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Do men and women political radicalization work differently?
Everyone of us know how riots, revolts and political radicalism are born; a segment of the population, resented or alienated by material means (they are too poor or too isolated by the access to political power, and they revolt by necessity) decide to adopt countercultural ideologies, often violent and revolutionary, in order to destroy the status quo and access the means of power.
But what if our model is obsolete, because we applied it to men and masculinity?
Being a middle-upper class European man, I have a lot of access, both personal and social, to my peers and to what they think. Last day, an homicide made by a men towards his girlfriend happened in Italy, and an enormous cultural war has started with all the related news (including the sister of the victim advocating a "cultural revolution", shame campaign by the media, storms of social media posts by women, and the "fascist" right-wing government immediately folding, promising some kind of introduction of sexual (ergo lgbt) education in the schools).
Well, the model of radicalization that I observed is the following; young, often upper-middle class women with no material problems and often with prestigious (but not high-earning) jobs adopting the position of intersectional or radical feminism in few days, moving quite a lot the Overton window to the left. From this, the following observations I gathered;
Women's political radicalization happen in different echo-chambers compared to the men's ones. While men's radicalization happens because of lack of material means, in women's case it looks like the more they happen to be privileged, the more they radicalize. As if material means have no matter for their well being, and the high status position is the source, not the solution, for their growing radicalization.
Could be that the de-materialization of post-Marxist politics happened because women are anti-materialists themselves and do not care about all this stuff? Okay all the discourses on post-industrialization, post-marxism, Foucault or whatever, but I do not think that, politically speaking, women cares at all about the well being of their societies at large.
Cultural-war-speaking, another demonstration that there is no opposition to the women's tears and resentement in Western Society, and we have still not produced the necessary antibodies to resist them. Far left organisations and ideologies have it far too easy, because they are free to propagandize using traditional medias and social network as an instrument of expansion.
A lot of normie women fell in the vortex of radicalizations. But unlike real radicalized womens, if you speak to them personally, they will not strike back at you. A distinction still exist between the mentally-ill woman and the woman who is only pushed by social media and social pressure to act.
And that I am lucky to have a girlfriend that does not give a damn about social medias at large.
I think you touch on a huge number of interesting questions in this post.
My view on why 'material' (ie 'orthodox marxist'; economic) socialist views have declined is that the average quality of life for the 'urban proletariat' is vastly higher than it was at the high point of communism. Especially if you look at the richest, most industrialized countries (where Marx predicted the revolution would happen first), ie. Germany, the UK, the US, the 'high point' for massively popular radical leftism was 1880-1930. Even by the mid-1930s in the UK (I choose because Germany saw democracy end in that time, while the US had a weird double dip recession due to extremely stupid policy by FDR) newfound prosperity had marginalized the truly radical left, which had its last great moment in the general strike of 1926.
You just can't compare the 'material conditions' of a miner in Lancashire in 1905, or a worker in a steel mill in Pittsburgh in 1890, to the conditions of a modern 'American proletarian', like a nurse, a content marketing manager, a mid-level employee of the local municipal government, or even a skilled blue collar worker like a modern steel industry worker. In 2010 pay for a fresh miner, in a huge recession, right out of high school was $70,000 a year in West Virginia. Still tough work, but much more than many 'white collar' jobs paid at that time fresh out of college (if you could get one at all), and in a state with a low cost of living.
This has happened every six months since the invention of social media, and nothing changes. As the old quip goes,
Lesbian separatism failed for a reason (well, many reasons, but one primary reason); women like men too much to commit.
The class that is most precarious today are surplus elites. The low income high status people struggling to not fall into the working class. An electrician with a good salary and zero risk of unemployment benefits from low taxes. The sociology major or artist who makes less than an electrician is dependent on state handouts. The class represented by the modern left isn't the working class, it is the state handout class. This can either mean underclass living on welfare or art history major managing a project that is supposed to help the underclass (don't ask for statistical evidence of the efficacy of this project). Canceling student debt and more money for modern art benefits people with upper middle class parents who didn't make it to medical school yet are terrified of becoming a nurse. The modern left is in a conflict with the working class as the working class doesn't want to pay for LGBTQA+ certifications while the downwardly mobile middle class desperately needs it so they don't end up in the working class.
Especially women tend to end up with college degrees that are difficult to find employment for without left wing politics. There would be a lot fewer HR jobs if it wasn't for all the regulations that have been passed. Meanwhile the actual workers find most of the HR-stuff bizarre and alienating.
These social media campaigns work, they provide new jobs for chief diversity officers.
And this is a self re-enforcing cycle; the more it becomes a default that mentally healthy non-underclass women have degrees, the more women get degrees in communications and psychology(typically the two least rigorous majors) because women are susceptible to societal pressure and low-rigor degrees make it difficult to get a job, which means there’s outcry to make more jobs specifically for degree holders.
Feminism doesn’t help- the way to break the cycle would be to acknowledge that most but not all women should just be homemakers, yes often for men who make $65k/yr, but it isn’t the root of the problem. Pretending that everyone can be an elite is the root of the problem.
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I think it'd be more accurate and simple to just call them intellectuals.
Elites who didn't develop some great new tech, trade their way to a career on wall street or become a surgeon.
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