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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Thanks for the poem and the translation.

Yes, it looks like something that we as civilization have not yet understood, and maybe we knew but we have forgotten, is the different moral framework of women in comparison to men. We notice it now way more because women has enormous political power, and this translates to a change in ethics in our political and cultural class.

From a political perspective, it makes very hard to dislodsge young women and the left, because, by nature, the modern left is based on the oppressor/oppressed moral framework. The only thing you can use it to introduce another oppressor/oppressed moral framework that is stronger.

It also make me think how the liberal civilization will fare in the future if we adopt women's moral framework, especially on foreign policy. And I think here there is a case of "wokes more correct than the mainstream" when they say that Imperialism is born from the Patriarchy.

The thing is, though, as I will not tire of mentioning, is that "left votes for women" is a very recent concept. In most European countries, until the 80s, the left voted for conservative parties more than the left-wing ones - there might have been a fair few more countries within the Eastern sphere if it hadn't been for women's suffrage! - and in UK the women voted more for Tories until 2017.

Most oppressor/oppressed frameworks that we have had already been introduced to politics before the 80s, of course, and a huge amount of men sympathized with the one that has had the most political strength by far - "we are workers, the bosses are taking from us, let's get ours". What really changed was the loss of strength of Christianity as the main, or one of the main, political frameworks behind conservative thought, particularly with its pro-maternal themes.

I wonder if declining fertility/maternity among women have a role to play here. Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring. By contrast, if you're 35 and childless, you don't have a proximal locus for it. Instead, it might be channeled into forms of high-visibility compassion-driven benevolence (no! not like that!) of the kind that progressivism strongly seeks to identify itself with.

There's something to this. Most unmarried men, married men and married women vote Republican. Most unmarried women vote Democrat.

Every woman I know who was a bleeding heart hippie turned into Phyllis Schafer once they had kids. A really fun thing to do at playdates is to let slip that 'boys play so differently from girls' and see how long the waters warm up before the hatred of trans shit pops up. Race takes longer to bring up, but it comes up quickly if the topic of school choice occurs.

turned into Phyllis Schafer

Did you mean Phyllis Schlafly here? Because googling "Phyllis Schafer" gives me a landscape painter.

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't really pay attention of the specific spelling. Good catch!

I agree - similar to men, who seek an outlet for their competitive and violent drives, women seek an outlet for their maternal and social drives. The problem is that while society is appropriately - sometimes overly - wary of toxic masculinity that results from not channeling these drives into something non-destructive or even constructive, society is completely in denial about the entire concept of toxic femininity; You can't reign in something you deny exists. The only remotely close concept I've heard in the mainstream was the "Karen", and even there it AFAIK only took off because a woman misjudged her position in the progressive stack, and it is generally not used by the mainstream in a way that fundamentally calls into question the feminine worldview.

Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring.

Anecdote: my mother was a hippie liberal commie until she had children, then she has gradually drifted right, but she apparently became very conservative on law-and-order issues more or less as soon as she had her first child. Lifestyle wise, she ended up going 75% tradwife and 100% Christian, having been a classic careerist feminist. Talk about a "transformative experience."

I completely agree with you.

What i was saying is that indeed there have been a replacement of the moral framework, and in order to change ideas, you need to change the moral framework of women again, making the "persuade them on the market of ideas" less useful.

And I am talking from a country where, still last election at least, women still vote right as the men.