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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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contribute to the future of humanity

The best way for top women to contribute to the future of humanity is by bearing humanities future directly.

Ehhh... in the strictest sense yes, and it's inevitable that women will bear the brunt of childbearing/childrearing, but the burdens of both don't seem great enough to be any woman's sole occupation. It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children. With how trivialized housekeeping has become, it seems to me that intelligent, childbearing women would be well served by WFH positions so they can contribute to the household in a more tangible sense.

Besides, you be the one to tell a curious young woman that the boys get to do all the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys.

Often these stifling parents will only have one or two children. If the goal is four or more different styles of parenting are necessary along with greater demands on home making for a larger family.

Is it the top women selecting WFH positions? These typically don't have the challenge or prestige top women are looking for. The bulk of the WFH ladies are mid, many in fake email jobs.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit, as opposed to telling them that boys have to do all the boring, tedious, monotonous, and dangerous shit?

Like, sure, you can, but that's a weird framing to take for what even you concede as the strictly superior option for society. Why would a society want to approach persuasion in that way?

It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children.

This is not the well established conclusion, since the comparison isn't terribly stifling parenting styles versus beneficent parenting styles, but rather terribly stifling parenting styles versus no parenting at all.

The repugnant conclusion of ethics is only repugnant if you think sub-optimization is worse than non-existence. Certainly the general child is not better off for having never been born to suffer parents (or worse, puberty). Those that disagree can and would resolve that issue themselves, but the survivors will- by definition- prefer the life with bad parents to no life.

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ. It is true that women have a certain baseline privilege, but with it comes a certain cap on their expected competence. It's a tradeoff that works to the favor of some, perhaps even most, but certainly not all women.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit

It's not explicitly said, but that's the message that at least one teenage girl got (though granted, perhaps she isn't a representative sample)

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ.

Again, this is reversing the paradigm to assume the conclusion. It's not about 'the male equivalents of the women in question,' it's how you are characterizing the jobs these women's spouses would be doing if they were expected to be breadwinners, i.e. "the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys."

Most bread-winning jobs are boring, tedious, monotonous, and/or dangerous because that is why they are paying you breadwinning wages in the first place. Higher wages aren't correlated with fun or excitement, but with the compensation required for people to take them, generally because the work is not generally desirable 'cool shit.' Quite often the greater the wage advantage the worse the desirability, because if it was highly desirable then other workers would want that job and be willing to do it for less.

Which returns to the question of framing bias.

Why would you insinuate to high IQ women that they should be envious of the often unpleasant jobs of their bread-winning spouses, while denigrating the alternative, except for the purpose of elevating the former over the later?

Aella is like the textbook example of a high-testosterone woman. She's definitely not a representative sample.

your mom finds you crying one night alone in your bed, crying in grief that god hadn’t made you be born a boy

This is not a thing that normal little girls do.

Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.

She also has never once thought about the male version of her life. Men are raised knowing that nobody will ever actually care about them. They know they have to earn everything. They know they are no allowed to ever show weakness. They’re striving because being a loser man is to be absolutely nothing, pathetic, and worthless. He strives to achieve because he’s been told since he was a baby that he’s the breadwinner, and he better get good grades and into a good school and into a good job because if not, he’ll be cast aside as a failed, pathetic man, and nobody will ever give a crap about him. If there’s a draft for the next war, he’s going, and if his limbs get blown off, nobody will care.

Women and I include myself just don’t get that stuff because society bends in half to accommodate them. Women get their own spaces (in part because of safety), where men’s spaces are open by default and the only way men’s spaces stay just for men is if they’re deliberately uncomfortable for women, and then you can bet someone will call men sexist for that. Other than that, you have to let women in, even if it’s the only place men can hope to get away from women so they can open up to other men, they can’t, be here comes the women. Women get to choose careers based on preferences, work hours, whether the job is fun, how close it is to their homes, etc. Men don’t get to, they will be the breadwinner, so they’ve been told since they were old enough to understand work that they don’t get to choose based on liking the job, they have to choose the money. If they best paying job they can get is dirty, disgusting, backbreaking, and has long hours, tough shit, you do it because if not you’re pathetic and a loser.

Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.

Not using capital letters is also an old internet thing. Jerry Yang, the old CEO of yahoo was famous for it.

Looking at her other Substack posts, it seems like she only did it for that particular post. I guess she was trying to evoke Zoomer angst.