In one of the recovery meetings I attended in my first year of sobriety, a first-timer shared that she felt embarrassed every time she gave into her cravings and purchased alcohol from the corner shop. She said that, rationally, she knew the cashier did not know or care about her situation. But he worked the same shift every day of the week, so she saw him regularly right after she got off work, and she had mentioned “needing to drink less” at one point when talking to him. She felt she had let him down every time she “made” him scan her booze.
Following the meeting I told her how I had once worked in a store like that, and how I remembered all of my struggling regulars. I said I had always felt proud when they came through and didn’t purchase whatever they had mentioned wanting to quit. She thanked me for sharing and asked for my number to call before she next had to go to that store for food on the way home. She called me and told me what she was going to buy, then sent me a picture of the receipt with nothing alcoholic on it. Her intensity amused me, but it has worked for her, and since then she has become one of my closest friends.
Thinking about it now I find it interesting that, hovering two centimeters above rock bottom, she felt like she was letting someone else down. When I had similar experiences at my regular shops, I felt ashamed, but more in the sense that I had become conscious of how pathetic I looked. Sometimes I would rotate them because I only ever bought “one or two” drinks from each, but sometimes I knew damn well how obviously drunk I was going in for “one or two” from this or that shop. Telltale signs of alcoholism had initiated my transformation into a type of guy that not even addict delusions could convince me to respect. I knew that I was harming myself, I knew why I did it, and I tried to keep others out of it because it was deeply embarrassing to impose my narcissistic self-loathing on them. Yet my friend seems to have found it deeply motivating to resist the addiction not only to improve herself or her life, but to avoid disappointing me and the friendly guy at the store.
Compared to men, women are far more proficient and interested in activities necessary for social reproduction, i.e. for the day-to-day maintenance of whatever regime of social relations their society employs to organize its economic activity. One archetypical example of a woman who performs socially reproductive labor is a Gilded Age housewife whose husband works in a coal mine. Her domestic work and organization of their economic consumption enables his continued participation in the system of wage labor. Each spouse is dependent on the other, and together they produce the next generation of wage laborers. The capitalist exploits the working family as a unit, rather than the working man as a free and independent economic actor.
In the economically right-leaning “heterodox space” I’ve heard political and professional-managerial manifestations of women’s tendency towards socially-reproductive “nurturing” priorities framed as misplaced or displaced maternal instinct, particularly when it is annoying like in the case of a safetyist busybody. This perspective reifies the capitalist form of the nuclear family, unsurprisingly as most of us have never experienced another form of family. I find the accompanying sense of annoyance itself annoying, and I don’t see enough class analysis in that explanation for it to ring true. Let’s take the “feminization” of university bureaucracies as an example.
Attributing the erosion of historically masculine values in PMC-operated institutions to the increased presence of women in them is a failure to recognize how that shifting bias is adaptive for the institution. The kind of institution that PMCs work in has accomplished its 20th-century mission to develop and promote progressive liberalism, and it now has the role of conserving progressive hegemony. Women are disproportionately proficient conservatives, in an interpersonal sense of maintaining cohesion. The raison d’être of the contemporary university is ideological reproduction of finance capitalism, and it has had to adapt to a position of governing, where it was once in a kind of opposition to the classical liberalism of industrial capitalism.
So the university under “late capitalism” has produced, through men in the mold of Derrida, a legitimizing regime of ideological relativism with lots of inertia. Its dominance enforces the logic of the market in the domain of ideology: the justification of a social consensus (in the market analogy, a price) is the assumption that its very existence reflects a democratic “wisdom of the crowd” in assessing the fundamental value of its component claims. Having produced a world where the status quo of meaningless churn is justified by its apparent popularity, the progressive capitalists put on the brakes by creating admin jobs in which women wield the authority to make the boys stop fighting and coloring outside the lines. I would agree that “feminization” of educational bureaucracy is maladaptive in its effect on the average Joe or Joanna, but I would also say that’s the whole point. Under capitalism the average working person’s interest is not the mission of the university, or the HR department, or the media.
In the university setting, this change has little to do with women who work as proper scholars, who are among the loudest voices in dissent when the feminized bureaucracy oversteps its outdated mandate. They share the “masculine” values of comradely and competitive confrontation that enabled the rise of new-money progressivism within the formerly-aristocratic university, a battleground in the civil war between industrial and financial capitalists. If I can risk an easy-to-misread analogy, complaints about women’s influence in academia that do not identify administrative bloat as the underlying problem remind me of people whining about children making children noises in places like museums, as though they don’t belong there at all. Say what you want about Disney adults – heaven knows I do – but I’ve never heard any complain about seeing children at Disneyland. If you create a bunch of jobs for people who want to keep the peace at all costs, you will have to work with a bunch of tyrannical peacekeepers.
Actually, you know what does bug me in this vein? Women In STEM. Not the actual women working in STEM, who are only annoying in that they’re often better than me at my job. I mean the insistence that we need more of them. Do you know what happens when we encourage women who don’t have a natural attraction to this kind of field to pursue it as a political point? They get pigeonholed by the expectation, they become mediocre at it like me, and statistically speaking they have it even harder than I do because they are less likely to be naturally decent-to-good at it. A woman who is an outlier in her capacity for mathematical abstraction is also likely better at it than the average man — but the average woman is not, and we keep devaluing what the average woman excels at.
So it is really great, if I can risk such an edgy take, that the barrier to entry for women in highly-technical fields is lower than ever. While I doubt the hypothesis, I wouldn’t ignore evidence that sex discrimination is still a relevant problem. But the people running the Women In STEM Show have done exactly what so many sex-atypical feminists seem to have done: they decided that women tend towards reproductive labor because the patriarchy brainwashed them. They then decided what women should want to do instead, which happens to look a lot like what men want to do on average. They chose targets that are already highly valued by the labor market, even when they agree that markets are inefficient means of determining the social utility of labor, thinking along the lines of “men have reserved this gold mine for the fellas, we need to send the women in”.
Meanwhile full-time working-class mothers still don’t get paid, from the surplus value stolen from their class, for doing literally the most important job in the world. Their sphere of interpersonal opportunity continues to shrink, their relationships with fellow mothers increasingly mediated by pay-to-play private spaces and disembodying communications technology. Female-dominated occupations of social reproduction like teaching and nursing still have some of the most miserable working conditions outside of male-dominated occupations with high risks of physical injury, for reasons unrelated to the inherent danger of the job as often applies to the latter. Attempting to do away with “women’s work” as a category, we have sidelined the fact that most of it is both essential to society and rewarding for the women who pursue it.
Biological reproduction necessarily has some role in the origin among women of this “talent bias”, if you will, but to the extent that it does, I contend it is an adaptation at the species level as well as the individual level. It is my impression that women as workers have always played a more essential role in social stability beyond the family than many feminists or trad types give them credit for. On my view, excellence in motherhood is a special case of an adaptive female talent for what I’ll call “reproductivity”, rather than a girly nuisance that bleeds into the implicitly masculine or androgynous public sphere as a result of women not having kids by their early twenties.
In other words, I don’t accept rebranded pathological hysteria as an explanation for the “feminization” of late-capitalist institutions. From my perspective, to do so is to accept that gender-critical feminists and gender-essentialist reactionaries are somehow both correct about women’s influence on social life and socialization’s influence on women’s revealed preferences. This is one reason why, at least in person, you will hear me gushing over brilliant female socialist leaders and everyday working women who have shaped my thinking at least as often as I complain about therapeutic feminism problematizing men’s constitutional inability to think like women.
After a disproportionate level of contact with social constructionist and “therapeutic constructivist” ideologues, I came to think maybe the red pill guys had identified a real problem, though not a real solution. Crudely, I thought that the propaganda of psychological androgyny had rendered “modern women” intolerable except as “one of the guys”. Surprisingly I reached that conclusion before it became the message of our ongoing short-form media psyop. I did not even realize that manosphere media had evolved into a woman-hate-bait business full of podcasts and TikTok channels that unsubtly run OnlyFans infomercials in the guise of complaining about women these days.
While I did not have any resentment towards the victims of this propaganda, I figured I would have to give up on love to preserve my sanity. There seemed to be vanishingly little hope of finding a woman I could trust such that I would never worry that our children might question my decision to marry her, especially because I was still irreligious at the time. Basically I psyched myself up to focus not on myself but on mentorship, volunteering to help young boys with no father figures. Of course I knew that this would remain a pale imitation of what both of us needed, but at least it seemed better than nothing, better than self-pity and depression, and far better than defaulting to mindless media consumption.
The irony of playing fake dad did not escape me, as I previously had long-term relationships with women who had no desire to have kids, and I thought I shared that lack of desire. At the time I felt far less optimistic than I do now about the future. Since then I have come around to the idea of family life as a vocation and realized that I had never planned for the daunting financial responsibility it entails. I make pretty good money at the moment, and I’m a notoriously frugal guy, but the thought of having a family while renting makes me want to die from stress I don’t even have yet.
Contrary to all my previous efforts, in prioritizing family formation I now sort of have to go out of my way to meet a woman who does not also make pretty good money. Looking for a woman who has a job she’d happily quit because it is a waste of her time, instead of a career that matters to her, is not about me wanting us to be poorer or “feeling emasculated because she earns more than me”. It is about the fact that I have never met a woman in my age range, at my income level, who displays any willingness to take a hit to her material standard of living on behalf of children she considers accessory to her real life goals. This abnormal sample of women I’ve known, mostly through professional contexts with their own added complications, are almost uniformly unqualified as mothers — at least, the kind of full-time mother I’d want my kids to have in their early years, based on evidence that suggests nothing less comes close to meeting their needs.
Like my more constructionist exes, professional peers I found attractive in the past seem to think of men as incompetent large children instead of respecting us as a fundamentally different type of adult, or at least they give that impression by shit-talking men in our presence. Never again, I told myself, would I get involved with someone who constantly tries to reform me in the image of John Stoltenberg, a man who possibly unfairly sticks out in my mind as an anti-role model, the most pathetic kind of man I could imagine becoming. However it seemed that the pickings in the category of women who would not do this were extremely slim. My own experience looking for love in the wrong places confirmed this thought well before I first entertained it. The odds were bad, and the baddies were odd.
“Reactionary feminist” thought caught me right before I dove into a deep ball pit filled with microplastic time-release blackpills. After reading
’s Feminism Against Progress I revisited early Marxist feminism to see if I could piece together a better way of relating to women in the abstract. Ultimately I would call this a success, but it required taking bits and pieces of what I found, rather than discovering someone who had correctly predicted our present situation and formulated a solution.One big problem with Marxist feminism is that much of it traces back to a rather shitty study by Friedrich Engels called The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In this book, if I may summarize from memory, Engels lays out an account of the origin of class society in the patriarchal “overthrow” of matrilineal and highly communal family relations. This patrilineal regime of property emerged in the transition from hunter-gatherer clans to agricultural civilization, in which clear ownership of productive assets like land and animals took on enormous significance. Because certain paternity is key to maintaining such a social order, this creates a pressure for monogamy on the part of women, while husbands of questionable character often find various outlets for excess sexual expression. For Engels and his disciples the abolition of private property, of which patriarchy is the original and basic form, in part explains how socialism is expected to obviate prostitution.
This is probably a decent account of polygamy and the loveless marriage as primitive features of class society, or perhaps as features of primitive class society, but note that in this context it effectively becomes the material origin of all class relations. In other words, the infamous patriarchy is truly part and parcel of class society, and like “the family” is thus almost transhistorical as recorded history is concerned, with changes in modes of production only superficially reforming the underlying institution. From this sort of thinking we ended up with a phase of free love idealism among Marxist feminists, with Alexandra Kollontai serving as a high-profile example. (I would argue that, in imagining women’s initially limited relationship to civilized economic production as primarily social rather than biological and technological in nature, it also laid the groundwork for trans-affirming Marxist feminists like Catharine MacKinnon, but I digress.)
This approach shares with other feminist methodological lenses an inability to account for an obvious fact: because the category of “adult human male” is not defined by historically-specific social relations, men do not constitute a social class. We cannot collectively benefit from specific men’s control of specific women. Nor can we collectively exploit or control all women, not least because they too cannot constitute a social class.
The ludicrous claim to that men can and do operate as a class leads many men, in my estimation, to see feminism as a collection of apex fallacies. As Engels correctly notes, the working man has no property with which to participate in such a system of inheritance. It follows that women of the exploiting classes, regardless of their position relative to men of their own class, are not “oppressed” by working men in any politically-meaningful sense and have no “sex-class” interest in common with working women. Any patriarchal society worthy of the name is a dictatorship of patriarchs, rather than of men in general.
Like the “primitive communism” that Marx imagined by applying his theory to prehistory, this account is little more than speculative anthropology. I would loosely compare it to Lysenkoism in that it basically negates contemporary scientist bigotry instead of separating the science from the bigotry. Engels and Marx, in these contexts, indulged partially and somewhat self-consciously in the colonially-tinged fallacy of viewing our low-technology contemporaries as a glimpse into our past, when in fact they are living in their present. Social and economic relations observed in extant low-technology societies cannot explain where our relations came from. They can only explain why those societies never reached the scale of economic activity that makes class society adaptive, nor produced technologies that make its abolition eventually possible without giving up its material benefits.
Despite my limited knowledge of genetics and skepticism towards behavioral science, if you pushed me on it I think I would consider myself “on the hereditarian left”. This is a phrase I first heard in reference to Freddie de Boer’s The Cult of Smart, and which I think also applies to his concern for leftists not taking antisocial or disabling mental illness seriously enough.
Identifying myself with this label does not mean that I accept at face value the arguments floating around about race and IQ, or that I take obvious “biotruths” like “most women want to become mothers” to the level of individual prescription. It means that I know my peers and I are all weirdos, statistically, by virtue of our engagement in politics. It means I don’t orient my priorities towards creating more activists or engineering a population capable of effective governance through direct democracy. It means I acknowledge that people doing population studies on spicy topics like intelligence and criminality are not motivated by hatred, that I don’t think the accuracy of “ugly” findings would undermine my politics, and that I am not afraid of taking them seriously and adapting to their possible reality.
For historical reasons I have only recently begun to study properly, “the left” is infested with dogmatic tabula rasa thinking and radical social constructionism. As my objection to Engels hopefully demonstrates, even within Marxism this increasingly anti-scientific bias of the broader left is pervasive. It seems many get stuck in a mindset of “everyone is a product of environment, so inequalities in outcome evidence inequalities in opportunity”. For me the better mindset is more like “natural hierarchy is obviously about competence in a domain, which can justify relevant authority but not labor exploitation, and also rich people are too stupid for natural hierarchy to explain their success”.
In other words, we live in an era where market logic infects our thinking at unprecedented scale and depth, such that we forget that people truly are not fungible commodities. Feeling locked out of political power, we attempt to tax and redistribute [perceived] social capital as though it were real capital, or restructure the prestige market instead of abolishing it. Equity as equality of outcome is a stupid and bad idea, and I submit that without the regime of private property über alles no democratically-minded person would feel obligated to believe otherwise.
At this point I realize that I have no point to make of all this, except to beat my favorite dead horse of saying we should focus our political efforts on the interests of demonstrably normal people instead of the weirdos like us who engage in said political efforts. My position on identity politics and leftist deviation from class analysis is not news to my readers, but I consistently argue that because womanhood is a material reality rather than a socially-constructed identity, special concern for the conditions of working-class women does not necessarily constitute identity politics. The women of the exploiting classes can kick rocks, for all I care, because they are not my sisters, nor are they the sisters of working women.
Mostly I think, as do many others across the political spectrum, that the bizarre culture war of the sexes is all a bit sad, and likely a blip on the historical radar. When I think about my friend from our story at the beginning, I see another person who accomplished the same thing I did by entirely different means. I see someone whose largely incomprehensible difference in perspective and needs became the foundation of our enduring friendship. Ultimately all I have to say is that I like women a lot, and I’m glad we live more heterosocially than we did in the past, but I think we have yet to thread the needle we’ll need to thread in order to create a society that allows every working person to flourish with due respect for both the equal dignity of men and women and the differences among and between us.