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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men.

There is certainly directional truth to this, but I think that you are going too far. Certainly, some progressives are fundamentally opposed to existence of men. But there are also progressives who barely care about gender issues at all and focus on other things like race. There are also dirtbag leftists who self-identify as progressives and are certainly progressives in that they want Bernie Sanders-style politics, but are fine with masculinity. I guess you could say that those are not real progressives, but then your statement just becomes the tautological "progressives who are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men".

The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women.

To me that does not seem like it is necessarily actual love. A man can enjoy eating fish and be angry that he does not have access to fish, yet without loving fish in any way other than for their taste. Which is a sort of love I guess, but it's not the kind of love that, say, friends feel for each other. In any case, I think that the idea of loving an entire gender doesn't really make sense. I like certain women, I dislike others. I think it would be strange to feel an emotion like love for all women.

That said, regarding hate... I think that we generally hate that which has power over us. You are right to point out that much male hatred of women is fundamentally driven by the man wanting women, which means that women have power over him, but not being able to get them. The kind of misogyny that is fundamentally driven by, say, thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak is fairly rare. There is a parallel there to racism in that I think the majority of white anti-black racism in the modern West is not the old-school Southern plantation owner's kind of racism that is based on thinking that blacks are inferior - rather, it is based on dislike of various ways in which some blacks have power over the person who hates... such as through street crime, selective hiring practices driven by wokism, making fun of white people in the media, etc.

The kind of misogyny that is fundamentally driven by, say, thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak is fairly rare.

Or is this even “misogyny”?

A lot of “misogyny” is just holding women up to the standards that you would expect out of a man, under the paradigm that women have the same rights and status as men, and that women are just as strong and independent as men.

The median woman is boring relative to the median man, much less the 90th percentile or so woman vs. the 90th percentile man (given tail effects) in terms of worldliness, funniness, interestingness. Many women and men would agree, regardless of their political orientation.

Women are physically weak. I don’t think it’s something that needs to be re-litigated here. But also perhaps mentally weak, in terms of being more subject to crying randomly, Stockholm Syndrome, being more prone to social trends, memes, preselection and female mate-choice copying. Women tend to be less agentic and more passive.

Women can be more useful in certain contexts. However, in a lot of contexts, they’re also quite useless. For example, screaming “STOP” or “STAHP” but doing nothing is a common feature in fight and/or crime videos on a worldwide basis. A lot of times, they’re but exacerbating the situation with their histrionics. Pointing it out is trite nowadays, like pointing out that there are clouds when it’s raining.

In a similar vein, children might be boring, useless, weak. Yet, men would hardly be regarded as mis-children-ists if they viewed children as such. In concept-space, women are tilted toward children relative to men, when it comes to standards and expectations.

I am not saying that thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak on average is necessarily misogyny, although of course thinking that literally all women are boring, useless, or weak would be misogyny. I am just saying that thinking that women are boring, useless, or weak on average can in some cases inspire misogyny.

That's fair.

Although I would add, conversely, misogyny (in the strict sense of hating women for being women) can in many cases inspire thinking that women are necessarily boring, useless, and/or weak just because they're women (where "weak" is probably the... weakest... part of the statement, as women are almost always indeed physically weaker than men, and in many cases psychologically, as well).