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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14327 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?

As I've said before.

Women aren't the problem. But the problem is with women. It is harbored in their minds.

Its right there in the data. In every piece of reliable data that is available on this topic.

Here's the actual graph on the data about each gender's view of the other as discussed in that article.

72% of men under 30 view women positively. 7% view them negatively.

For women under 30, 50% view men positively, 21% view them negatively.

For women under 25, its 35% and 27%, respectively.

If men are steeped in misogyny and treat women so horribly, how does it work that a supermajority of men view women positively, and a substantial minority of women view men negatively. This is incoherent without some very strained definitions of the terms used.

The only way the data makes sense is if these women absolutely believe men are steeped in misogyny, and do not realize that this appears to be misguided and incorrect.

It also pairs well with this bit of data out of the UK where young (teen) men in relationships report substantially more abusive behavior from their partners than the women do. This suggests that men's 'flaw' is believing in the goodness of most women in spite of experiencing their bad behavior.

And of course the official governmental policy [in the UK] is to crack down on male behavior. They (the UK) are trying to ban depictions of strangulation in porn even though, once again, women tend to be slightly more likely to consume such content. Its not clear to me if this is an incompetent government that is ignoring the data, or a malicious/intentional attempt to shape the outcomes by force because it just doesn't like what the data shows and wishes it were different.

How is it possible that after decades and decades of civil rights advances favoring women, they're LESS satisfied with their status in society?

How is it possible that they view men as collectively the biggest danger to their rights and safety when, A) women are as a class safer than they've been at literally any point in history and B) men have very peaceably stood aside or actively boosted women's interests to enable the aforementioned civil rights advances?

If the entire course of the civil rights movement was viewed as an empirical study, an experiment in trying to truly increase human thriving by social engineering and applying technology to alleviate almost every burden that is nominally borne by women... hasn't it objectively failed at that goal?

They're more sad. More mentally ill. Less healthy. They have more STIs (likely because they tend to have more sex partners). They have more debt (although you can certainly argue they're more financially independent). They commit suicide (slightly) more often. And to the extent they still care about marriage and childbirth, they're having more trouble finding and keeping relationships, and they're having fewer children, later in life, if at all. They've acquired artificial signifiers of success like degrees and job titles and digital photo albums full of travel photos... but have so very little tangible to show for it.

All the material wealth we've accumulated has made life easier, across the board. So most 'difficulties' they complain about must be either illusory or self-imposed. It is simply impossible that men as a group are conspiring to keep the women from achieving true happiness.

Anyway, my nutshell theory is that the women are wonderful effect simply dominates cultural and political norms. That's why we get a documentary about the Manosphere and its effect on women, and NOT one about Tiktok and Feminist influencers and its effect on women. Because there's an unstated assumption of "if women are doing it, it can't be bad!"

In spite of the latter being an OBJECTIVELY bigger deal with larger negative impacts on both the individual and social level.

Yes, I'm, still mad.

Women are not treated better, they are treated far worse. Huge numbers of women are in situationships, used for sex and losing out in other ways. A hypergamous dating market and hookup culture is deeply damaging to young women. The amount of women who have negative experiences is genuine and largely the fault of certain men who are over-represented in the amount of harm they commit.

That sexual revolution thing didn't turn out so well for women, did it?

As I said before.

Huge swaths of men don't even have the OPTION to enter a situationship. (hate that term, personally).

Women can practice celibacy if they want, they can stay off dating apps, they can avoid hookups and demand commitment before sex (or, marriage, if they're trad enough).

Some percentage of them do, its just far smaller than it used to be.

How much agency do we ascribe to the rest of them?

The amount of women who have negative experiences is genuine and largely the fault of certain men who are over-represented in the amount of harm they commit.

The question, of course:

In what way are those men forcing, coercing, or otherwise cajoling women to act this way? What we learned post #metoo is that a LOT of women will retroactively claim they were forced or coerced when in fact they just folded to the most minute amount of pressure or even enthusiastically accepted advances from a more 'powerful' male.

And if women are unable to resist a minute amount of pressure, or can't be trusted to make good decisions around powerful males... what else might we need to protect them from?

And more importantly. If women are having bad experiences with a small subset of men, then why does that justify negative opinions about all men?

Why are men expected to tolerate bad behavior (and as seen in the stats, maintain a positive view of women as a whole) or be labelled misogynist, whilst women can base their opinion of the whole male gender on the conduct of <10% of them?

This is where we find ourselves. Unable, as a society, to police womens' behavior (in part because the men who would do the policing benefit too much from the current arrangement), but far, far too ready to go after males for the smallest misstep, and to heap all blame on the men for things they ultimately have no control over. And unable to shift out of this equilibrium because any proposal that might inconvenience ladies is politically nonviable. Nonviable, that is, while the Boomers are in charge.

There are no non-loser first world men who are involuntarily celibate, you can passport bro if it comes down to it(and even if you have strong ethnic preferences, very poor countries with lots of white women exist)- but it usually doesn't. I don't know if it'll stay at that point forever, but most men can get themselves into a long term relationship, even if they're pretty average(and average is a broad term). Yes, this might entail lowering your standards, you're probably not that much of a catch either.

There are no non-loser first world men who are involuntarily celibate

This is just a tautology.

And more importantly. If women are having bad experiences with a small subset of men, then why does that justify negative opinions about all men?

Because the men the women are having bad experiences with are the only men the women have any interest in, in the first place. And they have that interest in them precisely for the same qualities that result in the bad experiences.

Yeah, which is indicating that there needs to be some policing of that subset of men too.

But the logic of the sexual revolution is that women get to choose whomever they want, so ipso facto restricting the access of those top tier men to the wider female population is verboten as it directly restricts female's 'choice'.

Like imagine a rule that, say, banned professional athletes from hooking up with random girls they see on Instagram in their hotel room while they're in town for a game. I'd go ahead and guess that the women would howl harder about this restriction than the athletes would.

They are treated worse, by men they choose. Yet it's a choice. I reject the idea that women as a sex are so stupid they can't help themselves, or that the hookup market is a force that acts upon them with no recourse.

Maybe in the 90s the memeplex around dating was "go grrrl", but today there's plenty of wisdom in the air that men [that they notice first] are not out for the women's best interest. One needs but listen and learn.

All humans are so stupid they can't help themselves. Thankfully they are never truly alone.

This is why wise leaders create institutions so that everyone helps each other reach higher Nash equilibria and we avoid the tragedy of commons.

One of these institutions is marriage, which among its many benefits (the thing is truly so neat it is rightfully associated with the divine) solves the problems we are talking about by taking top men out of the market and enforcing monogamy and certainty of paternity.

However marriage has sadly been abolished and forbidden by no fault divorce. This has evidently turned us into savages.

The simple fix is to allow people to marry again and encourage them to reenter civilization.

...Tune in next time, where we will solve rampant crime with wooden beams, rope and a wig.

<De Maistre Hat>The authority of marriage collapsed before the no-fault was the law. Before no-fault was the law, people would get around the fault rules by perjuring themselves. Only through the organic growth of successful subcultures will no-fault divorce once again be the social norm. </De Maistre Hat>

I'm glad to see I have some followers around here.

In practice, a truly no-fault divorce free marriage in the modern world requires a subculture in which every single one of your friends and acquaintances testifies against the spouse who wanted the divorce. The only successful ones so far have been religious.

Maybe in the 90s the memeplex around dating was "go grrrl", but today there's plenty of wisdom in the air that men [that they notice first] are not out for the women's best interest. One needs but listen and learn.

Well, listening and learning is hard enough for anyone, but I think there's a catch-22 here that's specific to this situation, in that the people they need to listen and learn from in order to avoid these pitfalls are people that they, almost by definition, don't respect or even notice. I do agree with you that it's entirely the personal responsibility for someone, woman or man, to avoid people who are romantically harmful to themselves, and the negative treatment of women in this context is the responsibility of the women who choose to tolerate or even reward such treatment. But I don't think they can help it any more than men can help being attracted enough to skinny, youthful women that they enable awful behavior from that set.

The issue is that it is far harder for a woman to compete when other women are engaging in that type of behaviour. If all other women are doing things to grab attention it is difficult for women who don't

If only it were illegal!

The issue is that it is far harder for a woman to compete when other women are engaging in that type of behaviour. If all other women are doing things to grab attention it is difficult for women who don't

I totally disagree with this. With so many women chasing so-called "Chad" it's become very easy for a woman to find a guy who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship. Provided she is willing to overlook the fact that he is short; or balding; or mediocre in facial attractiveness.

With so many women chasing so-called "Chad" it's become very easy for a woman to find a guy who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship. Provided she is willing to overlook the fact that he is short; or balding; or mediocre in facial attractiveness.

In other words, it hasn't gotten any easier for women to find a mate who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship.

They don't all have to compete for the top fuckboys. And seeing as we appear to have established that actually attracting the attention of the fuckboys then getting used in a situationship is bad for them, it should be a relief to quit the attention whoring race and get herself someone more her speed.

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