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Are we entering a new phase of the gender wars? To pull a term from Asmongold: "the age of the chud." That is to say: openly, unapologetically sexist men, who don't even try to hide it or justify it.
I can't exactly prove any of this, so I'm just going to list a bunch of anecdotes and vibes to show what I mean. You can decide for yourself if you agree or disagree.
The story thus far: for most of human history, humans had a patriarchy where men controlled most positions of power. Starting in 1919 with the 19th amendment in the US, and a similar date in most European countries, women got the right to vote and generally got legal equality with men. But certain social and institutional barriers remained, so 3rd wave feminists worked to gradually push back and get more rights and power for women. This was generally seen as a good thing by all, with only the most unashamedly reactionary men being opposed.
In the 80s and 90s, this was mostly done by trying to treat everyone the same, with the hope that taking away men's sexism would naturally create equality with men. But over time this proved insufficient, so left-leaning groups started pushing for more and more efforts to actively favor women. This was seen most acutely in corporate recruiting, where companies would heavily recruit in trying to get more women in male-leaning professions, especially engineering and management, and punish heavily anyone who was accused of making women feel "unwelcome." Male employees who wanted to fit in were forced to learn academic feminist jargon, and generally act like an "ally," regardless of their own personal views.
But has any of this actually worked? Well... no. Or at least, it's hit a wall. Engineering and the physical trades remain stubbornly male dominated. Women do a bit better in management, but only when they can sit in large meetings and avoid personal responsibility for anything. Their strong preference remains fields like nursing, HR, and marketing.
On a more personal level, I think any of us who have paid attention long enough have seen the cycle play out long enough to become jaded. Talking like a feminist might get you some kudos ("good boy points"), but it won't get you respected as a thinker- you're still expected to do your duty as an ally by following behind the female leaders. It certainly won't get you laid, which admittedly is not the fairest way to judge an ideology, but it does tend to influence the thinking of young men. It also won't get you the respect of other men, unless they're the most simptastic of feminist men who will still dislike you for being a man. It doesn't seem to get you anything at all, no matter how well you articulate the feminist talking points.
Enter: the chud. Or "C.H.U.D." if you will, since the term comes from an 80s movie where it's an acronym, but it's recently become internet slang for the sort of man who openly embraces reactionary cultural politics, without any veneer of intellectualism. They seem to have found a new way to play the game: you don't debate the feminists, you don't even try, you just do whatever the hell you want and ignore them, while openly embracing some of the worst stereotypes. Trump was probably the trailblazer here, with his total lack of shame, but lots of guys have learned this power.
At the same time, there's been a resurgance in traditional feminine behavior. Things like wearing makeup, lipstock, playing with dolls, openly crying, doing needlework, and sometimes even wearing sexy clothes. For a while these sorts of things were demonized by the more militant wing of the feminist movement, to the point where women felt a bit guilty for indulging in them, but now it seems like they're admitting that it's ok for women to have their traditional feminine interests too. And lots of chuds eat this up, too. I've also noticed a lot more games have blatant fan service in them, almost to the point where I'm numb to it, but this is a level of T&A that would have been protested if it was in old movies.
For a long time, the practical center on feminism was that it was good for the economy. Left or right, everyone agreed that we needed more women in the workforce to grow the economy. But with AI and automation, that's much less clear. So many white collar jobs are getting automated, and it's only going to get worse. Every new woman in the office is simply competition with a man for the same scarce job. The place where we actually need women is at home, having babies, and that doesn't seem to be happening nearly enough.
I think we're on the verge of rolling back a lot of feminism. I know you might say "oh, that's just internet talk, no one actually believes that in real life." But the internet is where we go to talk politics now. If you can win on the internet, you win in real life, too. We might see corporate and political groups stop trying to recruit women, and men being openly sexist again.
As an example, consider our new Secretary of War (that's war, not defense), Pete Hegseth. He opposes feminism, says that women should not be in combat roles, and has instituted mandatory testosterone testing for the military. He's also just generally blunt and aggressive in the way he talks. The left hates him but... he's still in charge. In his personal life, he is twice divorced due to having a lot of affairs.
Or consider JD Vance. He's a lot more intellectual than Hegseth, but still something of a chud. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and childlessness in general. He's flirted with the idea that parents should have more voting rights than non-parents. He wants to "de-woke-ify" all federal institutions. He's saying all kinds of things that would have gotten me fired from most corporate jobs, and yet there's a strong chance that he'll become president.
On a final note, consider the voting demographics. In pretty much every election, the women trend left and the men trend right. If only men voted, the right would basically win every election easily. And that's true internationally, not just in the US. So I'm sure there are a few strategists thinking... "hmm... are we sure we can't repeal that 19th amendment? Or at least make it more difficult for women to vote?" Because that would be an instant knockout blow to the left.
I will say, I don't support any of this. I still consider myself something of a feminist, and I wouldn't fit in at all in a world of chuds. But... I see the appeal, especially for young men, and I think that might be where the world is trending, unless the world finds a more reasonable compromise in the gender wars.
I think you're understating it. Women have been a majority of new doctors and lawyers for years. Young women (in the UK at least) outearn young men and there are more male NEETs than female ones. Women are about 62% of accountants. I think you can make the strong case that, in the modern economy, women are better suited to the working world. There's obviously still strong male and female preferences (vis. people vs things) and most workaholics are men but it's not as if women are just doing pretend makework while men do all the actual work.
Of course, you still see a wage gap within marriages because a) women prefer men who earn more money than them, b) women have a comparative advantage in having children and c) women who have children prefer to spend time with them while preferring their husbands work full time.
I'm not sure you can interpret much from either of these men. Hegseth seems pretty representative of Trumpian boorishness and chaos, rather than some kind of shift in the makeup of elites, and JD Vance's believes are pretty much in line with broad social conservatism. Vance's beliefs aren't too far from someone like Catherine Pakaluk, does that make her a Chud?
Also women seem to be in position to be more threatened by AI. Which explains why the foaming at the mouth AI haters are mostly women.
Do they? I don't know the stats exactly, but I was under the impression that women tended to do more people-oriented work like e.g. nurses, therapists, caretakers, while men tended to do more thing-oriented work like e.g. programmers, analysts, engineers. And the latter set of jobs seem to be more threatened than the former by AI right now. On top of that, threatening someone's job is far more negatively impactful for men than for women; a woman losing her job doesn't also have extremely negative impact on her sexual market value the same way that a man losing his job does, and that's a great determinant to someone's general life satisfaction.
Speaking of sexual market value, there's an argument that generative AI also tends to be more beneficial to women for simulating sexual relationships, as women tend to prioritize emotional connection more than physical ones, and currently AI can generate text that simulates emotions much better than it can generate atoms that simulate physical flesh and blood. So we could see a future with billions of femcels happily chatting with their AI boyfriends on their phones while billions of incels cry to sleep after jerking it to their ideal GF on a 2D screen on their phone.
HOWEVER, a counter-argument could be that women are more status-conscious and so they may be less likely to accept an AI partner as a good substitute; an AI can simulate status, but it can't actually be a high status man. So I think the jury's still out on that.
Of course, innovations in robotics and material sciences could make these even out or even flip, but those haven't happened yet.
This doesn't match my experience, but I feel like this could be more down to sex differences in how people react to things they hate in the modern environment than to do with sex differences in how much they actually are threatened by it.
I also think there may be a portion of image/video generation that women tend to get more upset about. That is, image/video generation allows for the creation of infinitely diverse, bespoke porn, which cuts out actual women from the production cycle, arguably lowering the price they can charge for actual photos and actually filmed videos. It also greatly lowers the barrier to entry for someone to take a real photo of a real clothed person and to draw over it in a way that makes it appear as if she's nude, or even to create a completely new image with a new pose and setting for the same face, which I believe women tend to find problematic more often than men do. Likewise with the ability for someone to take a photo and then generate more images and audio to put together to a video where only the first frame is a real photo, and the rest of the video is a depiction of the actual person doing something that never happened.
By women I meant corporate bitches.
Ah. I'd guess
is a big factor in that case, since corporate bitches tend to be some of the least encumbered when it comes to expressing righteous indignation over some sort of ideological/political issue and/or have immense amounts of practice and encouragement of it in the last few decades, which should be the formative years of most of anyone in corporate.
In terms of the threat to their actual work, if we presume that corporate bitches disproportionately fill what might be hyperbolically called sinecures, doing makework, versus men who disproportionately fill jobs where their actual productivity actually drives the company's performance, I'm not sure that women are worse situated either. AI is able to do productive work, allowing the productive workers to be replaced, but sinecures and makework can be justified and invented as much as needed, to fill demand, and I don't see any signs that the demand for more corporate bitches is going down any time soon.
However, there's also the argument that AI is capable of making the productive people so much more productive and capable of performing a lot of the makework tasks such that companies do decide to cut down on the demand for corporate bitches, in favor of profits. So who knows.
But most importantly, the perception of the corporate bitches versus men could indeed be that the former is more threatened than the latter, since, presuming that there's truth to the hyperbole, the former's work is, in fact, easier for AI to replace than the latter's. So you're probably right.
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I dunno about that, computer programmers are very male. Including the 'women'.
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I would put that down more to women being more risk averse and less interested in technology generally. Women are more NIMBYish than men when it comes to building houses, and men are more optimistic about technological progress generally.
And I don't think we can confidently argue that women are more threatened by AI in any case. If AI takes over all jobs, then really the only 'jobs' left will be interpersonal roles e.g. mothers and fathers, and the housewife role works better for women than for men. I suspect AI will hit white collar workers harder than blue collar ones, but blue collar workers aren't just plumbers and tradesmen, it also includes nurses, care workers, childcare workers and cleaners. And one of the main male blue collar roles (drivers) are getting automated away as we speak.
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That's fair. There are certainly some fields where feminism has worked as intended? women have caught up to, or surpassed men.
The question now is... is that a good thing? There's no longer a shortage of people willing and able to be doctors and lawyers. Instead, people fight viciously in competition to get those high-prestige jobs. I do not know if the current status quo of "give it to the teacher's pets" will hold, there. Perhaps the chuds will also take over that competition by simply banning female doctors and lawyers, instead of trying to out-study them on the exams?
Well, this is the first time I've heard of her, so it's hard to say. She seems quite conservative and reactionary. But I think she's still a bit too refined and intellectual to a be a proper "chud." Frankly, I'm not sure it's possible for any woman to be a chud, that's almost an oxymoron.
You don't need to ban female doctors. You need to end affirmative action programs and then institute new ones that favor conservative leaning men. I know it's hard to imagine exactly what that looks like but, you know, reversing the progressive behavior is how you get the biological solution to work.
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I guess that's what I'm getting at. You describe JD Vance as a chud because he has socially conservative or anti-woke beliefs, but I think we agree that those aren't the same thing. I would argue they probably aren't even very correlated. The barstool conservative may be anti-woke because he doesn't like being scolded and doesn't like woke's puritanism, but he's not socially conservative.
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I imagine this would cause the nurses and obstetricians to go on strike, and cause a huge shortage of doctors.
As the average age of populations increase and they become more sickly, health care workers will have increased economic and political bargaining power. This is probably to the benefit of women indirectly.
I think banning female doctors might be close to political suicide, and even if a chud aligned strongman dictator took power he would have no incentive to deliver on promises to ban female doctors. Who would be looking after the health of his women, female doctors or male doctors? It would be female doctors for anything related to reproductive organs.
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So basically, the only gender demanding affirmative action is also the one that from an objective view would be paying a penalty for.
That's kind of what's being litigated now, and why it's being litigated now. Basically, men only make 80% on the dollar in a system that is to a point set up to advantage women, and women are very interested in making sure that is never fixed.
If equality is to be true- if men and women are to have equal moral worth- this needs to be equalized. And I think it would be wise to note the previous answer, "strict legal equality", resulted in selective enforcement of various equality laws, which was how the gynosupremacy got established in the first place- so it might not be the answer now.
Strict legal equality and equal opportunities were never the problem. The issue is that the goal was always equality of outcome, with the assumption that women were oppressed. So instead of A woman and man with the same skillset and drive will have the same opportunities in life, the goalpost moved to the idea that less than equal representation is a sign of discrimination, while women doing better than men is a sign of equality.
This belief is what justifies the current state of affairs. Swapping the genders around so men are now seen as the oppressed group might feel good, but won't solve much in the long run. Rolling back to strict legal equality while recognizing that innate differences between genders will likely results in non-50% representation in many fields, seems much better.
In other words, you could also look at this as a problem of the state trying to micromanage in order to reach a specific outcome. If the state realizes this doesn't work, a rollback to legal equality but this time we learn from experience and don't pass laws that escalate it, should be possible.
No, this is impossible.
Selective prosecution means it doesn't matter how fairly you write equality law.
Which means if you want fairness (and aren't at the same time doing an overhaul of the justice system to prevent that) then you can't have equality law.
This is the same kind of talking point the leftists used to argue for preferential hiring of women.
"Biases in the population means it doesn't matter how fairly you write equality law. The only way to remove those biases is by forcibly including more women in workplaces, which will normalize it."
You are treading dangerous ground here. If anything, the rise of the chud indicates that explicitly giving preferential treatment to one gender will only result in resentment and backlash in the long run.
You misunderstand.
My argument is that legal equality itself is something inherently giving preferential treatment to women.
Women have enough social power to force men to treat them [more than] fairly already; by your words, you prove that the same does not hold true for men.
This is reflected by the fact that, even if you did write the laws perfectly neutrally (and in most nations they are not), they'll only be enforced in favor of women.
Thus, the only fair way is for there to be no law.
Granted, you could do some unfair laws- if you assume men and women are already equal, then the number of crimes committed against them should match, and having quotas for how many cases can be prosecuted (if no man comes in claiming workplace discrimination, that means it isn't happening, so no woman gets to do it either; if no man is demanding Title IX redress, then assuming things are already fair, then no woman gets it either that year) might solve that kind of abuse.
Not necessarily. You can assume equality before the law while also acknowledging that there are overall differences between the genders. Men may commit more violent crimes than women, but in each trial the judgement should be based on the specific case rather than the person's gender. The differences in crime rates would be caused by nature or nurture, neither of which the law is capable of controlling directly.
Again, I remind you that feminists have tried using the law as a blunt instrument to change the culture through gender quotas, which has not at all resulted in women being seen as more competent. Instead, they are regarded with increased scrutiny by coworkers, as there is no longer a guarantee that they were hired based on their skills.
How the co-worker men feel doesn't matter: they have no power to do anything about it, and they know it.
And you can't measure "the degree to which the State induces quiet quitting" in anything outside of a vibes-based manner- you can't go to your boss, or do a risk assessment about it, because even if you did selfish women would [ab]use the current law to throw you in jail for strike-breaking!
This is why I don't believe for a second that the "crime rate" is actually more of a man thing. Women are just as destructive; assuming equality, we should expect them to be responsible for half of all [anti-social behavior which merits prosecution, or 'crime' for short]. But the ways in which women crime are a lot less identifiable, a lot less cut and dry, than the ways in which men commit them.
So a legal system- one based on evidence and precedent- is the wrong tool to hold women to account for that.
In the same way that 90% of schoolchildren convicted for fighting are male. You can't prosecute bullying or exclusion, which are the ways women destroy each other, with a zero-tolerance policy based on who convinces who to throw the first punch.
And if you want to tell me "well, women destroying each other isn't as big a deal as it is when men do it"... well, that's not equality now, is it?
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That's your black pill. The leftists were correct: fairness does not work. There will always be a thumb on the scale and the only real questions are whose thumb, which side of the scale, and just how heavy is it pushing.
While actual complete 100% equality is probably impossible, it is still an ideal worth striving for. There are many cases where striving for objectivity is the best we can do, and once people stop doing that, leaning into their biases instead, the value of what they are doing plummets.
This is part of what is wrong with journalism and academia. Standards have shifted so far towards "bias can never be avoided" that presenting your own POV as objective fact while ignoring the other side is increasingly accepted, because everyone is biased anyway so it is pointless to try and mitigate it.
It is well known that no trial is completely fair. Lawyers literally try to pack juries in a way that make them favorable to their clients. But the law should still strive for objectivity and try to get as close as possible, otherwise it will only become more dystopian with time.
Striving for "equality" in practice gets you female supremacy.
Yes.
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Rent control doesn't work. And yet...
Here a false doctrine is arguably more useful for the state (or the people who run the state) than a true one. If a doctrine is true and the issue resolves itself it's no longer a lever.
If a doctrine is false it will continually contradict reality and will require constant government intervention.
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