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Is the Gender War the oddest "culture war"?
Fair warning: this is going to provide few conclusions. TBH I'm more interested in soliciting opinions on which explanation seems most plausible.
I was on another sub and someone complained about how tiring the interminable gender war was. And it raised something I had been thinking of for a while: it feels like there's something very odd about a society where sexes are encouraged to disdain each other despite being unable to actually do without said sex.
I grew up in Africa and moved to the West near the end of my teenage years so I've lived in very different societies and have struggled to understand their differences. . One highly progressive and aiming for gender egalitarianism and another that has a very traditional understanding of gender still, due to religion and culture. As Muslim nations go we're pretty progressive relative to some of the Arabs (no one I knew growing up wore or was expected to wear hijab - though I saw more of them around when I returned not too long ago), but it's no Sweden.
The interesting thing is though, growing up, gender wars weren't as big a deal as in the West. I'm not saying that women never reacted badly to sexism or no one ever pushed for change. But...it just didn't feel like there was this interminable "battle of the sexes".
Thing is: we had many other forms of culture war. The most obvious being ethnic strife. That was just taken for granted. It makes perfect sense to me that tribes will dislike one another, groups will cynically deploy identity politics as suits them and so on.
It doesn't seem obvious to me that any tribe will be so riven internally that men and women (the two components necessary for it to reproduce the tribe) see themselves as competitors or enemies. With this logic being taken to absurd extremes where women make money publicly mocking their husbands for the applause of the internet
So why is there a gender war? Why didn't it feel as big a deal back home? Potential reasons:
There was, I was just too young to know. The most parsimonious and intuitive. Game stops, do not pass "go".
There's "'gender war" in the same way there's "class conflict" in the medieval era: exploitation is still happening but conditions haven't allowed something like marxism (well...feminism here) to explode cause the proles are still too oppressed. So there's a latent gender war. a. There's some attraction to this one too, especially when it comes to one obvious gender war issue we don't share with the West: polygamy. Here many women are opposed and it does create a clear split between men and women. But it seems like it simply hasn't bubbled up into a politically salient critique of the whole institution or, even broader, some "patriarchy"
The West has much weaker tribal and religious links, which means there's much less of a sense of intratribal loyalty to block gender wars or redirect them. If you're just someone in some random urban region (that you likely moved to) they're not really your men/women, it's not really your tribe. There's no common destiny; it's just random individuals and so it's easier to demonize them as oppressors/bitches. a. As a corollary: the absence of strong, traditional identities allows/drives people to identify in different ways that allow gender conflict.
Traditional societies have a much clearer path to marriage/family which reduces what there is to fight over. It is precisely the shifting of norms (and their endless litigation) that justifies becoming a gender warrior. Even unjust but stable norms may be better here.
Blank slate ideology hasn't taken root. IMO this leads to damage because the natural points of divergence between men and women are no longer natural tendencies we have to work around but actual failings on the part of the other side (obvious examples would be: women being "too" choosy, men valuing youth and variety "too much")
The American culture war is just particularly strange; Austrians and other Westerners do not speak this way but they don't get as much airtime.
Similarly: the Culture war doesn't actually represent lived reality, it is just a loud form of kayfabe, especially on the Left. Women and men pair up and go about their days, regardless of the TikTok rhetoric
Feminism itself is to blame: the ideology, especially when stripped of class, requires a male enemy. When stripped of class it becomes a tool of middle class and above women seeking to remove barriers to their privilege who especially need men as such to be the enemy (if they argued on the basis of class they would risk arguing against the very privileged state they wish to reach). If this allows a middle class woman to talk down to a working class man as an avatar of the problems of all men...all the better.
So...I'm curious which ones the Motte finds intuitive (besides the obvious). Because - if I ignore my desire to be epistemically humble - I do have sympathy for 2,3 & 5 (though arguably 5 is just a proxy for how far feminist ideas have spread in the first place).
May I ask, does your native culture have jokes about nagging wives/henpecked husbands? Because this seems to be a staple of humour, even in the heyday of The Patriarchy.
The Battle of the Sexes is an old trope, and for any war, you need an enemy. For feminism, that was The Patriarchy (but in practice that meant 'men in general' and not 'the system of society under which both men and women live').
Things have improved greatly, but life is still not perfect. And it would seem that for many women, all the sexual liberation and workplace equality means "in fact, you can't have it all". So they feel they have been cheated out of what was promised, and there must be Someone To Blame for that, and that means "white cis straight (Christian) men" because that is the traditional enemy.
You are completely correct about class versus race; the newer strains of feminism have gone to Intersectionality and how middle-class white women are as much the enemy, because they modelled the feminist movement on what they wanted and experienced and didn't listen to, or silenced, BIPOC women. There is womanism and mujerism which evolved out of mujerista theology, which evolved out of liberation theology, for black and Latina women respectively.
Ironically, a lot of the black/latina women involved in the theoretical and activist work are just as privileged, having been inducted into the middle-class and academia, as the white women they are competing against, which is why the favoured enemy is still The White Male, because that is the ultimate of privilege against which one can measure oneself: yes, I am more privileged than you are, but I am still less privileged than Him.
The battle of the sexes is natural, but alliances within the sexes seems less straightforward.
Every harmony results from some conflict settling at some equilibrium. Men and women have different imperatives, desires, points of view, etc. and these fundental conflicts have to bump up against one another and get settled at some compromise but with some leverage and threat remaining, to keep both parties to hold to their end of the bargain.
Such conflicts even arise between generations and even the most intimate connections like mother and child. Both on a social and a biological level. The embryo already tries to exploit the mother in utero, trying to grab on to as much resources and nutrition as possible, which the mother must defend itself from.
Even one's own cells and body parts are in conflict and this is most apparent in cancer.
Men and women are in a biological arms race too, a lot of deception, signaling, trying to see through all that and more layers of this (with reality providing a grounding through life and death in natural selection, and so an anchor to truth).
But it doesn't follow that members of the same sex are allies in all this. Rather, they just have a different type of competition going on. Especially among males, who are more competitive (that's why they need to be so big). I think the MRA idea of male solidarity is therefore doomed to be low status. A man who needs other men to protect his interests against women is seen as weak. Now women are competitive among themselves too, but typically less openly and overtly and more subtly than men. So the expectation would be that they also shouldn't have too much purely sex-based solidarity to each other in reality, but perhaps more pretension of it at least, than in the case of men.
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