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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Both sides understand that "protect women" is the only widely shared moral foundation.

Yes. Although this is not a stable equilibrium either. A society that enshrines "protect women" but doesn't enshrine "respect men" ends up becoming horribly biased against men.

Example #1: Ukraine. Women flee the country and are living their best life clubbing with rich Germans. Men are press ganged against their will and go die in a ditch somewhere.

Example #2: Men perform nearly all the dangerous jobs in the U.S. (Probably 99%+). These jobs, which have high rates of death and dismemberment, often pay more. However, any time men make more money than women, there is talk of a "wage gap" which must be corrected.

The recognition that sexes are different must come paired with the recognition that both sexes have special needs and duties. Women are not inherently morally superior, but we've evolved as a species to see them this way because of the intense demands and vulnerability of motherhood. In an anti-natal society women might as well just be weak men.

I'm not sure we have "evolved as a species" to see women as morally superior. Plenty of societies in antiquity (and even more recently than that) treated women as basically defective (morally, intellectually, and physically) men whose sole redeeming quality was babymaking. Even when Christianity (with a much more egalitarian attitude, at least on the "morally" front) became widespread, it took a long time to purge those ideas from the zeitgeist, to the point that you can find them even in some early Christian writers.

Yeah, the Romans were pretty misogynistic, but where did all the "protect women" stuff come from if not evolution?

I was objecting to the implication that we're evolved to see women as morally superior, not to the corresponding claim that "protect women" is to an extent hardwired.