Women’s tears win in the marketplace of ideas

Saturday, June 3rd, 2023

Richard Hanania argues that women’s tears win in the marketplace of ideas:

We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top.

What is left to contribute on the question of how feminization relates to pathologies in our current political discourse? First, I think that the ways in which public debate works when we take steps to make the most emotional and aggressive women comfortable have been overlooked. Things that we talk about as involving “young people,” “college students,” and “liberals” are often gendered issues.

This doesn’t always show up in the data, and many may not want to discuss anything controversial without having numbers they can refer to, lest they be accused of everything they say being a figment of their sexist imagination. Nonetheless, I think that anyone who has spent time paying attention to politics, journalism, or academia, or wherever people debate ideas, will understand what I’m talking about.

Second, 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. How exactly this should be done is something worth thinking about. Finally, I argue that much of the opposition to wokeness is distorted and ineffective because it avoids the gendered nature of the problem, which also makes fighting it difficult.

Comments

  1. McChuck says:

    I have no problem with this. Women and men are different, and women have no place in politics, business or war.

    There, see how easy, natural, and true that was?

  2. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Women have a place which transcends mere politics, business. or war — women produce the next generation of human beings.

    Over millennia of evolution and social development, the essential role of women was recognized — “women & children first”. Societies which did not prioritize the protection of women and their child-bearing role died out, because there was no next generation.

    Modern Western societies are thus doomed. Women have fallen prey to the lie that spending their lives in government cubicles stamping bureaucratic papers constitutes a satisfying career, whereas bearing & bringing up the next generation is a male-imposed pointless burden upon them. The long-term outcome of so many women refusing their unique & admirable role is unfortunately inescapable.

  3. Ullan says:

    Women test men to see if they are worthy to submit to. Modern men mostly fail. Feminism is the result, they trash their societies because they are not controlled, hence mass immigration, sympathy for criminals (real, dominant men) and the humiliation of “nice guys”. They don’t want to reproduce with weak men.

    If you check out the mouse utopia study, any society that becomes too safe and rich seems to self destruct. Hard men bring good times, good times bring weak men, weak men bring hard times, rinse and repeat.

  4. Michael van der Riet says:

    @Gavin “Women & children first” is a fairly new survival strategy for humans. The Birkenhead was a landmark reversal. Before that is was strongest and fittest first.

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