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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Drat, you beat me too it. So a couple of thoughts-

  1. Student loans has an obvious explanation- Women are more likely to go to college(because there is no other socially acceptable decision for non-poor women, and no one wants to be poor), choose degrees which are appealing to women(which tend to pay less), when they're not able to handle their first choice degrees switch to psychology(while men tend to go to work), etc, etc. All that means is that women are typically the ones suffering under student loans. Even a young woman with few student loans because of scholarships, fortunate job placement, etc. likely runs in a social circle which overwhelmingly has student loan issues, and women tend to be more sensitive to each others' problems.

  2. Women tend to really value resources, and in the past few years the same-class standard of living for the red tribe has started getting much higher than for the blue tribe. It'll be interesting to see if that has any bearing on this trend in the future, assuming it continues. We know, BTW, that it isn't an inherent fact of life that women don't like red tribe things- Taylor Swift literally started as a country singer and church attendance has slanted female for forever. And while red tribe leftism exists, it rarely looks like a winning horse to back, although some of its hobby horses can get incorporated in a winning agenda, compassionate conservatism style.

  3. Abortion is the mind-killer and public rhetoric about it is generally quite poor, but liberal rhetoric about abortion is in particular just blatant lies. Pregnancy checkpoints in red states, handmaids tale, etc. Prolife rhetoric is the same five arguments repeated ad nauseam but it's usually not a lie unless you play definitional games. And one of those things tends to really hype up why women should care about it, even if it's simply factually not true.

  4. How much of this on the female side is metoo, too? Rape is a primal fear for young women, and the metoo narrative does have something to say to women, and tends to spread through female-heavy social media platforms. Insane rape scaremongering probably drives young women towards the feminist side of things on a 'men just suck and you have to be protected from them- all of them' basis. That can fit comfortably in the left side of the coalition.

  5. This gap is mostly about women moving left, not men moving right. https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx

Rape is a primal fear for young women

Is this a conclusion we can draw with certainty from women's usual observable behavior? I have my doubts.

Can you add detail? I'm not trying to needle you here, genuinely curious. I feel like there's some evopsych data you've got.

The everyday observable behavior of average young women does not seem to indicate that they are gripped by a primal fear of rape.