And I strongly suspect that the movement of women to the left will drive men away from it. Men tend to have a natural tendency to avoid women-centric organizations, movements, fashions and sports. Once the left is strongly coded as feminine, most men will want nothing to do with it.
Yes, that seems to be happening already, particularly with young men.
Ironically, it will likely happen with women as well. The "modern woman" seems to associate femininity with low status and masculinity with high status (despite their claims to the opposite). So as the percentage of women in a profession or institution increases, both sexes look for a way out (although for women this seems to be much less of impact on ideology and voting behavior where Agreeableness takes over(.
My worry is that many boys are being shaped differently now and grow up to be less manly. Less leader. The less they lead, the more likely they are to accept the Left.
That doesn't always happen. Christianity was much more feminine than prior religions and it wiped out all the more masculine pagan faiths, it was also full of male priests. And the left has been very female coded for a long time. What we see instead is some men leaving, and others adopt leftism to try and get girlfriends hotter than they'd otherwise be able to.
I can’t predict the future, but my half-assed argument is not that the left is more feminine (though it is), it is that it is turning into a movement for (pardon the expression) chicks and gays. Real men tend to run from this like dudes from Bud Light. We will see how it plays out, but if I was a national party chair for the Republicans, I know how I would characterize and portray and frame the left.
Male centric by the standards of today, not by the standards of the time in which it emerged. Lots of historians have written about the unusually female-heavy nature of early Christianity.
The first thing we need to do is to treat female neuroticism much in the same way we treat male aggression. A certain amount is natural, and has historically been a good thing. But you can have too much, and even way too much of the quality, and if you do you need to learn to regulate your behaviour. It is interesting that we have now learned why "stigmatising mental illness" and "blamining the victim" was socially adaptive, at the society level. However tough this was on those mentally ill and those who have suffered an offence, in the aggregate having people strongly avoid behaviours that could contribute or even cause them to become mentally ill or the casualty of some offence worked out better for all of us.
Do you have AI Therapists yet? We have them in Sweden. I think it is a terrible idea .... dangerous for the mentally ill who need real supervision of their mental behaviour, and habit forming in those who dont have anything particularly wrong with them but boredom, a disfunctional peer-group, inexperience in managing their own emotional states, and confusing an on-line community with real friends. At some point the lawsuits are coming .... probably not started here since the stigma against suing people is holding up .... and at some point we ought to be able to tell people that we can no longer afford, as a society, to allow people to have a hobby of being mentally ill. Like cock-fighting and dog-fighting, it is time to move on from this.
.... and moving to making more asylums to house the mentally ill and force them to get treatment might have a positive effect. "Keep this up and you will end up locked up for your own good" will sit badly on those who want to claim the moral high ground of "the neediest".
I don’t understand the emphasis on equality. No college professor believes that the immigrant woman who empties his or her trash basket should be paid as much as the professor.
Yes, I am not claiming to understand it either, but I have noticed that the professions that display the most inequality tend to have employees who most strongly profession a belief in equality. That is not a coincidence.
I think in some sense it is good old fashioned Christian Guilt that has morphed into an ideology.
Self interest is an important point: the emergent structure that arises out of the belief system pays off handsomely for white liberal women as they are given far more opportunities to extract resources than would be the case under a purer meritocracy. See Jacob Savage. And extracting resources matters when they cannot reliably find a mate of equal standing and won’t accept a lesser one. Also, young women are biologically coded to want children (above all else) and so get enormously frustrated and somewhat mad when this objective seems impossible. Employers channel the burst of energy into economic output. Women are very unhappy about the whole settlement so wang on about past oppression as cope. It’s a mess.
But they are selecting for resources and opportunities rather than directly for what makes them happy. People are notoriously unreliable when it comes to knowing what will actually make them happy.
The topic of this article is teen girls and young women and why the moved to the Left since 2010. I don’t believe that teen girls and young women are “ selecting for resources and opportunities.” It is not a rational, calculated decision.
If you are talking about something else, then it is off topic.
I really liked the article. Perhaps I’m framing things poorly, but I do see my point as complimentary to what’s written rather than either irrelevant/argumentative. Point being, an additional reason for female investment in the belief system is that it pays off in material terms by giving white women a structural advantage over white men. I do think this fits with the exchange above that the professed morals may not be entirely pure.
“Yes, I am not claiming to understand it either, but I have noticed that the professions that display the most inequality tend to have employees who most strongly profession a belief in equality. That is not a coincidence.”
They do believe that. They just phrase it as, it's so unfair that due to structural oppression the immigrant lady isn't also a highly paid professor. And they don't think much about who would do the cleaning in a world where everyone is a professor. If they do think about that, the answer they come up with is conservative a.k.a. "white" men.
What this essay is really describing isn’t “women moving left,” but what happens when civilizations lose their coordination interfaces.
Marriage, religion, work, and locality used to absorb anxiety and convert it into continuity. When those collapse, meaning doesn’t disappear, it gets rerouted into moralized identity systems.
The demographic signal shows up first where affective sensitivity and social attunement are highest, but the mechanism is structural, not ideological.
Social media doesn’t persuade so much as stabilize emotional states. Ideology then functions as an interface, not a belief system.
This is less about politics than about what happens when meaning becomes the control layer of a high-abundance, low-constraint civilization.
I still believe we're now seeing the "mass adoption" stage but the issue started in the 1990:s if not earlier; and the root of all evil was, as usually, the HR department.
Young unmarried ladies were given great power over men's and women's careers and rather vague rules to follow; in an economy with dozens of applications for a single position, they would, by the standards of previous generations, commit injustice daily — and they knew it.
Solution: jump aboard an ideology where the whole world is pervasive gross injustice, so that your own injustice becomes insignificant. (This is probably the most important psychological pathway to leftist ideologies generally.)
And these girlbosses were still looked upon as role models by younger girls.
You kind of nailed what I was thinking. If you are looking at the most militant damning harmful women out there you need to look no farther than Gen Y and younger Gen X's in REAL unrestrained power positions (prosecutors, judges, SCOTUS justices, law enforcement officers, etc.); there is a reason there is a direct correlation between "more men getting arrested with harsher punishments" and "women taking control of the criminal fabrication system". These are women with axes to grind and they raised an entire generation that this was not only normal, but correct. Look at the hysteria around Puff, Epstein, Weinstein, Trump, etc for example which fundamental is about female status games and nothing to do with their actual behavior cue the famous SNL about sexual harassment with Tom Brady.
The picture at the top of this article really hit home for me as I seen both my prosecutor and public defender (both women in their forties) a couple weeks later after my false conviction at a female empowered rally wearing "The Future is Female" shirts lock step hand-in-hand, I even snapped a picture of it, and then people express disbelief when I tell them "men don't get adequate representation in a court of women". I remember I casually asked my PO once "how is it in my years of coming here I have never once seen a woman in the waiting room" and her response was to immediately get angry and start drilling me about "Why do I hate women and if she needed to mandate I go go to court ordered therapy to deal with my misogynist attitude because only someone who hated women would even notice that". And she's not bluffing either, I've seen women judges in that same court order similar or get revoked; only against men of course. And the answer isn't more men because the men nowadays in that same system are both deathly scared of the women as they ought to be and likewise have that counterproductive self harming white knight albatross so many men of yesterday (and today sadly even) still have. Women aren't your friends men, not ones of this ilk.
Laws were made by men for men and we need to realized now that men are no longer involved in practice, we need to redesign the system because the traditional safeguards don't work anymore. And the affect of women taking control of these organizations isn't even being ignored, it's not even in the Overton window.
I think a cost free way to start is to just pay more attention to the language we all subconsciously use. For example, you say that women are "better off" than previous generations and "enjoy" full legal rights (actually superior legal rights), whilst also presenting lots of evidence that they are less happy than before. We shouldn't describe these changes as attainment, enjoyment or improvements if they are making women mentally ill.
A key change will have to be restoring meritocracy to the institutions. A lot flows from that: in any unrigged contest men tend to win by massive margins. Women marry less partly because they demand men of higher status than themselves, but when every contest in society is rigged to make women feel like winners, their relative status ends up equal or higher than men's. If this no longer happens, more women will find marriage and motherhood appealing, and having a man around to pour cold water on her leftist intuitions will help ground her.
I like the way you approach social media here. I don't think age limits will necessarily help. The same problems will remain when they age out, and our feminist society would never accept restrictions specific to women. Additionally, as the fiasco in Australia shows, left wing governments will always hijack such campaigns to make women even more mentally unwell: they blocked every social network EXCEPT BlueSky! The fact that YouTube gets classed as a social network also undermines this idea significantly. It's not really in my view, and blocking it would hurt boys significantly given how much practical educational content and content for men there is there. The most problematic social networks for girls are clearly BlueSky, TikTok and Instagram, so blocking YouTube would achieve nothing anyway.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that the Left will fight against anything that give more psychological stability to young women.
I am all in favor of restoring meritocracy to the institutions. I have written about it in other articles. I am skeptical whether that alone will change the ideological views of young women. Typically people learn by seeing the results of their actions.
I agree with the majority of your diagnosis but reject the treatment assigned (from what I’ve seen in your subsequent comments).
Disclaimer: I absolutely fall into the Post-Modern Left-of-Centre camp but as a man.
One thing that I’ve always been shocked about when speaking to women is how much more dangerous they believe the world is for them than it actually is. And they form this belief entirely on vibes, without the data, and are a bit stopped when I point out that men over index in almost every violent crime statistic (bar sexual violence, which yeah, massive problem, but so is murder and deadly assault). I think due to the fact that the significant majority of perpetrators of violence (both on vibes and objectively) are men, there’s a perception that male victims implicitly share some of their blame, while all female victims are victims in the truest sense. But in many cases, I can understand where these notions come from - obviously algorithmic content as you point out, but also things like true crime podcasts all targeted at women (one of the scourges of our society imo), traditional media disproportionately covering violence against women (I’m reminded of the story of Sarah Everard here in the UK who was tragically raped and murdered by a policeman; horrific yes, however based on the response you could easily believe that this was a daily occurrence). Even various campaigns targeted at ending violence against women (a ridiculous proposal in the first instance) only furthers the narrative that life is so dangerous for young women that we really need to do something about it.
I also agree that the decline of traditional structures you’ve mentioned; marriage, childbirth, religion, family only further this sense of danger among young women as they don’t have the feeling of being part of something greater than oneself, where an attack on the individual is an attack on the whole and support exists.
Where I disagree is that the only way to reverse this trend (note; I don’t want to reverse the trend of political liberalisation, only the deep anxieties and depressions that young women experience pushing them towards these ideologies) is to rewind the clock. For women to get married early, to have children early, to find religion. I think self-actualisation can happen independently of traditional forms, however for so long, millennia as you say, these were the only pathways open to actualisation for women, while men have consistently had more freedom in their role as a man. I don’t have specific policies or goals to enable greater actualisation (something you accuse women of in the article, and in truth something I anecdotally have also noticed), maybe time will take care of it as the default idea of a woman shifts from being a mother and wife to the freer role men have in their identity. But certainly more needs to be done to break the negative perception many women have of the world around them.
Given there is a time limit to all of this imposed by birthrates and the rise of Sharia law in the west, saying Magoon's suggestions are bad but not proposing alternatives isn't going to work. Something has got to change and soon.
One place to start is tackling the left's garbling of history. Men have not historically been more free than women. Men have been enslaved, conscripted, forced to work as serfs and ended up in many other undesirable outcomes throughout history. Very few men have ever had any meaningful freedom in what they do with their life up until recently, which isn't much different to women. At no point have women been oppressed by men either (at least, no more than men oppressed each other). The primary demographic that campaigned against female suffrage was women, not men. When women were granted the vote, most didn't use it. The biggest increases in freedom for women were created by the automation of housework, which was done by overwhelmingly male engineers and inventors, and the pill, also invented by men.
The false narratives around the history of women, equality, the Nazis etc are one of the primary factors preventing the world from healing. And so we need to rebut them whenever possible.
Great analysis. Such an important topic that is hardly talked about. As you mentioned, it’s usually just young men and them moving toward the right that gets the headlines. I’ve been noticing that all large, angry, social justice protests seem to have shrill women at the front of them, this article explains why.
What you've perfectly described is the ancient archetype of feminine 'chaos' which, unbound from structures, is a mess. Why the women in relationships or religion are more stable is that they are structured into anti-fragile pairings. Doing so, they also make the order less tyrannical and more flexible itself. Liberal women and Andrew Tate-Men are the negatives of chaos and order: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/chaos-and-order
Me too, unfortunately, the nature of the situation causes these young women to not want to discuss rationally. Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies have give them a quiver of snappy comebacks to virtually all rational arguments.
I think the best question to ask is:
Is this making you happy?
Is what you are doing likely to lead to a fulfilling life?
If these questions are coming from someone who they love and trust and are at the right moment, it may cause them to think. But don't be surprised if the initial reaction is to lash out and attack.
I think the best method is to immunize girls before they become teens and it becomes a problem.
So these psychologies and behaviors developed through evolutionary pressures and therefore in the normal course of biology helped our species survive. In men, characteristics of aggression were propagated. But advances in civilization have militated against male aggression. We know we can get along with civil law instead of might makes right. Male aggression is somewhat vestigial. In parallel, are these female attributes you explain, once critical for human survival, now vestigial?
Implications are truly fascinating… We still have to realise what kind of consequences our 'modern' life and material progress can have on our societies. And how much dysfunctional they may become. Especially since it seems to have the opposite effects on young men.
And so it turns out that, if any of them read your article, left-wing politicians, in order to get their own electoral base growing, would have to oppose any idea of banning social media for teenagers... They would probably argue that it is an intolerable threat to freedom....
Yes, I do think much of what is going on today revolves around the fact that the human brain did not evolve to be happy in a world of affluence. Our brains evolved for survival and reproduction on the African savanna.
Neuroticism makes perfect sense if you are young women with small children in that environment. Any women that just enjoyed life and the beauty of nature would not last very long.
Given that a gap seems to be widening between men and women (the visible result of which is political polarization), it would be interesting to have the same type of analysis for young men. Do they cope better with 'modern' life or not ? And what consequence does it have on their psychology and behaviour.
But you are right. It probably boil down to genetic evolution. In any case, the decline in the birth rate, at least in part voluntary, well below the threshold for generational replacement is a clear sign that something is seriously wrong.
And it's quite paradoxal in a way. Humanity always craved for abundance and that could well be its downfall. And in more than one way.
I have a nice house! Very comfortable and well situated. I no longer think I live in a civilization of Beings. The reality, I am living in Wildnerness and in one the many forests of Wilderness Earth. Forests are portals to the Divine Hierarchy! Bushcraft takes on a new meaning in Forest! Happy New Year!
Any inherent characteristics toward Neuroticism are surely magnified by Therapy Culture...and more neuroticism leads to more therapy, and so on, in a positive feedback loop aka a vicious circle (with teeth)
I think Therapy Culture is really an outgrowth of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies. It has been widely observed that many people go into the field of psychology because they want to self-diagnose their own mental issues. Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies give them a world view that redefines all internal struggles as being caused by society and oppression. So then they impose that world view on their patients and earn money making their patients feel worse.
Excellent analysis.
Thanks! I love your work, as well.
And I strongly suspect that the movement of women to the left will drive men away from it. Men tend to have a natural tendency to avoid women-centric organizations, movements, fashions and sports. Once the left is strongly coded as feminine, most men will want nothing to do with it.
Yes, that seems to be happening already, particularly with young men.
Ironically, it will likely happen with women as well. The "modern woman" seems to associate femininity with low status and masculinity with high status (despite their claims to the opposite). So as the percentage of women in a profession or institution increases, both sexes look for a way out (although for women this seems to be much less of impact on ideology and voting behavior where Agreeableness takes over(.
My worry is that many boys are being shaped differently now and grow up to be less manly. Less leader. The less they lead, the more likely they are to accept the Left.
That doesn't always happen. Christianity was much more feminine than prior religions and it wiped out all the more masculine pagan faiths, it was also full of male priests. And the left has been very female coded for a long time. What we see instead is some men leaving, and others adopt leftism to try and get girlfriends hotter than they'd otherwise be able to.
I can’t predict the future, but my half-assed argument is not that the left is more feminine (though it is), it is that it is turning into a movement for (pardon the expression) chicks and gays. Real men tend to run from this like dudes from Bud Light. We will see how it plays out, but if I was a national party chair for the Republicans, I know how I would characterize and portray and frame the left.
Cause and effect with respect to your observation about Christianity replacing prior religions because Christianity was more feminine is very flawed.
Christianity has been traditionally very male led and male centric.
And pagan faiths were very different around the world so the starting point is hard to generalize.
Let's keep the focus on the topic of the article. It is a commenting rule.
Male centric by the standards of today, not by the standards of the time in which it emerged. Lots of historians have written about the unusually female-heavy nature of early Christianity.
Let's keep the focus on the topic of the article. It is a commenting rule.
The first thing we need to do is to treat female neuroticism much in the same way we treat male aggression. A certain amount is natural, and has historically been a good thing. But you can have too much, and even way too much of the quality, and if you do you need to learn to regulate your behaviour. It is interesting that we have now learned why "stigmatising mental illness" and "blamining the victim" was socially adaptive, at the society level. However tough this was on those mentally ill and those who have suffered an offence, in the aggregate having people strongly avoid behaviours that could contribute or even cause them to become mentally ill or the casualty of some offence worked out better for all of us.
Do you have AI Therapists yet? We have them in Sweden. I think it is a terrible idea .... dangerous for the mentally ill who need real supervision of their mental behaviour, and habit forming in those who dont have anything particularly wrong with them but boredom, a disfunctional peer-group, inexperience in managing their own emotional states, and confusing an on-line community with real friends. At some point the lawsuits are coming .... probably not started here since the stigma against suing people is holding up .... and at some point we ought to be able to tell people that we can no longer afford, as a society, to allow people to have a hobby of being mentally ill. Like cock-fighting and dog-fighting, it is time to move on from this.
Bringing back the term "hysterical" would be one place to start. Ending the acceptance of anonymous complaints in the workplace would be another.
.... and moving to making more asylums to house the mentally ill and force them to get treatment might have a positive effect. "Keep this up and you will end up locked up for your own good" will sit badly on those who want to claim the moral high ground of "the neediest".
A parsimonious analysis!
I don’t understand the emphasis on equality. No college professor believes that the immigrant woman who empties his or her trash basket should be paid as much as the professor.
Yes, I am not claiming to understand it either, but I have noticed that the professions that display the most inequality tend to have employees who most strongly profession a belief in equality. That is not a coincidence.
I think in some sense it is good old fashioned Christian Guilt that has morphed into an ideology.
Self interest is an important point: the emergent structure that arises out of the belief system pays off handsomely for white liberal women as they are given far more opportunities to extract resources than would be the case under a purer meritocracy. See Jacob Savage. And extracting resources matters when they cannot reliably find a mate of equal standing and won’t accept a lesser one. Also, young women are biologically coded to want children (above all else) and so get enormously frustrated and somewhat mad when this objective seems impossible. Employers channel the burst of energy into economic output. Women are very unhappy about the whole settlement so wang on about past oppression as cope. It’s a mess.
Not convincing. It is exactly white liberal women that are doing the worst psychologically.
I don’t think any of this is explained by self-interest or by employers.
But they are selecting for resources and opportunities rather than directly for what makes them happy. People are notoriously unreliable when it comes to knowing what will actually make them happy.
The topic of this article is teen girls and young women and why the moved to the Left since 2010. I don’t believe that teen girls and young women are “ selecting for resources and opportunities.” It is not a rational, calculated decision.
If you are talking about something else, then it is off topic.
I really liked the article. Perhaps I’m framing things poorly, but I do see my point as complimentary to what’s written rather than either irrelevant/argumentative. Point being, an additional reason for female investment in the belief system is that it pays off in material terms by giving white women a structural advantage over white men. I do think this fits with the exchange above that the professed morals may not be entirely pure.
“Yes, I am not claiming to understand it either, but I have noticed that the professions that display the most inequality tend to have employees who most strongly profession a belief in equality. That is not a coincidence.”
They do believe that. They just phrase it as, it's so unfair that due to structural oppression the immigrant lady isn't also a highly paid professor. And they don't think much about who would do the cleaning in a world where everyone is a professor. If they do think about that, the answer they come up with is conservative a.k.a. "white" men.
What this essay is really describing isn’t “women moving left,” but what happens when civilizations lose their coordination interfaces.
Marriage, religion, work, and locality used to absorb anxiety and convert it into continuity. When those collapse, meaning doesn’t disappear, it gets rerouted into moralized identity systems.
The demographic signal shows up first where affective sensitivity and social attunement are highest, but the mechanism is structural, not ideological.
Social media doesn’t persuade so much as stabilize emotional states. Ideology then functions as an interface, not a belief system.
This is less about politics than about what happens when meaning becomes the control layer of a high-abundance, low-constraint civilization.
Yes, this article is about explaining a clear trend: young women throughout the Western world moving to the ideological Left since 2010.
I still believe we're now seeing the "mass adoption" stage but the issue started in the 1990:s if not earlier; and the root of all evil was, as usually, the HR department.
Young unmarried ladies were given great power over men's and women's careers and rather vague rules to follow; in an economy with dozens of applications for a single position, they would, by the standards of previous generations, commit injustice daily — and they knew it.
Solution: jump aboard an ideology where the whole world is pervasive gross injustice, so that your own injustice becomes insignificant. (This is probably the most important psychological pathway to leftist ideologies generally.)
And these girlbosses were still looked upon as role models by younger girls.
Thanks for the comment.
I think that it really started in the late 1960s. It just took a long time for the belief system to roll through the institutions:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/conscience-without-god-the-cultural
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/explaining-the-long-march-through
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-democratic-partys-internal-revolution
You kind of nailed what I was thinking. If you are looking at the most militant damning harmful women out there you need to look no farther than Gen Y and younger Gen X's in REAL unrestrained power positions (prosecutors, judges, SCOTUS justices, law enforcement officers, etc.); there is a reason there is a direct correlation between "more men getting arrested with harsher punishments" and "women taking control of the criminal fabrication system". These are women with axes to grind and they raised an entire generation that this was not only normal, but correct. Look at the hysteria around Puff, Epstein, Weinstein, Trump, etc for example which fundamental is about female status games and nothing to do with their actual behavior cue the famous SNL about sexual harassment with Tom Brady.
The picture at the top of this article really hit home for me as I seen both my prosecutor and public defender (both women in their forties) a couple weeks later after my false conviction at a female empowered rally wearing "The Future is Female" shirts lock step hand-in-hand, I even snapped a picture of it, and then people express disbelief when I tell them "men don't get adequate representation in a court of women". I remember I casually asked my PO once "how is it in my years of coming here I have never once seen a woman in the waiting room" and her response was to immediately get angry and start drilling me about "Why do I hate women and if she needed to mandate I go go to court ordered therapy to deal with my misogynist attitude because only someone who hated women would even notice that". And she's not bluffing either, I've seen women judges in that same court order similar or get revoked; only against men of course. And the answer isn't more men because the men nowadays in that same system are both deathly scared of the women as they ought to be and likewise have that counterproductive self harming white knight albatross so many men of yesterday (and today sadly even) still have. Women aren't your friends men, not ones of this ilk.
Laws were made by men for men and we need to realized now that men are no longer involved in practice, we need to redesign the system because the traditional safeguards don't work anymore. And the affect of women taking control of these organizations isn't even being ignored, it's not even in the Overton window.
Really good article.
I think a cost free way to start is to just pay more attention to the language we all subconsciously use. For example, you say that women are "better off" than previous generations and "enjoy" full legal rights (actually superior legal rights), whilst also presenting lots of evidence that they are less happy than before. We shouldn't describe these changes as attainment, enjoyment or improvements if they are making women mentally ill.
A key change will have to be restoring meritocracy to the institutions. A lot flows from that: in any unrigged contest men tend to win by massive margins. Women marry less partly because they demand men of higher status than themselves, but when every contest in society is rigged to make women feel like winners, their relative status ends up equal or higher than men's. If this no longer happens, more women will find marriage and motherhood appealing, and having a man around to pour cold water on her leftist intuitions will help ground her.
I like the way you approach social media here. I don't think age limits will necessarily help. The same problems will remain when they age out, and our feminist society would never accept restrictions specific to women. Additionally, as the fiasco in Australia shows, left wing governments will always hijack such campaigns to make women even more mentally unwell: they blocked every social network EXCEPT BlueSky! The fact that YouTube gets classed as a social network also undermines this idea significantly. It's not really in my view, and blocking it would hurt boys significantly given how much practical educational content and content for men there is there. The most problematic social networks for girls are clearly BlueSky, TikTok and Instagram, so blocking YouTube would achieve nothing anyway.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that the Left will fight against anything that give more psychological stability to young women.
I am all in favor of restoring meritocracy to the institutions. I have written about it in other articles. I am skeptical whether that alone will change the ideological views of young women. Typically people learn by seeing the results of their actions.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-merit-of-merit-part-1
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-merit-of-merit-part-2-of-2
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/combining-meritocracy-and-upward
I agree with the majority of your diagnosis but reject the treatment assigned (from what I’ve seen in your subsequent comments).
Disclaimer: I absolutely fall into the Post-Modern Left-of-Centre camp but as a man.
One thing that I’ve always been shocked about when speaking to women is how much more dangerous they believe the world is for them than it actually is. And they form this belief entirely on vibes, without the data, and are a bit stopped when I point out that men over index in almost every violent crime statistic (bar sexual violence, which yeah, massive problem, but so is murder and deadly assault). I think due to the fact that the significant majority of perpetrators of violence (both on vibes and objectively) are men, there’s a perception that male victims implicitly share some of their blame, while all female victims are victims in the truest sense. But in many cases, I can understand where these notions come from - obviously algorithmic content as you point out, but also things like true crime podcasts all targeted at women (one of the scourges of our society imo), traditional media disproportionately covering violence against women (I’m reminded of the story of Sarah Everard here in the UK who was tragically raped and murdered by a policeman; horrific yes, however based on the response you could easily believe that this was a daily occurrence). Even various campaigns targeted at ending violence against women (a ridiculous proposal in the first instance) only furthers the narrative that life is so dangerous for young women that we really need to do something about it.
I also agree that the decline of traditional structures you’ve mentioned; marriage, childbirth, religion, family only further this sense of danger among young women as they don’t have the feeling of being part of something greater than oneself, where an attack on the individual is an attack on the whole and support exists.
Where I disagree is that the only way to reverse this trend (note; I don’t want to reverse the trend of political liberalisation, only the deep anxieties and depressions that young women experience pushing them towards these ideologies) is to rewind the clock. For women to get married early, to have children early, to find religion. I think self-actualisation can happen independently of traditional forms, however for so long, millennia as you say, these were the only pathways open to actualisation for women, while men have consistently had more freedom in their role as a man. I don’t have specific policies or goals to enable greater actualisation (something you accuse women of in the article, and in truth something I anecdotally have also noticed), maybe time will take care of it as the default idea of a woman shifts from being a mother and wife to the freer role men have in their identity. But certainly more needs to be done to break the negative perception many women have of the world around them.
Otherwise good article, cheers
Thanks for the comment, but I am not sure what you mean by "I reject the treatment assigned."
I never proposed any treatment. In particular, I did not propose to "rewind the clock."
Women have had 60 years to adapt to "default idea of a woman shifts from being a mother and wife to the freer role men have in their identity."
It is clearly not going well for them. The best thing we can do is acknowledge the truth instead of pretending.
And I am not sure what you mean "the freer role men have."
I think the problem is trying to pretend biology is not a fundamental constraint. Biology is a basic constraint for all humans: male and female.
An inability of people in modern societies to acknowledge fundamental constraints is at the root of many our problems:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-animal-that-invented-progress
Given there is a time limit to all of this imposed by birthrates and the rise of Sharia law in the west, saying Magoon's suggestions are bad but not proposing alternatives isn't going to work. Something has got to change and soon.
One place to start is tackling the left's garbling of history. Men have not historically been more free than women. Men have been enslaved, conscripted, forced to work as serfs and ended up in many other undesirable outcomes throughout history. Very few men have ever had any meaningful freedom in what they do with their life up until recently, which isn't much different to women. At no point have women been oppressed by men either (at least, no more than men oppressed each other). The primary demographic that campaigned against female suffrage was women, not men. When women were granted the vote, most didn't use it. The biggest increases in freedom for women were created by the automation of housework, which was done by overwhelmingly male engineers and inventors, and the pill, also invented by men.
The false narratives around the history of women, equality, the Nazis etc are one of the primary factors preventing the world from healing. And so we need to rebut them whenever possible.
Great analysis. Such an important topic that is hardly talked about. As you mentioned, it’s usually just young men and them moving toward the right that gets the headlines. I’ve been noticing that all large, angry, social justice protests seem to have shrill women at the front of them, this article explains why.
What you've perfectly described is the ancient archetype of feminine 'chaos' which, unbound from structures, is a mess. Why the women in relationships or religion are more stable is that they are structured into anti-fragile pairings. Doing so, they also make the order less tyrannical and more flexible itself. Liberal women and Andrew Tate-Men are the negatives of chaos and order: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/chaos-and-order
I'd like to figure out what I can do to help people I care who are mired in it.
Me too, unfortunately, the nature of the situation causes these young women to not want to discuss rationally. Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies have give them a quiver of snappy comebacks to virtually all rational arguments.
I think the best question to ask is:
Is this making you happy?
Is what you are doing likely to lead to a fulfilling life?
If these questions are coming from someone who they love and trust and are at the right moment, it may cause them to think. But don't be surprised if the initial reaction is to lash out and attack.
I think the best method is to immunize girls before they become teens and it becomes a problem.
So these psychologies and behaviors developed through evolutionary pressures and therefore in the normal course of biology helped our species survive. In men, characteristics of aggression were propagated. But advances in civilization have militated against male aggression. We know we can get along with civil law instead of might makes right. Male aggression is somewhat vestigial. In parallel, are these female attributes you explain, once critical for human survival, now vestigial?
Yes, but you forgot the reproduction part. These evolved psychologies and behaviors are not just about survival. Reproduction is just as important.
And, yes, evolved female attributes for reproduction is as important as ever.
Implications are truly fascinating… We still have to realise what kind of consequences our 'modern' life and material progress can have on our societies. And how much dysfunctional they may become. Especially since it seems to have the opposite effects on young men.
And so it turns out that, if any of them read your article, left-wing politicians, in order to get their own electoral base growing, would have to oppose any idea of banning social media for teenagers... They would probably argue that it is an intolerable threat to freedom....
Yes, I do think much of what is going on today revolves around the fact that the human brain did not evolve to be happy in a world of affluence. Our brains evolved for survival and reproduction on the African savanna.
Neuroticism makes perfect sense if you are young women with small children in that environment. Any women that just enjoyed life and the beauty of nature would not last very long.
Given that a gap seems to be widening between men and women (the visible result of which is political polarization), it would be interesting to have the same type of analysis for young men. Do they cope better with 'modern' life or not ? And what consequence does it have on their psychology and behaviour.
But you are right. It probably boil down to genetic evolution. In any case, the decline in the birth rate, at least in part voluntary, well below the threshold for generational replacement is a clear sign that something is seriously wrong.
And it's quite paradoxal in a way. Humanity always craved for abundance and that could well be its downfall. And in more than one way.
Chaos has momentum! Time to return to Forest!
You are welcome to do so. I love camping, but I prefer my house.
I have a nice house! Very comfortable and well situated. I no longer think I live in a civilization of Beings. The reality, I am living in Wildnerness and in one the many forests of Wilderness Earth. Forests are portals to the Divine Hierarchy! Bushcraft takes on a new meaning in Forest! Happy New Year!
Let keep the comments to the topic of the article. It is a commenting rule.
Any inherent characteristics toward Neuroticism are surely magnified by Therapy Culture...and more neuroticism leads to more therapy, and so on, in a positive feedback loop aka a vicious circle (with teeth)
Yes, I agree with that.
I think Therapy Culture is really an outgrowth of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies. It has been widely observed that many people go into the field of psychology because they want to self-diagnose their own mental issues. Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies give them a world view that redefines all internal struggles as being caused by society and oppression. So then they impose that world view on their patients and earn money making their patients feel worse.