My beef with feminism is the lack of curiosity on the part of the feminists. Why does there need to be feminism? Why didn't our female ancestors fight against the unfairness? What is the reason for the unfairness and why was it maintained? Why is it only in the last century or so that it began to change?
Mary Wollencraft and contraception are so recent. There was gender division of labour for virtually all of human evolutionary history but this has eroded rapidly during the last few generations. That suggests that the difference was maintained by cultural norms not genetic differences. Why were the norms maintained for so long when they are clearly so fragile. Why is the erosion happening now? If these questions aren't being asked because they're silly, please explain why they're silly.
I don't think they're silly. There has been gender division of labour, but it may have been less strong among hunter-gatherers - in the sense that "men hunt, women gather" but this didn't necessarily lead to very sharp gender roles. I'm not au fait with the research on this. There's a nice paper about the effect of the plough. Heavy ploughing led to a bigger gender division and societies where the plough was introduced early still look different from the POV of gender roles: http://home.uchicago.edu/~bartels/ChoiceSymposium2013/05-Giuliano.pdf
Humans are mammals, which ensures that males and females have different lives. In only a few mammal species do males provide any parenting effort. Male apes don't parent. At some point in human evolution, males were recruited to help with parenting. This change was likely to be largely the result of cultural evolution because parenting norms vary so much between cultures. However, for most of human evolutionary history, males and females of all ages lived as part of families that worked together to raise the next generation. All cultures had a complex suite of norms that maintained the family and kept its members in line. Males tended to do different work from females, which was practical because males are stronger and they can't lactate or gestate. Until about 300 years ago, the family was the main social institution. Greater mobility, urbanization etc. separated family members and reduced the role and power of the family and this resulted in the erosion of family promoting norms and the collapse of human fertility. Western scholars of social change now largely neglect the importance of family until our recent past. In the final chapter of our book (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-story-of-us-9780190883201) we argue that the erosion of family promoting norms can explain much recent cultural change and can explain why gender division of labour is now considered unfair.
I think I read some of these ideas in a manuscript you sent around a couple of years ago and they helped to shape my ideas about what I call the "erosion" of the family. I agree that what has happened to the family is complicated but that is because families are complicated and diverse. I use the term erosion because families don't lose their power quickly or without a struggle. It happens over generations. The new institution called "school" was part of the erosion. For most of human history and pre-history, children learned by working as part of the family team doing more and more complicated things as they developed. Older children taught younger ones. Families whose members were disciplined and dutiful fared best. They could raise more children and more successful children so the family survived and grew. It was natural selection. There's more about it in the book. Looking forward to hearing what you think of it.
Men and women both have the ability to be terrible people, but only men have the physical strength to justify and defend their terrible actions against women. If a woman picks a fight with a man, she is far less likely to be successful in hurting him than the other way around.
For most of human history, egalitarianism was never a legitimate philosophy (although equality under God did offer a form of spiritual egalitarianism), and because women cannot fight men, men firmly placed women below them. Female ancestors couldn't fight against the unfairness because males would beat them. Female ancestors were stuck depending on men to protect them from men. It's really that simple.
The male>female hierarchy was maintained because it was convenient and easy to justify. Do what I want or I'll beat you. In religions created and led by men, woman is the scapegoat because she is an easy target. Eve ate the apple so Adam is the head. The man desires woman and he will have her, and if she is raped, it's because she "tempted" him. Pregnancy is difficult for you so I'll support you through it... but in return you and the children are my property. etc etc etc
You don't need feminism to see this throughout history. It's what's happened worldwide.
What changed? Industrialism and philosophy. A lot of women's work (sewing, laundry, etc) could be automated just as much as men's work. When the method of employment is factory or clerical work, there's less excuse to separate the sexes. Even less so as computers gain prominence. And as women gain control of their own money, they realize they don't have to be FORCED to stay with men who are unkind and even cruel to them. They leave. The pill and abortion makes this separation even easier.
Feminists have explained this thousands of times in many books. Consider the Second Sex or The Subjection of Women as starting points for your research.
In my opinion, things have become more difficult in this last century because men's ability to compete in the dominance hierarchy has been made more difficult by feminism. For most of history, the woman is a powerful token for man's ability to compete with other men socially (I have 3 sons and you have 1, I have a larger family, my woman is obedient, my wife cooks and cleans better than yours, my woman is more beautiful, etc). When your token can leave AT ANY TIME and even freely go after your reputation, it significantly complicates your ability to signal to other males your status.
Men and women both impact each others' status games, but men have much more to lose by not having a woman. This is because for women, unfortunately, it's oftentimes better to not be with a man. This isn't a "men evil" thing, just an unfortunate situation where a lot of women want men who care about them as complete human beings (instead of "bangmaids" as is commonly termed online) while a lot of men struggle with the concept, and still cling to the "I should be needed, not wanted" perspective of male-female relationships. Dave Shapiro made a great video on this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rZtLV-07iU).
And finally, women have been impacted by the changing economics and social environment just as men have. Women also have to face increasing rent prices, lack of social spaces, inflation, etc. I can go on this for hours but I doubt anyone will even read this lol.
My beef as such with feminism is that it is not a set of values or beliefs, or even a vague collective of sets of values and beliefs. It is (like many things these days) more like a Team. Wear your team colours (or t-shirt) and always support it is the main dictum. While I share many values and beliefs that can be described as feminist, I feel more comfortable with letting values and beliefs shape identity and not vice versa.
The classic conservative meme of "male feminists are predators" would have some epsilon but significant merit. Those that sincerely comply with the ideology 100% would more likely isolate themselves from women, while those that are sexually opportunistic about "joining the other team" are more likely to pretend their interest to get satisfaction. However, opportunism and attractiveness are not congruent.
This tactic also fails to account those that are on the other side, but are also people that women desire, thus they will openly shame men for not dating, in the tone of "conservatives are secretly gay". It is a social filter in equilibrium, but feminists will ultimately have to deal with incongruity between male desirability and willingness to switch teams.
A major part of your argument is flawed, because men do not need to strive to earn more than women if they want to get married and reproduce, they merely need to find a woman who earns less than them.
Therefore salary discrimination cannot be justified on the basis that otherwise men would not find women to marry.
Also, I can confirm that many men, like you do, feel no compunction in making anti-feminist arguments.
You are in no way a repressed minority, however much you would like to claim that position.
1) But just because women want to marry richer men cannot be the motivation for a man to earn more, as I pointed out. He just needs to find a lower paid woman.
2) Even if we assume that men marry only women with lower salaries, i.e., m>f in every couple, that does not mean men's salaries will be higher on average! It just means the lowest paid man does not get a wife, and the highest paid woman does not get a husband.
I think women prefering richer men probably *is* a motivation for men to earn more, though. Analogy: "just because men want to marry beautiful women is no reason for women to feel pressure to look good. They just need to find a less attractive man."
Yes, if there are lots of single people then the maths will work out fine. But the single people may object to this algorithm.
I think many people of both genders would prefer not to be single, and I'm not sure they are all just suffering from unrealistic expectations. But this is getting into a different track.
Hi Alexia, I'm not sure what exactly is the argument here, but I can see how an asymmetric market with friction can suffer welfare-wise from imposing these two conditions.
I find the idea that it's men who's responsible for the patriarchy utterly simpleminded. What about my grandmother who told me to wear this and that, showed me what and what not to do in society, while my grandpa died before I was born and who was a couch dweller reading the newspaper type while he was still alive. Now who is really responsible for the patriarchy there? I see a phenomenon there. I think all those hyperreligious grandmothers were perhaps more responsible of the "patriarchy" than men were, which means that we have been living in a secret "matriarchy" all this time and matriarchs were using physically superior men as their bodyguards and who were somewhat meaningless for most of history. I'm somewhat exaggerating that last part there.
I reckon that a large number of those "wife killing" stories you heard from the Middle East were to a large extent perpetuated by wise old women who were the harbingers of their millennia-old religious traditions. Perhaps there's a bit of a sexual selection thing going on there, where the women who survived religious conformity ended up being the most influential out of their age and gender combined. Your Greta Thunbergs would have been stoned to death already in 9,800 of the last 10,000 years of human history.
My beef with feminism is the lack of curiosity on the part of the feminists. Why does there need to be feminism? Why didn't our female ancestors fight against the unfairness? What is the reason for the unfairness and why was it maintained? Why is it only in the last century or so that it began to change?
Um. Contraception? You might be being a bit unfair to Mary Wollstonecraft et al., though.
Mary Wollencraft and contraception are so recent. There was gender division of labour for virtually all of human evolutionary history but this has eroded rapidly during the last few generations. That suggests that the difference was maintained by cultural norms not genetic differences. Why were the norms maintained for so long when they are clearly so fragile. Why is the erosion happening now? If these questions aren't being asked because they're silly, please explain why they're silly.
I don't think they're silly. There has been gender division of labour, but it may have been less strong among hunter-gatherers - in the sense that "men hunt, women gather" but this didn't necessarily lead to very sharp gender roles. I'm not au fait with the research on this. There's a nice paper about the effect of the plough. Heavy ploughing led to a bigger gender division and societies where the plough was introduced early still look different from the POV of gender roles: http://home.uchicago.edu/~bartels/ChoiceSymposium2013/05-Giuliano.pdf
Humans are mammals, which ensures that males and females have different lives. In only a few mammal species do males provide any parenting effort. Male apes don't parent. At some point in human evolution, males were recruited to help with parenting. This change was likely to be largely the result of cultural evolution because parenting norms vary so much between cultures. However, for most of human evolutionary history, males and females of all ages lived as part of families that worked together to raise the next generation. All cultures had a complex suite of norms that maintained the family and kept its members in line. Males tended to do different work from females, which was practical because males are stronger and they can't lactate or gestate. Until about 300 years ago, the family was the main social institution. Greater mobility, urbanization etc. separated family members and reduced the role and power of the family and this resulted in the erosion of family promoting norms and the collapse of human fertility. Western scholars of social change now largely neglect the importance of family until our recent past. In the final chapter of our book (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-story-of-us-9780190883201) we argue that the erosion of family promoting norms can explain much recent cultural change and can explain why gender division of labour is now considered unfair.
Oh! I didn't realise it was your book! I have ordered a copy.
That looks interesting. Though I'd say the "erosion of the family" is a bit simplistic. I just wrote about the C17-C19 reinvention of the family here: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-victorian-values
I think I read some of these ideas in a manuscript you sent around a couple of years ago and they helped to shape my ideas about what I call the "erosion" of the family. I agree that what has happened to the family is complicated but that is because families are complicated and diverse. I use the term erosion because families don't lose their power quickly or without a struggle. It happens over generations. The new institution called "school" was part of the erosion. For most of human history and pre-history, children learned by working as part of the family team doing more and more complicated things as they developed. Older children taught younger ones. Families whose members were disciplined and dutiful fared best. They could raise more children and more successful children so the family survived and grew. It was natural selection. There's more about it in the book. Looking forward to hearing what you think of it.
Men and women both have the ability to be terrible people, but only men have the physical strength to justify and defend their terrible actions against women. If a woman picks a fight with a man, she is far less likely to be successful in hurting him than the other way around.
For most of human history, egalitarianism was never a legitimate philosophy (although equality under God did offer a form of spiritual egalitarianism), and because women cannot fight men, men firmly placed women below them. Female ancestors couldn't fight against the unfairness because males would beat them. Female ancestors were stuck depending on men to protect them from men. It's really that simple.
The male>female hierarchy was maintained because it was convenient and easy to justify. Do what I want or I'll beat you. In religions created and led by men, woman is the scapegoat because she is an easy target. Eve ate the apple so Adam is the head. The man desires woman and he will have her, and if she is raped, it's because she "tempted" him. Pregnancy is difficult for you so I'll support you through it... but in return you and the children are my property. etc etc etc
You don't need feminism to see this throughout history. It's what's happened worldwide.
What changed? Industrialism and philosophy. A lot of women's work (sewing, laundry, etc) could be automated just as much as men's work. When the method of employment is factory or clerical work, there's less excuse to separate the sexes. Even less so as computers gain prominence. And as women gain control of their own money, they realize they don't have to be FORCED to stay with men who are unkind and even cruel to them. They leave. The pill and abortion makes this separation even easier.
Feminists have explained this thousands of times in many books. Consider the Second Sex or The Subjection of Women as starting points for your research.
In my opinion, things have become more difficult in this last century because men's ability to compete in the dominance hierarchy has been made more difficult by feminism. For most of history, the woman is a powerful token for man's ability to compete with other men socially (I have 3 sons and you have 1, I have a larger family, my woman is obedient, my wife cooks and cleans better than yours, my woman is more beautiful, etc). When your token can leave AT ANY TIME and even freely go after your reputation, it significantly complicates your ability to signal to other males your status.
Men and women both impact each others' status games, but men have much more to lose by not having a woman. This is because for women, unfortunately, it's oftentimes better to not be with a man. This isn't a "men evil" thing, just an unfortunate situation where a lot of women want men who care about them as complete human beings (instead of "bangmaids" as is commonly termed online) while a lot of men struggle with the concept, and still cling to the "I should be needed, not wanted" perspective of male-female relationships. Dave Shapiro made a great video on this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rZtLV-07iU).
And finally, women have been impacted by the changing economics and social environment just as men have. Women also have to face increasing rent prices, lack of social spaces, inflation, etc. I can go on this for hours but I doubt anyone will even read this lol.
My beef as such with feminism is that it is not a set of values or beliefs, or even a vague collective of sets of values and beliefs. It is (like many things these days) more like a Team. Wear your team colours (or t-shirt) and always support it is the main dictum. While I share many values and beliefs that can be described as feminist, I feel more comfortable with letting values and beliefs shape identity and not vice versa.
The classic conservative meme of "male feminists are predators" would have some epsilon but significant merit. Those that sincerely comply with the ideology 100% would more likely isolate themselves from women, while those that are sexually opportunistic about "joining the other team" are more likely to pretend their interest to get satisfaction. However, opportunism and attractiveness are not congruent.
This tactic also fails to account those that are on the other side, but are also people that women desire, thus they will openly shame men for not dating, in the tone of "conservatives are secretly gay". It is a social filter in equilibrium, but feminists will ultimately have to deal with incongruity between male desirability and willingness to switch teams.
A major part of your argument is flawed, because men do not need to strive to earn more than women if they want to get married and reproduce, they merely need to find a woman who earns less than them.
Therefore salary discrimination cannot be justified on the basis that otherwise men would not find women to marry.
Also, I can confirm that many men, like you do, feel no compunction in making anti-feminist arguments.
You are in no way a repressed minority, however much you would like to claim that position.
1. I didn't justify salary discrimination. I pointed out men's motivations.
2. "For all i, m_i > f_i" implies "mean(m_i) > mean(f_i)".
3. But I feel repressed (weeps into beer)
1) But just because women want to marry richer men cannot be the motivation for a man to earn more, as I pointed out. He just needs to find a lower paid woman.
2) Even if we assume that men marry only women with lower salaries, i.e., m>f in every couple, that does not mean men's salaries will be higher on average! It just means the lowest paid man does not get a wife, and the highest paid woman does not get a husband.
3) Drink vodka like a real man :)
I think women prefering richer men probably *is* a motivation for men to earn more, though. Analogy: "just because men want to marry beautiful women is no reason for women to feel pressure to look good. They just need to find a less attractive man."
Yes, if there are lots of single people then the maths will work out fine. But the single people may object to this algorithm.
That is not a good analogy. "Beautiful" is not measured in relation to the man's beauty.
True, the incels are not too happy to be left out of the marriage market. But that is because their expectations are unrealistic w.r.t. their merits.
I think many people of both genders would prefer not to be single, and I'm not sure they are all just suffering from unrealistic expectations. But this is getting into a different track.
Hi Alexia, I'm not sure what exactly is the argument here, but I can see how an asymmetric market with friction can suffer welfare-wise from imposing these two conditions.
I agree with this.
I find the idea that it's men who's responsible for the patriarchy utterly simpleminded. What about my grandmother who told me to wear this and that, showed me what and what not to do in society, while my grandpa died before I was born and who was a couch dweller reading the newspaper type while he was still alive. Now who is really responsible for the patriarchy there? I see a phenomenon there. I think all those hyperreligious grandmothers were perhaps more responsible of the "patriarchy" than men were, which means that we have been living in a secret "matriarchy" all this time and matriarchs were using physically superior men as their bodyguards and who were somewhat meaningless for most of history. I'm somewhat exaggerating that last part there.
I reckon that a large number of those "wife killing" stories you heard from the Middle East were to a large extent perpetuated by wise old women who were the harbingers of their millennia-old religious traditions. Perhaps there's a bit of a sexual selection thing going on there, where the women who survived religious conformity ended up being the most influential out of their age and gender combined. Your Greta Thunbergs would have been stoned to death already in 9,800 of the last 10,000 years of human history.