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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gaza as the omnicause. Many words have been spilled about this already; suffice to say that the Gazans would have none of this.
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.
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 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.
'Just be rich enough to fly to another country and find a wife' is not the stirring rebuttal you think it is.
I understand the Motte is weird, but you do realize that this is outside the price range for most men, yes?
You know I am not a tech worker, right?
Affording a mail order bride/passport bro wife(I don’t quite know the difference between the two, and I suspect there isn’t one) is doable for a man earning mildly above median(which is a very reasonable expectation in a high opportunity society), because there are many such men who have done it. And most men don’t have to, thé average 35 year old man is married. The point is that unmarried western men who are genuinely above average in desirability are unmarried because they choose to be, perhaps by priority- not because there are no options.
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I'm reactionary enough to suggest that an average male shouldn't have to leave the country of his birth to have a prospect of finding a wife. That's a major social failure.
And now you've just exported the externality. What of the poor males in the countries where the women are being plucked from? Now they've got to compete with wealthy foreigners and THEY can't passport bro it up.
And it all leaves the fundamental, core problem. Men have no stake in the continued maintenance of their future if they don't expect to be able to form a family. Why would they throw in their lot with their home country at that point? What's their buy-in?
And of course, all the single cat ladies will continue to cast votes in their country too.
However, if we were to implement an immigration program specifically to allow scads of young, nubile, single women to attain citizenship if they marry and pop out some kids, I think the incentives overall would get aligned REAL QUICK.
Of course, it appears that a huge excess portion of the ACTUAL immigrants we get are young males.
I’m not disputing that something is broken in a system where guys who round to average and aren’t doing anything wrong need to go to foreignstan to find a wife often enough for it to be a discussed phenomenon(to be perfectly fair, this system isn’t great for women either). Just saying that ‘incels’ aren’t an actual thing- they don’t ’just Want a wife’, those are available assuming these guys aren’t just, giant losers, and basement dwellers wouldn’t have been married in 1955 either(there were just fewer of them). The craving for validation from a specific kind of woman is a different phenomenon entirely, and while it’s not entirely unprecedented it’s also… look, these guys want to be rock stars. It’s not a totally natural response to circumstances, thé history of loveless men is pretty long and it tends to look like broadening thé search pool, not like endless public whining about the need to restructure society completely.
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This is just a tautology.
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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.
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