In which I opine on the origins and nature of the growing gender polarisation and sketch a vision of a very grim future, one in which we'll have to choose between The Longhouse and The Gooncave
Another aspect is that if feels like people are demanding more agreement not only with what ultimately needs to be done but also the aesthetic/emotional way the issue is expressed. I strongly suspect that even when men and women end up close in policy space the emotional/aesthetic approach to the issue varies more.
For instance, both someone who feels the threat posed by CO2 is a matter of hard science and to deal with it we need more technical mastery, more subjugation of the natural world and more technical progress and someone who feels we need to give up our consumerist and anthropocentric dispotions and degrow to return to harmony with nature may be said to be very worried about climate change and might show up similarly in those surveys but, at an emotional/aesthetic level, they couldn't be farther apart.
Whether it's increasing polarization or social media or the declining role of experts in mediating our opinions and information, my sense is that the emotional/affilative aspects of many views are gaining in importance. It's less about finding places where you happen to agree on a particular proposition or action and more about espousing the right attitude. I suspect that effectively increases the difference between the genders.
This seems to track with a general shift to a more expressive approach to politics (more about displaying your values and less about achieving some particular objective).
Though it's possible that's just a reflection of us having less pressing issues to worry about.
My best guess is that a significant factor has to do with the decline of marriage. Married women vote more in line with their husbands. With less marriage not only are men and women not sharing a household, their economic circumstances now differ greatly. Single women and particularly single mothers are more likely to depend on public goods such as welfare, public schools and housing. Women are more likely to complete tertiary education and so be more exposed to 'student activism' in environments that are controlled by overwhelmingly leftist professors. Women are more likely to benefit from positive discrimination. Men are more likely to go into trades, entrepreneurship, STEM. We're becoming different classes.
Enjoyed reading this. I've also been really frustrated by these ill-defined terms like "liberal" and "conservative" being used in terms of these gender divergences. The standard narrative that women just naturally lean left and men just naturally lean right is undercut by the fact that not even 10 years ago, the most significant leftist movement in recent American politics was characterized and also heavily impugned as being too male. The whole Hillary vs. Bernie fight was framed as a gender showdown, but with women on the more rightist side and men on the more leftist side (broadly speaking, of course).
The Bernie movement was attacked as misogynistic because it was seen as not prioritizing women's issues enough (or to be more specific, the issues most relevant to educated metropolitan progressive types of women). This is what it's really about. You call it aesthetics and vibes, and I agree. The fundamental question is, "Who is the main character of this ideology?" On the issues, men and women may largely agree. But what they're really fighting over is who gets to be the protagonist. Whose concerns and stories, both of the grand and petty sort, get the spotlight, and whose get relegated to the warm-up act.
People don't gravitate towards political ideologies by tallying up their stances on discrete issues and then waiting for some program to inform that they're liberal or conservative. It's more the other way around. People generally have a good sense of feeling where they're wanted and unwanted. And once they find their club, they'll more or less adopt their new friends' beliefs, with some minor disagreements here and there. Going back to American politics, the leftism of Bernie and the leftism of AOC may not be that substantively different, but the vibes and aesthetics are totally different. Bernie's unkempt hair was a statement. AOC says makeup is a radical act. Stuff like this has been enough to cause rifts even within ideological allies, so imagine the splits they'd cause a much wider and adversarial political spectrum.
Empathy has been mentioned several times. If 'empathy' refers to Theory of Mind, ie, interest in and ability to understand what someone else else feeling & thinking, then I do believe women in general have more of this attribute than do men. (A female friend remarked that being able to really understand another person would be 'the ultimate adventure.' A former girlfriend said she liked to lie on the floor and look into her dog's eyes and try to understand what it was like to be him)
But it's important to understand that this ability to understand other humans can be used for ill as much as for good. Con men have a lot of it, as do bullies of a certain type.
And while the Longhouse may have a neon sign out front that says 'Kindness'...and while its occupants may indeed possess a lot of empathy in the sense described above...that doesn't mean that there is not a lot of emotional cruelty taking place. An awful lot of women have testified as to some of the unpleasant treatment they have experienced at the hands of other women, and this seems especially true in the case of those women who are outliers in any way.
Thanks for another thoughtful piece, Ruxandra, I'll have to reread carefully and mull awhile & then maybe comment. One initial thought: I'm not sure that the 'operational ideology' questionnaire really does a good job in getting at essential issues...there is nothing, for example, about free speech versus the suppression of 'wrong' views, 'misinformation', etc. Also, nothing about crime except for the special cases of gun-related crime and illegal immigration. And the very high %s for 'guarantee jobs for all Americans', in all age ranges, seems quite surprising.
The real reason for this divergence seems to be a game theory self-preservation manoeuvre from both genders. In the hyper competitive dating mass market fewer people are coming away with desired relationship outcomes. Significant subsets are then drawn to cultural identifiers that explain their failure inwardly and outwardly, outwardly because “everyone knows that women don’t like conservatives” (and its gender inverse) and inwardly through and ideological framework about the malignancy of the other gender. Everyone thinks male feminist incels are losers, but an incel that embraces misogyny is at the very least not perceived as a “simp”. This also explains the superficiality of these divides because very few young men are truly sexist in the materially discriminatory sense, and I have observed that many “gooncavers” have no real beef with egalitarianism when questioned IRL.
An idea that has been growing in salience recently is that the 'feminisation' of Western society - though necessary to some extent - has now overshot in the 21st c. West. Viewed this way it should not be so surprising if this has led to some souring of young men on the idea of 'Progress'. There has even been an acknowledgement of this amongst some well known dissident feminists..... as I have written about here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance. Snippets:...".....recently - in a certain kind of feminist journalism - I keep coming across warm-hearted acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life.........As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all. But it’s fair to say that masculinity has not had a good press in recent decades. As journalist Kathleen Stock (* see bio note below) remarked recently “Men are pretty much banned from making any generalisations about women good or bad......"
I’m sure there are 3rd ways to be online. From observation they are usually honest, introspective without grievance. Or with minimal grievance. Which makes those voices less amplified, harder to hear, but we all can think of when we’ve seen them.
To be fair to the gooncave, low-status men in former days at least had the option of being forced into dying in combat as a consolation prize. I don't really believe that they believe themselves strong men marginalized by a society that hates strength. From IRL conversations with this population, my assessment is that they know they are weak and low-status but wish a society of strong men had press-ganged them into maybe dying, maybe becoming stronger.
The aesthetics of that are terrible (as they should be) from a mating perspective and women should hate it. But on a 1:1 human level it is impossible not to feel love for a young man suffering this arguably worst of all afflictions.
I think the insight that old-school division of conservative vs liberal don't capture the growing delta between men and woman is a very useful one. Your exploration of the true lines of divergence seems to lack some self-awareness though -- while still capturing it well.
The transgressive-for-the-sake-of-it is in some ways a necessary filter. The underlying idea being that you need to develop that culture and "icky" mindset in order to fully explore unpleasant conclusions. The shock shtick is not itself the logical discourse, but the presumed-necessary substrate for it.
The second half of this post takes the ironic posture that the only real problem with the gooncave is that it doesn't meet the longhouse requirement for acceptable discourse. But the gooncave wants to isolate itself from the longhouse.
I think gooncavism could very well be incompatible with success in society, but one cannot define it as a failure by pointing to its own definition of success. One must instead show that the gooncave dwellers:
A. Want something outside of the gooncave
B. Will not get that something unless they compromise with the longhouse
Is this true? Gooncavers hope not, longhousers hope so. Time will tell.
Very interesting. As you note, this divergence between the sexes isn't that great in reality when it comes to policy preferences, its more of a cultural thing. As you point out, in the sentence about the Longhouse descending into learned helplessness, if you (meaning the MSM and popular culture) tell women they are 'victims' for decades, eventually they are going to believe it, get depressed and become 'progressive' which, by definition, means they abandon personal agency, increase there in-group identity and thinking and generate an external locus of control. What else would one expect? The only solution is to help people (of both sexes) overcome any Victim Mindsets they have learned and/or been taught.
This is high fidelity conversation. Wonderful reading. In an effort then to identify the root causes [overused term but I don’t have another] of ideological gender divergence, my read out points to two. Aesthetics and Definitions. Both are ill-defined. Relativism has infected aesthetics and post-modernism has corrupted definitions. When polling occurs, are terms defined?
I’m optimistic that this will pass though. Boys and Girls are confused and frustrated because their ability to communicate has been stifled. Stifled by low expectations. So they are talking past each other as a result. But nature finds a way in the end.
In larger context, we’ve all been talking past each other. In every direction and group. Not just boys and girls. In a world where the managers and the organization men throw doughy terms around like “rules based international order” and “protecting American interests” as existential things for which there should be no ambiguity, and while leaders complain about their intentions being mischaracterized and characterizations being inaccurate, it is no wonder we can’t figure out what we are saying. There is little fidelity in communication anymore. Except here. Thanks for that!
Another aspect is that if feels like people are demanding more agreement not only with what ultimately needs to be done but also the aesthetic/emotional way the issue is expressed. I strongly suspect that even when men and women end up close in policy space the emotional/aesthetic approach to the issue varies more.
For instance, both someone who feels the threat posed by CO2 is a matter of hard science and to deal with it we need more technical mastery, more subjugation of the natural world and more technical progress and someone who feels we need to give up our consumerist and anthropocentric dispotions and degrow to return to harmony with nature may be said to be very worried about climate change and might show up similarly in those surveys but, at an emotional/aesthetic level, they couldn't be farther apart.
Whether it's increasing polarization or social media or the declining role of experts in mediating our opinions and information, my sense is that the emotional/affilative aspects of many views are gaining in importance. It's less about finding places where you happen to agree on a particular proposition or action and more about espousing the right attitude. I suspect that effectively increases the difference between the genders.
This seems to track with a general shift to a more expressive approach to politics (more about displaying your values and less about achieving some particular objective).
Though it's possible that's just a reflection of us having less pressing issues to worry about.
My best guess is that a significant factor has to do with the decline of marriage. Married women vote more in line with their husbands. With less marriage not only are men and women not sharing a household, their economic circumstances now differ greatly. Single women and particularly single mothers are more likely to depend on public goods such as welfare, public schools and housing. Women are more likely to complete tertiary education and so be more exposed to 'student activism' in environments that are controlled by overwhelmingly leftist professors. Women are more likely to benefit from positive discrimination. Men are more likely to go into trades, entrepreneurship, STEM. We're becoming different classes.
Enjoyed reading this. I've also been really frustrated by these ill-defined terms like "liberal" and "conservative" being used in terms of these gender divergences. The standard narrative that women just naturally lean left and men just naturally lean right is undercut by the fact that not even 10 years ago, the most significant leftist movement in recent American politics was characterized and also heavily impugned as being too male. The whole Hillary vs. Bernie fight was framed as a gender showdown, but with women on the more rightist side and men on the more leftist side (broadly speaking, of course).
The Bernie movement was attacked as misogynistic because it was seen as not prioritizing women's issues enough (or to be more specific, the issues most relevant to educated metropolitan progressive types of women). This is what it's really about. You call it aesthetics and vibes, and I agree. The fundamental question is, "Who is the main character of this ideology?" On the issues, men and women may largely agree. But what they're really fighting over is who gets to be the protagonist. Whose concerns and stories, both of the grand and petty sort, get the spotlight, and whose get relegated to the warm-up act.
People don't gravitate towards political ideologies by tallying up their stances on discrete issues and then waiting for some program to inform that they're liberal or conservative. It's more the other way around. People generally have a good sense of feeling where they're wanted and unwanted. And once they find their club, they'll more or less adopt their new friends' beliefs, with some minor disagreements here and there. Going back to American politics, the leftism of Bernie and the leftism of AOC may not be that substantively different, but the vibes and aesthetics are totally different. Bernie's unkempt hair was a statement. AOC says makeup is a radical act. Stuff like this has been enough to cause rifts even within ideological allies, so imagine the splits they'd cause a much wider and adversarial political spectrum.
I also wrote recently on the vacuum that is contemporary non-manospherey guys' culture: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/for-the-boys
> (yes, it’s you Millennials, you’re the elders now)
😔
Empathy has been mentioned several times. If 'empathy' refers to Theory of Mind, ie, interest in and ability to understand what someone else else feeling & thinking, then I do believe women in general have more of this attribute than do men. (A female friend remarked that being able to really understand another person would be 'the ultimate adventure.' A former girlfriend said she liked to lie on the floor and look into her dog's eyes and try to understand what it was like to be him)
But it's important to understand that this ability to understand other humans can be used for ill as much as for good. Con men have a lot of it, as do bullies of a certain type.
And while the Longhouse may have a neon sign out front that says 'Kindness'...and while its occupants may indeed possess a lot of empathy in the sense described above...that doesn't mean that there is not a lot of emotional cruelty taking place. An awful lot of women have testified as to some of the unpleasant treatment they have experienced at the hands of other women, and this seems especially true in the case of those women who are outliers in any way.
Thanks for another thoughtful piece, Ruxandra, I'll have to reread carefully and mull awhile & then maybe comment. One initial thought: I'm not sure that the 'operational ideology' questionnaire really does a good job in getting at essential issues...there is nothing, for example, about free speech versus the suppression of 'wrong' views, 'misinformation', etc. Also, nothing about crime except for the special cases of gun-related crime and illegal immigration. And the very high %s for 'guarantee jobs for all Americans', in all age ranges, seems quite surprising.
The real reason for this divergence seems to be a game theory self-preservation manoeuvre from both genders. In the hyper competitive dating mass market fewer people are coming away with desired relationship outcomes. Significant subsets are then drawn to cultural identifiers that explain their failure inwardly and outwardly, outwardly because “everyone knows that women don’t like conservatives” (and its gender inverse) and inwardly through and ideological framework about the malignancy of the other gender. Everyone thinks male feminist incels are losers, but an incel that embraces misogyny is at the very least not perceived as a “simp”. This also explains the superficiality of these divides because very few young men are truly sexist in the materially discriminatory sense, and I have observed that many “gooncavers” have no real beef with egalitarianism when questioned IRL.
An idea that has been growing in salience recently is that the 'feminisation' of Western society - though necessary to some extent - has now overshot in the 21st c. West. Viewed this way it should not be so surprising if this has led to some souring of young men on the idea of 'Progress'. There has even been an acknowledgement of this amongst some well known dissident feminists..... as I have written about here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance. Snippets:...".....recently - in a certain kind of feminist journalism - I keep coming across warm-hearted acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life.........As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all. But it’s fair to say that masculinity has not had a good press in recent decades. As journalist Kathleen Stock (* see bio note below) remarked recently “Men are pretty much banned from making any generalisations about women good or bad......"
I’m sure there are 3rd ways to be online. From observation they are usually honest, introspective without grievance. Or with minimal grievance. Which makes those voices less amplified, harder to hear, but we all can think of when we’ve seen them.
Sorry I'm late.
To be fair to the gooncave, low-status men in former days at least had the option of being forced into dying in combat as a consolation prize. I don't really believe that they believe themselves strong men marginalized by a society that hates strength. From IRL conversations with this population, my assessment is that they know they are weak and low-status but wish a society of strong men had press-ganged them into maybe dying, maybe becoming stronger.
The aesthetics of that are terrible (as they should be) from a mating perspective and women should hate it. But on a 1:1 human level it is impossible not to feel love for a young man suffering this arguably worst of all afflictions.
Great piece. I would point out, however, that to a large degree we already have a Longhouse academe. This recent judgement by the UK Employment Tribunal is, in effect, a report on field work in the same. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Joanna-Phoenix-v-The-Open-University-Employment-Tribunal-Reserved-Judgment.pdf
I think the insight that old-school division of conservative vs liberal don't capture the growing delta between men and woman is a very useful one. Your exploration of the true lines of divergence seems to lack some self-awareness though -- while still capturing it well.
The transgressive-for-the-sake-of-it is in some ways a necessary filter. The underlying idea being that you need to develop that culture and "icky" mindset in order to fully explore unpleasant conclusions. The shock shtick is not itself the logical discourse, but the presumed-necessary substrate for it.
The second half of this post takes the ironic posture that the only real problem with the gooncave is that it doesn't meet the longhouse requirement for acceptable discourse. But the gooncave wants to isolate itself from the longhouse.
I think gooncavism could very well be incompatible with success in society, but one cannot define it as a failure by pointing to its own definition of success. One must instead show that the gooncave dwellers:
A. Want something outside of the gooncave
B. Will not get that something unless they compromise with the longhouse
Is this true? Gooncavers hope not, longhousers hope so. Time will tell.
People I know in mixed political marriages have been very stressed since 2020.
Very interesting. As you note, this divergence between the sexes isn't that great in reality when it comes to policy preferences, its more of a cultural thing. As you point out, in the sentence about the Longhouse descending into learned helplessness, if you (meaning the MSM and popular culture) tell women they are 'victims' for decades, eventually they are going to believe it, get depressed and become 'progressive' which, by definition, means they abandon personal agency, increase there in-group identity and thinking and generate an external locus of control. What else would one expect? The only solution is to help people (of both sexes) overcome any Victim Mindsets they have learned and/or been taught.
Another banger - the internet is a mirror and the opposite sex might not like what they see
This is high fidelity conversation. Wonderful reading. In an effort then to identify the root causes [overused term but I don’t have another] of ideological gender divergence, my read out points to two. Aesthetics and Definitions. Both are ill-defined. Relativism has infected aesthetics and post-modernism has corrupted definitions. When polling occurs, are terms defined?
I’m optimistic that this will pass though. Boys and Girls are confused and frustrated because their ability to communicate has been stifled. Stifled by low expectations. So they are talking past each other as a result. But nature finds a way in the end.
In larger context, we’ve all been talking past each other. In every direction and group. Not just boys and girls. In a world where the managers and the organization men throw doughy terms around like “rules based international order” and “protecting American interests” as existential things for which there should be no ambiguity, and while leaders complain about their intentions being mischaracterized and characterizations being inaccurate, it is no wonder we can’t figure out what we are saying. There is little fidelity in communication anymore. Except here. Thanks for that!