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Is the Gender War the oddest "culture war"?
Fair warning: this is going to provide few conclusions. TBH I'm more interested in soliciting opinions on which explanation seems most plausible.
I was on another sub and someone complained about how tiring the interminable gender war was. And it raised something I had been thinking of for a while: it feels like there's something very odd about a society where sexes are encouraged to disdain each other despite being unable to actually do without said sex.
I grew up in Africa and moved to the West near the end of my teenage years so I've lived in very different societies and have struggled to understand their differences. . One highly progressive and aiming for gender egalitarianism and another that has a very traditional understanding of gender still, due to religion and culture. As Muslim nations go we're pretty progressive relative to some of the Arabs (no one I knew growing up wore or was expected to wear hijab - though I saw more of them around when I returned not too long ago), but it's no Sweden.
The interesting thing is though, growing up, gender wars weren't as big a deal as in the West. I'm not saying that women never reacted badly to sexism or no one ever pushed for change. But...it just didn't feel like there was this interminable "battle of the sexes".
Thing is: we had many other forms of culture war. The most obvious being ethnic strife. That was just taken for granted. It makes perfect sense to me that tribes will dislike one another, groups will cynically deploy identity politics as suits them and so on.
It doesn't seem obvious to me that any tribe will be so riven internally that men and women (the two components necessary for it to reproduce the tribe) see themselves as competitors or enemies. With this logic being taken to absurd extremes where women make money publicly mocking their husbands for the applause of the internet
So why is there a gender war? Why didn't it feel as big a deal back home? Potential reasons:
There was, I was just too young to know. The most parsimonious and intuitive. Game stops, do not pass "go".
There's "'gender war" in the same way there's "class conflict" in the medieval era: exploitation is still happening but conditions haven't allowed something like marxism (well...feminism here) to explode cause the proles are still too oppressed. So there's a latent gender war. a. There's some attraction to this one too, especially when it comes to one obvious gender war issue we don't share with the West: polygamy. Here many women are opposed and it does create a clear split between men and women. But it seems like it simply hasn't bubbled up into a politically salient critique of the whole institution or, even broader, some "patriarchy"
The West has much weaker tribal and religious links, which means there's much less of a sense of intratribal loyalty to block gender wars or redirect them. If you're just someone in some random urban region (that you likely moved to) they're not really your men/women, it's not really your tribe. There's no common destiny; it's just random individuals and so it's easier to demonize them as oppressors/bitches. a. As a corollary: the absence of strong, traditional identities allows/drives people to identify in different ways that allow gender conflict.
Traditional societies have a much clearer path to marriage/family which reduces what there is to fight over. It is precisely the shifting of norms (and their endless litigation) that justifies becoming a gender warrior. Even unjust but stable norms may be better here.
Blank slate ideology hasn't taken root. IMO this leads to damage because the natural points of divergence between men and women are no longer natural tendencies we have to work around but actual failings on the part of the other side (obvious examples would be: women being "too" choosy, men valuing youth and variety "too much")
The American culture war is just particularly strange; Austrians and other Westerners do not speak this way but they don't get as much airtime.
Similarly: the Culture war doesn't actually represent lived reality, it is just a loud form of kayfabe, especially on the Left. Women and men pair up and go about their days, regardless of the TikTok rhetoric
Feminism itself is to blame: the ideology, especially when stripped of class, requires a male enemy. When stripped of class it becomes a tool of middle class and above women seeking to remove barriers to their privilege who especially need men as such to be the enemy (if they argued on the basis of class they would risk arguing against the very privileged state they wish to reach). If this allows a middle class woman to talk down to a working class man as an avatar of the problems of all men...all the better.
So...I'm curious which ones the Motte finds intuitive (besides the obvious). Because - if I ignore my desire to be epistemically humble - I do have sympathy for 2,3 & 5 (though arguably 5 is just a proxy for how far feminist ideas have spread in the first place).
To a person living with very traditional gender roles in the west, the question addressed to feminism is not "why do you think men and women are the same", it's "why do you think there can be a democracy with two people". Whether the differences between men and women are well understood or not, the need for gender roles seems like common sense because you cannot have democracy in relations between the sexes because it's inherently an even number of people involved, and the innate differences are viewed as supporting evidence rather than the main case to be made.
I find this interesting because neoreactionaries usually go about making their arguments running in the opposite direction; innate sex differences prove the need for gender roles and the "duh, if two people disagree then one of them has to be in charge or the issue will never get resolved" doesn't seem to come up very often.
I would hazard a guess that more traditional gender roles in african society spares the need to shut down gender wars with 10,000 word essays because "duh, think about it" suffices, and "duh, think about it" is probably a much better argument.
I don't find this to be true at all, whether in my personal relationships, business, or even politics.
Further, even in this case, who do you think should be in charge? In traditional gender roles it's obviously the man, but why? In a lot of ways this is what the 'battle of the sexes' is all about: One group claiming a right to power and the other challenging it.
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This doesn't seem to be at all true to me. Not just in my marriage, but in many situations with just 2 people, nobody is in charge and issues are still resolved. I often do sports in twos with various friends, and I can't figure out any hierarchy at all. In certain situations it's clear that one person has more expertise
People will often say how in male-only groups there is a clear hierarchy, and I have certainly seen that on occasion, but it's not the norm.
Adults can resolve issues in small groups down to pairs, without anybody being in charge.
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This is my view right here, although it goes past gender. I think when it comes to Progressive concepts of identity, you're not actually supposed to internalize/actualize them, and they live in more of a theoretical/political space. As someone who has internalized these concepts, I've been told many a time by advocates for these concepts that you're not supposed to do that. Of course, the out-group doesn't get the message on this (and how could they, considering how often they're analyzed and deconstructed using them), and it's that which creates the bulk of the conflict.
It may start out that way. But I think the wrestling concept of "working yourself into a shoot" can be at work, especially for the younger women and "allies" who absorbed this stuff young without any critical responses and exist in far more cloistered environments.
Even the in-group can get high on its own supply.
Does that include all office-working women you know?
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Oh certainly, and I'm not saying that this message is wildly sent out, but my experiences with being told this make me comfortable with pointing this out without it being intended as boo-outgroup, as I think it's a fairly accurate statement.
My personal belief is that there's just people (including myself) who are more innately wired to internalize these ideas, and this stuff is going to be a potential danger to us. When it comes to teaching this stuff in schools, at the minimum I want "guardrails" put in place to protect vulnerable people in this regard. The other side of this, is that I don't see the actual benefit. I mean...I can understand the meaning of just "Vote Left"...but that feels very hollow. Truth is, even as someone who understands how unhealthy it is, if I thought that there was a hope of internalization being more common, I at least could see the point.
The overarching thing, is that I think the idea of socioeconomic decline, or even stagnation is too horrific to too many people for this to be even a possibility. So any sort of internalizing of the idea of "You don't deserve this, time to give it up", which I think is the message being presented to people on the outside, I think is simply a no-go area.
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May I ask, does your native culture have jokes about nagging wives/henpecked husbands? Because this seems to be a staple of humour, even in the heyday of The Patriarchy.
The Battle of the Sexes is an old trope, and for any war, you need an enemy. For feminism, that was The Patriarchy (but in practice that meant 'men in general' and not 'the system of society under which both men and women live').
Things have improved greatly, but life is still not perfect. And it would seem that for many women, all the sexual liberation and workplace equality means "in fact, you can't have it all". So they feel they have been cheated out of what was promised, and there must be Someone To Blame for that, and that means "white cis straight (Christian) men" because that is the traditional enemy.
You are completely correct about class versus race; the newer strains of feminism have gone to Intersectionality and how middle-class white women are as much the enemy, because they modelled the feminist movement on what they wanted and experienced and didn't listen to, or silenced, BIPOC women. There is womanism and mujerism which evolved out of mujerista theology, which evolved out of liberation theology, for black and Latina women respectively.
Ironically, a lot of the black/latina women involved in the theoretical and activist work are just as privileged, having been inducted into the middle-class and academia, as the white women they are competing against, which is why the favoured enemy is still The White Male, because that is the ultimate of privilege against which one can measure oneself: yes, I am more privileged than you are, but I am still less privileged than Him.
The battle of the sexes is natural, but alliances within the sexes seems less straightforward.
Every harmony results from some conflict settling at some equilibrium. Men and women have different imperatives, desires, points of view, etc. and these fundental conflicts have to bump up against one another and get settled at some compromise but with some leverage and threat remaining, to keep both parties to hold to their end of the bargain.
Such conflicts even arise between generations and even the most intimate connections like mother and child. Both on a social and a biological level. The embryo already tries to exploit the mother in utero, trying to grab on to as much resources and nutrition as possible, which the mother must defend itself from.
Even one's own cells and body parts are in conflict and this is most apparent in cancer.
Men and women are in a biological arms race too, a lot of deception, signaling, trying to see through all that and more layers of this (with reality providing a grounding through life and death in natural selection, and so an anchor to truth).
But it doesn't follow that members of the same sex are allies in all this. Rather, they just have a different type of competition going on. Especially among males, who are more competitive (that's why they need to be so big). I think the MRA idea of male solidarity is therefore doomed to be low status. A man who needs other men to protect his interests against women is seen as weak. Now women are competitive among themselves too, but typically less openly and overtly and more subtly than men. So the expectation would be that they also shouldn't have too much purely sex-based solidarity to each other in reality, but perhaps more pretension of it at least, than in the case of men.
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I've seen those jokes but you'd be surprised how hard it is to tell what's been influenced or not in a place where the language - and thus history - is oral and the British have ruled since before living memory. I suppose, at a certain point, it doesn't matter.
I sometimes saw - amongst the more educated cadre - a more benign version about the supposedly all-powerful "lady of the house" and I'm really not convinced it's an independent belief.
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I agree with you, gender wars make least sense when it comes to conflict. Mostly because men and women do (or at least used to) literally live together. Everybody has some mother and father or some brothers and sisters or cousins and nephews. Also it is very hard to be hardcore misandrist feminist if you happen to raise a boy.
I think that the modern gender wars are fueled by mostly technological but also social changes in the west in 20th century. There are several important milestones there: the first one being invention of home appliances which made it easier to take care of household production/chores freeing mostly women to pursue other things in life. Second was overall servitization of economy where unlike agricultural or industrial economy the physical strength is no longer advantage. And the last and huge one is of course the pill which gave women control over their reproduction.
What happened as a result of all three of these technological changes is basically emasculation of women who could go out and take over traditionally masculine roles of a provider and also ability to adopt more male style of sexual behavior. One can easily see this in all cultural product where a woman can get away with some pretty nasty and outright insulting stuff that men would not be able to get away with. But this is still incomplete transition, there is still a lot of friction there. We still see lingering women are wonderful effect which basically gives them license to behave this way. It also has to be said that while emasculated women and effeminate men are a thing, they are not necessarily viewed as a model for ideal partner.
I like how Louise Perry described it - if you are a modern woman in office setting you can go about your life without ever encountering any situation where sex really matters, that is if you do not go to a gym or similar setting trying to lift weights or something like that. You would be correct to assume that there is no distinction between men and women and possibly perceive any challenge to that experience as somehow weird or even insulting. Having a widely accepted conspiracy theory about how patriarchy is beyond all this, that any differences are unnatural and a result of these nefarious forces distorting the natural equality of sexes for millennia can look very appealing - especially if believing or at least espousing ideas of such a conspiracy can get you advantages. However this is less tenable view if one becomes a mother of a boy or if one wants to have long-term partnership or if a woman is faced with some really nasty things like financial stress, crime in the neighborhood or myriads of other situation when actually having masculine man would really come in handy.
Did you perhaps mean "masculation of women" and "masculated women"? What you wrote means the opposite of that.
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This one hits with my personal experience. Much as my TikTok feed is full of TedPosting, but only the marginal "weirdoes" actually go shoot up an ATF office, and I suspect even most people posting these memes would agree that such a person wasn't "in on the joke" or didn't "get it;" the internet is full of feminisms and RedPills, but only the weirdoes actually do things like refuse to have sex for fear of rape/false-rape-accusations, or can't get a date because of ideology, or view men/women as the enemy in a way that interferes with their day to day life. Hell, irl I know a fair number of like serious racists who have fully normal cordial relations with Black people in their day to day lives. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and expecting people to live by their rhetoric would leave very little of the motte standing.
Speaking personally, the only romantic life I can truly speak to, I've hooked up with lots of women who love to make "God, men are the worst" jokes, and for whom Cis-Hetero-White-man is practically a slur! I'm whiter than mayonnaise and straighter than a yardstick; alone in bed the members of our school's "Women of Color Collective" would mostly just flat out say they loved white guys, while the white girls wouldn't admit it but their dating patterns proved them wrong. For all the criticism from the online left and all the corresponding whining from the online right, being a white man is awesome, I've never experienced it as anything but an advantage.
But this probably also plays into the "class struggle" aspect to the soft-polygyny that lots of other comments are pointing out: the top whatever% of white men have it great because the benefits of being tall/strong/pretty/blonde/rich/intelligent outweigh the rhetoric of criticism, while white men who are short/weak/ugly/defective get all the rhetorical criticism and none of the spoils.
I agree with your general point - that most people don't say extreme things and most people who say extreme things don't act on it.
But the problem is the everything is indicating there is a breakdown of the relationship between the sexes, extreme rhetoric or not. Increasing rates (and somewhat assymetric) of sexlessness, lower and delayed marriage, increasing rates of divorce (which are overwhelmingly initiated by women). If we are willing to looking media and culture we are increasingly getting stuff like 'where are all the good men gone' published in mainstream media.
Really, it seems obvious to me that the sexes are coming apart and it's making everyone unhappy. I don't think it's unreasable to that 'TikTok rhetoric' is just a symptom of that.
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I strongly suspect that framing celibacy as a reaction to being afraid of accusations is often just a mental crutch to explain away an unwillingness to suffer the fear, doubt, and embarrassment of approach and rejection. Rather than having to deal with that real, difficult reality that men get rejected a lot and it stings, but eventually you'll get through (in all likelihood), adopting a defensive crouch that explains away why you're not doing it allows reconciling some cognitive dissonance. Regarding ideology, quite a few people have noted that the commonly experienced reality is that most people aren't actually all that dedicated to their politics and that pairing off with a fairly normie woman tends to result in her adopting some approximation of her man's politics, or at least tolerating his idiosyncrasies. Sure, being a literal Nazi might be a dating problem, but you can probably get away with saying "Pinochet did nothing wrong" without alienating very many women.
They admit as much. The people who take this stance are usually the more jaded MGTOW types who had some sort of bad experience (divorce is a common one) and have decided romance isn't worth it.
Incels just tend to state that they have no chance cause women are totally shallow or whatever other story they come up with, not that they could have women but it wasn't worth it
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In my opinion, as with most wars, the reason why it started becomes less important as the war continues and we should examine the reasons why it doesn't end. And of course I can provide that reason: Because the west can afford it. We are so damn wealthy and powerful that we can afford to let our birth rates plummet, to sacrifice our economies for vanity projects and to fight the stupidest culture wars among ourselves. Why is a war between the sexes? Because it was started, and there is no pressure to end it.
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I'd wager most of it is simply from the decline of monogamy. In the West, both men and women are regressing to their biological sexual imperatives where men want to have sex with lots of women and women want to clinch commitment from a high-value man. This creates an adversarial relationship with many people left out in the cold: low-value men are rejected by most women outright, high-value men have a huge abundance and can treat women like sentient fleshlights, and women in general target the top quintile of men who treat them as disposable goods, or else they have to brave the lower quintiles full of "creeps". The best soothing balm for the battle of the sexes is simply being in a healthy long-term relationship, as it's hard to have a war when all the soldiers are fraternizing with the enemy. But the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships.
There are other more minor factors, e.g. the Internet has let people delve into their niche interests harder than ever, which has led to men and women dividing from each other more. I, for example, spend much of my free time playing grand strategy games and discussing culture war + philosophy with strangers in a rationalist framework. Women probably make up <5% in any of these areas, and as such I barely have any meaningful interactions with women since I graduated college. I didn't make a conscious effort to weed women out of my life or anything, I just focused on the things I was most interested in. I do interact with women a bit at work, but modern white collar environments are completely sterile so that hardly counts for much. In any case, two groups dividing from each other doesn't do wonders for understanding between them.
There's also the impact of third wave feminism implicitly branding most men as latent rape machines and red-pill/incel communities treating women like drones, which also doesn't help.
But yeah, it's mostly declining monogamy.
What you describe, however, is more the traditional way things worked: men had their own sphere (generally the exterior world of work) and women theirs (the domestic), and both sexes went their own ways with regards to interests and hobbies (men-only clubs, women's sewing circles or coffee mornings). Interaction between the sexes was mostly within the realm of the family; you found someone, or your parents found someone for you, you got married, and setting up as man and wife in your own home was where you interacted. Men in general didn't expect to interact with women at work or in their spaces, and the same for women with regards to men.
And then the feminist movement pushed for women in work alongside men (ignoring for the moment that working-class women and men were working together in factories and the mines, which is a whole other question) - in white-collar jobs, let us say, and no more men-only clubs. This introduced more social interaction between men and women, but unless interests overlapped, there still remained and remains the gap where, as you say, "I, for example, spend much of my free time playing grand strategy games and discussing culture war + philosophy with strangers in a rationalist framework. Women probably make up <5% in any of these areas, and as such I barely have any meaningful interactions with women since I graduated college."
I think this was less of a problem when society as a whole accepted that "John is going to visit his club and talk about politics" (even if mostly John went to his club to drink and smoke and gossip with the lads), and "Mary is going to her sewing circle or ladies' benevolent club" and there wasn't the expectation that the sexes were supposed to mingle like that. Yes, it was hard on women who did want to talk about politics and philosophy and not about cake recipes or knitting scarves for the poor, hence the label of bluestocking, but it also gave both sexes a breathing space where they could cluster around their own interests.
But the decline of the acceptance of separate spaces, because that is discrimination (and again, yeah, if the boys are all going to strip clubs for entertaining clients and making deals, this cuts out Joan who works in the same industry from climbing the career ladder the same way Phil can) combined with the decline of monogamy and marriage, means that the gears have slipped. Now Sally is supposed to be able to join the He-Man Girl Haters' Club and talk about politics and economics and the like, which is great if Sally is interested in that and can hold an intelligent opinion. But if Sally is only joining because "I should be able to join this club!" (the absurd limit of this being avowed atheists protesting that they can't join college Christian groups and be officers in them, so the university either forces the group to let them include atheists or close down) then in the long run there will be a dilution of the purpose of the club, and we'll end up with the familiar complaint by women that "I wanted to join this hobby club, and I met a guy there who I thought was interested in being my friend, but it turns out he only wanted to sleep with me and when I turned him down he never spoke to me again" versus the complaint by men that "she friendzoned me, why are women such mercenary bitches?"
You don't meet a girl, get married and settle down now as per the expectations of society; both men and women are supposed to play the field, sow their wild oats, and cohabit before marriage. Romantic partners are now also supposed to be all-in-all to each other - not just lovers or spouses, but best friends, total emotional support network, interested in everything the other is interested in, the first and only port of call for all needs. That John goes out for a night out with the boys separately, leaving Susie at home, and Susie goes off on a day shopping with the girls, leaving John home, is now a bad thing. You're supposed to be joined at the hip at all times.
A little space, where John and Susie are allowed separate interests, as long as Susie (or John!) can join the same Baking Club or Economics Forum, isn't a bad thing. I think we threw the baby out with the bathwater when we pushed for closing those down. And the decline of monogamy/the family does mean that the primary way men and women relate to each other is as sexual partners first, before ever stable relationships come into the picture, and that drives for a lot of sleeping around when you have the opportunity, then the whole "men want a lot of women, women want a high-value man" disjoint becomes even worse.
EDIT: To quote C.S. Lewis writing about Friendship in "The Four Loves":
We have down-valued friendship and companionship, and mixed them up with erotic love, and so there is now the feeling that not alone should men and women intermingle in all spheres, (and I have no objections when it comes to them both being genuinely interested in something for its own sake, be that talking about philosophy or the latest Marvel movie), but that not to do so is discriminatory, and on top of that, you should always be on the look-out for sexual opportunity: whether that is "join this club to meet people" (again, not a bad aim in itself, but if you're only wanting to find someone to bang, then you are misusing the club) or "why do guys always try to get in your pants/why do women always friendzone you" complaints.
If they wanted to do that they could just join one of the numerous female political groups - temperance and abolitionism vome to mind e.g. Women's Christian Temperance Union. Of course, despite obviously engaging in political activity, they are rarely if ever described as 'political' clubs or organisations even today, often described in terms of the social or moral. Politics has acquired a broader meaning in contemporary society ('personal is political') but historically mostly just meant explicit partisans politics reflecting parliament. The idea that women weren't engaged politically in the broad meaning is a myth that won't die. They just did it via different means and largely seperate from men, which is keeping in with the theme of this thread.
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Men and women used to have common interests, but seperate spheres.
Everyone went to the same movies, dances, etc... but men had clubhouses (litterally this is what service clubs were) women had their own seperate spaces, and this was how you had cross gender and homosocial relationships...
Now to get the value of single sex spaces you prettymuch need to dive into some niche interest that's actively repellant to the opposite sex. men can't just have men only drinking and social clubs, that's sexist, you have to cultivate something so nichely male coded that it will actively prevent women from trying to voluntarily occupy the space... thus you get something like warhammer 40k which could be summarized as "history, but actively trying to alienate women"
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I don't know that America made a conscious choice to downgrade friendship - Bowling Alone was calling the decline of social interaction and traced it to much earlier in time (which implies it isn't just ever more hegemonic feminism at play)
And, tbh, a lot of hobbies (And even sites) are still functionally gender segregated, outside of spaces where you can get sued for it.
The declining friend group issue may be its own that then exacerbates others (e.g. like turning one partner into the end-all,be-all - which may also be helped along by monogamy)
I do think the glamorisation of romantic love has a lot to do with it, and this is probably more so for women than men, but I'll let the men answer that for themselves.
Our culture has made romantic love the supposed peak of existence, there is a Mr. Right, the soulmate, out there for you and until you find him (or her) then your life is not worth living. When you do find them, they will be the all-in-all to you, this will be the most important relationship in your entire life, they will meet your every need. And when the romantic glow fades and you find that the soulmate is just another struggling human, then you dump them and go out to find the real soulmate to live happily ever after.
Which is stupid, because no one person can be everything, and they shouldn't have to be. When it was accepted that men had their own interests, and women had theirs, and once married you would have kids and women's main priority would be their family and home, then there was more room for people to get on. John could go off with the boys, and it wasn't a hanging offence. Susie could have her night out with the girls, and that was fine. They didn't have to be in each other's business all the time, and they had a wider circle of people to meet their emotional and other needs, rather than putting all the eggs in one basket.
I think also women took on the role of managing friendships once married; it seems often to be that the friends of a couple are different to the friends each individually had before. But now we're supposed to put our romantic partners above our natal families or our friends, and they are supposed to come first in everything (except your career). And then we had the breakdown of the bargain, and maybe it was good that it broke down, but it hasn't made all the problems obsolete. Now women are supposed to 'have it all' - a career and a relationship, and men are supposed to be whatever ideal modern feminism holds up. So there is more strain on people, and more dissatisfaction: you are not having the perfect work life and perfect relationship and being fulfilled and all the rest of it, and it's easier to blame the other party for it - it's all the fault of men who still have all this privilege, or it's all the fault of women who take advantage and then fall back on "you are supposed to treat me as special".
I don't have any solutions, but maybe putting down the guns in a ceasefire is a good start. Yes, men did have a social advantage, but men today aren't the oppressors (unless they are, you know, burning their wives in dowry murders). Yes, women do have a social advantage today, but we should be aware of that and not expect six impossible things ("I didn't really want to kiss him but we were both drunk and I felt pressured into it so it was rape because I didn't consent the way I'm supposed to consent").
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I do think it is the oddest culture war in that such an antagonistic relationship between the sexes is historically speaking quite new and seems to have originated in the West (though it is increasingly spreading to other countries now due to the fact that a huge amount of countries are culturally influenced by and want to emulate the West, and additionally feminist ideology has been intentionally promulgated by the West in countries they deem as being insufficiently progressive).
As to your list of possibilities, I think I am most sympathetic to 3, 4 and 8. I am not sympathetic to 2 at all.
The most key thing that I think it's necessary to note is that the gender "war" is mostly only fought in one direction - it's primarily feminist-leaning women and their male sympathisers accusing men of all manner of wrongdoing towards women, and most people out there who aren't all that invested in the gender war seem quite willing to go along with and accept that same narrative. The only major pushback is from people who think that feminism goes too far in their demonisation of men (a defence of men rather than a condemnation of women). Outside of a few isolated and much-maligned circles which people really love to draw attention to due to their deviance from mainstream thought, there's no real reverse equivalent where men express animosity towards women on any large scale and identify them as the source of society's major social ills.
I do think there's an element here of Western society being extremely fractured. When people's lives are atomised and disconnected, it's very easy to forget about people as being, well, people. Especially by the people most disconnected from the trials and tribulations that "normies" face. It's easy to forget about the countless men who work the dirty dangerous jobs to hold our society together when you spend your whole life far removed from that, and to see men as a group as being privileged oppressors. It's notable that feminism is predominantly a movement of upper-middle class women, and has always been such from its very inception. They are so distanced from these conditions that they have the ability to ignore the sacrifices of the men who keep society afloat, and can regard male behaviour and masculinity as a virtual pathology in need of reform. These are the women with the most social clout and influence, and who have the most ability to propagate narratives into the mainstream.
Even in the West, the further away you get from the urban sprawl and the less atomised people are, the less of a gender "war"-type dynamic there is. In the smaller and more rural towns, everyone knows each other, the conditions are far tougher, and it's probably more difficult to start arguing that the men going out and doing all kinds of dirty, thankless labour each day to bring back money for their families are nefarious oppressors of women whose behaviours exemplify toxic masculinity. It's harder to conceptualise of an imaginary spectre of "patriarchy" looming over everything when the society is cohesive and you have personally formed bonds with everyone in your small village.
Then there's the inherent unnatural-ness of the current environment we exist in which has shaped our gender roles in a very weird manner. Our advancement rendered the female role obsolete - a domain which women's psychology is suited to - and pushed them into the male sphere. While technology didn't render human labour in the public sphere obsolete (it would probably take the development of AGI to do that), it unintentionally ended up destroying the private/domestic sphere. The development of all sorts of domestic conveniences to make women's lives easier - created in the men's public sphere, might I add - ended up leading to women's discontentment, as all sorts of chores they would often do communally and share with other women essentially became a set and forget activity. The female role lost the status that it once had (which it should be noted was considerable), and so they flooded the male sphere. Who wouldn't?
The issue here is that the public sphere is characterised mostly by hierarchical, stratified relationships where people are valued for their productivity and are generally held at arms length. This contrasts with the kind of more communal relationships that women prefer, and additionally women are less likely to value climbing the rungs of the corporate ladder than men are. In line with these preferences, since women have entered the workplace and public life more broadly you can see social changes to the nature of the workplace which have made it fall better in line with women's preferences. There's increased emphasis on niceties, stepping on other people's toes is discouraged, making people feel uncomfortable is the worst thing you can do, strict hierarchies are increasingly seen as a negative and the environment has slowly started to look more and more like the personal network-type relationships women tend to be predisposed to.
But no matter how friendly to women's psychology the workplace has become, there's only so much that can be done. These cooperative super-organisms which make up the public sphere can't exist without hierarchy, and can't exist while prioritising the comfort and preferences and sensibilities of every individual at all levels. In other words, it will always suit male psychology far more than it does female, and women will always feel somewhat alienated in such an environment. So you get all these knee-jerk narratives which I think resonate with a lot of women on some level about how the public sphere and its institutions are unfriendly to women. However, they get the cause wrong.
All these things that accompanied industrialisation and modernity massively contributed to the rise of feminism. The feminist preoccupation with women's representation itself could be an ill-conceived attempt at replacing the social status and elevated moral standing that used to accrue to women for performing their roles in the private sphere with formal authority in the public sphere, and it might be ultimately why they attempt to engineer equal outcomes for women in the public sphere in the face of all evidence pointing to the fact that it is simply unworkable. Though of course they won't frame it that way, they'll point to "workplace gender bias against women" (the widespread existence of which, for the most part, I think is questionable and contested at best) in order to justify their attempts at social engineering in order to force parity in public life.
Once feminism and feminist ideas about the "patriarchy" and man-as-enemy became entrenched, the whole thing ended up feeding itself. While it claimed to be a radical, revolutionary ideology, its success was precisely because it capitalised on and reinforced very old perceptions of men as agents with a responsibility to channel their agency towards protecting and providing for women, and women as non-agentic victims who are the appropriate recipients of this protection and provision. Fundamentally, feminism is nothing new, and the main difference I see that exists is its extremely antagonistic attitude towards men and its portrayal of gender relations as being a conflict (well, and its insistence that women occupy the same sphere as men). Many generations have at this point grown up being invested in feminism, and there are plenty of feminist academics and activists who have made the entire thing their livelihoods.
As to the reason why I am not sympathetic to 2, it's because I think any claims about any historical female lack of power (and by extension, female lack of power in other similarly traditional third world societies) are incorrect and simply appeal to perceptions of potentially dangerous, agentic men and non-agentic women. Analogising it to class is a false equivalence because women have never been viewed by men like the underclass was viewed by the nobility. For an upper-class person, their entire social milieu and family are likely upper-class as well, whereas men have wives, sisters and daughters and have incentives to want them to do well. There's also all sorts of evidence pointing towards the idea that people generally (yes, including men) have a preference for protecting women and view them more positively than men which is simply not the case when it comes to other social distinctions like class or race, and there's lots and lots of evidence of traditional social norms and practices that clearly contradict the "male oppression of women" hypothesis. And that perspective is incoherent too - how is it that feminism is such a dominant ideology now if under traditionalism men were so tyrannical and women were so powerless? Men just thought "you know, we should stop doing this 'oppression of women' thing we've done for centuries on end now in virtually every society and never once questioned before?"
I don't hold the opinion that even polygyny reflects male privilege and female oppression. I don't think polygyny has to reflect control and coercion of women and there's evidence against that prevailing view, but even if we assume that that is what it is for the sake of argument the fact is that anything that controls female reproduction necessarily also controls male reproduction. Every polygynous marriage results in a man (or multiple men) being forced into reproductive oblivion and no hope of partnership (especially in these societies with strict premarital and extramarital sex taboos), and the only way you won't end up with a society full of incels is a society where a good portion of the men are dead. This is actually a big deficit of polygamous societies stability-wise - it's not good to have a huge amount of men disconnected from society and family.
There's so much more to say (I can explain and source my arguments more rigorously than I have here) but I don't want this comment to branch into a two-parter.
You would think that the ban on widow remarriage in such societies also disadvantages men - after all, being able to marry a widow gives a second chance to men who can't get a partner under the system of one man/multiple wives - and yet it is always the widows who seem to do worse. The traditional hope and blessing was for the wife never to be a widow (so she should die before her husband), and the widower is free to remarry if he wishes.
I do think we don't realise how heavily Western values were influenced by Christianity, especially by the honour paid to the Virgin Mary. This slowly changed attitudes to women, to marriage, to sexuality, to a lot of things.
As far as I know there is currently no legal ban on widow remarriage in India at the moment. This is not a particularly new development either - the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act 1856 is the early piece of legislation that granted widows the legal ability to remarry, and more current laws such as the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 do not prevent widows from remarrying (rather, it simply provides that a marriage may be solemnised between any two Hindus as long as neither party has a spouse living at the time of the marriage). The article you linked is talking more about the social stigma that gets attached to widows in very staunchly conservative parts of the country than anything else.
If we were to talk about the current Indian laws, I think there's actually an argument that the laws are very favourable to women in quite a few ways, especially considering the fact that preferential treatment of women is explicitly allowed in the equality provisions of the Indian constitution. In a section dictating that the State shall not discriminate based on demography, it's followed up with a bunch of caveats, including "(3) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children."
Unless you do a proper comparison as to who's "doing worse", I don't quite see how this has been proven. The article does speak about the plight of shunned Hindu widows, but it does not provide any such comparison, nor does it attempt to.
This is a common view I see expressed - that the Western world is unique in its treatment of women, even historically - and I am a bit doubtful about it. I've noticed that women are simply assumed to be worse off in the third world with no real substantiation - this is not to say that everything is great for women in these societies, but there's little acknowledgement of the corresponding male issues that exist in them.
In countries such as Afghanistan, there is a practice such as bacha bazi, which translates as 'boy play'. It is on the surface a harmless form of entertainment - young boys dancing for the entertainment of their elders. The boys are trained as dancers, dressed as girls and made to perform to groups of men. Then the boys are taken to hotel rooms where they can be sexually abused. And despite the US military knowing that many of their Afghan allies were involved in the practice of bacha bazi, they continued providing aid to these units.
Then there's things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. People know them for kidnapping the Chibok girls. What people don't know is that Boko Haram went from village to village kidnapping thousands of boys. They not only kidnapped boys, but they killed them too (in many of their attacks, they seem to have specifically targeted men and boys and exempted the women and girls). Here are some links about that. Source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4.
A report by Oxfam in August 2016 noted that thousands of men and boys were killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria. In an Oxfam protection survey with communities affected by violence, people reported 41% more killings of men and boys by Boko Haram than of women and girls; and the number is even higher among adults, with 77% more men killed than women.
What the mainstream goes nuts over, though, is the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls. This despite the fact that Boko Haram were not initially intending to kidnap the girls - the girls were not even the actual target of the raid, and yet these girls being kidnapped was the event that galvanised the international community to start paying attention, as well as offering equipment, intelligence, resources and manpower to "bring back the girls" and deal with Boko Haram.
So let's just say I always regard it as a bit dubious whenever the spectre of misogyny and unique female hardship in third-world countries is raised due to the selectivity of the attention applied to the third world. This is a very good counter-narrative article on women in the third world and media bias (actually, it's a chapter in a book by Tim Goldich, published as an article), which sums up my views on this pretty well:
"You can go to a brutal place, catalogue only the brutality toward women, and on that basis conclude that women are the victims, but if you don’t research conditions for men, if you don’t compare the female victimization against male victimization, your conclusion is logically bankrupt."
Don't get me wrong: I am not trying to argue who has it worse or better. I'm trying to explain why as a result of all of this, I've come to see most takes on gender relations in the third world as the presentation of half-truths at best.
Social stigma is a very potent force, no matter what legislation may say. Talking about how polygyny affects and affected men neglects how it affects and affected women, too. We can't disentangle it by saying "X has it worse, Y has it worse"; for every man who can't marry the woman he wants, there is a woman being married off as a second or third wife who doesn't want it either (first or primary or higher-ranking wives have traditionally not been very kind to subsequent wives or concubines).
The Bachi Bazi boys and the likes are disgraces. It's not much consolation to say that women have been forced into similar roles, and I think you do have to look at "why do some cultures tolerate this, and others don't"? You are correct to say that unique female hardship in third-world countries is not unique and is more complicated than "Western culture is more advanced", but there are differences.
However, the main point is that feminism took the real disadvantages and pointed them out, but is now stuck in the mode of "it is all the fault of men". Men are disadvantaged too, but it may be that male disadvantage and female disadvantage do not resemble each other. So we're trying to compare apples and oranges, and measure it in how many bananas that means.
Sure (though I suspect the stigma heavily depends on where in India you are). I'm just clarifying some things and also stating that there's no actual proper analysis which is made that allows us to appropriately come to a conclusion that women are faring worse. Usually, people look at things that affect women (or that they think affect women), create narratives of female oppression in their mind and assume there is no "other side" of things, when often, there is.
Legally, women in India actually have a huge amount of protections and privileges most people elsewhere never hear about. There's way too many to easily list here, but as previously noted, article 15(3) of the Indian constitution explicitly allows for preferential treatment of women. The constitution (article 243D and 243T) surprisingly also provides for very generous female quotas in village councils (panchayats) and municipalities, but there are other, more egregious things in the law I'll detail below.
The Indian penal code (IPC) contains specific offences that uniquely protect women.
IPC section 354 contains the offence "Assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty" which is female specific and carries a more severe sentencing of up to 5 years. Section 354A on sexual harassment is also gendered. Section 354B "Assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to disrobe" and 354C "Voyeurism" are both strictly male-on-female crimes and carry sentencing of up to 7 years. Section 354D "Stalking" is also male-on-female, and carries a maximum of 3 to 5 years depending on whether it is a first or second conviction. In comparison, the penalties for the other gender neutral offences under the section "Of Criminal Force and Assault" carry sentences of up to only 2 years at most.
IPC section 375 clearly defines rape as only male-on-female, and any attempts to make the definition of rape gender neutral were fiercely protested against by Indian feminists. The IPC does have a law against unnatural offences (Section 377) which may cover male-on-male offences, but it doesn't seem like it would cover the case of a woman forcing "natural" PIV sex on a man.
IPC section 493 has an offence titled "Cohabitation caused by a man deceitfully inducing a belief of lawful marriage" which is also gender-specific - it can by definition only be male-on-female.
IPC section 498A has an offence titled "Husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty" which carries a sentence of up to three years and a fine. 498A is pretty infamous in India for being misused by women, where many of them used it to file false accusations so that they could settle scores. In line with this, there is also an additional law called "Protection Of Women From Domestic Violence Act 2005" which is again gender specific.
IPC section 509 has an offence titled "Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman" which sets out punishments for anyone who, intending to insult a woman's modesty, "utters any words, makes any sound or gesture, or exhibits any object, intending that such word or sound shall be heard, or that such gesture or object shall be seen, by such woman, or intrudes upon the privacy of such woman". There are other corresponding gender-specific acts relating to this topic such as the "Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act".
Then there's the Code of Criminal Procedure, or Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which has more. CrPC section 46 states that "Provided that where a woman is to be arrested, unless the circumstances indicate to the contrary, her submission to custody on an oral intimation of arrest shall be presumed and, unless the circumstances otherwise require or unless the police officer is a female, the police officer shall not touch the person of the woman for making her arrest". Even more bizarrely, officers are instructed not to arrest women after sunset and before sunrise (except in exceptional circumstances with prior permission from a Judicial Magistrate).
As to male social issues, I'd note that India itself has its own version of bacha bazi, known as "launda dancers". Again, these are young boys who dress as women and dance, and "A range of physical and sexual abuse towards launda dancers has been documented during wedding processions. These include: being bitten, burned with cigarettes, assaulted and gang raped at knifepoint, with even reports of deaths for protesting against such abuses."
There are studies that seem to indicate that boys in India are subjected to more childhood sexual abuse than girls, but boys are hardly ever thought of as victims in the mainstream.
Then there's also the boys and young men who are abducted, castrated and forced into being "hijras". Point of this entire thing is, if you don't go looking into things yourself, you're going to come out with a bit of a skewed view as to what third world countries as well as traditional, historical societies are actually like.
I'm unsure how I specifically neglected this and how else I was supposed to approach it, especially considering that my comment partially functioned as a rebuttal of the conceptualisation of polygyny as being oppressive towards women - I argued that it was a fundamentally incomplete view because it ignores how polygyny affects men. In my opinion, the majority of people have a fundamentally broken view of polygyny as representing male privilege when I think it does not. My statement that "People are ignoring half the picture" isn't me ignoring half the picture.
I'll also restate that it's probably a hasty assumption that polygyny must represent women being coerced since there is ample evidence that polygyny can be driven by female choice. As I stated elsewhere:
"It's commonly posited that polygyny can definitely be chosen by women when a given female’s position is enhanced by becoming the second mate of a resource-rich and already paired male, rather than the sole mate of a resource-poor unpaired male."
"In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice. "These findings are consistent with our prediction that women choose to marry polygynously or monogamously according to which choice benefits them or their offspring"."
Feminists created a false perception of how gender relations operate with their myopic focus on women. If someone is essentially going around treating massively important social issues and parts of the social system as if they're not even there, it can hardly be argued that their view is in any way balanced.
Well, if anything that's a reason why one should find statements about women's oppression dubious at best! Any statement that women have been uniquely oppressed and represent a sort of gender "underclass" requires one to have made such a comparison, which is probably quite difficult if not impossible to do without making a litany of very questionable value judgements. More than that, as you also note it's presented as oppression by men without much evidence being offered up to support the idea that the offending custom actually originated from men in the first place.
And the other big reason is that most of the people making these statements often fundamentally just don't consider male issues to be a salient consideration at all, which is another huge error in their thinking.
EDIT: trimmed some parts, made an amendment
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I think there is starting to be a new front opened up, where men are now accusing women of having the upper hand - the whole "Women Are Wonderful" narrative, that men lose everything in a divorce, that men can and do/did have their lives ruined by accusations of sexual harassment where the female accuser never had to prove anything and got away with it (see Mattress Girl ) that women gatekeep sexual access and create incels, that women over-value their own sexual market value and chase a small number of high-value men who only use them, and so forth.
And, like the women's accusations about male privilege, there is certainly something in the men's accusations of female privilege. But I think we should remember that we are in a war, and a lot of accusations made during wartime are propaganda, not fact. Men did have the upper hand in society in the past, women do have the upper hand in society at present. Either or both of these states can change, and are not permanent.
I was about to say: just cause feminism started the gender wars doesn't mean no one else can participate.
I would argue that, where progressivism wins, it often makes even its critics absorb parts of its ideology or tactics to fight back.
For example: conservatives attacking affirmative action for disadvantaging a minority (Asians).
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I don't think "only a subset of a group X can obtain benefit A, and those of group X that don't obtain it are actually worse off than in the alternative" is at odds with a reading of "benefit A is only available to members of group X" as advantaging group X. Compare monarchy where the monarch has to be a specific gender - or, even better, an extreme form of DEI world (only minorities and women can get scientific or corporate positions). It seems that in the latter, your argument would then say that because there are only so many spots in science/corporations and the other members of the groups in question will suffer from science and technology being run into the ground just the same, this world does not in fact amount to minorities/women being privileged over majority men. Do you agree with this? If not, why not and why does that argument not also apply to the polygyny setting?
The distinction is fairly simple to me. In the case of science and technology being run into the ground, these minorities and women who do not obtain these positions are no worse off than your average white man.
In the case of polygyny, I would actually argue that this results in lower-class men's position being worse than women's - being the second or third wife of a powerful man does confer certain benefits that make the position preferable to having no partner at all. Polygyny simply results in a very severe reproductive skew among men that doesn't exist among women: if there is a subgroup of men enjoying the reproductive benefits that polygyny allows them to have, the remainder of men will reproduce less than even the women under polygyny.
This is not the case when a certain sex or race can monopolise positions. However, I will grant that in the case of sex the inherent inseparability of men and women makes things more complicated, namely, the sharing of resources between men and women when they pair up is a pretty big equaliser. That being said, fast-tracking women into high-status positions men are barred from will likely wreak havoc on male-female pairings in the first place due to a female tendency to look to partners of higher status than themselves (so what these DEI programs are doing is essentially making it so that almost all men will be far below her standards, which is going to have wide-ranging effects). And there's also the fact that a lot of these positions are inherently more suited to male preferences than female which makes such extreme DEI programs for women quite a maladaptive way of doing things. So I do think these hypothetical sex-based DEI programs are basically How To Make Everyone Unhappy: A Guide.
I'll also take this opportunity to elaborate on my other statement by providing some challenges of the common idea that polygyny is enforced merely by successful men and that it is against the interests of the women (thus its existence reflects female control by successful men). It's commonly posited that polygyny can definitely be chosen by women when a given female’s position is enhanced by becoming the second mate of a resource-rich and already paired male, rather than the sole mate of a resource-poor unpaired male.
In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice. "These findings are consistent with our prediction that women choose to marry polygynously or monogamously according to which choice benefits them or their offspring".
https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/SF1999.pdf
Again, none of this is to say that polygyny is a sustainable model for a society to operate by in the long run - sexual egalitarianism among males carries the benefit of increased male-male tolerance. But I fundamentally disagree with the automatic framing of polygynous societies as necessarily reflecting male coercion and control, or that it actually serves the interests of men in general.
EDIT: added more thoughts, cut out some long-winded bits
This is a fair distinction to make, if it is indeed correct that the two scenarios can be distinguished in that fashion. Thing is, though, I'm not sure it's so clear-cut.
However, being the first wife of a powerful man is probably worse than being the only wife of an equally powerful man in a monogamous society. Is the loss to the first wife (assuming for simplicity's sake they can in fact be totally ordered by "quality"; otherwise just take it as a stand-in for "the woman the powerful man would have otherwise monogamously married", assuming for simplicity's sake that her counterpart will be in the harem in the polygynous world) worth less than the gain to the second, third etc. wives over being stuck with someone of their rank? Perhaps it is, in which case your argument holds; but perhaps it isn't, in which case women as a group do in fact lose total utility - and then we could further debate whether their total loss of utility is actually less or greater than that of the men who would counterfactually have been paired up.
If we're moving the discussion into the increasingly wishy-washy realm of "utility" instead of using more definite measures, any such questions are probably going to be very difficult to answer.
But I will add that even if I assume for the sake of argument that the entire population of women does end up losing total utility under polygyny as opposed to monogamy, a pretty convincing argument can be made that men as a whole lose total utility as well (even after you factor in the polygynous men) because of the diminishing returns inherent in adding on wives - after all, a single man getting a wife will have a much higher gain in utility than a polygynous man getting his 5th woman, or his 10th, or his 30th. That woman, if paired with a single man instead, is going to result in a greater gain in utility for the single man than the loss for the polygynous man. Correspondingly, if a successful man can monopolise multiple women, his gain from doing so will be less than the total loss experienced by the (now single) men who would've been able to procure a wife under monogamy.
It also seems clear to me, at this point, that then trying to compare "which sex's total loss of utility is more" is something that would be very difficult if not outright impossible to measure.
EDIT: clarity
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It would be helpful for this discussion to provide a strict definition of "gender war" first (or at least try to).
In my personal worldview, "gender war" is not really its own thing. The observations you make seem to be more a consequence downstream of the general atomisation of society caused by modernity. The bond between man and woman seems like one of the final units to split up in this process of increasing entropy, largely enabled by technology (contraceptives, service economy).
To speak of a "gender war" means moving largely into the frame of neo-marxism (see your point #2), where one always needs groups/classes to pit against each other to provide a worldview. E.g. in my country, leftists speak of "femicide", when a woman gets killed by her male partner. This wording implies that its somehow "all the men's fault".
The topic is interesting, because IMHO personal relationships (or lack thereof) are a strong entry point to persuade individuals more on the left of the need for some kind of narrative bonding modern people together and somehow working to reverse the ever increasing entropy of society.
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