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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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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But what if our model is obsolete, because we applied it to men and masculinity?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.

There are a couple of problems with this question.

Everyone of us know how riots, revolts and political radicalism are born

Those are very distinct phenomena. Conflating them is highly problematic.

a segment of the population, resented or alienated by material means

This is not very clear, but if it is meant to refer to economic deprivation, it has been clear for decades that economic deprivation is a poor predictor of participation in political violence; at best, the relationship is highly contingent. Eg:

There does appear to be an inverted “U” relationship between terrorism and the factors of education and wealth, although that relationship might be contested in terms of measurement validity. Some of this complexity probably stems from the conflation of the revolutions/rebellion literature and the terrorism literature, because much of the former focused on peasant rebellions or the role of the “masses” in fomenting revolution. More-recent demographic research has revealed that individual participants in terrorist groups and in terrorist violence are both more educated and more financially well off than was previously believed—although this was no surprise to scholars who studied anarchist and other social revolutionary terrorist groups in the 1970s. However, the emerging picture of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq suggests that they fit the old model of the undereducated, unemployed, alienated terrorist far better than the new model. This contrast, too, might be better understood by distinguishing types of terrorism.