Motus Mentis

Richard Hanania has just published an excellent piece at Substack on the enfeebling and corrosive effect of the feminization of public affairs. The problem, as he describes it, is that the natural asymmetry between men and women gives women a pass when they respond emotionally to the rough-and-tumble that is an inevitable part of every aspect of public life.

Hanania points out inconsistencies on this issue on both sides of the cultural divide:

I think there’s a certain weirdness to the arguments made by both sides of the gender issue. To simplify, you have the left, which leans towards the blank slate and opposes gender stereotypes but demands women in public life be treated as too delicate for criticism, and conservatives, who believe in sex differences but say to treat people as individuals. But if men and women are the same, or are only different because of socialization that we should overcome, there’s no good reason to treat them differently. And if they are different and everyone should accept that, then we are justified in having different rules and norms for men and women in practically all areas of life, including political debate.

(Related: the lowering of physical standards to admit females to the ranks of police, military, and other occupations.)

Hanania continues:

For all our talk of equality, our culture treats violence, incivility, and aggression towards women much more seriously than the same towards men. This creates a difficult dynamic, in which if a man disagrees strongly with a woman, he has to tread very carefully if he is not to be judged harshly by observers.

Exactly so. And the problem hardly ends there; the “difficult dynamic” takes many other forms. The entry of women into traditionally male roles and occupations has without exception added tension, and operational complexity. Military combat forces, for example, have been made up exclusively of men in pretty much every human society that has ever existed (one has to imagine that this universality implies some reason far deeper than groundless cultural prejudice); the introduction of women into these mannerbunds, especially given the complications of sexual attraction and men’s instinctive protectiveness toward women, can hardly fail to be disruptive to both military culture and cohesion, and so to military effectiveness generally. So why do we do it? Because the axioms of blank-slatism tell us that to do otherwise unfairly excludes women. But then why must we lower standards to admit them? Is “fairness” based on the questionable (to say the least) axioms of the interchangeability of the sexes worth the tradeoffs? Worth it to whom? Women? Society as a whole? To pursue this example further: if the inclusion of women into the military (in order not to make women feel unfairly excluded) leads to a fatal weakening of the military, with the usual consequences that nations have suffered throughout history for being inadequately able to defend themselves, is that not, in the long run, a bad thing for women as well as men?

What is to be done? Hanania offers three alternatives:

I think we have a few options for how we treat public discourse. The first two are

1) Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.

2 ) Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates.

Instead of either of these options, I think we’ve stumbled upon a hybrid system, where

3) We accept gender double standards, and tolerate more aggression towards men than we do towards women. We also tolerate more hyper-emotionalism from women than men.

Option (2) is what I think most people mean by the feminization of intellectual life, but Option (3) is actually worse, because it also introduces double standards we see everywhere in our culture.

Hanania also refers to the instinct that I mentioned above: protectiveness toward women. He muses about where this might have come from (I think the answer that he passes over — that women are the limiting resource for population growth — is the right one, and I don’t share his misgivings about group selection), but regardless of its origin, it should be beyond dispute that it is what is known as a “human universal”, manifesting itself in all human societies.

Whether or not the tendency reflects a rule of human nature, it is unquestionably true that the modern West prioritizes female well-being.

There’s a funny Hillary Clinton quote that couldn’t demonstrate the point more clearly: “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.” If the gender ratio of COVID were reversed and women were more at risk than men, all we would ever hear about would be the “femdemic.” Even the way we judge fiction reflects our bias towards caring more about harm done towards women. If you include the battle scenes, Game of Thrones probably killed off hundreds of times more male than female characters, yet we had to suffer through an endless number of think pieces on the show having too much violence towards women.

That we naturally accept that men are shock-absorbers for the world’s physical dangers is plain in every direction. Men comprise about 90% of workplace deaths. When the subject of workplace “equity” comes up, how often do you hear anyone complain about that?

Returning to the alternatives he outlined above, Hanania plants a flag:

As long as men and women are treated differently by society, they cannot engage in public debate with each other in a fair and consistent way. And because of human nature, society will always treat men and women differently, as it should. So what should we do?

Given that (3) is so horrible and basically gives a veto to hysterical women over all public policy, we have to choose (1) or (2). I have no doubt that public discourse as a male space works better. That doesn’t mean women are barred from voting or discussing politics. They can participate in the public arena but as soon as they start crying over a Halloween costume or talking about “online abuse,” most people should roll their eyes and understand that someone without the emotional stability to even participate in the marketplace of ideas isn’t going to have the traits necessary to contribute much to it.

…The strength of any anti-wokeness movement depends in large part on the strengths of its antibodies to a certain kind of female emotionalism.

Read the whole thing here. It’s well worth your time.