Sexual violence accusations are rarely proven false. They're also rarely proven true. If someone pointed to a study that found 2% of accusations were proven true and concluded that truthful accusations are rare, is that sound reasoning? No, we also need to know how many were proven false, and how many could not be proven either way. If 96% of accusations can't be proven, and of the remaining 4%, half are proven true and half are proven false it'd be incredibly dishonest to claim this as evidence that just 2% of accusers are truthful.
Every study on false accusations I've seen have had over 50% of the sample that could not be determined true or false. The only intellectually honest answer about the rate of false accusations is that we don't know what the rate of false accusations are.
What we know is that in the justice system “everyone is innocent until proven guilty” and it must remain so. False accusers should be punished so harshly that no one don’t dares to ruin anyone’s live by lying. There has been documented examples of people’s lives being destroyed by a psychopath making a false claim.
I'm more conflicted on punishing false accusers, especially if they come forward on their own volition. Oftentimes, we only know accusations are false because the accusers admit as such. Leveling punishments in response would disincentivize people from admitting to have made false accusations. Punishment is probably be reserved for people who were caught in a lie, and did not admit to having fabricated the accusation until after other evidence contradicted their accusation.
How many rapes go unpunished? This seems like a relevant statistic to the discussion. The vast majority of people would agree that being raped is much worse than being falsely accused of rape, so lowering the barrier for people to make accusations might be justifiable if it reduces rape cases. Of course, many of the cases of unpunished rape cases occur within the family, but it is plausible that behavior within families is also influenced by the social environment.
The fact that many rapes go unpunished does little to diminish the fact that Evans is making a baseless claim about the rates of false accusations. She didn't bother to cite this claim, so we have no idea what kind of evidence led her to write this, but chances are it's going to be a study where the number of unproven accusations dwarfs both the percentage proven true and the percentage proven false.
I keep hearing this, but when you look into the evidence provided to support it it rests on "assume all accusations are true unless proven false." Which is exactly the kind of mentality that led to that retrenchment.
Yes, just imagine what the response would be if you applied the same thought process to the validity of accusations: "Truthful accusations are extremely rare," there's as much evidence to justify this statement as there is with the claim that false accusations are rare. People would correctly point out that such a statement is dishonestly ignoring the vast majority of accusations that cannot be proven and may be true or may be false. But they're happy to engage in the same pattern of dishonesty to minimize false accusations.
Ah the gender divide - one day in the distant future we will begin to consider if the best way forward for society (and women) is to raise our sons on Pornhub.
Deep thinking and much soul searching will be required to grapple with this very difficult question. But it’s probably healthy. I hope we ignore it for another two decades so we have more time to think. 🤔 because free speech = letting CSA and trafficking reach epidemic proportions. And it’s great for sex relations too.
I have two boys and I am deeply concerned about them growing up in a world with always-available short-form viral videos, social media, portable sports gambling, and pornography.
And I think of all of those, the porn is the biggest problem (if I could snap my fingers and nuke one, I think that's what I'd pick?) and it's a problem where we (their parents) have been boiled alive like frogs. I'm old enough that when I was a teenager, pornography meant magazines, and when it moved to the internet it meant "100x100 pixel crappy JPEGs that loaded slowly" (meaning: not real different from the magazines). Now it is a literal firehose of video, and the priors I have from being a teenager absolutely do not apply to my children at all. What I can teach them about sex and pornography could be the most important thing they learn from me.
But my god, also, it's all bad. The online sports gambling situation is totally insane and out of control. Phone use is rampant and clearly destructive. It all looks like a sea of "we're raising our boys in the cultural equipment of a heroine den full of used needles."
Can I poke at this for a minute? "more mental fortitude" struck me because I think on one side of the debate over "the problem with men" (meaning any of: worse socioeconomic outcomes for men over time and other indicators of struggle like addiction and suicide, or the reactionary backlash we see) often one side will say something that rhymes with "the men need to man up and just deal with it."
And the thing that strikes me is that this view of how men should deal with what is happening exactly plays into the traditional stereotypical views of what 'being a man' is that really haven't gone questioned.
- To be a man is to be strong enough to get through difficult things without telling other people that it's hard. Don't admit this to your friends, don't admit it to your family, don't admit it to yourself.
- Being in touch with any vulnerability, sadness, anxiety, none of that is okay. Being overly emotional isn't okay. Feelings other than anger aren't manly.
- As a man, you have total internal agency. Your destiny is what you make it, so what happens _is your fault_ and not a function of circumstance.
I'm exaggerating here, but you get the idea.
What I find both interesting and perhaps sad is that in seeing a situation that is fundamentally about changing gender dynamics, a group of people who can totally understand how old gender roles were a straight jacket for women and it would be beneficial to smash them to bits doesn't apply the same scrutiny to men.
Now if by "stronger egos and more mental fortitude" you meant something very different (like: defining their self worth intrinsically or by their connections to other human beings and not by external validation, and having greater emotional resiliency)...that's a whole different ball of wax and I've just gone off on a huge tangent because I've read your comment entirely through the lens of "traditional masculinity."
Hi and thanks for engaging with my comment! I’ll admit I was in a salty mood when writing it, probably amplified by the first sentence of this post that spoke of cancer and feminist activism in the same breath.
I’ll start by saying that this post in itself is illuminating and really does a great job of situating backlash against feminist activism.
To your comment - I definitely wasn’t approaching this through the traditional masculinity lens. My comment could have been better worded for sure, but I have grown rather tired of finding ways to make mainstream feminism more palatable to men (and I’m generalising ‘men’ here. Usual ‘not all men’ caveats apply). Feminists having both the onus of feminist activism and of packaging it in a way that doesn’t trigger backlash is a bit unfair. Resistance to patriarchy is already an under resourced and under funded movement. My view is that this resistance would be more productive if most men (I.e. the source of this ‘backlash’) realised that the patriarchy holds them victim too, as you allude to in your comment.
"but I have grown rather tired of finding ways to make mainstream feminism more palatable to men" - I hear this, and I wonder if that sense of exhaustion can be found in many civil rights movements because the unfairness is structural to trying to fix things from below.
"My view is that this resistance would be more productive if most men realised that the patriarchy holds them victim too"
I think this is a really key point...men may think we're "winning" from our position in the patriarchy, but we're not. We're just "screwed over less." This is a message that probably has to come from men to be persuasive; the only thing we will need from women is a little bit of space to recognize how we are bound.
I worry that traditional masculinity absolutely can be enforced by women ... we are conditioned to be vey sensitive to those signals, and if it is, it doesn't give us the tools to change. I don't know if traditional masculinity (value comes from achievement, achievement is a zero sum game, ergo you exist in a hierarchy, looking for outside support is failure, etc.) serves patriarchy or generates it, but I don't see us being free from one without the other.
If you have the patience for it, I strongly recommend "raising cain protecting the emotional life of boys" by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thomson. They really paint a vivid (and heartbreaking) picture of how men are conditioned into our role.
I don't understand how you can believe that traditional masculinity is enforced by women. Was racism triggered by black people? Of course, you don't have nothing to be "traditional" about when you are not facing the very thing that provides you the one to be traditional about.
To be honest, you sound like you want to listen and help, but are just using the same tools: making women the ones to blame. Men have all the tools to be better, feeling triggered by asking them for a little bit of emphaty, positionality and just maybe a little bit less of entitlement.
I understand Aditi, and I also do understand Alice's point. You are just the plain example of her problem: while we could be discussing the main point, we have to lose time with people who has the audacity to ask for emphaty, yet giving none, sending her books to have patiance, yet having none with her, and talking so openly about your "bound", when talking about the n°1 oppression of the historical oppressed, bounded, sold, used, ignored and basically trashed class the world has consistently seen.
There's a lot here, so this reply may end up on the long side, which I imagine might be frustrating if you see my comments as part of the problem. I swear I am not your enemy in this, but that is not for me to decide.
When I wrote "I worry that traditional masculinity absolutely can be enforced by women ... " my meaning is that (in the United States, where I am) women _can_ and sometimes _do_ enforce traditional gender rolls. I absolutely do _not_ think that women are the only ones enforcing traditional masculinity, or even that they are a majority of the problem. There's no question that men play a huge role in this...from every father who felt the need to stop his son from cuddling with mom at age four to every football coach using homophobic put-downs in an all-male environment.
There are men on the internet who have argued (with me) that women enforce gender norms, and I discounted this quite a bit too until I read Brené Brown's Daring Greatly, particularly the chapter on shame. What I would say specifically here is that when women enforce traditional gender norms on men...
- It may be totally accidental.
- Men's fear is doing the heavy lifting.
The thing I read over and over is "I showed vulnerability and some emotions once, she dumped me, I'll never do that again." That one incident, which may have been as simple as her reacting negatively at first to a dysregulated, immature first step towards sharing feelings, can live on as fear and lore as this guy tells all his friends "here's the one thing to never do."
I see this first and foremost as a problem for us (men) to solve ourselves. As a father, I see raising my children to be emotionally healthy fully formed human beings as the most important thing I'll do, and that's my job. There are interactions where women who interact with them will be able to help or hurt, but this isn't a problem for women to fix.
If at this point you're ready to punch the monitor because I've gone on and on and on about the emotional lives of men in a comments section about feminism and backlash, I think that's totally fair. I've gone massively massively massively off-topic. Guilty as charged.
But I do think there is a connective thread and it's this: Alice Evans' original post that started all of this was about promoting equality without backlash, and in my corner of the woods, it's the men who are doing the backlash. At the same time there's a fair amount of "the men suck" discoarse and at the same time even "these redefining masculinity groups are just relabeling being feminine."
I think Alice Evans' recommendation to build an inclusive coalition is exactly correct, and to that end feminists have to make a persuasion choice:
- choose to find common cause with men who think that holding men to traditional gender roles and work together to free people from "because of your gender, there should be social constraints on what it is okay for you to do" or
- observe that if the men would just 'do better' and suck less, these problems would go away.
I imagine that first choice must be incredibly hard. Sarah McBride was on the Ezra Klein podcast a few weeks ago and I thought her discussion of how difficult it is to be a trans activist having to persuade a skeptical cis majority that you have rights was a really good listen...her point is that while none of it is fair, if activists want to be effective, they have to do the hard, unfair thing because it will work.
So to the extent that I am suggesting feminists who see the oppression of women by men as _the problem_ to make a huge mental leap of empathy and see the ways that _this sucks for men_, I have to recognize, I'm asking for a lot. Patriarchy doesn't suck for all men, and it doesn't suck as much as for women, but it's not good. (The drinking, the drugs, the overdoses, teh suicides, the depression...it's telling us something.)
I think that change of frame is the correct one and the one that will lead to a stronger coalition that brings men and women together instead of pitting us in a zero sum fight. It's the way to avoid backlash and grow the coalition.
I can't understand why is so difficult to just understand that if you want to be an ally, the first thing to do recognize your position of privilege, and that the system, even when it can have downsizes, overall is one that provides you with such an entitlement that you are not being able to see we Patriarchy's oppresion of some of men's
Do you think any white person would have the audacity to go to a black liberation blog and teach them how to be more "appealing"? or that a cis person would go and do the same for a trans liberation blog? no. Because everyone could see it's just not their place. That we are venting about how be thinking about how to be "effective" when what we are asking for it's just for some plain humanity from men. But here you come, lecturing about how to appeal to men, that WE have to understand that you suffer ALMOST as much as we do.
I really want to be more emphatetic with you, but your entitlement is truly offputting. Your post just make my point: how tiring is to try to convince men that no, you don't suffer as we do. Sorry, but no. No in a million years.
You really think "Patriarchy doesn't suck for all men, and it doesn't suck as much as for women, but it's not good".... it's going to make me feel some emphaty? what do you know what to be a woman is? I don't know how is like to be a man, but I can reassure you... very little men suffer as much as most women do.
If you really think that the constant fear of rape, violence, the invisibilization of our work, our need for feel validation in looks, in the way we interact, the need to do 5 times the work to have the same recognition as men do, the constant insecurity we feel for our rights. Having to be there and be strong when yet another of your female friends tells you how she was sexually abused as a child.
And plus, we need to be super emphatetic of men, because if not, we are not going anywhere.
Everyone can see the backlash happening. As a man who would like to make society as safe as possible for women I am glad to see someone trying to voice solutions rather than just raging about their perceived opponents.
I really enjoyed reading this, but every new insight only seems to reinforce the negative case for social media. Salvation will not come through hashtags and giving everyone a platform perhaps wasn't a great idea.
Well articulated. Very important. I'm concerned, though, that the backlash to this piece will be the same as the backlash to MLK, etc.: "Why should the oppressed keep accommodating for the psychology of the oppressors?"
I hear this a lot. How should we respond?
More generally, it's very difficult ever to tell someone that they are doing activism "wrong". Any success stories on this?
Because you live in a society where you have to live together. Ignoring another group issues and problems because they are the “oppressor” is detrimental and harmful to your cause.
Yes! I do think part of the problem is that it has become increasingly easy in cosmopolitan circles to forget that we live in a society "together" with folks we deeply disagree with. Then comes election day and it's like "Who are these people"?
So I think you are right: a good approach would start by raising the obvious fact that, like it or not, we are in it together.
I think my answer to a "Why should the oppressed keep accommodating for the psychology of the oppressors?" rebuff of whatever-you-would-call-what's-up-with-men-these-days is that the way forward isn't zero sum and human empathy isn't a finite commodity we need to ration out.
In particular, I think that (this is Terry Real's ideas from his books, all of which I recommend) where-as the patriarchy robs women of their agency, it robs men of connection.
That effect on men may not be nearly as bad as bad things that happen to women...but that doesn't mean it is _good_ or that we _shouldn't give a crap_. In particular, helping men feel more socially connected and less isolated doesn't have to come at the cost of female agency.
I think the actual situation is much more hopeful: if men felt less disconnected, that would be a group of men that women would be less frustrated with.
WHO is robbing you from connection? Even if it was women (and it is not), robbing our agency (making us less than human, less than a men,"the other", equals robbing men from their ...connection? yes, it's the same.
the worst things that happen to women are mostly done by men. numbers don't lie. and again, why do WE have to help you? why don't you help yourselves? we are not your therapists. And yes, it doesn't come with our agency, but it's so frustrating to, once we are rising, having to deviate from our goal to "help you feel less isolated", like it was our fault.
And the last part, no. Men, connected or not, are really frustrating. The inability to get out of the picture, to take accountability, to not be the main character, it's just annoying or even depressing. Do youreally spend your time in different marginalzied group forum to provide your advice on how to do conduct their movement? saying how men are the victim there too?
We are raised culturally to be disconnected. A lot of it is by men, a little bit by women too, but my critique is not of individual people, it is of our culture. I am not asking women to fix this. I am not asking women to rescue men.
But you are correct. The worst things done to women are done by men. My job, as a father, is to make sure that my boys never act that way. And I am trying to do that in a culture that says that when something sad happens to them, it's not okay for them to cry - they will be shamed for it, but it is okay to get angry. It's not okay for them to talk about their feelings, they just have to hold them in, and we'll all hope they don't explode violently.
Having read your other comment, I think we've reached the point where anything I write is just going to make you angrier. If your thesis is "the men aren't invited to the conversation" then there's nothing for me to say.
But the original post is about backlash, and the backlash is coming from men - and a lot of the men who are the backlash, who think this whole feminism thing in the united states has been a giant disaster and we should somehow put the toothpaste back in the tube - those guys don't like what I have to say much either...they think I should be "toughening my boys up" or that I should "knock it off with that feelings crap", etc. They're gender essentialists who have concluded that men and women are clearly different because of what they observe in our (patriarchal) culture.
To be honest, yes, your audacity is just a reminder that you have no idea and really don't really want to learn anything about women's life. Your lack of awarness makes me sad, and makes me lose hope. If anything, you convinced me that, even when I admire her, Alice's approach might be helpful to decrease backlash, but with the price of silencing women, losing all appeal for same group we are supposed to be fighting for. If advancing comes to the price of embracing men's feeling, even when they are feelings that minimize and trigger us, then feminist for what? if it basically means to just keep ourselves appealing to men, and letting men vent about their issues, comparing them to ours, in spaces where I hope women would be the ones with the leading voice, then it just loses it's point. It's not about fighting for equality, just teaching them that we are not going anywhere if men are not happy with it. And that's basically the status quo.
Also, I am not American, I come from a Chile. Born and raised. The center of the world is not America (nor Europe), sorry. I am dropping this conversation here, you are not going to convince me that you have anything to say about feminism, or women's experiences. BTW: The only thing I was maybe hoping for it was for you to say something like "you might be right, I will think about it". But no, you want me so say that, you are very wrong.
For what it's worth, I do not think you are wrong, and this whole thread has made me think quite a bit, and i will continue to think about what you have written. I appreciate a perspective very different from my own.
I love your point: Female Co-Workers Demonstrate Talent, and I think this is an area that is largely neglected.
When I entered the workforce in the US I was surprised by how gender segregated it was.
Women either work in feminized industries (nursing/healthcare being a quintessential example) or they work in highly feminized departments.
Since changing careers, I’ve primarily worked at SASS companies and typically value centers, like engineering, product, and sales are dominated by men, and cost centers like HR are dominated by women.
But even within value centers, support work like marketing, customer success, and program/product management are primarily dominated by women, and the “real” work of the value center, like new sales, and engineering are done by men.
I suspect this pattern replicates across the economy, either segregation by industry or segregation by department and function, and I think this has a pernicious effect on gender equality, both in terms of leadership opportunities (leaders are more likely to be chosen from value centers) but also in areas like workforce participation (if a family has to choose who leaves their job, pay is a big factor and cost centers generally pay less).
The only tweet I remember from after the election said something like “America didn’t want a diversity hire as it’s next president.”
And I suspect that a lot of voters felt that Harris was like somebody from HR and Trump felt like somebody from sales.
I don’t understand what is wrong with letting men and women decide what they want to do or become? It’s their life. It’s their right to pursue happiness in whatever they perceive to be their best choice. If they are forced either way it’d be wrong. There’s no imperative to make the sexes equal in every aspect because they are simply different. By nature all the terrible jobs are for men and nobody protests to that and I have no objection but to try to forcefully make the division in every job equal is misleading and creates backlash. DEI is unethical and unfair. Let there be true competition and stop obsessing over identity whether racial or sex.
What I conceive as “compelling” is for example setting sex based quotas for companies to adhere to. It’s in itself a violation of property rights and therefore the individual rights. Let the businesses decide how they want to hire. The ones who hire based on merit will eventually flourish and merit in intellectual jobs at least is independent of sex or race. These laws are discouraging to men as it always favors women or some other minority just for being women or having that identity which should not be an advantage just as the opposite is not/should not be.
Some people seem to miss the fact that free speech means that people are free to point out things they see as problems, even if you don't, and do whatever advocacy they want to solve them. If someone forms an organization to, for example, encourage more women to go into software engineering, that is completely within free speech and free association.
Anyway, for the discussion at hand, Evans doesn't give an example of what policy would help disadvantaged young men, and I'm curious if she has any, because I can't think of any. Women's economic rise didn't happen because of specific and intentional economic policies, it was just due to women entering the workforce and education, made more possible by family planning, and then organic changes in the economy.
I can think of policies that would help young people as a whole, like more abundant/cheap housing, and maybe that helps avoid some gender antagonism. Some European countries have relatively cheap housing, and some American cities have relatively cheap housing, so maybe that's a topic for someone to study. Overall, the US economy has been doing great, so economically Americans have been handed the goods, but status is a zero-sum game, and the decline in status of some men without college education was inevitable due to women entering the workforce and more jobs shifting to service.
I'll also just say that people really should avoid reading too much into Trump's victory. Trump won the popular vote by 1.5% and the Electoral College by 1.7%, these margins are easily explained by the fact that the US experienced its highest inflation rate in decades under Biden. Democrats will likely win big in elections between now and 2028, so people really shouldn't read too much into why one side or the other wins elections in a very closely divided electorate. American underlying social attitudes, however, have become much more liberal in the last many decades, regardless of who was president, and American attitudes on abortion have become more liberal in recent years, even as Americans have also become more conservative on issues such as immigration during the same period, probably due to the aforementioned inflation.
The problem with young men failing to thrive can really be thought of as 2 problems:
1. How do we increase opportunities for the next cohort?
This is a much easier problem and there are a number of proposals. The easiest is to either start men in school a year later, or delay their graduation by a year (by having boys repeat a year of grade school).
There is a mountain of evidence that shows that boys mature more slowly and a lot of what school assess is maturity. Wealthy families already practice this with private schools and it has its own term, “red shirting.” So as policies go, we should endeavor to extend the ability to do that down the economic ladder.
We also could do educational reform to increase offerings like shop class, home economics, and physical education.
Social media bans for children under 16 or 18 would also benefit boys and girls.
Will we do these things? Probably not, but they are at least proposals.
What we do about the problems current young men face is an entirely different question, and I don’t really know what we can do.
The rise of women in civil-service during WWI is incredibly interesting. Likely, it helped to pave the way for the wider inclusion of women in WWII production. I've been corrected, I used to trace the feminist rise to the WWII era.
Personally, I feel the retrenchment tracing back to the oil-shock economic stresses in the mid 1970's. There was enormous pressure to reduce costs. This motivated the changes in the 1980's to move production to Canada, Mexico and overseas where labor costs were more favorable. In turn, labor lost a lot of bargaining power.
Tax changes in the 1980's let the monied keep the windfall from the increases in production efficiency, stratifying the financial status men were keenly attuned to.
Blame shifted from Japan to Taiwan to China to Asia in general, and then to women, who were continuing to improve their lot the old fashioned way, through education and merit.
It is so easy to lash out without looking at the men who fucked over men.
I loved your explanation, with links to sources bc of course that's how you roll, of social media's role in gender equality. One graf was so useful that I had to go back and add it to my recent post on how and why the media distorts feminism into female supremacy which most people (correctly) dislike: https://open.substack.com/pub/cathyreisenwitz/p/why-the-media-misleads-everyone-about
It is misleading to see the resistance against “equal rights” for women attributed to men feeling threatened. At least in the case of Middle East the culprit is the Islamic culture. Which btw many women are brainwashed with as well and force it on other women. An anti human and anti civilization religion that promotes female subjugation to men and male subjugation to an imaginary sadistic god. Awful for everyone but for women it’s even worse.
I think it’s important to emphasize that the equality is about the “rights” only not an egalitarian Marxist ideology covered under “equality of opportunity” to aim for outcome equality and make the premise that sexes should earn the same. Just pause and ask why? If they decide willfully to become teachers or doctors and not engineers what is wrong with that? Let individuals pursue their happiness. It’d be nice if women would more often show a consistent and coherent interest in discussing ideas on a philosophical basis. An example would be the abortion rights. It must be legal until birth because of property rights. It’s your body. But I’ve still to see any woman protesting against draft laws which primarily targets men. It’s also their body and it has nothing to do with the state. You mention the right and left as if they are so different. Both are collectivist statist and anti “individual” which is btw the most oppressed minority! The “right” is just more discriminatory and more Christian and is sometimes also racist. The true battle is to advocate for the individual rights and freedoms.
Speaking only from a Western perspective here, so take the following with a grain of salt. I think, while the general focus on status here is correct, trying to create a strategy for promoting gender-equality based on the broad groups of "men" and "women", while intuitive, is unlikely to succeed. You highlight how women's political and economic participation can lead to status anxiety among men, and thus backlash; but fail to consider how those shifts impact existing status structures for women and result in backlash there. To take the example I am most familiar with, I don't think it's a coincidence that the face of the anti-ERA movement, Phyllis Schlafly and STOP ERA, was run by--and made up of--women. Looked through the paper you linked on the backlash to ERA, was unable to find a breakdown of women's responses by marital and maternal status, but would hypothesize that the impact on women's opinions split along those lines.
Pure conjecture, but I suspect one of the reasons that there was dramatically less cultural backlash (open to counterarguments here) to the leaps in women's economic participation during WWI and WWII is that their temporary nature did not disrupt the already existing status hierarchy. It seems like the most effective methods of improving women's standing in society with minimal backlash are those that are seen as temporary and have a substantial economic benefit to society as a whole (see: the Factory Girls in China). If the economic benefit is large enough to the family unit to outcompete those not participating (taking the China example further, families who sent their daughters to work in the factories in other provinces and received remittances were much wealthier), it seems to overcome the original bias (especially when the situation is thought to be temporary and the women were expected to settle down after). Then, more gender-equal standards take shape as a side-effect of the spending power of the women. I think any movement dedicated to improving the lot of women abroad would be quite successful aping the examples of factory girls all across history.
On an unrelated note, I'm curious how your thoughts on fertility play into this picture. It seems to me that an ideology (my read on much of modern feminism) that places economic success over reproductive success is unlikely to sustain itself over multiple generations. I can't say I'm a fan of Robin Hanson's Mennonite future, but it seems hard to refute that something in modern gender relations is unsustainable on those grounds (your point on the rise of singles). Some sort of syncretic "motherhood" and "career" status ideal would be my preferred solution, but I admit to having been unable to find an example of success in such a manner.
Appreciate the great post, gave me a lot to think about.
The problem here is equilibrium. To what extent can gender equality advance without triggering backlash – but without losing women’s support in the process? If activism becomes about being palatable to men, it risks losing its meaning for women altogether. This comment section is a good example.
Reading your piece, I couldn’t help noticing how many of these points imply that women somehow hold agency over men’s resentment and their reactions when they feel threatened by external shocks. Is that really the case? Would these men feel less threatened if we rebranded the way feminist movements frame topics such as sexual harassment? Would they suddenly become allies? If so, that requires evidence – not assumption. Suggesting that women should adopt tactics that validate men’s narratives – like the idea that we are “gatekeeping” sex and relationships from less privileged men – is deeply problematic. As a feminist, I hope you agree we are not gatekeeping anything; we are simply living our lives and choosing who to connect with. Framing it otherwise implies we should surrender this basic and (historically) new freedom to avoid male resentment.
And when you argue for supporting men who are lonely, childless, or unable to find partners, it reads less like smart strategy and more like appeasement – especially when there is no evidence it would make any difference. Does having a partner make lonely men more likely to support gender equality? I have read your post many times trying to understand it, but I just can’t see why, to advance, women must think so deeply about men’s feelings – to the point of using our own bodies as tools for their companionship and pleasure.
Along the way, you imply that our desire is negotiable, and that we can’t even think about our own liberation without first considering men’s comfort. How could feminism, with a discourse so close to the very misogynistic narratives it seeks to dismantle, hope to remain a movement women would proudly stand behind – especially if it demands we empathise with men who openly express their contempt for us? For me, that would be humiliating. What, then, is feminism for?
I’d genuinely like to hear how you reconcile these ideas – because while the comments here are full of applause, especially from men, I was left wondering whether this vision of feminism is one that women themselves would find worth fighting for.
I love this blog so much.
> While false accusations are extremely rare
Sexual violence accusations are rarely proven false. They're also rarely proven true. If someone pointed to a study that found 2% of accusations were proven true and concluded that truthful accusations are rare, is that sound reasoning? No, we also need to know how many were proven false, and how many could not be proven either way. If 96% of accusations can't be proven, and of the remaining 4%, half are proven true and half are proven false it'd be incredibly dishonest to claim this as evidence that just 2% of accusers are truthful.
Every study on false accusations I've seen have had over 50% of the sample that could not be determined true or false. The only intellectually honest answer about the rate of false accusations is that we don't know what the rate of false accusations are.
What we know is that in the justice system “everyone is innocent until proven guilty” and it must remain so. False accusers should be punished so harshly that no one don’t dares to ruin anyone’s live by lying. There has been documented examples of people’s lives being destroyed by a psychopath making a false claim.
I'm more conflicted on punishing false accusers, especially if they come forward on their own volition. Oftentimes, we only know accusations are false because the accusers admit as such. Leveling punishments in response would disincentivize people from admitting to have made false accusations. Punishment is probably be reserved for people who were caught in a lie, and did not admit to having fabricated the accusation until after other evidence contradicted their accusation.
How many rapes go unpunished? This seems like a relevant statistic to the discussion. The vast majority of people would agree that being raped is much worse than being falsely accused of rape, so lowering the barrier for people to make accusations might be justifiable if it reduces rape cases. Of course, many of the cases of unpunished rape cases occur within the family, but it is plausible that behavior within families is also influenced by the social environment.
The fact that many rapes go unpunished does little to diminish the fact that Evans is making a baseless claim about the rates of false accusations. She didn't bother to cite this claim, so we have no idea what kind of evidence led her to write this, but chances are it's going to be a study where the number of unproven accusations dwarfs both the percentage proven true and the percentage proven false.
"While false accusations are extremely rare"
I keep hearing this, but when you look into the evidence provided to support it it rests on "assume all accusations are true unless proven false." Which is exactly the kind of mentality that led to that retrenchment.
Yes, just imagine what the response would be if you applied the same thought process to the validity of accusations: "Truthful accusations are extremely rare," there's as much evidence to justify this statement as there is with the claim that false accusations are rare. People would correctly point out that such a statement is dishonestly ignoring the vast majority of accusations that cannot be proven and may be true or may be false. But they're happy to engage in the same pattern of dishonesty to minimize false accusations.
Ah the gender divide - one day in the distant future we will begin to consider if the best way forward for society (and women) is to raise our sons on Pornhub.
Deep thinking and much soul searching will be required to grapple with this very difficult question. But it’s probably healthy. I hope we ignore it for another two decades so we have more time to think. 🤔 because free speech = letting CSA and trafficking reach epidemic proportions. And it’s great for sex relations too.
I have two boys and I am deeply concerned about them growing up in a world with always-available short-form viral videos, social media, portable sports gambling, and pornography.
And I think of all of those, the porn is the biggest problem (if I could snap my fingers and nuke one, I think that's what I'd pick?) and it's a problem where we (their parents) have been boiled alive like frogs. I'm old enough that when I was a teenager, pornography meant magazines, and when it moved to the internet it meant "100x100 pixel crappy JPEGs that loaded slowly" (meaning: not real different from the magazines). Now it is a literal firehose of video, and the priors I have from being a teenager absolutely do not apply to my children at all. What I can teach them about sex and pornography could be the most important thing they learn from me.
But my god, also, it's all bad. The online sports gambling situation is totally insane and out of control. Phone use is rampant and clearly destructive. It all looks like a sea of "we're raising our boys in the cultural equipment of a heroine den full of used needles."
It’s interesting how many problems could be solved if men had stronger egos and more mental fortitude
I agree, this section in particular stood out.
' “Mera jism meri marzi” ("My body, my choice) and “Apna moza khud dhundo” (Find your socks yourself) - triggered massive online backlash.'
Bodily autonomy and finding socks, triggering a backlash seems ridiculous at face value.
Can I poke at this for a minute? "more mental fortitude" struck me because I think on one side of the debate over "the problem with men" (meaning any of: worse socioeconomic outcomes for men over time and other indicators of struggle like addiction and suicide, or the reactionary backlash we see) often one side will say something that rhymes with "the men need to man up and just deal with it."
And the thing that strikes me is that this view of how men should deal with what is happening exactly plays into the traditional stereotypical views of what 'being a man' is that really haven't gone questioned.
- To be a man is to be strong enough to get through difficult things without telling other people that it's hard. Don't admit this to your friends, don't admit it to your family, don't admit it to yourself.
- Being in touch with any vulnerability, sadness, anxiety, none of that is okay. Being overly emotional isn't okay. Feelings other than anger aren't manly.
- As a man, you have total internal agency. Your destiny is what you make it, so what happens _is your fault_ and not a function of circumstance.
I'm exaggerating here, but you get the idea.
What I find both interesting and perhaps sad is that in seeing a situation that is fundamentally about changing gender dynamics, a group of people who can totally understand how old gender roles were a straight jacket for women and it would be beneficial to smash them to bits doesn't apply the same scrutiny to men.
Now if by "stronger egos and more mental fortitude" you meant something very different (like: defining their self worth intrinsically or by their connections to other human beings and not by external validation, and having greater emotional resiliency)...that's a whole different ball of wax and I've just gone off on a huge tangent because I've read your comment entirely through the lens of "traditional masculinity."
Hi and thanks for engaging with my comment! I’ll admit I was in a salty mood when writing it, probably amplified by the first sentence of this post that spoke of cancer and feminist activism in the same breath.
I’ll start by saying that this post in itself is illuminating and really does a great job of situating backlash against feminist activism.
To your comment - I definitely wasn’t approaching this through the traditional masculinity lens. My comment could have been better worded for sure, but I have grown rather tired of finding ways to make mainstream feminism more palatable to men (and I’m generalising ‘men’ here. Usual ‘not all men’ caveats apply). Feminists having both the onus of feminist activism and of packaging it in a way that doesn’t trigger backlash is a bit unfair. Resistance to patriarchy is already an under resourced and under funded movement. My view is that this resistance would be more productive if most men (I.e. the source of this ‘backlash’) realised that the patriarchy holds them victim too, as you allude to in your comment.
"but I have grown rather tired of finding ways to make mainstream feminism more palatable to men" - I hear this, and I wonder if that sense of exhaustion can be found in many civil rights movements because the unfairness is structural to trying to fix things from below.
"My view is that this resistance would be more productive if most men realised that the patriarchy holds them victim too"
I think this is a really key point...men may think we're "winning" from our position in the patriarchy, but we're not. We're just "screwed over less." This is a message that probably has to come from men to be persuasive; the only thing we will need from women is a little bit of space to recognize how we are bound.
I worry that traditional masculinity absolutely can be enforced by women ... we are conditioned to be vey sensitive to those signals, and if it is, it doesn't give us the tools to change. I don't know if traditional masculinity (value comes from achievement, achievement is a zero sum game, ergo you exist in a hierarchy, looking for outside support is failure, etc.) serves patriarchy or generates it, but I don't see us being free from one without the other.
If you have the patience for it, I strongly recommend "raising cain protecting the emotional life of boys" by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thomson. They really paint a vivid (and heartbreaking) picture of how men are conditioned into our role.
Many thanks - I'll check out Dan Kindlon and Michael Thomson
I don't understand how you can believe that traditional masculinity is enforced by women. Was racism triggered by black people? Of course, you don't have nothing to be "traditional" about when you are not facing the very thing that provides you the one to be traditional about.
To be honest, you sound like you want to listen and help, but are just using the same tools: making women the ones to blame. Men have all the tools to be better, feeling triggered by asking them for a little bit of emphaty, positionality and just maybe a little bit less of entitlement.
I understand Aditi, and I also do understand Alice's point. You are just the plain example of her problem: while we could be discussing the main point, we have to lose time with people who has the audacity to ask for emphaty, yet giving none, sending her books to have patiance, yet having none with her, and talking so openly about your "bound", when talking about the n°1 oppression of the historical oppressed, bounded, sold, used, ignored and basically trashed class the world has consistently seen.
There's a lot here, so this reply may end up on the long side, which I imagine might be frustrating if you see my comments as part of the problem. I swear I am not your enemy in this, but that is not for me to decide.
When I wrote "I worry that traditional masculinity absolutely can be enforced by women ... " my meaning is that (in the United States, where I am) women _can_ and sometimes _do_ enforce traditional gender rolls. I absolutely do _not_ think that women are the only ones enforcing traditional masculinity, or even that they are a majority of the problem. There's no question that men play a huge role in this...from every father who felt the need to stop his son from cuddling with mom at age four to every football coach using homophobic put-downs in an all-male environment.
There are men on the internet who have argued (with me) that women enforce gender norms, and I discounted this quite a bit too until I read Brené Brown's Daring Greatly, particularly the chapter on shame. What I would say specifically here is that when women enforce traditional gender norms on men...
- It may be totally accidental.
- Men's fear is doing the heavy lifting.
The thing I read over and over is "I showed vulnerability and some emotions once, she dumped me, I'll never do that again." That one incident, which may have been as simple as her reacting negatively at first to a dysregulated, immature first step towards sharing feelings, can live on as fear and lore as this guy tells all his friends "here's the one thing to never do."
I see this first and foremost as a problem for us (men) to solve ourselves. As a father, I see raising my children to be emotionally healthy fully formed human beings as the most important thing I'll do, and that's my job. There are interactions where women who interact with them will be able to help or hurt, but this isn't a problem for women to fix.
If at this point you're ready to punch the monitor because I've gone on and on and on about the emotional lives of men in a comments section about feminism and backlash, I think that's totally fair. I've gone massively massively massively off-topic. Guilty as charged.
But I do think there is a connective thread and it's this: Alice Evans' original post that started all of this was about promoting equality without backlash, and in my corner of the woods, it's the men who are doing the backlash. At the same time there's a fair amount of "the men suck" discoarse and at the same time even "these redefining masculinity groups are just relabeling being feminine."
I think Alice Evans' recommendation to build an inclusive coalition is exactly correct, and to that end feminists have to make a persuasion choice:
- choose to find common cause with men who think that holding men to traditional gender roles and work together to free people from "because of your gender, there should be social constraints on what it is okay for you to do" or
- observe that if the men would just 'do better' and suck less, these problems would go away.
I imagine that first choice must be incredibly hard. Sarah McBride was on the Ezra Klein podcast a few weeks ago and I thought her discussion of how difficult it is to be a trans activist having to persuade a skeptical cis majority that you have rights was a really good listen...her point is that while none of it is fair, if activists want to be effective, they have to do the hard, unfair thing because it will work.
So to the extent that I am suggesting feminists who see the oppression of women by men as _the problem_ to make a huge mental leap of empathy and see the ways that _this sucks for men_, I have to recognize, I'm asking for a lot. Patriarchy doesn't suck for all men, and it doesn't suck as much as for women, but it's not good. (The drinking, the drugs, the overdoses, teh suicides, the depression...it's telling us something.)
I think that change of frame is the correct one and the one that will lead to a stronger coalition that brings men and women together instead of pitting us in a zero sum fight. It's the way to avoid backlash and grow the coalition.
I can't understand why is so difficult to just understand that if you want to be an ally, the first thing to do recognize your position of privilege, and that the system, even when it can have downsizes, overall is one that provides you with such an entitlement that you are not being able to see we Patriarchy's oppresion of some of men's
Do you think any white person would have the audacity to go to a black liberation blog and teach them how to be more "appealing"? or that a cis person would go and do the same for a trans liberation blog? no. Because everyone could see it's just not their place. That we are venting about how be thinking about how to be "effective" when what we are asking for it's just for some plain humanity from men. But here you come, lecturing about how to appeal to men, that WE have to understand that you suffer ALMOST as much as we do.
I really want to be more emphatetic with you, but your entitlement is truly offputting. Your post just make my point: how tiring is to try to convince men that no, you don't suffer as we do. Sorry, but no. No in a million years.
You really think "Patriarchy doesn't suck for all men, and it doesn't suck as much as for women, but it's not good".... it's going to make me feel some emphaty? what do you know what to be a woman is? I don't know how is like to be a man, but I can reassure you... very little men suffer as much as most women do.
If you really think that the constant fear of rape, violence, the invisibilization of our work, our need for feel validation in looks, in the way we interact, the need to do 5 times the work to have the same recognition as men do, the constant insecurity we feel for our rights. Having to be there and be strong when yet another of your female friends tells you how she was sexually abused as a child.
And plus, we need to be super emphatetic of men, because if not, we are not going anywhere.
Everyone can see the backlash happening. As a man who would like to make society as safe as possible for women I am glad to see someone trying to voice solutions rather than just raging about their perceived opponents.
I was also happy to see some pragmatism. If the goal is to be effective, I don't think backlash effects can be ignored.
I really enjoyed reading this, but every new insight only seems to reinforce the negative case for social media. Salvation will not come through hashtags and giving everyone a platform perhaps wasn't a great idea.
Well articulated. Very important. I'm concerned, though, that the backlash to this piece will be the same as the backlash to MLK, etc.: "Why should the oppressed keep accommodating for the psychology of the oppressors?"
I hear this a lot. How should we respond?
More generally, it's very difficult ever to tell someone that they are doing activism "wrong". Any success stories on this?
Because you live in a society where you have to live together. Ignoring another group issues and problems because they are the “oppressor” is detrimental and harmful to your cause.
Yes! I do think part of the problem is that it has become increasingly easy in cosmopolitan circles to forget that we live in a society "together" with folks we deeply disagree with. Then comes election day and it's like "Who are these people"?
So I think you are right: a good approach would start by raising the obvious fact that, like it or not, we are in it together.
I think my answer to a "Why should the oppressed keep accommodating for the psychology of the oppressors?" rebuff of whatever-you-would-call-what's-up-with-men-these-days is that the way forward isn't zero sum and human empathy isn't a finite commodity we need to ration out.
In particular, I think that (this is Terry Real's ideas from his books, all of which I recommend) where-as the patriarchy robs women of their agency, it robs men of connection.
That effect on men may not be nearly as bad as bad things that happen to women...but that doesn't mean it is _good_ or that we _shouldn't give a crap_. In particular, helping men feel more socially connected and less isolated doesn't have to come at the cost of female agency.
I think the actual situation is much more hopeful: if men felt less disconnected, that would be a group of men that women would be less frustrated with.
WHO is robbing you from connection? Even if it was women (and it is not), robbing our agency (making us less than human, less than a men,"the other", equals robbing men from their ...connection? yes, it's the same.
the worst things that happen to women are mostly done by men. numbers don't lie. and again, why do WE have to help you? why don't you help yourselves? we are not your therapists. And yes, it doesn't come with our agency, but it's so frustrating to, once we are rising, having to deviate from our goal to "help you feel less isolated", like it was our fault.
And the last part, no. Men, connected or not, are really frustrating. The inability to get out of the picture, to take accountability, to not be the main character, it's just annoying or even depressing. Do youreally spend your time in different marginalzied group forum to provide your advice on how to do conduct their movement? saying how men are the victim there too?
We are raised culturally to be disconnected. A lot of it is by men, a little bit by women too, but my critique is not of individual people, it is of our culture. I am not asking women to fix this. I am not asking women to rescue men.
But you are correct. The worst things done to women are done by men. My job, as a father, is to make sure that my boys never act that way. And I am trying to do that in a culture that says that when something sad happens to them, it's not okay for them to cry - they will be shamed for it, but it is okay to get angry. It's not okay for them to talk about their feelings, they just have to hold them in, and we'll all hope they don't explode violently.
Having read your other comment, I think we've reached the point where anything I write is just going to make you angrier. If your thesis is "the men aren't invited to the conversation" then there's nothing for me to say.
But the original post is about backlash, and the backlash is coming from men - and a lot of the men who are the backlash, who think this whole feminism thing in the united states has been a giant disaster and we should somehow put the toothpaste back in the tube - those guys don't like what I have to say much either...they think I should be "toughening my boys up" or that I should "knock it off with that feelings crap", etc. They're gender essentialists who have concluded that men and women are clearly different because of what they observe in our (patriarchal) culture.
To be honest, yes, your audacity is just a reminder that you have no idea and really don't really want to learn anything about women's life. Your lack of awarness makes me sad, and makes me lose hope. If anything, you convinced me that, even when I admire her, Alice's approach might be helpful to decrease backlash, but with the price of silencing women, losing all appeal for same group we are supposed to be fighting for. If advancing comes to the price of embracing men's feeling, even when they are feelings that minimize and trigger us, then feminist for what? if it basically means to just keep ourselves appealing to men, and letting men vent about their issues, comparing them to ours, in spaces where I hope women would be the ones with the leading voice, then it just loses it's point. It's not about fighting for equality, just teaching them that we are not going anywhere if men are not happy with it. And that's basically the status quo.
Also, I am not American, I come from a Chile. Born and raised. The center of the world is not America (nor Europe), sorry. I am dropping this conversation here, you are not going to convince me that you have anything to say about feminism, or women's experiences. BTW: The only thing I was maybe hoping for it was for you to say something like "you might be right, I will think about it". But no, you want me so say that, you are very wrong.
For what it's worth, I do not think you are wrong, and this whole thread has made me think quite a bit, and i will continue to think about what you have written. I appreciate a perspective very different from my own.
I love your point: Female Co-Workers Demonstrate Talent, and I think this is an area that is largely neglected.
When I entered the workforce in the US I was surprised by how gender segregated it was.
Women either work in feminized industries (nursing/healthcare being a quintessential example) or they work in highly feminized departments.
Since changing careers, I’ve primarily worked at SASS companies and typically value centers, like engineering, product, and sales are dominated by men, and cost centers like HR are dominated by women.
But even within value centers, support work like marketing, customer success, and program/product management are primarily dominated by women, and the “real” work of the value center, like new sales, and engineering are done by men.
I suspect this pattern replicates across the economy, either segregation by industry or segregation by department and function, and I think this has a pernicious effect on gender equality, both in terms of leadership opportunities (leaders are more likely to be chosen from value centers) but also in areas like workforce participation (if a family has to choose who leaves their job, pay is a big factor and cost centers generally pay less).
The only tweet I remember from after the election said something like “America didn’t want a diversity hire as it’s next president.”
And I suspect that a lot of voters felt that Harris was like somebody from HR and Trump felt like somebody from sales.
Excellent work as always!
I don’t understand what is wrong with letting men and women decide what they want to do or become? It’s their life. It’s their right to pursue happiness in whatever they perceive to be their best choice. If they are forced either way it’d be wrong. There’s no imperative to make the sexes equal in every aspect because they are simply different. By nature all the terrible jobs are for men and nobody protests to that and I have no objection but to try to forcefully make the division in every job equal is misleading and creates backlash. DEI is unethical and unfair. Let there be true competition and stop obsessing over identity whether racial or sex.
I don’t think anyone suggested compelling anyone to do anything.
But I at least am interested in why this is the case?
I am interested in this because I want to live in a world that maximizes human flourishing and misogyny harms the flourishing of men and women.
What I conceive as “compelling” is for example setting sex based quotas for companies to adhere to. It’s in itself a violation of property rights and therefore the individual rights. Let the businesses decide how they want to hire. The ones who hire based on merit will eventually flourish and merit in intellectual jobs at least is independent of sex or race. These laws are discouraging to men as it always favors women or some other minority just for being women or having that identity which should not be an advantage just as the opposite is not/should not be.
Some people seem to miss the fact that free speech means that people are free to point out things they see as problems, even if you don't, and do whatever advocacy they want to solve them. If someone forms an organization to, for example, encourage more women to go into software engineering, that is completely within free speech and free association.
Anyway, for the discussion at hand, Evans doesn't give an example of what policy would help disadvantaged young men, and I'm curious if she has any, because I can't think of any. Women's economic rise didn't happen because of specific and intentional economic policies, it was just due to women entering the workforce and education, made more possible by family planning, and then organic changes in the economy.
I can think of policies that would help young people as a whole, like more abundant/cheap housing, and maybe that helps avoid some gender antagonism. Some European countries have relatively cheap housing, and some American cities have relatively cheap housing, so maybe that's a topic for someone to study. Overall, the US economy has been doing great, so economically Americans have been handed the goods, but status is a zero-sum game, and the decline in status of some men without college education was inevitable due to women entering the workforce and more jobs shifting to service.
I'll also just say that people really should avoid reading too much into Trump's victory. Trump won the popular vote by 1.5% and the Electoral College by 1.7%, these margins are easily explained by the fact that the US experienced its highest inflation rate in decades under Biden. Democrats will likely win big in elections between now and 2028, so people really shouldn't read too much into why one side or the other wins elections in a very closely divided electorate. American underlying social attitudes, however, have become much more liberal in the last many decades, regardless of who was president, and American attitudes on abortion have become more liberal in recent years, even as Americans have also become more conservative on issues such as immigration during the same period, probably due to the aforementioned inflation.
Pablo, those are all excellent points.
The problem with young men failing to thrive can really be thought of as 2 problems:
1. How do we increase opportunities for the next cohort?
This is a much easier problem and there are a number of proposals. The easiest is to either start men in school a year later, or delay their graduation by a year (by having boys repeat a year of grade school).
There is a mountain of evidence that shows that boys mature more slowly and a lot of what school assess is maturity. Wealthy families already practice this with private schools and it has its own term, “red shirting.” So as policies go, we should endeavor to extend the ability to do that down the economic ladder.
We also could do educational reform to increase offerings like shop class, home economics, and physical education.
Social media bans for children under 16 or 18 would also benefit boys and girls.
Will we do these things? Probably not, but they are at least proposals.
What we do about the problems current young men face is an entirely different question, and I don’t really know what we can do.
The rise of women in civil-service during WWI is incredibly interesting. Likely, it helped to pave the way for the wider inclusion of women in WWII production. I've been corrected, I used to trace the feminist rise to the WWII era.
Personally, I feel the retrenchment tracing back to the oil-shock economic stresses in the mid 1970's. There was enormous pressure to reduce costs. This motivated the changes in the 1980's to move production to Canada, Mexico and overseas where labor costs were more favorable. In turn, labor lost a lot of bargaining power.
Tax changes in the 1980's let the monied keep the windfall from the increases in production efficiency, stratifying the financial status men were keenly attuned to.
Blame shifted from Japan to Taiwan to China to Asia in general, and then to women, who were continuing to improve their lot the old fashioned way, through education and merit.
It is so easy to lash out without looking at the men who fucked over men.
you are implying that meritocracy and competition are the best (cost-benefit weighted) solutions
I loved your explanation, with links to sources bc of course that's how you roll, of social media's role in gender equality. One graf was so useful that I had to go back and add it to my recent post on how and why the media distorts feminism into female supremacy which most people (correctly) dislike: https://open.substack.com/pub/cathyreisenwitz/p/why-the-media-misleads-everyone-about
It is misleading to see the resistance against “equal rights” for women attributed to men feeling threatened. At least in the case of Middle East the culprit is the Islamic culture. Which btw many women are brainwashed with as well and force it on other women. An anti human and anti civilization religion that promotes female subjugation to men and male subjugation to an imaginary sadistic god. Awful for everyone but for women it’s even worse.
I think it’s important to emphasize that the equality is about the “rights” only not an egalitarian Marxist ideology covered under “equality of opportunity” to aim for outcome equality and make the premise that sexes should earn the same. Just pause and ask why? If they decide willfully to become teachers or doctors and not engineers what is wrong with that? Let individuals pursue their happiness. It’d be nice if women would more often show a consistent and coherent interest in discussing ideas on a philosophical basis. An example would be the abortion rights. It must be legal until birth because of property rights. It’s your body. But I’ve still to see any woman protesting against draft laws which primarily targets men. It’s also their body and it has nothing to do with the state. You mention the right and left as if they are so different. Both are collectivist statist and anti “individual” which is btw the most oppressed minority! The “right” is just more discriminatory and more Christian and is sometimes also racist. The true battle is to advocate for the individual rights and freedoms.
Speaking only from a Western perspective here, so take the following with a grain of salt. I think, while the general focus on status here is correct, trying to create a strategy for promoting gender-equality based on the broad groups of "men" and "women", while intuitive, is unlikely to succeed. You highlight how women's political and economic participation can lead to status anxiety among men, and thus backlash; but fail to consider how those shifts impact existing status structures for women and result in backlash there. To take the example I am most familiar with, I don't think it's a coincidence that the face of the anti-ERA movement, Phyllis Schlafly and STOP ERA, was run by--and made up of--women. Looked through the paper you linked on the backlash to ERA, was unable to find a breakdown of women's responses by marital and maternal status, but would hypothesize that the impact on women's opinions split along those lines.
Pure conjecture, but I suspect one of the reasons that there was dramatically less cultural backlash (open to counterarguments here) to the leaps in women's economic participation during WWI and WWII is that their temporary nature did not disrupt the already existing status hierarchy. It seems like the most effective methods of improving women's standing in society with minimal backlash are those that are seen as temporary and have a substantial economic benefit to society as a whole (see: the Factory Girls in China). If the economic benefit is large enough to the family unit to outcompete those not participating (taking the China example further, families who sent their daughters to work in the factories in other provinces and received remittances were much wealthier), it seems to overcome the original bias (especially when the situation is thought to be temporary and the women were expected to settle down after). Then, more gender-equal standards take shape as a side-effect of the spending power of the women. I think any movement dedicated to improving the lot of women abroad would be quite successful aping the examples of factory girls all across history.
On an unrelated note, I'm curious how your thoughts on fertility play into this picture. It seems to me that an ideology (my read on much of modern feminism) that places economic success over reproductive success is unlikely to sustain itself over multiple generations. I can't say I'm a fan of Robin Hanson's Mennonite future, but it seems hard to refute that something in modern gender relations is unsustainable on those grounds (your point on the rise of singles). Some sort of syncretic "motherhood" and "career" status ideal would be my preferred solution, but I admit to having been unable to find an example of success in such a manner.
Appreciate the great post, gave me a lot to think about.
The problem here is equilibrium. To what extent can gender equality advance without triggering backlash – but without losing women’s support in the process? If activism becomes about being palatable to men, it risks losing its meaning for women altogether. This comment section is a good example.
Reading your piece, I couldn’t help noticing how many of these points imply that women somehow hold agency over men’s resentment and their reactions when they feel threatened by external shocks. Is that really the case? Would these men feel less threatened if we rebranded the way feminist movements frame topics such as sexual harassment? Would they suddenly become allies? If so, that requires evidence – not assumption. Suggesting that women should adopt tactics that validate men’s narratives – like the idea that we are “gatekeeping” sex and relationships from less privileged men – is deeply problematic. As a feminist, I hope you agree we are not gatekeeping anything; we are simply living our lives and choosing who to connect with. Framing it otherwise implies we should surrender this basic and (historically) new freedom to avoid male resentment.
And when you argue for supporting men who are lonely, childless, or unable to find partners, it reads less like smart strategy and more like appeasement – especially when there is no evidence it would make any difference. Does having a partner make lonely men more likely to support gender equality? I have read your post many times trying to understand it, but I just can’t see why, to advance, women must think so deeply about men’s feelings – to the point of using our own bodies as tools for their companionship and pleasure.
Along the way, you imply that our desire is negotiable, and that we can’t even think about our own liberation without first considering men’s comfort. How could feminism, with a discourse so close to the very misogynistic narratives it seeks to dismantle, hope to remain a movement women would proudly stand behind – especially if it demands we empathise with men who openly express their contempt for us? For me, that would be humiliating. What, then, is feminism for?
I’d genuinely like to hear how you reconcile these ideas – because while the comments here are full of applause, especially from men, I was left wondering whether this vision of feminism is one that women themselves would find worth fighting for.