{"id":331,"date":"2021-12-13T10:20:02","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T10:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5257.temp.domains\/~houghty5\/?p=331"},"modified":"2022-10-22T16:34:23","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T21:34:23","slug":"we-need-to-talk-about-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/we-need-to-talk-about-women\/","title":{"rendered":"WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT WOMEN"},"content":{"rendered":"
Once more unto the breach, dear friends.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve written about women and their cultural\/political ascendancy so much in recent years, especially the last three, that I worry about sounding like the proverbial broken record if I write any more. But it seems to me that as this idea is accepted more widely\u2014including by commentators who see it as their own idea . . .<\/p>\n <\/p>\n . . . there is a tendency to narrow the focus (e.g., \u201cfemale graduates,\u201d \u201cHR ladies,\u201d or \u201cwomen explain wokeness\u201d) so that the true extent of the West\u2019s feminization is obscured.<\/p>\n Moreover, the case can be made that feminization is having not only an enormous but also a potentially fatal impact on Western civilization as we have known it. Thus, thumping the tub about this subject may be a good and necessary thing to do now.<\/p>\n To that end, I think at least several key points within this overall hypothesis bear repeating:<\/p>\n Women\u2019s broad cultural\/political ascendancy has been reshaping the West for decades<\/strong><\/p>\n The big idea here is that women have been the principal drivers not only of the creeping wokeism post 2015 or so, and of the ongoing semi-spiritual movement known as the Great Awokening, but also of the general \u201cleftward\u201d (in fact, \u201cfeminine\u201d<\/a>) trends in Western culture and politics over the last six-plus decades. This is the period in which women moved en masse<\/em> into, and achieved parity or dominance within, culturally and politically influential professions such as journalism, publishing, entertainment, law, academia, politics, even blogging.<\/p>\n It is not just from one or two of those professions but from all of them, and in every circumstance along the way (e.g., university life, engagement with social media, office politics, voting, protest marches), that women have been causing cultural and political change, effectively feminizing the West to a degree never seen before in any large civilization.<\/p>\n Activist women\u2014mostly single, university-educated, and\/or young\u2014may be the \u201cshock troops\u201d of feminization, and the most dedicated and effective practitioners of wokeism and cancel culture. But women in general<\/em> have been driving this social transformation.<\/p>\n Women\u2019s ascension to cultural and political power has had cultural and political consequences because women on average are different than men across a wide range of attitudes and behaviors<\/strong><\/p>\n Gender differences in attitudes and behaviors were presumably shaped\u2014at a biological level with changes that cannot easily be undone\u2014by men\u2019s and women\u2019s distinct roles during the long period of hominid evolution, roles that for women centered on maternity. Women even now in modern times appear to be markedly more emotionally sensitive than men on average, quicker to form social networks, less interested in abstract and inanimate things, less interested in systems, more personal (including ad hominem<\/em>) in their thinking, and more fearful\u2014not just of ideas and people they dislike but also of toxins and other putative environmental threats. All these differences have had cultural and policy consequences as women\u2019s power has increased in societies designed and traditionally run by men. One could say that women effectively have been using their new cultural and political power to renovate and redecorate their civilization according to their distinctive tastes. As Virginia Woolf put it in her 1938 essay, \u201cThree Guineas\u201d:<\/p>\n Let us never cease from thinking\u2014what is this \u201ccivilization\u201d in which we find ourselves?<\/p>\n Cultural\/political feminization therefore involves a multitude of changes<\/strong><\/p>\n Cultural and political changes that have plausibly been driven by the ascendancy of women in Western societies are not limited to the extreme changes associated with \u201cwokeism.\u201d They include also relatively mild and gradual, long-term trends:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Cultural\/political feminization, far from being \u201cprogress,\u201d is probably destroying Western liberalism—the liberalism that emancipated women in the first place Yes, men on average have their own ways of thinking and acting\u2014their own stubborn, long-evolved biases. And yes, the traditional male mindset is not necessarily optimized for running human societies in the 21st<\/sup> century. But there is an obvious reason why the male mindset, compared to the female mindset, is probably better adapted for managing culture and politics: Men have been managing culture and politics, and getting punished in the harshest ways for failure, for hundreds of millennia. Women, by contrast, have been working on a large scale in public life for not even two generations\u2014and still seem inclined to blame men when things go wrong.<\/p>\n On the flip side of that argument is another obvious point: Women\u2019s mindset is not simply unadapted or insufficiently adapted by evolution for managing public affairs; it is adapted specifically for other<\/em> tasks, mainly domestic tasks revolving around the bearing and raising of children. In other words, women\u2019s higher emotional sensitivity (compassion, guilt, fear, anxiety\/turmoil); their relative indifference to machines and systems and cold, abstract thought; their stronger fear of toxins; their greater tendency to think un-independently and transmit social contagions<\/a>, etc. are in a fundamental sense out of place<\/em> in the culture- and policy-making spheres.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not suggesting that women\u2019s traits are totally separate from men\u2019s in this regard\u2014for virtually any trait there would be two highly overlapping distributions, so that there would be lots and lots of women further towards the \u201cmale\u201d end of the distribution compared to the average male.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But there clearly are differences between the means of those distributions, between the average<\/em> male and the average<\/em> female in other words; and the central idea here is that those differences, on a population level, are not only meaningful but potentially cataclysmic in their civilizational impact.<\/p>\n That impact is evident not only in the broad cultural and policy shifts since the early 1960s—the \u201cpink shift<\/a>\u201d as I have called it—but in the more recent and extreme policy changes in places where cultural and political feminization is most advanced: \u201cdefund the police,\u201d \u201clet violent criminals out on bail,\u201d \u201copen the borders \/ diversity is our strength,\u201d \u201clet homeless people camp and crap wherever they like,\u201d \u201cgive addicts needles,\u201d \u201cmath is racist,\u201d \u201clogic is sexist,\u201d etc. Not all of these policies are wildly popular, and obviously specific groups of hardcore activists are to blame for some of them, but I don\u2019t see how these changes, collectively, could have taken root to the extent they have except against a heavily feminized cultural background\u2014they are essentially ad absurdum<\/em> expressions of the feminine mindset applied to policy.<\/p>\n I don’t think that every manifestation of feminization will be harmful in the long run. But some will. The move away from free speech towards speech- and thought-policing seems pretty ominous. Even worse, I suspect, is the encouragement of mass non-Western immigration to Western countries. One does not have to \u201chate\u201d non-Western immigrants to understand that they and the culture they bring with them are . . . non-Western . . . so that the more there are of them, the less Western their host countries become. The women who encourage mass non-Western immigration seem surprisingly indifferent to the fact that non-Western cultures generally are less liberal, and a lot less friendly to the idea of female power, compared to Western cultures even from a few decades ago.<\/p>\n Can liberal Western societies nevertheless avert their impending self-destruction, by—among other measures—reining in cultural\/political feminization? We’ll soon see, but I doubt it. I think it could help some to talk more about this cultural feminization hypothesis\u2014\u201ccult-fem theory\u201d\u2014at least as a way of dispelling the holy aura of \u201cprogress\u201d that feminization-related social changes have acquired. But could one attack cultural feminization more directly and conclusively? Could one expel women, or even just the \u201cbad apples,\u201d or even persuade them to think and act differently, in all significant Western institutions\u2014legislatures, government offices, universities, corporations, media organizations, philanthropies\u2014where they are now embedded and substantially run things? I don’t see how. I don’t think liberal Western societies have any strong defense against this threat, other than by reverting to overt illiberalism.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Author\u2019s note:<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I\u2019ve been writing about \u201ccult-fem\u201d for more than a decade\u2014which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely<\/a><\/em> in recent years, and I\u2019ve even placed one<\/a><\/em> in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being \u201cmuch read but seldom cited.\u201d (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay \u201cThe Tree of Knowledge<\/a><\/em>.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n Also, though I don\u2019t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you\u2019d like to support my writing.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once more unto the breach, dear friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":338,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6,7,11,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":710,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions\/710"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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