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Consider it this way: when the Chinese government banned cram schools, one might think they were attacking a deeply beloved institution. People paid huge amounts of money to the cram schools, kids spent huge amounts of their time there. Surely they would be really upset at having them taken away?
But no, of course not. Everyone hated and resented the cram schools. They existed because of a specific set of incentives that were unchangeable from the inside, and that could only be changed by a large-scale coercion.
I can’t speak for the Dread Jim etc. because I don’t follow them, but IMO the point is that men and women more naturally form loving bonds when a) they are paired together, and b) their interests are broadly aligned.
Modern society has broken both of these conditions, in an attempt to solve the problems that arose in cases when the previous system went wrong. By allowing women to work in the same paying jobs as men, and by providing unconditional support, it deliberately ensured that women didn’t require a man to take care of herself. A noble goal to be sure, but the result is that the natural fear of opportunity costs, generalised fear and distrust of men, (and, yes, a certain hypergamous tendency) combine to ensure lots of women don’t end up paired. (The same dynamics apply on the male side to but I think to a lesser degree).
Likewise, we have worked hard to ensure that even when married, a woman’s interests are kept separate from her husband’s, in order to avoid genuinely nasty abuses that occurred under the previous system. Women now retain their property when married, they usually retain their jobs, and they can decouple with minimal difficulty. This means that even during marriage, a woman often has one eye on being ready for an exit and her own private interests often conflict with the interests of her husband and family.
IMO the goal is lots of loving, happy relationships. (With, yes, an inevitable long tail of grudging-but-functional relationships and some pretty nasty ones). This benefits a big fraction men very clearly, because the current system is straightforwardly inimical to them; it’s hard to say whether it benefits women because they will gain certain things and lose certain things and probably different groups of women will benefit. I would like to think that the averaged outcome for women would be better, but even if it is mildly negative, ultimately the end effect will be positive when averaged across the sexes.
I don't personally agree with passing whatever laws you think would be necessary to eject women from the workforce, but the principle behind it, that women are happier being married with children and that everyone would be happier if society aligned to encourage that instead of "independent women," is probably true. I object to coercion and restricting people's freedom, even freedom to make bad choices, so I am not going to subscribe to "We should make women do what's best for them" even if I really did believe it's what best for them and not motivated by self-interest. "Society would be better if people did X, therefore we will force X through legislation" is ironically the sort of authoritarian thinking communist governments try to implement to reorder society for the greater good.
This is a pretty autistic Motte-pilled take. "If we measure how much happier most men would be, and how much happier many women would be, we can calculate that the net increase in happiness X is greater than the decrease in happiness Y of the women who don't like this arrangement, therefore they can suck it up." Talk about your authoritarian central planning! But let's say it's true. Let's say we blithely handwave away your "long tail" of abuse and misery which was much of the motivation for the rise of the feminist movement in the first place.
Here is the part you're really missing:
The Dread Jims of the world (of whom there apparently many more than you might think, even in Western society) don't care about love and happiness. They care about themselves and sexual satisfaction, and removing the indignity of women being able to thwart them. I don't know what Jim's personal life is actually like, but having read enough of his essays, it's hard to believe he actually loves his wife or daughters, except maybe in the same sense you might love your dog. Some of them (like Jim) might talk in Biblical terms about God's intended role for men and women, but their motivation is much baser and cruder: they think women should be property. Literally. Unironically. Dread Jim wrote an essay about it. He isn't kidding and he isn't being metaphorical. Most of our blackpillers and incels aren't so explicit about it, but you can read it in their words. They aren't motivated by some philosophical notion of what's best for society. They're seething that women they want to have sex with can tell them no. Their goal is not "loving, happy relationships," because that implies that the happiness of women is important also, and they consider pleasing women to be a distraction at best, the source of all evils at worst. You are not cynical enough when reading the words they actually type.
You know the old feminist slogan "Feminism is the radical belief that women are human." It's rightly derided for its simplistic, bad-faith assumptions about those who criticize feminism ("What the hell do you mean, no one is saying women aren't human!") While I roll my eyes like most people when I actually see it on t-shirts in the wild, I am occasionally reminded, even here on the Motte, that there are in fact people who exemplify the mindset that slogan is reacting to. It is not surprising to me that, faced with men like this who make it clear that they see a woman as a collection of warm wet holes that unfortunately has vocal cords and a brain stem attached, some women react in an extreme and possibly self-destructive fashion. If you want to persuade women that they should "settle" for less than the unrealistic and absurdly high standards that supposedly they are all demanding nowadays, keep in mind you're not just telling them to settle for an average guy who'd be a good if unexceptional husband, you are (at least from the incel viewpoint) telling them they should settle for a man who viscerally hates them and will treat them like a fleshlight.
You can either say you don't care about that because society as a whole will be better off, or you can have some understanding for why this is a hard sell for anyone who does, um, think women are human.
Certainly, but it's also the thinking of anyone who writes legislation! I don't know you very well, but I don't think you are the kind of full-fat libertarian who thinks that all regulation should be repealed, that we should remove all central attempts at law-enforcement and go back to privately-leased thief-takers and bounty hunters, etc. etc. Assuming that you aren't, the next obvious question is, 'when and to what degree should we force X through legislation, and when should we refrain?'. My previous reply was an attempt to argue that for the last 70 years or so we have been too liberal in the area of 'relationships between men and women' and 'female employment', that the results have been bad on net, and we need to roll that back somewhat.
Well, there's a reason I'm writing here and not in a byline for the Times. But more seriously, this is simply a reversal of the argument from feminism for the last 70 years. That argument being that 'men have had a good run of it for centuries, and they now need to take a hit to vastly increase the happiness of women'. You may well be a principled libertarian who objects to this particular argument equally whether it comes from women or from men, but it is clearly not a moral bridge too far for many people.
I have two responses to this, neither of which will probably satisfy you:
The first is that I do not think we should aim for a 100% marriage rate. Some men (and some women) are simply so toxic that people will not marry them even under pressure, and that's okay. Good, even. Similarly there are people who simply can't be in a relationship for various reasons. I want to give the curve a firm shove back to times of much higher marriage rates, not to ensure that even the most spittle-flecked violent maniac gets a government-mandated girlfriend. But yes, there will still be sad cases. There are sad cases today too - we have domestic murders, abuse, and deeply vile things perpetrated up and down the land - but they are likely to increase somewhat under this system. And it is indeed a hard, even an impossible sell in a modern democratic society operating under today's social mores. I write these things for my own satisfaction and to clarify my thoughts, not as an act of political activism.
The second is that we are now in the realm of competing intuitions, axioms and viewpoints:
In practice, I suspect that your informal definition of misogyny is much more extensive, very broadly along the lines of 'sees men as being rational enlightenment agents who have high moral worth and deserve respect and high levels of liberty, and treat women with some combination of having reduced rationality, reduced moral worth (depending on the tradition) and believes that they should be constrained i.e. not granted liberties to the same degree'. Would I be right in saying so?
If so, I think you are then vastly inflating the number of misogynists and unintentionally hopping between the motte and the bailey by using the latter set of beliefs as dogwhistles for the former. I'm sure that's true sometimes, but I think it's also very untrue sometimes, and you can tell because it basically condemns all humanity prior to 1900, plus the Amish, many Mormons, etc. etc. all of which clearly contained men who valued and loved their wives for more than being a warm orifice. It's always dangerous to make assumptions about other people's POV but assuming I'm correct, I believe this is a place where your beliefs aren't quite cleaving the joints of reality correctly, though of course that doesn't mean you have to approve of either.
I am not a libertarian.
Well, I agree that in some cases that was effect (if not the intent) of legislation. No one thinks "I will stamp out visible tragedies affecting a small fraction of people at the expense of long-term happiness." The problem with all legislation is that even the best-intentioned legislators do not have a crystal ball or the ability to foresee all second and third-order effects.
So if you want to argue "Feminism was bad for society and we should repeal feminism," uh... I kind of agree with the first statement (for some value of "feminism") but I do not see how you achieve the second (given that "repeal feminism" tends to mean "repeal the entire concept of female emancipation writ large") without winding up at "Women are property." If you want to argue for that explicitly, I guess I can hear you out, but you are right that my moral intuitions are against it.
I dunno how you failed to see it in that essay, but have a look at some of his other essays. I'm sure Jim himself (and indeed, almost no one but the most psychotic incels) will actually own up to literally believing "I do not care if women suffer, they should be treated like the livestock they are." But I absolutely do believe that is Jim's conviction, and that the words of some people here have come about as close as they felt they dared to expressing that. And here is mild compared to some other corners of the Internet.
Are those men a small minority of the (Western) population? Yes. (At least, I certainly hope so and have to believe so to preserve what little faith in humanity I have remaining.) But they are a non-neglible portion of the vocally online and advocates for "social change for the betterment of the whole," and they are a substantial contingent of the sad incel constituency the less, er, explicit sex warriors are arguing we need to appeal to.
You're incorrect. My definition of misogyny is not quite as narrow as yours, but I reserve the label for men who genuinely dislike (if not hate) women and don't believe women's concerns or preferences should register at all. A tradcon who thinks women are less rational and have less agency than men and should stay at home and raise children is not necessarily a "misogynist" in my view. (Maybe sexist, though I actually have no problem with that kind of relationship- I only have a problem with a woman who doesn't want that kind of relationship being forced into it.) No, I do not think everyone who lived prior to 1900 was a woman-hating misogynist just because almost all of them had a "traditional" view of women.
I see, thanks. I apologise for misjudging your convictions in various areas. I don't think I have that much to say as a follow-up right now, beyond a few points:
Broadly, I agree with you, with the caveat that I don't think the mores and customs of the pre-1900s West or the Mormons/Amish/Harethi are as bad as 'women are property'.
I also agree with you here, which is why I would ideally like us to take a gradualist approach to this kind of thing, starting off with:
and going from there. I don't think that this is actually politically possible - even such relatively minor measures would only become possible if mores have shifted so far that those changes are the first movements of a giant landslide. It seems to be the nature of human society and democratic politics in particular to careen rather than adjust, and I think we will end up at the bottom of the slope no matter what. Not much to be done about that IMO.
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The mistake is thinking that modern society broke men and women on a simple whim that could be reversed just as simply with a lil' bit of political will. In reality, we have had techno-economical changes that first uplifted many men and women from farming/peasantry to urban work, offshored a lot of labor that required raw physical strength to machinery, and interlinked industry in such a way that people no longer rely mostly on themselves and a few local craftsmen to produce all they need in life.
Meaning, the attempts to blindly RETVRN are not aligning the interests of men and women because regressing to the farmer economy is not really in most people's interest. Also, the men that are most interested in upending the status quo are, it seems, not really the kind of men who were capable of forming "grudging-but-functional relationships" before, let alone loving ones.
The way for west-of-Hajnal societies, I think, is nowhere but forward. Or, we can break down our factories, go back to villages and sit there waiting for the ever-dreaded Muslims, who have got a lot more experience in that kind of life, to overrun us.
Contra ergw and the rest, I do not believe most true incels are so productive that they must be appeased with government-issued wives or society collapses. It should be sufficient to let the incels have their AIfus, the femcels their serial killer LLMen, erect some basic fucking standards so that the eligible men don't poach the femcels too much and use technology to connect pair-bondable men to pair-bondable women for once. Instead of whatever it is the dating apps are doing.
I'm skeptical as to the true extent that so-called femcels even exist in modern society but this is by definition impossible.
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I don't think it can happen at all, not when half of voters would take the initial hit and have been heavily propagandised against, and a good chunk of the other half would prefer to please them. I just think that it probably should. Maybe things will change as the demographic pyramid changes, but frankly I don't think anything will happen until we have a collapse of some sort and probably not then either.
Moreover, I am not advocating for RETVRN to medieval peasant life or turning off the factories. I agree with @TheNybbler that a lot of white-collar female jobs are really direct or indirect government sinecures; beyond that we have a huge legal and social apparatus dedicated to making it almost impossible to be a large company that doesn't hire a large %age of women, and there is no technical reason why that can't be reversed to apply pressure in the opposite direction.
I don't think you and I are talking about the same people. I work in tech and a big chunk of my colleagues (as well as myself) are intelligent, productive, reasonably well-socialized... and can't get a date. I think @Goodguy gave the number of about a third of men being out of a relationship and AFAIK that skews high-IQ and high-conscientousness. 'Literally every single man' is too much of an ask, but if we can get the marriage rates up to 90% or so like they used to be, that would do it for me.
I don't think this works, for the reasons I gave. It might help but the problem is that pair-bondable people don't have the external pressure to actually break through their fears and actually pair-bond, or to bond on a long-term basis once married. I went to a pair-bonding event recently and it seemed to me that even the girls who had nominally come there to pair-bond were deeply ambivalent about actually doing so. That's the problem.
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