Lorenzo Warby on Feminization

Invoking Benenson

Preliminary: What is wrong with feminization?

This is not an argument against having women in traditionally masculine roles. It is not an argument that women are inferior. This is not a claim that men are victims.

What I do believe is that, at large scale (above the Dunbar number), human institutions and societies function better under modes of interaction that include:

• tolerance for nonconformity

• overt competition

• regulation by formal, impersonal rules

These modes of interaction are stereotypically natural among men. They are stereotypically less natural among women, who tend toward conformity, covert competition, and regulation by gossip and personal exclusion.

What I call feminism is the participation of women in roles that were otherwise reserved for men. What I call feminization is the institutional shift away from tolerance, overt competition, and formal regulation. I am in favor of feminism. I am disturbed by feminization.

Now, on to Warby

Lorenzo Warby writes¹, [UPDATE: in the comments, Helen Dale writes “This piece is mainly Lorenzo with some input from me.”]

[Around 5000 BC] farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans—which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species—and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils.

Hence, there is a dramatic bottleneck in male lineages but not in female lineages.

…the male expression of human genes became dramatically better at forming and maintaining teams—as there was drastic selection pressure for that—but the female expression of human genes did not.

This “genetic bottleneck” story is new to me. Of course, I was familiar with Joyce Benenson’s Warriors and Worriers model of male-female differences. But Benenson’s story of how men became more team-focused was based on women’s need to protect their individual bodies in order to have babies.

Then, without mentioning Helen Andrews, Warby writes,

Men are notably more positive about free speech than women, because men often see speech as a test while women are more likely to see it as a threat. As universities have feminised, the male-female differences on free speech among students have become more pronounced.

…As institutions, occupations and public discourse become more feminised, there has been a shift in patterns of language. A massive study of patterns of language use found a dramatic shift since the 1980s, such that:

our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

Feminization means treating negative feedback as a threat rather than an opportunity to improve.

Lower trust, and the narrowing of acceptable feedback, encourages safety through conformity. Modern publishing, which is very strongly female-dominated displays such problems.

Warby further speculates about the genetic bottleneck,

Generations of women bred with a rapist who had helped kill all their male relatives. This has continuing consequences. …

In more recent times, it’s become clear that some Western women are fascinated by Hamas and other jihadis, not despite them being ruthless killers, but because they are.

This is a very different speculation from the Joyce Benenson model of Warriors and Worriers. I have more doubts about the “women love cads” story. I do not think that anyone has a clear understanding of sexual preferences, which strike me as varied and complex.

Nonetheless, the claim that (some) women admire violent men might (but also may not) have some explanatory value. James Billot notes that sympathy for Hamas rather than Israel has become a “purity test” in the Democratic Party. Young women are a major factor there.

Or think of the Luigi Mangione fans.

substacks referenced above:

@

You may not be Interested in Genes, but Genes are Interested in You

1. The substack is by Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby, but I thought that I spotted a first-person pronoun at one point, and Helen has hosted essays written solely by Warby in the past. I apologize if she is a co-author and I am not crediting her.