Feminization

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone,” argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire “woke” era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization.” Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers’s resignation.

The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria. 

This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

Of course, an even bigger part of the problem are low status men, often raised by single moms with an ax to grind against her own low status mate that she abandoned, or low status dads who pedestalized their women inculcating a terrible, terrible attitude in these additional low status men. They are reliably even worse than the women.

More from the article:

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies. 

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine. 

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

And another snippet:

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic. 

A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

These two approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.

If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. It was possible to believe back in 1970 that introducing women into the legal profession in large numbers would have only a minor effect. That belief is no longer sustainable. The changes will be massive. 

And one more snippet:

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?  

And it's worth pointing out that the article was written by a woman.

Isaiah 3:12 "As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths."

Doesn't mean much until you start to notice other patterns that suddenly puts in its proper context, doesn't it? Anyway, I recommend reading the whole article. There's more. And there's more that she doesn't even talk about. No mention of how over-educating women and preparing them for careers takes them out of their best marriagable window and is tied very closely with lack of marrying, lack of children, and all kinds of anxiety and depression, not to mention lonely, frustrated old maid old age—which they quixotically blame on men rather than on their own poor behavior, poor decisions or poor judgement. 

As the article says, though; stop propping up the enforced feminization with the force of government, and it'll go away quickly. The question is; how much pain do we all have to suffer before it becomes obvious that it needs to be done? Most people still don't accept this, because most people refuse to recognize obvious patterns that make them feel bad.

ESR and me

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned;”

The part of me that was once an idealistic anti-racist liberal marching for civil rights died its final death last night as I watched the video of Irina Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail, being fatally stabbed in the throat from behind by a black savage I refuse to name.

What has finally broken me is, incidents like that aren’t even a surprise anymore. The frequency of brutal, senseless murders by “African-Americans”, both individually and in predatory mobs, has risen exactly as rapidly as social and coercive controls on their behavior have weakened.

Meanwhile, for anybody who’s wondering, American whites still have about the same crime rate as Switzerland. When enforcement of norms disintegrates, only intelligent people with low time preference still act civilized.

As I’ve watched us sliding down the civilizational failure gradient, the question I’ve been increasingly unable to dismiss is this: was the whole ugly apparatus of racial repression – segregation, sundown towns, lynchings -really just senseless hatred? Or was it a rational containment strategy evolved under pressure from living alongside a large, visually distinct population of low-IQ savages?

I think I know the answer now. And I hate knowing it. I preferred my innocence.

It doesn’t do any good to protest that this particular savage was “mentally ill”, whatever you think that means. The mobs that routinely form to beat up and kill whites unwary enough to wander onto their turf aren’t psychotic, unless all Blacks are psychotic.

Yes, yes, I know. If you were to select a population of whites for the same distribution of IQ and time preference as American Blacks, and then coddle them, scholarship out their brightest kids for four generations, and tell them all of their failures are society’s fault, you’d get the same level of pathology and violence in about the time it took you to say “dyscultural and dysgenic”.

That doesn’t matter. We’re not dealing with that hypothetical. We’re dealing with reality. The reality is that we have a predation problem that will only be solved when our actual population of low IQ savages is contained again. Creatures like Irina’s murderer, cognitively unable to participate in civilization, must be subject to either segregation or repression so brutal that they live in fear of it.

I don’t really want to live in the kind of society that can do either these things. But Irina Zarutska’s murder is the seal on my realization that there are no longer soft options, only hard choices.

I’d prefer the one where armed citizens routinely shoot down creatures like that at the time of the attempted crime, or immediately after it. All the alternatives seem far worse.

No, ESR. That's nice but naive. Four generations of passive incentives isn't nearly enough to turn white people behavior into black people behavior. We certainly have our own natural man, and it's bad enough, but it's not the same as Third World natural man. It's a completely different thing, and it would require either much more active and aggressive stimulus, or a multiple generations-long breeding event that changed genetic behavior. The first time around for white people, it took the better part of a thousand years to turn our savage ancestors into more civilized modern Western civilization.

Women's suffrage

From Kat Rosenfield, whoever she is, and her substack: (And this is somewhat edited/cut by me, without annotation, so if you want the whole unfiltered thing, follow the link.)

Neil Gaiman appears to be a pretty bad guy. That's not actually what this essay is about, but I know people are going to ask — what about the man, are you defending the bad man — so let's just get it out of the way, the bad man is so extremely bad. He’s so bad that I don't even care if he broke the law, at this point; if the best defense for your behavior is "But she consented to eating her own **** and vomit!," if you find yourself saying anything even in the ballpark of that statement, you need either therapy or Jesus or both. Neil Gaiman gets a big thumbs down from me, he gets zero stars. I would certainly not have sex with him and I don't think you should, either.

I mean, unless you really want to, but ah, there it is: even if you say so, how can we know you're telling the truth?

There's a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he's doing. Gaiman says he's struggling: he's heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. "I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed," he writes.

"It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn't mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much. But also, we know this because she didn't mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that's what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we've been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can't assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

So close, and yet refusing the see the very question that she begged or its obvious and inevitable conclusion! For the entirety of human history until very recently; the last couple of generations or so, literally everyone in the world knew that about women and treated them accordingly. Sure, sure; women have agency. They're ultimately responsible for their own decisions, same as everyone else. But women are fundamentally different than men, and our desire to treat women and men as interchangeable widgets in the social sphere, the work sphere, the political sphere, and elsewhere was always based on a fundamentally flawed and incorrect baseline assumption, and was therefore fundamentally doomed to failure before it even started. It only kinda sorta worked as long as it has because Western Civilization is a nice civilization, and was able to indulge some bad ideas for a time before they metastasized to a dangerous level.

https://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2020/06/fall-of-empire-thy-name-is-woman_30.html

Women's lib, even the very first wave of feminism and women's suffrage a hundred+ years ago now, was always the wrong idea. And men gave women what they wanted, to be treated kinda sorta like fake men, even though that's not really want they wanted and it's actually been a disaster for them. Just look at mental issues the modern working woman faces, for instance! Women coveted what they imagined men had, but women are not men, and women and men both should have been content with a very workable status quo that was actually in harmony with divine intent for the roles women and men should have in an idealized, divine society.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world?lang=eng

The world is fallen, so human societies will inevitably give way to entropy and decay. However, rarely can we draw to clear and bright a line to that decay from a conscious decision made at a societal level to erode the roles of men and women and blend them together, treating women like fake men and treating men (sometimes) like women, and allowing women and their "natural woman" instincts be treated as if they were good instead of bad inclinations that need to be contained and bridled. Our current discourse frequently refers to toxic masculinity, and while it exists, the phrase has become a joke because all masculinity is confused for toxic masculinity, and toxic femininity is treated as a desirable rather than dystopian state of being.

Liberal women

Borrowing from another post someone else made. In fact, mostly quoting him explicitly.

I wonder if they’ve ever considered how not behaving like horrifically unpleasant control freaks ready to take offense or administer a retarded lecture at the drop of a hat might make people more willing to spend time with them? Almost certainly not. They probably haven’t considered how actively uglifying themselves with ridiculous haircuts, piercings, and venomous hair colors makes them unattractive to others either.

It’s interesting to see how the conservative women are not only more soundly based, but more socially successful.

At the risk of sounding like a pedantic sperg, just a bit, I tend to find that conservative and liberal are not as meaningful as they used to be. But they still serve as a kind of self-sorting activity, if nothing else. Plenty of liberal women can be more or less pleasant, even if they believe stupid things, and plenty of conservative women aren't pleasant even if they more or less believe sensible things about political and social issues. Political and social issues are almost certainly correlated with personality issues, but it's not a 1x1 correlation, and I personally know plenty of exceptions. But Vox Day is also certainly correct; the problem with liberal women feeling lonely is a problem almost entirely of their own making. If they'd quit being so terrible to be around, they'd likely be much less lonely. 

It's also gotta be the people that they hang around. The whole point of liberalism is that it attracts people who 1) are envious and resentful of people who are happier or more successful than they are, 2) hate normal behavior and social norms and nihilistically want to tear them down, 3) desperately want to feel morally superior to people around them, and 4) in general is attractive to people who are narcissistic, immature, and/or psychologically broken in some way. This doesn't help them feel less lonely; even if they are hanging out with other people, the other people tend to be narcissists and complainers; self-absorbed and completely lacking in empathy. It doesn't help your loneliness to hang around with people like that.

Again, it's not a complete 1x1 correlation; there are still some foolish nice people who think liberalism "sounds nice" so that's why they identify as liberals. But that's a vanishing breed, and most of those people don't call themselves liberals or self-identify by their politics anymore anyway. If they ever even did. Liberals, more and more, are shrill, unlikeable, dysfunctional people who surround themselves with other shrill, unlikeable, dysfunctional people.