Quotulatiousness

December 5, 2025

“I can stop [buying books] anytime. It’s not an addiction!”

Filed under: Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Freeman, Nichole James resists the notion that her bookbuying habit is an addiction (because she could stop anytime she wants, unlike addicts who clearly can’t ever stop):

A small portion of my own book hoard. These shelves at least have a bit of commonality to them, unlike a lot of other shelves I could share.

There are people who collect sensible things, like pensions or matching dining chairs. Then there are people like me, who collect books and then build new shelves to hold the books, then buy more books to fill the shelves, then realize the house is now 70% paper.

I have always loved books. The magical lands they open up, the lives you try on for a few hundred pages. Places you cannot reach with a passport and an airline ticket. Narnia, Hogwarts, Mordor, and the parts of Sydney where even Google Maps looks nervous. The whole lot. Some people fall in love with the smell. Others with the weight of someone’s thoughts in their hands. I fall in love with all of that and then apparently forget that my house has finite wall space.

Which is why, as I call the carpenter for “just one more bookshelf”, a tiny voice in my head wonders if this is still charming or if I now qualify for some kind of diagnosis.

As it turns out, I might. The diagnosis even has a very fancy Greek name: bibliomania.

Back in the 19th century, an English cleric called Thomas Frognall Dibdin wrote a whole book called Bibliomania, or, Book Madness. He gleefully catalogued the symptoms of the afflicted: obsession with first editions, uncut pages, vellum, rare bindings, and the sort of Moroccan leather that smells faintly of money and self-satisfaction. It was a time when collectors bid like lunatics at auctions, paid “fancy prices”, and were generally regarded as slightly cracked.

That was then. Now, we call it a “TBR pile” — To-Be-Read.

Today, psychologists define bibliomania as a type of compulsive buying disorder. The warning signs are sobering. You buy more books than you can possibly read. You feel out of control. You get into financial trouble. You feel guilty. Your loved ones begin sentences with “Do you really need …?” and gesture helplessly at the tottering stack of paperbacks by the bed.

I recognize a few of these symptoms. I have definitely skipped a meal to afford a hardback. I have walked into a bookshop to “just browse” and come out clutching a small tower and a freshly re-mortgaged soul. There are hardbacks I have moved house with three times that I haven’t yet opened. They look at me accusingly whenever I walk past, like neglected gym memberships in dust jackets.

But here is where I part ways with the diagnosticians and join the Church of Umberto Eco.

Eco, the Italian novelist and semiotician with the beard of a wizard and the library of a dragon, reportedly owned around 50,000 books. He did not consider this a problem. He considered it a system. He said it was foolish to think you have to read every book you buy, just as it would be foolish to insist you must use every screwdriver before you are allowed to own another one.

Books, in his view, are like medicine. You keep a lot in the cabinet. Most of the time they sit there harmlessly. Then one day, in some dark night of the soul or slow Wednesday in July, you need the exact one that will fix you. So you reach into your “medicine cupboard” and pull out the right book for that moment. Which, he argued, is exactly why you should always have more than you need.

This is the philosophy I am choosing to live by, rather than the one that suggests I should be monitored by a spending app and gently reintroduced to the public library.

December 4, 2025

“… the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Freddie deBoer decries the New York Times viewpoint that “there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities”:

(you would find this horribly condescending too)
Image from Freddie deBoer

I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes

    Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”

Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.

Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. If only the elderly would embrace the capital-D Disability identity, we’re told, everything would be better — their health care would run smoother, their interactions with institutions would be less demeaning, their sense of community would blossom. Maybe they’d even be happier! The Times treats this as self-corroborating common sense, like, well, everything else argued in the New York Times.

What this kind of thinking actually represents is the natural endpoint of a cultural project that has turned medical pathology into a personality type. It’s the codification of a worldview where suffering is not something to address, treat, alleviate, or recover from, but a new kind of boutique identity, complete with community membership, branded discourse, and moral status. It turns vulnerability into a form of social currency, rewarding performance over authenticity and turning genuine suffering into a spectacle for peer validation. In doing so, it erodes the very possibility of meaningful treatment, because the focus is no longer on recovery or well-being, but on cultivating a carefully curated self-image that fixates on impairment. And what I think, as I read this person tut-tutting senior citizens for not embracing that new ethos, is “Maybe they just feel like they’re too fucking old to take part in such nonsense?”

The piece insists, without evidence or even really argument, that treating disability as an identity will improve access to accommodation. Disability accommodations matter; of course they do. But what this article is concerned with is patently not getting older adults the practical support they need. The piece is instead fixated on the idea that the real issue here is that people don’t want to be disabled in the metaphysical, self-defining sense, as though the reluctance of an 84-year-old to call herself Disabled-with-a-capital-D is some retrograde psychological failure rather than a perfectly sane human impulse born of a lifetime of struggle. Span frames this as a story about insufficiently enlightened seniors who need to be ushered into the disability “community”. But maybe the reluctance they’re describing is the whisper of something older and much wiser: the understanding that disability is not a polity you join, not a club whose membership conveys special epistemic authority, but a condition of life that you endure and attempt to mitigate. These older people don’t identify as disabled because they remember, stubbornly enough, the distinction between having a problem and being the problem. They treat disability as a practical reality, not an existential category. And they’re right to do so.

Update, 5 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 2, 2025

QotD: Brutalism “is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful”

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When a country is intent on committing suicide, as is Britain, it celebrates the very things that have led, or are leading, to its demise. Whether this is because it thinks it no longer has a right to exist and the world would be better off without it, or whether it is because, when something appears inevitable to us, we welcome it to disguise our impotence to halt it, I do not know. But the fact is that London is about to have a museum devoted to the kind of architecture that has turned so much of Britain’s urban landscape into a visual nightmare, a scouring of the retina.

I have long suspected, but cannot prove with an indisputable argument, that this architecture has played its part in the brutalization of daily life and social behavior in the country. Certainly, it has dehumanized the appearance of many towns and cities; its harsh surfaces and willfully austere and jagged designs leave the mere human being feeling that he is about as welcome as an ant on a kitchen counter — which, indeed, he now much resembles.

This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it. They are like the doctors of old, who, if they could not cure their patients, could at least make them take the most repellent and noxious medicine, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good.

The projected museum is in a former school in the north of London, designed in 1968. Here is fairly typical commentary on the building:

    Despite decades of wear and some unfortunate interventions, the raw concrete structure has remained a cherished example of socially driven modernist design.

It is to be noticed that the cherishing done here is independent of anyone who cherishes; as for “socially driven modernist design”, we might read “totalitarian”. Indeed, the building exudes totalitarianism, as raw reinforced concrete exudes ghastly stains after a short time.

Le Corbusier, one of the founders of this kind of architecture, was indeed a fascist in the most literal sense, though he had no real objection to communist totalitarianism, either. What he most hated was what he called the street, that is to say the place where people behave spontaneously and without direction from above, and where they are not corralled into functions imposed on them by all-wise socially driven architects. It was for this reason that he and his acolytes preferred to build urban wildernesses of the kind that have now been built the world over, but especially in Britain.

The architects who have been given the task of renewing the school building where the museum dedicated to architectural brutalism is to be housed have “noted its distinct geometry, as well as its symbolic presence reflecting the ideals of the school’s broader 1960s Brutalist architecture conceived in an era of social progress”.

Apologists for such architecture write a pure Soviet langue de bois — or perhaps I should say langue de béton, since concrete rather than wood is their favorite material:

    Consultation with the school, families and local stakeholders has underpinned the project from the outset, ensuring that the building’s next chapter remains tied to its founding ethos centered on architecture as a tool for collective learning and expression.

Does anyone, after the death of the late, not much lamented, Leonid Brezhnev, have thoughts that correspond to, or are couched in, words such as these? By their language shall ye know them.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architects of Our Own Destruction”, New English Review, 2025-08-08.

November 30, 2025

The plight of most young western men

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter explores the dangerous psychological rift in western thought that casts young men into a literal no-win situation and yet blames them for not succeeding:

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Frank Bernard Dicksee, 1901

A great deal of Discourse revolves around the desultory state of the broken modern young man. We wring our hands about porn brained incels, and about the incel’s mirror image in the sociopathic gym bro fuckboy. We talk about how men need to man up, put down the console controller, get out of the basement, talk to real girls, and wife them up. At the same time, we do everything we can to make this as difficult and unappealing as possible. Male sexuality is relentlessly demonized, and this is at the root of great deal of social dysfunction.

Our society has established new social norms that make talking to girls in the wild, or even looking at them, tantamount to a sex crime. Buying a girl a drink at the bar is an imposition, an implicit expectation that she will at the very least say thank you, and this is essentially sexual harassment. As a result of this men do not buy girls drinks anymore. Glance at a girl’s cameltoe as she places her yoga pants between you and the mirror to do hip thrusts while you’re trying to focus on your deadlift, and get put on blast on TikTok as a perv. As a result men carefully avoid looking at girls, and girls wonder why they don’t get attention. Office romances are right out: ask Betty from accounting if she’d like to get a coffee, and you’re rolling the dice between getting lucky and getting a talking to from HR (if you’re lucky). Friend-group romances are discouraged: they bring too much drama.

The only romantic avenue still permitted is the dating apps. The de facto proscription of every other venue was so abrupt and thorough that I can’t help but wonder if MeToo was engineered by Match Group, in order to do to dating what Uber did to taxis. Just like Uber took an occupation that was able to provide a reasonable living standard for working class guys and turned it into piece-work for an imported third-world precariat, so Tinder wiped away thousands of years of accumulated social technologies optimized for the purpose of bringing young men and women together into stable, loving, and fecund matrimony, and replaced it with a winner-take-all meat market in which a small minority of the best-looking men swipe their way through a digital harem of emotionally crippled cum-dumpsters, while women retaliate by using their matches to get free meals and ghosting as soon as the cheque comes without so much as a thanks for the company. Commoditizing romance left everyone more lonesome and miserable than ever, but would you look at that market cap.

The decay set in long before Tinder, however.

Feminists have gotten a great deal of mileage out of Freud’s Madonna-whore complex. This is the idea of a Manichean division of femininity: the chaste purity of the innocent nurturing mother, contrasted with the wanton looseness of the degraded prostitute. The Madonna is embodied by the Virgin Mary, whose only begotten child was conceived immaculately, which is to say without actually having sex. Both archetypes are caricatures that fail to capture the full range of feminine sexuality, but a traditional, god-fearing society effectively forced women to choose between one or the other. Either she represses her instincts and lives a passionless life of quiet misery, or she becomes a fallen woman.

Unlike much of Freud’s oeuvre, which largely consisted of the author’s barely concealed fetishes, the Madonna-whore complex has held up fairly well in the era of evolutionary psychology. Freud’s explanation for the phenomenon – that it is rooted in the Oedipal desire to rut with your own mother – is of course nonsense (except possibly insofar as it may have applied to him). Its origin is more plausibly in the predicament of paternal uncertainty which has bedevilled men since before the dawn of mankind, and which leads to a trade-off between short- and long-term mating strategies with easy women on the one hand (with whom paternity is always in question, and in whom investment should therefore be kept to a minimum, but since they’re easy you can sow your seed in lots of them), and chaste women on the other (with whom paternity can be more reliably determined, and in whom greater investment is therefore warranted). It doesn’t matter that we have paternity tests now: evolved instincts don’t care about your technology.

In the aftermath of the sexual revolution female sexuality was freed from these ancient constraints. Women are permitted to dress as they please, date who they want, have sex with as many partners as they desire. Any attempt to dissuade women from such behaviour is attacked as slut shaming, a ploy by the patriarchy to control their bodies.

Promiscuous premarital sex was once a one-way street to single motherhood. The pill and legal abortion reduced that risk considerably, which provided the justification for eliminating sexual restraint in the first place. Male sexual psychology presents its own problems, however. Revealing attire invites male attention, and often not from the males whose attention a woman wants to attract. Women enjoy male attention, and so dress to attract it. Sexually excited men are liable to behave badly. Badly behaving men result in women getting hurt. Obviously, if a man behaves badly, society will punish him … but the wise course is to avoid putting temptation in his way in the first place. Those ancient restrictions on female sexuality weren’t there to oppress women: they were there to protect women from themselves.

Women may have chafed under the chastity belt of the Madonna-whore complex, but it caused problems for men too. Men don’t generally want either a frigid Victorian schoolmarm or a drunken slattern for a wife: he wants the happy medium between the two, purity in the streets but a prostie in the sheets, a girl who enjoys sex and is good at it, but only has it with him. The Madonna-whore complex is a schizoid separation of these two conflicting desires, which then leads to the romantic frustration of both sexes: men have to choose between two equally unappealing options, and women are required to deny one or the other aspect of their own sexuality.

Just like men, women tend to want two, somewhat contradictory things from the opposite sex. First, they want men to protect and provide for them: to build what needs building, fix what needs fixing, pay for dinner, buy them pretty jewellery. In other words, they want men to sacrifice their time and energy of their behalf. At the same time they want men who are dominant, strong, confident, and at least potentially dangerous, for the obvious reason that men must compete with other men, and men who do not possess these traits make terrible protectors and providers in comparison with men who do. The necessary tension is that dominant, aggressive men are generally much less interested in protecting and providing: a man who won’t submit easily to other men, won’t submit to women either; a man who can force other men to submit to his will, can also force a woman to do the same. This mirrors the tension in male desires: a girl who’s a good lay might not be the most impeccably virginal of innocent maidens.

We can’t call women whores anymore in order to enforce virginal purity, but bad romantic decisions still carry bad consequences, and women also need to be protected from those consequences (and can’t ever be held responsible for them). The emphasis has therefore shifted from policing female sexuality to policing male sexuality. The result of this is the emergence of the simp-rapist complex.

The only way to create a safe environment for women whose behaviour is entirely unrestricted is to ruthlessly suppress precisely those masculine traits of dominance and aggression that women find attractive in the first place. All of these traits get included into the broad category of “rape culture”. Even looking at a woman without her expressly stated positive consent becomes a problematic act. Men who violate these norms become, according to this standard, “rapists”.

Update, 1 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 29, 2025

Eliminating fathers – a long-term goal of early Feminists

Filed under: History, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo laments a recent British change to family law that “family courts will no longer work on the presumption that having contact with both parents is in the best interests of a child”. This is merely the latest move in a long-running legal and political struggle to alienate fathers from their children:

“Even today most people will refuse to believe that one of feminism’s main aims is, and always was, to give women the power to rid their families of men.” — William Collins, The Empathy Gap (2019)

“‘The person who is least likely to abuse a child is a married father,’ notes Canadian Senator Anne Cools. ‘The person who is most likely is a single, unmarried mother.'” — quoted in Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family (2007)

[…]

It is a truism that feminists seek to destroy the father-led family and have long worked to do so through anti-father propaganda, legal chicanery, and evidence-free allegations of abuse.

Those who have not read feminists’ own words on this subject may have difficulty appreciating the depth of their desire to deny fathers any legally- or socially-recognized familial role.

Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex (1971) provides a compelling example. Written at the height of the Second Wave of feminism, and published three years before the author’s death by suicide, it was a popular female-supremacist treatise. In it, Davis rhapsodized about goddess worship and female power in the ancient world, detailing a time when societies allegedly recognized and revered women as the superior sex.

In these societies, according to mythographer Robert Graves, “Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch” (quoted p. 121). In thrall to women, men were peripheral, their roles as fathers non-existent: “[The woman] took lovers, but for her pleasure,” writes Davis, “not to provide her children with a father, a commodity early woman saw no need for” (p. 121). In this matriarchal sexual utopia, “Sexual morals were a matter of personal conscience, not of law” (p. 116), and the sole familial bond was between the mother and her offspring.

A chapter on “Mother-Right” made the case for a return to such a system, explaining that fathers contribute nothing good to their children’s lives. “The father is not at all necessary for a child’s happiness and development” (p. 117). Even children allegedly know this to be so: “In nearly every child’s experience, it is the mother, not the father, who loves all the children equally, stands by them without regard to their worth or lack of it, and forgives without reservation” (p. 118).

The father’s irrelevance is rooted, Davis explained, in men’s inability to love. “Maternal love was not only the first kind of love. For many millennia it was the only kind” (p. 119). Man has merely “learned to appreciate and be grateful for woman’s love, even though he was not emotionally equipped to return it in kind” (p. 119). She quoted Freudian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik to support her view that when men speak of love, they are actually speaking of a mere ‘scrotal frenzy'” (p. 119).

This rhapsody to female power and assertion of male uselessness continues for hundreds of pages in Davis’s ludicrous yet impressively-detailed book. Many feminists at this period made similar claims, attacking fatherhood and calling for the destruction of the patriarchal family. Author and activist Kate Millett, for example, argued in Sexual Politics (1970) that women’s oppression could not be ended without a transformation of “patriarchy’s chief institution […] the family” (p. 33).

In the same year, feminist radical Shulamith Firestone excoriated the patriarchal nuclear family as the “most rigid class/caste system in existence” (The Dialectic of Sex, p. 15). Two years earlier, would-be killer Valerie Solanas had expressed the sentiment crudely in her SCUM Manifesto: “The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch — everything he touches turn to shit” (p. 45).

These were not simply sad cranks penning screeds in cat-piss-scented rooms (though many of them were mentally ill). They were acknowledged leaders of a movement that would, within a few decades, shape and control the core institutions of western civilization.

November 27, 2025

We’re not quite at the point that we get trigger warnings for trigger warnings, but …

Filed under: Books, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

On her blog, Sarah Hoyt discusses the continued expansion of trigger warnings in fan fiction, but not because the readers demand it:

Image from According to Hoyt

… I’ve noticed a creep up of trigger warnings in fanfic. Some of these would be incomprehensible to non-Jane-Austen fans and are actually not so much trigger warnings as sub-genre warnings. There are subgenres some fans (sometimes I’m some fans) hate, like “Lizzy is not a Bennet” or “Bingley is evil” or … whatever. That’s fine. It saves me the trouble of reading a fanfic that’s going to annoy me. Unless I’m in the mood to be annoyed, in which case I will read it so I can grit my teeth and mentally yell at the writer. (Bingley is evil is a problem because it usually turns into a revenge-fest on EVERYONE. Everyone is evil. Etc. I don’t think there’s ever a time I want to read that. You find yourself wanting to take a shower for the soul. With a wire scrub brush.)

We make fun of trigger warnings, often, but it’s a real measure of how stupid things have gotten. When I’m having to read a trigger warning for say “kissing without consent.” or “violence against children” (Okay, you’ll think that last makes perfect sense, until you find out it’s because a kid gets slapped once in the novel) or “verbal violence” or –

And you start wondering, on the serious, if the ideal novel for these people has no plot at all, just people sitting around having a nice meal and talking.

This is disturbing, because the whole point of a novel is to make you feel emotions and experience things you either can’t in your real life, or which wouldn’t be safe to experience in your real life, followed by resolution and catharsis. That’s what a novel offers you. The opportunity to be the someone else far away experiencing “Adventure” (which as we all know is really a series of unpleasant events.)

Anyway, I’ve slowly come to the conclusion all this demand for warnings and screeching about offense isn’t by real readers.

No, seriously. Real readers know that no one can insulate them against all surprises in a book (or blog) and that in fact the point of reading is to get out of your head and experience different things, different events, different emotions and different points of view. You might disagree vehemently with them (I actually do with most of the really old science fiction. Really, scientists in charge? Who thinks that’s even safe? Oh, yeah, the Soviet Union. But even they didn’t DO IT. They just paid lip service. They might have killed a lot more people if they’d done it, at that.) but that forces you to think about why you disagree and how you’d do it differently. If you’re of a certain frame of mind, you [might] end up becoming a novelist and writing your response to what you disagree with. Though if you are worth spit, even then, your “response” will be less of a response and more of this whole new thing it became, with the response buried somewhere inside it. And if you’re not of that frame of mind, you’ll still end up a more considered and self-reflective thinker than you were before. For one, while you might think that the other POV is stupid, if you read a whole novel with it, you’ll be aware that thought went into it, and might even have to confront that the worst stupid takes a lot of thought and self deception.

Anyway, the point is, I don’t think the offense-monsters read. Because the whole point of their screeching is to shut down the thinking and prevent ANYONE ELSE from being exposed to the material, and maybe thinking.

That’s not what they say, of course. They say “I’m offended”. And “I’m hurt”. And “You’re mean because you offended me”.

But what they really mean is “this you cannot think” “This you cannot see” and “this you cannot read” and “this you cannot write”. And “this you cannot say”.

They have, you see, completely surrendered their very core to the herd. They have given up their right to think and feel and be, in favor of belonging completely to the herd. (They used to have a term for this and said it as though it were praiseworthy: “mind-kill”.) So being exposed to contrary things hurts, and they have no defense, because they have taught themselves not to think and/or reason through things.

The pain they feel at the slightest hint of disagreement is true. It is also a symptom of what they have done to themselves, and has nothing to do with being mentally or emotionally healthy.

Just like the pain of withdrawal of a chronic alcoholic denied alcohol is real, and continued and too fast withdrawal might kill him, however continuing to feed his drinking habit will also kill him, faster.

To give them trigger warnings, apologize for any offense and handle them with kid gloves is not only bad for them but bad for society in general.

November 19, 2025

Julia: A Feminist Retelling of 1984?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 11 Jul 2025

Julia, a 2023 novel by Sandra Newman, does more than just retell Orwell’s 1984 through Julia’s eyes. That perspective switch presents an Oceania that is both more mundane and more familiar. It’s certainly a companion piece more than a stand-alone work, but it does have something to offer both in how it examines Orwell and a few times, how it contradicts him.

00:00 Intro
02:18 a Different Perspective
09:30 Caught in a Trap
12:45 Backstory
15:40 Departures
20:18 Endings and Beginnings
(more…)

November 15, 2025

There’s not much room for men and boys in the “Female Future”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson which was intended to be about men’s lives but “quickly becomes a conversation about what women want”:

Chris Williamson: “It’s very hard to try and put forward something that doesn’t sound like putting the brakes on women. And I don’t think that’s what either of us …”

Here is the problem in a nutshell. We must never say No to a woman, no matter the social atrophy and misery she and her sisters are causing. Carlson, in turn, gives the only permissible response: “Are women happier than they were?”

A conversation about men’s lives quickly becomes a conversation about what women want.

**

Men’s issues have long been the purview of a tiny group of outliers who gained traction in the early days of the internet and were popularized in Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill.

Following in the footsteps of iconoclasts like Ernest Belfort Bax (The Legal Subjection of Men, 1896), Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man, 1971), and Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power, 1993), they questioned standard feminist wisdom, focusing on male disposability (see also here) and the empathy gap. For years, they were voices crying in the wilderness.

Now, decades into our Female Future, it’s becoming harder to ignore the suffering and plummeting fortunes of men and boys — and their knock-on social effects. But what happens when the red pill begins to go mainstream?

As the recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson makes clear, most hard truths get leached away, and we’re left with half-hearted calls for a compassion that the influencers themselves seem unable to maintain.

Spoiler Alert: “Chris Williamson’s Guide to Being Happy, and Debunking the Feminist Lies Sabotaging You” doesn’t debunk any feminist lies. Even the MeToo movement, which harmed or destroyed thousands of men’s lives through unproven accusations (some of them almost inconceivably ridiculous and trivial), is accepted as an attempt to “sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior”. Accusers’ falsehoods, ‘Poor-me-I’m-so-desirable’ showboating, manipulations, and blithe indifference to evidence are all passed over in feminist-compliant silence.

Sadly, the discussion is full of feminist lies.

**

Near the beginning of the discussion, Williamson expresses frustration that in order to acknowledge any of the troubles of men and boys in the modern world, it has become obligatory first to rehearse women and girls’ (always at least equal, if not greater) suffering. Unfortunately, Williamson is a prime example of such gynocentric genuflecting, visibly uncomfortable every time the conversation seems to be moving into non-feminist territory.

In order to talk about the drastic decline in men’s higher education attainment, for example, Williamson seems to think it necessary to point out that women were at some point in the past discouraged from getting university degrees. Both Williamson and Carlson refer to men’s diminishing earning power, but pivot immediately to stressing how hard this is on professional women looking for marriageable men.

The sexual revolution is alleged to have mainly benefited men who can now, with impunity, “use and abuse women”; nothing is said about women’s rampant OnlyFans activity or their exploitation of men in divorce.

It goes on and on like this: for every male suicide, divorce-raped father, falsely accused or incarcerated man, there must be at least one woman somewhere who felt at some point that she wasn’t encouraged to do something.

There is a small amount of criticism directed at women, but only when women act badly towards other women, as is the case, according to Carlson, with female bosses. But about female cruelty to men or children (over half of child maltreatment, for example, is female-perpetrated), we do not hear anything.

There is a good deal said about women as a civilizing force, how much women bring to family life, how women are better with social cues, how they are “unbullshittable.” Carlson even gushes about how kind women are to their hubbies: “They wash your underwear. They listen to you snore,” he rhapsodizes. For the considerable number of men who have rarely had a kind word from any woman or who have gone through a hellish marriage and/or divorce with a vindictive shrew, the adulation seems quite unhelpful.

November 10, 2025

QotD: “Is it a boy or a girl?”

Filed under: Books, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even in our supposedly enlightened times, “Is it a boy or a girl?” is still the first question asked of nearly every newborn — and the answer continues to shape how the child is raised. Research shows that from infancy, boys and girls are touched, comforted, spoken to, and treated differently by parents and caregivers. These early experiences may reinforce sex-typical patterns of behavior that often persist into adulthood.

People are intrinsically fascinated by psychological sex differences — the average differences between men and women in personality, behavior, and preferences. Psychologists have studied this topic systematically for decades, beginning with landmark works like The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974) by Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin. That book helped spark a wave of research that continues to this day. Since then, increasingly sophisticated methods have enabled researchers to detect subtle but consistent differences in how men and women think, feel, and act.

Men and women use language and think about the world in broadly similar ways. They experience the same basic emotions. Both seek kind, intelligent, and attractive romantic partners, enjoy sex, get jealous, make sacrifices for their children, compete for status, and sometimes resort to aggression in pursuit of their interests. In the end, women and men are more alike than different. But they are not identical.

To be sure, sociocultural influences play a role in creating those differences. But environmental factors don’t act on blank slates. To understand young men and young women, we must consider not only cultural context but also evolved sex differences. We are, after all, biological creatures. Like other mammals, we share similar physiology and emotional systems, so it’s not surprising that meaningful differences exist between human males and females.

To understand why psychological and behavioral sex differences evolved, the key concept is parental investment theory, developed by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in 1972. The basic idea is straightforward: the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be more selective when choosing a mate. This selectivity follows basic evolutionary logic: those with more to lose are more cautious and risk-averse. To put the stakes in perspective: raising a child from birth to independence in a traditional, preindustrial society requires an estimated 10 million to 13 million calories — the equivalent of about 20,000 Big Macs. For women, reproduction is enormously expensive.

Men also incur reproductive costs, though of a different kind. On average, they have about 20 percent more active metabolic tissue — such as muscle — that fuels their efforts in competition, courtship, and provisioning. While pregnancy requires a large, immediate investment from women, men’s reproductive effort is more gradual, spread out over a lifetime. In evolutionary terms, both sexes pay a price for reproduction, but in different currencies — women through gestation and caregiving, men through physical competition and resource acquisition.

Yet while nature can inform our understanding of human behavior, it does not dictate how we ought to live. A clearer grasp of sex differences can help guide our decisions. It cannot define our values.

Rob Henderson, “Sex Differences Don’t Go Away Just Because You Want Them To”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2025-08-03.

November 7, 2025

“BookTok on its own sounds innocent enough”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’ve seen occasional references to BookTok on other platforms but as it seemed to be as female-coded as an online community can be, I’d never bothered to pay close attention to it. If Zoomertea is to be believed, it’s a weird and disturbing space for the unprepared to visit:

Image from “The Female Gooner Epidemic” at Zoomertea

If you’re smart enough to have never downloaded TikTok, then you’ve probably never heard of BookTok and the resulting epidemic of female gooners (a term borrowed from porn culture to describe obsessive arousal and fixation). BookTok on its own sounds innocent enough, women rediscovering the joys of reading, romanticising cozy nights in, or even joining a book club. In theory, what could be more wholesome? However, the reality is more concerning. It turns out the bookish girls have traded the likes of Pride and Prejudice for highly pornographic dark fantasy erotica, stories that make Fifty Shades of Grey seem tame.

Women have always enjoyed a flair for romance. Once it was the slow burn longing of Romeo & Juliet or Wuthering Heights – the stories weren’t explicit, yet still roused deep, passionate feelings. By the 2000s, romance had evolved into “chick lit” – breezy novels about friendship, love and self-discovery. Books like Bridget Jones and the Devil Wears Prada swapped tragic love for witty realism, capturing the struggles of modern women navigating careers, dating, and independence. It seems like in all aspects of modern culture, people have been pushing for the “reliability factor” – they wanted to see themselves in the characters and storylines. But somewhere along the way, the realism and reliability factor lost its appeal.

During the pandemic, while the virus spread and the world stayed home, TikTok spread too, surpassing 2 billion downloads by mid-2020. With endless free time, people picked up new hobbies: some tried Chloe Ting’s “Get Abs in 2 Weeks” workouts, others turned to BookTok and rediscovered their love for literature. Booktok isn’t just for explicit romantasy novels, however it’s become synonymous with women who obsessively consume dark romance. On BookTok, desire isn’t intimate anymore; it’s performed.

While Fifty Shades of Grey, a book very explicitly about sex, came almost ten years before BookTok, it wasn’t exposed to the algorithmic amplification loop we see today. Although its release did shock readers and spark feminist critiques about patriarchal relationships and sexual themes, it still felt more like a dirty secret. Its eroticism was discussed privately, even sheepishly. It was a book club secret, not a TikTok performance. Now, even the most unassuming women are flocking to BookTok and demanding books with a maximum “spice rating”, without an ounce of shame. But how did this happen?

Somewhere between the isolation and scrolling, the lines between fantasy and reality began to blur. The algorithm on TikTok can be very dangerous for enforcing unhealthy habits on its users. When a woman watches or likes just one “spicy book” video, even just out of curiosity, TikTok interprets it as interest in similar content. Without the user’s knowledge, suddenly their ForYou page is filled with similar videos, “books with a max spice rating”, “extreme taboo book recommendations” or “Top five dark romance recs”. The more they see, the more they engage, the more the algo pushes darker more extreme content. Essentially, the algorithm learns: You like desire, here’s more. Louder. Darker

November 1, 2025

QotD: Bullies

Filed under: Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I suppose that people who feel little control over their own lives or destinies can obtain a slight sense of agency by interfering in the lives of others, in tiny ways. I have noticed that many of the men who are violently dictatorial at home often count for little once they pass their own threshold. They are the Stalins of their own home.

Theodore Dalrymple, interviewed by James Glazov in “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It”, FrontPage, 2005-08-31.

October 30, 2025

Cowardice & Courage – Fear, Flying & Combat Stress

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 24 Oct 2025

Just getting into a bomber took guts. To do it twice required balls of steel. What happened when men wouldn’t or couldn’t continue to fly? We’ll look at the dangers they faced, what the RAF and the USAAF did to tackle the problem and talk about the infamous “LMF” cases in the RAF

00:00 – Come with Me
03:51 – Intro
04:16 – Shell Shock
06:00 – Inter War vs Early War
09:17 – Night Terrors
10:31 – Death in the Daylight
11:00 – Common Fears
13:22 – Raw Numbers
14:55 – The Mew Who Flew
16:35 – In The Hands of the CO
18:53 – LMF
21:01 – Combat Stress in the USAAF
22:03 – Attempts at treatment
24:47 – Wrap up and Closing Message
(more…)

QotD: When species’ mating rituals are disturbed, they don’t mate … and Humans are a species

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Rob Henderson @robkhenderson

    The actual truth is a lot of guys are naturally timid and are secretly grateful that approaching women was stigmatized because it gave them a righteous-sounding excuse for their own cowardice.

Is thirty seconds’ thought before posting too much to ask?

If cold approaching strange women was part of the natural human reproductive cycle, no men would [be] afraid to do it, because those who were would not have had descendants.

Every species has mating rituals. If those rituals are not disrupted, they will mate. If they are disrupted, they will not mate.

This is why a cattery run by a middle aged housewife in her own home can breed Occicats, Russian Blues, or Bengals, but the best zoos in the world can’t make two pandas into three pandas.

The basic mating ritual of human beings does not begin with a man cold approaching a strange woman.

It begins with a woman covertly signalling a willingness to be approached, either to a specific man, or in general. Only then is the man supposed to respond with an overt approach.

Women raised under the heel of feminism not only don’t know how to signal, they don’t even know that they should.

Men raised under the heel of feminism not only don’t know how to spot a signal, they don’t know they should be looking for one. And even if they did, it wouldn’t do them any good, because the women are not signalling.

This is why women’s twitter histories are an endless litany of “don’t approach me at the park, don’t approach me in the dark, don’t approach me here or there, don’t approach me anywhere”, alternating with “why don’t I get any attention? *sob*”.

They instinctively know that an approach from a man they do not favor is an affront, so they are affronted, and demand not be approached, when it happens.

Then everyone stops approaching, and they cry.

They want only men they like to approach them, but they have no idea that it’s their responsibility to make this happen.

If you attempt to make them understand this, most of them think you are telling them to overtly cold approach men, and they hate this idea, because it’s not natural to them, either.

Blank slatists, who don’t think humans have mating rituals, or at least don’t want them to, will insist that men “man up” and do all the work of solving this problem by cold approaching a steady stream of women until something clicks.

Or they will try to get women to do the approaching by building a dating website where only women can make first contact.

Doesn’t work.

Because mating rituals aren’t just “things you’re afraid to stop doing”, they are “things that make you feel attracted at all”.

When I was in my 20s, I would certainly cold approach women. But only for sex. If a woman didn’t make some sort of “come-hither” signal to me, sex was all I was in it for, and sex was the highest level of commitment she could expect from me.

Because it was firmly fixed in my mind, on an instinctive level, that she wasn’t actually that enthusiastic about me. And if she wasn’t enthusiastic about me, how could I be about her?

No thanks. I wanted to be appreciated, and so do most men.

Walking around with your breasts on display may attract the male gaze, but it’s not a substitute for contributing some energy and enthusiasm to the process.

This is what men really mean when they say “you told us not to approach you”.

It doesn’t mean “I am afraid of being called a creepy pervert or even arrested”.

It means “I can’t drum up much enthusiasm if you don’t show any”.

It means “You told everyone not to approach you, and you never shot me that eye contact and smile to say ‘I didn’t mean you'”.

It means “You project an air of defensiveness, and I’m not interested in rowing upstream. I want to be appreciated.”

No one wants to dance with a mannequin.

Devon Eriksen The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-26.

October 20, 2025

QotD: Wanting to be a pet, not an adult human

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Sagu @Sagutxis
    Seeing so many men happy to replace us with robots is very blackpilling ngl

I didn’t go to college until I was 30. This gave me a chance to see it with the perspective of an adult.

One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget.

The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics.

For example, “maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys”, instead of “be cheerful and upbeat”, or even “interact positively with customers”.

This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable. A job is to do something, not be something.

Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise.

He asked the female students to come up with a job description for “husband”. At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions.

But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way.

And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns.

Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc.

They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears.

And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn’t the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to.

It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities.

These women didn’t want to be wives. They wanted to be pets.

What’s a pet? Well a pet is not a wife, or a friend. A pet is a creature of instinct, which you bring into your home because you like how it naturally behaves.

You get a cat because you want [it] to behave like a cat, and do things a cat naturally does, like play with string, and purr when you pet him. If he’s smart, he’ll adapt [to] you somewhat, but he doesn’t have responsibilities other than “be a cat”.

If you get a wife, you get a wife so she will do things for you, specific things that are the responsibilities of wife, like care for your home, bear and raise your children, cook nutritious meals so you don’t have to eat processed slop, look after your emotional well-being, and so on.

These girls didn’t want to be held responsible for those things. As married women, they might have anticipated doing some of them, but some of the time. When they felt like it.

The cat chases the string if and when it wants to, not because chasing the string is its job.

These young millennial women didn’t realize it, but they wanted to be pets. And that’s what they were in their college relationships. They hung out with guys when they wanted to, had sex with them when they wanted to, broke up with them for someone new when they wanted to.

Their relationships had no element of reciprocal responsibilities. They were perfectly at home with the idea of men having responsibilities to them, but they would repay those men if they chose, and how they chose, not how the men actually wanted.

And as I’ve said twice already, someone you have responsibilities to, but who has none to you, is a pet, or a child.

The reason that a significant portion of men want to invent sentient feminine robots so that they can marry them is because they want wives, and they have given up on the possibility of young women re-embracing the concept of sex roles and actually having to do something for someone else.

Women didn’t spontaneously became more selfish than previous generations, of course. They were the targets of a concerted psyop whose purpose was to convince them that female responsibilities were demeaning. It was tailored to their unique psychological vulnerabilities, and they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

Who mounted that psyop, and why, is a conversation most of us aren’t ready for yet.

But our point for today is don’t worry, young ladies.

The robots aren’t being brought in to replace you.

Just to do the jobs you won’t do.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-18.

October 17, 2025

Civilizational collapse is … female

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo addresses the unpalatable contention that female power leads to civilizational disaster:

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix

Multiple surveys (see, for example, with thanks to James Nuzzo, here, here, here, here, here and here) suggest that when women hold power, they pursue typically feminine preferences and policies. Female-led institutions become more oriented to social justice than objective truth. Feelings matter above facts, context above law, and victimhood above expertise.

Protecting and promoting the allegedly vulnerable — through censorship, shaming, coercion, or lawbreaking/lawfare — becomes a greater priority than excellence or impartiality. Truth-tellers find themselves cancelled, Nobel prize winners reduced to tears, laws and policies applied unequally, white men accused and vilified, criminals cossetted, mental illnesses affirmed, and destructive policies embraced. No one who has paid attention over the past 20 years can be surprised by the findings.

Moreover, our ability to discuss this feminine revolution in values is hampered by the very logic of the revolution, as I will show. Both women and men, deeply disinclined to “harm” women, fail to confront the problem adequately.

Two discussions of the subject — an essay by two social psychologists at Quillette and, more recently, a conference speech by a feisty conservative woman — draw a line under the seeming inevitability of the west’s collapse. Even faced with that alarming prospect, most pundits cannot bear to imagine an alternative to the female-led assault on our core institutions.

Cheering on Women’s Empowerment

A 2022 article in Quillette, “Sex and the Academy“, provides a stark illustration of my thesis. The subtitle rules out the very conclusion the data supports, with the authors emphasizing that “The inclusion of women in higher education is a great achievement for Western liberal societies. How is this changing academic culture?”

The “great achievement”, as it turns out, will almost certainly be a lethal one.

The article was written by two academics, Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, both PhDs in social psychology. Winegard, a male scholar, had an unfortunate run-in with academic orthodoxy that led to his loss of employment; Clark, a female scholar, has a secure academic position. Both authors express enthusiasm for the takeover of academia by women even as they point out its damaging consequences. Neither one advocates any form of resistance, no matter how mild, to feminine academia’s assault on truth.

Summarizing the results of many surveys, Clark and Winegard demonstrate that while a majority of men favor free speech and the advancement of knowledge over emotional comfort, a majority of women prefer conformity, safety, and the protection of victim groups’ feelings. Not all women are indifferent to the traditional underpinnings of western civilization (and not all men support those underpinnings), but the general trends are clear.

Women are significantly more likely than men to support the cancellation of controversial speakers or the suppression of controversial research.

Women also tend to favor the existence of snitch lines to report people who cause offence. Women are more supportive than men of diversity quotas that exclude white men from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions. (It would be interesting to know how many white women support diversity quotas that exclude white women from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions.)

[…]

Asserting that both sides are pursuing worthy goals, the authors downplay the shock value of the findings, which show that women are, overall, less interested in truth and accuracy than men are. Imagine assessing such a finding as anything but catastrophic. Imagine calling the disregard for truth moral.

In place of truth, women value a utopian ideology that they perceive — usually without any consistency or adherence to fact, but nonetheless granted by Clark and Winegard — as “morally desirable”. But morally desirable for whom, and to what end? The use of the phrase, a misnomer, demonstrates how thoroughly the authors themselves are in thrall to the corrosive feminine culture they examine.

There is nothing moral (or generally desirable) about the suppression of truth-seeking research when it conflicts — or is perceived to conflict — with an allegedly emancipatory social goal. There is nothing morally desirable or indeed “protective” about shouting down an academic speaker because of the alleged harm of the speech. Naturally, social justice proponents would be outraged if their speeches were shouted down or their research blocked and censored.

I saw a link to this Helen Andrews article which seems to go well with Janice Fiamengo’s article linked above describing the “Great Feminization”:

… Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

[…]

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—”colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine.

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

[…]

The Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place. There are many people who think the Great Feminization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Women were finally given a chance to compete with men, and it turned out they were just better. That is why there are so many women in our newsrooms, running our political parties, and managing our corporations.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter comments on Helen Andrews’ article:

One thing Helen misses in this otherwise excellent analysis is the role played by prestige. Cancel culture was enabled by the unique circumstance of women weaponizing the prestige of freshly feminized legacy institutions. So long as those institutions retained their prestige, what the people who ran them said really mattered.

Unfortunately for the ladies (but luckily for civilization), this is self-limiting, because prestige is fundamentally an emergent property of masculine competence hierarchies. We see this demonstrated whenever a profession becomes coded as women’s work: its prestige immediately crashes. Feminists have complained about this for years, though of course they misunderstand the mechanism (prestige is a component of male sexual attractiveness, but not of female, and this is biologically hard-wired).

This prestige collapse is now affecting essentially every coopted, feminized institution — universities, news media, publishing houses, movie studios, large corporations, various government agencies, hospitals, courts, churches, all of them wield far less cultural power than they did even a few years ago. The only people who really care what these legacy institutions say are the women who took them over. To everyone else, the angry sounds they make are nothing more than background noise.

This is probably the main reason for the vibe shift. Once the prestige of feminized institutions declined below a certain threshold, their ability to enforce social consensus began to evaporate.

It’s also probably no accident that the Trump administration seems to care a lot more about what the anons of the Online Right say than it does about the opinion of the universities or the news media. All the intelligent young men got pushed out of the institutions, and those ionized particles of free male energy then began to self-assemble online into an ad hoc competence hierarchy where prestige is measured by clout rather than professional degrees, job titles, or institutional affiliations. The anon swarm is entirely informal, meaning that its outcomes are not amenable to antidiscrimination legislation or to procedural manipulation; you can screw with the algo all you want but you can’t actually force people to care what women say just because they’re women (thereby placing women into the position of openly trading in thirst, which gets them attention but certainly doesn’t mean that anyone has to pretend to take them seriously).

All that’s happened so far is that people’s attention has been redirected away from crazy woke females and towards the influencers of the online right. The fever has broken but society is a long way from recovered. The institutions are still under the control of crazy woke females, and this is extremely bad, especially because they are – for biological reasons related to childlessness — only going to get crazier as time goes on. Fortunately no one really cares what they say anymore, so as they throw tantrums as the institutions are reclaimed over the next decade or so, their protests won’t register as anything but irrelevant toddler noise.

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