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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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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."