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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12073 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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I would dispute this; I would actually go for this qualifier:

There's almost nothing that women can do better than men that society values. If society valued these things, I don't think the issues between the genders would be anywhere near as clownish as it is today.

The other thing is that on a graph, men are the extreme outliers at both ends of the graph; in a world that tries to reduce everything to binary ones and zeroes, you'd end up self-selecting the extreme outliers at either ends of the scale.

There's almost nothing that women can do better than men that society values. If society valued these things, I don't think the issues between the genders would be anywhere near as clownish as it is today.

That was G. K. Chesterton's issue with feminism.

But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.

-- What's Wrong with the World (1910)

And you think this is the strongest or most representative ask from women wanting to participate in politics: drinking at the pub with the boys? Not voting or participating in discussion that is separate from hanging out at the pub?

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