There are thousands of crappy videos in aid of dubious projects. So I generally have to be paid to care about any of them. And lo, my latest hire: to examine what’s going on with Stardusk’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes on his channel Thinking-Ape. Considered one of the founding members of the Men Going Their Own Way movement online, Stardusk is still a manosphere YouTuber with a lot of bizarre pseudoscientific views. Which is SOP in the manosphere, but he’s even weirder and more right wing than Jordan Peterson. He’s on the gender separationists side and promotes Black Pill ideology. You can find a friendly sort-of bio at IncelsWiki (which is a site run by Incels, so, be wary). And he’s influential. His site has over a hundred thousand subscribers and his videos get tens of thousands of views.
I’ve kept up on this subject generally and written on it often. For a starter, see my article A Psychology of Men? A Critical Review of Robert Glover’s No More Mr. Nice Guy, which links to my other articles on manosphere ideology before and since (including How to Do Men’s Rights Rightly), so the rabbit hole begins there (one should also explore the flipside: my discussions of feminism). Those articles also survey a lot of the science I will be discussing here (and you’ll find more in my article on modern gender panic). But the best studies on the manosphere of late are Alice Cappelle’s Collapse Feminism: The Online Battle for Feminism’s Future (she also touches on it several times on her excellent YouTube channel), Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, and the Routledge anthology Male Supremacism in the United States: From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynist Incels and the Alt-Right.
As it takes far less time to make a bogus claim than it does to explain why it’s bogus, analyzing and correcting all of Stardusk’s mistakes here will be a Herculean effort. Clearing these Augean Stables will therefore take two long articles. First, I will introduce the video and explain some important underlying concepts and how they pertain. Then in Part 2 I fisk the rest of the video, and give my final assessment, with all of these principles and points already established.
The Video and Its Conceits
Stardusk’s video “Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes” (but not Oxford commas) is now over ten years old but still occasionally getting views and comments and it is as of this moment number two on a Thinking-Ape playlist compiled in 2021. It also reflects themes he repeats in other videos, and is representative of his ideology and methodology. In fact, it is a nutshell case for the entire “Men Going Their Own Way” ideology, so if you want to understand that, you’ll get up on that watching this. Yes, it’s crap. But all MGTOW literature is.
It is quite typical, for example, that this video’s bibliography includes amateur male supremacists and Red Pillers (alongside such eminently reliable sources as The Daily Mail), so we know what kind of literature Stardusk takes seriously. That’s a bad sign. But from a critical thinking perspective, what is most notable about this is the preference for linking to unreliable or paraphrastic discussions of scientific studies—but not the actual scientific studies (much less studies with contrary or qualifying results). You will soon see why this is important. Failing to critically read the actual science is a common failure-mode among ideological demagogues (I’ve documented examples from Jordan Peterson to anonymous vegan clickmills).
So what’s this video’s thesis? “Female mate selection” (sic) has today become dysfunctional because of the decline of the supremacy role that used to be enjoyed by cavemen. Cue here—literally—a classical artwork (shown above) depicting a caveman hunting with a bow for his baby-cradling woman. Or…correction, I think Stardusk wanted an image of that but couldn’t find it, and hoped instead we wouldn’t notice that the woman in the painting he chose (“Prehistoric Man Hunting Bears” by Emmanuel Benner, 1892) is holding a rather skull-crushing mace in a combat stance ready to protect herself, and her helpless babe and elder cowering beside her. So let’s remember “man” in the 19th century was a gender plural inclusive term; Benner did not mean a man, but men, i.e. a man and his wife. Why this is funny is that Stardusk’s entire schtick is to argue that “biologically” women can’t protect themselves or their families, and so evolved to exploit men to do it instead—and to illustrate this weird theory he chooses an image of a woman entirely capable of protecting herself, and her babes and elders. You know. Like they do.
It’s also funny to see Stardusk claim over this image that “back then,” without “technology,” men were the sole providers and protectors. It’s just biology, you know. Except that…the mace the woman is holding is a technology, a rather well-built force multiplier. Humans have always been distinguished by a reliance on technologies. This is not some new thing that just happened. And trust me. Any average wilder-healthy woman can crush a bear’s skull with a mace. You just need speed and daring—and, ideally, a team (to wear down and distract the bear in order to chess-move a coup de grâce to its skull). A common failure-mode of misogynistic ideologies is to confuse “humans need to work together to accomplish things” (a fact entirely divorced from gender) with “women as individuals need men as individuals to accomplish things” (a claim that does not track with fact). Benner’s painting depicts men and women working together as equals, both using (surprise!) force-multiplying technologies. Benner was a better anthropologist than Stardusk.
Here Stardusk even claims that it was men, not women, who were skilled in building shelters and thus providing for and protecting their women. Ironically, I doubt Stardusk could do this. Yet the Thai woman in the video I just linked is smaller than me—and she entirely builds a shelter, from scratch, on her own. The skills she displays there are local and ancient. This is a far more accurate example of how “cavewomen” were. And it destroys Stardusk’s entire thesis. Women do not need men. They just, like men, benefit from cooperation. But there is no biological fact here about men being the shelter-builders. Women clearly evolved to be entirely capable of doing that as well. Women hunted with weapons just like men. Women made shelters with tools just like men. Division of labor in the ethnographic record tracks to no clear sex distinctions, except one: men did tend to be assigned the role of hunting bigger game, which was arguably a display of value—but it wasn’t the only way for men to display value even then. Tribes always survived on a dependence just as much on women’s labor, who worked as much as men, and provided as much as men.
Some cultures gender labor more than others. Some cultures gender labor one way, some an entirely different way (for example, in some cultures hide processing and toolmaking are the man’s domain; in others, the woman’s). One of the principal causes of Evo-Psych’s endless bullshit is the ignoring of actual scientific evidence of diverse cultures and how this actually disproves the biological determinism that has taken illogical root in the Evo-Psych community. If you want to make an argument for biological determinism, you cannot do it while ignoring all the evidence of ethnography and cultural anthropology (and you can barely even do it then, since you still have to rule out convergent cultural evolution before you can get to a conclusion of genetic causes; and if all you have left after that is a small or moderate effect size, leaving a majority of subjects as outliers, you still don’t have determinism). I have already thoroughly covered the rampant pseudoscience in evolutionary psychology elsewhere (in Is 90% of All EvoPsych False?). That field’s conclusions are often patently irrational and even anti-empirical. It ends up becoming an uncritical and largely faked-up ideological tool of racists and sexists.
So, needless to say, Stardusk loves Evo-Psych. Like any Nazi loves Social Darwinism or any American slaveowner loved the Bible. It’s bullshit all the way down. But ironically (or, maybe, not?) Stardusk never even gets anything in evolutionary psychology right, either. He basically just makes shit up, calls it Evo-Psych (even though it is backed by literally no scientific study whatever, not even a crappy one), and then declares his conclusions “science.” The same sort of thing Creationists and Flat-Earthers and Climate-Deniers do. This all starts with his bogus accounting of how primitive peoples gendered their labor. No science is cited here. Just his own imagination, circularly consulting what he thinks must be true in order to prove what he thinks must be true is true. Any actual investigation of the science would have exploded his entire thesis. Indeed, serious Evo-Psych researchers have already been calling out manosphere abuses and misrepresentations of their own science: for example, and of particular relevance to Stardusk’s thesis, see Louis Bachaud and Sarah Johns, “The Use and Misuse of Evolutionary Psychology in Online Manosphere Communities: The Case of Female Mating Strategies,” Evolutionary Human Sciences (2023).
Let’s Pause for a Moment to Talk about Violence
The only thing we can credit here is that it is true that biological sex has differentiated male and female hormone regimes, which create divergences in puberty, to the effect that men are (in some sense) hyper-violent (brains and bodies kitted out to be disposable combat machines, whether against threats or prey) and women are (in some sense) not (their brains and bodies instead being kitted out to be disposable baby machines). Chromosomally, the default sex for everyone is female, so the female body is mostly just “what you end up with” if you don’t meddle with its biochemistry. This is illustrated by people with AIS (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome): simply making the body insensitive to androgens (the chemicals that convert a generic body into what we call a “male” one) results in a person with a full XY chromosome (often a transphobes’ definition of a “man”) developing an entirely stereotypical female body (breasts, body, vagina, and all)—with a few exceptions; for example, they don’t develop a womb, since the coding for that is on the X chromosome where the broken Y blocks its function.
So men are a deviating design from the natural baseline. Which means we should consider how male sex development differs from female sex development if we want to look for any hypotheses of biological determinism. And remember: it would just be hypotheses at that point; you then need abundant converging evidence to establish any of those hypotheses are true. And ideological misogynists don’t “do” evidence, really. Despite huffing constantly that it’s all they do, it’s almost never anything they do. Case in point: Stardusk is naively reacting to the fact that the male-developed body is principally for enhanced violence; but his reaction is naive because it assumes (via the black-or-white fallacy) that this means women are not built for violence, and that nature operates by black-and-white sex division (everyone is for one thing; everyone else another), and that violence is therefore, simply, “what men are for.” None of that is true.
Stardusk is the sort of person who might think “women on average are shorter than men” means “all women are shorter than all men,” and therefore “all men exist for the purpose of being tall.” In fact sexual genetics is entirely driven on the principle of bell-curve dynamics: nature builds plenty of tall, strong women, and short, weak men. It hedges its bets. So there is no way to argue biological determinism by sex differentiation. If a job requires you be tall, fewer women will qualify than men—but plenty of women will still qualify. Therefore, you can draw no conclusion about whether “women” will qualify for the job. You simply just have to measure height. You can say there is a sort of biological determinism surrounding height (although it’s pretty weak; hardly anyone gets rutted into job specialties by height), but not sex (and I am skipping over gender here for now—but remember, gender is not sex, and there are also more than two sexes, as people with AIS demonstrate, as do other intersex bodies). The same goes for anything else you want to measure, whether it’s physical strength or even emotionality.
In fact, when you check, apart from that one thing (muscularity and propensity to violence), which I’ll get to, statistically men differ from women by only ten percentiles on any metric (like height or felt intensity of emotions) and their peaks and tails hugely overlap (by around 90%). That’s actually quite small a difference objectively. And since combat depends as much on speed, skill, and tools (knives, for example, long predate civilization), “muscularity and propensity to violence” are not defining. This does mean averages won’t overlap (e.g., more men will be capable of becoming good fighters than women; but only by a percentage) and extreme outliers won’t overlap (e.g., super-absurdly strong men will not have many counterparts in the ciswoman population), but being extreme outliers, they can tell us nothing about sex or gender generally.
For example, almost no man is Arnold Schwarzenegger. So you can learn nothing about “men” from the example of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Consequently, any biologically determinist argument you made about him (like, he’s more likely than other men to end up in, and excelling at, a weightlifting culture) would not apply to “men” (almost none of whom, statistically, even end up in, much less excelling at, a weightlifting culture). And to illustrate with a different case: men and women don’t significantly vary in IQ, yet men do tend more often (albeit still rarely) to have extreme IQs. And yet this has no substantial effect on any metrics of even those men’s competence or success (as I documented in Luck Matters More Than Talent), much less any measurable effect on men’s competence or success.
These basic failures of logic I suspect are one of the two main drivers of all bigot-culture (sexists, racists, classists, and the like); the other being an ironic disregard for Shapiro’s Law (“facts don’t care about your feelings”). Bigots, especially ideologically-grounded bigots, actually disregard facts in pursuit of their feelings. They “feel” certain things are true, and get emotionally triggered whenever their feelings about things are challenged by facts, and in consequence they flee from facts, avoid facts, invent facts, or try to make facts go away by every apologetic device they can desperately contrive (usually on the fly). And failing all that, they just get angry and smash things (like hurling insults or trying to down your likes or even your webserver). Stardusk illustrates this in the first minute and a half of his video: he has emotionally attached himself to a delusionally constructed “identity,” a functionally religious belief about what “men” and “women” essentially are and are like, which in result causes him to advance what he merely feels as factual, while forgetting to instead check actual facts first. Even though that is a fundamental requirement of rationality (see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking).
So there is a kernel of truth in the fact that humans evolved for a somewhat sex-differentiated skew in violence-perpetration, and did so possibly in biological reaction to the disposability of men: one man can impregnate ten women; but ten women can still only have the same number of children. So, by nature’s cruel logic, men aren’t that important. It can afford to burn more of them off. This results in a disparity: ciswomen tend to have wombs; while cismen tend to be hyper-violent. Men are built to jump into the fray and be chosen for dangerous missions because they are disposable. However, this is not what MGTOW mean by “men are the disposable sex,” since in this sense, so are women (they just more usually get killed by babies). I’ll get to that. But again, bell curves, remember? The difference in capability can be small (that woman with her mace is almost as deadly as the man by her side); and the variability is extensive—in fact it is greater within each sex than across them: men differ from other men more than they differ, overall, from women; and women differ from other women more than they differ, overall, from men; and these curves all substantially overlap.
So nature was more ambivalent about all this than the biological determinists want her to have been. She found an advantage in some skew in this enhanced-for-violence trait, just as she found an advantage in a slight skew in sexuality: for homosexuality appears to be a selected trait, too, as it remains at roughly the same percentage across even widely divergent species over (evidently) eons. But it was selected specifically to be relatively rare. This means it is not possible to say gay men are not men, as if they are “deviant.” To the contrary, they are as purposeful a make-and-model for men as crazy-hulk weighlifters like Arnold: not the norm, but also fully intended. Just like a short man is not “not a man” nor even “not a representative man” (since a “man” entails many more traits than mere height), so, too, gay men and non-hulking men. It is therefore not possible to advance any sweeping biological-determinist argument like Stardusk is attempting.
Which brings me to the final point any critic must grasp here before continuing: culture is a construct. It is, itself, a technology. The enormous diversity of cultural structures across the ethnographic record proves this (something everyone should be forced to take a college course in cultural anthropology to realize, as I did). And one thing science has established is that Western culture is actually WEIRD. Literally. It is not representative of human cultures past, but extremely divergent. Which means our culture, which people like Stardusk sometimes treat as a biological norm, is actually not. Which actually undermines his project: if we are supposed to return to our biological norm, then we should abandon modern Western culture, which is not what Stardusk wants. Obviously his thesis is wrong from its very first premise: we should not be valorizing some ideal biological norm. We do far better as a civilization the more we get away from that norm, and thus defy rather than obey our biology. So Stardusk is wrong at even the most basic level of his thinking.
To illustrate why this matters, consider the hyper-violence attribute of developmentally male-sexed bodies and brains. Its principal outcome difference between men and women is that in most communities men commit acts of violence at a far higher rate than women. For example, in America men commit four times as many violent crimes, a difference of not ten but three hundred percentiles. That is an enormous disparity in outcome. But if you dig into the sociological studies you’ll find this disparity varies a lot according to social rather than biological factors. And even in the worst cases (where we see men engaging in violent crime ten times as often as women), still only a very small minority of men are implicated. Biology is not destiny. Violence is not even “natural” in the sense that Stardusk means—it is rare and thus atypical, and modulated more by culture than sex. Indeed, over the long arc of history, violence has been in steady decline—which means it is not biologically determined. Another fact about violence is that it tends only to be productive when not pursued individually but in cooperation (armies, not lone wolfs, win wars; and it’s tribes, not lone hunters, who reliably defeat predators and process prey).
So to center violence as “being a man” might signal an unusually violent mind in Stardusk, rather than a more typical male mind, which will instead balance cleverness, competence, compassion, cooperativeness, and contemplativeness with any physical readiness to action (as will plenty a woman have done). Stardusk’s ideology thus reflects certain disturbing beliefs about himself rather than objective facts of the world. This will also become clear in his even greater (and equally disturbing) centering of sex as the only reason to interact with women.
Which gets us to the real crux of the issue…
Let’s Pause for a Moment to Talk about Culture
Nature hates you. She built you to be disposable. Women and men. Pregnancy wrecks women. Fighting wrecks men. You all wear out and die eventually, and right soon in the scheme of things. You are all throwaway sacks of mindless, meaningless genes. Once we figured this out, we rebelled against nature’s callous maleficence and started fixing everything we could (with technologies, from those force-multipliers, to aqueducts, medicine and roads, eyeglasses and mechanical hearts, all the way to cultural constructs, from democracy to science), and pursuing more meaningful ends—from discovery, of the world and our selves, to the enjoyment of life, love, and company, all the way to the act of creation itself, from art and engineering to relationships and communities.
Nature is a shit guide. And her designs are often vile. You should rarely want to emulate her or return to her. The correct path is to escape her, through culture and technology, and build something better, more humane, more satisfying to the sentient. This does not mean we cannot roll with nature better or learn from nature or even enjoy nature (suitably managed). Judo defeats its opponent by rolling with their own inertia and using it against them. Which requires learning how they move, and how to leverage it to a different outcome. We can master nature the same way: learning how she works, and using the way she already works to our advantage, and even enjoyment. But this is not the same thing as “returning to a state of nature” or “obeying nature.” We absolutely will not do well for ourselves doing either of those things.
This is the first lesson Stardusk failed to learn. The second is its corollary: that we do this with culture. Culture is a technology; and technology entails a culture. Gender is a tool, something we invented. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. We aren’t terribly rational as a species and are mostly ignorant most of the time, so most of the things we make are not well made, particularly the more complex and difficult they are to make or change. Our ideas about gender have mostly been bad ideas. But bad ideas can be replaced with good ones. The Scotts figured out men can wear skirts. The punks of the 80s figured out men can wear makeup. What we think is “appropriate” for this or that gender doesn’t have to be that way. We can retool it, or discard it.
Hence you will indeed find that a central tenet of MGTOW (which is fundamentally a toxic grievance culture) is that “men are the disposable sex,” but in the sense of not being needed—and we are supposed to blame women for this. In fact, men aren’t disposable in Stardusk’s sense, because they’re people, and people are always useful. They can produce and trade and work together to accomplish things. While in nature’s sense, women are just as disposable—nature just wants them to burn themselves out replacing everyone with babies. The original labor, misery, and danger was all commensurate between early men and women. In nature, pregnancy is permanently crippling, while roughly one in a hundred women will eventually die from pregnancy or childbirth (without modern science, the average single-birth mortality is in the low hundreds per 100,000; compounded over five pregnancies, the number required to maintain a population with standard infant-and-child mortality rates above 50%, and this produces around one in a hundred women eventually dying from pregnancy, worse than men dying by violence). And yet look how much culture can change that (and look at how miserably the supposedly “great” United States has uniquely failed at this). And that is culture: not just medical equipment and techniques, but attitudes and values, leading to different decisions regarding the allocation of resources. This is why over forty times more women die from birthing children in the U.S. than in the Netherlands today. There are no relevant biological differences between those women. That difference is all culture. Just as with endemic violence against women.
But assume you are more concerned about all the things killing more men, such as homicide, suicide, labor accidents, vehicular accidents, misadventure, and so on. These kill women, too; but men, a lot more. Although contrary to legend, war and policing kill almost no one in developed countries now, e.g. actual combat deaths per year for the U.S. military is comparable to lightning strikes, and non-accidental police deaths is only slightly higher; even adding suicide and accidental deaths, policing isn’t even in the top twenty deadliest occupations, nor is serving in the military. But the other categories are substantial, with annual deaths in the tens of thousands.
Did women cause any of that? No. Will isolating yourself from women change any of that? No. Will collaborating and cooperating with women change it all? Yes. Because notice the massive cultural variation in those statistics. In Germany, Japan, Norway, and New Zealand, for example, women and men are equals in homicide statistics. These peoples are not biologically different from Americans. So the difference is cultural. And that means we could change it. It requires changing the culture. And just as it was in those countries, this requires full collaboration between both genders to build and maintain the corresponding society. Women everywhere are keen to do that. MGTOW are resisting it. They are therefore causing their own harm, like a drowning man in a rage irrationally fighting off his rescuers. Because, in reality (the place where I live) quite a lot women are actively working to reduce all of those statistics (example, example, example, example, example). We could, you know, help them.
Gendered suicide also varies a lot by country, but in this case owing to conditions and ideologies. But developed societies actually care a lot about it—they are not “ignoring” this. You can Google it and find countless studies and articles taking it seriously. And if you actually cared about it, you would know that, in fact, in developed societies women and men attempt suicide in roughly equal numbers. So the disparity is in success. What is the leading difference there? About a third of the difference may be guns. Take them away, and successful suicides drop by the thousands (in America, over half of all gun deaths are suicides: owning a gun is more likely to kill you than an intruder). But the mere fact that, despite supposedly being the stronger sex, more men own guns to kill themselves with. Statistically, women are less interested in guns. And that’s a cultural thing. If you want to lower the male suicide rate to be comparable to the female suicide rate, you will have to look at what is actually causing the difference. MGTOW do not want to face that fact.
Which is significant. Because the number one (and even associated) difference in suicide rate is strength of intent (men are more intent on success), which is a product of gendered differences in seeking mental health care. Indeed, if you want to address the underlying causes of attempting suicide in the first place—in other words, if you care about people and not just men—the issue is, across the board, mental health care. Substantial gains could be reached if society paid for more of that. But even just with what we have, culture decides who benefits from it more. No one else is blocking men’s access to it any more than women’s. To the contrary, men are doing this to themselves (and each other). “Male culture” teaches men to hide their emotions and not admit to even needing mental health care. That will be denigrated by men (hence even by themselves) as “girly” and thus “unmanly” and “weak” and thus “inferior” (rather than responsible and courageous), which makes everything worse. Male culture is what has to change.
MGTOW don’t want to hear that, either. It’s the irrational drowning man all over again. One can also observe here that Stardusk’s latent anarcho-libertarianism opposes any actual cooperative solution like public funding of mental healthcare, even though that is the only way it can be available to any significant number of men. But male culture underlies even that irrational hostility to cooperative venture. Women are fifty years ahead of men on this realization—in the latter half of the 20th century, toxic femininity came to be increasingly called out and abandoned by women. They’ve been sorting themselves out for generations now. It’s time for men to step up and do the same.
Even if we look at conditions and ideologies as factors in gendered suicide, the latter are literally culture (what the men killing themselves learned or were taught to believe), and the former are a product of culture. Women and men suffer the same rate of conditions (like poverty, loneliness, bullying, and other factors), so the gendered difference in outcome is coming from how men react to those conditions. Which is a function of male culture. White male culture in particular has become increasingly dysfunctional, having previously been based on supremacy and dominance, on a basis of exploitation of the labor of women and minorities, and a privileged (line-jumping, competition-quashing) access to resources, opportunities, and avenues of success. Greater equality thus makes the cultural assumptions of (especially but not only white) men no longer functional. They need to change. White men need to learn how to navigate society and their own lives and expectations from women, minorities, and other male cultures beyond the U.S. who already learned how to live without advantage. They also need to team up with these groups for common goals rather than hate and fight them.
For example
- Throughout childhood, prioritizing social, emotional, and communication skills and the importance of social bonding and building deep friendships (not only outside the family but even within it) would have a substantial impact on suicide rates, by reducing isolation and increasing cooperative coping.
- Abandoning unrealistic expectations—such as no longer assuming that “because” you are white or a man that you should be getting things like jobs and wealth and respect, and instead realizing these things have to be earned (you have to actually be respectable, competent, and industrious, because you are competing with everyone now).
- And discovering the true enemy, the thing actually suppressing men’s opportunities and advancement—capitalist plutocracy—and finally uniting against that, rather than fake bugbears (whether “women” or “immigrants” or “wokeness,” for example, none of which are actually the things getting in your way).
Which entails realizing that any actual unjust barriers to your earning jobs, wealth, and respect, are not coming from women, but from political decisions you could be doing more about. For instance, “women” are not causing massive societal income disparity or the decline of rural America—our collective political decisions are doing that. MGTOW should stop hating women and make more friends, and join more labor unions and pursue more socialist (hence, cooperative) solutions to the failure-modes of capitalism (as becomes clear from how better off men are in more balanced socialist societies). This will in fact reduce suicide rates both structurally (by reducing its economic causes) and directly (by anchoring men’s satisfaction in action toward something greater than themselves, thereby anchoring them more to living than merely existing, or “pursuing sex”)—as well as generate countless other positive improvements on your life and society as a whole.
Likewise deaths by vehicular accident and misadventure: disparities in these are caused by men making poor decisions more often than women. For example, men speed more, they drink and drive more, and they are more reckless drivers overall. Responsibility is being undervalued by men. Hence in 2004 “male drivers caused 94% of accidents that caused death or bodily harm.” And this was not because men drive more (hours driven between genders differ by less than a third, as do the collisions they cause). Indeed this effect is witnessed across all mortality categories: men make bad decisions. They smoke more. They engage in reckless activities more. They avoid preventive healthcare more. This is a problem with male culture. And it plays a role even in causing excess workplace deaths, from the same excessive recklessness, disregarding safety measures as unmanly or ignoring safety by acting more impulsively. Men need to stop scolding and looking down on the responsible and cautious and start elevating those qualities as definitive of being a good man.
The effect of male culture goes even beyond that. Disparities in combat and policing deaths are caused by men excluding women from combat and policing roles. The same is the case in dangerous industries. Women could be doing more construction work (remember that Thai woman earlier?). Who do you think is making that difficult for them, and neglecting to step-up recruiting and retaining them? Men need to change how they think, if they want to change the outcomes for their lives—and want to actually share the risks of building and maintaining a civilization. This is true also at the other end of the cultural production line: gendering how children are raised also pipelines women away from what we have coded as “male” roles more than would be the case if we treated girls and boys the same.
And tu quoque won’t work here. For women have been the first to point out that female culture has traditionally been just as toxic or dysfunctional as men’s culture still is. Unlike healthy femininity and healthy masculinity, toxic femininity as well as toxic masculinity pressure women toward characters and behaviors that subordinate women to men. For example, “nurturing” is a synonym of “serving” and “homemaker” is a synonym of “servant”; valorizing not being loud or aggressive or risk-taking is valorizing submission; the supposedly feminine virtues of “listening” and “patience” both entail subservience to those who don’t listen and aren’t patient, which are being automatically coded here as what “men” do. But unlike male culture, female culture has been productively self-critical and reconstructive for some fifty plus years. Men seem stuck. Women cannot be blamed for that. They’ve been trying to help men change it.
In short, the Stardusks of the world should be thinking more about culture than biology. They should be thinking how to change their culture to be more functional. And they should be doing this on a basis of actual evidence, not internal mental fantasies, which simply reproduce their myths and biases and thus avoid contact with reality, and thereby avoid productive change. Above all, men should be doing all this collaboratively with women, with critical engagement, rather than sinking into a stagnant cycle of malignant hostility and resentment that not only prevents any progress but even makes it all worse. Dialing back your obsession with violence and sex, and dialing up more meaningful aims and values, would be a good start.
So, What Then?
I will get asked at this point what “healthy” femininity and masculinity are. But I find this tends to be framed as what “should” men and women do, what makes someone a “better” man or woman apart from simply being a better human being. And that is precisely the problem. Modern genders, all of which were invented by imperialist empires, tend to serve this false notion that you should be a “better” man and a “better” woman, in some fashion apart from just being a better human being. And this has always been in aid of serving male dominance and the values of hierarchical imperialism: women must serve men, and men must serve the state, and success is a function of how much power you have in the system, to which everyone must defer—rather than a function of how happy or fulfilled you are. As Brit Marling observed, “It’s difficult for us to imagine femininity itself—empathy, vulnerability, listening—as strong.” Why is that?
As such, modern genders are the broken ideas of dead or dying empires. If you honestly go questing for what a real man is, or what a real woman is, you’ll find six (possibly uncomfortable) truths waiting for you at the end of that rainbow:
- The linking of dominance-subordination characteristics to gender is what is toxic. The very notion that women are supposed to be soft, patient, quiet, demure, nurturing, prettied-up homemakers is the very attitude designed to subordinate them to men, who alone are allowed to be hard, impulsive, loud, aggressive, rational, rough-and-tumble warrior-providers. The very dichotomy itself is bullshit.
- At the level of values and character, being a “real man” or a “real woman” really just ends up being an excellent human being, undifferentiated by sex or gender in values and character. Both sexes should be courageous, responsible, reliable, cooperative, caring, passionate, confident, ambitious, and rational.
- What remains is, alas, literally just an aesthetic. Man or woman, you can be demure or loud, patient or impulsive, stoic or emotional, into kids or not, even prettied-up or rough-and-tumble (or either as the mood or occasion suits). Personality is, like everything else, bell curved and overlapping, with sex differences too small to stereotype. Sex thus has no consistent connection to these things. And gender has no inevitable connection to them, either, because gender is arbitrary—mere culture, not biology.
- Beyond those arbitrary cultural assignments of personality to gender that have no real connection to one’s sex, sounding or looking or vibing masculine or feminine really is just a style choice. Whether men wear skirts or dresses or make-up or braid their hair, whether women don’t do hair or makeup, or wear tuxedos or bowties, or chaps and cowboy hats, or whatever, is no more meaningful (and no more connected to one’s value or character) than whether one effects a goth style or a preppy style or a new wave or biker style, or whether one is a trekkie or a hippie or a furry or a punk or a sportsballer or a monk.
- Therefore we ought to decouple both the fundamental human qualities of character and arbitrary style attributes from gender and sex. At most gender can survive as a style (someone can thus be more or less masculine or feminine, or fluid or nonbinary, in presentation—from clothes to body language, even styles of voice and speech). But until men (and women) stop denigrating, subordinating, and emotionally or even physically bullying other men unless they conform to “the style,” masculinity will forever remain fundamentally toxic, as destructive and lethal to men as to everyone else around them.
- Femininity has already gotten here. Apart from conservatives struggling desperately to turn back the clock, and the unenlightened still confused about the direction of civilization, a growing plurality of women in free democracies no longer denigrate, subordinate, or emotionally or even physically bully other women for not conforming to “the style.” Femininity is a choice, not a destiny. Women can effect any style they want; their variations in personality are recognized as human and not some failure or success at being a woman; and actual failure or success at being a woman is literally no different than failure or success at being a human being. Men need to get to the same place.
Our civilization is far from accepting these six truths—even among women, although progress there is large enough to be quite visible now, and moving apace. But men are not catching up. Men still socially punish men (and even themselves) for not conforming to what is, in the end, just an aesthetic in no way defining of one’s character or value to society. Women have almost escaped this. Tradwives still trying to browbeat other women back into the fold are increasingly a societal joke now, and not taken seriously by most women. Men need to get to that same place: laughing at tradmen bullying everyone into an aesthetic they have confused for character—instead of stumping for or submitting to them. Be courageous and strong not because that’s being a man—be courageous and strong because that’s being an excellent person. The fickle and weak are no less men. They are, rather, just ordinary people.
There are many ways to explore what “healthy masculinity” looks like (example, example, example, example). But in the end, really, it’s just being a good human being. As Alice Cappelle warns, one should not confuse the aesthetic policing of men with the pursuit of better values in men. Certainly the former has to stop (and many women are responsible for perpetuating it, so they need to change, too). But the latter is the more pressing goal. Toxic masculinity is any concept of a man that hurts people (the men themselves, and people around them). Healthy masculinity is any concept of a man that helps people (the men themselves, and people around them)—helps them be better selves, have better lives, and enjoy better company. Decoupling aesthetics (looks, clothes, body language) from values and character is an essential first step.
Back to the Video
Illustrating all my points so far, Stardusk starts right off saying several dumb things like “a man in uniform is not necessarily rich but he is a man who, by the very definition of his trade, is committed to inflicting violence upon the world,” and that’s why women swoon at men in uniform (circa minute 2). I think firefighters, marching bands, airline pilots, cruise ship captains, and postal workers would disagree. So would men with a fetish for women in the uniform of a schoolgirl or maid—or indeed, soldier or police officer. Clearly there is no factual correlation between the aesthetic effect of “a uniform” and any propensity or assumption of violence. Of course, not all women are into the uniform thing anyway; while plenty of men are. I’ll bet even Stardusk gets emotionally excited by the sight of a man in a snazzy uniform—I don’t mean sexually, but simply because uniforms are deliberately designed to have that aesthetic effect. Which is why recruiters attract men with posters of Marines in full dress uniform (a uniform relatively encumbering and useless for combat). It looks awesome. Because it was made to.
This illustrates Stardusk’s armchair methodology: he doesn’t even query whether the things he wants to say match reality. Are uniforms solely associated with violence? Is it that association and not simply their artistic design that people react to? He has this idea that centers violence as the pinnacle of human supremacy, and interprets everything through that lens, without testing his hypotheses even for their coherence much less empirical merit. What else might uniforms (particularly the most affecting uniforms) be associated with that impacts people’s sexual and nonsexual attraction to them? For example, might it really be the communication of discipline, reliability, and professionalism?
By contrast, when I think about these things, I immediately observe facts in the world contrary to Stardusk’s thesis without even doing any research (do we really think stewardesses are violent?). And when I do the research, the results look closer to what I thought than Stardusk thinks. For example, try “why are women attracted to men in uniform” in Google Scholar and see what you get. You might find (as I did) that it draws too many unrelated hits (too many articles using the word “uniform” in a completely different sense); so to force a fit with purpose I put “men in uniform” in quote marks to force Google Scholar to select articles with that exact phrase (and to be complete one should then also run a search there for “man in uniform”).
Here is what you get. The results might differ for you, as cookies and time will change them, but as some examples:
- Topping my results was a peer-reviewed study in Fashion Theory by Jennifer Craik, “The Cultural Politics of the Uniform,” which is behind a pay wall, and not available on my JPASS or GALE accounts, but with some clever search stringing I could reconstruct its general points, which confirm mine. Craik has in fact written up quite a few studies of uniforms and their culture and aesthetics, continuing this trend.
- Very high on the list was an amusing study in the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis (which I am delighted to learn exists) by Gwenith Blount-Nuss, Kelly Leach Cate, and Heidi Lattimer, “G.I. Average Joe: The Clothes do Not Necessarily Make the Man,” which found “that there is not enough evidence to say conclusively whether females prefer men in military dress versus casual attire” anyway. It appears to be an idiosyncratic affectation that men over-remember, a form of availability bias. But their survey of past research (and the discrepancies in their own results) further confirms the findings of Craik: any effect uniforms do have is not likely a product of their association with violence.
- Most hits were still irrelevant but the next most pertinent was a rather enlightening chapter by Alexander Maxwell in Patriots Against Fashion: Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions, titled “The Discovery of the Uniform,” which traces the very idea of “a uniform” to the 18th century, and explores the actual stated reasons for introducing the concept. It is notable that “uniforms” arrived so late in human history, which cancels any possibility of their being linked to biological determinism. But history has a lot to say about the reasons for using them and the aesthetics of their construction that supports Craik over Stardusk.
With the target phrase in the singular I also found a great article studying the historical reasons men gave for liking uniforms and designing them the way they did: Philip Hoare, “I Love a Man in a Uniform: The Dandy Esprit de Corps,” also in Fashion Theory (which I could access and read from home with my local public library GALE account, which provides access to all issues between 2003 and one year ago). Which gives a completely different account than Stardusk imagines, and aligns with the findings of Craik et al.
This Is Why We Are Supposed to Study History
The lesson here, besides basic matters of method (like how to check facts, the need to do so, or how to critically evaluate your results), is that we cannot just make shit up from the armchair. If you have theories or questions about history, you need to actually study history—either directly (as a historian) or indirectly (reading the actual findings of real historians). My first peer reviewed article was on this crucial social role of the historian (and thus of history) for the public. And I am (if you hadn’t known) an actual historian. But my skills are only transferable in basics; I still need to rely on specialists outside my own fields. So I know to check what, for example, fashion historians and sociologists have published about “uniforms” and their aesthetic origins, functions, and impact. I also know how to critically evaluate it—but so should anyone.
For my best tutorials on that last point see:
- On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus
- Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony
- The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History
- Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus
- Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases
- A Vital Primer on Media Literacy
I make this point because Stardusk then commits an even more serious mistake in his invention of a history of labor that does not track anything in reality. Starting at minute 2:22 he claims that “civilization” led to “currency” (fiduciary trade) and “modernizing technology” which “began to dissolve” the “protector-provider role” for men. As usual, he cites no evidence at all for this account of history. And the obvious facts of history do not support it. Trade predates currency by eons; as do strength-multiplying technologies.
The invention of civilization is less important here than the correlated invention of land ownership. Long before that the principal driver of marriage was access to political resources—early marriages were marriages of families. Likely from its inception and for tens of thousands of years, marriage appears to have been arranged and familial, not simply a choice of either partner, and more serving the combination of the resources of entire extended families and not merely the combination of the resources of the couple, and was thus less about sex (the ethnographic record is replete with instantiations of non-monogamous marriage). That remained the case for most of human history. But when property became central to that equation (with land and other forms of accumulated wealth), inheritance became the central question, which led to a drive to declare wombs and hence women to be property, leading to patriarchal culture. Men then needed to control women, in order to control their children, in order to control land and wealth.
The outcome, upon the rise of civilization and thousands of years after, was that men remained dominant and populated all protective services (military and police) and all top-earning professions—because they forced it to be that way. Women were typically banned from leadership and most leading avenues of trade and commercial success; even prostitutes were subordinated by laws to a lower class status with fewer rights. None of this was biological determinism; it was all male fascism. And there is a uniform rule in history that helps you detect this fact:
- You don’t have to legislate biology.
If men are “naturally” the providers and women the homemakers, you would never have to force them to be by passing and enforcing laws and customs compelling adherence to these roles. This is thus evidence against Stardusk’s entire thesis. Indeed, twice over: first, the need of arbitrary compulsion refutes any possibility of biological determinism; second, there was no resulting decline in Stardusk’s imagined roles for men and women, but exactly the opposite: this is when those roles were invented as we know them. Which is the opposite of their decline. We actually here see instead their rise.
It is also not true that violence became “less and less” important (circa minute 2:40). Civilization actually amped up the human scale and dependence on violence. It forced the entire model of land and naval warfare for the expansion and maintenance of civilization, and other forms of societal violence, such as slavery. Prior to this, human societies were generally more peaceful, and wars and inter-tribal conflict rare and small in scale. Most human food production was not procured by violence. Gathering was central, hunting supplemental—and even that entailed pursuing comparatively helpless prey, not grappling with bears. Farming (beginning with horticulture) and husbandry (herding) had already supplanted the majority of the supply chain before civilization arose to control the land and herds that agro-husbandry then made central to the economy. The response to this was not a decline in demand for male violence, but a horrific rise in demand for male violence. In no way can humans have been biologically evolved for this outcome because all our biological evolution preceded this strange development. Human recourse to violent systems of oppression in reaction to farming was a failure-mode—a dysfunctional response to an unfamiliar circumstance we hadn’t evolved to cope with (at all, much less well).
It is thus notable that the history of progress since then is really a measure of our gradual calming back down. It took thousands of years to make visible progress in getting this toxic recourse to violence—this literal culture of violence—to fade back into something far healthier and productive (both economically and psychologically). We are better off now that we are less violent, approaching our prior evolved state of being (a rare instance of that being a good thing). And yet we are still centuries away from “cured,” as local and global human violence remains rampant, even if much less so than once was (statistically, per capita). Thus, Stardusk has gotten history all wrong, and in more ways than one. “Civilization” did not downgrade the economic value of violence; it had exactly the opposite effect. And that upgrading of its value was not a good development but a rather awful one that did humanity no favors.
Stardusk’s narrative is that a decline in the market value for violence has unnaturally allowed “beta males” to gain more access to women than “should” be the case. But history does not track with his narrative. Nor does the science. There is no such thing as alpha and beta males in the sense he means. That was scientifically debunked ages ago (indeed by the very same scientist who erroneously proposed the idea). The science has since found very different realities, undermining the entire concept, especially in humans (example, example, example). I discuss this (and the science) more in my articles on Glover and Peterson. Even where the phenomenon exists, it evinces different results than the naive model embraced by the manosphere.
For example, in a primate study of Katharine Jack and Linda Fedigan, one species of capuchin monkey shows reproductive advantages for alpha male status within the dominated group, but beta males still get mates (just less often), and can even emigrate and become alphas in other groups. And yet there is no relevant correlation between capuchin and human biology and social organization, or indeed among primates generally. For example, capuchin sexual dimorphism is far more extreme than human (with around a thirty percentile difference in size, for example, compared to the human ten), and therefore its biology is uninformative for humans. And as Jack and Fedigan observe in their survey, “the correlation between male dominance and reproductive success is less than straightforward” in primate studies generally, “with results ranging from no correlation to a significant positive or negative correlation depending on the species, seasonality, and/or housing conditions.” So, there’s nothing to learn here about people.
In reality, through all human history, smart men and sociable men have had marketable selection traits, too, and thus competed with “large” men or dominant men. This is illustrated by the fact that even rape is not adaptive, and that has nothing to do with the biologically evolved preferences of women anyway (to the contrary, it defies them). And yet any “male dominance” advantage in mating has tended to be coercive. Land-owning civilization has tended to limit women in choosing whom they can have sex with, rather than respecting any biologically innate choice they may have had. Women’s liberation in mate selection is relatively new for civilization now—and another rare case of an improving return to how things most likely used to be.
And yet, either way, there is no evidence that a man of smaller build who is simply a reliable partner (responsible and intelligent and prosocial) was ever “denied” access to mates. Which should be biologically obvious: that’s why those kinds of men still abundantly exist. There is no evidence even that women as a whole have ever preferred large dominating men as mates over average men who were merely reliable. This should also be biologically obvious: that’s why almost all of the sexual dimorphism between male-sexed and female-sexed bodies is so small (at mere ten percentiles). On average women clearly prefer men who aren’t maxing the bell curve, but who are, in fact, closer to women: men who are just a little larger and more domineering than the average for women, not overly so. Conversely, quite enough men clearly like larger and domineering women to keep them around as well—hence the bell-curve overlap still produces quite a lot of them.
This is why it matters that the trend in hominins (of which we are the last surviving species) has been a steady reduction of sexual dimorphism, which reached current levels before civilization arose. Which means women’s preferences for less dimorphic men have been driving this reduction for millions of years. It therefore cannot have suddenly changed when civilization arose. And therefore nothing Stardusk is arguing is even possible. This holds even given the fact that decreased dimorphism was partly in response to women’s bodies needing to be larger to survive more births owing to the increased brain size that comes with increased intelligence: women still developed a preference for men closer to their size, and thus men were not selected to be yet larger (like, for example, gorillas). Moreover, the decline in dimorphism ranges well across mere stature, including even such things as emotionality. On every metric, men and women have been evolving to be more like each other. They have also developed to provide a considerable overlap in distributed traits, including strength (examples, examples, examples).
Conclusion
Stardusk is obsessed with strength because he is obsessed with violence, which he (ominously) connects to sex (this is not a profile to be proud of). Which produces his misogynistic thesis that women are dysfunctionally and incorrectly mating with “beta males” now because their soulless mercenary hearts no longer attract them to “alpha males” except for illicit sex, when they cheat on the betas they are only luring with sex to steal their resources. All of which is built on totalizing fallacies contrary to all evidence (all women are one way, all men are another way, men and women only contribute one thing, and so on), as well as on a completely made-up and provably false understanding of human history and ethnography, and a complete disregard of what relationships even are. He sees women as having no use than for sex and therefore as exploiters of men’s labor rather than contributing substantial labor to the households they join, contrafactual notions I will demonstrate and explore in Part 2. Above all, his methods are garbage. No quality research. No self-questioning. No falsification tests. No critical source analysis. No competence at logic.
One thing Stardusk claims is true: strength (the one substantial advantage men are more often born with) has less value as a resource in a modern society. But only someone like him finds this as grounds for panic, rather than relief. This is a good thing. We shouldn’t be wingeing about it. We should be eagerly adapting to it. To be civilized literally means to prioritize the intellectual over the physical. You needn’t abandon the physical, and it will always be of use. But you will do more with the intellectual. Compassion, reliability, competence, ingenuity, wisdom, passion, sociability, determination. These are more valuable now, both for your own welfare and for finding love (and, yes, even sex). So get on that. Whereas embracing totalizing and counterfactual worldviews of abject hate will sink you. Get out of there. Stat.
What I have covered so far backgrounds everything I will discuss next, where in Part 2 I provide a complete fisk of Stardusk’s Thinking-Ape video.
As I was reading this I couldn’t help thinking about “cultural appropriation”. Here, it seems to me, for some people, culture isn’t really thought of as being arbitrary, but as something much more fundamental (at times even seemingly biological). Fashioning oneself in a similar way to some cultural appearances then might earn one scorn and criticism. Of course the topic is much more nuanced and complex than I’ve elaborated here, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about cultural appropriation in connection to what you’ve said about culture in Part 1.
I have an article on cultural appropriation (Atheist Dudebros Don’t Know What Cultural Appropriation Is). It should not be confused with cultural diffusion.
Part of the problem is that real academics and activists often get ignored while ignorant amateurs misuse an important concept to death. “Cultural appropriation” is one of those terms, where even some allies misuse it to mean things it doesn’t, which actually harms their own cause by straw-manning themselves; while enemies almost always misuse it to mean things it doesn’t, to the same result.
Jennifer Craik, “The Cultural Politics of the Uniform,” https://sci-hub.se/10.2752/136270403778052140
Thank you. And good opportunity to remind critical thinkers of that website (Sci-Hub, “to open science”). It gets hunted down a lot but as long as it stays up, it makes science available to the people.
That picture reminded me of an old joke.
Why did cavemen drag women around by their hair?
Because if they dragged them by their feet they would fill up with dirt.
One has to wonder where anyone even gets the idea in the first place that cavemen dragged women at all (much less “by the hair”).
I suspect there is some modern Western misogynistic history behind that joke, of which I’m happily ignorant.
It was a comic-panel trope, intentionally absurd, easily drawn, to be comically subverted: “have you been clubbing other women?”
Hey RIchard, thanks LOADS FOR WRITING THIS ARTICLE. However, as somebody who has been MGTOW from 2012 to 2018 (or 19) I do have minor issues with the characterization of MGTOW. For example, a lot of these men may have a lot of anger and resentment towards women (and not hate per say), so I would be careful in using “hate” and “MGTOW” together. Are there MGTOWs who hate women, I bet, but anger and resentment are another type of heated emotion that can be the root and fuel instead of hatred. Also I feel the need to point this out is that a lot of these men are also people who have been tremendously hurt and harmed by the opposite sex which then triggered a domino effect leading them to be the way they are combined with falling into confirmation bias. AS a result we despite criticizing their ideas and teachings should nevertheless not lose our empathy/compassion for such men. The same goes for women who have gone through the same and now want men to cease from existing. I am not saying you are devoid of empathy and compassion, but its just something I geniunely felt like getting off my chest and sharing.
Plus there are also MGTOWs who don’t susbscribe to EvoPsyche as well, John the OTher along withe RazarBladeKandy and TheIGnoredGender. Also I don’t know where you got that women are to be blamed for mens’ disposability in the MGTOW narrative? As some one who has been in the sphere for a long time (which I wish never happened….) its really nature that is blamed for it not women. The argument used in the Manosphere (not just MGTOW) is that women are basically born with inherent value due to carrying the cradle of life whereas men are not born with any value.
Alas, anger and resentment at a person or a group is hate. This is an uncomfortable truth.
And reacting to a bad person by maligning and resenting an entire group you perceive them to be a part of is the foundation of most bigotry (and the rest is founded on imagined bad people, which is no different, just even less in contact with reality).
And yes, women who act this way are also haters and bigots. But there aren’t anywhere near as many such people, nor do they have anywhere near such a scale of organization, influence, and propaganda machinery. There is no feminazisphere. There are almost no femininazis. And they have no influence or impact. But the manosphere is millions strong and a major societal problem. We cannot dismiss that with fallacies of false equivalence. This is why tu quoque fallacies won’t work here, just as I noted.
Bigots who form and promote ideologies of hate are not sympathetic. And until they realize this themselves, they will not become admirable, nor anyone we can help. Generally, people deconvert from toxic ideologies only when forcing cognitive dissonance upon them triggers them to try and disprove their critics and fail. Hence tough love is their only way out. They are the ones who have to dissassociate their personal traumas from the false conclusions they draw from them. Then we can sympathize with their real injuries, because then and only then will they have become sympathetic.
In the meantime, the real things worth caring about, we are already caring about and working to help with. I provide numerous links demonstrating this. It is these ideologues who refuse to help us, or even help at all, but instead attack and denigrate and belittle us and out every effort. Drowning men, beating off their rescuers.
As for the logic of the ideology: blaming nature is blaming women. As this very video says: women are too arrogant to recognize their alleged folly and are therefore responsible for it and to be blamed and even shunned for it. The entire construction of bigotry operates this way: as an example “black people are violent by nature” is blaming black people. It is racist. It is hatred. It simply rationalizes that blame, racism, and hatred, making it sound sophisticated or scientific. The same thing is happening with women as the target here. These videos drip with loathing and disdain, not sympathy or any real effort to help.
This is evident even from the MGTOW construction of “men as the disposable sex.” In objective biological terms, men and women are the disposable sex, because they are built to be worn out and eventually killed by diverging trends in their respective functions. What MGTOW mean is that women dispose of men (not nature), that it is women who are doing this and responsible for it and refusing to acknowledge it and this is why women are to be hated and shunned. There is no fact here (women are no more disposing of men than men of women, and men have as much value as anyone else: we all produce, labor, befriend, parent, care, and so on). So there is nothing for women to be blamed for refusing to acknowledge. It is MGTOW who are to be blamed for refusing to acknowledge reality.
These are hard truths. I acknowledge that. But truth must prevail. We cannot coddle the delusional. We must rattle them out of their slumber.
Thanks for the response. I do want to comment on the following, “Generally, people deconvert from toxic ideologies only when forcing cognitive dissonance upon them triggers them to try and disprove their critics and fail.”
I guess I could be the exception here, since for me this tough love would just make it worse and all I needed was time to slowly weasle out of this cage. No tough love was required in my case, I just needed time. I would like to see evidence for the whole forcing of cognitive dissonance is what eventually gets people out of toxic ideologies. I find this finding quite interesting and would love to go deeper. Maybe this is what happened to me?
I mean I am all for debunking toxic ideologies (since they are unhealthy for every one including those who hold onto these), I just am not a fan of shaming any one and I have come across people online who shame MGTOWs and Incels which I genounely find dismissive and callous and therefore counterproductive, its like ripping a wound wider than it is. Anyways the last paragraph was just a bit of rant on my part lol.
I also think what happens is some event happens or a series of events happen and the next thing you know it you come across a video or two at least that reasonates…which then spirals you into a rabbit hole with various countless other videos and content materials.
It’s not clear how the Oxford comma marks a person as morally and intellectually superior. But I guess I would say that, since I think of a comma as the written code for “pause or and or end of clause,” in speaking.
Didn’t finish this one, largely because Stardusk’s errors struck me as so elementary there wasn’t much to be gained by error analysis. But skipping through I noticed a phrase about how male culture needed to be changed. At a guess, this is just a little bit sloppy phrasing. Women may not get the credit, but they are by and large in the long run equal co-creators of any particular culture. (My understanding of “culture” is not a set of ideas, but a specific way of life.) If you insist on expressing this in individual agent terms (in speaking of a collective phenomenon like culture?) you might say, the son’s toxic masculinity is the mother’s deadliest weapon.
If you had read the article, you would notice at several points I discuss women’s role in perpetrating male culture (through both peer pressure and parenting), and that it is changing apace (women are more widely aware of this and starting to do things about it), whereas men’s culture remains largely stuck (especially in the manosphere), or indeed even resisting every effort to help them (descriptive of the manosphere itself).
Culture is an entire set of learned behaviors that are treated as or even believed to be normal or even normative. Culture is always a fully integrated system of habits and beliefs. There is no difference between “set of ideas” and “way of life.”
Toxic masculinity is more learned from men than mothers (science, science, science). Indeed, it is often learned in spite of a mother’s every effort to prevent it. It most typically comes from fathers and male peers and role models. For example, many members of the manosphere learn their ideology from the manosphere, not their parents. And when they come primed by parents, it is often the example of their fathers or men seen as father figures or chosen as male mentors or role models (even fictional men) that transmits male culture.
And above all, it can only really change there: fathers and mentors and peers and (even fictional) role models setting a better example to follow.
Pressure also comes from bullies (or fear of them), most often men, creating a panopticon effect that coerces boys into adopting the toxic masculinity that bullying reinforces. And bullying (any threat of social punishment) comes from not just school but the workplace as well.
The difference is illustrated in my article with a control sample: look at how toxic femininity (female culture) was already identified as a problem in the 1960s and has every decade since become more a calling among women to do something about, and quite a considerable number of women are engaged in active change. This has not happened to male culture. It needs to.
Because that is why we have gigantic influence systems like the manosphere still holding progress back for men, whereas only small efforts to roll female culture back, which is largely ineffectual because more usually laughed at, as represented by the examples of the tradwife movement; or never ideologically defended in the first place but universally condemned, like “meangirl” culture.
Male culture needs to get to the same place as female culture. Both have further to go; but male culture is decades behind.
According to plenty of scientists and philosophers this is not the case. You may have examples among these people giving bad (ideological) arguments supporting the case for a binary classification of sex; I hope you can recognize that there are good (steel man) arguments that you need to address in order to conclude that there are or we need more than 2 sexes to describe what’s going on in nature. The articles I have seen attempting to do this fall short in my opinion.
Note that a binary sex frame for understanding biology does not imply (to me) any argument one way or another for the majority of the discussion you present in these 2 articles.
The semantic problem is that sex has no consistent definition. Is it hormones, chromosomes, or genitals? Is it phenotype or genotype? And what about people who don’t have either XX or XY chromosomes?
Clearly, AIS has a female phenotype (including genitals and hormonal effects) but a male genotype (XY). This does not fit a binary classification; it is a mixed sex, hence called intersex. And people with neither XX nor XY chromosomes don’t fit any binary sex schema for genotype at all, much less phenotype.
There are single X’s, XXY’s, XYY’s; and there are people whose bodies develop into a female regardless of genotype.
The only chromosome necessary for a human is a single X, and therefore the default “sex” is “woman,” so everyone is a “woman” in that sense. But add at least one Y and you get androgens, and that causes changes in the body at puberty that we classify as male—unless you have AIS, when it does the opposite, and you develop changes in the body at puberty that we classify as female.
So there is no reliable way to classify sex in binary terms. Mixed sexes (intersex humans) prevent that.
You can “bite the bullet” and arbitrarily choose genotype over phenotype, and just focus on the presence or absence of the Y chromosome (and reclassify X, XXY, and XYY genotypes as de jure XX or XY), but then you have to abandon everything you actually think of as male and female bodies: disregarding whether a person has an hourglass figure, breasts, vagina, and a female hormone regime from day one (and thus female muscle mass and bone density and every other thing), creating the illogical outcome that a woman with AIS is treated as a man for no intelligible reason.
Or you can “bite the bullet” and arbitrarily choose phenotype over genotype, and get stymied by the fact that some phenotypical women do have Y chromosomes.
In other words, to get a binary result, you have to “pick a lane,” disregarding complex cases, but no lane you pick will work in any practical way, because it won’t correspond to anyone’s popular understanding of what a man or woman is.
This is why science does not accept human sex to be strictly binary. It formally recognizes the intersex condition, where the three definitions of sex (chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical) do not align, producing mixed cases that defy binary assignment.
Do you think that the more aggressive religious push on American culture has played a significant role in stifling improvement of men and if so how significant would you say it is?
Also, while I agree with you completely, as someone who isn’t big on public affairs, what methods would you say we should do to encourage change to the degree that encourages growth?
The problem I see is that you focus on human sexuality rather than in biology, which includes even microbes (for an interesting case may want to check the life cycle of the malaria parasite). I think the relevant questions that must be answered are: what is sex about? and/or why do we observe sex in nature? The answer is ‘reproduction’, and the requirement for sexual reproduction to occur is the fertilization of an egg (female gamete) by sperm (male gamete). That’s it, general principle that applies in every case throughout earth’s history. That basic fact manifests in different ways in sexed organisms, but there’s no third sex or way of sexual reproduction.
So you are choosing to “bite the bullet” and mean only gametes.
Where does that put humans who don’t have gametes? Sounds like a third group to me.
And apparently you don’t think women have vaginas and men penises, or any other anatomical distinction, because you just defined sex in terms that no longer track those properties. Your bullet-bit new definition of sex does not predict who will have what anatomy, or what hormone regime.
If that’s fine with you, then baller. But the other two definitions of sex still exist in science (hormonal and anatomical), and you can’t make those go away by insisting on only talking about the third definition (chromosomal).
This is rather individualist and moralizing. Many, I think most aspects of culture, are not so much deemed normal (which usually implies normative in practice) but instrumental or functional or practical or simply necessary, particularly in regard to the material aspects of the way of life. Very few tend to think of personal automobiles as norms in the sense implied here. Ideas about how your car is your status or independence come after, and they are not uniform. Learning often is treated as synonymous with what is being taught, but life experience in a culture largely centered on personal automobiles implies individuals find their own, differing solutions to their own problems or goals…and these will not even necessarily be deemed normal, much less normative.
Literally this means there is no such thing as a separate “manosphere” (which I don’t know anything about.) And literally it means there are no multicultural areas. And in this context that means there are no separate male and female cultures, just one culture with different gender roles. The notion there are two cultures where women are correctly integrating good ideas while men are incorrectly holding onto bad ideas strikes me as a recapitulation of the evolutionary psychology trope about the different mating strategies of men and women. And worse, this notion rules out the very concept of culture change, inasmuch there is no coherent notion of full integration of habits and beliefs. I’m pretty sure this integration is not typical of individuals, much less a population.
This to my eye looks like saying what people say and what they do are the same thing. That’s not necessarily true of individuals, and it verges on obscurantism to apply this to collectives. You might rephrase this as, “There’s no such thing as ideology.” This is a very extreme claim and really needs much more justification.
As to the existence of a manosphere, it seems to be an internet thing. I’m never sure when internet things are really things. Such things are obviously verbal behaviors but it is never clear when they change anything other than the words.
I’m just following what words actually mean, in science and regular discourse. And culture means what I said it does. Not what you are going on about.
And indeed, that we drive cars is a part of our culture, and is studied by science as a cultural phenomenon.
That male and female cultures differ and diverge is a well established scientific fact (just go and check Google Scholar: countless science on male culture and female culture and how they diverge and how they are separately enculturated).
Indeed, gender is culture (in the very articles you are commenting on I cited my previous articles on this fact if you want to go learn about this; I already discuss it in these two articles, with abundant links to corresponding science).
This should not surprise you; subcultures are normal (there is a culture of academia, a corporate culture, class culture, black culture(s), Irish-American culture, Trekkie culture, Hollywood culture, and so on).
No it doesn’t. That the manosphere (and its culture) exist is extensively documented even in the sciences (I cited several studies in the article you are commenting on here, and its sequel, and I have written on it before: see my discussion in A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis)
Obviously not. That cultures can change is the very thing that disproves any idea that they are biological.
That female culture has enormously changed since 1960 (and for the better) is a thoroughly documented fact, discussed in literally thousands of scientific and sociological studies to date. That male culture hasn’t as much is likewise well documented (I cited numerous scientific and sociological studies of this very fact in this very article and/or its sequel).
That’s a non sequitur. That beliefs underly, motivate, and justify actions and habits and assumptions is a fact independent of what anyone “says.”
First, that’s wildly false (they have literal IRL conferences, meetups, and physical books, and it’s a massive international movement that has even caused numerous mass shootings IRL across the US and Canada; and it has been studied in countless journalistic investigations and scientific studies in printed news and journals for years; there are even college courses on it).
Second, that’s like saying propaganda is just an internet thing. Obviously what people are convinced of via the internet affects what they say and do IRL. So there is no such thing as a massive ideological movement being “just an internet thing.” It is affecting what men believe and how men behave IRL (and not for the better).
Trying again…But first, Stardusk seems to me to be too much of an idiot to bother with, as I’m not being paid.
““Culture is an entire set of learned behaviors that are treated as or even believed to be normal or even normative.” Learned behaviors must include original behaviors created by individuals. How can novel behaviors be normal, much less normative? Given that culture change is universal (claims of unchanging culture are I think guaranteed to be untrue and motivated.,) this is not a trivial objection. Simply describing normal can be difficult, if genuinely empirical. This hidden assumption somehow ignores the (should be!) inescapable fact of variation in humanity. Thus, by default, this definition reduces to ideals, belief, presumably as expressed verbally by some kind of authority (polls even?) rather than actual behaviors. And the invocation of “normative” is even more symptomatic. Behind all this seems to be the stance that ideas cause behavior. I believe ideas come from experience, which means engagement with the world physically and socially, not the other way round. Selecting some norms and defining this as the culture is not a very good approach I think. I think culture is like religion, a word used in the academy (what seems here to be meant by “science.,”) and everyday language because it is ambiguous.
““Culture is always a fully integrated system of habits and beliefs.” As in, there is a human culture? I think that is just as obvious as the proposition that there is a human reproductive strategy. Evolutionary psychology says instead, there is a male mating strategy (which is not actually the same thing as reproductive success by the way, EP is pulling a fast one here in my opinion,) and a female mating strategy. And some claim there is a male culture and a female culture. I have no idea where the notion that a set of norms had to be a coherent system even came from, it flagrantly defies common experience. The declaration all norms are functional is rather Panglossian in my view. Of course you contradict this by arguing strenuously for the indoctrination of boys by their mothers in the correct norms in order to reform male culture. But that implies culture is not fully integrated but a product of conflict!
““There is no difference between ‘set of ideas’ and ‘way of life.’” Back in that first sentence, norms and normative were invoked. Those are sets of ideas but they most certainly do not reflect actual behaviors. The assertion they are is astounding. The only possible reconciliation between the facts and this claim, is that ideas are assumed to determine behaviors—that’s the “way of life”—and therefore it must be true. But again, I don’t believe this.
As to the authority of wikipedia, yes, wikipedia is a good place to start but no contested issues can rely on wikipedia as an authority. Evolutionary psychologists have credentials and journals with peer review and by your standards I think count as science. But I have rejected EP years ago after what no doubt was an insufficient and cursory examination but I did. Still, being so rabid as to have rejected Tooby and Cosmides and Buss et al. you should perhaps be more tolerant of my slowness to accept your references yet.
As to the reality of the manosphere somewhere else, I must accept it. It feels like being told there are Flat Earthers.
That’s a fallacy of affirming the consequent. That all cats are mammals does not mean all mammals are cats.
You can think better than this, surely.
Culture precisely is the assumptions and ideas that have become normed. Original or new ideas are not culture yet. They have to diffuse widely enough to qualify as “culture.”
Both statements are false.
Culture varies ethnographically and even by subgroup. There is no single “human culture.” The closest you can get are cultural memes that result from convergent cultural evolution, but there is no culture that entirely consists of convergent cultural memes nor are convergent cultural memes universal to all cultures.
This is literally Anthro 101. So you really need to get up to speed. I recommend taking some college courses in cultural anthropology.
There is also no such thing as “a human reproductive strategy.” Reproductive strategies in humans are extremely diverse, and influenced (and thus vary) by culture and individual preferences (human traits are bell-curved, not flatlined universals; this is a fundamental point in my articles).
This is explained by actual scientists here.
It does not say that. That’s a myth invented by the manosphere. As actual evolutionary psychologists will explain to you.
No. Not “some.” All. All scientists in the fields of anthropology and sociology and psychology. Literally all of them. Because it is a scientific fact. Not some conjecture. It is extensively documented in thousands of scientific studies and reports.
False. I cited several dozen studies extensively documenting that “common experience” establishes in fact homeostatic variances in culture (behaviors and beliefs) between men and women that are widely shared by men and women. I did not claim universality; not all men adopt the dominant male culture, for example, the problem is that most or a substantial plurality do. This is why, as I also documented, female culture is more diverse and evolving now than male culture, and this has to change because male culture has become dysfunctional. As I explain and document in my articles with numerous studies and statistics.
Please actually read the articles. Your bogus armchair made-up stuff is tedious and not worth anyone’s time reading.
I said the opposite of that.
So, you really do need to read the articles. Because now you are just inventing things I never said. That’s getting old.
Your trying to invent the claim that my cited studies and statistics are “Wikipedia” only exemplifies my point. That suggests you are being evasive and disingenuous and not really interested in engaging on anything resembling “facts.”
Your endorsement of evolutionary psychology is noted. I missed your criticism of Stardusk as behind on the EP literature (and apparently primatology literature too?) Jason Brennan wants epistocracy in politics, are you endorsing epistocracy for posting on the internet?
But on a personal note, your very first link was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
Your link is my reason for denying authority to wikipedia. I didn’t drag in wikipedia, you did.
When you write that culture is fully integrated, then it is entirely reasonable to see that as implying functional. It is entirely unclear what a dysfunction yet fully integrated culture can even mean. Yes at one point you talk about dysfunctional male culture but you’re being inconsistent. I think that’s due to your sloppy use of the word “culture,” which was in fact the—actually rather mild constructive criticism I made!
“Culture precisely is the assumptions and ideas that have become normed. Original or new ideas are not culture yet. They have to diffuse widely enough to qualify as ‘culture.’” Culture is a set of norms, which is a subset of ideas in general, therefore not a way of life as it is really lived. But when I objected that a set of ideas and a way of life are not the same thing, you rejected this simple observation. Make up your mind. I still object that norms/ideas do not cause actual behaviors in the simplistic way implied in this false model. Also, there is a fatal ambiguity in “widely enough,” that leaves this as rather vacuous. Norms can even be minority viewpoints imposed by repressive means. Surely a new norm created by one person can’t count, but what about 2% of a population? Behind this is lurking a notion of norms as functional, the glue of society, the mental essence even.
I expressed disbelief at the notion a set of norms (according to you and wikipedia, “culture”) must be coherent (as you put it, “fully integrated.”) Your response was “I cited several dozen studies extensively documenting that ‘common experience’ establishes in fact homeostatic variances in culture (behaviors and beliefs) between men and women that are widely shared by men and women. I did not claim universality; not all men adopt the dominant male culture, for example, the problem is that most or a substantial plurality do.” The lack of universality is not the criticism, even if your EP studies the evolutionary origin of cultural universals. In fact, my position rather assumes diversity in behavior regardless of norms, which is why a set of norms is not a way of life, despite you. Your position is that norms, which are not even directly observable, much less easily measured, are culture. My criticism of your usage of “culture” is that ideas are not necessarily coherent or fully integrated, which by the way is one reason why culture, norms, ideas cannot be causal in the way your usage persistently implies. I’m not quite sure what “homeostatic variances” might mean? If I did I might even agree, but I cannot read this as the same claim as culture being fully integrated. And I don’t think a way of life can be changed by converting people to a different set of ideas.
As for the general perspective that the journals are not just the current thinking but the correct thinking? I think the peer-reviewed literature can in fact be systematically wrong. You personally defy the large majority of the literature in New Testament studies. I think the peer-reviewed literature in parapsychology is systematically wrong. I think the peer-reviewed literature in EP, despite your adherence, is systematically wrong, despite not having really paid attention to it for decades, especially since Thornhill and Palmer. In history, the so-called Dunning school was the best peer-reviewed literature and still wrong, wrong, wrong about the history of Reconstruction. And in Russian studies, the peer-reviewed literature was actually manipulated by government.
Please stop disingenuous word games. My article is called “Is 90% of Evo-Psych False.”
The converse of 90% is 10%.
You know that. So no more games.
What has any of that to do here?
Where do I cite Jason Brennan? And on what? And does that entail epistocracy?
And where does Jason Brennan advocate epistocracy? And what does that have to do with Stardusk?
I have linked dozens of scientific studies. To then pretend I only cited Wikipedia is dishonest. It’s game playing. Not sincere engagement.
I only linked Wikipedia in this case on the definition of culture. You have not challenged Wikipedia’s accuracy in that. Because I cited several scientific sources corroborating it.
So even on that one issue you lied, by pretending I leaned on Wikipedia, when in fact I backed it up with primary science.
Lying is a bad look on you.
You might want to see to that.
No, it isn’t. There is no logical connection between “he has a coherent worldview that spans every aspect of his life” and “his worldview is entirely functional.” Those properties are decoupled. Coherent and pervasive worldviews can easily be, and often are, dysfunctional.
But integrated doesn’t even mean coherent. Christian fundamentalism is incoherent. Yet fully integrated. That still does not make it functional.
I explain in vast detail in the two articles you are commenting on. I give numerous examples there.
Read the articles.
Stop playing games here.
I said no such thing. So stop playing word games. Any further dishonesty will get you banned here. So you had better quit it.
I said culture consists of behaviors and habits (things we do), not just ideas. Ideas are what underly and justify or rationalize the habits and behaviors. Both are culture: they are fully integrated, a closed-loop.
That “behaviors and habits” are not the same thing as “ideas” therefore has nothing to do with what I actually said.
Yes. Called subcultures. I already covered this.
Ignoring that is again dishonest.
If you keep that up, you will be banned.
You are morally obligated to read what I write in this conversation and not ignore it or change it into something else. If you do not accept that, you have no place here.
Integrated doesn’t mean coherent. Playing word games is not honest engagement. So you better shelve that shit.
Can be does not mean is.
You have a very high burden to meet to establish is. Instead, you just make false statements refuted by every competent source that exists, including my own eyes.
So, you have a lot of self-repair to do. Your position is shit. Your epistemology is shit. And your facts are wrong.
Sort it.
“What has any of that to do here?
Where do I cite Jason Brennan? And on what? And does that entail epistocracy?
And where does Jason Brennan advocate epistocracy? And what does that have to do with Stardusk?”
Answers to direct questions should be given, if only from courtesy. (I’m afraid I don’t really believe these are actually questions, but merely rhetoric. But you have complained I misrepresent you so I will give you the benefit of the doubt, as I may be wrong.) If anyone is reading but hasn’t heard of Brennan or epistocracy, epistocracy is basically the position that voters should have to pass of test of basic knowledge to qualify for a franchise. The “episto-” is from the same root as epistemology.
Taking up the second first, I didn’t say you cite Jason Brennan, I compared your insistence on citing up-to-date academic periodicals as a precondition for disagreement on the usage of the word “culture,” to Jason Brennan. That disposes of the redundant third question, as I didn’t cite him either.
I did not in your eyes contest the wikipedia definition of culture—which was the first link because this authoritative definition is absolutely vital to everything that follows—with citations of current professional academic literature, therefore my “vote” should not count, any more than the vote of any ignorant person should not count in an epistocracy. Yet I very much did contest this definition. A voter excluded for failing the qualifying test in an epistocracy is indeed very much like excluding an opinion even from any charitable reading, except much stricter. That answers the first question and the fourth question as well.
The answer to the fifth question is Brennan’s book, Against Democracy, plus posts that may still be archived at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (I read a lot of stuff from people I don’t find congenial precisely because I don’t know everything, sue me.) But finally correctly, it has nothing to do with Stardusk. I’m afraid I dismissed Stardusk as an idiot too lost in nonsense even to provoke thought (unlike Bleeding Heart Libertarians, but that example proves I may err on the side of charitable reading?)
I do not know what the normative content of the Acheulean hand ax could possibly be, yet I suspect Anthro 101 still speaks of Acheulean “culture.” I do not think norms are ordinarily causal. Historically revolutionary situations are when ideas take the stage as arguments for action.. But these are disintegrated times and their acceptance or denial depends not upon thoughts in individual minds, but on the outcome of rather material struggles.
I do not think there is a separate male culture and female culture. One might speak of male and female subcultures perhaps (which you don’t) but then the problem arises of how or why you should single out these subcultures as opposed to the military subculture or the urban ghetto subculture or the middle class (SES) subculture?
I genuinely do not understand how it is even possible to distinguish “fully integrated” from “coherent.” The rebuttal that people have integrated ideas strikes me as simply false. The little bit of Stardusk to my own eyes was a grand example of how random ideas and norms that conflict are still held by individuals. To me it seems that such fine distinctions are the word games. Norms are enforced, not chosen. They don’t have to be fully integrated, because again, that is a rather Panglossian view of how any society makes everything functional. Or something. But then my objection was that a careless use of the word “culture” was misleading.
You cannot argue that every expert on a subject is wrong and you are right without some extraordinary evidence. But you don’t even have ordinary evidence. You’ve given nothing but plainly false statements and bizarre non sequiturs.
So I can safely conclude you have no honest point to make here.
I’ve extensively disproved your factual every point with extensive evidence. You’ve lost the argument. And that’s that.
Evidence trumps armchair bullshit. That is not epistocracy (which is a belief about who should run governments, not whether conclusions should be based on evidence). If you want to defend an epistemology that rejects all evidence, you have a far larger battle ahead. You’ll lose.
I’ve also caught you repeatedly changing what I said into something else, and using entirely bogus definitions of words you just made up in your head. This signals that you actually don’t want to engage with reality at all. You know you lost on the basis of what I actually said, so you invent fake things I didn’t say to maintain your self-delusion that you didn’t just lose every element of our argument.
Even now, your wildly absurd attempt to claim that it is even difficult to distinguish “fully integrated” with “logically coherent” betrays you have lost and just want to avoid what was even being argued and instead make bullshit semantic arguments backed by literally no convention of the English language.
I outright said I meant by fully integrated that “there is no difference between ‘set of ideas’ and ‘way of life'” because the way of life defining a culture is grounded on a set of beliefs rationalizing it. This does not entail any part of it will be coherent (tons of cultures and worldview rest on logically incoherent systems of beliefs; they believe and act on them anyway, defining “culture”) or functional (tons of cultures and worldviews are dysfunctional).
I was completely clear on this. So you have demonstrated that you just want to make shit up rather than address anything I ever actually said.
Do this one more time, and you are permanently banned.
You have been warned.
Steven:
I have to say that I think you tend toward using motte-and-bailey type arguments where you start with an eminently reasonable premise and then go down wild rabbit holes by extension.
So, yes, of course culture is this lived, organic thing based in experience. No cultural anthropologist would deny that.
However….
1) It’s not just that. Culture occurs in contexts of economic, social and kinship relations. (At this point it’s possible to even just use straight Marxist theory because it’s sufficient to correct this, even though it’s also far afield). People’s lived experiences include their interactions with systems of power. And people are not so uniformly libertarian, heroic and antagonistic to oppression that they always perceive and dismantle systems of power. Instead, they do that sometimes, but also sometimes rationalize those experiences, or route around them. I actually think that a ton of what keeps social systems alive is precisely what you identify: People in flawed situations adapting to it and making the best of it. The most salient example here: Women throughout history have been in deeply hierarchical situations that often were essentially institutionalized sex slavery or domestic servitude, but various norms allowed that to not be so dysfunctional as to utterly destroy society, even a lot of misery continued.
Notice how that means that you can be right, that people can create culture in a highly lived and pragmatic way… that also ends up dovetailing with systems of oppression. You can see this profoundly in social movements for justice. Every social movement I’ve ever been a part of or studied had to make tradeoffs where they had to accept certain social injustices and norms as effectively fixed for the moment in order to be able to make progress. The civil rights movement had to accept that beating de jure segregation was achievable, and that meant targeting specific mechanisms and using specific tools and rhetoric, even though even the most accommodationist civil rights leaders knew (though many admitted they ended up being more optimistic than appropriate) how serious de facto segregation was, that couldn’t ever actually threaten de facto segregation. Whether one agrees with King or X in hindsight (and I get the impression you’d be an X guy), the point is that neither was making a purely idealistic calculus. The feminist movements have emerged over and over again from broader movements for justice that just blithely accepted and even exploited sexist norms, in ways that ended up harming women in the movement. Pragmatism isn’t ever perfect, by its very nature.
2) Obviously we’re not all radical empiricists. It’s not even possible. The cultural toolkit people actually inherit includes highly honed bits of wisdom and adaptation alongside much more poorly-crafted “common sense”, mythologies, “just so” stories, and self-serving concepts.
Just look at the history of folk medicine. Some good ideas combined with some really bad ones. That’s not because these people were stupid. But they didn’t have the intellectual tools to even quantify and track what efficacy was, let alone implement changes. They did the best they could.
3) Biases exist. We don’t have perfectly pragmatic, calculating brains. We frame the world in certain ways and make certain assumptions. In-group biases, hasty generalizations, stereotypes… these are fundamental outcomes of heuristics in our mind.
I can go on, but the point is this. Your general picture of culture is wholly correct. Your bailey is defensible. But the motte, that therefore cultural anthropology is nonsense and we can’t see cultural norms in things like sexism, is nonsense.
“But the motte, that therefore cultural anthropology is nonsense and we can’t see cultural norms in things like sexism, is nonsense.” That’s not my motte. And since I took many of my ideas from “cultural anthropology” I don’t think that entire field is nonsense.* The wikipedia definition of culture, which is absolutely vital to the exchange, is vacuous, which is at least a first cousin to nonsense. It’s EP I think really is nonsense (and no, a 10% chance of being worthwhile is not good enough.) On top of that I don’t even know what you mean, much less that I meant it, by “see cultural norms in sexism.” I would say “sexism” is enforcement of cultural norms, and anti-sexism is enforcement of cultural norms, both. Talking about the sense in which both are alike (being norms) clarifies nothing. Which one will end up winning or how it will be compromised or simply replaced with something else will not be determined by persuading individuals to consent, even if each was sincere.
For what it’s worth, so far as I know, some cultural anthropologists do in fact deny culture includes behaviors.* So what you see as my bailey, although I largely agree with your remarks, isn’t necessarily sound, as in, the consensus in the current periodical literature. Which I don’t know or have access to. Above Richard Carrier wrote: I meant by fully integrated that ‘”there is no difference between ‘set of ideas’ and ‘way of life’” because the way of life defining a culture is grounded on a set of beliefs rationalizing it. My bailey actually is, no culture is grounded on a set of beliefs. The rationalizations come after. It’s the norms that are grounded on the way of life. Trying desperately to figure out what “fully integrated” actually means is very hard. “Christian fundamentalism is incoherent. Yet fully integrated.” This one-ness is why there are so many denominations? Maybe the argument is that there is one causal chain, from norms (set of ideas) to way of life (actual behaviors) and this causal arrow is fully explanatory? I don’t know, that’s the criticism, this usage is confusing and implies erroneous misunderstandings. My motte is that this confusion is real, not a falsification of Richard Carrier, and that none of the rebuttals have acknowledged the issues of causality, even though I thought this was highlighted from the beginning.
*Anthropologists that I have read is largely limited to those who engage the public, thus unacceptable to informed discourse. And it is largely out of date, also unacceptable to those who know. Some of the anthropologists I have read in (can’t claim to have necessarily understood much less absorbed) include Ashley Montagu, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Marshall Sahlins, Fox and Tiger and Desmond Morris in their vogue, the socialists Engels (who is largely Morgan) and Evelyn Reed, some EP oriented types who to be honest I realize I have expunged from my memory out of disdain, Julian Steward, and a great deal of Marvin Harris. Looking in the attic to see if I still had a copy of Dune Messiah yesterday, I noticed Harris’ book Theories of Culture in Post-Modern Times. Re-reading for moments reminded how much my opinion on this was based on my agreement on this point with Harris. On page twenty, Harris wrote “I do not regard the extirpation from culture as a mere definitional foible; rather, it implicates certain fundamental theoretical differences between two ways of framing the anthropological enterprise. In the ideational perspective, the relationship between memes and behavior encrypts a definite paradigmatic commitment, namely that ideas determine behavior.” Memes are used by William Durham, who is one of the anthropologists cited as rejecting the materialist perspective. In 1999, Harris believed that the majority of anthropologists adhered to this perspective, though he was (incorrectly, we are told) hopeful the consensus would change.
Steven, this dishonest and disingenuous reply to Fred is your last post here. You are banned for life. Do not ever comment on my blog again.
We can call this worldview of of Stardusk misgynistic, but I would also argue that its self-sabatogingly misandric as well. Like what benefit can any man (or any woman even for that matter) get when having an unusually nihilistic and pessimistic worldview of intersexual relationships between men and women. I mean you are immensely hurting yourself constantly and continuously engaging in self-sabatoging behavior. Would I be wrong to argue that MGTOWs like Stardusk are doing more potential harm than any manhating feminazi would? Stardusk has been making such videos since 2012 (or 13) and still does, its like dude you are killing yourself internally and you need serious therapy! Go get some help man, I mean it and I don’t mean it in a condescending manner even.
The misandry is feature, not bug.
First of all, right-wing movements are cultic in their behavior. They need their members to be angry, insecure and vicious. If they ever take a breath and calm down, they are vulnerable to deconversion. So attacks on their own number, implicit and explicit, are constant. The victims of this grinding down of their self-esteem will interpret it as
a) “tough love” (e.g. Peterson)
b) necessary drill sergeant-like behavior for them to fight their holy war
c) actually totes from the broader culture (such that you’ll hear them blame women for the shit they themselves said about men)
Second, because these are conservative hierarchy movements, they actually don’t want solidarity of any kind.
The fascist pyramid always shrinks. The victims of it routinely learn that too late. (Lauren Southern just had a nice lesson there).
So shitting even on the in-group serves to force hierarchy-climbing and hierarchy-acknowledging behaviors.
Combine that with the first point and you get the same kind of self-flagellation relieved by self-exaltation that Christianity provides.
Thank you, Fred. It’s always worthwhile pointing out the fascism that underlies these things, and thus who is actually interested in promoting and sustaining them. Cui bono.
Hey thanks for the insights man, I do appreciate it.
Funny how you brought Lauren Southern up. She was this massive white nationalist who then ended up having a kid with a half-Asian man. I swear humans never cease to amaze me.
So, lots of classic manosphere shit here to discuss!
1) Using science (and, more typically, pseudo-science or badly mangled science or speculative cherry-picked science) as a pseudo-intellectual gloss and, much more importantly, as an intellectual distancing tool. Most of these guys who get decently popular know that the really extreme, emotive misogyny of the neo-Nazi or the active rank-and-file incel won’t sell. So what they do is say, “Hypergamy is just a real thing, guys, and it has all these negative effects. I guess making it so that women don’t get to choose their reproductive choices is critical”.
The way to get these guys to pop off and reveal how utterly disingenuous they are is to point out where the science, especially science closer to their ideological side, says anti-male things that they want to get around. They don’t like the social science of rape statistics, but you can find conservative and evopsych approaches that make that rate of rape by men common and firmly establish that it will be men and not women raping and sexually harassing. Even folks like Pinker agree that men are statistically far more criminal and more violent, and indeed claim that that’s natural (contrary to feminists who tend to point out that it’s a result of social power and expectations). But that contradicts manosphere dogma about how badly men are mistreated in the criminal justice system and during custody hearings. And women at present have a higher IQ. I got an alt-righter misogynist on this score. He went from singing Flynn’s praises to condemning his data set in a heartbeat because suddenly he had to defend male superiority instead of white superiority.
The use of scientific, objective, non-emotional rhetoric is both shibbolth and excuse for guys like this. Their goal is to play a shell game and dull the utter banal evil of their actual social proposals and views by introducing it in a seemingly objective way and then painting anyone who points out that their arguments don’t mean that we should violate human rights even if true as triggered emotional libs.
These guys love to bring up Julie Bindel’s joke that men should be segregated into camps until they can be civilized. But their own data and their own policing methodology when applied to racial minorities (and even to women for the kind of sexual “misconduct” they care about, sluttinesss, rather than rape) would justify exactly that. Stardusk says that men are naturally violent rapists? Great, then men should indeed be kept from women and from positions of power, except maybe for a good few who can prove they aren’t the norm. Men should be profiled by cops, security guards and airport personnel.
But, no, contrrary to their personal responsibility lies: When women have a supposedly natural behavior, e.g. hypergamy, both the coercive power of the state and coercive cultural norms can be brought to bear for pragmatic society-preserving reasons. When men have a supposedly natural behavior, [i]by their own admission[/i], e.g. rape and violence, the response is not to police men, but for society to just let them do their thing. Let boys be boys. The only way to square these beliefs is to say, out loud, “I believe that groups with power metaphysically deserve better treatment, despite their lack of merit”.
2) Nature is used in exactly the same way. It’s easy to think these guys are actually falling for the naturalistic fallacy. And some or even many individuals might: The naturalistic fallacy is kind of intuitive if you’re ideologically motivated to believe something.
But if people actually gave a shit about nature, they’d learn what it was and follow it consistently. They don’t. No one actually acts as if nature is the guide, for exactly the reason Richard explains: Nature sucks. It’s perfectly natural that we get killed by tigers and wildfires. And some ghoulish conservatives sometimes even like this idea and say we should let more people die by natural causes for social Darwinist reasons, as if it makes any fucking sense for humans to hamstring the adaptive capacities we have (society and intelligence) so maybe in the future we can have new ones from adaptation I guess?
They use an idealized version of an uncorrupted state of nature to arrive at ideological conclusions, but they don’t actually want to protect nature or study it. Nature is another excuse for bad behavior, deployed selectively. Again, if it’s natural for men to crush skulls, it’s also natural for women to be hypergamous and cheat, and so both are okay, right?
3) While we’re on the topic of hypocrisy, notice how precisely ubiquitous this faux-libertarianism is among these people. If this was really a male idenitty movement, wouldn’t there be the equivalents of Wendy Mcelroys? There are centrist feminists, radical feminists, postmodern feminists and anti-postmodern feminists. Yet the manosphere is overwhelmingly a patchwork of conservative ideologies.
What grounds does Stardusk have to care about people being used disposably? That’s the market, right? Why is it a problem when men are disposable but workers aren’t? Right, he sympathizes with men but not with workers.
When I was engaging with anti-feminists regularly, I would point out that woimen in fact would like to work blue-collar jobs, even hard blue collar jobs, and men drive them off with sexual harassment even above and beyond shitty management. Contrary to their lies, men clearly perceive social value in tough work and want to preserve a monopoly on it. I’d also point out that, you know, we could fund OSHA and indeed liberals and leftists are demanding better work safety.
Suddenly, people complaining about men being disposable are denying that they want to make workplaces safer, even voluntarily. So which is it, guys?
4) Which leads us to their disingenuity they all have.
They don’t give a fuck about discrimination.
Everything they bring up, from supposed inequities in custody and divorce cases to differential treatment in the criminal justice system to men dying in wars, are, as the Alt-Right playbook put it, beating feminists at their own game. “Oppression is bullshit but if it’s not then I’m oppressed”.
They can huff and puff all they want. But the fact that they actually don’t care about any oif these problems and want them as grievances and woobies to let them be personally enraged is made clear by the fact that they never have any proposals, especially non-gendered proposals.
Contrast that with feminists. Conservatives can lie all they want about liberals and leftists being whiners who just want excuses, but feminists opposing the gender wage gap propose a wide variety of solutions, including ones where women lead (e.g. women training each other on better negotiation tactics), approaches where men and women will cooperate (e.g. increasing unionization for both men and women), approaches that are gender-blind (e.g. just generally improve the market and make negotiations fairer for workers), and targeted approaches on gender lines (e.g. bias training, enforcing anti-discrimination laws). Not only do feminists actually propose solutions to problems, showing that the claim that they’re just whining is sheer projection from whiners, but also they propose solutions that aren’t even gendered. I love citing the AAUW at these chuds because the AAUW’s sources are always so reasonable and careful (such that [i]a manospherian even cited one at me once and ate shit for it[/i]) and include such equitable proposals.
5) The use of a biology that you have to legislate.
Conservative ideology in general imagines a nature both so overwhelming that it is inescapable and so fragile that it must be policed by people.
Which is just ancient superstition, dressed up in new clothes.
Again, this is so obviously ideologically motivated contradictory nonsense that it indicates a serious lack of sincerity on display.
Well put.
The ones I sincerely worry about the most are countless young and naive men who fall prey to content creators like Stardusk and geniunely end up believing that society decieved them regarding feminism and women to then later feel an uncontrollable rage than in extreme cases result in societal ramifications that I do not even want to think about. Hence, why its vital for well rounded scholars like Richard here to academically rip and tear these concepts espoused by the manosphere up. Not only do I want the safety of women, but also to save the mental wellbeing of men as well.
Shaikh:
Not only do I worry about them, I know many of them. A good friend got taken down the full alt-right pipeline because he had personal issues in his own life caused by his own personality issues, and fully admitting that was not within his abilities at the time, so anti-feminism sucked him down a fascist rabbit hole. We engaged over and over and it always got personal because it was all his grievances and anger.
I do think that activists need to realize that, to some extent, what we’re doing is effectively collective therapy. This is trying to heal, and some people won’t heal. Unfortunately, medicine isn’t perfect, of any kind.
So this is a numbers game, and it’s one we are winning. It’s easy to look at the strength of a backlash and the way it can entrench certain social forces, but that backlash is active, and requires institutional commitment and cultural commitment, and it eventually fades.
Every century since the Enlightenment, our gender politics have improved. We have no reason to think that the average trend in that regard is going to stop.
It’s worth reiterating that the manosphere does indeed pipeline into white supremacism. See Three Arrows, How to Fall Down the Anti-SJW Rabbit Hole and The Dangerous Subtlety of the Alt-Right Pipeline at the Harvard Political Review (even Wikipedia has an article on this phenomenon). There are numerous scientific studies now.
Generally, even the best debunking will deconvert only a small percentage, so you only start to win (gradually, by compound interest) when they hit market saturation (and have convinced all the men who ever will be convinced). This is why Christianity is now in decline in the developed world: it reached saturation, so deconversion can only slowly subtract from its numbers going forward, until it reaches minimum saturation (and Christianity becomes the purview of only a fringe few who can never be swayed, like the Amish).
This is because once someone is trapped in a delusion, it has already been engineered to make them immune to all reason and evidence, and so they will be. I discuss some of the trap beliefs that do this in A Vital Primer on Media Literacy and The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking. It is identical to fundamentalist Christianity. Or flat earthism. And MAGA. And every other delusion.
Rather, the greatest impact we can have is what’s called prebunking: inoculating targets against the mind-virus. So the widest effect my writing can have is men and boys reading it and thus being on their guard against the tactics and failings of manosphere evangelists, so that they never get trapped in the delusion in the first place. Our primary objective should therefore be to prevent anyone falling for the grift—just as we prevent more and more people falling for Christianity or MAGA or flat earthism and the like.
(In response to your reply to me above) Richard, for someone who complains loud and often (and most of the time justifiably so, IMO) of people missing the point you must realize how good a job you’re doing at that in this case. So a gamete definition of sex implies people not producing gametes constitutes a third sex and nobody in the gamete’s camp realized that? Then you complain on people not checking on things?
Since you avoided commenting on the actual premise, are you saying that the reason for the appearance and sustenance of sex in nature is other than reproduction or reproductive strategies? You may be right, but you need to do what you preach and steel man your arguments.
And one last time, sex entered the scene much much earlier than humans did, so any (good) theory of sex should be able to explain it without reference to humans. Agreed that said theory should apply to humans as well, but not liking the answer is not a good reason to get rid of it. That seems to be all you have to show up to now.
You have to pick a lane. Since there are three different definitions of sex, if you want to semantically define sex as binary, as only two, and outliers as simply “unsexed” (because you are scared by the word “third”), you have to pick one definition, and then accept the consequences.
So, do that.
Pick one of the three definitions. Explain why you are rejecting the other two. And then admit you will accept the consequences of the one you picked. Then watch what happens.
Hazur:
Let’s try a substitution, shall we?
“Life entered the picture far before humans. Therefore, humans must be microscopic and lack consciousness”.
You cannot circularly assume that the organism you’re discussing has the same biological patterns as any other organism even when they’re closely related . That’s literally what makes us notice species in the first place: we find the one thing that makes that bird different from other kinds of birds.
Even with mammalian sex determination, there’s huge variation. I just spent time on Google Scholar and found that everything from sexed differences in average life expectancies to various genetic determinants are immeasurably complicated.
Check out Rosario, V. A. (2009). Quantum sex: Intersex and the molecular deconstruction of sex. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 15(2), 267-284. Also, HJ Hornbeck has a really good breakdown at “Dawkin’s Discontinuous Mind”. Here’s one study he cited:
“However, rules are meant to be broken, and mammalian sex determination is no exception. Around a dozen therian mammals have been described with so-called “bizarre” and “weird” sex-determining systems which deviate from the standard therian mammal XX/XY mechanism. These species, all rodents, have puzzled scientists for nearly 60 years, since Robert Matthey, who characterized a fair share of these atypical systems, analyzed karyotypes of the mole vole Ellobius lutescens, in which the Y chromosome is missing. …
Overall, mammalian species with bizarre sex-determining systems have been poorly studied. Nevertheless, a sizeable body of new literature has appeared since the last comprehensive review on these species, almost 30 years ago. New weird sex-determining systems have been discovered, others have been revised, and our understanding of the ultimate and proximate mechanisms involved in their evolution has grown. In this paper, we attempt to present an updated critical review of the literature published about these species. We deliberately excluded the multiple sex chromosome system of monotremes, which has an independent origin from the rest of mammals, and was reviewed recently, as well as other mammalian species with sex-autosome fusions (e.g., XX/XY1Y2 or X1X1X2X2/X1X2Y systems), as the latter does not involve an alteration of the mechanism of sex determination per se.
Saunders, Paul A., and Frédéric Veyrunes. “Unusual mammalian sex determination systems: a cabinet of curiosities.” Genes 12.11 (2021): 1770.”
So, actually, no, you need to do your homework and check, and see if humans actually do fit into a pattern. It’s not Richard’s duty or anyone else’s duty to argue an a priori case against any species being extraordinary.
The biologists are overwhelmingly rushing to tell people like you that this is an immensely complex, at-best-bimodal, medically-difficult topic of ongoing research. Why would you ever disagree with them? And why do you find it at all reassuring that your deliberate flaunting of the scientific paradigm also happens to dovetail with simplistic, reductionist thinking that lets you preserve comfortable mythology and limit your ambiguity in life? I submit that any rational person should immediately panic when their simplistic binaries are being overwhelmingly obliterated by the evidence, given what we know about our tendency to use simplistic binaries to avoid having to think too hard.
Just FYI, Fred, I don’t believe at this point that Hazur is sincere.
I suspect he is running a motte and bailey game where he wants to establish a trivial premise (there are two literal sexes and indeterminate or mixed outliers, like saying there are only two colors in a black and white movie, because every shade of grey is just a mixture of those two) in order to pivot to a bullshit premise (sex is gender, therefore gender is binary and determined by sex).
Seeing this coming, I haven’t let him get off of even premise one (hence why I keeping asking him to pick one of the three definitions of sex; notice he keeps avoiding that request), and that is clearly stymying is game. I don’t expect he will take seriously anything you wrote, but it is useful support of my point, so thanks for including it. Sincere readers will benefit.
Oh, I don’t think so either, Richard. But my point was to note that the pseudo-intellectual artifice that gets built over bad arguments, basically cargo cult logic, always includes things that sound reasonable but really aren’t. All those disconnects are why the motte isn’t the bailey.
Richard, when I checked next day after sending my comment and didn’t find it I thought you’d simply ignore it, glad to see I was mistaken. Let’s see how it goes with this one.
RC: “Just FYI, Fred, I don’t believe at this point that Hazur is sincere.
I suspect he is running a motte and bailey game where he wants to establish a trivial premise …”. Well, yes, trivial like the earth circles the sun rather than the other way around.
RC: “… in order to pivot to a bullshit premise (sex is gender, therefore gender is binary and determined by sex).” That is a bullshit consideration, same as considering that a binary sex paradigm is incoherent because leads to the conclusion that everyone not producing gametes constitute another sex. That gender is not binary is not something I dispute, nor it follows from considering sex in binary terms.
RC: “Seeing this coming, …”, you saw that wrong.
Frederic, I appreciate the time you took responding and listing several references. You ask: “The biologists are overwhelmingly rushing to tell people like you that this is an immensely complex, at-best-bimodal, medically-difficult topic of ongoing research. Why would you ever disagree with them?” Well, I disagree with some, but agree with others (that happen to disagree with you). I don’t agree that ‘overwhelmingly’ is accurate either (despite appearances; see link to Sokal’s article below).
FC: “why do you find it at all reassuring that your deliberate flaunting of the scientific paradigm also happens to dovetail with simplistic, reductionist thinking that lets you preserve comfortable mythology and limit your ambiguity in life?” I just don’t see a problem with the binary paradigm (for sexual reproduction) explaining our observations. Reproduction in mammals is a complicated affair that may lead to ‘non-canonical’ situations, yet I agree with those that don’t see the need of the multiplication of the sexes that is being pushed around. I see this attitude akin to creationists that when presented with a new transitional fossil go out claiming ‘see, we had one gap and now there are two’.
FC: “I submit that any rational person should immediately panic when their simplistic binaries are being overwhelmingly obliterated by the evidence, given what we know about our tendency to use simplistic binaries to avoid having to think too hard.” I submit that who is and isn’t being rational in this matter is very much in dispute. For instance, Alan Sokal (who would not have been decried as irrational by anybody until not so long ago) has this to say (https://thecritic.co.uk/woke-invades-the-sciences/): “the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.” He, naturally, presents arguments defending this position, which I find rational and compelling. (If it hasn’t been clear, I’m no authority on the matter, but I’m interested on it from a scientific point of view.)
Sokal also writes: “The bottom line is this: It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just. If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world; if that cannot be done, then the cause is not just.” I believe RC has also expressed this type of sentiment, are we simply going to doubt everybody’s sincerity or discuss arguments properly?
Hazur, you just confirmed my every prediction. Thank you. I am uninterested in your game.
As for how sex and gender work, everything I said is correct and you have offered no legitimate alternative, just semantics that have no significance to any fact of the matter.
Hazur:
“I disagree with some” is the hallmark of the crank. Like all people trying to defend a transphobic and irrational worldview, you started with an implication that sex is actually really super simple to understand and the science is unequivocal. That’s the bailey. But the moment anyone points out that, no, that’s not actually true, whether by Richard asking you to commit to the consequences of a single definition (which you repeatedly failed to do) or by me pointing out that your underlying reasoning is hopelessly fallacious with citations to the science, suddenly you have to admit that, yeah, of course science isn’t wholly behind you. You retreat to the motte.
But even the motte isn’t really defensible.
In matter of fact, of course, we’re the ones the science is behind . And not just the anthropology, sociology, history and social science, which is often ignored by people in the physical sciences or who begin with frameworks (ostensibly) based in the physical sciences to their detriment when they want to talk about human affairs (see: evo psych). But the biology too. The overwhelming consensus of all of the sciences is that sex is complex and so is gender, and they are only loosely connected. And so even trying to say that you disagree with some of the science is again exposing an irrational commitment on your part. You can find ideologically-motivated cranks, out-of-date science and bad explainers to back you, the way that HBomberguy caught people doing with the Bill Nye episode on gender when people tried to find Nye being a gender binarist in the past and found bits from Nye’s episode about probability that clearly reduced the complexity of sex determination to a 50/50 and didn’t even mention gender because it was a goddamn kid’s show trying to teach the absolute basics.
And then, once a failure mode of your thought is pointed out to you, you duck and weave to an implicit argument from authority, one that doesn’t even carry any water. Sokal is a math professor. His original hoax wasn’t even that impressive ( https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2018/10/06/this-isnt-incompetence/ ) and really poorly engaged with postmodernism. (And I’m anti-postmodern, but it’s actually kind of embarrassing in retrospect to see people like Chomsky and Albert overhype the hoax). But in any case, he’s eminently not qualified to speak here, either on the biology or the sociology.
I know you find the argument compelling, Hazur. Because you’ve already admitted that you’ll just bin the science you don’t agree with.
And Sokal’s argument sucks . He fails to actually address the point about gender assignation, which is already a strawman because he’s not addressing the arguments in totality, which is that *there is actual intervention done to assign people outside of a binary into the binary *. He’s flatly wrong when he says that the binary is just observed. It’s enforced, by decision and even by medical intervention. https://affirm.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2023/06/01/beyond-the-binary-making-space-for-gender-expansive-health-care/ . He can address that argument if he wants to, but he didn’t. His biases are really, really transparent, and actually always have been.
In any case, though, he still doesn’t line up behind you. He states this: ” Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned”.” He never actually ignores gender the way you are insisting. He cites Carol Hooven, but like most of these citations of supposedly neutral scientists, he ignores who Hooven actually is and implies she just said something and got cancelled: https://www.transgendermap.com/issues/anthropology/carole-hooven/ . Sokal’s axe to grind here is telling, and it’s clearly not motivated by the science.
Which means all of that, all the misrepresentation and incompetence, flew over your head.
All because you needed to cite an authority, any authority.
Despite that authority not being one.
I’m going to harp on this for a bit. I pointed out that all the biologists are telling you one thing, quite consistently. You cite a mathematician in response, while trying to pussyfoot around what being rational means. And Sokal isn’t responsive to anything Richard has said, either. Indeed, Sokal falls into the exact trap Richard pointed out, and he’s apparently not informed or bright enough to get out of it by moving the goalposts the way Dawkins did: He chooses one criterion, in this case gametes, and doesn’t even bother addressing the obvious problem. To quote Hornbeck (who, yes, is not a biologist, but does actually cite the biological literature properly instead of trotting out grievances):
“This view is comically reductionist: it doesn’t matter how large your breasts are or whether you lactate, it doesn’t matter whether you can get an erection or possess a uterus, your sex is 100% determined by whether your gametes are large or small. At this point you’re probably queuing up examples where small gamete producers put in extraordinary investment in their young, which is a waste of time.
‘Hermaphrodites such as earthworms and land snails have testes and ovaries all in the same body at the same time. Snails are capable of exchanging sperm both ways, having first violently fired harpoons into each other.’
See, Dawkins just did your work for you, by giving two examples where gamete size does not determine sex. He straight-up admits his dichotomy doesn’t exist! But he has a way to get out of the box he’s placed himself in”.
So why are you letting politically motivated non-experts decide your beliefs, again?
Richard, don’t despair, this will be my last comment in this thread. I wasn’t going to, but Frederic’s last comment changed my mind.
Frederic, so much wrong with your comment, let aside the attacks. You want to know what I’m committed to, science and fairness for as many as possible, including trans-people of course. The problem is, you want to force me to accept your account of matters while I find your arguments weak. I don’t think trans-people and people in general are well served with an erroneous account of reality, which is, as far, how I see the sex spectrum or more than 2 sex ‘theory’. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to change my mind, I’ve done so on other matters, is just that I find the better arguments in the binary camp. And of course, things like ‘sex assigned at birth’ nonsense doesn’t help. (talking about semantics, Richard)
What about gender, you ask? I have opinions, but find the sex issue more fundamental, I don’t think the gender discussion can be correctly framed based on mistaken concepts of sex. Importantly, I don’t see a binary paradigm as detrimental to trans-people. There’s going to be people misusing that, of course. The same is true of your newly adopted dogma.
To Richard, I find ironic the stance the ‘sex is a spectrum’ camp have adopted in this matter, it reminds me of the attitude Bart Ehrman and the historical Jesus camp takes in relation to the mythicist arguments (I’ve been reading you since the beginning). You may check this peer reviewed paper to see what I mean: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02851-3. I hope you denounce this way to do things now that you are on the other side.
Hazur: None of us have ever said sex is a spectrum.
This illustrates your either delusional or disingenuous engagement here. You fake a position we did not take, and then attack that. To what point? All you have done is avoid our actual arguments and evidence. Evasion is not resolution.
Our position on sex is the position of literally the entire actual field of biology: that it has messy mixed cases and is not neatly divided into a binary outcome. For a logical analogy, there is no “spectrum” between whether a traffic signal is red or green, but there are messy mixed cases (both red and green; and neither). So it is false that traffic lights are “a binary.” There are modes outside the binary. There is still no “spectrum.” This is still true even if we add other permutations, like yellow lights and other colors, and combinations of colors blinking or not; the permutations are still not a spectrum, but a fixed number of discreet outcomes, many of which are mixed outcomes.
This is why it matters that you keep avoiding our request to pick which definition of sex you want. You are avoiding our entire actual point.
Gender, by contrast, is a spectrum, because there is available a fairly continuous degree of femininity or masculinity in any culture; but it, too, has off-axis outcomes (e.g. someone who switches where they are on that spectrum by context, e.g. drag and gender fluid identities) and mixed outcomes (what positions someone on the same place on the spectrum can vary, e.g. someone can be 30/70 masculine for different reasons than someone else at 30/70 masculine, because genders consist of large and arbitrary sets of features, like who wears skirts or makeup and of what kind and when). But to talk about gender is a completely different matter from talking about sex.
Hence you have to choose a lane. Failing to do that commits you to just wasting everyone’s time (including your own) with pointless grievance-marching rather than getting to anything to do with even reality, much less policy.
And as a case in point. You humorously didn’t even read the paper you linked to. It agrees with me. You didn’t even read its abstract!
It says the facts “may reveal less strict sex roles than previously presumed and help with the identification of crime victims” and “forensic anthropologists should also increase their efforts to identify whether individuals have undergone medical procedures intended to change one’s gender due to the current rise in transitioning individuals” are sentences even in the abstract.
The paper itself is not about denying mixed-sex (out-of-binary) outcomes, but about misclassifying a gender spectrum to sex, and thus is all about the importance of distinguishing sex from gender, and argues for specific distinctions only in respect to specific forensic goals; and thus unlike you, it picks a lane, and starts with a genetic definition of sex, and points out that a phenotypical definition won’t always agree with it (not all female sexed skeletons turn out genetically female). Hence Weiss qualifies herself even in her abstract: “skeletal sex differences are in large part biologically” determined, thus not strictly correlative to any biology, acknowledging out-of-binary possibilities. Likewise the very first page of her paper lists specific examples of out-of-binary binary deviations in the medical literature.
Weiss’s point (if you will read the paper) is that with respect to this one specific goal (forensic identification), the genetic definition is most useful, and outliers are rare, yet must still be taken into account, lest forensic examination miss them, e.g. a man with AIS will present with a fully female skeleton, so a genetic test for AIS, from extractable DNA, is still necessary to be certain whether you are looking at someone who would have been classified and treated as male or female in their culture. She also makes the point that anthropologists need to separate sex from gender because it is gender that is on a spectrum, while sex is binary with outliers. And so how someone is treated (whether their society assigned them to men’s roles or women’s) might not be clear from the sexing of the bones, but the DNA status of the bones can be clear—including outlier, and hence out-of-binary, cases like AIS and body modification.
This is exactly everything we have been saying.
Hazur:
Lots of extremely telling moves.
First, “attacks”. What attacks? I didn’t use any name-calling from what I can see. I identified arguments and behavior I found to be disingenuous, and explained why. You clearly have no problem with this: My tone was scarcely different from Sokal’s, and in fact a good deal more reserved. Sokal dismisses entire philosophies and fields based on his experience with one journal and some people he cites to disagree with.
And it’s super precious to use the word “attacks” in this context. Hazur, what people taking your kind of tack don’t seem to get is that this is a topic where you really are treading on thin ice in terms of basic courtesy from the get-go. The entire conversation essentially involves interrogating people’s personal experiences and their own lives and second-guessing them. There’s actually fundamental ethical, social, psychological and scientific problems with doing so to begin with. The moment that anyone points out that what is being discussed is a phenomenological experience and not a biological claim, the conversation should be over. No one, even you, actually cares about the gametes, or the chromosomes, or anything else. If you did, you wouldn’t call anyone by any gender or sex at all until you had a lab report . No one does this because it’s nonsense. So when you’re effectively refusing to do what even Sokal did (an example of you being selective with your sources) and just admit that folks can have whatever gender experience they actually do and you can have no principled objection to it, you’re already fallaciously and erroneously attacking the competence, honesty, intelligence and/or mental capacity of millions of people. I’m glad you did not use overtly transphobic rhetoric, but if you don’t understand why the conversation may seem more heated than, say, a conversation about some detail of mythicism would, then you’re just not engaging with the topic. And in that case, why did you even comment?
Second, it seems as if you just decided to puff up your chest, but the problem is that you yourself conceded that there’s disagreement on this topic from informed people. And you never once articulated why you’ve decided to land where you have. You cited Sokal without even bothering to explain why we should take it seriously. All you said is that you found their arguments compelling. Great. That’s a verbal shrug. I know you found the opposite position compelling, Hazur. I don’t agree. But, unlike you (and, actually, unlike Sokal), I took the time to explain why, including making the kind of distinctions that Richard keeps asking you to make and stick to .
So when you then say that the gender issue can’t be framed based on a flawed understanding of sex, great! No one is doing that. Because no one cares about sex. Sex determination is strictly a medical and biological matter. The social interactions we have are actually wholly divorced from sex. When a firmly AFAB, cis-gender woman who presents even slightly masculine gets harassed or attacked in a bathroom, it’s not because the people in there had some kind of flawed chromosome detector.
But if you actually want to talk about the sex topic, why don’t you? Why is it that you try to arbitrarily pick a definition when you have been shown that, actually, no one definition will actually do, so that people in the field use an array of definitions as needed? Right, because you actually are having the gender conversation. There is absolutely no reason to do so otherwise.
And this is revealed by you citing Sokal. Who pretends that he’s talking about sex but really isn’t. Sokal is huffing about culture war nonsense. He didn’t write some detailed, interesting analysis. Because he couldn’t. It’s not his field. If your goal was to settle the sex question, you’d have cited a scholarly paper on sex determination. But we all know why you couldn’t do that. Because none of them are going to agree with you. Again, even Dawkins could do this better than you have because Dawkins knows enough to engage in the goalpost moving. And you find the “sex is a spectrum” stuff funny, but the Dawkins article that Hornbeck fisked is precisely about how nature is actually continuous and spectral all over the place with no clear lines… until it comes to sex when suddenly magically it is, evidence be damned. So even Dawkins disagrees with your binary thinking… everywhere except the place it counts.
Nature had a recent excellent piece about the challenges of exploring gender in a useful way. I recommend you read that if you decide that the science actually matters to you.
As a clarification, I think Richard’s analogy to traffic lights is excellent. “There is no yellow light!” really is what the transphobes are saying. In virtually all of these cases, from gametes to chromosomes, there’s at least three categories: Male, female and “other”. As Hornbeck keeps pointing out, the very fact that there’s always a third category and yet people want to try to pretend that the third (or further) categories can just be ignored is just classic ambiguity intolerance cherry-picking. It’s invalid to just ignore 1% of the data, let alone much more of the data. It’s not an infinite spectrum, but it’s not binary. I used the phrase bimodal because that’s usually accurate. I just found it intensely funny that in this very conversation there are people for whom it is wholly comfortable to be able to see fuzzy boundaries between species, between taxa, between life and death… and then the sex binary suddenly magically is so utterly clear.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/ is a good breakdown. It’s particularly telling how cells in the body can vary by chromosmes. Microchimerism is apparently quite commonplace. I also read a City Journal article which was really remarkable in that it mostly correctly summarized the science and then made some incredibly silly strawmen while clearly implicitly trying to defend not letting trans women into sports, which is so telling from the simple question, “Would you let a hormonally or chromosomally unique AFAB cis woman into sports?” To which the answer either must be yes, in which case denying trans women is just special pleading, or no, in which case we now actually are creating biological discrimination even against women for no good reason.
And what’s so telling about this conversation is that the anti-trans crowd has to run back and forth between two bailies. If they run toward the scientists, the scientists point out that not only is gender not sex but more importantly that in their field actually properly sexing people is astonishingly complicated. Because for scientists, “Bruh, why are you even bringing up chimeras and Klinefelter, they’re not a majority of cases” is intellectual and practical suicide. The actual jobs that we need biology for need to be attentive to the complex (though, yes, not literally fully continuous) reality on the ground. But then when the anti-trans camp wants to run to the other side, and start whining that we can’t possibly have legislation and social systems that account for all of these tiny biological minorities, the gender camp points out that now we are talking about gender again, and now the binary is especially stupid and unnecessary.
As an example, something I missed the first time: “You conflated “sex as spectrum” with “sex as non-binary” when you said “more than 2 sex ‘theory’”. Even with the scare quotes on the “theory”. Hazur, if you were actually amenable to changing your mind on this front, cursory research would have made you realize that you can only get to a binary at best through highly restrictive definitions that literally can’t capture all human organisms. (The City Journal article tries that by trying to say that it’s a definitional fact that there’s only two sexes. Okay, then some people aren’t in either sex. This doesn’t do anything because reality doesn’t care about your definitions. So if you choose that definition, you still need three boxes: “Male”, “female”, “unsexed”. Which changes nothing). At this point we’re in the realm of scientific meta-theory, and it’s just so telling that the theoretical considerations for how to think about the topic bear so little resemblance to any other theory that is useful and has definitions that were chosen well, all to keep a binary and sweep by fiat everything that doesn’t match under the rug. And lots of supposed Rationalists(TM) seem to be wanting to do that. The reasons aren’t mysterious and we don’t need to pretend they are.