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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11774 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Feminism in the YooKay

This is an article that popped up on my feed and has been making the rounds.

It's about young women in the UK. The UK, for context, has been stagnating on a GDP per-capita basis since 2008 and is facing funding problems amid a large social spending bill. It's hardly a Randian capitalist paradise.

O’Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the “asset class” and what she calls the billionaire “Epstein class”.) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master’s degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing “random content”, but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response in Gaza, was a “catalytic moment” for her. “I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy,” she said. “Then it all just became the war.”

I don't have a problem with her in particular. There are odious people in every generation, in either sex. There will always be people that demand more even in the face of the state being bankrupt, nobody ever thinks they live in a good economy (not to say the UK has one).

The problem is that the movement here has become utterly unmoored from reality. In the case of the UK, the left broadly got what it wanted. There are sweeping laws against almost every leftist bugbear, there are gender equality rulings that means female cashiers have to be paid the same as male warehouse workers, taxes are incredibly punitive at the top end, the UK has worse pay compression than the Soviet Union (!!!).

While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women than their sexually more successful counterparts), there is no societal feedback mechanism against the wishes of women. When the (western) world chafes against women's preferences, the world gets sanded, even if it shouldn't. There is no accountability or feedback mechanism against female preferences, they are assumed to be true. While this is unpleasant, one could stoically accept this for a while. But when it starts intersecting with politics at large and with the functioning of the economy, well, that's a different story. I don't live in the UK but I have strong ties there, so this story did feel sad.

Online divides have also bled into real life. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. This polling found that young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. They are also much more pessimistic about the future – their own, and everyone else’s. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bends over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen. I work in quantitative finance, in a field where there is an incredibly tight feedback loop between performance and PnL. It's really not that possible for us to do affirmative action or similar. And yet every year, HR tries to force teams (sometimes successfully) to hire subpar women. I am sure there are some women who could do the job, but most very intelligent women eschew quant finance. And yet.

O’Brien told me she considers herself a revolutionary rather than an activist. “Revolutionary is more, ‘I want systemic change. I don’t want to exist within these same systems. I want to be an instrument of the revolution.’” She said she felt anxious seeing injustice and doing nothing. It was a physical sensation in the centre of her body. Perhaps this was why women were more likely to be progressive than men, she speculated. “Women tend to be a little bit more connected to their bodies and their physical sensations and emotions.” It seemed like an essentialist, even reactionary view of gender: the idea that women are emotional, physical beings, in a way men aren’t.

Women are more agreeable and more neurotic than men, in a big five sense. Both qualities that are not necessarily adaptive. Women are good at steering and enforcing social consensus, at language games, etc. What is described here is just women's greater emotional reactivity, as measured by the big five personality scores. This is not new information or anything; variants of these tendencies have been known to societies across the ages.

Anna’s politics had become more radical during the long process of getting personal independence payments for her disability. She felt the whole system was set up against her. The experience made her feel dehumanised.

I grew up in a European country with a large welfare state. It's quite funny how quickly people start taking welfare payments for granted. I guess if you believe in the whole Marxist system as such you are just taking what you are owed and any obstacles to that are just signs of reactionary resistance.

When I asked women what specifically had radicalised them, the war in Gaza was the most common answer.

Gaza as the omnicause. Many words have been spilled about this already; suffice to say that the Gazans would have none of this.

These women weren’t outliers. According to the New Statesman’s polling, young women are twice as likely not to want children as young men. All the Leeds women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. One woman mentioned Suella Braverman’s pledge to scrap the Equality Act and repeal other human rights laws. “It just feels… out of control.”

Their growing isolation could also have profound long-term consequences for British society. It will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. And it’s getting worse. Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

The UK's current TFR is 1.41 and recent research suggests TFR is heavily downstream from relationship formation. It making relationships harder is one thing; if the Zoomettes mass opt-out of having children then it's very possible (and I'm generally no doomer!) that the UK as its current society no longer exists in 50 years. Maybe reality has to be the escape valve that forces women's beliefs to become moored to reality again.

Is this what it's like to be in Latin American country seeing decline, like Argentina? Blame everything on capitalism, ignore the fact that you are getting your preferences (as much as the state finances and bond markets can bear it year over year) and continue advocating for a system that guarantees you'll be worse off in 20-30 years?

The problem is that the movement here has become utterly unmoored from reality. In the case of the UK, the left broadly got what it wanted.

Well, Phoebe O’Brien certainly does not feel she is living in paradise. Neither would any representative of historical "left" before about Clinton times.

There are sweeping laws against almost every leftist bugbear, there are gender equality rulings that means female cashiers have to be paid the same as male warehouse workers

And neither are paid very much.

taxes are incredibly punitive at the top end

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

the UK has worse pay compression than the Soviet Union (!!!).

And like in Soviet Union, it does not matter, because the real elite benefits are not things you can buy in shop with pieces of paper or plastic.

Yea, Phoebe O’Brien is angry. And you admit that there are many good reasons to be angry in today's UK and today's world.

Yea, Phoebe's anger is misdirected. Yea, Phoebe is ignorant, badly miseducated and misinformed. Now, instead of laughing at her hair, what would you tell to her? Who is her real enemy, who should she be angry at? If it's not the men, the billionaire class, Keir Starmer, Donald Trump and Israel, who is it?

Or would you tell her to chill, stop GAF about anything and be content with her lot of life?

"Dear Phoebe, you live in the best possible world. Stop crying, stop complaining, be thankful you were not born as slave in ancient Egypt and enjoy your life. Do not forget to thank every day Israel and heroes working in quantitative finance who made it all possible."

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

Yes. Her education is subsidised, a lot of the jobs she could get are probably a result of legislation passed by the state and subsidised by it, in the unlikely event she has kids that is heavily subsidised, as is her aged pension, her healthcare, of which she will consume a lot more statistically over a lifetime than if she were a male, is subsidised. Taxes overwhelmingly go to the old, women and the infirm. The purpose of the system is partly to take money away from people she hates to people like her.

Who is her real enemy, who should she be angry at?

The real enemy is, well, herself. Pre-2008 the UK had some of the highest growth rates in the developed world. A big reason it's gone to shit and is on managed decline is that its slowly changing into a weird social market economy with pay rates set by fiat at the behest of people that think like her.

Or would you tell her to chill, stop GAF about anything and be content with her lot of life?

I would ask her to think about what exactly makes modern industrial life possible in the first place and how precarious it is.

What does she really want? I am not going to try and psychoanalyse the people that think differently to me as that would just lead to a lot of unfair characterisations. What I can say is that what she wants, would, historically and practically speaking, generally lead to very bad things if fully implemented, if you believe empirical observations about econometrics and history.

And neither are paid very much.

A warehouse worker makes £26k a year.

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

Yes, as outlined in the OP. Feel free to consult the most recent budget if you don't believe it.

who should she be angry at?

The people who design social media algorithms, chiefly.

The UK's current TFR is 1.41

Pakistanis have far more children than the natives. I wonder if you disaggregate TFRs by ethnicity, are white Britons already significantly below replacement? Children of Men for the natives, but not for the migrants.

I think minorities actually converge to native (low) birthrates remarkably fast IIRC. This has been one thing that right-wing commentators of the 2000s got wrong.

True, but it hardly matters when the immigration floodgates have never been shut. The proportion of natives in any given western population is still shrinking.

While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women)

I'll be honest, that show radicalised me far more than "Andrew Tate" could ever hope to.

UK's statistics show a downward trend of violence against women over the years, a pattern that's remained consistent throughout Andrew Tate's influencer period. So even if we generously allow the dubious "correlation = causation" logic, empirical facts point in the opposite direction of the show's premise.

I'm overgeneralising, but progressives are consistently inviting allegations that facts and figures function as their worst kryptonite. The irony is compounded by the real world assault charges against the actor who played the black detective.

And for a production that lampoons boomers for their lack of tech literacy, the show itself mirrors the very species of reflexive (and completely unfounded) moral panic stoked by suburban karens over violent video games in the 2000s.

The actual crime is young white men's perceived departure from progressive politics, but that is not enough to cause alarm. You need to engineer a moral hysteria that your 13yo sons are gonna murder your daughters. But really, you're streisand effecting stuff like this. Progressives seem to have forgotten what teenagers are like. They push boundaries, they don't care what it is but if it's a sacred cow to the adults, they will push those buttons. Perhaps they thought bible thumpers would be the butt of the jokes forever and cannot fathom being seen as the out of touch scrooges themselves.

They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

Yet we're told that men are the ones being radicalised! Women's concerns are a failure of society and men, but men's concerns are a failure of men.

Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bend over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen.

And yet, young able bodied men continue to disproportionately shoulder physically intensive and dangerous vocations that sustain modern infrastructure - the grid, roads, energy, built environment. Men still account for >90% of all occupational fatalities. Male labour remains foundational to the physical backborn of the modern world. Yet, the culture allows anti-male messaging to proliferate without consequence, while framing women's minimal participation in these fields not as a reflection of preferences or average physical differences, but as society's failure to accommodate them. Collective male guilt for crimes committed by men is axiomatic, but collective male credit for dangerous, essential labour carried out by men is never acknowledged.

And despite this, we are not allowed to write stories about male heroism without extensive ideological throat clearing to accomodate girl power mandates. Women are encouraged to retrofit male oriented media (movies that they don't watch and video games that they don't play) with feminist themes, to atone for the arbitrary crime of pandering to male power fantasies and featuring female character designs that appeal to straight men. Frank discussion of men's distinctive struggles is permissible only when prefaced by deference to feminist priors.

Times are a-changing. White guilt petered out with the George Floyd riots, the "Holocaust industry" ran out out of steam with the Gaza war, the "misogyny industry" is next. Acknowledging men's unique qualities and contributions, and extending reciprocal respect, is unlikely to leave women worse off. Quite the contrary, in fact.

@2rafa

I'd like to call your attention to this. Just recently you discussed the allure of right-wing extremism to autistic men and their concept of fairness. Would argue that this here is a valid left-wing feminine parallel?

She discussed the allure of both left-wing and right-wing extremism, not just right-wing.

I am sure there are some women who could do the job, but most very intelligent women eschew quant finance. And yet.

Surely gotta hope for Speedrunning-type women to come and save the day

We get a few of those too, but they also don't seem to enjoy this sort of job too much (and they are generally not that well liked). Unlike Google et al. you get fired pretty quickly for doing anything but your job and it's a much more pragmatic environment than big tech of old used to be.

That article is great reporting; I feel like every line had a gem.

Take:

Anna has a boyfriend, whom she described as “a fucking Labrador”. “He’s reading books about how climate change isn’t actually that big a deal, and it’s hard to separate that from the fact that he’s not really faced much adversity in his life as a straight white man who was privately educated,” she said. “I’m probably the adversity in his life.”

Or:

Israel struck a Palestinian camp in Tel al-Sultan in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack caused a blaze that set tents alight and killed 45 people. Ash remembered watching videos of the attack, feeling cold and hopeless. Several women began openly weeping. The male students, meanwhile, were preoccupied with planning the next day’s protest. “I feel like sometimes men don’t feel the gravity of the thousands of people that have died,” Ash told me.

Wow.

But, my takeaway: you're imagining things. I direct this at both you and the interview subjects.

It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.

And so are they:

Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…”

This is a typical pattern: a man whispers Andrew Tate's name once, and it echoes a million times.

Her friend group can almost certainly be assumed to be nearly entirely college educated men. And a reasonable bet for the modal number of times they had engaged with a misogynistic reel is 0. Men absolutely have their electronic follies, but few suffer from social media addiction (the more usual error path is video game addiction or porn addiction). Men are on social media much less than women, and they spend much less time on it when they do.

It's a extremely weird gap in understanding of reality to me, akin to a man worrying that women were learning to hate and murder men by playing too many first person shooters.

It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on.

But the "illness" is spread through information. So when people of the media class are afflicted with it, their vast reach spreads it to others. As their words reach more people and start to dominate on social media, more people will assume that this is now the default, socially acceptable outlook.

So politicians start using these opinions to formulate policy, and ordinary people start to adopt them as a way to fit in. Initially this only happens to terminally online folks and activists, but over time a feedback loop is created, as the more people believe in it, the more it actually becomes the dominant idea. Thus, even ordinary people will adopt theses beliefs as a way to fit in, which is when they really start to affect the world.

I wouldn't dismiss this as a fringe phenomenon. They appear to be average middle-class / precariat urban college girls to me.

Anna has a boyfriend, whom she described as “a fucking Labrador”.

Not even trying the least to beat the dogpill allegations.

“I’m probably the adversity in his life.”

It’s a common flex for a young woman to brag about how she’s negative value-add to the men she dates. To boast about how desirable she is, that men will put up with her shit as the cost of being with her. “Just here to ruin your life.” “Hope you like bad girls because I’m bad at everything.” Or the older: “If you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best.”

This is a typical pattern: a man whispers Andrew Tate's name once, and it echoes a million times.

Bro got Streisand Effected to fame, as did Clavicular after him. Good for them, I suppose. To the extent Tate or Clavicular are part of a cause, they don’t have to do much recruiting as women do it for them.

Not even trying the least to beat the dogpill allegations.

Nor the "redpill" allegations. She knows that he doesn't share her values, she believes he's lounged off his wealthy (allegedly) straight white male privilege all his life, so what made her choose to be with him? Just what about him is worth overlooking his politics for, which she claims is alarming her?

This tracks with the pattern I've seen irl, literally the worst men I know (deadbeats, drug users, serial cheaters, emotionally distant dbags, Andrew Tate followers) who treat their girlfriends like fleshlights face near zero barriers to attracting women. You can't keep wielding the social crime of "misogyny" as a conversational cudgel to stop people from noticing unflattering* patterns in female attraction and dating incentives.

*I personally don't think it's unflattering, but it's probably difficult to reconcile it with progressive sacred cows.

I actually think it is the only logical thinking they perform. If you truly believe in white privilege and that misogyny and patriarchy is ever-present and powerful, then of course you will make those associations on personal level and you should date white privileged boys to eke a little bit of that power for yourself. You would be stupid if you go for oppressed black handicapped weakling.

It is self-defeating nature of these movements, the same by the way goes for the other side of the spectrum where some parts of the manosphere give advice to have many sexual partners. They at the same time resent women as hoes but they cannot help and validate their own masculinity by sleeping with dozens or even hundreds of them - this actually giving them value.

There is a saying that you are what you worship. If you worship power, this is how it logically ends.

It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.

I'd like to believe this but more and more data points corroborate the fact that people do sincerly believe this stuff.

Her friend group can almost certainly be assumed to be nearly entirely college educated men

Why? Probably it's all neurotic women.

But, my takeaway: you're imagining things. I direct this at both you and the interview subject.

Women radicalizing to the left is a real phenomenon. For example this. It's trivially researchable.

Men are on social media much less than women, and they spend much less time on it when they do.

The average man and woman spends something like 2-4h a day plus on social media.

And a reasonable bet for the modal number of times they had engaged with a misogynistic reel is 0.

Yeah probably, as mentioned, the whole Tate thing is more moral panic and partially driven by immigrants and immigrant-descendant men (for whom this whole thing like acting like Tate is much more de rigeur)

Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

One of the biggest issues we seem to be facing socially right now is pessimistic victim complexes, especially among young people but it's popping up everywhere. The obsession with being the underdog narrative has grown to massive proportions, whether it be young people adopting oppression olympics identities or the insane comments I saw just a few day ago comparing being a modern man in Europe as tantamount to slavery. Everybody needs to be a victim now in at least some way.

I do think part of it is exposure to more information and negativity focused algorithms. It's hard to feel all the wins when everything in your feed is just people complaining about the compromises they've had to mistake. It's like what Scott Alexander had talked about before with showing the same film to Israel/Palestine supoorters and them both coming thinking it was biased against them. People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.

But it's not just algorithms and information, they would not work if people did not bite. It's because they want to be angry. Someone naive might think "good news, data centers don't use much water!" or "good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift" or "good news, cops don't really kill that many minorities" or "good news, schools are not giving litter boxes and trans surgeries to cat identified kids" would be received with a smile, but instead it's pushed away with anger. Weirdly enough, "the world is better than you thought" is seen as a bad thing to learn! They want to be a victim of a bad society.

Bruh I had to quit Facebook over this. Not posting culture war content. No, the things that drove others most berserk was arguing things were, actually, good and getting better and not bad

"good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift"

Uh this just opens up a cascade of other issues. Like it's good that the 'classical autism' numbers are remaining consistent but significant diagnostic drift around mental illness is going to have other major issues especially in a robust welfare state.

That there is actual issues in the world to discuss doesn't make the main complaint people keep saying over and over again any less nonsense and anger motivated. Someone like RFK has all the resources he could possibly need to understand that the "autism epidemic" isn't actually meaningfully a thing, and yet instead of focusing his efforts on what you said, issues related to diagnostic drift, he wastes all the effort and energy instead. Because admitting that the autism epidemic isn't real topples the other parts of the jenga tower he's built his beliefs on (like if autism epidemic isn't real, then vaccines or preservatives or whatever else couldn't be causing it) so he has to clutch onto nonsense and waste time and money that could be actually doing something useful.

And even when things aren't directly connected, it's not like people go "X isn't true? That's good to hear, but I'm still worried about Y". Like if you think data centers are using too much water and too much electricity and are only good for slop then you can accept the good news on water but still be worried about the grid and slop content. Instead, most people just get pissed that you're pointing out X isn't true.

You're completely missing the point with this. Yes, autism as defined by the previous school of thought is maintaining relatively consistent numbers generationally. However, scope creep of the diagnosis combined with the weaponization of 'I have a disability give me free shit' from people tapped into the system inevitably gets downright rapacious when people who were considered able to have full healthy lives (albeit a bit weird) a generation ago now have a label which entitles them to access whatever societal privileges. I agree that the vaccination = autism correlation/argument is spurious and created by a series of underlying mostly-uncorrelated correlations. RFK's identifying something salient in that the modern system of privilege creates massive overdiagnosis of psychological conditions, even if he doesn't understand or wish to communicate that fact since he'd likely get sledgehammered from anothe direction.

The Data center point is a complete non-sequitur in this case and isn't really reasoned from any place other than 'I don't like data centers and I broadly like the environment, this is a good cudgel'. The same goes for discussing the Trans violence rate not being that high when you take out a vanishingly small chunk of sexworkers, yet yaddayadda Trans genocide.

I don't personally care that much about the victim complex per se. That's eternal. What I care about is real politics being done according to those grievances and the downstream societal damage. And that's hard to deny. Though that's kind of been the story of the entire 21st century so far I suppose.

The genetic legacy which will be squandered by these women not reproducing is a tragedy of historical proportions, but I think we're less than a generation away from the corrective counterswing.

Main problem being institutional capture and the unbelievable amount of human damage which will be committed in the name of pride, i.e. futile resistance.

Are you referring to futile right-wing assistance and an impending severe economic collapse please?

The genetic legacy which will be squandered by these women not reproducing is a tragedy of historical proportions,

Will it really? I'm inclined to think that anyone so susceptible to the media environment as to be taken in by demoralization tactics would not improve the gene pool by breeding. And besides-- rates of intermarriage are high enough that mixed race children will serve as reservoirs for whatever positive alleles you believe white people possess. If those alleles are truly beneficial they will persist at higher-than-chance rates and on the order of a few hundred years (less with embryo selection) will reach their optimal distribution again.

Just look at how the mutation for blue eyes got distributed, for example.

rates of intermarriage are high enough that mixed race children will serve as reservoirs for whatever positive alleles you believe white people possess

Does intermarriage happen to any significant degree in the UK?

Will it really? I'm inclined to think that anyone so susceptible to the media environment as to be taken in by demoralization tactics would not improve the gene pool by breeding.

I went to a pretty elite high school/university combination and I see a lot of girls in my cohort who I'd say are high ranking for intelligence, conscientiousness and a bunch of other positive traits who'd post this kinda content fairly frequently. They might not be on the right social wavelength right now to be maximally productive, but if you're nerdsniping a bunch of high IQ performers with the powers of Girlbossing I'm pretty skeptical it's longterm beneficial to the gene pool.

What I think @GBRK is saying is that evolution doesn't care about what you might think is "longterm beneficial to the gene pool".

If the liberal striver class does not want to reproduce then the liberal striver class deserves to go extinct. That's just Darwinism in action.

Beneficial alleles might not coincide with the values or goals someone has for Homo sapiens. You could very well see e.g. rule following and neuroticism as good (either in themselves or in what function they perform in society), but they make carriers susceptible enough to behavioral defects to pull them out of the gene pool.

So then the solution is to create a society where people posessing particular positive trains (NOT genes, traits) are reproductively advantaged. The genes that code for those traits will then bounce back from any temporary deficit regardless.

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