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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21484 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?

I think you are largely correct about the state of things, except that it’s not just women. The rise of social media and thus social media politics is very radicalizing. This works in both directions, to the point that I’d suggest that there is a correlation between time spent on political social media (and later activism) and radicalism. It works by creating a tight feedback loop that rewards people for saying the most radical versions of what they believe, and for liking and sharing that content. This is made worse by the filter bubbles that feed content that affirms the politics you hold and paints your out group as evil and stupid and possibly subhuman.

The problem with this is that only one set of these communities is seen as the problem. Male and conservative communities are constantly being considered as radicalized communities of potentially dangerous individuals who are going to be violent or totalitarian. The other side gets a complete pass. Mainstreamish media can get away with referring to the right as fascist, and the current ideology as fascist, even referring to the current government as soft dictatorship. They can talk about disruptive protests, and not even sit-ins, but directly interfering in ICE raids. No one is handwringing about liberals being radicalized online. No one is concerned about protecting women from toxic feminist or radical left ideologies.

This is bad from two angles. First, focus on one group makes it almost impossible to talk about the actual phenomenon and the mechanisms that drive it. Social media is perfectly designed to promote engagement and it turns out that the best way to do that is to radicalize everyone so they keep doomscrolling and hate posting. Second, the large blind spot on the left makes it extremely likely that there will be political violence coming from the left where this is allowed to go on unhindered. Bluesky is liberal twitter. But while twitter is regularly called out as dangerous radicalization, blue sky gets a pass. Liberals can get mainstream publication for a book called “On Tyranny” that pretty much calls Trump and MAGA fascist. No one would have touched a similar book about Biden. When that happens, it seems pretty likely that the group getting a pass for violent and dehumanizing speech is going to create radicals.

Male and conservative communities are constantly being considered as radicalized communities of potentially dangerous individuals who are going to be violent or totalitarian...No one is concerned about protecting women from toxic feminist or radical left ideologies.

If my relatively unconsidered perception that women are more susceptible to peer pressure (on average) whereas men are more likely to go full on dril "it only makes my opinions Worse" in response, then this is both ironic and counterproductive, or at least an inefficient use of cultural resources.

It’s all counterproductive in the very real sense of the world, whether you double down or fall for peer pressure simply because a society full of opposing radical factions is going to quickly tear itself apart. The society full of people cheering every ICE raid and with people convinced that ICE raids are (and I’ve seen this phrase used in the wild) the boxcar phase of the holocaust is going to come to blows rather quickly.

And the problem to me isn’t which side gets radicalized, tbh especially since my exit from a lot of online political discourse, both sides are pretty darn radical at this point, and it’s going to get worse as the algorithm rewards radical content and silos people into political tribes. At the moment, because only one group of radicals is being monitored and warned against, it’s easier for the other side to push the envelope farther until we start seeing it acted out in very violent public ways.

And again, this is a problem that happens on all sides. But until you can talk about the general process and incentives in the social media space that are creating radicalization, it’s hard to stop it. The problem isn’t the teen doing a TikTok dance on hearing about the Kirk assassination. The problem is the social media creating an environment that encourages and rewards radicalization and keeps people in radicalization silos. Fixing that before we blow up Western civilization for likes is the challenge of our time. At present, we only want to talk about the issue in terms of incels and “fascism” and “the manosphere” all of which, from the liberal perspective is “those weirdos over there”. And as long as everyone is saying “it’s not us, it’s those people over there,” no one will solve the problem.

I definitely think the algo has something to do with it (perhaps even a lot to do with it) but I also think the influence of social media would be tempered by much better economic conditions. The ideological terrorism in the 1970s happened without the algorithm, but I would hazard a guess that the mediocre economy helped fan the flames more than a little.

On the gripping hand, though, the worse economic conditions would be tempered by a better algorithm (or none at all). In particular, it seems like gender relations are really poisoned now in a way that they weren't in, say, the 1970s. And I think that's insanely radicalizing, people can handle being relatively poor if there is still a viable path to marriage and family formation, and it seems to me that right now the algorithm and the socio-cultural trends it amplifies are harming that more than the economy.

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