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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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One of the unspoken pillars of feminist thought is that members of the female sex are perpetual children and members of the male sex are perpetual adults, with corresponding levels of responsibility and agency. Of course, this is systematically denied by feminists (aside from rare gems like Paglia), but is self-evident in the practical outcomes of their ideology.

The treatment we received as 10-year old boys in school after having roughhoused around a bit or done harmless pranks was always extremely stern and guilt-laden - compared to female college students have hysterical breakdowns and being coddled in manners virtually indistinguishable from how you treat crying toddlers.

I would note that feminist treatment of women as perpetual children and men as perpetual adults is highly selective and inconsistent. They'll selectively absolve the woman of all responsibility and place all fault on the man when these poor darlings are "pumped and dumped" and taken advantage of and supposedly manipulated into sex acts that get retroactively interpreted as predatory once the outcomes of the sex don't result in what they want. They will put out pieces of special pleading explaining how women's special circumstances justifies them being treated more lightly when dealing with them in multiple contexts, sexual, professional, criminal and so on. The same people who pull such shenanigans will generally not acknowledge that women's lack of agency and unique delicateness should ever affect how they get treated when they are in the running for leadership roles or positions which require one to take on a huge amount of responsibility. There is no consistency here, it's all "Who, whom".

The even more irritating thing is that much of these same beliefs are also sincerely held by social conservatives (including many users in this space), who tend to typecast women as "potential victims" and men as "potential problems"; they view women through a lens of what others can do for them and men through a lens of what they can do for others. They are exceptionally paternalistic towards women, have a tendency to place all responsibility and blame upon men, and will virtually only recognise "innate sex differences" in ways which justify special and preferential treatment for women. The acknowledgement that men and women are not the same only ever gets used in one direction, and this hypocrisy seems to be common in mainstream political thought on gender.

and will virtually only recognise "innate sex differences" in ways which justify special and preferential treatment for women

On the contrary: James Damore got fired from Google essentially for arguing that, because of innate sex differences in career aspirations, Google's efforts to provide special and preferential treatment for women were misguided and a misallocation of resources. It's my impression that most people in this space agree with him - certainly I don't think that qualified men who want to work in STEM should be passed over in favour of less qualified women just for the sake of gender equality. Likewise, I don't think fitness requirements for firefighters, soldiers etc. should be relaxed just because the candidate is female.

The even more irritating thing is that much of these same beliefs are also sincerely held by social conservatives (including many users in this space), who tend to typecast women as "potential victims" and men as "potential problems"

Do you have any recent examples of this? As one of the resident social conservatives, my belief is that this "perpetual childhood" should include a curtailing of rights and privileges in proportion to its reduction of responsibility/culpability, and the fact that it does not is an enormous problem. I thought this was a fairly common view among the social cons here. The double standard you're referring to strikes me as more of a boomercon thing, and I don't know if we have any of those here anymore.

I think most of the perpetual childhood stuff is social permissions. A woman is generally permitted to be the second income, worry about such nonsense as “work life balance” (which generally means working 40 hours a week or less, rarely taking work home, and getting lots of PTO), whether or not the job is fulfilling (in other words is it fun and do things that are good for virtue signaling), and so on. Men, unless they’re extremely privileged don’t get to think that way because their career has to feed, house and clothe the family. Sure, the wife’s income might supplement, but she almost always makes a lot less than he does. A man is expected to protect himself, his family, and if there’s a war, his country. In both cases, his actual wants take a very strong step back to the practical aspects of the job market. Men are forced to look to high paid jobs whether or not they want to do that sort of work. They are forced to work longer than they actually want to because they need to take care of a family, and they need to suck up to the boss by working late, they need to manage themselves to take advantage of trainings and promotions or job hopping opportunities even if they’re not interested in that work for itself because they have a family.

Even in social situations, there’s a constant need to make sure to not show weakness, or to be emotional, both of which make them look weak. The number of men who made an early on in dating mistake of admitting to being sad about something and thus lost someone they loved is astounding. Women are allowed feelings, in fact women are basically allowed tantrums over stupid things that they don’t have any right to be upset about. There are viral videos of women pissed off because their man can’t load the dishwasher. Left out — she’s generally a stay at home mom in a nice middle class neighborhood and he’s working 60+ hours a week so she can complain that he doesn’t do enough chores on top of all of that.

I don't know if it's all that dominant on the right but one does come across quite a few "man up and do whatever your wife says like a REAL ALPHA would" takes from conservative media figures - they are right about men needing to accept that they are the foundation of responsibility and economic provision within family and society at large, but fail to understand that without corresponding power and rights, this just becomes a form of indentured servitude in which you're supposed to grin and bear any humiliation.

I agree that those people are real, but IME it's the older generations posting the "Buckle up, buttercup!" and "my hands look like this so hers can look like this" memes. The only millennials I see posting in that vein (on X) seem to be trolls.

I was going to post something like this myself -- it's age effects. Both because culture was just different when older generations came up, and also because Gen X and above, even some millennials, have no clue how bad things have gotten in culture for the younger generations.

Younger social conservatives are generally very chill and warm people, even if they're dogmatically rigid. I think it's selection effects because social conservatism requires a certain approach of dutifulness and compassion, and highly disagreeable right-wing men under ~30 gravitate towards libertine libertarianism and are people I expect would be Democrats in the 60s-2000s.

I mean to me it’s a little like a social version of socialism where the responsibility is given to the men while the benefits are given to women. Women want the option to get a girl-boss job, or serve in the military. They don’t want the responsibility that comes with it. Women even the most hard core feminists don’t sign up for the draft, and seem likely to oppose women being entered into selective service. They want the high powered jobs, but don’t want the responsibility of being a breadwinner, or even working the long hours necessary to earn such a position. For the feminist, it appears that adulthood is optional — they can take or leave whatever parts (generally the taking responsibility parts) they want while taking the benefits of being socially treated as adults. Weak when demands come but strong when the social credit or other benefits are available. It’s not inconsistent.

I think that equal ought to mean equal in both rights and responsibilities. If I’m perfectly capable of doing the girlboss thing, then I ought to be able to take responsibility to provide equal income to the family budget. If I’m capable of choosing sex, then I don’t get to cry rape when the guy doesn’t call me the next morning or bring me flowers. If I’m capable of fighting in the military, I need to sign up for the draft.

The foundational lines of thought behind 19th century patriarchal paternalism and modern feminism are closely linked since they are both inherently bourgeois philosophies that emerged among the upper segments of wealthy, educated society as a reaction to social upheaval from the lower classes - patriarchs wanted to preserve their class standing by limiting bourgeois female interaction with the plebs, while early feminists saw early signs of social mobility and were so outraged at the thought that a man of a lower social status could have the right to vote that they concluded "we need a bourgeois chauvinism but for the girls". Look at some of the earliest suffrage posters and pamphlets - they all engage in a degree of extreme classism that we would consider almost anarcho-capitalist today.

The outcomes only differ in the sense that both have an opposing foregone conclusion - patriarchy highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, men should be in charge", while feminism highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, women should be in charge". The step-by-step thought processes are remarkably similar.

I would say they're not mirror images; namely, that 19th century patriarchal paternalism was far more consistent and reciprocal than things are today. Sure, men were the heads of the household with some legal power like owning the property that came into the marriage and being able to enter into contracts, but that came with a corresponding responsibility - husbands had a legal responsibility to support their wives and any children born out of the marriage, and what was considered "necessaries" for a wife (and kids) was dependent on socioeconomic status. So a rich man could not simply leave his wife in rags, feed her gruel and claim she was technically being supported. The courts would not accept this.

The next thing to note is that the husband, along with taking ownership of all of his wife's property, also took responsibility for all of her debts before marriage. Husbands continued to be responsible for all family debts contracted after marriage as well. A wife could also buy necessaries on her husband's credit (this was called the law of agency), and had the ability to act as her husband's agent. This is important because it means all debt contracted on behalf of the family's maintenance (whether made by the husband or the wife) was held to be the husband's debt. And defaulting on the debt meant he could go to jail. In the 18th/19th centuries, the vast majority of imprisoned debtors in England and Wales were men (all estimates of the sex ratios of imprisoned debtors are over 90% male), and it is likely that coverture was a very big reason why.

Now? The male end of the responsibility is still being socially upheld under a veneer of female helplessness and victimisation, and at the same time, women are equally as capable as men and all of that agitprop distinctly non-agentic framing that emphasises their need for special protections shouldn't impact your evaluations of their suitability for leadership positions that require one to exercise agency. You don't want to be a misogynist, do you?

Yes I agree, I was oversimplifying for sure.

It's interesting to note how since the dawn of settled civilisation, there has been a clear understanding of the reciprocal nature of rights and responsibilities - you can't vote unless you serve in the Athenian army, you can't pursue a career as a Roman magistrate without financing public infrastructure, you can't hold a title of nobility unless you also physically fight on the battlefield when the king summons you to, etc.

Liberalism's lean into universalist perspectives on societies and the nature of civic cohesion completely shattered this extremely meaningful relationship of the individual to the collective - the very last gasp of this traditional understanding of civics might have been JFK's "ask what you can do for your country". Today, one can demand all rights with zero corresponding responsibilities - like the left-wing/communist alliance here in Vienna demanding full voting rights for any adult who lives here - no matter if they are citizens, net contributors to the welfare state, or if they can even speak German. They of course don't remotely understanding how this would be the deathknell of any kind of civic mindset and would rapidly push society into the same tribal ingroupings based on family, clan, ethnicity and faith that have dominated virtually all societies on Earth outside of highly structured civilisations.

It's interesting to note how since the dawn of settled civilisation, there has been a clear understanding of the reciprocal nature of rights and responsibilities

The industrial revolution destroyed the specific socioeconomic/sociobiological niche for men and offered no replacement.
It did not do the same for women.

The more automation replaces one gender more than the other, the worse it gets for that gender- if you want to see how that ends, look at how we treat teenaged men, who have been completely replaced in the workforce to the point society considers disenfranchisement a moral imperative.

There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that most of the West is democratic and therefore there’s a sort of pandering that develops where people prefer leaders who tell them what they want to believe, and what people generally want is liberty from obligations both social and economic, liberty to do whatever they want to regardless of consequences, and someone else to be forced to pick up the tab.

But of course none of that works. A society in which no one has any obligations even to simply not be a drain on society is one that will not last. A society in which every social vice is tolerated is one that will quickly decline due to disease, drugs and associated crimes to pay for those drugs. And thus no one will want to go into the increasingly lawless parts of civilization, or if they do, they go prepared to defend themselves and trust no one until they can retreat into areas where social bonds prevent the social and economic rot they see in the city.

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