"My ideal society would be on in which we are eager to include women in all of our institutions"
Perhaps we think of different things as "institutions" but I think it is important to have some things that are all male and some that are all female. What are sometimes referred to as "male spaces" and "female spaces". Most everyone can agree that there is nothing wrong with a therapy center for rape victims being all female. And the law in its sexism says "women's colleges" are perfectly fine--because women are more comfortable there and more able to thrive. There are plenty of circumstances where males are more comfortable and better able to thrive in all-male groups, and I think we should not automatically think it is progress to have females in them.
Here's an example that comes to mind. During holiday gatherings, rather than both sexes sitting around talking in one big group, it's fine to have men talk about cars, guns, boats, sports, etc and the women to sit in another room and talk about all the stuff they like to talk about. If both sexes sit together, the men's louder, deeper voices may dominate the room. This isn't oppression. Most men just happen to have loud, booming voices, and would rather not talk about feminine topics.
When in mixed company men don't talk about the same things, and don't talk in the same way. As Justice Scalia described in a positive way, the presence of women on the Court had a "domesticating influence" on conversation. Women sometimes complain about the exclusionary-seeming experience of walking into a room with only guys and feeling them all suddenly clam up and change the subject. They would likely complain more had the guys just kept on going.
It's not just topic preference. People like to talk with others of the same sex about (1) the other sex, and (2) about matters directly related to their own sexuality that are intimate and sensitive and much more comfortably shared only with members of the same sex. This is one of the more natural, instinctive, and effective ways to build bonds among a group of individuals of the same sex, and it is experienced as frustration and alienation when one cannot engage in it. That why American English has the idiom, "locker room talk". When Vernon Jordan was asked what he discussed with Bill Clinton on the golf course, his answer was, "We talk p***y."
There is another angle to it, which is that mildly lewd conversation can often enjoy the benefit of being found generally enjoyable and humorous in nature in such like company, and doesn't give rise to any kind of opportunity for argument or debate on deeply held opinions like ideology, politics, religion, etc. that could be divisive and stir passionate debate or acrimony.
When Boswell asked why have dinner parties at all if nothing important was discussed, Johnson replied, "Why, to eat and drink together, and to promote kindness. And this is better done when there is no solid conversation; for when there is, people differ in opinion, and get into bad humor, or some of the company who are not capable of such conversation, are left out, and feel themselves uneasy. It was for this reason, Sir Robert Walpole said, he always talked bawdy at his table, because in that all could join."
As the world has become more accommodating for women and their standard of living gone up, not only feminists, but women in general have only become more hostile towards men, masculinity, patriarchy, and society. In many ways the feminist movement pushes that society (through government) owes women a lot in terms of both equality and equity but women really don't owe anyone anything. Not their parents, men, or society in general.
I read quite a few of the (young) feminist leaning substacks. I don't have the quote on-hand, but a few days ago a prominent writer replied to a comment by saying 'I don't feel that anyone should criticize women except for women.' I won't adjudicate this here will leave it as self-evidently destructive. I think it manifests itself as something of a defense mechanism, and hence why far too often any criticism of women is waved away as misogyny.
Read Cranmer, Charles comment (above?) if you have a moment. I read it and imagined a Rockwell style scene with a modern girl-boss leaning over a 5 year old boy, muddied and bloody from play, and scolding him, 'you are responsible for all the problems in the world.'
Regardless, I appreciate Arnold's piece, as I spend a lot of time thinking (and doing) about how to make society work for men and women, boys and girls.
I thought it might be worthwhile to share the concluding paragraph from my essay "Why Kamela Lost: A Study in 9 Charts" which I intend to post today after I double check a few things.
"I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are inexorably alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his gauleiters. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – did just that."
Ah, but can it really? It can substitute goods and services, but can it substitute emotional closeness? Or do many want emotional closeness the way lots of young people want to have children? They want to but they want more to have a materially rich lifestyle. And do many deal with the conundrum in the same way, by becoming a "pet parent"?
And the rise of porn and Men Going Their Own Way suggests that lots of men find substitutes that they consider about as good as they can do.
Most men aren't good at emotional closeness and most women really don't care about that in a man. Also, women have much lower testosterone than men. They don't have the same deep and constant urge towards sexuality that men do. Women are also less likely to be friendless and research suggests they just handle being single better than men. On an individual/personnel level, women really don't need men, even if they need our money (and can get it via taxation).
As for MGTOW. It really is just "men sent their own way". They are losers coping about the fact that no one would have dated in the first place.
Prohibition was quickly repealed in part because repeal also became a rival women's movement, led by the highest status women from what was at the time the de facto American aristocracy. See Pauline Sabin (her father and grandfather were both department secretaries, her uncle founded Morton Salt) and the WONPR.
In an episode which would set a pattern for other future splits between the "protection" and "liberation" camps in feminist intellectual development and movements (e.g., prostitution and pornography) two different visions had only temporarily overlapping positions on the issue and then the tension between them gradually grew and one side triumphed.
The two different visions could be called Christian Propriety and Female Liberation. Those women motivated by the first vision still saw the proper role of women being that of wife and mother in a secure and stable household where members of the family practiced a virtuous lifestyle. They wanted prohibition to tame men and keep drunk dads from drinking up their whole paychecks, from sexual dalliances, from running off, from getting into trouble to include killing and getting killed over idiotic nonsense, from drunkenly beating their wives and kids, and so forth. My impression is that around the turn of the 20th century, these were real and major social problems. This started as the dominant faction of women, but the influence of Christianity was quickly fading.
The female liberationists, on the other hand, started off small but grew quick and gained influence rapidly, especially during the roaring 20s. They wanted higher education, jobs, legal equality, and freedom from traditional social pressures and moral constraints, and didn't want to have no other options in life besides early marriage and kids. But like the Christian social uplifters they also wanted prohibition so they wouldn't get beaten up by drunk men all the time.
By the mid 1920s, especially at the highest levels of class and status, few really believed in Prohibition any more except as perhaps something the lower classes needed, and they didn't take it sincerely or seriously except in the form of hypocritical political rhetoric. At this point most higher class women now viewed Prohibition as an impediment and de-facto drag on their capacity to get into the old boys clubs and get genuinely integrated into the social networking at the top. And since high class men still networked with each other over drinks, and it was harder to women to skirt the law as easily for that particular context and function, they wanted to repeal prohibition to, heh, I suppose it gives a slightly different meaning to "break the glass ceiling".
The fact that prohibitions and repeals tended to follow similar timelines in multiple countries shows that things were driven by larger, international trends, especially correlated with economic developments.
"The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) was founded in 1929 by a group of women led by Pauline Sabin, a wealthy and politically-connected socialite. Within a year, the organization attracted over 100,000 members, and by 1932 [the year of repeal] it had 600,000 members"
"1. We are convinced that National Prohibition is fundamentally wrong."
Men give love to get sex; women give sex to get love.
Why buy the cow when the milk is free?
Monogamous marriage is the best compromise, socially optimal. There is an increasing gender gap in politics, with women voting Dem and men voting Rep. Yet this is strongest in unmarried women, who are usually less happy than married women at every age over 30.
Men and women are similar being humans, but very definitely different in important ways. Even the Big 5 is actually sort of a Big 10 personality mix, since there seem to be somewhat different aspects of each OCEAN trait expressed by men & women.
Men, especially young men, really really want sex. Even tho they're not ready for commitment, and thus not really ready for love. Women really want romance. See the huge sales of romance novels - women's romance porn. The Feminist lie on equality is especially bad on casual sex, where most men are happy satisfied after it, while many, often most, women are unhappy & regretful about it. The Pill gave women an almost equal opportunity to have casual sex, but not really the desire. Rob H posts & tweets on many instances of similar factoids.
Along with that Fem lie of equal desire for sex, is the lie about IQ & mental equality -- Larry Summers being driven out of Harvard for stating the T-truth that there are fewer top females physicists because fewer women are top scorers in math (800 SAT) / lower top IQ. IQ graphs show more extremes for men, more 2&3 standard deviations above and below the median bell curve peak.
My daughter was, like me, in Scouting. Well, actually I was in Boy Scouts, without girls. For growing boys into men, a male only, no gay leader, boy space was likely better. Scouts was good for her -- but I think it was a bit worse for the boys, and now oppose integration of all institutions. I especially oppose XY trans women in women's sport. As does feminist JK Rowling, who opposes them in safe houses and prisons.
The big push to get more women to do more coding is likely a mistake, as well. Govt policy based on the lie of equality is fighting against reality -- and reality will win. Yet the man-hating childless cat ladies will likely get louder, and achieve more legislative victories that hurt men for normal masculine behavior. The govt sanctioned punishment is real, current, and a cause for increasing, not decreasing, war.
I really wish this overt hostility by women against men would decrease, but also recognize that a huge amount of current & past hostility has been aimed at women by men. And far more damage done to women in domestic violence, tho there's a lot of smaller damage many women inflict on their partners. I'm pretty sure one reason for more VR time is to allow boys to be in virtual institutions without real girls to complain of or shame them.
It's good that abortion is going down, but many women will continue to support legal abortion and oppose Reps on that issue -- tho having it at the state level reduces it as a national issue. More issues should be state, not Federal. But most Dem women want things national, and only as they like.
If it's not worth you looking up, I'm not going to believe it yet, but it might be true. What do you think the abortion numbers have been trending for the last 20 years? Or X years.
Someone mentioned the fact to me the other day. I didn't choose to look it up because I don't care one way or the other. It appears to have furnished several NYT headlines this year, and - "Yes [says the AI], the Guttmacher Institute reports that the number of abortions in the United States increased in 2023, marking the highest rate in over a decade.
2023: The number of abortions in the United States was over 1 million, a 10% increase from 2020. The abortion rate was 15.9 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44, an 11% increase from 2020.
2020: The number of abortions increased to 930,160, an 8% increase from 2017.
2012: The last time the number of abortions in the United States was over 1 million was in 2012.
Other trends in abortion rates include:
The number of abortions peaked in 1990 at 1.6 million.
The number of abortions declined for nearly 30 years, falling to 885,000 in 2017.
Medication abortions accounted for 63% of all US abortions in 2023, up from 53% in 2020.
This may simply reflect the demographic shift towards a Hispanic majority. abortion being popular in Mexico.
Women also often vote in favor of a fusion of state and society -- which is what is leading us to the current (already existing!) postliberalism. (Linked to in a comment this month)
Hmm, very interesting. I will just give my personal take on Prohibition. FWIW, I have known a not small number of women, and I see much diversity among them with respect to issues such as drinking. I can imagine that the architectural proponent of prohibition was a certain type of woman that would generally (and I am just roughly generalizing here) appear as not particularly fun, somewhat inhibited and perhaps religious, at least in a conventional sense. My guess is that these women were able to form a powerful coalition and get prohibition enacted. (Again for what it's worth, I drink very little and I am very religious, so I don't see myself as biased against people with similar traits). For this reason, I think it is unlikely that the coalition of women who pushed for prohibition were highly representative of women as a whole. Perhaps their religious affiliations what the mechanism that allowed them to effectively do their coalition building. I would also guess that it would be almost impossible for such a coalition of like-minded women to make much headway today with prohibition, or something similar to prohibition.
When I was taking American History, Prohibition was a non-solution to a non-problem, a backlash of rural Protestants to an increasingly diverse America. A cause led by Mencken's Puritans, who had "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." That story is, at best, incomplete.
At the turn of the century, "drink" was a real problem. "Drinking up the rent money" was not at all uncommon. Nor were husbands getting drunk and beating up their wives. Technology had made distilled spirits cheap, and it was easier to get drunk on them than on beer or ale. Since opportunities for women were limited, exiting a bad marriage was often not a realistic possibility. Drinking reduced a man's ability to get and keep a job. (To use economic jargon, drink inhibited the development of human capital, and not infrequently destroyed it.) Limiting drink was a feminist issue. It was an early example of "safetyism".
Industrialization brought these problems to the attention of progressive reformers. Just as many progressives today will say that free speech does not include hate speech, so progressives of the time said that economic freedom did not include the freedom to produce a socially destructive product. During WW I, those reformers had gotten a taste of government telling people what to produce or not to produce, all for the common good. In fact, various alcoholic beverages had been suppressed during the War to save food that would otherwise be turned into liquor. Prohibition had good progressive precedent.
It is hard to get reliable statistics, but alcohol consumption seems to have gone down substantially during Prohibition. After repeal, legal sales were substantially less than they had been before 1919. "Problem drinking" seems to have been less of a problem, though that is of course relative. Some time around the 1980s, with 12-step programs and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the broader culture noticed there were still major problems.
Daniel Okrent wrote an interesting book called "Last Call" about prohibition, the conditions that led to it, and how coalitions formed to put it in place (and to dismantle it shortly after). It's been awhile, but I recall it touching on topics relevant to this thread, including women's activism, social dysfunction, and the power of committed minorities to sway democracy - especially when they vote on a single issue.
Many hot-button issues today have sorted themselves along party lines, e.g. abortion and increasingly immigration. But you could imagine a world where a committed minority's singular interest is in play for both parties, with candidates on both sides of the aisle who support and oppose that interest. That's probably an oversimplification of what drove Prohibition, but perhaps explains how the country adopted it in spite of it never being a majority preference, as far as I know.
Separately, I imagine Arnold knows and likes Okrent, whatever he thought of the book. Okrent is generally considered one of the fathers of fantasy baseball! Renaissance man.
If it does I'd like to know, because two of my posts need tables. I see it supports Latex, but I don't know Latex and haven't tried using that feature.
It's interesting the way male versus female is becoming the axis along which left or right is defined. You could be the for the most aggressive socialism that ever existed but you're right wing if it exalts hard hats too much and male discourse norms.
As Robert Benchley wrote in 1920: "There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know."
Free speech, merit, and other grouped together "virtues" or desirable characteristics of societies were supposed to be victories against the old regime of hereditary and unquestioned rule, patronage, religious censorship, and the like. And that old regime was ruled by men. The persecutors of Socrates and Jesus were men making arguments supposed to appeal to men. The perennial "masculine virtue" of simply wanting to grab and hold power is a good explanation for much of the above. That, and general human tendency for conformism (which itself has evolutionary explanation), can also help explain censorship in academia, or men censoring other men more generally, prior to 1960. And yes, of course, there were many such incidents: don't pretend there was some free speech utopia prior to 1960.
And there are alternative explanations for expanding "social justice" which one might see as part of a general tendency since Enlightenment times to expand the circle of moral concern. And that expansion itself can be seen as a tendency, or at least fallible effort, to be more and more logically consistent with moral beliefs, values, rules.
This "masculine vs. feminine" framing seems far too simplistic for help in understanding the wide swath of phenomena being invoked. Almost cartoonishly so.
I love my wife, mother, sister, daughter, grand daughters, sisters-in-law and nieces and am deeply grateful that we are blessed in being able to enjoy each other's company peacefully despite our various political differences. I pray it lasts and never comes to anything like "war." I suspect I am not at all unusual in this regard.
Nor do I suspect that I am unusual in rarely making more than polite conversation when necessary with women at work and elsewhere. I share deeper conversations mostly with long established friends.
When someone, male or female, imposes unwelcome conversation upon me, I tend to withdraw and avoid further contact but without emotion. Apathy comes easier than emotion. And, unfortunately, if I am anything like anyone else, there seems to be less a war between the sexes than an apathy.
"I think that some cultural conflicts can be described as wars of the sexes." I suspect that most people are not warring, but rather negotiating with the opposite sex with respect to raising their children. These negotiations have become more intense and argumentative. The war that you speak of largely emerges from government subsidies to higher education and public schools. Women who are genuinely abused and disrespected by their fathers find sympathy and belonging with activist feminists within the academy. These feminists become surrogate family. Women from more loving families aren't as likely to get sucked into to the feminist ideology. But just as with the Boomers who passed through the wave of socialism in the Sixties, women and men who pass through the university come out with a distorted view of the world. Except for the most well-prepared and vigilant, feminist ideas rub off on most people. Unfortunately, subsidies that are intended to promote the general welfare end up subsidizing social justice dogmas. These dogmas then distort belief norms, and perceptions of reality. They trickled down to primary and secondary schools like a disease affecting even the red counties.
“In addition, women have altered the norms of discourse and decision-making within these institutions to conform to a more feminine approach.”
"My ideal society would be on in which we are eager to include women in all of our institutions"
Perhaps we think of different things as "institutions" but I think it is important to have some things that are all male and some that are all female. What are sometimes referred to as "male spaces" and "female spaces". Most everyone can agree that there is nothing wrong with a therapy center for rape victims being all female. And the law in its sexism says "women's colleges" are perfectly fine--because women are more comfortable there and more able to thrive. There are plenty of circumstances where males are more comfortable and better able to thrive in all-male groups, and I think we should not automatically think it is progress to have females in them.
Here's an example that comes to mind. During holiday gatherings, rather than both sexes sitting around talking in one big group, it's fine to have men talk about cars, guns, boats, sports, etc and the women to sit in another room and talk about all the stuff they like to talk about. If both sexes sit together, the men's louder, deeper voices may dominate the room. This isn't oppression. Most men just happen to have loud, booming voices, and would rather not talk about feminine topics.
When in mixed company men don't talk about the same things, and don't talk in the same way. As Justice Scalia described in a positive way, the presence of women on the Court had a "domesticating influence" on conversation. Women sometimes complain about the exclusionary-seeming experience of walking into a room with only guys and feeling them all suddenly clam up and change the subject. They would likely complain more had the guys just kept on going.
It's not just topic preference. People like to talk with others of the same sex about (1) the other sex, and (2) about matters directly related to their own sexuality that are intimate and sensitive and much more comfortably shared only with members of the same sex. This is one of the more natural, instinctive, and effective ways to build bonds among a group of individuals of the same sex, and it is experienced as frustration and alienation when one cannot engage in it. That why American English has the idiom, "locker room talk". When Vernon Jordan was asked what he discussed with Bill Clinton on the golf course, his answer was, "We talk p***y."
There is another angle to it, which is that mildly lewd conversation can often enjoy the benefit of being found generally enjoyable and humorous in nature in such like company, and doesn't give rise to any kind of opportunity for argument or debate on deeply held opinions like ideology, politics, religion, etc. that could be divisive and stir passionate debate or acrimony.
When Boswell asked why have dinner parties at all if nothing important was discussed, Johnson replied, "Why, to eat and drink together, and to promote kindness. And this is better done when there is no solid conversation; for when there is, people differ in opinion, and get into bad humor, or some of the company who are not capable of such conversation, are left out, and feel themselves uneasy. It was for this reason, Sir Robert Walpole said, he always talked bawdy at his table, because in that all could join."
Excellent.
As the world has become more accommodating for women and their standard of living gone up, not only feminists, but women in general have only become more hostile towards men, masculinity, patriarchy, and society. In many ways the feminist movement pushes that society (through government) owes women a lot in terms of both equality and equity but women really don't owe anyone anything. Not their parents, men, or society in general.
I read quite a few of the (young) feminist leaning substacks. I don't have the quote on-hand, but a few days ago a prominent writer replied to a comment by saying 'I don't feel that anyone should criticize women except for women.' I won't adjudicate this here will leave it as self-evidently destructive. I think it manifests itself as something of a defense mechanism, and hence why far too often any criticism of women is waved away as misogyny.
Read Cranmer, Charles comment (above?) if you have a moment. I read it and imagined a Rockwell style scene with a modern girl-boss leaning over a 5 year old boy, muddied and bloody from play, and scolding him, 'you are responsible for all the problems in the world.'
Regardless, I appreciate Arnold's piece, as I spend a lot of time thinking (and doing) about how to make society work for men and women, boys and girls.
I thought it might be worthwhile to share the concluding paragraph from my essay "Why Kamela Lost: A Study in 9 Charts" which I intend to post today after I double check a few things.
"I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are inexorably alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his gauleiters. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – did just that."
https://x.com/naval/status/1858739295781351781
“The state can substitute for what women want from men, but it can’t substitute for what men want from women.”
Ah, but can it really? It can substitute goods and services, but can it substitute emotional closeness? Or do many want emotional closeness the way lots of young people want to have children? They want to but they want more to have a materially rich lifestyle. And do many deal with the conundrum in the same way, by becoming a "pet parent"?
And the rise of porn and Men Going Their Own Way suggests that lots of men find substitutes that they consider about as good as they can do.
Most men aren't good at emotional closeness and most women really don't care about that in a man. Also, women have much lower testosterone than men. They don't have the same deep and constant urge towards sexuality that men do. Women are also less likely to be friendless and research suggests they just handle being single better than men. On an individual/personnel level, women really don't need men, even if they need our money (and can get it via taxation).
As for MGTOW. It really is just "men sent their own way". They are losers coping about the fact that no one would have dated in the first place.
How about if the state provided high-quality prostitutes?
Then you are living in the Serene Republic of Venice. (And you still had to pay for them.)
Prohibition was quickly repealed in part because repeal also became a rival women's movement, led by the highest status women from what was at the time the de facto American aristocracy. See Pauline Sabin (her father and grandfather were both department secretaries, her uncle founded Morton Salt) and the WONPR.
In an episode which would set a pattern for other future splits between the "protection" and "liberation" camps in feminist intellectual development and movements (e.g., prostitution and pornography) two different visions had only temporarily overlapping positions on the issue and then the tension between them gradually grew and one side triumphed.
The two different visions could be called Christian Propriety and Female Liberation. Those women motivated by the first vision still saw the proper role of women being that of wife and mother in a secure and stable household where members of the family practiced a virtuous lifestyle. They wanted prohibition to tame men and keep drunk dads from drinking up their whole paychecks, from sexual dalliances, from running off, from getting into trouble to include killing and getting killed over idiotic nonsense, from drunkenly beating their wives and kids, and so forth. My impression is that around the turn of the 20th century, these were real and major social problems. This started as the dominant faction of women, but the influence of Christianity was quickly fading.
The female liberationists, on the other hand, started off small but grew quick and gained influence rapidly, especially during the roaring 20s. They wanted higher education, jobs, legal equality, and freedom from traditional social pressures and moral constraints, and didn't want to have no other options in life besides early marriage and kids. But like the Christian social uplifters they also wanted prohibition so they wouldn't get beaten up by drunk men all the time.
By the mid 1920s, especially at the highest levels of class and status, few really believed in Prohibition any more except as perhaps something the lower classes needed, and they didn't take it sincerely or seriously except in the form of hypocritical political rhetoric. At this point most higher class women now viewed Prohibition as an impediment and de-facto drag on their capacity to get into the old boys clubs and get genuinely integrated into the social networking at the top. And since high class men still networked with each other over drinks, and it was harder to women to skirt the law as easily for that particular context and function, they wanted to repeal prohibition to, heh, I suppose it gives a slightly different meaning to "break the glass ceiling".
The fact that prohibitions and repeals tended to follow similar timelines in multiple countries shows that things were driven by larger, international trends, especially correlated with economic developments.
"The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) was founded in 1929 by a group of women led by Pauline Sabin, a wealthy and politically-connected socialite. Within a year, the organization attracted over 100,000 members, and by 1932 [the year of repeal] it had 600,000 members"
"1. We are convinced that National Prohibition is fundamentally wrong."
Men give love to get sex; women give sex to get love.
Why buy the cow when the milk is free?
Monogamous marriage is the best compromise, socially optimal. There is an increasing gender gap in politics, with women voting Dem and men voting Rep. Yet this is strongest in unmarried women, who are usually less happy than married women at every age over 30.
Men and women are similar being humans, but very definitely different in important ways. Even the Big 5 is actually sort of a Big 10 personality mix, since there seem to be somewhat different aspects of each OCEAN trait expressed by men & women.
Men, especially young men, really really want sex. Even tho they're not ready for commitment, and thus not really ready for love. Women really want romance. See the huge sales of romance novels - women's romance porn. The Feminist lie on equality is especially bad on casual sex, where most men are happy satisfied after it, while many, often most, women are unhappy & regretful about it. The Pill gave women an almost equal opportunity to have casual sex, but not really the desire. Rob H posts & tweets on many instances of similar factoids.
Along with that Fem lie of equal desire for sex, is the lie about IQ & mental equality -- Larry Summers being driven out of Harvard for stating the T-truth that there are fewer top females physicists because fewer women are top scorers in math (800 SAT) / lower top IQ. IQ graphs show more extremes for men, more 2&3 standard deviations above and below the median bell curve peak.
My daughter was, like me, in Scouting. Well, actually I was in Boy Scouts, without girls. For growing boys into men, a male only, no gay leader, boy space was likely better. Scouts was good for her -- but I think it was a bit worse for the boys, and now oppose integration of all institutions. I especially oppose XY trans women in women's sport. As does feminist JK Rowling, who opposes them in safe houses and prisons.
The big push to get more women to do more coding is likely a mistake, as well. Govt policy based on the lie of equality is fighting against reality -- and reality will win. Yet the man-hating childless cat ladies will likely get louder, and achieve more legislative victories that hurt men for normal masculine behavior. The govt sanctioned punishment is real, current, and a cause for increasing, not decreasing, war.
I really wish this overt hostility by women against men would decrease, but also recognize that a huge amount of current & past hostility has been aimed at women by men. And far more damage done to women in domestic violence, tho there's a lot of smaller damage many women inflict on their partners. I'm pretty sure one reason for more VR time is to allow boys to be in virtual institutions without real girls to complain of or shame them.
It's good that abortion is going down, but many women will continue to support legal abortion and oppose Reps on that issue -- tho having it at the state level reduces it as a national issue. More issues should be state, not Federal. But most Dem women want things national, and only as they like.
I don't think abortion numbers have gone down since Dobbs.
If it's not worth you looking up, I'm not going to believe it yet, but it might be true. What do you think the abortion numbers have been trending for the last 20 years? Or X years.
Someone mentioned the fact to me the other day. I didn't choose to look it up because I don't care one way or the other. It appears to have furnished several NYT headlines this year, and - "Yes [says the AI], the Guttmacher Institute reports that the number of abortions in the United States increased in 2023, marking the highest rate in over a decade.
2023: The number of abortions in the United States was over 1 million, a 10% increase from 2020. The abortion rate was 15.9 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44, an 11% increase from 2020.
2020: The number of abortions increased to 930,160, an 8% increase from 2017.
2012: The last time the number of abortions in the United States was over 1 million was in 2012.
Other trends in abortion rates include:
The number of abortions peaked in 1990 at 1.6 million.
The number of abortions declined for nearly 30 years, falling to 885,000 in 2017.
Medication abortions accounted for 63% of all US abortions in 2023, up from 53% in 2020.
This may simply reflect the demographic shift towards a Hispanic majority. abortion being popular in Mexico.
Women also often vote in favor of a fusion of state and society -- which is what is leading us to the current (already existing!) postliberalism. (Linked to in a comment this month)
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/11/actually-existing-postliberalism
Hmm, very interesting. I will just give my personal take on Prohibition. FWIW, I have known a not small number of women, and I see much diversity among them with respect to issues such as drinking. I can imagine that the architectural proponent of prohibition was a certain type of woman that would generally (and I am just roughly generalizing here) appear as not particularly fun, somewhat inhibited and perhaps religious, at least in a conventional sense. My guess is that these women were able to form a powerful coalition and get prohibition enacted. (Again for what it's worth, I drink very little and I am very religious, so I don't see myself as biased against people with similar traits). For this reason, I think it is unlikely that the coalition of women who pushed for prohibition were highly representative of women as a whole. Perhaps their religious affiliations what the mechanism that allowed them to effectively do their coalition building. I would also guess that it would be almost impossible for such a coalition of like-minded women to make much headway today with prohibition, or something similar to prohibition.
When I was taking American History, Prohibition was a non-solution to a non-problem, a backlash of rural Protestants to an increasingly diverse America. A cause led by Mencken's Puritans, who had "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." That story is, at best, incomplete.
At the turn of the century, "drink" was a real problem. "Drinking up the rent money" was not at all uncommon. Nor were husbands getting drunk and beating up their wives. Technology had made distilled spirits cheap, and it was easier to get drunk on them than on beer or ale. Since opportunities for women were limited, exiting a bad marriage was often not a realistic possibility. Drinking reduced a man's ability to get and keep a job. (To use economic jargon, drink inhibited the development of human capital, and not infrequently destroyed it.) Limiting drink was a feminist issue. It was an early example of "safetyism".
Industrialization brought these problems to the attention of progressive reformers. Just as many progressives today will say that free speech does not include hate speech, so progressives of the time said that economic freedom did not include the freedom to produce a socially destructive product. During WW I, those reformers had gotten a taste of government telling people what to produce or not to produce, all for the common good. In fact, various alcoholic beverages had been suppressed during the War to save food that would otherwise be turned into liquor. Prohibition had good progressive precedent.
It is hard to get reliable statistics, but alcohol consumption seems to have gone down substantially during Prohibition. After repeal, legal sales were substantially less than they had been before 1919. "Problem drinking" seems to have been less of a problem, though that is of course relative. Some time around the 1980s, with 12-step programs and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the broader culture noticed there were still major problems.
Re: "Nor were husbands getting drunk and beating up their wives."
Did you mean: "And husbands were getting drunk and bearing up their wives"?
I meant "husbands getting drunk and beating up their wives" was also "not at all uncommon". Probably not the clearest way to put it.
Daniel Okrent wrote an interesting book called "Last Call" about prohibition, the conditions that led to it, and how coalitions formed to put it in place (and to dismantle it shortly after). It's been awhile, but I recall it touching on topics relevant to this thread, including women's activism, social dysfunction, and the power of committed minorities to sway democracy - especially when they vote on a single issue.
Many hot-button issues today have sorted themselves along party lines, e.g. abortion and increasingly immigration. But you could imagine a world where a committed minority's singular interest is in play for both parties, with candidates on both sides of the aisle who support and oppose that interest. That's probably an oversimplification of what drove Prohibition, but perhaps explains how the country adopted it in spite of it never being a majority preference, as far as I know.
Separately, I imagine Arnold knows and likes Okrent, whatever he thought of the book. Okrent is generally considered one of the fathers of fantasy baseball! Renaissance man.
Last Call was quite good.
I think you left the referenced table out."Below is a table that illustrates these differences in terms of pairs of expressions..."
Should the table read as follows?
Masculine vs Feminine
Competition vs Equity
Merit vs DEI
Free Speech vs Safety from hate speech or misinformation
Elon vs Fauci
Police vs Social Workers
Innovation vs Regulation
I don’t think Substack supports tables.
If it does I'd like to know, because two of my posts need tables. I see it supports Latex, but I don't know Latex and haven't tried using that feature.
It _sort of_ supports MarkDown.
I’ll have to look that one up.
Not consistently.
There's a jumble of words there, which I think needs to be formatted into a table.
yes the table isn't showing up for me at all. Just a word jumble.
It's interesting the way male versus female is becoming the axis along which left or right is defined. You could be the for the most aggressive socialism that ever existed but you're right wing if it exalts hard hats too much and male discourse norms.
As Robert Benchley wrote in 1920: "There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know."
1920. Ah, before he made those wretched 8 minute shorts for MGM.
The only people who think women lost the war of prohibition are people who haven’t looked into drinking habits before and after.
There's a mutually reinforcing partisan toxicity that's becoming increasingly interchangeable with gender politics.
Which seems to suggest that parties, and their elite, are more to blame than gender.
In which case the influence of parties should be curtailed to put an end to the nonsense.
The list is all false dichotomies and nothing particular "masculine"/"feminine about either error.
Neither Musk or Fauci would know a cost benefit analysis if it slapped him.
Free speech, merit, and other grouped together "virtues" or desirable characteristics of societies were supposed to be victories against the old regime of hereditary and unquestioned rule, patronage, religious censorship, and the like. And that old regime was ruled by men. The persecutors of Socrates and Jesus were men making arguments supposed to appeal to men. The perennial "masculine virtue" of simply wanting to grab and hold power is a good explanation for much of the above. That, and general human tendency for conformism (which itself has evolutionary explanation), can also help explain censorship in academia, or men censoring other men more generally, prior to 1960. And yes, of course, there were many such incidents: don't pretend there was some free speech utopia prior to 1960.
And there are alternative explanations for expanding "social justice" which one might see as part of a general tendency since Enlightenment times to expand the circle of moral concern. And that expansion itself can be seen as a tendency, or at least fallible effort, to be more and more logically consistent with moral beliefs, values, rules.
This "masculine vs. feminine" framing seems far too simplistic for help in understanding the wide swath of phenomena being invoked. Almost cartoonishly so.
I love my wife, mother, sister, daughter, grand daughters, sisters-in-law and nieces and am deeply grateful that we are blessed in being able to enjoy each other's company peacefully despite our various political differences. I pray it lasts and never comes to anything like "war." I suspect I am not at all unusual in this regard.
Nor do I suspect that I am unusual in rarely making more than polite conversation when necessary with women at work and elsewhere. I share deeper conversations mostly with long established friends.
When someone, male or female, imposes unwelcome conversation upon me, I tend to withdraw and avoid further contact but without emotion. Apathy comes easier than emotion. And, unfortunately, if I am anything like anyone else, there seems to be less a war between the sexes than an apathy.
"I think that some cultural conflicts can be described as wars of the sexes." I suspect that most people are not warring, but rather negotiating with the opposite sex with respect to raising their children. These negotiations have become more intense and argumentative. The war that you speak of largely emerges from government subsidies to higher education and public schools. Women who are genuinely abused and disrespected by their fathers find sympathy and belonging with activist feminists within the academy. These feminists become surrogate family. Women from more loving families aren't as likely to get sucked into to the feminist ideology. But just as with the Boomers who passed through the wave of socialism in the Sixties, women and men who pass through the university come out with a distorted view of the world. Except for the most well-prepared and vigilant, feminist ideas rub off on most people. Unfortunately, subsidies that are intended to promote the general welfare end up subsidizing social justice dogmas. These dogmas then distort belief norms, and perceptions of reality. They trickled down to primary and secondary schools like a disease affecting even the red counties.
“In addition, women have altered the norms of discourse and decision-making within these institutions to conform to a more feminine approach.”
Yes. Thank you.