Dec 24, 2023·edited Dec 24, 2023Liked by Misha Saul
Before society could be feminized, women had to be "feminized." Think about THAT. You're blaming us for doing to you what was first done to us. Domestication. Breaking, housebreaking.
That's not to say "wild" women would be (or were) just like men. But quite a job was done on us—psychic bone-breaking, footbinding—so that men could 1) be reasonably sure of paternity, 2) keep "their" women safe from other men's predation, 3) monopolize the genderless realms of excellence (the arts, sciences, religion) for themselves and label them "masculine." (There are gendered realms—around aggression and reproduction—but we've gendered ALL the realms, and women gaining overdue access to the genderless ones shouldn't "emasculate" anybody.)
The decline in male spaces is pretty interesting to think about. I think a bunch of variables come into play that sort of all relate to a trend you could call feminization, but looking at my friends it's hard to pin down any single thing:
1) Re: Bar fights, absolutely right that this is something we've (mostly) agreed to get rid of. Nobody in my friend group has been in one, and this is night and day different from my dad's generation. Bro I don't need more concussions I've hung out with the boys already.
2) The male spaces of sports magazines are gone, because those are magazines, but I think most guy spaces are private groupchats now. Occasionally I even see ads for 'men's groupchats' which sounds silly, but if you don't have one already is that worse than a frat membership? I just learned all my old friends are in touch via videogames, as male-skewed a domain as ever existed. Most of my newer friends keep in touch with their childhood friends through videogames. I think this sucks, for several reasons, but chief among them is the fact that guys like competitions, and at some point looking at every skill curve means either putting a ton of time in, sucking, or not playing at all. The median guy in 6th grade can play soccer or tennis or football with other sixth-graders. By 20, that's gone, the semi-pros stomp the collegiates stomp the varsity guys. If noobs wanted to play, they'd have gotten good a long time ago...lunches, on the other hand, come easy. In college people always had an activity they wanted you to try, now everybody just suggests drinks after work (or something you can drink while doing.) Idk if women have an equivalent.
3) Work is several orders of magnitude worse for making friends now than before. Higher turnover, more money but higher prices, greater competition, - the opportunity cost of offending is just much higher, and your reward is a pal who leaves for a better job in four months. The more time you're willing to spend talking shop, the more you can make friends with people talking shop, but it's commonly understood that this is a "work friend" and not someone you invite over for dinner.
The old guys I know all rib their coworkers, and they are merciless compared to what I would say. I've said several things that I didn't mean with intent to offend, that got taken that way, and felt horrified at the potential blowup. Older guys will literally be like "Jim served in Vietnam so we would order takeout from the Vietnamese place at every team meeting as a bit" or some crazy shit. That women relay stories of old guys offending wouldn't surprise me, it's just that once you see them go off on something weirder than office sexism you're forced to step back and understand that these guys fully expected to live like their dads. Boomer expectations and all. I'm exaggerating, it's only the most outspoken old guys, but there are some wildly provocative old dudes out there.
The most provocative younger women (and some men too, to be fair) have expectations for how to build a fun, bringing-your-whole-self workplace. Like their predecessors, they are both wildly entertaining and wildly offensive, maybe 60%/40% instead of 40%/60%. DEI meetings are the new golf course - if you can make it to one, you will hear crazy shit, and nobody's whispering. Fortunately for the HR department, this group is only offensive regarding topics that *used to be* verboten at work, like talking about sex, drugs, politics and your personal life. That's fair game now, which sucks if you don't like your coworkers chiming in on your marriage, their crazy edibles in Denver, etc. but otherwise not problems you'd bring to HR. Like the old guys, there's often a sense of "Shouldn't someone bring this to HR" followed by a steady realization that, if this were considered a problem, they would have dealt with it long ago.
So while the old boisterous ones have friends, but not friends you'd want to make, the young boisterous ones want to be your friends by getting all of your personal faults in writing or in a conversation between 25 people crazy enough to talk race politics etc. at work. Also eliminate most people in relationships/parents and the pool is very, very thin.
Long story short, bad place to make friends.
4) Guys like hanging out with girls, and guys+girls, more than hanging out with just guys. Frats, despite being a guy-centric org, are essentially saying "Don't worry ladies we got rid of the uncool ones, pls come party here pls." This is underrated, in a Tyler Cowen sense.
So there you have it. A combination of classic male competitiveness, a demographic change in the office banter, and a lack of demand for the thing being offered.
> And you have these groups that are issue focused, the gun people ... do well, they’re organized and get the bills passed that they want.
I would say this is true so long as we define "the gun people" as the incumbent gun manufacturers' lobby. "Saturday Night Special" bans mostly no longer exist, but massively bogus activist lawsuits function to heavily suppress the market for anything small, cheap, and actually effective. There are a blizzard of more-or-less pretextual regulations and market manipulations that effectively discourage innovation and require guns to look and work exactly like they did 80 years ago. The whole controversy is literally over whether guns that look and work exactly like they did 60 years ago (AR-15) are acceptable or not. The idea that none of this is legitimate occurs to absolutely no one, and certainly not to "gun rights" advocates, because they are basically dupes of the incumbent manufacturers' lobby group.
Chris Rock's "bullet control" bit is coming increasingly true – the ammo market is completely cartelized and manipulated, stuff costs probably literally 3–10 times what it ought to. Lee Jurras in the 1960s as an independent businessman invented a new type of pistol bullet called the jacketed hollow point, that was simultaneously more lethal on intended targets and less dangerous to bystanders, and when the cartel realized what had happened it cut off his access to manufacturing inputs and implemented its own copies of his invention. In the light of Ukraine it is not even so implausible to suggest that the cartel poses a direct threat to America's national security by damaging its wartime industrial mobilization potential.
White-tailed deer are literally back to Pre-Columbian population levels and there is absolutely no movement to open up the hunting regulations or do anything to improve public lands, because Democrats hysterically despise hunters and Republicans slyly despise the nonrich. (To give you an idea of the quality of right-wing thought on this issue, there is a movement to boycott companies that produce California-compliant lead-free ammunition, despite the fact that there is zero movement to go back to lead shotgun ammo for waterfowling and broad agreement among serious authorities that nobody really needs to be using a lead bullet on a game animal they intend to eat.)
The ATF effectively bans all innovation in triggering and firing mechanisms, not only the stupid shit like bump stocks, but the actually relevant stuff like electronic ignition. Electronic ignition, if combined with computer vision it could plausibly lead to a gun for which the difficult skill of trigger control is irrelevant and which fires itself automatically at the moment it is best aligned. It would be fairly shocking if the military's new XM7 rifle is not intended, on the down low, to at some point be refitted for this form of firing via its sophisticated XM157 sight; so it's a very cool and useful capability. But the problem is you can make it full auto by the equivalent of changing a line of code, and this is considered to be disastrous in a way that being able to make it full auto by obtaining a tiny "Glock Switch" or auto-sear that looks like, and is, something you can buy for $3 + shipping on eBay... and again, there is zero political movement to do anything about this.
If anything, the gun lobby is closer to supporting the ban, in the sense that they hate and stigmatize any attempt to design guns with electronic locks and security mechanisms on the theory that as soon as someone invents a crappy first-try version of it everyone will be forced to give up all their actually functional guns. Which is not crazy and I think there are even liberal laws on the books that purport to do that.
I tried to write a conclusion since this is already pretty long, but I don't have one. Shit sucks, and is bad. Shoutout to all Hmong-American squirrel hunters.
> I’m not 100% sure, I was told this by a law professor at the University of Chicago, so it’s not like I read it on Twitter somewhere. It’s credible though I haven’t looked into it.
Indeed you haven't. Howard Smith was a longtime supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, and was close to the National Women's Party.
Before society could be feminized, women had to be "feminized." Think about THAT. You're blaming us for doing to you what was first done to us. Domestication. Breaking, housebreaking.
That's not to say "wild" women would be (or were) just like men. But quite a job was done on us—psychic bone-breaking, footbinding—so that men could 1) be reasonably sure of paternity, 2) keep "their" women safe from other men's predation, 3) monopolize the genderless realms of excellence (the arts, sciences, religion) for themselves and label them "masculine." (There are gendered realms—around aggression and reproduction—but we've gendered ALL the realms, and women gaining overdue access to the genderless ones shouldn't "emasculate" anybody.)
The decline in male spaces is pretty interesting to think about. I think a bunch of variables come into play that sort of all relate to a trend you could call feminization, but looking at my friends it's hard to pin down any single thing:
1) Re: Bar fights, absolutely right that this is something we've (mostly) agreed to get rid of. Nobody in my friend group has been in one, and this is night and day different from my dad's generation. Bro I don't need more concussions I've hung out with the boys already.
2) The male spaces of sports magazines are gone, because those are magazines, but I think most guy spaces are private groupchats now. Occasionally I even see ads for 'men's groupchats' which sounds silly, but if you don't have one already is that worse than a frat membership? I just learned all my old friends are in touch via videogames, as male-skewed a domain as ever existed. Most of my newer friends keep in touch with their childhood friends through videogames. I think this sucks, for several reasons, but chief among them is the fact that guys like competitions, and at some point looking at every skill curve means either putting a ton of time in, sucking, or not playing at all. The median guy in 6th grade can play soccer or tennis or football with other sixth-graders. By 20, that's gone, the semi-pros stomp the collegiates stomp the varsity guys. If noobs wanted to play, they'd have gotten good a long time ago...lunches, on the other hand, come easy. In college people always had an activity they wanted you to try, now everybody just suggests drinks after work (or something you can drink while doing.) Idk if women have an equivalent.
3) Work is several orders of magnitude worse for making friends now than before. Higher turnover, more money but higher prices, greater competition, - the opportunity cost of offending is just much higher, and your reward is a pal who leaves for a better job in four months. The more time you're willing to spend talking shop, the more you can make friends with people talking shop, but it's commonly understood that this is a "work friend" and not someone you invite over for dinner.
The old guys I know all rib their coworkers, and they are merciless compared to what I would say. I've said several things that I didn't mean with intent to offend, that got taken that way, and felt horrified at the potential blowup. Older guys will literally be like "Jim served in Vietnam so we would order takeout from the Vietnamese place at every team meeting as a bit" or some crazy shit. That women relay stories of old guys offending wouldn't surprise me, it's just that once you see them go off on something weirder than office sexism you're forced to step back and understand that these guys fully expected to live like their dads. Boomer expectations and all. I'm exaggerating, it's only the most outspoken old guys, but there are some wildly provocative old dudes out there.
The most provocative younger women (and some men too, to be fair) have expectations for how to build a fun, bringing-your-whole-self workplace. Like their predecessors, they are both wildly entertaining and wildly offensive, maybe 60%/40% instead of 40%/60%. DEI meetings are the new golf course - if you can make it to one, you will hear crazy shit, and nobody's whispering. Fortunately for the HR department, this group is only offensive regarding topics that *used to be* verboten at work, like talking about sex, drugs, politics and your personal life. That's fair game now, which sucks if you don't like your coworkers chiming in on your marriage, their crazy edibles in Denver, etc. but otherwise not problems you'd bring to HR. Like the old guys, there's often a sense of "Shouldn't someone bring this to HR" followed by a steady realization that, if this were considered a problem, they would have dealt with it long ago.
So while the old boisterous ones have friends, but not friends you'd want to make, the young boisterous ones want to be your friends by getting all of your personal faults in writing or in a conversation between 25 people crazy enough to talk race politics etc. at work. Also eliminate most people in relationships/parents and the pool is very, very thin.
Long story short, bad place to make friends.
4) Guys like hanging out with girls, and guys+girls, more than hanging out with just guys. Frats, despite being a guy-centric org, are essentially saying "Don't worry ladies we got rid of the uncool ones, pls come party here pls." This is underrated, in a Tyler Cowen sense.
So there you have it. A combination of classic male competitiveness, a demographic change in the office banter, and a lack of demand for the thing being offered.
Two hilariously stupid idiots
> And you have these groups that are issue focused, the gun people ... do well, they’re organized and get the bills passed that they want.
I would say this is true so long as we define "the gun people" as the incumbent gun manufacturers' lobby. "Saturday Night Special" bans mostly no longer exist, but massively bogus activist lawsuits function to heavily suppress the market for anything small, cheap, and actually effective. There are a blizzard of more-or-less pretextual regulations and market manipulations that effectively discourage innovation and require guns to look and work exactly like they did 80 years ago. The whole controversy is literally over whether guns that look and work exactly like they did 60 years ago (AR-15) are acceptable or not. The idea that none of this is legitimate occurs to absolutely no one, and certainly not to "gun rights" advocates, because they are basically dupes of the incumbent manufacturers' lobby group.
Chris Rock's "bullet control" bit is coming increasingly true – the ammo market is completely cartelized and manipulated, stuff costs probably literally 3–10 times what it ought to. Lee Jurras in the 1960s as an independent businessman invented a new type of pistol bullet called the jacketed hollow point, that was simultaneously more lethal on intended targets and less dangerous to bystanders, and when the cartel realized what had happened it cut off his access to manufacturing inputs and implemented its own copies of his invention. In the light of Ukraine it is not even so implausible to suggest that the cartel poses a direct threat to America's national security by damaging its wartime industrial mobilization potential.
White-tailed deer are literally back to Pre-Columbian population levels and there is absolutely no movement to open up the hunting regulations or do anything to improve public lands, because Democrats hysterically despise hunters and Republicans slyly despise the nonrich. (To give you an idea of the quality of right-wing thought on this issue, there is a movement to boycott companies that produce California-compliant lead-free ammunition, despite the fact that there is zero movement to go back to lead shotgun ammo for waterfowling and broad agreement among serious authorities that nobody really needs to be using a lead bullet on a game animal they intend to eat.)
The ATF effectively bans all innovation in triggering and firing mechanisms, not only the stupid shit like bump stocks, but the actually relevant stuff like electronic ignition. Electronic ignition, if combined with computer vision it could plausibly lead to a gun for which the difficult skill of trigger control is irrelevant and which fires itself automatically at the moment it is best aligned. It would be fairly shocking if the military's new XM7 rifle is not intended, on the down low, to at some point be refitted for this form of firing via its sophisticated XM157 sight; so it's a very cool and useful capability. But the problem is you can make it full auto by the equivalent of changing a line of code, and this is considered to be disastrous in a way that being able to make it full auto by obtaining a tiny "Glock Switch" or auto-sear that looks like, and is, something you can buy for $3 + shipping on eBay... and again, there is zero political movement to do anything about this.
If anything, the gun lobby is closer to supporting the ban, in the sense that they hate and stigmatize any attempt to design guns with electronic locks and security mechanisms on the theory that as soon as someone invents a crappy first-try version of it everyone will be forced to give up all their actually functional guns. Which is not crazy and I think there are even liberal laws on the books that purport to do that.
I tried to write a conclusion since this is already pretty long, but I don't have one. Shit sucks, and is bad. Shoutout to all Hmong-American squirrel hunters.
> I’m not 100% sure, I was told this by a law professor at the University of Chicago, so it’s not like I read it on Twitter somewhere. It’s credible though I haven’t looked into it.
Indeed you haven't. Howard Smith was a longtime supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, and was close to the National Women's Party.