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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).
This one hits with my personal experience. Much as my TikTok feed is full of TedPosting, but only the marginal "weirdoes" actually go shoot up an ATF office, and I suspect even most people posting these memes would agree that such a person wasn't "in on the joke" or didn't "get it;" the internet is full of feminisms and RedPills, but only the weirdoes actually do things like refuse to have sex for fear of rape/false-rape-accusations, or can't get a date because of ideology, or view men/women as the enemy in a way that interferes with their day to day life. Hell, irl I know a fair number of like serious racists who have fully normal cordial relations with Black people in their day to day lives. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and expecting people to live by their rhetoric would leave very little of the motte standing.
Speaking personally, the only romantic life I can truly speak to, I've hooked up with lots of women who love to make "God, men are the worst" jokes, and for whom Cis-Hetero-White-man is practically a slur! I'm whiter than mayonnaise and straighter than a yardstick; alone in bed the members of our school's "Women of Color Collective" would mostly just flat out say they loved white guys, while the white girls wouldn't admit it but their dating patterns proved them wrong. For all the criticism from the online left and all the corresponding whining from the online right, being a white man is awesome, I've never experienced it as anything but an advantage.
But this probably also plays into the "class struggle" aspect to the soft-polygyny that lots of other comments are pointing out: the top whatever% of white men have it great because the benefits of being tall/strong/pretty/blonde/rich/intelligent outweigh the rhetoric of criticism, while white men who are short/weak/ugly/defective get all the rhetorical criticism and none of the spoils.
I strongly suspect that framing celibacy as a reaction to being afraid of accusations is often just a mental crutch to explain away an unwillingness to suffer the fear, doubt, and embarrassment of approach and rejection. Rather than having to deal with that real, difficult reality that men get rejected a lot and it stings, but eventually you'll get through (in all likelihood), adopting a defensive crouch that explains away why you're not doing it allows reconciling some cognitive dissonance. Regarding ideology, quite a few people have noted that the commonly experienced reality is that most people aren't actually all that dedicated to their politics and that pairing off with a fairly normie woman tends to result in her adopting some approximation of her man's politics, or at least tolerating his idiosyncrasies. Sure, being a literal Nazi might be a dating problem, but you can probably get away with saying "Pinochet did nothing wrong" without alienating very many women.
They admit as much. The people who take this stance are usually the more jaded MGTOW types who had some sort of bad experience (divorce is a common one) and have decided romance isn't worth it.
Incels just tend to state that they have no chance cause women are totally shallow or whatever other story they come up with, not that they could have women but it wasn't worth it
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