Childcare professions if anything have enormously inflated status in American society. In terms of skill, intelligence, and utility to society, I would posit that a kindergarten teacher is similar to a garbage worker, but no one warns their children, ‘if you fail all your classes you’ll grow up to be a kindergarten teacher.’
Being a kindergarten teacher is fun. Lots of women like being around small children, and often your teach your own kids that go to he school. You get summers off, the benefits are awesome, and you can have two pensions by the time you retire.
Being a garbage man means waking up at 3am and doing hard labor working nights and weekends and smelling like shit.
I would much rather be a kindergarten teacher than a garbage man. My guess is that men become garbage men because it pays more and they need to money to attract women, who will then be able to afford nicer lower paying jobs like kindergarten teacher because the man is paying the bills.
>"I agree that the “woman’s role is just worse” for some women. But plenty of women feel otherwise. And plenty of men with unpleasant and low-status jobs would prefer the woman’s role if they could get it."
Those women don't dominate the feminist movement.
For the educated, driven women that do, it's in their interests to obscure differences in interests and to act like the situation is straightforwardly unfair.
The most obvious reason being: if it's just a fact that women value parenthood and relationships more than accruing "male-coded status" someone might draw a population judgment that disadvantages the woman who really is as driven (for example: an employer might conclude that women are more likely to drop out of work, even if the girlboss isn't).
If women actually came out to argue "yes, a significant portion or even majority of women would prefer to not work and instead have some paid support for raising a child" - this would work for Perry's feminism but not for the girlbosses since it'd be validating something they've otherwise tried to obscure and/or blame on patriarchy.
Feminism isn't just a pragmatic movement cloaked in a moralistic one. It's often a pragmatic movement for a particular class of women whose interests require obscuring the differing interests of women outside of their class or milieu.
At my wife's firm they tried to line up three women to be partners and take over the firm. Each in turn dropped out of the workforce or wanted to downshift in their mid to late 30s when they had a lot of kids running about. My wife was the last as she's taking time off now that we have a third kid.
The firm probably would have been better off if it had discriminated against women for filling senior leadership roles, they would be less in the lurch.
I don't see this situation as bad for women, my wife enjoys being with the kids more than answering emails and sitting in endless meetings. But there probably is a certain kind of childless girl boss out there that wants that.
Lots of women in prestigious law firms quit around that age, which probably leads to some statistical discrimination against "childless girl bosses" in hiring. I can understand why that would be frustrating for them, but I don't see how that problem could be solved without violating someone's rights.
“For a long time, women in the West were treated as property and were considered emotional, irrational, and incapable of contributing significantly to higher culture.”
Ironically, feminists seem to embody the stereotype of women as irrational.
That's amusing, but don't forget that the debate about whether women or men are more 'rational' already elides the more important question, which is: are women and men equally fit for running a society as measured by a variety of metrics, 'rationality' being only one (and one of the more recent). A society that, for instance, regards physical courage and the ability to do hard ugly things as necessary for leadership will never have any confusion about the question.
Today, it's common to treat a former spouse as - literally - an income-generating property partially owned by the other spouse. It's so because of an underlying sexist belief about men and their role in relationships; and it survives today because most of those treated as property are men. So, before we get too wrapped around the axle about how women used to be treated before almost anyone alive today was born, let's think about how people who are children today are going to be treated when they grow up, unless something changes.
To put the point more sharply: Intuitively the overrepresentation of men at the bottom of social hierarchy only balances the overrepresentation of men at the top of the men at the bottom are there through no fault of their own. If they are at bottom because they are being dumb it's not relevant.
And I think from POV of most elites the choices low status men make which harm them relative to low status women are just stupid macho bullshit not rational risktaking. They'd point to the expected costs of crime, violence, drug use, being profligate with money etc and say that low social status men could just behave like their female counterparts.
But men and women aren't the same and even if it's dumb from POV of our elite preferences millions of years of evolution ensure that low status men are willing to take huge risks to avoid being pushed out of gene pool. Those same psychological pressures seem crazy if you are high status and your lizard brain isn't demanding you take action.
But this really fucks up the whole notion of fairness at issue -- especially for you. Aren't you committed to saying those low status men really do have revealed prefs that make that justify their taking risks at low end that low end women don't so aren't really worse off than the women. Indeed it raises questions about whether this notion is even well-defined.
Being a low status man doesn't require you be a druggy or a criminal. You could just be a normal talentless guy with a normal boring job that doesn't pay much. In todays environment that really isn't enough to get a wife, marriage has collapsed in the entire bottom half of the bell curve and they aren't all gangbangers (and newsflash, some gangbangers get tail).
By contrast, basically any woman under 40 has some social value even if they have done nothing with their lives.
Lol, "low status" as a man means "not having a wife"? That says a lot about your view.
By the way, poor men actually have more children and are more sexually active than middle-class and rich men. But you're right about poor men being less likely to be married. It's not because they can't attract women, it's because poor people just marry less today (probably because they have less impulse control and prefer multiple mates at the same time instead of one steady partner).
That may be true (I suspect it probably is) but that's not what can be easily backed up with clear evidence. The clear evidence covers things like education, jobs etc where the difference in outcomes isn't because of discrimination. It plausibly is because the point you raise changes incentives but I think that's a very hard point to convince someone of who hasn't experienced it.
>I believe that there is some merit in using a looser definition of feminism that incorporates the recognition of substantial differences between the sexes
This is an odd definition that would seem to have questionable ramifications. If we need an -ism for and advocacy against the existence of biological differences, then why choose this particular fight? If it's unfair that men have biological characteristics that make them more fit for leadership positions, why is it not unfair that leaders in general - even women - likely have more of these traits than non-leaders?
And of course, "disability rights" mostly extend to things like building ramps into buildings. But what about the difference in outcomes between someone with the biological advantage of having a 150 IQ over someone with an IQ of 50? Surely the difference between those two groups is vastly greater than any difference between men and women.
Sure being born a male affords you certain biological advantages over women (even ignoring the biological advantages women have over men), but being born a human also affords you certain biological advantages over being born a cow.
Why would the former be unfair, but not the latter?
Classically, advocacy for feminism and other -isms has been against external discrimination - not against biological reality itself. The latter leads to the aforementioned absurdisms.
If Louise Perry wants an intentionally vague and intuitive definition of the word "Feminism", rather than one that clearly distinguishes between concepts, it inevitably raises the question: "Is this intuitive definition reasonable?" The answer to this question lies in the historical and etymological emergence of the word "Feminism".
First off: contrary to popular belief, Mary Wollstonecraft, often considered the intellectual mother of Feminism, was not a Feminist. The word didn't exist yet in the 18th century, so she couldn't possibly have called herself that. Moreover, her arguments of equality between the sexes were rooted in the Classical Liberalism of the Enlightenment. Her philosophical predispositions put in her in conflict with proto-Socialists like Rousseau, with whom she frequently sparred. The word "Feminist" was coined by the French pre-Marxist Socialist, Charles Fourier, in 1837, decades after Wollstonecraft's death. In other words, the very historical emergence of the word "Feminism" is rooted in Socialist, not Liberal, ideology.
Second off: intuitively, the word "Feminism" does not etymologically align with the concept of "equality". There are words that are related to "equality", such as "Egalitarianism"; "Feminism" is not one of those. What does "Feminism" mean then, etymologically? Well, anyone who knows Latin, knows that "Feminism" and "femininity" comes from "femina", which literally means "woman". Evidently, even people who don't know much Latin intuitively understand that "femininity" is associated with the female sex. So, the intuitive definition of "Feminism" is as simple as "Woman-Ideology".
Conclusion: there is simply no *reasonable* definition, by *any* metric, that allows the word "Feminism" to be used the way it is used by Feminists today. It cannot, under any circumstance, be reasonably said ot have anything to do with equality between the sexes in the Liberal sense.
Another point: many / most women enjoy social power on a much smaller scale: a few people to tens of people: the family, groups of families. So, very few men occupy the loftiest heights of power, but many women have small-scale power.
Seems to me that the crux of your disagreement relates to how you understand fairness -- and I think this suggests to really state your claims preciscly you need a more robust account of fairness than: triggers my sense of unfairness.
I think for many middle/upper class women barriers to reaching the top level of society trigger their sense of unfairness even if there are fewer women at the bottom. At a psychological level that might be because most elites of both genders never faced much risk of falling to the bottom and those are the ppl they interact with.
But I suspect many would defend this POV by saying that if men just didn't make dumb/bad choices (commit crimes, drop out of school, fail to be frugal, and not be conscientious about their jobs) they wouldn't suffer the greater risk of being at the bottom. And there is probably alot of truth to that. There are good ev-psych reasons why men at bottom of social hierarchy would adopt more risky/dangerous strategies than women. And notably, if men at the bottom were more risk adverse it probably wouldn't reduce men's representation at the top. Indeed, one can plausibly argue that elite men are taking rational risks (worst outcome is pretty decent) but low status men are taking irrational ones.
But now those fairness intuitions aren't so clear. Are women treated unfairly because -- if men at the social bottom are (from the POV of women) just making bad choices then the fact they are overrepresented at the bottom doesn't balance anything about the top.
But there’s a direct parallel between the top and the bottom. Perry herself accedes that women’s greater agreeableness is a driving factor. Women don’t negotiate as hard for higher salaries than men. What makes a middle class woman dismiss male underperformance at the bottom as perfectly fair because it’s just their bad (risk seeking) choices but then offloads responsibility for her own lower salary onto the unfairness of society rather than accepting it as the result of her own bad (risk averse) choices? Still just seems to come down to asymmetric attribution of agency to men (or just self interested hypocrisy on the part of middle class women).
I love the quote-and-response style of this rejoinder. It gives it the effect of a discourse happening in real time.
On this eternal debate between the sexes, I think one of the reasons why it has lingered, escalated, and become muddled over the decades is that, except for a very few thinkers (think Simon de Beauvoir), majority of those who participate in the debate are flawed by two things: first, arguing from a phenomenological perspective rather than from a truly observational perspective. The commit the error of generalizing from the personal to the collective, forgetting that even within each sex, variation abounds. Second, this self-limiting approach ensures the arguments would be riddled with personally significant emotional sore points.
On the balance, I think this author has managed to largely minimize these two flaws better than the other critical author.
Feminists appear to be what Ed Dutton calls “spiteful mutants”, as they are not normal in terms of what we would expect from evolution. Most women do not dislike men.
You evade defining feminism. "Spiteful mutants" is merely a metaphor, not a rational category. And an appeal to evolution is a rationalization of the evasion of the common human experience of the free will choice of ideas. Conservatives are as mindless as feminists but, unlike feminists with their pretentious pseudo-intellectuality, dont pretend to be anything other than willfully and profoundly stupid. I give you Trump as Exhibit A. You feel bad about feminism. You dont know why and dont care to know. Got it.
I wasn’t attempting to define feminism; I was suggesting a psychological account of why feminists exist. For example, I read recently about a study that, on average, feminists have male hand pattern, which indicates higher testosterone. This doesn’t mean that feminists can’t be intellectually jarred into abandoning feminism but it might suggest an underlying psychological disposition.
Psychology is trivial and a response to chosen ideas. Ideas underlie psychology. Mans life basically requires ideas to guide thought and action. Without ideas, the mind disintegrates and psychology follows.
>I read recently about a study that, on average, feminists have male hand pattern,
I read recently that, on average, people who disagree with me are lizards from another galaxy. Trump is a lizard. You need to be more serious about the sources of your "evidence" than the medieval Christians convinced th
“Psychology is trivial and a response to chosen ideas. Ideas underlie psychology.”
I agree. But people can be drawn to various ideas for psychological reasons. If some feminists are more masculine, they may take great offense at being regarded as “childlike” by males (as noted in the post). I did take note that you described feminists as “nihilists”. In what sense do feminists reject life as meaningless? This sounds like psychology to me.
>But people can be drawn to various ideas for psychological reasons
AND, not BUT. Man is a mind/body unity, not split as in mysticism and subjectivism. Psychology automatizes and feeds back our ideas with memory, imagination, emotion, instant behavior so that ideas can have practical effect and we are free to learn more. Eg, infants learning to walk, memorizing a computers operations to easily use them for our purposes. Thus the literal life-and-death need for true ideas and and the resulting psychology that automatizes responses to true ideas. Eg, driver training.
>If some feminists are more masculine
Man, ie, humans, are heterosexual (reproduction) mind/body UNITIES. Women w/psychosexual problems are WOMEN w/psychosexual problems. A man in a dress told me that he felt like a woman. I asked how he knew. He admitted that he didnt know. And, of course, he could not. Drugs, therapy, surgery, social approval and legacant split the mind/body unity. Facts dont care about your feelings.
> In what sense do feminists reject life as meaningless?
Modern nihilism goes beyond meaninglessness to hatred and rage. Its not a passive retreat. Its destruction for the sake of destruction, not destruction for a glowing future. Both Left and Right are basically or very importantly, nihilist, more concerned w/destroying their political enemies than w/positive values. Leftists are ANTI-racist, ANTI-American, ANTI-West, ANTI-fossil fuels or ANTIfa. The communist future has been abandoned. The professor who taught Existentialism and Marxism in my former department told me that he "wanted to kill someone, anyone." The dept chair said that reason could not guide her in choosing the color of socks, thus knowledge is subjective. She brought her lesbian lover to a public lecture in which she said that sex is disgusting. A Marxist sociologist wanted to hit me for criticizing his ideas. A Leftist anthropologist had her students lay on thin mattresses so that they would be sufficiently "relaxed" to listen to her lectures. A behaviorist psychologist had to be restrained from jumping on me when I ridiculed his reduction of psychology to math. The Pragmatist philosophy professor attacked logic as merely "choosing your poison." One of the philosophical analysts, who also taught Nietzsche, was fascinated with German Nazis who had created a little town in Argentina after the war. I saw the future and it didnt work. But, then again, I lived in LA in the late '60s and very little surprised me. Good music, tho.
My black cat ate a lizard. The sky darkened and and the cat fell into a huge smoke-filled hole. He then shot straight up, landed on all fours and licked his paws and blinked a few times.
Loud and clear... Glad to see someone wiser than me having the same thoughts I have again and again, in this topsy turvy world, specially the last paragraph (father of two women, BTW...)
Look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind. Objectivism is a new way of using ones mind. Its philosophical self-help. You evade the content of the philosophy.
Personally, I just see Perry’s critiques as further evidence of Scott Alexander secretly agreeing that you were right about mental illness all along.
Ooof
Lmao
Childcare professions if anything have enormously inflated status in American society. In terms of skill, intelligence, and utility to society, I would posit that a kindergarten teacher is similar to a garbage worker, but no one warns their children, ‘if you fail all your classes you’ll grow up to be a kindergarten teacher.’
Being a kindergarten teacher is fun. Lots of women like being around small children, and often your teach your own kids that go to he school. You get summers off, the benefits are awesome, and you can have two pensions by the time you retire.
Being a garbage man means waking up at 3am and doing hard labor working nights and weekends and smelling like shit.
I would much rather be a kindergarten teacher than a garbage man. My guess is that men become garbage men because it pays more and they need to money to attract women, who will then be able to afford nicer lower paying jobs like kindergarten teacher because the man is paying the bills.
The top 20% of men probably have it better then the top 20% of women.
The bottom 80% of men probably have it worse then the bottom 80% of women.
Quibble with that numbers if you will, maybe its 10% or 5% or 1%, but you get the point.
>"I agree that the “woman’s role is just worse” for some women. But plenty of women feel otherwise. And plenty of men with unpleasant and low-status jobs would prefer the woman’s role if they could get it."
Those women don't dominate the feminist movement.
For the educated, driven women that do, it's in their interests to obscure differences in interests and to act like the situation is straightforwardly unfair.
The most obvious reason being: if it's just a fact that women value parenthood and relationships more than accruing "male-coded status" someone might draw a population judgment that disadvantages the woman who really is as driven (for example: an employer might conclude that women are more likely to drop out of work, even if the girlboss isn't).
If women actually came out to argue "yes, a significant portion or even majority of women would prefer to not work and instead have some paid support for raising a child" - this would work for Perry's feminism but not for the girlbosses since it'd be validating something they've otherwise tried to obscure and/or blame on patriarchy.
Feminism isn't just a pragmatic movement cloaked in a moralistic one. It's often a pragmatic movement for a particular class of women whose interests require obscuring the differing interests of women outside of their class or milieu.
At my wife's firm they tried to line up three women to be partners and take over the firm. Each in turn dropped out of the workforce or wanted to downshift in their mid to late 30s when they had a lot of kids running about. My wife was the last as she's taking time off now that we have a third kid.
The firm probably would have been better off if it had discriminated against women for filling senior leadership roles, they would be less in the lurch.
I don't see this situation as bad for women, my wife enjoys being with the kids more than answering emails and sitting in endless meetings. But there probably is a certain kind of childless girl boss out there that wants that.
Lots of women in prestigious law firms quit around that age, which probably leads to some statistical discrimination against "childless girl bosses" in hiring. I can understand why that would be frustrating for them, but I don't see how that problem could be solved without violating someone's rights.
We've clearly decided to solve it by violating the right of employers to hire and associate with who they please.
From the linked Quillette article:
“For a long time, women in the West were treated as property and were considered emotional, irrational, and incapable of contributing significantly to higher culture.”
Ironically, feminists seem to embody the stereotype of women as irrational.
That's amusing, but don't forget that the debate about whether women or men are more 'rational' already elides the more important question, which is: are women and men equally fit for running a society as measured by a variety of metrics, 'rationality' being only one (and one of the more recent). A society that, for instance, regards physical courage and the ability to do hard ugly things as necessary for leadership will never have any confusion about the question.
Today, it's common to treat a former spouse as - literally - an income-generating property partially owned by the other spouse. It's so because of an underlying sexist belief about men and their role in relationships; and it survives today because most of those treated as property are men. So, before we get too wrapped around the axle about how women used to be treated before almost anyone alive today was born, let's think about how people who are children today are going to be treated when they grow up, unless something changes.
When I remark that most homicide victims - ~89% in the US - are men, feminists retort that most killers - ~87% in the US - are men. Well, yes...
To put the point more sharply: Intuitively the overrepresentation of men at the bottom of social hierarchy only balances the overrepresentation of men at the top of the men at the bottom are there through no fault of their own. If they are at bottom because they are being dumb it's not relevant.
And I think from POV of most elites the choices low status men make which harm them relative to low status women are just stupid macho bullshit not rational risktaking. They'd point to the expected costs of crime, violence, drug use, being profligate with money etc and say that low social status men could just behave like their female counterparts.
But men and women aren't the same and even if it's dumb from POV of our elite preferences millions of years of evolution ensure that low status men are willing to take huge risks to avoid being pushed out of gene pool. Those same psychological pressures seem crazy if you are high status and your lizard brain isn't demanding you take action.
But this really fucks up the whole notion of fairness at issue -- especially for you. Aren't you committed to saying those low status men really do have revealed prefs that make that justify their taking risks at low end that low end women don't so aren't really worse off than the women. Indeed it raises questions about whether this notion is even well-defined.
Being a low status man doesn't require you be a druggy or a criminal. You could just be a normal talentless guy with a normal boring job that doesn't pay much. In todays environment that really isn't enough to get a wife, marriage has collapsed in the entire bottom half of the bell curve and they aren't all gangbangers (and newsflash, some gangbangers get tail).
By contrast, basically any woman under 40 has some social value even if they have done nothing with their lives.
Lol, "low status" as a man means "not having a wife"? That says a lot about your view.
By the way, poor men actually have more children and are more sexually active than middle-class and rich men. But you're right about poor men being less likely to be married. It's not because they can't attract women, it's because poor people just marry less today (probably because they have less impulse control and prefer multiple mates at the same time instead of one steady partner).
That may be true (I suspect it probably is) but that's not what can be easily backed up with clear evidence. The clear evidence covers things like education, jobs etc where the difference in outcomes isn't because of discrimination. It plausibly is because the point you raise changes incentives but I think that's a very hard point to convince someone of who hasn't experienced it.
>I believe that there is some merit in using a looser definition of feminism that incorporates the recognition of substantial differences between the sexes
This is an odd definition that would seem to have questionable ramifications. If we need an -ism for and advocacy against the existence of biological differences, then why choose this particular fight? If it's unfair that men have biological characteristics that make them more fit for leadership positions, why is it not unfair that leaders in general - even women - likely have more of these traits than non-leaders?
And of course, "disability rights" mostly extend to things like building ramps into buildings. But what about the difference in outcomes between someone with the biological advantage of having a 150 IQ over someone with an IQ of 50? Surely the difference between those two groups is vastly greater than any difference between men and women.
Sure being born a male affords you certain biological advantages over women (even ignoring the biological advantages women have over men), but being born a human also affords you certain biological advantages over being born a cow.
Why would the former be unfair, but not the latter?
Classically, advocacy for feminism and other -isms has been against external discrimination - not against biological reality itself. The latter leads to the aforementioned absurdisms.
If Louise Perry wants an intentionally vague and intuitive definition of the word "Feminism", rather than one that clearly distinguishes between concepts, it inevitably raises the question: "Is this intuitive definition reasonable?" The answer to this question lies in the historical and etymological emergence of the word "Feminism".
First off: contrary to popular belief, Mary Wollstonecraft, often considered the intellectual mother of Feminism, was not a Feminist. The word didn't exist yet in the 18th century, so she couldn't possibly have called herself that. Moreover, her arguments of equality between the sexes were rooted in the Classical Liberalism of the Enlightenment. Her philosophical predispositions put in her in conflict with proto-Socialists like Rousseau, with whom she frequently sparred. The word "Feminist" was coined by the French pre-Marxist Socialist, Charles Fourier, in 1837, decades after Wollstonecraft's death. In other words, the very historical emergence of the word "Feminism" is rooted in Socialist, not Liberal, ideology.
Second off: intuitively, the word "Feminism" does not etymologically align with the concept of "equality". There are words that are related to "equality", such as "Egalitarianism"; "Feminism" is not one of those. What does "Feminism" mean then, etymologically? Well, anyone who knows Latin, knows that "Feminism" and "femininity" comes from "femina", which literally means "woman". Evidently, even people who don't know much Latin intuitively understand that "femininity" is associated with the female sex. So, the intuitive definition of "Feminism" is as simple as "Woman-Ideology".
Conclusion: there is simply no *reasonable* definition, by *any* metric, that allows the word "Feminism" to be used the way it is used by Feminists today. It cannot, under any circumstance, be reasonably said ot have anything to do with equality between the sexes in the Liberal sense.
Another point: many / most women enjoy social power on a much smaller scale: a few people to tens of people: the family, groups of families. So, very few men occupy the loftiest heights of power, but many women have small-scale power.
Seems to me that the crux of your disagreement relates to how you understand fairness -- and I think this suggests to really state your claims preciscly you need a more robust account of fairness than: triggers my sense of unfairness.
I think for many middle/upper class women barriers to reaching the top level of society trigger their sense of unfairness even if there are fewer women at the bottom. At a psychological level that might be because most elites of both genders never faced much risk of falling to the bottom and those are the ppl they interact with.
But I suspect many would defend this POV by saying that if men just didn't make dumb/bad choices (commit crimes, drop out of school, fail to be frugal, and not be conscientious about their jobs) they wouldn't suffer the greater risk of being at the bottom. And there is probably alot of truth to that. There are good ev-psych reasons why men at bottom of social hierarchy would adopt more risky/dangerous strategies than women. And notably, if men at the bottom were more risk adverse it probably wouldn't reduce men's representation at the top. Indeed, one can plausibly argue that elite men are taking rational risks (worst outcome is pretty decent) but low status men are taking irrational ones.
But now those fairness intuitions aren't so clear. Are women treated unfairly because -- if men at the social bottom are (from the POV of women) just making bad choices then the fact they are overrepresented at the bottom doesn't balance anything about the top.
But there’s a direct parallel between the top and the bottom. Perry herself accedes that women’s greater agreeableness is a driving factor. Women don’t negotiate as hard for higher salaries than men. What makes a middle class woman dismiss male underperformance at the bottom as perfectly fair because it’s just their bad (risk seeking) choices but then offloads responsibility for her own lower salary onto the unfairness of society rather than accepting it as the result of her own bad (risk averse) choices? Still just seems to come down to asymmetric attribution of agency to men (or just self interested hypocrisy on the part of middle class women).
I love the quote-and-response style of this rejoinder. It gives it the effect of a discourse happening in real time.
On this eternal debate between the sexes, I think one of the reasons why it has lingered, escalated, and become muddled over the decades is that, except for a very few thinkers (think Simon de Beauvoir), majority of those who participate in the debate are flawed by two things: first, arguing from a phenomenological perspective rather than from a truly observational perspective. The commit the error of generalizing from the personal to the collective, forgetting that even within each sex, variation abounds. Second, this self-limiting approach ensures the arguments would be riddled with personally significant emotional sore points.
On the balance, I think this author has managed to largely minimize these two flaws better than the other critical author.
Feminism is a nihilist hatred of men. It is NOT rational individualism applied to women.
Feminists appear to be what Ed Dutton calls “spiteful mutants”, as they are not normal in terms of what we would expect from evolution. Most women do not dislike men.
You evade defining feminism. "Spiteful mutants" is merely a metaphor, not a rational category. And an appeal to evolution is a rationalization of the evasion of the common human experience of the free will choice of ideas. Conservatives are as mindless as feminists but, unlike feminists with their pretentious pseudo-intellectuality, dont pretend to be anything other than willfully and profoundly stupid. I give you Trump as Exhibit A. You feel bad about feminism. You dont know why and dont care to know. Got it.
I wasn’t attempting to define feminism; I was suggesting a psychological account of why feminists exist. For example, I read recently about a study that, on average, feminists have male hand pattern, which indicates higher testosterone. This doesn’t mean that feminists can’t be intellectually jarred into abandoning feminism but it might suggest an underlying psychological disposition.
Psychology is trivial and a response to chosen ideas. Ideas underlie psychology. Mans life basically requires ideas to guide thought and action. Without ideas, the mind disintegrates and psychology follows.
>I read recently about a study that, on average, feminists have male hand pattern,
I read recently that, on average, people who disagree with me are lizards from another galaxy. Trump is a lizard. You need to be more serious about the sources of your "evidence" than the medieval Christians convinced th
“Psychology is trivial and a response to chosen ideas. Ideas underlie psychology.”
I agree. But people can be drawn to various ideas for psychological reasons. If some feminists are more masculine, they may take great offense at being regarded as “childlike” by males (as noted in the post). I did take note that you described feminists as “nihilists”. In what sense do feminists reject life as meaningless? This sounds like psychology to me.
>But people can be drawn to various ideas for psychological reasons
AND, not BUT. Man is a mind/body unity, not split as in mysticism and subjectivism. Psychology automatizes and feeds back our ideas with memory, imagination, emotion, instant behavior so that ideas can have practical effect and we are free to learn more. Eg, infants learning to walk, memorizing a computers operations to easily use them for our purposes. Thus the literal life-and-death need for true ideas and and the resulting psychology that automatizes responses to true ideas. Eg, driver training.
>If some feminists are more masculine
Man, ie, humans, are heterosexual (reproduction) mind/body UNITIES. Women w/psychosexual problems are WOMEN w/psychosexual problems. A man in a dress told me that he felt like a woman. I asked how he knew. He admitted that he didnt know. And, of course, he could not. Drugs, therapy, surgery, social approval and legacant split the mind/body unity. Facts dont care about your feelings.
> In what sense do feminists reject life as meaningless?
Modern nihilism goes beyond meaninglessness to hatred and rage. Its not a passive retreat. Its destruction for the sake of destruction, not destruction for a glowing future. Both Left and Right are basically or very importantly, nihilist, more concerned w/destroying their political enemies than w/positive values. Leftists are ANTI-racist, ANTI-American, ANTI-West, ANTI-fossil fuels or ANTIfa. The communist future has been abandoned. The professor who taught Existentialism and Marxism in my former department told me that he "wanted to kill someone, anyone." The dept chair said that reason could not guide her in choosing the color of socks, thus knowledge is subjective. She brought her lesbian lover to a public lecture in which she said that sex is disgusting. A Marxist sociologist wanted to hit me for criticizing his ideas. A Leftist anthropologist had her students lay on thin mattresses so that they would be sufficiently "relaxed" to listen to her lectures. A behaviorist psychologist had to be restrained from jumping on me when I ridiculed his reduction of psychology to math. The Pragmatist philosophy professor attacked logic as merely "choosing your poison." One of the philosophical analysts, who also taught Nietzsche, was fascinated with German Nazis who had created a little town in Argentina after the war. I saw the future and it didnt work. But, then again, I lived in LA in the late '60s and very little surprised me. Good music, tho.
at black cats are familiars of the Devil. I had a black cat and the only familiar was himself.
My black cat ate a lizard. The sky darkened and and the cat fell into a huge smoke-filled hole. He then shot straight up, landed on all fours and licked his paws and blinked a few times.
Loud and clear... Glad to see someone wiser than me having the same thoughts I have again and again, in this topsy turvy world, specially the last paragraph (father of two women, BTW...)
Look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind. Objectivism is a new way of using ones mind. Its philosophical self-help. You evade the content of the philosophy.
Sounds like Perry largely agrees with you and with natural gender differences in general.