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There's a name for moralizing women who enforce the social consensus: it's called culture, and we need it. It's your mom teaching you to wipe your ass and chew with your mouth closed.
Power flows through the male line, culture flows through the female line.
In a healthy male society, the young male capacity for violence is channeled to defend the society. Men defend the weak from the depredations of the strong, and the insiders from the outsiders. Status and the right to use violence are conferred by older men to those who use violence to defend the society. This is "patriarchy", and it has been so successful that young women think the purpose of patriarchy is to keep young women from dating other young women, when it's real purpose is to keep young men from killing you.
When that healthy society breaks down and the patriarchs lose authority, young men do not lose their capacity for violence, but now status and authority go to those most capable of exercising it.
Violence is exercised for its own sake, for the difference between a gang and a police force is merely that one is accountable. When people sneer that a corrupt police force is just a gang in blue, they are more correct than they understand.
Destroy the systems containing male violence to pro-social ends and you have the child soldiers of Africa and the gangs of Central America.
In a healthy female society, female social power is used to benefit the culture as a whole. Female social power is the old woman that will give you a dirty look if you litter, the young woman who won't marry you unless you have a job. In a healthy society the librarian, the school teacher, and the nun guide people, especially young women, into orderly lives that benefit the society as a whole. That's the under-discussed matriarchy, the rule of mothers over children and younger women.
Unfortunately, as Louise Perry suggests, the feminists took a big swing at the patriarchy and took down the matriarchy instead. The stabilizing power of older women and their social structures has been destroyed, leaving millions of atomized women who are in their own way every bit as dangerous as atomized men.
We don't live in a healthy society, and female social power is now exercised for the benefit of the user. Young women cancel each other over tiny or imagined infractions, they whip up social media mobs against each other, and they grift in any industry that generates excess revenue. They extract money and status from the productive without providing any value, and they attack each other in endless status games. Many PMC women, having been removed from the old containment structures of female social communities, now live in a social war of all against all.
Gang colors are to atomized young men what causes are to atomized young women - a set of symbols to fight over in the quest for social dominance. There's no real value in being able to wear blue on 18th street, and nobody believes any AWFL activist that claims to fight for AI safety for globally warming people of color. Both of them are just symbols of power.
Great post. It's refreshing to read something with some thumos [Greek: spirit] on The Motte. I agree with the critical mass of this, but I am going to focus on the things I don't agree with:
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Once upon a time I dated a woman whose boss kept a closet full of posters so that she'd always have one appropriate for whatever the next protest was
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I don’t think this destruction of the matriarchy was necessarily unintentional. Young women tend to hate the matriarchy because it places restrictions on their behavior and interferes with maximal sexual success. The downside of this destruction is that women will now lose most of their social capital by the time they turn 30. But many young women (like many young men) have very low time preference and poor ability to visualize themselves in the future.
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I'd like to hear more about this. Could you expand, or share a link?
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