29 Comments

Maybe the discrepancy re status could be explained as follows. Males have a higher average status than females (due to most extremely high status people being male), while females have a higher median status. You focus on the median, while Perry is thinking of the average? This also fits with the point that high-status women are the ones with the most complaints.

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+1

Let's add something else. Low Status men are invisible and unimportant to women as comparisons.

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Women don't have a higher median status. Women are overrepresented among the poor, in the low-paying jobs and among welfare recipients.

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Actually, men are overrepresented at the bottom of the income distribution.

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Nope. Women are overrepresented at the lowest income levels: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233154/us-poverty-rate-by-gender/

And they do most of the low-paying jobs as well as being the majority of the welfare recipients.

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"...stubbornly self-imposed painful parenting choices."

Oh, man! This is it, 100%. I'm a serial parent raisin my second child with my first one already 18 when the second was born. It's of course an opportunity to review all the mistakes I made and to improve on them, but the self-imposed parenting choices is just absolutely gob-smacking. All of the child-play interruptions to make sure their kid says please/thank you, the total involvement in their activities to signal they are good parents, the expectation that kids will follow orders and the collapse into defeat when they don't.

I've described it as parents treating children like dogs (good dogs, of course) not future adults. Addressing my current 7 yo as a person of whom we have expectations and whom we also trust explicitly has paid off in huge dividends, if for no other reason than we all get along and have little stress in our household. If we have an issue with her behavior, we describe in terms of expectations and responsibilities and never in a way which will embarrass her. We see our relationship as inherently collaborative.

When you see your child as an adult-to-be, you often realize that the behaviors that need to change are your own.

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Don't you think that it would be very difficult for someone in academia or other elite circles to publicly endorse the statement that feminism is bad? Even if they are willing to endorse the substance of all the empirical claims you make in your book?

Doesn't that make your choice of definition a substantial barrier to convincing the kind of people (your daughters) you claim to want to persuade? Just as a tactical matter, why not define a new term so you avoid the resistance you are bound to generate by asking people up front to endorse claims that would ostrasize them from their social groups? If necessary, do that in the last chapter but it seems like a mistake in the title.

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I understand the case for tactical wordplay, but there is a sense in which you just have to get people to a decision point. If "give into your social group" is a deal breaker even when your social group is insane, perhaps you have some thinking to do about your social group and yourself.

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Yah, I agree with that. I think we disagree about what most progressive circles are like. It's not scientology or a cult. It's mostly just people who have some vague general values and then some associations about what kind of things someone with those values says or does.

My experience is that when you push most people who claim to be progressive (but aren't the few loud activist types) on what they think or believe it's not that extreme (I presume it's similar in conservative circles). Indeed, it's more than they just give the benefit of the doubt to people on their side (ohh that's hyperbole they just mean...) and not those on the other side. And much like I saw when I used to be religous, people would rather twist a definition so they don't have to face conflict than insist on interpreting it straight.

So I figure it's mostly like the situation with patriotism: they just have a strong association that the people who say they are anti-feminist are asshole sexists because amoung the people they encounter (we are split into our little bubbles) the only people willing to say that are the people who tend to be so bitter and angry about gender they do hate women or cases they hear about because they are cherry picked in their media to support those associations. That and because of the pressure not to say things that get your peers angry at you.

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Maybe.

During COVID I watched progressives engage in child abuse of their own children, so it's hard for me not to view them as cowardly and deranged. When I went to a playground around DC and 100% of the children are masked outdoors in 95 degree weather after vaccination...screw it man at some point be brave enough not to fit in.

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"Gender Tribalism" by Peter Schwartz, in _Return Of The Primitive_ by Ayn Rand makes it possible to refute feminism. Definitions are a need and product of the focused mind. They are not not arbitrary and conventional products of the unfocused mind. Defrauding people into ideas increases contempt for them.

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To put the point differently, suppose lots og (maybe most) people are using patriotism as an excuse to suppress freedom of speech and punish anyone who critisizes the government.

Which is the better play:

1) Saying actually patriotism means suppressing dissent and that is bad and we shouldn't be patriotic.

2) Saying: true patriotism is living up to our ideals of freedom of speech and belief and all these people who are using patriotism as an excuse to punish dissent aren't the real patriots.

I think it's obvious that 2 is the more effective political play even though you are technically critisizing the same behavior in both cases.

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The choice of the term that you define is arbitrary even if the definition you use isn't. He could have defined squalbalbagey as the belief that women have it on net worse than men and replaced every *use* of the word feminism in the book with squalbalbagey and it would be logically equivalent.

Of course there are places he discusses how other people use the word feminism (places where he mentions the term 'feminism' ...if written in a logically rigorous language we'd use quotes). And he could still perfectly well say, the way people out in the world use the term 'feminism' seems to in practice track what I call squalbalbagey and every logical inference is preserved.

And sure, if people were perfectly logical it wouldn't matter one way or another. But they aren't and many people will falsely associate saying that feminism is bad with hatred of women.

You end up with the same result: a criticism of what most people are doing under the banner of feminism but you avoid the negative association and can recruit the people who actually take the feminism = equality definition seriously (you can just say, fine in that sense I'm all for feminism but you should be on my side bc all those things those other people are calling feminism aren't actually treating men and women equally).

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> The choice of the term that you define is arbitrary even if the definition you use isn't

Thats valid, I believe, for our discussion but its not precise epistemology. I believe that you mean that a cat can be called a ham sandwich as long as you dont put mayo and lettuce on it and, perhaps, dont tell the cat what youve done.

I originally thought that you advocated evading the controversial basic properties of feminism for some widely accepted non-basics, for the sake of agreement, logically identified and organized facts be damned. But your last paragraph confuses me. Feminism is a witches(!) brew of nihilism, Marxist egalitarianism and subjectivism. It is not Enlightenment rational individualism applied to women, something you, I believe, accept, as I do. Cultural critic, Camille Paglia, even defends a view of feminism based on classical Greek rational self-actualization, which I probably also like. And, I think, increasing numbers of women globally accept the Enlightenmment and Greek views. Its driving Moslem fundamentalists batty.

But the Leftist, ie, generically communist, view that is legallly enforced and used to indoctrinate uneducated students is another thing. The distinction here is a matter of life and death. Are you advocating a pretense of feminist communism to later persuade people into

feminist individualism? If so, that is pseudo-practical, Pragmatism, like Chamberlains peace in our time, which lasted three years and less for Czechs. Being explicitly fundamental is practical. Compromising on principles is impractical. Man needs a consistent, comprehensive guide to thought and action. Consider the American shot heard 'round the world that continues to increase in influence despite traditionalists, religionists and Leftists. Even Putin, yes, Putin the Christian nationalist (and globalist!), has been affected. There is a video someplace online and maybe on TV that shows him singing karaoke. He's not bad. Maybe the State Dept could offer him his own TV show...

not It would reinforce communism.

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> not It would reinforce communism.

Ignore this mistake.

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I'm saying that it's much easier to convince people in left leaning circles to agree with the criticisms and claims about what's wrong with the movement Bryan calls feminism than it is to get them to say "feminism is bad/wrong". That's because for the left feminism functions like patriotism for the right in that you can critisize whatever views you want and say that the people who call themselves patriots/feminists are actually bad and not the 'true' patriots/feminists but to actually use the phrase 'patriotism is bad' conveys an emotional disrespect of people who have fought for our country that goes beyond the mere logical content.

Lots of people on the left have strong positive associations with the word feminism because they see (and I don't think Bryan disagrees) many of the boomer women who fought to enter the workforce etc etc as heroes and phrasing the conclusion as feminism is bad seems disrespectful of them. And if you say something like: what feminism has become is bad, or people are confused about what feminism was really about fine...but phrasing it as 'feminism is bad' feels disrespectful to them the way 'patriotism is bad' feels disrespectful of veterans to many on the right.

That's true even though I know a number of boomer feminists who would agree with the content of pretty much every claim Bryan makes (and feel that women have forgotten that the goal was equality not to have it better than men).

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> it's much easier to convince people in left leaning circles to agree with the criticisms and claims about what's wrong with the movement Bryan calls feminism than it is to get them to say "feminism is bad/wrong"

Isolated facts (empiricism) have no value for mans life. (1) Mans mind needs a framework, a rational framework, for thinking about reality. Man needs a philosophy that identifies the fundamental facts of existence. When man has no rational philosophy,he will choose mysticism or subjectivism. That will guide his thinking about everything, inc/society.

(1) Rationalism (pseudo-rational, mystical or subjective ideas not abstracted from the evidence of the senses) is as destructive to the mind as empiricism.

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> Defrauding people into ideas increases contempt for them

Would you mind unpacking this more? I'd like to understand this better.

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>Just as a tactical matter

Ie, a short-range, out-of-context, Pragmatist lie to hide ones ideals

> why not define a new term so you avoid the resistance

Definitions are the product of a mind focused onto reality, not arbitrary and conventional expressions. Eventually your audience will recognize that your new term hides their old enemy.

>Don't you think that it would be very difficult for someone in academia or other elite circles to publicly endorse the statement that feminism is bad?

If you want to live, the nihilism that dominates modern culture must be explicitly identified and explicitly condemned and an alternative must be explicitly advocated. There is no short-cut to cultural change,especially basic cultural change. One neednt accept Marxism to agree w/Gramsci that cultural change requires a "march thru the institutions." If cultural and intellectual leaders lack the honesty and courage to rejecrt a destructive culture, it will continue. There is no substitute for new ideas, explicitly advocated.

"The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society’s course by transmitting ideas from the “ivory tower” of the philosopher to the university professor—to the writer—to the artist—to the newspaperman—to the politician—to the movie maker—to the night-club singer—to the man in the street. The intellectual’s specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called “humanities,” but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man’s means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields."

-Ayn Rand

"The foundation of any culture, the source responsible for all of its manifestations, is its philosophy. What does modern philosophy offer us? Virtually the only point of agreement among today’s leading philosophers is that there is no such thing as philosophy—and that this knowledge constitutes their claim to the title of philosophers. With a hysterical virulence, strange in advocates of skepticism, they insist that there can be no valid philosophical systems (i.e., there can be no integrated, consistent, comprehensive view of existence)—that there are no answers to fundamental questions—there is no such thing as truth—there is no such thing as reason, and the battle is only over what should replace it: “linguistic games” or unbridled feelings?"

-Ayn Rand

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Perhaps the disagreement is over who gets to make decisions and set the rules (for particular institutions, or even all of society in the case of governments)? If men predominate at the higher echelons of most institutions (and I believe the data indicates this), by implication, they are making decisions and framing rules. And this is perhaps the asymmetry that feminists are concerned about while non-feminists aren't.

If the hypergamy hypothesis is true and continue to remain true, achieving full gender parity in decision-making and "ruling" will only make dating market imbalances worse (and collapse TFR even more than what it is presently). Unless there is a parallel effort to encourage women to be more like men in dating dynamics, to be forward and risk-tolerant and be willing to have a "house husband". But this effort seemingly contradicts Mrs. Perry's proposals, which are to encourage women to be somewhat more traditional in their attitudes.

I don't think it's possible to square this circle (tradeoffs are intrinsic), but I could be wrong.

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Brian please get yourself a better mic! The audio is quite bad. But thanks for the great content as always

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I have been eagerly waiting for your podcast with Louise, and have listened once, but I think I need to listen again!

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I’m listening for the second time later today!

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While Louise Perry complains about women being perceived as childlike, she still advocates for paternalistic policies to keep them from making wrong decisions.

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Perry is a journalist. Negativity sells more that positivity. It's no surprise that the book has the word 'against' in the title. Much similar is her negative predisposition. Women are higher in trait neutoticism.

As Bryan mentioned, it's not very productive to focus on the negative. It takes much effort on a woman to hold her negative thoughts. Women can learn to meditate and find better outcomes in their life if they choose.

Sexual revolution (and whatever wave of feminism that brought women to be at war with their female bodies). Who is responsible to do change that? Each woman herself.

Sure enough, women love their choices. How about they start being more dilution oriented than complain about things. I wasin the dating pool myself and encountered all the problems other epmrn encounter. They odd were against me in my city. But staying positive and determined is what helped me find true love.

I'm not here to say it's easy. I'm here to say it's possible. I'm living proof.

Keep up the good work and your rational thinking, Bryan.

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I suspect that we’re seeing female intrasexual status competition. It’s potentially every bit as vicious as harem politics. Any downside for men is merely collateral damage.

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I'm uninspired by Bryan's definition of feminism because it doesn't seem philosophically robust enough to do any real work. Everything gets stuck in semantics.

If you're going to say that feminism means believing society is more fair to men than you women, well, what is "fair?" You have to settle the whole nature of justice before you can apply the definition.

And you have to settle the nature of justice in a way that allows for *comparison of degree* in widely different situations. It makes sense to say that one number is odd and another even, but not that one number is odd*er* and another even*er.* "Fair" could be a little like that. Is it even meaningful to say that it's *more* unfair to conscript a person to fight in a war than to deny them access to most professions? Is justice quantifiable like that?

Also, the definition misses the activist element in feminism. What if I think that society is fairer to men than women, but there are good reasons why it needs to be that way, and trying to change it is a dangerous mistake? Am I a feminist? By Bryan's definition, yes, but that doesn't seem very plausible.

I would define a feminist as someone who thinks that society ought to be reformed to give women more status, opportunity and success through greater equality with men. I am not a feminist.

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>your book is less-than-perfect.

Perfect by what standard, omniscience or what you could and should do? Religion sneaks into the mind very abstractly, thus man needs a sense-based, rational philosophy to guide the use of the mind.

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