When feminism dies, what will take its place?

Munchausen by Patriarchy, pt. 4

Intro

Let’s recap where we are so far (you can read these posts in any order):

1. In part 1, I point out that the current strategy of shaming men lost them the 2024 election.

2. In part 2, I note that much of feminist rhetoric borrows it’s language from sociology departments, which comes across as condescending to men, and ultimately repulses them.

3. In part 3, I discussed some of the subcultures that we see when feminist thought gets twisted by the modern online landscape.

In this (hopefully) final post, I will answer three basic questions:

1. What was the motivation in writing all this?

2. How did we get here?

3. Where do we go from here?

An Anecdote

A little while ago, I was getting my haircut, and it just happened to be the same day as the first assassination attempt on Trump. My barber brought up the subject unprompted. She was annoyed, primarily because she knew this would give Trump a boost at the polls.

Her point was fairly reasonable: avoiding assassination isn't a qualification for becoming president. Nevertheless, her derision was palpable. She kept saying that Trump played well with “the stupid”, and used their stupidity for his own gain.

Considering this lady quite literally had a razor to my throat, I wasn't exactly in a position to debate her on the topic. I just wanted a haircut.

The bill for the haircut was exactly $30. I handed her a $50.

She pulled one of these calculators in order to determine the amount of change she had to give back:

I don’t care that she was bad at math — although that's pretty sad in my opinion. I care that she spent all this time deriding “uneducated people” only to require a separate machine in order to tell her what 50 minus 30 was.

This interaction was a microcosm of what I kept seeing over and over again. 

I would repeatedly hear about women blaming one issue or another on “the patriarchy” — how they had diagnosed all of society's woes in this single word. Moreover, I would see how condescending and rude they were to men, and how they would justify this condescension under the principles of feminism.

Beyond this, I found a hypocrisy in their worldview, especially in how they viewed gendered issues.

1. If women were facing a problem in society, then it was a problem with society itself, and this required systemic level changes.

2. If there was a problem that disproportionately affected men, however, the women turned into libertarians. Suddenly the solution focused on the individual, and how men needed to change.

It was frustrating to talk to these people. I’m not particularly antagonistic by nature, but I was genuinely confused and curious about their world view, and the response I received was some variation of “educate yourself.”

So I did.

I plugged my nose and read some of the feminist literature; the person who was recommended to me the most often was bell hooks.

And quite frankly, I was surprised at some of the things feminists were writing. Her books are far more sympathetic to men than one might imagine. She is very critical of other feminist scholars — particularly those who belong to the upper classes, and those who use “the patriarchy” as a blanket term to avoid any responsibility for their bad behavior.

That’s why I named this series of posts Munchausen by Patriarchy. Under this framing, the patriarchy is a get out of jail free card, and an excuse to get attention.

Originally this was an exercise to organize my own thoughts, but I was compelled to post this online shortly following the election, because I genuinely that people are getting fed up with the idea that you have to agree with them along every ideological dimension, or otherwise you are a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe. 

How did it get so bad?

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of problems with feminism: ideological, technological, and sociological.

The ideological problem stems from the fact that feminists are disproportionately represented by: 

1. Gender nonconforming women

2. Upper middle-class women i.e. white women who have plenty of time to read feminist literature and essays.

I think both of these groups suffer from the typical mind fallacy. They implicitly believe that everybody thinks the same way as they do. 

People who don’t conform to the gender binary think that everybody must be negotiating with their sexuality in the same way. They don’t realize that the majority of people see their sex and gender as the same thing.

Similarly, the upper middle-class feminists don’t viscerally understand the lives of people who live paycheck to paycheck. Working class people don’t have the luxury to be so ideologically rigid.

As a result of these biases, there is a blind spot when it comes to how feminism grapples with the realities of everyday men.

The technological problem has two sub components: algorithms, and the psychograph.

Algorithms are always attempting to predict your online behavior. They can do this in one of two ways:

1. Try to understand the complexities of your character, and make a prediction as to what you want next.

2. Try to manipulate your personality so that you become more fundamentally predictable.

When people fall prey to Method B, they end up falling into online rabbit holes.

The psychograph is a relatively new phenomenon in the online landscape; in the old school days of social media, content was recommended to you based on your peers and friends (the social graph). With new social media like tiktok, content is exclusively driven by the swipe left/swipe right mechanism based on your psychology (the psychograph).

In this sense, it would be more fitting to call these platforms psycho-media.

This dynamic disproportionately impacts women, as they tend to be the primary users of these platforms. To be clear, men have their own issues with the online landscape, such as porn, gambling, and video games, but the specific issues played out by social media primarily impact women.

Which brings us to the sociological problem. 

There have been a number of population trends going back several decades:

1. The rise of single-parent households, in which the mother is usually the primary guardian.

2. The drop in the number of children per women, increasing the number of children who grow up without siblings.

3. The precipitous decrease of men in female coded jobs such as primary school education. 

When you combine all of these things, you see a sharp rise in the number of women who grow up with no fathers, no brothers, and no male teachers. As a result, many of them live the first two decades of their life without any understanding of how men operate.

They have no understanding of male psychology, nor the male experience. They can’t even really conceive of men as real people. To their minds, men are like Sauron from Lord of the rings — some vague and nebulous presence sitting at the edge of middle earth.

As bell hooks points out, women who live without the presence of a strong male figure tend to disproportionately promote the values of the patriarchy. This sounds counterintuitive, but in retrospect it is obvious. Women who have no strong male presence tend to idealize masculinity, and see every man as failing to live up to an impossible standard.

It’s no different than a dweeb who has trouble talking to women. In their minds, women are perfect angels who always smell like flowers and never have to take a shit. This is why dweebs have such a hard time understanding why women prefer the “asshole”. Women understand that the dweeb will turn into a raging lunatic the moment he realizes she doesn’t live up to the pedestal he has put her on. The asshole might be an asshole, but he won’t dehumanize her.

A lot of women are experiencing the same phenomenon, only they are now in the position of the dweeb.

When you combine these ideological, technological, and sociological factors, you get this twisted generation of feminists who are intent on shaming men based on delusional ideas of masculinity. 

Where do we go from here?

There's good news, there's bad news, and there's more good news. 

The good news? There are concrete steps.

First, feminists need to internalize a fact, and let it sink into their bones: The strategy of berating and shaming men into becoming feminists is not going to work. If they continue to do this, they will continue to lose elections.

Second, feminists need to do away with the condescending verbiage that they’ve borrowed from sociology departments. Using words like mansplaining and toxic masculinity and patriarchy is only going to repulse men. In fact, I would ditch the term feminism in favor of gender equality.

This onion video perfectly describes why holding onto these words is so hilariously misguided:

Third, feminists are going to have to acknowledge a basic reality. It is something that sounds so simple it’s almost condescending, but I honestly believe that a lot of self-proclaimed feminists do not truly believe it.

Men are real people.

Men make up the majority of the homeless people, the prison population, the addicted, and the suicides. Increasingly, men are dropping out of universities, and becoming structurally locked out of the workforce.

If feminism as a project is in any way tied to the idea of equality, eventually these will become problems that they will need to deal with.

Which brings us to the bad news

Women will have to be the ones to bring about change.

As a man, I can write about this all I want, but the people who truly need to hear this message will never listen to people like me. The change has to come from within; it has to come from reasonable women who are willing to change their minds.

Of course, there is a natural objection to all of this. Why can’t the men’s rights activists focus on these problems? Women can continue with feminism as usual, while men can detoxify their own half of the equation.

The truth is — a truth that is going to piss off a lot of men — is that men are nowhere near as capable of forming such coalitions as women. We don’t take time to write literature about systemic issues. We don’t ponder on the nature of gender relations. If there’s a problem in the world, we find solutions, and usually at the individual level. 

It’s on women to jumpstart the conversation.

Back to the good news

At the individual level, there is an opportunity for both men and women. A sort of arbitrage, if you will.

Right now, the bar of empathy for the opposite sex is so low it might as well be up Satan's asshole.

If you're a woman, and you have even a remote degree of empathy for the problems the average man faces, that puts you so far ahead of a disparagingly large number of people. If you can understand that most people are complex and multifaceted, and that shitposting “man or bear” memes might not be the best way to improve gender relations, then you're already ten steps ahead.

If you’re a man, the next time you have the opportunity, ask your female friends for their dating app conversations. You will see a flood of the most degenerate male behavior that’s humanly possible. If you’ve made it this far into the post, then I’m going to assume that you have the ability to empathize and reason with various perspectives, even if you don’t agree with them. And that alone puts you ahead of so many men.

While I still believe that so much of modern feminist thinking is delusional, they’re absolutely correct in that a solid fraction of men are dysfunctional and emotionally stunted. As with so many different ideologies, it’s important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Edit: New post up! Check it out if you like: