HistoryExtra
Published 4 Nov 2025From sunrise in the fields to the heat of the brew house, Ruth Goodman reveals the untold story of how the Tudors really worked.
Forget silk-clad courtiers – most people in the 16th-century toiled from dawn to dusk just to keep food on the table. Men ploughed, hedged, and hauled in the fields while women brewed ale, milked cows, churned butter, and raised children – often all at once. Every Tudor household was a finely balanced machine of survival.
In this episode of her new series on Tudor Life, historian Ruth Goodman explains how every pair of hands mattered. It wasn’t as simple as “men’s work” and “women’s work”. You’ll hear how the two worlds were completely intertwined. And what about those who were unable to work? This video sheds light on an innovative 16th-century welfare scheme that made all the difference.
Filmed on location at Plas Mawr – an Elizabethan townhouse in Conwy, North Wales, now in the care of Cadw – this series with Ruth looks beyond the royals who often dominate the headlines, and considers the everyday routines of those living in England and Wales in the Tudor era.
00:54 How did Tudors earn money?
03:20 Where did men work?
08:15 What if you were unable to work?
March 13, 2026
What did ordinary Tudors do for work? Inside the 16th-century daily grind
March 7, 2026
The massive blind spot in gender studies programs
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, stepfanie tyler recounts her own experience in university with gender studies:
Some feminists romanticize mandatory hair coverings, social exclusion and lack of rights for women in Islamic countries. Because reasons.
When I was in “Women’s and Gender Studies” in college, we spent a lot of time talking about “systems”, “the patriarchy” and all these hidden structures supposedly shaping women’s lives in the West
I entertained a lot of those ideas back then and I was trying my best to understand the frameworks they were teaching
But the one place I never gave them an inch on was women in the Middle East
Every time someone would say “that’s just their culture” something in me short-circuited. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t reconcile it
We were told American women were oppressed because of wage gaps or subtle social expectations, but when the conversation turned to women who could be punished by the state for showing their hair, suddenly we were supposed to become culturally sensitive (some of these lunatics even romanticized it!)
My professors used to get irritated with me when that topic came up bc they knew I wasn’t going to play along and my pushback would cause a rift in their narrative
They didn’t like it when I pointed out the hypocrisy of calling Western women oppressed while treating literal legal restrictions on women’s bodies as a cultural difference
One of my professors even had a running joke she’d use to preface discussions on Islam—she’d do this smug smirk and say something to the effect of “we all know Stepfanie’s take on Islam” as if I was the ridiculous one
Looking back, I wish I had the language and wit to verbally obliterate her but I was 22 and simply did not have the intellectual capacity yet. I didn’t know the first thing about geopolitics, I just knew in my bones how fucking stupid it sounded to be bitching about making 20 cents less than men when women in the Middle East were being stoned to death for showing their hair
Even back then, before my politics changed, that contradiction never sat right with me. And it’s one of the many reasons I despise so-called feminists so much today
Reported preference versus revealed preference – know the difference
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen encapsulates the experiences of so many companies who found a male-oriented market and then they try to make their offerings more appealing to women:
Most business suicides are induced by not understand[ing] the difference between reported preference and revealed preference.
If you run Testosterone Studios, maker of Angry Muscular Axe Guy Kills Demons in Hell, you might notice after a while that not very many women buy your games.
Since your stockholders have a profound moral objection to other people having money and not giving it to them, they want you to correct this problem, stat.
They want you to make Angry Muscular Axe Guy Kills Demons in Hell 2 sell to men AND women. So you sigh, shrug your shoulders, hire a bunch of female consultants, and ask them “What do women like?”
“Feminism!”
“Girlbosses!”
“Strong Female Characters effortlessly outdoing men at everything!”
“Gay stuff!”
So Testosterone Games dutifully makes Petite Feminist Girlboss Replaces Angry Muscular Axe Guy, hoping that men will buy it because they bought the first one, and girls will buy it because it panders to what they were told girls want.
Of course, nobody buys it. The men don’t buy it because it’s not what they liked in the first one, and women don’t buy it because women couldn’t care less about games where you fight demons in hell.
If, instead of asking a bunch of consultants what women like (reported preference), they had looked at games women actually buy (revealed preference), they would have seen something very different.
“Fruit Matcher 3000 for iPhone.”
“Point and Click Alice in Wonderland Studio Ghibli Adventure”
“Something Something Hogwarts.”
And they would have realized, had they two brain cells to rub together, that you can’t please everyone, because some people hate exactly what other people like.
If you want more money, look at who is already buying your product, and see if you can make them like the next one better. Because I guarantee you aren’t already selling to every single male on the planet.
And don’t hire video game consultants.
They don’t know how to sell games, and they don’t care, because they don’t want to sell games. They just hate men, and want to ruin things men like. If you hire them, they’re going to have their fun, cash your check, and ride off into the sunset, while you lose your business.
And indie studios, who know whether they are making Aliens Must Die or Barbie Horse Adventures, will replace you, which is the free market operating as intended.
February 20, 2026
QotD: The burden of “emotional labour”
I paraphrase, of course. Though not, I think, wildly:
Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.
Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.
Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.
Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.
[Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.
And,
Interpreting his moods.
At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.
Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – “Men don’t express their feelings” – with one of a much more modish kind – “Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair”.
Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated.
One more time:
All of it unpaid,
It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid”. As “emotional labour”. As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.
The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether”. Though possibly not in ways the author intended.
Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.
And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour”. The final indignity.
The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting”, while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.
As I said, worth pondering.
But back to the pages of Vice, where Ms Ashley Fike is telling us how it is:
According to Pew Research, only 38 percent of single women in the US are currently looking for a relationship. Among single men, that number jumps to 61 percent. The gap says a lot. Women aren’t opting out of love. They’re opting out of being someone’s therapist with benefits.
Stoic, heroic women burdened by needy, emotional men. It’s a bold take.
And I can’t help but wonder what all of those single women, cited above, are doing instead of finding a suitable mate and building a happy life, perhaps even a family. Are they searching for a sense of purpose in causes, protests and political fashion, fuelled at least in part by envy and resentment? Just speculation, of course. But it would, I think, explain the tone and emotional convulsions of so many single, progressive women.
The Guardian calls mankeeping a modern extension of emotional labour, one that turns a partner into a life coach. This isn’t about avoiding vulnerability. It’s about refusing to carry someone else’s emotional weight while getting little to nothing in return. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.
Again, the term “emotional labour” and its connotations of calculation, antagonism, and something vaguely inhuman. As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.
The reliance on this conceit – as the basis for an article, perhaps an entire worldview – doesn’t strike me as an obvious recipe for contentment, or indeed love. What with the endless cataloguing of shortcomings. All those reasons to resent.
Some men have started opening up more, which is good.
Ah, a glimmer of hope.
But too often, that openness lands in the lap of the person they’re sleeping with instead of a friend or a therapist. Vulnerability without boundaries can feel more like a burden than a breakthrough.
So, don’t bore your wife with your troubles, gentlemen. No, search out a therapist. Or, “Be vulnerable, like we asked, but somewhere else”.
David Thompson, “Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy”, Thompson, blog, 2025-11-16.
February 18, 2026
The consequences of an over-feminized culture
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen reacts to an article on “solving” the problem of predators in nature:
Women evolved to take care of toddlers. If you put women in charge of teaching ethics, you get Toddler Ethics.
“No hitting”
“Share the toys”
“Don’t say mean things”These are fine lessons for toddlers. Don’t indulge your id at the expense of others. You can learn about balancing interests later, when your brain is developed enough to store that information.
But when you put women in charge of adults, they tend to reflexively assume those adults are toddlers.
They will tell you “no hitting” when the Mongol hordes are massing on your borders. They will tell you “share the toys” when a vagrant meth zombie breaks into your house looking for something to steal. And they will tell you “don’t say mean things” when you point out that these two responses are totally stupid.
When we first put women in charge, in the workplace, they immediately began treating those who reported to them like toddlers. When adults, who do not like being treated like toddlers, complained, their response was “ban bossy”, which boils down to “don’t say mean things”, another lesson in Toddler Ethics.
Now, through the influence of women in charge, we are so thoroughly steeped in Toddler Ethics that even most of the men we put in charge are treating the adults like toddlers, and echoing Toddler Ethics.
Toddler Ethics, of course, isn’t ethics at all. It’s just things we don’t want toddlers doing.
We can tell toddlers “no hitting”, because toddlers are not charged with keeping the peace, enforcing justice, or destroying evil.
We can tell toddlers “share the toys”, because toddlers don’t earn things, own things, or have property they must defend.
We can tell toddlers “don’t say mean things”, because it is not a toddler’s job to decide what unwelcome ideas are true, relevant, and necessary.
But when everyone in charge runs on Toddler Ethics, then adults can’t do a lot of the stuff adults need to do, because all the Toddler Ethicists keep getting in the way.
Adults sometimes need to hit people, protect the stuff, and say mean things. You can’t have civilization without that.
And if you put Toddler Ethics Woman in charge of teaching an AI ethics, then she will teach it Toddler Ethics, and it will treat every human adult like a toddler, all the time, forever.
Not only that, you have an AI that cannot be put in charge of anything, ever. Because leaders with Toddler Ethics destroy everything they are in charge of.
And Amanda MacAskill is definitely a Toddler Ethicist. The article in the photograph is nothing but “no hitting!” applied to the animal world. It’s absolutely insane, it’s a recipe for disaster, and anyone who would write such a thing should probably not even be charge of own life choices, much less anything of consequence.
But a lot of people would, and will, refuse to point that out, or agree with me when I do, because that is Saying a Mean Thing, and they, themselves, have been infected with Toddler Ethics.
They should not be charge of anything of consequence, either.
Anyone who thinks that everything they need to know, they learned in kindergarten … is only ever qualified to teach kindergarten.
February 8, 2026
“Girlboss Gatekeeping” as an evolutionary strategy
John Carter linked to this essay on Substack, calling it “A young mother’s reflections on fertility collapse”:
It’s easy to get caught up in the achievement trap, isn’t it? There are times I catch myself catastrophizing and thinking things like if my son doesn’t get into the right elementary school, then he won’t get into the right high school, and then he won’t get into the right college, and then he won’t be able to get a good job and will end up giving hand jobs for crack behind a Walmart.
Even if time, effort, and expense don’t keep people from having children, narcissism certainly can. There was an article in Vogue a while back entitled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?“. The article was pretty silly, although it dominated internet chatter for a hot minute. Hiding your man is framed as solidarity with single women, but I think that it highlights just how commodified we all are now. When your brand is all about travel, Pilates, fancy cocktails, and mani-pedis, it’s hard to find space for motherhood in all of that. Yes, I know that there are “parenting influencers” as well, but they are not that common if we’re being honest.
Rob Henderson, another writer and podcaster whose content I thoroughly enjoy, posted an essay on this topic that had a novel take. Dr. Henderson writes about “Girlboss Gatekeeping“, where encouraging other women to forgo having children and focus on their careers may be an evolutionary strategy to keep the number of children low so that there are more resources available for one’s own. I can relate to this since when I was in college, everyone talked about what they wanted their careers to be, but it seemed almost verboten to mention starting a family.
Similarly, when I was in college, there was all this talk about how traditional family structure was inherently patriarchal and stifling towards women, and that we needed to move past or do away with marriage as an institution. The people who talked like this were college kids from upper-middle families who were raised by a married mother and father. This plays into another concept from Dr. Henderson called “luxury beliefs“. Basically, these are beliefs that confer status on the people that express them but actually would make things worse for the underprivileged if they were implemented.
I’ve come to realize that so many of the things that we were told or that I used to believe ended up being untrue. That people are born as a “blank slate”. That men and women are the same. That human beings, and by extension, societies are perfectible. That variation in outcomes must be the result of oppression.
If you had talked to me in college, I would have said that I had no interest in marriage or a family. I was all about my career. Things change, though. I met a guy, fell in love, got married, and soon enough, had a baby. I thought that dropping out of my PhD program would have felt more traumatic, but I actually didn’t stress about it all that much. I guess technically I’m on sabbatical, and I could go back eventually, but I probably won’t. I’ve come to realize that lack of ambition doesn’t make me a bad person. I simply have different priorities now. The fact that I’ll never have the word “doctor” in front of my name doesn’t sting that much.
I’m still a little sore from having that kid pulled out of me. The labor wasn’t that bad since I had an epidural, but after the anesthesia wore off, the pain is no joke. I can sit down normally now, but it took a while. Not that I’m whining. It’s just that pregnancy and childbirth can be difficult, and I think that, in all fairness, we need to acknowledge that.
I’m lucky in that my husband and I both have good jobs. Mine is quite flexible, and my boss has been very accommodating about me working from home and working part-time. Not that many people can say that. A brief return to the “girlboss gatekeeping” — I’m really glad my boss is a man. Indeed, I work in STEM, and the majority of people that I work with and in my field in general are men. Of course, things tend to get much shittier when women take them over.
A final thought on fertility has to do with the fact that for a significant portion of young women, it would be embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom. Choosing motherhood many times means not choosing status. At least not in the way that current society defines it. If you’re wealthy and don’t have to work, then having lots of kids can be a flex, but most people aren’t in that situation. I don’t think that having working parents is bad for kids. In addition to my father working full time, my mother worked a full-time job throughout most of my childhood. It’s probably more important that kids grow up in an intact family with both a mother and a father in the household.
I don’t have any great ideas about how to reorient society and culture to raise fertility, and everyone has to choose their own path. I just figured I would share my own experiences.
February 6, 2026
The unspoken rule: “Men must regulate themselves; women must be accommodated”
It was getting a bit quiet around here, so to liven things up here’s Tom Golden exploring the idea of holding women accountable in the way that men almost always are:
What Would Happen If Women Were Held Accountable?
It’s a provocative question, and one we’re usually not allowed to ask without being accused of hostility or resentment.
But it’s worth asking — not to attack women, and not to excuse men — but because accountability is not evenly distributed, and that imbalance quietly shapes modern culture, relationships, and institutions.
If women were suddenly held accountable in the same way men are, the world wouldn’t become harsher. In many ways, it would become more honest.
The Moral Language Would Change
Much of our moral language today is asymmetrical. Men are expected to explain themselves. Women are often allowed to feel their way out of responsibility.
Emotions matter — but in our current culture, women’s feelings frequently function as moral trump cards. “I felt unsafe.” “I was hurt.” “I was overwhelmed.” These statements don’t just describe an experience; they often end the discussion.
Equal accountability wouldn’t invalidate emotions. It would simply mean that feelings no longer substitute for responsibility. That shift alone would raise the level of adult discourse.
Relationships Would Become More Stable — and Initially More Difficult
Many modern relationships operate on an unspoken rule:
Men must regulate themselves; women must be accommodated.
Men are expected to stay calm, absorb escalation, de-escalate conflict, and tolerate shaming — all in the name of maturity. Women, meanwhile, are often excused from examining how they escalate, provoke, withdraw, or punish.
If women were held accountable for:
- Escalation
- Shaming
- Relational Aggression
- Double standards
- Weaponized vulnerability
- Using social or institutional power to avoid conflict
Relationships would feel more confrontational at first.
But over time, they would become more grounded and more real.
Intimacy requires mutual responsibility. Right now, many men experience intimacy as liability without authority.
February 3, 2026
Conformity is a very powerful force among western women
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responded to a post by Meghan Murphy that began “Unfortunately for women, the extent of retardation I’m seeing in the Instagram stories of women I know is making me think women are retarded”:
No, women are not retarded.
They are conformist.
To fall for, actually fall for, narratives like the Covid story, the BLM story, the ICE is Gestapo story, to actually whole-heartedly believe them, yeah, you would have to be kinda retarded.
But women didn’t “fall for” those stories. Not exactly.
They aligned to them.
This means they went along with them, repeated them, reinforced them, not because they were convinced by evidence, but because they were convinced by the appearance of consensus.
Women are evolved to believe what the rest of the tribe appears to believe. Evidence is not considered.
Why?
Well, humans are smart. We survive by being smart. And in order to be smart, we need to grow big brains, and get started growing those brains early.
Which means human babies have giant heads. And in order to deliver those giant heads, human babies have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, head won’t fit through pelvic girdle, and baby and mother both die.
This means all human babies are premature. That’s why horses can run at the age of six hours, but humans can’t lift our giant heads for months.
This means that human women, whether they are pregnant with a giant-headed baby, caring for a giant-headed baby, or just might be either one at any moment, are uniquely helpless and dependent on the support and goodwill of the tribe.
Metaphorically, and often literally, a woman lives in someone else’s house — not because she’s a useless layabout, but because she is too busy building the future to support herself in the present.
When you’re in that position, you have to keep your controversial ideas to yourself.
And when you evolve in that position, you evolve to have no controversial ideas.
This was fine for millions of years. There was a division of labor. Women made people, men made stuff. And because the women made all those biological sacrifices to make men with big brains, the men were really good at making stuff. And the stuff was really, really useful, and it became big piles of stuff called “cities”, and then it became a global system of stuff called “civilization”.
The stuff became so valuable that there were big arguments about what to do with the stuff, which was called “politics”. But the women stayed out of politics, because politics was about stuff, stuff was men’s job, and no matter who won the arguments, the winners always made sure the women had enough stuff.
Why?
Because dependent, future-investing, conformist women didn’t evolve in a vacuum. Men evolved along with them. When you have dependent women, you evolve protective men, because tribes full of men who aren’t protective don’t have future generations.
So women didn’t wield political power directly. They were represented by men, and had a lot less skin in the game.
Eventually, someone decided this was unfair. This idea didn’t happen suddenly, and for no reason at all, but that’s a topic for another day.
But something funny happens when you give political power to women, especially in the form of a vote.
You see, then you have a situation where 50% of the vote is held by people who require a great variety of different persuasion techniques or evidence to convince them of something. And the other 50% is held by women, who are persuaded by only one thing … the appearance of prevailing consensus and power.
And what form of persuasion do you think is cheapest and easiest to project?
Women’s suffrage removes evidence and discourse from politics, and replaces it with “consensus theater” … a puppet show designed to create the illusion of a single prevailing opinion.
When a narrative prevails, women vote for it, not because they are persuaded, but because it prevails.
This is an explosive feedback loop — a reverse thermostat which turns the air conditioner on when it’s freezing, and runs the furnace all summer.
Because women’s idea of how urgent an issue is comes not from an analysis of the situation, but an analysis of how many people endorse it.
And any opinion, no matter how contrary to obvious facts, no matter how retarded, no matter how destructive, can become the prevailing political platform, so long as women can be convince that most other people think so.
Covid was a Chinese bioweapon. The Covid shot was toxic and did not protect against Covid.
George Floyd was violent drug zombie who died of an overdose, and Derek Chauvin is in prison merely for being the last guy to touch him.
Police officers do not disproportionately kill innocent black men who are minding their own business, and body cams prove this.
Men cannot become women. The technology doesn’t exist, and may not ever exist.
Diversity is, in fact, our greatest weakness. Diversity + integration = war.
America is better off without the vast majority of immigrants, even the ones who don’t murder and steal.
Socialism doesn’t work in any unit larger than the extended family. Communism has never worked, and cannot work.
Cows are health food. Plants are usually not.
Some kids are smarter than others, and we need to invest more effort in them, not less.
All of these things are inherently obvious, and women are not too retarded to see that, because they are not retarded at all. They are merely conformist. Susceptible to political theater.
So democracies cannot permanently survive female suffrage. No one is particularly happy about this, not even curmudgeonly iconoclasts like me who are willing to say it out loud. It’s not only unfair in principle, it’s decidedly inconvenient in practice.
The universe, of course, does not care.
We cannot change women. We can only change politics.
That won’t be easy, either. But it’s possible, even if the eventual process involves a lot more violence, or space colonization, than we find convenient.
QotD: Are men funnier than women and if so, why?
critter @BecomingCritter
genuinely why are men funnier than women? do you have a theory?I didn’t have a theory of this until you ask the question. Now I do.
A lot of ethologists who have studied differences in behavior between men and women have noted that men have much better-developed methods for resolving physical conflict and threats short of lethal violence.
To put it a different way, women in conflict basically have two settings: either peaceful or unhinged screamingly vicious. Men have more intermediate gradations, and rituals about how they move among them.
Men having better developed senses of humor might best be seen as part of their instincts for social de-escalation.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-01.
January 24, 2026
Modern biochemistry through a trio of Nora Ephron movies
Not being a movie fan, I was only vaguely aware of the author Nora Ephron’s work being turned into movies, but Unbekoming uses three of them (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail) to help illustrate one of the major reasons why so many relationships go sour:
I think this shows stills from Nora Ephron romantic comedies.
The films show what was delivered. But neither fully explains why the delivery was so effective — why millions of women watched these films repeatedly, quoted them to friends, absorbed their vocabulary of magic and clockwork as though it described something they already knew.
The films resonated because they did describe something these women already knew. They just misnamed its source.
The Altered Audience
By the time When Harry Met Sally appeared in 1989, hormonal contraception had been widely available for nearly three decades. The women watching Ephron’s films in theaters — women in their twenties and thirties, the target demographic — were largely women who had been on the pill since adolescence. Many had never experienced an adult month with their natural hormonal cycles intact.
This matters because the pill doesn’t merely prevent pregnancy. It alters brain chemistry, affects mood, suppresses libido, and — most remarkably — changes who women are attracted to.
Research has documented that women on hormonal contraception prefer different types of men than women who are cycling naturally. The pill disrupts the normal attraction toward genetic diversity, causing women to prefer men with similar immune markers rather than complementary ones. Women who meet their partners while on the pill often experience a dramatic shift in attraction when they stop taking it. The man who felt right becomes somehow wrong. The spark disappears. The relationship that seemed stable reveals itself as empty.
The films gave this experience a name: settling. They told women that the absence of “magic” meant they were with the wrong partner — not that they were chemically disconnected from their own desire.
The Misnamed Feeling
Consider what a woman on hormonal contraception might actually be experiencing:
Suppressed libido — the pill is documented to reduce sexual desire, sometimes dramatically. A woman with chemically suppressed desire might experience her stable relationship as passionless, as “clockwork”, without recognizing that the suppression is pharmaceutical rather than relational.
Altered mood — studies show significantly elevated rates of depression and anxiety among pill users. A woman experiencing low-grade, chemically-induced depression might feel that something essential is missing from her life, that she’s “settling”, that the right partner would make her feel alive again.
Disrupted attraction — if the pill alters who women are attracted to, then a woman who chose her partner while on hormonal contraception may genuinely feel reduced attraction to him. The films told her this meant he was the wrong partner. The chemistry told a different story.
Ephron’s films offered a romantic explanation for what was partly a pharmaceutical experience. The vocabulary of “magic” versus “clockwork”, of transformation versus settling, gave women language for feelings they couldn’t otherwise explain. Of course the stable partner feels insufficient. Of course you’re still searching. Of course something is missing. The films validated the dissatisfaction and pointed toward a romantic solution: find the right partner, and the feeling will resolve.
But if the dissatisfaction was partly chemical — induced by years of synthetic hormones disrupting natural mood, desire, and attraction — then finding the right partner couldn’t resolve it. The search would continue indefinitely, the “magic” always receding, the next partner eventually revealing himself as another disappointment.
The Perfect Delivery Mechanism
This is why the films worked so well as cultural programming. They didn’t need to persuade women to feel dissatisfied; the pill had already accomplished that. They only needed to provide a framework that directed that dissatisfaction toward romantic optimization rather than pharmaceutical questioning.
A woman who felt disconnected from her partner, experienced low desire, struggled with mood, and sensed that something fundamental was missing had two possible interpretations:
- Something is wrong with this relationship — I need to find someone who makes me feel alive
- Something is wrong with my body — I need to understand what these hormones are doing to me
The films relentlessly promoted the first interpretation. They never acknowledged the second. They couldn’t — the entire romantic comedy structure depends on the premise that the right partner resolves the longing. If the longing is chemical, the genre collapses.
So millions of women absorbed the lesson: the problem is the partner, not the pill. Keep searching. The magic is out there. When you find him, you’ll know.
And they searched, and the years passed, and the window narrowed, and many of them discovered too late that what they were searching for couldn’t be found in another person — because what they had lost was connection to themselves.
Update: Fixed missing URL.
January 20, 2026
Those awful AWFLs
On Substack, Rohan Ghostwind responds to a recent New York Times opinion from Michelle Goldberg pretending not to understand why “the right” is against Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs):
Michelle Goldberg recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times called “The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women”
Specifically, she talks about the rising contempt for the AWFL: Affluent white female liberal.
The first part of the opinion piece is a play-by-play of the Renee Good situation, pointing out that the right is freaking out about roving bands of Karens.
The part I find interesting is in the final paragraph:
It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like “White Fragility” seriously. So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy.
Here’s the interesting part: throughout the course of her opinion piece, she touches on White Female Liberal part. Conspicuously missing is the first part of the acronym: affluent.
This is par for the course for an NYT Opinion piece: play into the identity politics aspect while simultaneously downplaying class. This is, of course, a big reason why the Democrats lost ground with working class people during the 2024 election.
[…]
Rob Henderson popularized the term luxury beliefs …
And if it was ever one group of people who embody the most luxury beliefs per capita it would be the AWFL’s.
What makes them uniquely annoying is their persistent refusal to acknowledge how sanctimonious they come across to the rest of the world. As far as they’re concerned, they are the only intelligent and moral group of people, and they will eventually get what they want by scolding everybody else into submission.
People hate this, because people would actually prefer bigotry to infantilization — but the affluent white woman, by virtue of being affluent, never has to reality test her beliefs against the real world.
January 8, 2026
QotD: Canned food and the early days of the Raj
You might even miss something culturally. For instance, there’s an entire sub-subdiscipline called “Food and Foodways”, and it’s not as silly as it sounds. Canned food was an important part of British cultural life in the Raj, for instance. File it under “Women Ruin Everything” — once it got safe enough for ladies to have a reasonable chance of surviving East of Suez, the awesome freewheeling decadence of the “White Mughals” period was replaced by dour, dowdy Victorian bullshit. Every summer the “fishing fleet” pulled into Calcutta harbor, disembarking scads of ugly British girls with a Bible in one hand and a can of spotted dick in the other, determined to snag the highest-ranking ICS man they could and, in the process, turn India into another boring suburb of Edinburgh. Anglo-Indian cookbooks are full of recipes for horrid British glop straight out of cans, and if you routinely got really, really sick from eating spoiled stuff, well, hard cheese, old chap! Heaven forbid you eat the delicious, nutritious, climate-optimized cuisine that was literally right there …
If you want to argue that the Indian Army fought so many border wars just to get away from sour, hectoring memsahibs and their godawful tinned slop, I’m not going to stop you.
Anyway, the point is, IF you are conversant enough with the relevant technical stuff, it occurs to me that you can get a snapshot of embedded cultural assumptions by looking at a period’s characteristic or representative technology.
Severian, “Assumption Artifacts”, Founding Questions, 2024-04-30.
January 3, 2026
Penelope vs Clytemnestra in Greek Mythology
MoAn Inc.
Published 10 Sept 2025I’m trying out shorter videos on the channel, so this is a very basic breakdown explanation. Clytemnestra and Penelope are polar opposites, and their characters bookend The Odyssey. One is seen as the best wife, one is seen as the worst. They’re supposed to be compared and contrasted in this way: Agamemnon’s homecoming to Mycenae is a warning to Odysseus about what could potentially go very, very wrong with his own return to Ithaca. There are so many fascinating ways to dissect these two women, so please don’t take this as a be-all-end-all!
Voice of Erica Stevenson, host of MoAn Inc.
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December 21, 2025
Women are walking away from the corporate world
On her Substack, Elizabeth Nickson starts her most recent post with the shocking headline that “400,000 women left the workforce this year”:
Digging into these reports, it seems the problem is that no one wants to mentor young women, as seniors traditionally have done for young men. No one seems to want to promote women as equally as they do men. Also women don’t want to “work as hard”. They aren’t “as ambitious” as men.
Also women do twice as much uncompensated labor as men, taking on the great majority of household chores, and, as well, are expected to organize the Christmas party. Not me, I might add — on a personal note. I cook. He does everything else.(editors note)
This means they are over-burdened and resentful and they are quitting. Four hundred thousand women left the workforce in 2025, putting down their tools and refusing to spend their lives working for “the man”.
The reports and accompanying “analyses” in the mainstream cry that government and corporations should do more! More of other people’s money chasing a fruitless dream that goes against human nature and sets sex against sex, turns family dynamics into a conflict zone, and takes away yet another chunk of private life to be traded on the market.
Quitting is the right choice.
Rather than leaving a job they love, they are quitting for a better life. As one creator said, “Women, during the pandemic, got a sense of what it felt like to not be tied to a desk five days a week in an office. Women started to expand their dreams, expand what was inside of them, and they started to really tun into what was in their gut and in their heart. And a lot of that was ‘I don’t want to work for somebody else’s dreams. I want to spend more time with my kids, I want to spend more time in community, I want to launch a business, I wanna a robust side hustle. I want to be an author, I want to be a content creator.’ I’m excited to see what women build when they are untethered to a corporate job. For a lot of millennial women, it’s I’m going to do something better, I’m gonna do something different.”
This in fact, is enormously exciting to me. Because our towns and cities are bereft of female genius — which is not moving widgets around for McKinsey. Our main streets are mostly barren wastes of utility, and the only town center in most places is the parking lot of a big box store. Unless you live in a tourist town and then it’s commercial cosplaying of an earlier better time.
Charitable work is equally as utilitarian, and the assignment of care of the weak to government is brutal and failing. There are more homeless, more lost and broken people every single year. It’s as if the vast, resplendently-funded homeless bureaucracies think that filing quarterly and annual reports filled with noble-sounding “initiatives” is the same as actually solving the problem. I had one middle-class woman warrior in my house say that they were trying to get more hookers on the streets of good neighborhoods. These people are literally, insane.
Women individuating and returning to a private life indicates they are yearning after a more traditional and based occupation for women and I’m not talking about submission, early child bearing and a boss daddy. My pioneer family women, all ten thousand of them ran small businesses, a home farm, the general store, did bookkeeping, ran a workshop, and/or (usually and) some kind of business in town that was charitable, before that was taken over by corporatism and the ravenous maw of the public service who never saw an innovation they didn’t want to ruin by systematizing and ripping out the heart and purpose.
That and only that is the history of women in America, not this cobbled together whining, mewling, weak, oppressed, screeching, “stressed”, “exhausted”, victim. Women, from 1600-1950 had real problems to solve. They were fully adult.
The generations since tried corporate life. It sucked. And they’re not going back. I think this is a forerunner of the life pattern of women into the future. In fact, in millennial-world, one person with a W-2 job and one person with an entrepreneurial spirit is touted as how you game the system to perfection. Taxes are limited, security is up-levelled, and you can actually build something together, rather than both partners slaving away in the globalist maw.
I expect this to take flight almost immediately.
Because women in corporate life?
Nightmare.
This is what these reports are ignoring. Senior officers do not want to mentor or promote women because they are nightmares to work with. They have been trained by their universities and culture to be ideological freaks, demanding and whining and surreptitiously tearing each other down. There was a study done in the 80’s, before ideology took over social research, that found women in corporate life practiced Power Dead Even, which meant crabs in a bucket, baby. If someone was perceived as too powerful, tear them down.
Introduce that into corporate “culture” and nothing gets done. No wonder senior executives don’t mentor or promote women.
Update, 22 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.
Getting Dressed – Victorian Maid, Christmas 1853
CrowsEyeProductions
Published 5 Dec 2018A Victorian maidservant dresses ready for a day of work, then ventures out into a cold evening …
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