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I mentioned here many times that I consider the gender (sex) divide the greatest factor in our model of understanding modern political thought and action.
Background; middle-class male, young, Catholic family, Mediterranean, living in a big, poor city. Moved to Central Europe to work in a big èlite public institution with many young people, especially females. History of belonging to Marxist organisations in the past btw.
As a passionate about history, I normally talk about it, especially in a highly-educated environment where discussions about complex topics are the norm.
What I noticed in the past year it is astounding and moulded a lot of my thought. Every time I talk with women about history, and the topics fall on some past event/political regime/ideology/whatever, there is a lot of disinterest towards it from the women's side. Not disinterest in the sense of "I do not care", because as I said it is a highly-educated environment where being uncaring about this kind of thing is uncool, but disinterest in the sense of:
"I understand that in the past things worked a certain way, but the past is always worse than now because women had it worse".
From there, after it happened dozens of times with dozens of different women, I elaborated:
Women are the true accelerationist.
I could not elaborate or argue about past political or moral issues or ideologies or sovrastructures, because, from the other side, the argument is always that every behaviour or ideology of the past is ontologically evil because it discriminated against women.
I will never forget how when I was arguing about how 19th-century European states had probably a higher state-capacity than contemporary European states, I was accused of sexism because I expressed a preference for a non-contemporary political structure. The same happened when I mentioned how I admire Charles De Gaulle (because Macron, while being bad, is better than him because he is more feminist).
The most amazing moment was when I said to a group of women (yes, a lot of weird moments this year) that the loss of Church participation alienated a lot of people and diminished the sense of belonging and social participation of the community in the public thing. They agreed with me (!) but still for them, it is better now because they prefer a more isolated society but with more feminism.
Women are true accelerationist because the consequence of feminism has been a weirdo para-futurism philosophy but without fascism. Everything that can be conducted to the past is suspected as part of a reactionary plot to be judged on moral grounds. No detached interests in History per se, but only moral condemnation of everything that is not the "current year".
For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".
The biggest consequence of this sex divide is, imho, that a feminist liberal society has a huge gap in understanding the context when society begins to decline after drifting from some past ideology or structure. It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past.
I would like to receive some input on my "theory" from the residents of the motte, expressed in the English language which is better than mine.
PS: for people who are curious, I never received any sort of cancellation or consequence for my brazen rhetorical behaviour. Europe is not as woke as the US, and I am a kinda of "high-status male" for several reason, so I noticed that women tolerate way more whatever I say.
Yes, I agree with you. There's a sense of solidarity by a modern liberal woman with anything perceived as progressive that overrides debate on certain issues.
I'd like to outline my meta-critique of feminism in relation to this phenomenon. It's a kind of speculative post-Jungian thing and doesn't attempt any evidence so take it with a grain of salt.
The first thing women know is that men are more powerful than them physically - they are stronger and more violent, so the average woman would lose in a fight to an average man. Additionally because of procreation they are more vulnerable- men desire to rape woman more often than they desire to rape men, so even a weak man will be safer on the streets from that kind of violation (though more likely to experience common assault).
Men also have higher representation in the tails of achievement across many different domains - this is not describing the average, but does mean that generally the smartest woman would have usually found a smarter man in her domain (of course there are spectacularly smart woman in the distribution as well).
All this means that deep in their psyches, women feel an inferiority complex in relation to men (men in turn have inferiority around the ability to procreate, hence a push to have the heavenly father dominate over earth mother in Western traditions). Also as an aside both men and women are misogynistic, projecting their existential disgust/despair onto woman as the closest to 'life/creation/existence'.
This inferiority combines with the actual injustice of historical patriarchy, servitude, male domineering that woman have experienced into feminism.
To avoid the knowledge of male primary power, feminism took up the ideas of social constructivism a la Foucault, where power relations determine the way things are. Thus the exclusion of biological science in discourse in favour of blank-slate ideas. And the explicit use of politics and solidarity to wield power.
But, political aims work against truth discernment and so feminism has wandered, and failed to integrate biology and evolution, and has, like a lot of social science, favoured novelty over synthesis.
This political wandering has led to internal factionism, first with intersectionality, which undermines solidarity across the category women, and now gender ideology and queer theory, the bastard sister of gender studies, which undermines the very category of women.
But modern liberal progressive politics demands solidarity across the sisterhood, and so more than anyone, women are responsible for sustaining the politics undermining feminism, and womanhood, itself.
What actual injustice?
It frustrates me to no end that the Motte is more than happy to debate HBD and other taboo topics, and criticise mainstream liberal narrative generally, but still generally believes in the feminist myth that is the historical oppression of women.
And it is a myth. The idea of an oppressive 'patriarchy' in history is a produce of feminist historical revision, aided by our modern liberal democratic sensibilities making us believe anything not liberal or democratic as morally inferior.
This is something I've previously argued about both here and on the old subreddit and elsewhere on cyberspace many times in the past (please, read those previous comments if you haven't already). But the conclusion I'm very slowly and reluctantly reaching is that it doesn't matter how much I or anyone else try to argue against it and prove its falsehood.
It doesn't matter how many feminists myths, like the idea that husbands could beat their wives with impunity, are debunked. It doesn't matter how many prominent, power female historical figures are pointed out that shouldn't really exist in a supposed patriarchy. It doesn't matter how much subtlety you try and introduce into the debate around female suffrage including the fact that men were more in favour of women's suffrage than men were. It doesn't matter how historically rights and responsibilities have gone hand-in-hand which each sex preferred a different balance. It doesn't matter trying to explain how men and women having distinct sex roles does not necessarily mean one was inferior. It doesn't matter if you point out all the ways that women actually did have unique privileges that men did not have. It doesn't matter trying to explain that women can, do and did exhibit huge amounts of agency, influence and power in history and in our societies, if in ways often distinct from men. It doesn't matter pointing out that any onerous ritual that women experienced almost always had a male equivalent, such as FGM and MGM. It doesn't matter the ways in which men objectively and materially had it worse than women both historically and in the present, like life expectancy, participation in dangerous work and so on. It doesn't matter that the most important relationships between the sexes (family) is characterised by love, affection and cooperation, not oppression. It doesn't matter how blatantly obvious how absolute rubbish feminist theory to anyone with a brain who reads it. It doesn't matter how many holes you poke in the idea of the feminist idea of a 'patriarchy' (and you can poke so many holes), there is always the 'patriarchy of the gaps' and the historical oppression of women lurking somewhere, somehow as a historical 'fact'.
The conclusion I've come to as to why it doesn't matter is because I think deep down on some innate, primal level, we want to believe in the idea that women are oppressed, historically or otherwise, is true. Men want to believe it because we want to play white-knight-in-shining-armour, our instinctual desire to be a protector and provider for women. Men want injustice against women to be true so we can swoop in and save women from that injustice and be a hero and loved by those women for it. Women want to believe it because it justifies their own special status. It justifies the special treatment and privileges, which they deserve by virtue of their oppression. It's a convenient noble lie long ingrained deep in our cultural consciousness, rendered dysfunctional by modernity. We love to demonise our outgroup by how badly they treat women to demonstrate how virtuous we are. There's no better outgroup to beat on than the past, because they're really bad at fighting back.
To be completely clear, I'm not saying women have never experienced any injustice. But any injustice is specific and not part of a universal, continuous effort ('patriarchy') to injure women, and it has to be put in the context than both women and men have faced injustices historically.
I'm not completely defeatist on this issue, at least not yet. But part of me recognises the futility of fighting human nature, no matter how irrational, self-destructive and maladaptive it might be. But I don't know what the alternative is.
Welcome to arguing against Enlightenment Ideology. Its core claim is that it can guide us all to a brighter future, but actually doing that is quite hard, and "brighter" is always relative to the past. Consequently it's easier to lie about how bad the past was, then to actually improve on it.
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