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I mentioned here many times that I consider the gender (sex) divide the greatest factor in our model of understanding modern political thought and action.
Background; middle-class male, young, Catholic family, Mediterranean, living in a big, poor city. Moved to Central Europe to work in a big èlite public institution with many young people, especially females. History of belonging to Marxist organisations in the past btw.
As a passionate about history, I normally talk about it, especially in a highly-educated environment where discussions about complex topics are the norm.
What I noticed in the past year it is astounding and moulded a lot of my thought. Every time I talk with women about history, and the topics fall on some past event/political regime/ideology/whatever, there is a lot of disinterest towards it from the women's side. Not disinterest in the sense of "I do not care", because as I said it is a highly-educated environment where being uncaring about this kind of thing is uncool, but disinterest in the sense of:
"I understand that in the past things worked a certain way, but the past is always worse than now because women had it worse".
From there, after it happened dozens of times with dozens of different women, I elaborated:
Women are the true accelerationist.
I could not elaborate or argue about past political or moral issues or ideologies or sovrastructures, because, from the other side, the argument is always that every behaviour or ideology of the past is ontologically evil because it discriminated against women.
I will never forget how when I was arguing about how 19th-century European states had probably a higher state-capacity than contemporary European states, I was accused of sexism because I expressed a preference for a non-contemporary political structure. The same happened when I mentioned how I admire Charles De Gaulle (because Macron, while being bad, is better than him because he is more feminist).
The most amazing moment was when I said to a group of women (yes, a lot of weird moments this year) that the loss of Church participation alienated a lot of people and diminished the sense of belonging and social participation of the community in the public thing. They agreed with me (!) but still for them, it is better now because they prefer a more isolated society but with more feminism.
Women are true accelerationist because the consequence of feminism has been a weirdo para-futurism philosophy but without fascism. Everything that can be conducted to the past is suspected as part of a reactionary plot to be judged on moral grounds. No detached interests in History per se, but only moral condemnation of everything that is not the "current year".
For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".
The biggest consequence of this sex divide is, imho, that a feminist liberal society has a huge gap in understanding the context when society begins to decline after drifting from some past ideology or structure. It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past.
I would like to receive some input on my "theory" from the residents of the motte, expressed in the English language which is better than mine.
PS: for people who are curious, I never received any sort of cancellation or consequence for my brazen rhetorical behaviour. Europe is not as woke as the US, and I am a kinda of "high-status male" for several reason, so I noticed that women tolerate way more whatever I say.
I think a part of the issue is that the blinders people put on themselves are precluding them from seeing the reality of the past. And instead always default to ingroup bias. Why is the 'now' better than the 'then'? Well, I perceive that my ingroup is stronger now than then. OK... Is that good, relevant or even true? Is the 'amount' of feminism in the world correlated with the things you like in practice? Or are we just chasing our pathologies and perceptions of what should make us happy whilst actually finding ourselves in situations that don't. Or worse, being so blinded by our perceptions and beliefs that we preclude ourselves from recognizing that they are a part of the problem.
For example, by exalting a mythology of how bad life was for women in the past because they had less feminism and freedom, or how bad life was in the past for blacks because of drinking fountain exclusivity, one is not creating a virtual reality that allows people to experience the reality of the past. One is just creating a victimary narrative that says ones ingroup was being victimized back then. A cogent example of this being the fact that blacks and women today are not modulating their emotional experiences of struggle against the patriarchy or white supremacy based on objectivity. They very much feel put upon. The 'system' is still very much against them. And to any end that it is too obviously not, we just invent new theories and mechanisms to explain and rationalize our victimary disposition. Quite literally, in real time, we invent a new reality. What a 'huge surprise' that it shares total emotional congruity with the alleged old reality...
Part of the observation being made, which I feel a lot of the replies to your post are missing the point of, is that the reason why women weren't choosing to look fondly at the past isn't because it was objectively worse time in the context of what was being discussed. You can still have superior mechanisms and social technology in the past despite not having running water. Pointing to the fact you don't have running water is not a relevant argument against those things. Yet that is what many women are allegedly doing with regards to evaluating everything with regards to 'feminism'. Which, in reality is just serving as a proxy for the perceived interest of the ingroup.
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"Notice that these discussions were not serious intellectual inquiries about the past, they were more of light topics when you shot out random questions."
This is the basic issue - for women and frankly, many minorities, the past before, let's say, 1980 is not a light topic. Like, yes, even as a left-wing dude, I have thoughts about going back to random time x, because there's entertaining possibilities or thoughts about changing the past, even though, rationally, I know I'd be dead of a disease or whatever fairly soon. But, it's still a nice fantasy.
OTOH, for 99% of women, even well-off educated women, what's the thing they can fantasize about doing in 1740's France, Sweden during the Viking Era, or the height of the Roman Empire?
Women couldn't get credit without their husband or father co-signing until the 70's. It's not shocking that they have no great fantasies, outside of a bodice ripper or two, about going back to the time x.
Yeah, it's a real shame there's exactly zero noteworthy women who affected any political or social change before the 19th century or so. I can't think of a single one.
Yes I am being sarcastic. There are obviously plenty of women throughout history have 'done stuff', which can and does serve has historical fantasy fodder for women (assuming they want to identify with women who take on a masculine role, which liberal feminist society does want them to).
To go on a slight tangent, it's both endlessly frustrating and amusing how feminists on one hand will decry the past as an oppressive patriarchy where women were treated little more than slaves, and on the other hand constantly laud historical female figures (Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great random Viking "Valkyries" buried with their weapons etc etc) for being powerful and influential, and seeing no contradiction there.
The feminist try to patch this over this inconsistence with some post-hoc justifications, usually some just-so justification that these were exceptional women that somehow managed to break the chains of patriarchy (despite it literally being a universal phenomenon), though it's remarkable how common these 'exceptions' are. The craziest feminist explanation of this was that men occasionally allowed a very small handful of women to rise to the top as a conspiracy to better help them subjugate women... as for why women just didn't subjugate all women to begin was unclear.
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That's just false isn't it? There wasn't a legal right for women to get credit cards without their father's or husband's permission, but nothing prevented any bank from offering such a service. Googling it quickly doesn't bring up anything about how widespread this practice was.
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I think people look back and romanticize about kings and the like, but reality for most people, male or female, was pretty rough. Hell, even when people look back to the 1950's, they think they'll be in Madmen and not someone working in an asbestos factory. Yep, that factory worker was able to buy a house and have a family... He also died slowly and painfully.
Yes, many injustices were done. That's human history, it's weird to act like one group of people has a monopoly on it.
Here's the difference - yes, life was rough for men as well, but there were actually "mad men"-style accountants, there were brave slaves who became powerful in the Roman Empire, there was even the occasional peasant who became a knight, and leaders of worker's revolutions, and such. Sure, it was not incredibly likely, but it was still a much greater chance than anything happening for women.
Meanwhile, with women, unless you were born into power until basically last week historically, you weren't going to be much of anything, no matter how much some people try to push, no actually, women had secret power in the past within families - ignore the part where they had basically zero legal rights.
This right here, regardless of gender. Please tell me about the privilege of being conscripted to die in a battlefield or a mine.
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Does it just not occur to people anymore that maybe women don't want the exact same things out of life as men?
I find it interesting that the historical female figure that is perhaps best known and fantasised about by women is Cleopatra. A figure who has entered the public conciousness as a master seductress and manipulator of men (albeit one that met a tragic end).
Why is it so many women today adore and imagine themselves as Marilyn Monroe, and very few as Madeleine Albright?
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Yes, I agree with you. There's a sense of solidarity by a modern liberal woman with anything perceived as progressive that overrides debate on certain issues.
I'd like to outline my meta-critique of feminism in relation to this phenomenon. It's a kind of speculative post-Jungian thing and doesn't attempt any evidence so take it with a grain of salt.
The first thing women know is that men are more powerful than them physically - they are stronger and more violent, so the average woman would lose in a fight to an average man. Additionally because of procreation they are more vulnerable- men desire to rape woman more often than they desire to rape men, so even a weak man will be safer on the streets from that kind of violation (though more likely to experience common assault).
Men also have higher representation in the tails of achievement across many different domains - this is not describing the average, but does mean that generally the smartest woman would have usually found a smarter man in her domain (of course there are spectacularly smart woman in the distribution as well).
All this means that deep in their psyches, women feel an inferiority complex in relation to men (men in turn have inferiority around the ability to procreate, hence a push to have the heavenly father dominate over earth mother in Western traditions). Also as an aside both men and women are misogynistic, projecting their existential disgust/despair onto woman as the closest to 'life/creation/existence'.
This inferiority combines with the actual injustice of historical patriarchy, servitude, male domineering that woman have experienced into feminism.
To avoid the knowledge of male primary power, feminism took up the ideas of social constructivism a la Foucault, where power relations determine the way things are. Thus the exclusion of biological science in discourse in favour of blank-slate ideas. And the explicit use of politics and solidarity to wield power.
But, political aims work against truth discernment and so feminism has wandered, and failed to integrate biology and evolution, and has, like a lot of social science, favoured novelty over synthesis.
This political wandering has led to internal factionism, first with intersectionality, which undermines solidarity across the category women, and now gender ideology and queer theory, the bastard sister of gender studies, which undermines the very category of women.
But modern liberal progressive politics demands solidarity across the sisterhood, and so more than anyone, women are responsible for sustaining the politics undermining feminism, and womanhood, itself.
I don't think that both men and women are misogynistic. Rather I think that both men and women are predisposed to hating men due to the essential power structure you outline in paragraph 3 above. If you hate a more powerful person who has power over you, it's righteous and empowering and normal to do so. If you hate someone weaker than you, you are a loser. I am not predisposed to hating women. When I think of my father, I think of him eternally as an adult who subjugated me as a youth, but when I think of my mother I just feel regret for ever having hurt her in any way. Indeed the things I fault my father for are for his weaknesses, not being strong enough, out of this grew my resentment toward him. Toward my mother I would never feel any hatred toward her weakness, to do so would be gruesome, especially as an adult.
As a gay man the only misogyny I can find in myself is a sort of irritation that straight men are attracted to women, but this doesn't really spark a deep seated hatred within me but if anything rather an irritation toward myself that I'm not what a straight man would be attracted to. I'm more predisposed toward hating men and it's downstream of hating myself which I believe all men are predisposed toward. As a young child I was resentful toward women because I imagined they would reject my love but this just made me seek male affection instead, not hate women.
What makes you draw the conclusion that men and women are misogynistic? It's funny that you mention projection in this sentence as I think it's male self-hatred and women's hatred of men that you are projecting onto men and women as misogyny.
Thanks for your input and personal experience. Yes, I think you're right. It seems a poor assumption that both men and women tend to misogyny and ironically wrong even for me, I don't hate women and feel somewhat aligned with them. Also, the cliche of the archetypal feminist is man-hating, so not consistent either if we take that cliche seriously. I'll abandon that bit then as it doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. The bit I'm trying to explain is that misogyny tends to be more prevalent in both men and women than misandry and it seems that in 3rd wave feminism, in upholding ideas that undermine the rights of women and viciously othering and attacking 'terfs', women are being fundamentally misogynistic - the whole trans phenomenon has a misogynistic thrust and it's mainly women supporting it. Perhaps it's just the 'dark mother', the projected dark side of the kindness and nurturing of women.
Though of course, these Jungian analyses could be just a lot of just-so bullshit and it's just contextual...
But persevering with the deep psyche as the explanatory frame, i know from experience an extraordinary amount of men are somewhat or very misogynistic - I wonder why that is, it seems like a mother issue and feels like an early imprint around early rejection in infancy around needs met. I speculate that woman could experience this same imprint and be misogynistic by virtue of mother being the first thing, while man being somewhat peripheral. Though of course many women have very good relationships with their mothers...
In exploring the self-hate, which I know well also (perhaps it's a universal?), I wonder if it is in fact not gendered in it's sense at all.
I think the power structure explanation you outline seems right.
I think it's really a projection of men's inner frustrations with themselves and their situation. They want sex, desperately, and they want it from women. They believe if they were more fit or attractive they'd have an easier chance of getting sex from women. They blame themselves for their lack of sex and try to pin the blame on women because it alleviates them from the pain of pinning the blame on the self. This is not born out of misogyny but self hatred. If the man believed the woman/object of his desire would love him back unconditionally and deservedly, he would have not be acting out in ways perceived as misogynistic. The most confident secure men who are sexually desired by the people around him are not misogynistic because they are comfortable with themselves and have no reason to project their self hatred onto women.
I'm not sure how to interpret this, it depends on if you're male or female. I think that all men are self hating. Women can also be self hating but they often grow out of it and find meaning through family and relationships at a younger age than men do. Many men grow to an old age and never escape their self loathing, or it can fluctuate throughout their lives based on their condition and perception of their lives.
Interesting, yes, I think projection of life circumstances onto the other sex plausibly accounts for a lot of male misogyny. Obviously a lot of different contextual factors might account for it, ie a patterns learned from their fathers.
But not necessarily an infant attachment thing, ie Bowlby. That seems to lead to deeper issues perhaps than misogyny/misandry.
Re the self-hate I just mean that it doesn't seem directed at man or woman per se. It has that empty-like ego quality, at least for me.
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If you are gay, then I'm fairly certain your experiences are not very relevant when discussing the modal man's gender relations. No offense intended, but obviously you are wired differently and thus not a suitable example to study.
I have learned so much about gay men through looking at straight men, I believe we are wired broadly the same but with some small points of difference. I offered my perspective because if I can learn things from straight people then perhaps straight people can learn something from my experiences as well. I don't think you can fully understand gay men without understanding straight men and vice versa.
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Do you have link to that? Not that I disagree, but I know none
You accidently replied to the wrong comment ;)
But here's a source.
An amusing consequence of this was you had suffragettes in the late 19th century stating that women shouldn't be allowed to vote on whether to grant themselves the right to vote.
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What actual injustice?
It frustrates me to no end that the Motte is more than happy to debate HBD and other taboo topics, and criticise mainstream liberal narrative generally, but still generally believes in the feminist myth that is the historical oppression of women.
And it is a myth. The idea of an oppressive 'patriarchy' in history is a produce of feminist historical revision, aided by our modern liberal democratic sensibilities making us believe anything not liberal or democratic as morally inferior.
This is something I've previously argued about both here and on the old subreddit and elsewhere on cyberspace many times in the past (please, read those previous comments if you haven't already). But the conclusion I'm very slowly and reluctantly reaching is that it doesn't matter how much I or anyone else try to argue against it and prove its falsehood.
It doesn't matter how many feminists myths, like the idea that husbands could beat their wives with impunity, are debunked. It doesn't matter how many prominent, power female historical figures are pointed out that shouldn't really exist in a supposed patriarchy. It doesn't matter how much subtlety you try and introduce into the debate around female suffrage including the fact that men were more in favour of women's suffrage than men were. It doesn't matter how historically rights and responsibilities have gone hand-in-hand which each sex preferred a different balance. It doesn't matter trying to explain how men and women having distinct sex roles does not necessarily mean one was inferior. It doesn't matter if you point out all the ways that women actually did have unique privileges that men did not have. It doesn't matter trying to explain that women can, do and did exhibit huge amounts of agency, influence and power in history and in our societies, if in ways often distinct from men. It doesn't matter pointing out that any onerous ritual that women experienced almost always had a male equivalent, such as FGM and MGM. It doesn't matter the ways in which men objectively and materially had it worse than women both historically and in the present, like life expectancy, participation in dangerous work and so on. It doesn't matter that the most important relationships between the sexes (family) is characterised by love, affection and cooperation, not oppression. It doesn't matter how blatantly obvious how absolute rubbish feminist theory to anyone with a brain who reads it. It doesn't matter how many holes you poke in the idea of the feminist idea of a 'patriarchy' (and you can poke so many holes), there is always the 'patriarchy of the gaps' and the historical oppression of women lurking somewhere, somehow as a historical 'fact'.
The conclusion I've come to as to why it doesn't matter is because I think deep down on some innate, primal level, we want to believe in the idea that women are oppressed, historically or otherwise, is true. Men want to believe it because we want to play white-knight-in-shining-armour, our instinctual desire to be a protector and provider for women. Men want injustice against women to be true so we can swoop in and save women from that injustice and be a hero and loved by those women for it. Women want to believe it because it justifies their own special status. It justifies the special treatment and privileges, which they deserve by virtue of their oppression. It's a convenient noble lie long ingrained deep in our cultural consciousness, rendered dysfunctional by modernity. We love to demonise our outgroup by how badly they treat women to demonstrate how virtuous we are. There's no better outgroup to beat on than the past, because they're really bad at fighting back.
To be completely clear, I'm not saying women have never experienced any injustice. But any injustice is specific and not part of a universal, continuous effort ('patriarchy') to injure women, and it has to be put in the context than both women and men have faced injustices historically.
I'm not completely defeatist on this issue, at least not yet. But part of me recognises the futility of fighting human nature, no matter how irrational, self-destructive and maladaptive it might be. But I don't know what the alternative is.
I like your take, we always have to dig deeply into accepted ideas to see how much myth-making. It's something I will 'lean-into' over the next while to see where I land.
However, I was already aware that females contribute a good portion of partner violence - although of course, tending to be less serious harm than male on female violence. I was also aware that key males had been written out of the suffragette story.
I also don't view it as man beating wife with stick through human history. The past is a different country as they say, so it's mistaken to project the modern idea of agency blindly onto previous eras Obviously women have always had agency and our history is shared, there must have always been accommodation of needs in the shared goal of child rearing and woman have been honoured and had certain priviliges over different cultures etc, depending on class. However, and bearing in mind I'm no historian and I shudder to think how little I know of it, but I'd say it's a given that among human hierarchies, women would tend to be lower than men in terms of power. The church asserts this explicitly, and clearly there wasn't even a thought to consider women as distinct entities legally until modern times. So I suspect that while revisionism against some of the myth-making of feminism may be due, it's not going to upend it to the point of there is 'no thing there'.
Feminism fits within a modern liberal view of freedom and opportunity. Here I think it's clear that there was a patriarchy, as evidenced by the efforts required for women to do things that men had always done-get a degree, occupy professional positions of power, own things, receive benefits as single parents etc. Now most women probably didn't object to this world, it was the water they swam in, but for some women it was a grave injustice under the modern liberal terms taking root. Now that doesn't subsume women to some powerless servitude but it is pretty inarguable as a real patriarchy.
I have also observed patriarchy first-hand, though as an outsider, when living in Japan. Again many women have power, many are happy with the status quo, but the hierarchy is plain to see. I'm given to understand that effectively the wife sits underneath her sons in the power structure side of things (though probably worth checking) and language itself reified this in the honorifics etc used when addressing then. Men have a mixed position there, often as salarymen that might only see there children on weekends, and of course are wedded to their own work heirarchies, but equally, are clearly top-dogs as far as society goes. Again this is under the lens of modern liberal values. Japan is a very civil society and there are many great things about it. And if course it's changing. But if you're a young woman wanting to progress professionally in male-dominated fields, you're going to put up with a lot of unjust shit, by virtue of being a woman.
Anyway I take your broader point and I have gone on too long. One of my first posts here was complaining about long posts and here I am....
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Welcome to arguing against Enlightenment Ideology. Its core claim is that it can guide us all to a brighter future, but actually doing that is quite hard, and "brighter" is always relative to the past. Consequently it's easier to lie about how bad the past was, then to actually improve on it.
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Surely there are historical romance novels marketed towards women. What time periods do they tend to be set in?
Even if any of these women did fantasize about being married to a crusading knight, or being a learned nun writing mystic theology, those aren’t high-status things to admit.
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Have you considered that there’s pretty major filtering going on for your female colleagues?
I mean, I highly doubt that if you went to a bunch of checkout clerks in Sheboygan, that they'd have much different thoughts. Like, if you talked to a History phd, you'd maybe get an interesting response, but they'd still prefer today.
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I'd have to answer the same way as a man. If the question was, "In which historical epoch would you like to take a month long vacation?", I have a lot of options I would pick, but that question is a bit like "In which third world country would you like to live?" except worse, because I wouldn't even be able to leverage the favorable currency exchange rate I enjoy as an American, and I wouldn't have any access to modern conveniences.
I mean I think there’s a lot of bias in how people perceive history and the things that they’re valuing over other things. It’s almost always a bias in favor of more technological devices, more official freedoms and more official equality with almost everything else taking a distant second or even third even if, as a practical matter, you’d be freer, happier, healthier, and safer in earlier eras.
There’s a lot to dislike about modern life. The panopticon, street crime, the number of people who have control over your ability to live your own life, the mental and physical health crises that plague us, debts that most people owe for decades now, and the costs of health care for most Americans.
So to me there is a bit of a trade off depending on the era. Obesity and mental health reaching the crisis point in the twenty first century— I would absolutely dare argue that other than crisis care, we were much healthier a century ago when the fattest man alive was 300 something pounds and this was rare enough that he was in a circus. A century ago, millions of kids in America were not depressed, and suicide wasn’t common.
Likewise with street crime. In most cities crime used to be well controlled. I don’t think there was ever an era in which unaccompanied women could safely walk the streets at midnight, but there were eras where crime was low enough that you could walk the streets or let kids play outside without too much fear of theft or violence. There were no open street markets for drugs, no open air homeless encampments within the cities, and no need to plan to avoid human feces.
As far as freedom, we have freedom in name only a lot of times. The amount of control other people have over your life (in part enabled by the panopticon that rats you out all the time) would be mind boggling to someone living in an absolute monarchy in the 1800s. Louis XVI of France couldn’t require your boss to spy on you and fire you if you ever said anything anti-regime. Even if he could, most people in France were farmers and thus self employed. Joe Biden tried to get people fired for refusing an injection. Through liability, the government can force your boss to fire people over Facebook posts (lest not doing so is proof of a hostile work environment). Likewise the control over what can and can’t be done on your own land or with your own house is pretty high. The government can tell you whether you can raise food or animals on your land, require you to get approval to expand your house or build permanent structures, require inspections at every step of the process. I don’t think you could have done that a century ago.
As far as health...We were a hell of a lot sicker a hundred years ago. Why would I say that? Well...life expectancy is a fairly crude measure of population health, but you can guess that sick people die sooner and in a world without antibiotics you have things like the President's son dying of blood poisoning from an infected blister.
You would have a much better argument if you were talking about a time when cheap antibiotics and something like modern medical care were available for most people...fifty years ago, not a hundred.
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Uh, street crime is what the panopticon is for. People who live in bad neighborhoods know that surveillance works. While there can be other concerns with the panopticon, the entire raison d'etre of the thing is to get rid of that problem. If it's not being used to at least accomplish that, then you've got a hell of a raw deal with your local politicians.
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Those debts are usually mortgages to pay for an enormous, luxurious home of the kind that only the richest had access to a century ago. If you want to have ten people sharing a bedroom in a small hut, you can still get that at an affordable price point. Finding a small windowless room in a tenement in NYC to house your family will be a bit more difficult because of regulations, but you could probably find a studio apartment to squeeze them into, if that is what you want.
Again, health care of the kind that was available to the average person a hundred years ago is still accessible: just don't go to the doctor. Even for those who could afford one, a doctor couldn't do anything much of the time. There were no antibiotics, there were no vaccines for polio, smallpox and other debilitating illnesses that have been eradicated in the West (if not the world), there was no organ transplantation, cancer care was exclusively palliative, and medical imaging technology was limited to X-ray machines that gave you a huge dose of radiation.
Life expectancy and infant mortality are two objective measures of health. Both have improved dramatically since the 19th and early 20th century.
How do you know? Did you ask them? Because no one else did.
Mental health care is a luxury for which demand only exists after physical ailments have been largely dealt with. There was no mental health care to speak of a century ago. The closest is some rich people going to psychoanalysts. The world back then was awful in a way that is hard to comprehend for a person in a developed country in the 21st century. Many people were horribly traumatized and depressed by modern standards, it's just that no one cared. Veterans returning from the trenches of the First World War with PTSD were told to suck it up, if they weren't shot for being cowards. Asking if a two-year-old was depressed in this kind of environment would have been laughable.
I am in fact very glad that my neighbour isn't allowed to open a pig farm next to my house in a residential area and that he needs to get a permit and a professional crew to build his house rather than improvising something on his own that could collapse and bury me in the rubble. If you want to see what a world without building codes would look like, you can look at the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Turkey. Regulations weren't followed, buildings collapsed, sixty thousand people died.
Just as a simple sanity check, all the arguments you're making comparing people in 1900 to people today, would apply just as much to people in 1800 to 1900, and 1700 to 1800, and 1600 to 1700, no? If life was so much worse a hundred years ago, shouldn't it be even worse than that the further back you go? At what point, shouldn't the misery become unsurvivable? And yet people clearly survived, and even thrived to the point of producing rich cultures of beauty that we enjoy to this day. Do you not see a contradiction here?
Psychology mostly didn't exist a century ago, but given that Psychology is fake as fuck, it's unclear to me why that is supposed to be a problem. I see absolutely zero reason to believe that the "common factors" giving rise to the Dodo Bird Verdict should be supposed to have been a recent discovery, and not achievable through previous religious and spiritual traditions the world over.
We can't cure most serious mental illness now, and for all the criticisms of Bedlam, it is not obvious to me that our current method of allowing the mentally-ill to kill themselves on the streets with meth and heroin is in any way an improvement
Based on your personal experience, presumably? I mean, we have writing and records from quite a ways back, stories, songs, plays, art, personal journals; why speculate, when we could look at their thoughts directly? None of these depict an unmitigated hellscape. On the contrary, most people seem to have been reasonably happy and healthy, even in times of considerable duress. Heck, why not compare suicide rates? That's an objective measure, right? Or maybe marriage rates, given the overwhelming correlation between long-term marriage and a whole host of positive outcomes? Or average numbers of close friends?
What you're doing here is comparing every bad thing you can imagine about the past against every good thing you can imagine about the present. Shockingly, this results in the present being the apparent best of all possible worlds. Your explanation ignores the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the way peoples psychology adjusts itself to both prosperity and hardship, such that the former does not simply satisfy, and the later does not simply crush. People are more complicated than that.
It gets worse the further back you go, yes. There are ups and downs, but there is a secular trend of living standards getting better throughout the past few millennia. However, this improvement is not linear. Things were getting better slowly for most of history before the rate of improvement increased in the past couple of centuries. The period after WWII is the second half of the chessboard.
Mental health care includes applied psychology, i.e. counselling, therapy (CBT is supposedly an evidence-based intervention; I haven't really looked into it very much), etc., but it also includes psychiatry, a field that has seen immense progress in the past century. When the first antipsychotics were introduced shortly after World War II, they were seen as miracle drugs. Newer antipsychotics have only improved treatment since then. I don't know if we can cure most serious mental illnesses, but we can certainly treat many effectively and enable the patients to live a more-or-less normal life. Contrast this with a hundred years ago, when the only option for someone with schizophrenia was being confined to a lunatic asylum.
I know a substantial portion of homeless drug addicts are mentally ill, but I'm not sure if a substantial portion of people with severe mental illness are homeless drug addicts. Presumably these are only the most severe cases, or people who haven't been treated at all due to lack of access to health care in the US. Poor health care and mass overdoses, along with the drug markets and homeless camps mentioned in the original comment I was replying to, are a primarily American phenomenon and they could be solved if the political will existed. But I guess you could argue that the fact that politicians have accepted this is part of the supposed social decline.
The "rich cultures" were created by an elite minority who lived in relative luxury. The vast majority of people until relatively recently were illiterate farmers and pastoralists.
Even so, the stories I have read do in fact depict the many horrors the plebs were subjected to. Ever read Dickens? And if we go further back in history, you have stories featuring abusive feudal lords, marauding armies, and so on. The horrors of everyday life – lack of sanitation and running water, entire families sharing a single tiny bedroom, mothers dying in childbirth – don't get mentioned very much because they were unremarkable.
The honest answer is "because I tried and I couldn't find good data on historical suicide rates, and my post was already getting long". If you have the data, please do post it. It should be noted when comparing suicide rates that culture is a major factor. There is significant variation between developed countries today that is not explained by objective economic circumstances.
The correlation is only recorded in modern times, as far as I know. There could well be a confounder, e.g. people with higher conscientiousness or people who are already doing well mentally also have a higher chance of having a successful marriage. In a time when people didn't have to work for a marriage because society made sure that everyone got married, there would have been no such correlation.
My interpretation of the hedonic treadmill is that people will eventually adapt to an objectively higher or lower standard of living, such that the difference eventually won't be as great as might be expected, but it would still exist. I do sincerely believe that people in the past were often horribly traumatized by modern standards, and no one cared because it was so widespread and nothing could be done about it anyway.
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Proves too much. Using your 'hedonic threadmill' and 'unsurvivable misery' argument, you can't discriminate between a cherrypicked absolute worst society of the past (say, glorifying human sacrifice, slavery and war) and your personal favourites.
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I'd say worseness plateaus at some point. The difference in the standard of life in 1000 AC and 1000 BC would be indistinguishable to me, probably. But I'm no historian.
You can argue of whether going as far back as pre-agriculture would be a drop or a rise relative to agriculture, but either way I prefer the modern era.
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How narrowly/broadly are you defining "crisis care" here, before I take you up on that offer of arguing?
Edit: Also on the subject of crime, 1923 is not exactly a year I would choose for "crime was well controlled" in cities in the US.
Yeah, but I imagine the difference is that crime was more...bounded, I guess? I imagine that you only had to worry about being near crime if you wanted to go drinking or maybe if you worked in a bank--whereas these days, you can be the most straight-edge guy and still suffer from more random criminality. I imagine many posters here would trade all the modern-day gangsters and drug dealers for the old-timey Italian, Irish, and Jewish mobs.
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But the statement "people had it better off in time and place X" doesn't mean "I will be better off in time and place X."
Even if I agree that the general social situation of some era is better off than the general social situation of the present day, the biggest issue with going to the past is the lack of family and connection there. I'll be coming in as an isolated individual without much in the way of useful resources and skills to that era, so I think the modal outcome of me showing up in most eras is going to be miserable.
Again, if the question was different, say, "What historical era would you like to live as a member of the highest class, in a tightly-knit community with strong family support?" then my answer would change. But the base question of what historical era I want to live out the rest of my life in is going to be close to "almost no where and no when."
It doesn't hurt that I feel pretty well off in the modern era. To me, one of the only advantages of living as a stranger in the past is that I would be guaranteed that an AI apocalypse/nuclear armageddon/etc. wouldn't happen within my life time.
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This is possible in Hong Kong. I was speaking to a woman recently who has lived in HK for a year and not even been catcalled when dressed to go out, let alone felt unsafe at night, even in a dark alleyway.
Also, it's not clear what times or places you are talking about in your post, but the 1800s was a period of an awful lot of surveillance for most people, just not by the government. What proportion of people were even free from the eyes of others (including, in many cases, their parents) when they slept at night? Would you trade staying in the same room as the rest of your family for 19th century French political freedom?
And while you could say some things without the consequences that they'd have today, there were other restrictions in Bourbon France, such as the crime of outrage à la morale religieuse. Another example is that, early on, in the Deuxième Terreur Blanche, saying the wrong thing about Napoleon could get you lynched.
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Your experience has been dissimilar from mine. A high level of interest in history is pretty rare in general, but personally I have encountered as many women who are really into history as I have met men who are really into history, and none of those men or women are ideologues. It seems to me that history has a relatively low gender gap compared to many other intellectual disciplines and that female writers about history are just as likely as men to be drawn to history by the wonder of contemplating different worlds rather than by any sort of political ideology. It is true that there are thousands of feminist history books written by women, but there are also thousands of Marxist history books written by men. Are women really more likely than men to look at history through an ideological lens?
Another thing which comes to my mind: aren't women the main consumers of historical dramas in both text and visual form? I do not think that most of them read those books and watch those shows because they want to get enraged by the lack of feminism in previous time periods. They read and watch them because they find themselves captivated by them.
In short, I question the idea that women in general engage with history mainly through leftist ideology. It has not been my experience. By the way, my personal experiences on this topic come from living in highly leftist-voting areas of the United States.
It is hard for me to understand why anyone at all, of either gender, would answer anything other than "now". And as a big history buff, the more I learn about history, the more strongly I feel that I would rather live now than in any previous historical era.
A female history buff here. I agree that "female writers about history are just as likely as men to be drawn to history by the wonder of contemplating different worlds rather than by any sort of political ideology". I personally love that about history. When you get far enough back things just were a certain way and no one tries to get all moralistic about it.
From watching Youtube historians, I do sometimes feel like women feel pressured by modern politics to make asides ("of course this is only what the white women of a certain class were wearing") but women feel more social pressure from negative comments, in general, I think.
There might be an illusion that women want to analyze history from a Marxian/feminist lens but that is what academia has done to the humanities and scholars having to be careerist to survive, it doesn't seem to permeate voluntary history enjoyment at all.
Yes, this.
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I’ll be honest I think most people only care about politics for social signaling purposes. It’s as you say, maybe 10% of the adult population of the country cares about politics to any level. They don’t really see it as an object level reality.
This can be most easily seen in state and local politics. To whit, the place where the average person has orders of magnitude more power than they do in federal politics. You can get infrastructure projects funded. — by the city or state government. You can affect how hard your commute is — at the city planning meetings. You can affect (especially now that the courts have send a lot of stuff back to the states) a good chunk of culture war issues. Turnout is terrible, and even fewer attend the meetings. Like, you want to keep woke out of the schools (or put it in) — the school board meets once a month. They have committees that go through and approve textbooks. Nobody goes.
It’s actually funny to me. People don’t actually want power. They don’t want their decisions to matter. They in fact want to demand things with no responsibility, which turns out to be super easy if you’re signaling with things you have little power over.
When people showed up, the Attorney General literally designated them as domestic terrorists.
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People do go, but if they actually attempt to object, the meeting gets closed, canceled, or the objectors get thrown out for disruption. Those meetings are pro forma public; the board doesn't actually want public input and knows how to avoid it.
Part of this is just normal scale impediments to organisational decision making, whatever the politics. The truth is nothing good gets done by consensus, it just ends in entropic back and forth.
Whatever the reason, it means trying to fob off the blame for wokeness in schools on people being insufficiently interested in local politics doesn't work.
That too I know. I encourage people to get on a board but public meetings with people shouting don't achieve anything for a school it has to be said.
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If we're going the evo-psycho route I'd posit women prefer low risk above all else. Women have a pretty natural cap on how many offspring they can have and it's pretty easy for them to have at least some so long as some resources come their way no matter from where so things like egalitarian redistribution and strong stable states both make this more likely. While men have much more to gain from risk and much more to lose from not embracing some risk. The range outcomes for women on surviving offspring historically have been something like zero to ten while for men it's a huge amount at zero and a scale that goes all the way to Genghis Khan.
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Isn't the evosych bit backwards? Evolution mostly occurred for humans in small-scale societies (some did in larger societies recently, but less, and I don't think there's are any significant differences in noncultural sexual dimorphism between populations with more or less agriculture historically). In a small society, conflict might mean (exaggerated) half the men die, while their wives are just taken by the winning men and continue to reproduce (maybe their kids die, maybe they don't). Part of my guess - Men (also a very questionable justso story) would rather have a more spread out distribution - have a chance at being 'the best' or 'the worst' - rather than conforming and having a higher chance at being mid-distribution, because the best men might be able to reproduce a lot, while both middling and bottom men reproduce close to zero. Female reproduction is capped, so they're more influenced by the natural risk-aversion of it being easier to imitate the current cultural set of good ideas than try to come up with your own, most of which will be bad.
No because the scale or agricultural bias of the society is largely irrelevant to the biological fact that adult males are a disposable resource.
A society or tribe can afford to lose 90 percent of its male population in a manner that it can't afford to lose 90 percent of it's women and children. The former can (and likely will) bounce back to its original population numbers in the space of a generation or two, the latter is likely doomed.
If you believe in a strong theory of group selection, but the Fisher's principle proves that an approximately 50-50 male female ratios will prevail. Something, empirically provable, even in humans. Empirically males aren't disposable biologically. I'm not sure why you think the Lord your God thinks males should be disposable; either, as an ex-Catholic.
I think you need to explain what you think you mean by "empirically" in this instance because I'm not making a "should" statement im making an "is" statements and the existance of selection pressures that favor parity between the sexes over time does not change the fact that adult males are essentially disposable.
Sure, but in Western society, both Western Christianity and even before in pagan Greece and Rome monogamy was strictly enforced and this makes men not so disposable. Especially in a plow based farming economy that relies on male labor and in many cases restricted females from working many jobs. Males are not disposable, they are essential. I discussed this with you before about how infanticide is almost always biased towards killing female infants and male children are almost always favored in most societies including present ones.
No it doesn't, because a widow can remarry. The reason we used men for hard, physical, and often dangerous labor is that we can afford to lose them.
Likewise, the historical reason that male children have been preferred is that until very recently only male children could inherit, and this bias was very much tied to their disposable nature. What does a man do? A man provides.
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OP claimed that "revolution and social upheaval are often worse for women than for men", which isn't really true, because 90% of the men are lost while the women aren't, for the reason you describe. Losing 90% of your men is worse for the men, and requires explanation. But the explanation is that men can reproduce more, and thus benefit from either socially outcompeting or killing other men more than women do.
No it's not, because men are disposable. That's my point.
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...this sounds suspiciously close to "women have always been the primary victims of war".
Was the Bolshevik revolution worse for women or men? I genuinely don't know; I'm asking. I'd be willing to hear arguments for both sides.
Men play high stakes but in times of war increase their power advantage over women, so men die but do lots of sacking and raping.
Mind you, war increases the desire for chivalrous protection of women and could enhance in-group honour codes that prohibit taking advantage of women of one's own side.
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I guess you could cheat and not count The Eastern Front of WWI or the Russian Civil War. If you do count them, well, I’ll just leave this here.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the more modernity I see, the more the Soviet Union's collapse becomes inexplicable (because our society is so rife with Fake And Gay Economics, and yet doesn't collapse, that the official narrative of "The USSR collapsed due to its Fake And Gay Economics" must also be false).
That datum raises only further questions, because I know I wouldn't be protesting the CCCP in Red Square if I had 1.6 Russian women per man to distract me.
It is false. It collapsed because the soviet elite believed its own political formula to be fake and gay.
If the soviet elite was still communist despite their lying eyes, there would still be a Soviet Union today, and probably a pretty powerful one at that. And I know because that's what happened in China thanks to Deng's careful maneuvers.
Time and time again throughout history and empire, collapse always happens when the elite lose faith in their own right to rule. Of course their ideology leading them to stupid places can help with that, but you can always twist the lie to make it do what you want if you're competent enough to back it up with success.
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It’s not just that the USSR collapsed because it had Fake and Gay Economics, it’s that there was a hot and ready example of what a less Fake and Gay economy looks like. If China starts kicking out ass economically and culturally in the next decades, I fully expect to see mobs in the street demanding “Socialism with American Characteristics”.
Also, note that the sex ratio returns to normal for the generation that was too young to fight in WWII. It is interesting that there were no protests in Red Square during the post-war decades, though the population would have returned to normal by 1990.
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The USSR's economics was much gayer and much, much faker. The US is David Bowie; USSR was Holly Johnson (this comment is now itself gay).
That is an excellent analogy, so excellent I feel compelled to post about it.
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Sure, it's just like how we all acknowledge that men are the primary victims in situations where a mother dies giving birth.
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Feel free to ignore as you said you weren't interested but it's difficult no to bite at this. If you are distinguishing one group, which is roughly half the popular, from the other and the other half is dying as combatants and thus aren't victims then the whole statement becomes devoid of meaning. It's like saying the apples left in the crate have always been the primary apples left in the crate. It is a fair assumption that statements are not supposed to be entirely devoid of meaning.
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Male non-combatants/civilians are killed at far, far, higher rates than female non-combatants/civilians. I remember reading that in Afghanistan, 75% percent or so of civilian casualties were male. This even extends to children, when boys were killed at higher rates than girls comparable to that of adults.
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This is just playing a shell game with words here, no different to redefining racism as "privilege + power, impossible to be racist to whitey". If someone who just got his arms blown off by a mortar while he was eating his campfire beans doesn't count as a victim, then I contend that you have changed the word beyond all plausible recognition.
I feel like you might be conflating the concepts of "victim" and "non-combatant" and claiming that those categories are exactly identical. But it's pretty clear to me that there are combatants who are also victims.
The most clear-cut case would be wars where one side is an unjust aggressor and the other side is engaging in self-defense. For the defensive side, I think even voluntary enlistees are victims, despite also being combatants for legal purposes; they're fighting a war of self-preservation that they didn't ask for. In cases where we agree that one party bears the moral blame for the war, it would seem odd to suggest that the other party's combatants are as equally culpable as the aggressor's. People have a right to self-defense.
Can you at least agree that the primary victims in the current war in Ukraine are Ukrainian men?
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No, but neither is any woman in his life.
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Then it should be "everyone except men in their 20s have always been the primary victims of war".
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In a civil war, I would expect more men to die than women, but for the men on the winning side to have better post-war lives than the women. I doubt I can find persuasive evidence of that and I express it with very little confidence in the accuracy or generalizability of the claim.
I think the balance is also likely impacted by how organized the factions of the civil war are and how clear the lines are. I can't imagine the American Civil War, for instance, being worse as a woman than as a man. But when you get into stuff like competing warlords and ethnic cleansing with no separation between the frontlines and the homefront I could see it being worse for women, especially in cases where resources are scarce (food requisitioned for soldiers so anyone not seen as fit to fight is left to starve).
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Yeah. I feel men are more liable to reap the benefits of the 'chaos is a ladder' phenomenon but are also going to have the very bad outcomes.
Then again conquered men's genes and memories get wiped out. Conquered women are generally kept alive and reproducing.
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Suppose you asked a black person which historical period of the USA they would rather live in. Very few would prefer to live in the 19th century, or during Jim Crow laws, or during racial segregation, or any time before the recent present. Would you also conclude that black people are accelerationists, and be surprised when they also agree that they would rather live in a less socially cohesive environment but also less racist environment? Same would go for gay or transgender people - my own answer wouldn’t be any different from the women you talked to.
Also I don’t understand why the answer to “in which historical period would you rather live” would be anything but “now” for literally anyone (except for a cop-out answer like 2013). What advantages are there to living in any pre-21st century period? Even setting medicine aside - higher rates of violence and warfare, fewer social opportunities (most people lived and died as farmers), living under the threat of famine, much worse food, living conditions and sanitation, repressive social conformity (look what the Catholic Church did to slightly different versions of Christianity, no need to be an atheist). All this for… what, having a vague sense of purpose? Surely you have a higher chance of getting purpose and social cohesion today by joining a community, movement or even forming one around your idiosyncratic belief system (see Rationalist), without abandoning any of the modern advancements that truly make your life better?
The fact that people are able to feel purposelessness today is an utter luxury born of the fact that their life are stripped of the daily struggle for existence and that they have time to engage in activities other than obtaining food, clothing and shelter - the answer to modern alienation is not to return to a life of privation and barbarism but to find meaning in the new social and technological landscape. Is there not a great meaningful story being told in the current digital age, where we are on the cusp of creating generally artificially intelligent beings? Doesn’t being part of an huge interconnected network of minds where thoughts can be beamed across the entire earth in less than second not fill you with wonder? Plus, for the first time you can find your community around something other than mere geographical proximity and the happenstance of your birth - why would I trade that for being an 11th century peasant who lived and died within a few kilometres of the village he was born?
You can get a wife that doesn't have to work and can take care of your kids. People still believe in Truth. No nuclear bombs have yet been detonated. Privacy is a real thing. People still read books. Money is backed by gold. Industry has not yet devalued the power of your mind and body. Etc.
It's not really hard to find a reason not to want to live in the decline of a civilization. Unless all that interests you is material things, of course. But it's a nonsense idea anyways. You don't get to pick your time.
So youre saying people did not believe false things before the 21st century?
Certainly not. True things and the concept of Truth are different things.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#EpiRel
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I dunno, I certainly wouldn't mind being able to visit the 1980's, 1990's, or even something like the Old West/Early New West, even if only in simulation form.
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The analogy between black people and women is a false one. The historical treatment of women was vastly different to that of blacks. The idea of universal, mass oppression of women is a falsehood created by historical revisionism, something I've detailed here and on the old subreddit in the past.
Most women would live relatively happy lives as the wife of some minor Roman noble or merchant in Renassaince (in fact, framing it as 'wife of' basically plays into the framing and ignores the influence and power these women had). It's just that this doesn't match how the liberal and feminist zeitgeist thinks women should live their lives. Would it have sucked to be a poor or peasant woman in the past? Sure, but for much the same reason it would have been for a man.
Most? Who were all the peasant wives then, aliens perhaps?
By 'most' I meant that most women today, engaging in this lighthearted thought experiment of throwing yourself back in time, would be perfectly content with a position of a high status women.
When men engage in this thought experiment, they rarely imagine themselves as slaves or peasants. The same can apply to women.
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I see this as terrifying, precisely because of the state of decay we find ourselves in. Yes, we have progressed, and I wouldn't want to go back, but we are currently stuck in a pit of philosophical relativism and a suite of human political problems, no different from the past but exacerbated through the new technology of the internet. In short we have fallen already from peak-progress and are now adding disruptive technologies to the already existing X-risk problems.
Call me an old-fashioned pessimist, or just old maybe...
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Ted Kaczynski would like a word.
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This is why Curtis Yarvin irritates me so much. He's an unapologetic monarchist, but the definition of monarchy he uses doesn't describe any actual monarchy in history. In one of his articles he lists ten principles he wants, the implication being that they cannot be achieved by democracy which is why monarchy is necessary:
The health of the citizens is the supreme law
Every citizen is equally protected under the law
The law does not notice trivia
Every citizen has freedom of association
Collective grievances are socially unacceptable
Every citizen gets the same information
The government makes all its own decisions
The government is liable for crime
The government is financially simple
The government curates labor demand
I could go by these blow by blow, but one would be hard-pressed to find historical examples of monarchs who subscribed to any of these principles, let alone all of them. In the introduction to the article, he tries to differentiate monarchy from dictatorship by describing the latter as merely physically competent while the former is also spiritually competent, which brings to mind images of Platonic virtue and philosopher kings. Well, what actually kings could be described that way? Henry VIII? Louis XIV? Nero? Mohammed bin Salman? Once you have absolutist rule you have absolutist rule, period. The minute you put restrictions on a monarch's power (especially the kind of restrictions advocated for here), congratulations, you're a liberal.
Two immediately come to mind coming very, very, close if they didn't actually achieve it - Marcus Aurelius, and Pedro II of Brazil. I'm less familiar with non-Western history, but I imagine some others would qualify, perhaps Harun Al-Rashid, Ashoka (after conversion) and others.
Also, this engaging in a bit of a nirvana fallacy. A hypothetical just monarchy doesn't have to be perfect, just reasonably and practically just. Our own liberal democracies aren't perfect either (as was and is commonly proclaimed in communist propaganda)
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Does liberalism follow the "one drop rule", but monarchism doesn't? Because to preserve symmetry, one would have to be called a monarchist the moment one puts limits on the power of the masses (supreme courts, human rights, abolishment of lynching).
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I think that something like mid-1990s (or a few years earlier, depending on society) would be an acceptable answer in Western context. Well over a decade of almost uninterrupted growth until the Great Recession awaits, along with the rise of Internet as a system that facilitates human communication and togetherness instead of replacing it. Technically, that's pre-21st century...
Even that would be too much of a culture shock for most people. Consider the cell phone. Now that they're ubiquitous there's some consternation that they intrude too much into daily life; it used to be that if someone wanted to get a hold of you either had to be at home or (in an emergency) another known location. Now there's nowhere to hide. This ignores the fact that before the rise of cell phones if you were expecting a call you were pretty much stuck at home until that call came. And when a call did come you had no control there. Caller ID existed, but it cost extra so few people had it. When that phone rang it could be anybody, and the only way to find out was to pick up. When you did make a call, you generally couldn't call just anyone, since there was a charge for anything other than local calls, and it wasn't cheap. And of course you can forget about text messaging.
While the 90s may be know for the internet's meteoric rise, it wasn't really a thing for most people until the end of the decade, and even then it was more popular as a buzzword than something people actually used. By the year 2000 only about half of American households even had a computer, and fewer than 40% had internet access. In 1995 fewer than 10% had internet access. And the most popular way of getting internet access was through AOL, which was describes as a "walled garden" since it wasn't true internet access but access to a curated selection of popular sites. You got this access via a 14.4 or 28.8 kbps modem (though broadband was available in some places by the end of the decade) that was slow as hell, and through a machine that was as finicky as hell. This was the era when you'd try to do something relatively straightforward—like connect to a new printer—and all hell would break loose with Illegal Operations and Blue Screens of Death while you tried to navigate the autoexec.bat and config.sys via MS-DOS to make sure there wasn't some driver problem or IRQ port conflict or whatever. And this "togetherness" was limited to the before time, when the internet was Usenet and was the domain of hippies and nerds. By the time normies got online chatrooms were full of drunken fratboys swearing at each other and flame wars over which pro wrestlers were better (I still maintain that Nailz sucked).
Re: cell phones vs. home phones, you do realize that answering machines also came about at around the same time, right? We literally had machines for being able to receive phone messages in the event we were called and weren't at the house to take it, I don't think the whole "trapped at home waiting for a phone call" thing was all too common even before the dominance of cell phones.
Dude, if you were waiting for a girl to call you back you weren't looking for her to get the machine. There's a reason Soul Asylum sang "Waiting by the phone / waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone".
Okay, but what about the 95% of the time where you're not looking to score pussy?
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I'm not saying I'd go myself, really - just that it wouldn't be in the same category as, say, answering 1917 or 1950 would be.
Also, of course, going by personal experiences, I started using Internet around mid-90s (being around 10 at that time), I'm fairly sure we had Internet at home before 00s, and was already pretty deep in the forums world around 98-99. Finnish online access was, of course, world-class from the get-go, with none of the AOL walled garden stuff. While I've had my fights with autoexec.bat and config.sys, that was more connected to (pirated) games to work than anything Internet-related.
There's a lot of charts like this showing that the time from ca 1997 to ca 2012 was basically less lonely time for teens than before and after that, and I hold that the most likely explanation is, indeed, that it was the time after it became possible to form and maintain friendships online but the online part of the friendship complimented the physical, in-person part instead of replacing it, which happened after smartphones became ubiquitous.
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Most people, male or female, operate on the principle of "what's good for me is good simpliciter, and what's bad for me is bad simpliciter". When evaluating any ideology, philosophical theory, or political system, the most important question is always "what's in it for me?". Only a relatively small number of people are able to break out of this type of thinking and evaluate things more objectively. In keeping with the general trend of women clustering more tightly around the psychological average, I would be willing to believe that women are somewhat more prone to this type of thinking than men are; but in most cases that will be hardly worth bringing up, because most men are prone to it too.
You may be able to better understand the responses you're getting from women if you look at things from their perspective. If someone said "I have this idea for an alternative political system where men will not be allowed to own property or assets, they will be barred from most careers and schools simply on account of being male, and they will not be allowed to control their own bank account separate from their wife's", how do you think most men would react? Maybe you can do the 150 IQ big-brained Rationalist routine and say "that sounds unappealing to me on a personal level, but I'm willing to hear out the rest of your proposal and make a holistic evaluation once I have considered all relevant information". But most men wouldn't react that way. They would just say "what? No that sounds dumb, I don't want that. No I don't care about the abstract spiritual benefits of living in accordance with natural law. Go away."
Same thing is happening here.
The difference isn't that men are more objective, it's that men are more hopefully or narcissistically certain of their own unique special superiority. A vanishingly small percentage of men name time periods by Rawlsian veils of ignorance.
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You mention a degree of incredulity at the homogeneity of this attitude, and I think that points to a specific insight. Other commenters have suggested that "2023" is indeed the right answer for everyone, men and women, because... there's more Marvel movies to consoom now, I guess, and only edgelords would disagree. And that may be true, but it misses the point that you always get some male edgelords who get autistic about DEUS VULTing with the Crusades or Smashing The Fash in 1917 Petrograd, and are willing to stick their neck out and say "Yes the spiritual interesting-ness of the times exceeds the appeal of being able to go see Ant Man: Quantumania". Even if it's poorly thought out; even if they're almost certainly, objectively wrong; they'll speak the words, publicly.
What I think you're seeing with women is probably not some deeper or more clear-sighted shared awareness of either the rising tide of technological progress nor the snowballing gynocentrism of society. What I think you're seeing with women is the greater conformism of their gender. They know that "Now" is the answer that all their friends will say, that you might get cancelled if you don't say... so that's what they say. They gain nothing from being an edgelord because (as has been rehashed on these pages and infinitum) women get points/mates/security just for existing. If you want anyone to notice you as a man, you must stand out from the crowd, and this is the biological basis for male edgelord-ism.
That the answer "2023" is plausibly correct in an objective sense is a coincidence. They say it because it's conformist, not because they have deeply considered the pros and cons of ACCELERATE
No need to cook up an "actually women don't think about things"-like explanation where "it's painfully obvious for anyone who is in college or would want to go there that you wouldn't be able to go to college if you were a 1800s peasant" suffices.
Frankly, I'm tempted to write off many mottizen politically incorrect posts as "they actually haven't evaluated those ideas, they just learned to rehash Wrongthink (and quote 1984isms while doing so) to feed their compulsive contrarianism". Do you believe that would be charitable? Or even falsifiable?
If one of the rules of charity is that you’re never allowed to psychoanalyze your opponents, then I suppose it’s uncharitable by definition. But I do think your hypothesis is a reasonable one, and it probably has some truth to it. A lot of us are compulsive contrarians.
As for falsifiability, it’s not really a reasonable criteria to aim for outside of the hard sciences. If we had to restrict ourselves to only discussing what was in practice falsifiable, we would close off vast swaths of human thought.
Certainly not everything has to be falsifiable, but factual statements about your opponents probably should be if there's a productive discussion to be had.
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Probably none. The point I'm trying to make is not that the homogeneous women or the heterogeneous men are either right or wrong, or sincere or insincere. These considerations go deeper than necessary to understand the phenomenon OP identified. We can explain the observation without ever having to consider the truth-value of the answers his colleagues gave. Considering "publicly stated opinions" through the lens of a high school popularity contest has a lot better predictive power than considering the relative merits of whatever that opinion purports to be about ex facie. Requires a lot less domain knowledge, too.
That being said, I'd really want to see the Fourth Crusade, just because I'm a Dandolo fanboi.
The one where they destroyed and looted a bunch of (Christian) cities, including Constantinople? A bizarre crusade and doge to be a fan of.
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I wish we could just make this a permanent sticky post. This explains the majority of questions that one might have about gender dynamics.
Only if we can pair it with this one.
Frankly, I expect the reasoning for “but women have it so easy” is pretty motivated. I don’t think the actual evidence for it is very strong, either, but it’s better than appeal to consensus.
This will sound totally audacious, but the concept of privilege, and all the work that leftists have done to defend its coherence over the years, is very useful here. It's just female privilege instead of male privilege. Obviously women have problems too, and no one has it so easy that they can just lay there and have things handed to them; but women will still have it easier in many ways as compared to men.
What do you think of this post? (And some of the surrounding ones where people discussed the same issue)
Absolutely, that's what I'm always trying to tell people. Sticky it. Once you understand that sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive then everything else follows in a very natural and rational manner.
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That would be consensus-building.
More deeply, one of the founding ideas of this place is that fundamental social ideas should be questioned, constantly. Social science is bad. We know it’s bad. I am not a huge fan of Popper’s “scientific theories can never be proven, only falsified,” idea, but that’s about as good as we’re going to get in social science with current levels of technology. I consider it immensely valuable to point out “this observation does/does not falsify theory X, Y or Z”, whenever novel social information is obtained.
It was a more elaborate way of saying “This!”. I wasn’t actually being serious.
I’m all for constant questioning. There comes a point where continued questioning is no longer that useful though, barring a major new discovery. Biologists have better things to spend their time on than questioning evolution; better to just teach it as truth and get on with other things.
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"DAE women bad?" It's like I travelled back in time to early 2010s Reddit or something.
Why? Any good Marxist should understand the fundamental divide is between capital/human beings and labor/human doings- that whole "workers of the world, unite" thing doesn't ring any bells? Yeah, being one sex or the other tends to overwhelmingly bucket one in one or the other group for evolutionary reasons, but not always- there's plenty of (by this definition) room for transgender activity and group membership is not set in stone. Technology will soon arrive to obsolete what little productive role capital has in the same way technology obsoleted labor 100 years ago, and there will likely be a renegotiation between the sexes at that time, so there's very little novel observation to make about inter-sexual relations other than watching the system evolve from those initial conditions.
And Eve was the first to eat the fruit. You were raised Catholic, so you should know that's, uh, a low-hanging fruit. Not a new observation.
No, I'd say the capital gender understands the social framework perfectly fine. If the society has managed to defeat every enemy capital can (and the West absolutely has, at least for now) be as corrupt as it likes; it doesn't need to work or improve anything because there are no barbarians to come and lead them away in chains as a punishment for their waste of resources, and that's just the way it is.
Yes, 1984 should have taught you this is what the capital gender brings about when it has no external opposition. As described, we also observe the emergence of the Junior Anti-Sex League as labor declines in social power; while man/woman are a proxy for labor/capital, that proxy isn't useless to capital, and now you know why progressive women have the internal politics that they do (and also why they're fine with encouraging anything but bog-standard heterosexuality).
Technology is capital, it's the most central possible example of capital.
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That's some level of wishful thinking, really.
No, technology is arriving that's going to make labor wholly irrelevant by replacing it with 'service fees' for AI, and capital completely dominant.
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Yours is a good post.
But probably my message and what I wanted to say was not so clear; I am not condemning the logic behind the capital gender reasoning, because it is perfectly fine.
I offer a helpful? refinement that should cut down on the previous polemic. Most of the women I know don't act like what "their gender" should predict from a naive analysis (true for some of the men I know, too), and what someone's gender [in the capital/labor sense] is tends to be a collision of a bunch of personality traits in the same way a discrete electron orbiting an atom is more properly described as a probability density, so I just figured I'd go one level deeper and it seems to work.
Or maybe I'm just making excuses. Take progressive thought to its logical conclusions controlling for expressions of anti-social intent and action being different between the genders, remember that the female tendency to do nothing and hide under the bed from any risk whatsoever is just as destructive and deadly as anything males get up to, add a generous helping of "your rules, fairly", and you'll get most of the way to a workable argument. You're still not going to convince a womanist because "man bad woman good" is an intractable [bad] faith argument, but you already know that anyway.
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How many men do you know that would answer differently? I realise this is one of your weaker assertions regarding gender differences (with the stronger one being "It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past"), but to my eyes answering earnestly with anything other than "now" is a mark of edginess: you must either be so dramatic that you refuse to let yourself consider the less-glamorous parts of your value function, or so psychologically deviant from the grillpilled median that you genuinely would trade off arguable spiritual benefits of past societies for all our material advances in technology, medicine, peace et cetera. Ironically, the only people over the age of 18 I know irl who would answer differently from "now" are women in my family: my mother who would return to the Soviet Union per the "dramatic" exception, and her mother who would choose some point in time before 1900 for being a religious extremist.
If you have come to be known as the "actually arguing to retvrn to the past" guy in your social circles, consider that your arguments about more detailed pros and cons of past societies might no longer actually be received on their own merits either. People might not be willing to entertain an "isn't it curious how quickly they could build a bridge or train station in the late 1800s compared to now?" in the spirit of intellectual inquiry if the expectation is that it will be used as ammo for "...and therefore we should restore the hereditary monarchy", and if you are a woman in $current_year, pointing out that the hereditary monarchy entailed wrongs against your gender that are nowadays treated as blasphemous is as convenient a way to shut down the discussion as any. In other words, your problem may not actually be that women are politically qualitatively different, but rather that you haven't found a social circle that agrees with your politics, and it is merely a downstream annoyance that women have a particularly quick and easy way to weaponise the disagreement.
Notice that these discussions were not serious intellectual inquiries about the past, they were more of light topics when you shot out random questions. And men almost always answered with any epoch that you can think of. Obviously anyone put always first the "but the medicine", but that was logical and assured from the beginning, I still have not met someone that likes to die because of the lacks of antibiotics.
This is a weird assumption from your side: I am not the "retvrn guy" neither in my circles nor personally speaking, and my social circle is radically diverse in terms of ideologies and nationalities. And again, it happens also when I met people that do not know me well or very well.
It wasn't clear to me from your original post that you are talking about lightweight low-stakes conversation rather than an attempt to seriously think about questions (even if they may have a whimsical dimension); however, if you are, then I'm all the less sure that anything you observe is indicative of any sort of deeper qualitative difference. It really shouldn't be a surprise that, at the level of "you have 2 seconds to come up with an answer, otherwise the silence will be awkward and your social status will drop", what will come out is our society's cached thoughts, and that our society's cached beliefs include every past era having been terrible for women. Speaking for myself, if you asked me over a drink about my favourite daydream timetravel mental LARP, I might talk your ears off with semi-elaborate plans for how I would go from stranded in the Ancient Roman countryside to having the ear of someone with whom I could bring the timeline of history forward by a bit (I like to imagine I would have gotten along with Varro); but if you instead asked me what era I would suggest my girlfriend to have a timetravel adventure in, I would respond in exactly the same way as the women you are quoting, for exactly the same reasons.
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