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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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The kind of misogyny that is fundamentally driven by, say, thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak is fairly rare.

Or is this even “misogyny”?

A lot of “misogyny” is just holding women up to the standards that you would expect out of a man, under the paradigm that women have the same rights and status as men, and that women are just as strong and independent as men.

The median woman is boring relative to the median man, much less the 90th percentile or so woman vs. the 90th percentile man (given tail effects) in terms of worldliness, funniness, interestingness. Many women and men would agree, regardless of their political orientation.

Women are physically weak. I don’t think it’s something that needs to be re-litigated here. But also perhaps mentally weak, in terms of being more subject to crying randomly, Stockholm Syndrome, being more prone to social trends, memes, preselection and female mate-choice copying. Women tend to be less agentic and more passive.

Women can be more useful in certain contexts. However, in a lot of contexts, they’re also quite useless. For example, screaming “STOP” or “STAHP” but doing nothing is a common feature in fight and/or crime videos on a worldwide basis. A lot of times, they’re but exacerbating the situation with their histrionics. Pointing it out is trite nowadays, like pointing out that there are clouds when it’s raining.

In a similar vein, children might be boring, useless, weak. Yet, men would hardly be regarded as mis-children-ists if they viewed children as such. In concept-space, women are tilted toward children relative to men, when it comes to standards and expectations.

I am not saying that thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak on average is necessarily misogyny, although of course thinking that literally all women are boring, useless, or weak would be misogyny. I am just saying that thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak on average can in some cases inspire misogyny.

That's fair.

Although I would add, conversely, misogyny (in the strict sense of hating women for being women) can in many cases inspire thinking that women are necessarily boring, useless, and/or weak just because they're women (where "weak" is probably the... weakest... part of the statement, as women are almost always indeed physically weaker than men, and in many cases psychologically, as well).