if you look at the places where interesting ideas proliferate without the allure of a secondary reward (social attention), it’s overwhelmingly men, like on the anonymous humanities or political board of 4chan (which like it or not has had an enormous influence on today’s online culture). And the games which focus on creative problem solving, strategy or Minecraft style games, are overwhelmingly male, whereas the cosmetic and nurturing games are overwhelmingly female. This tells us something because what people do in their leisure is what they like to do without the watchful eye of society. So, women can do systems-oriented creative problem solving, but will they if they don’t have a structure involving secondary rewards of cogent social reinforcement (degrees and peer competition), by which they can feel superior to their pretty peers? I’m going to say usually not, most just don’t do that, but that’s an issue if we want people who intrinsically love problem-solving in every kind of role like that — such people require less mentoring, less extrinsic reward infrastructure, might come up with a novel insight out of the blue, etc

That's a lot of speculative theories and subjective experience that may really just be yours (maybe about 1/3 of research papers I have built on had women first authors, and I'm in a hard theory corner of CS). Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do? Instead, on top of the steamrolling dominance of egalitarian Western society, we are now seeing the ascendancy/imminent superiority of China which at least anecdotally places even more women in competitive tail jobs.

I have no understanding of that field so I’ll take your word for it. But if you look at open source contributions on GitHub as recently as 2021, which is far from theoretical computer science but is at least something technical and important, women make ~5% of contributions. This study looked at names, and there are many transgender programmers active on GitHub, and they seem to love Linux… so the number of real female contributors may be as low as 1-3%. This is a good metric because it’s technical work for the pure love of technical work.

I dispute that it's such a good metric, because GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).

Hell, even in my personal space, my SO has probably written 5x the volume of shell scripts to automate random chores that I have (my tolerance for annoyances being much higher), but mine are on github with a nice readme and Show HN post to introduce them and hers are not.

it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.

More anecdata, but some of the most mathematically interesting code in one of my favorite open source projects had its first version written by a female programmer, who doesn't have a single commit, because her conditions for being persuaded into contributing were basically "you own the translated code, you don't put my name on it, you don't ask me for support, you don't suggest others ask me for support".

She got like 5 papers and a dissertation for her PhD (which she finished at least 25% faster than I did) out of the research that led to that code, during a period when I was spending a ton of time helping new users of the rest of the software for no immediate personal benefit, so it's hard to say that she was doing the wrong thing, at least in the short run. On the other hand, today those papers have ~140 citations between them, none since 2022; the one paper about the project she was a silent contributor to is over a thousand now, and that's because most users' papers cite a downstream project instead.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats