Narcissistic cultural degradation of the masculine

Women are not a finer form of Homo sapien. (III)

This continues the discussion of how careerist feminism operates in our society that began in this post and then in this post. The series continues in the fourth and fifth posts.

Is the Evil Queen from Disney’s iconic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a strong female character? How about Snow White? She gets adopted by seven male adults and, in no time, this teenager has organised said adults the way she wants them. After she marries the Prince, does anyone think she did not arrive, look around, and start organising his household the way she wanted?

Does anyone think that Bette Davis (the first thespian to get ten Academy Award nominations) or Joan Crawford or Mae West did not play strong female characters? Does anyone think Wonder Woman was not a powerful female character?

Would it have occurred to anyone during the “golden age of Hollywood” to have taken an iconic female character and deliberately write them down, deliberately belittle them? Of course not. Yet, in age of self-righteous, narcissistic, careerist feminism, that is exactly what Hollywood has been doing to iconic male characters as part of a broad cultural assault on the masculine.

Gamergate

Gamergate has come to mean very different things to very different people. For many, the key element is various threats, including death threats, to various female journalists. This take, perhaps somewhat retrospectively, epitomises the point that James Lindsay likes to make that your reaction is their action.

For others, Gamergate represents gamers striking back against two things: (1) a very incestuous, even corrupt, games journalism; and (2) the attempt to extend the imperial propriety of careerist feminism to gaming.

Journalist Cathy Young provides a reasonable short history of Gamergate. Ironically, it started as a manifestation of callout culture within “social justice” circles. It was when it became tied up in a wave of critique of “gamer culture” as misogynist that it really took off as a phenomena.

It is useful to remember the principle: if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny.

This wave of critique was a manifestation of a standard technique of all forms of Critical Social Justice activism — call something bigoted until you destroy, control or dominate it. This had very much a feature of feminism — call something sexist or misogynist until you destroy, control or dominate it. This is powerful because, regardless of what level of truth may be involved, it operates as both a status strategy and a social leverage mechanism. It enables the moralising of aggression.

It also epitomised the feminist slogan of “the personal is political” which Critical Social Justice has taken up so that no area of social life is permitted to provide a relief from The Message.¹ Keeping politics — and a particularly preachy, condescending form of politics — out of their hobby was clearly a powerful motivation for many gamers.

Source.

What was striking was the extent of the pushback. Gamers were — by the nature of their hobby — online and connected. The attempted extension of the imperial propriety of a puritanical and controlling feminism to computer games was a direct blow against something they cared about. Moreover, they were used to associating with other people who also cared about it.

Gaming is a high volume, highly competitive business with relatively low entry costs, while there are lots of skilled folk who dream of creating a popular game. So, gaming in general was not an ideal target for a controlling feminist puritanism. Especially as — while it is a notoriously male-dominated cultural area — there are enough female gamers passionate about their hobby to hugely undermine the “it’s computerised misogyny” claims.

If you want more of the details, Cathy Young’s piece is well worth reading, including her takes on its significance:

For journalists, GamerGate should be a cautionary tale about lumping all critics of the left together with extremists, taking the progressive “good guys” at their word, and treating an important story as having no valid “other side.” Such an approach can alienate moderates and promote a dangerous anti-media cynicism about “fake news.” Yet five years later, the media are still sticking to a simplistic and polarizing narrative that stokes the culture wars. Until that changes, it’s #GamerGate forever.

That was written in 2019. As far as the mainstream media has concerned, these patterns have continued, or worsened. They are institutionalised Bourbons — they have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. (Apart, that is, what is very convenient to forget.)

The Luke Skywalker effect

I am, in many ways, a Stars Wars kid. I can remember sitting in a cinema in 1977, listening to the music play as the opening words flowed across the screen and the sound of the Star Destroyer rumbled out of the speakers and thinking “Yes, a film by One of Us”. That is, a film made by a genuine fan of SF.

A film, moreover, that gave us epic characters. Luke Skywalker: young, eager, physically skilled, charmingly gormless. Han Solo: charismatic rogue (who definitely shot first, that’s what charismatic rogues who read the room do). Princess Leia: the epitome of the competent-beyond-her-age young woman making sure the boys don’t get above themselves. Darth Vader: the looming — and yes charismatic — menace. Chewbacca: scary loyal sidekick. Obi-wan Kenobi: wise, world-weary, teacher with intriguing powers. Grand Moff Tarkin: the ruthlessly competent minion that autocrats both want and fear.

A film that was fun, that was embedded in an intriguing universe. A film that understood the need for training, the hero’s journey, building teams. The briefing of the fighters before the attack on the Death Star is a classic example of informing the audience by letting them see the process of getting everyone on the same page.

I loved the first three films: yes The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is the best of them. I was not entirely sold on the Ewoks, but they were fun. Those films were a huge success for very good reasons.

I was less impressed with the prequels. I described The Phantom Menace (1999) as “Star Wars for six year olds”. Lucas should have stuck with the pattern that worked so well for The Empire Strikes Back — get a good director and have good scriptwriters tighten up his story.

When Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, I was actually pleased. Disney, I thought, knew how to tell stories. Rogue One (2016) seemed to be a vindication of that.

When The Force Awakens (2015) came out, I was so happy to have a big screen Star Wars epic film, I just went with it. There were huge problems with the character of Rey, but I wanted to be taken for a ride, and so was: in so many senses.

Looking back, the writing down of the character of Han Solo was a big red flag. In the original trilogy, he grew as a character, as a person. In the first of the sequel trilogy, we were presented with a broken down, ageing failure as husband and father who had decayed to less than what he was when we first met him.

Meanwhile, we had the Mary Sue of a Rey who was just better than the boys as everything, including running the Millennium Falcon. She didn’t need training or experience, she was just naturally awesome because … girl.

Hollywood pretending that women have the same upper body strength as men is pretty pathetic, but never as pathetic as in the light-sabre fight between Rey and the Emo-Teenager Discount Darth Vader aka Kylo Ren. Yes, Ren was wounded, but years of experience and training counted for naught against Rey because … girl.

The Last Jedi (2017) was so much worse. Again, I wanted to like it, but things just niggled at me all the way through, despite my wish to enjoy the ride.

Once I got out of the cinema and began to consider what I had watched I became very angry. The chubby Chinese girl and belittled Black guy side plot was tired agitprop. Snope had been built up as epic villain but was disposed off with ridiculous expedition without any backstory explanation. Admiral Gender Studies was a study in pathetically bad leadership who clearly had no idea of how to build a team yet presented as a righteous authority. Poe Dameron was diminished into Male Initiative Is Bad Because Toxic Masculinity morality-play persona.

Epic military scenes do not work as parables. Parables subordinate story and character to didactic purpose. Epic military scenes really do not work as parables when the didactic purpose itself is so pathetic.

This is all bad enough, but the unforgivable crime against the entire legacy of Star Wars was what was done with Luke Skywalker’s character.

The original Luke Skywalker was a study in epic heroism. Yes, he was genetically advantaged, but he also trained to hone those advantages. He was not only physically brave, he was morally brave. Alone, captive, in the hands of his enemies — having deliberately surrendered to save his friends — he refuses to strike his father down. Alone, he defies the Emperor to his face and suffers terribly for his decision. He earned his capacities and his heroic standing.

What are we presented with in The Last Jedi? A broken and pathetic shadow of his former self. The offhand disposal of Snope has the effect of belittling the characters of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker even further. Their son, nephew and disciple had defected to the Dark Side because of … an explanation that made no character sense at all.

Seriously, the man who had shown that level of moral courage decided to kill his disciple and nephew because he had disturbing visions? It was an insult to the character, to the legacy and to the audience.

The sequel trilogy, particularly The Last Jedi, was a profound insult to legacy. To the legacy of Star Wars and to legacy within Star Wars. Thus was another parable pushed: legacy is pathetic and needs to be abandoned and subverted. The contemporary progressive contempt for all past human striving — it’s so full of male faces don’t you know, and (in the West) white ones — in fictional form.

We were presented with a universe where men fail as mentors and examples and women don’t need such. The later added-in training of Rey in The Rise of Skywalker was a pathetic patch on a deeper story-telling failure.

Any white male was pathetic, a failure, evil, stupid, toxic or some combination of the same. Meanwhile, the protagonist was great because … girl.

This was a vision that is sexist-racist, in a quite deliberate fashion.

The completion of the trilogy in The Rise of Skywalker (2019) had interest only to see how they were going to resolve (or not) all the story-telling holes The Last Jedi had lumbered the trilogy with. Bringing back Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine — easily the best thing in the prequel trilogy — was a sign of desperation, of creative exhaustion.

Each of the films in the sequel trilogy did worse than at the box office than the one before. A very clear statement of a legacy being run down.

But it is not remotely the only case. The writing down, or even out  — a young John Connor being killed off in the last, failing, gasp of Terminator franchise — of iconic male characters has become a recurring pattern. As has the boosting of girl-boss Mary Sue female characters who are a great because … girl.

It would never have occurred to the writers, directors and producers of the golden age of Hollywood to write down, or write out, iconic female characters. Still less to boast of doing so. Yet, in the age of feminisation, and of narcissist careerist feminism, that is precisely what we are getting.

Because Western societies used to be (mildly) patriarchal,² young men and boys who had nothing to do with that history must have their dreams and heroes ripped from them. Why the deliberate anti-male sexism? Because it is careerist feminism, so collective narcissism, so moralised aggression wielded via an imperial propriety. It is intersectional equalitarianism, so driven to put everyone into identity boxes.

The notion of male wisdom — about striving, about making things work — is something the narcissism of careerist feminism naturally seeks to undermine or deny.

The personal-is-political of feminism enables an aggressive, humourless and intolerant propriety to invade all spheres of life, so you cannot get away from it: not in humour, sport, TV, films … The shift among Western viewers, especially younger audiences, to East Asian cultural products — Japanese manga; Japanese, Korean, Chinese films and TV dramas — represents a flight from the tedious and belittling didacticism that has become so much a feature of Anglosphere comics and of the “entertainment” products of its public and private broadcasters.

I have shifted to watching costumed C-dramas (Chinese dramas) not merely because, yes, pretty men in elegant flowing robes, who wear eye-liner and eye-shadow, cry, and beat the crap out of their enemies does it for me.³ (Ladies, you don’t know what you’re missing.) But because C-dramas have a powerful sense of beauty and cultural confidence while these products of a Leninist tyranny — unlike their Anglosphere equivalents — do not push propaganda at you. C-dramas are character-driven, not intersectional morality-plays populated by under-written avatars with pre-set roles.⁴

There is a striking institutional difference between the products of Anglosphere public broadcasters and Hollywood. C-dramas operate under an official censorship regime, but they don’t have commissars embedded in their productions. Those of the Anglosphere do not operate under an explicit official censorship regime, but they do have commissars and inquisitors — sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants, etc. — embedded in the production process that shape output on the basis of bullshit Theory.

The result is that the entertainment products of the Anglosphere now incorporate way more propaganda — what The Critical Drinker calls The Message — than do C-dramas.

If positive images of masculinity are undermined, degraded or excluded, you don’t get no image of masculinity, nor a feminist-subordinated image of such, you get Andrew Tate.

As a recent diagnosis of the decline of Hollywood notes, Hollywood studio execs produce films that are “preachy and lazy”. That has become the burgeoning tendency of the Western managerial class in a nutshell. It is not merely which gametes a particular decision-maker has, but the overall culture.

Source.

The denizens of corporate entertainment don’t respect their audience because Theory tells them not to. They have the arrogance of “we are blank slates so my smarts are all me” which makes them suckers for such Theory.

They don’t do escapism competently because doing so lacks didactic, validating Purpose. It lacks manifest Propriety. They don’t do anything beyond an ersatz creativity because Deconstruction is their default perspective. They despise — and yet colonise — their cultural heritage.

Meanwhile, films suffer ridiculous budget bloat while losing money by driving away the audience they clearly despise. Critical Drinker, in his inimitable style, makes various good points about the bloated-budgets-for-worse-performance patterns of Hollywood films. Dysfunctional incentive structures — which includes the norms and expectations within the relevant networks — produce these outcomes.

Contemporary Hollywood studio execs are serially incompetent while mutually congratulatory. It really is the sharp end of the modern management class.

For Hollywood is a particularly visible and egregious example of a much wider trend of more-resources-for-worse-outcomes managerial bloat. There are plenty of others: such as the homelessness industrial complex on the US West coast.

What other trend does all this coincide with?

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

It is almost as if institutions and organisations that should be formalised teams, focused on outcomes, have become formalised cliques, focused on mutual self-congratulation; using diversity officers, etc., plus online and other mobbing, to keep the game going.

References

Roy F. Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men,  Oxford University Press, 2010.

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2. https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Tim Kaiser, Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, ‘Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset,’ Journal of Personality, 2020, 88, 415–429.

Jessica K. Padgett and Paul F. Tremblay, ‘Gender ­Differences­ in Aggression,’ in The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences (eds. B.J. Carducci, C.S. Nave, A. Fabio, D.H. Saklofske and C. Stough), October 2020, 173-177.

Daphne Patai & Noretta Koertge, Professing feminism: Cautionary tales from the strange world of women's studies, Basic Books/Hachette Book Group, 1994.

Rausch, Z. M., Redden, C., & Geher, G. ‘The value gap: How gender, generation, personality, and politics shape the values of American university students,’ Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, (2023).

Tania Reynolds , Roy F. Baumeister, Jon K. Maner, ‘Competitive reputation manipulation: Women strategically transmit social information about romantic rivals’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018, 195-209.

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34.

Gijsbert Stoet and David C. Geary, ‘The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education,’ Psychological Science, 2018, Vol. 29(4) 581–593.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

1. This extends-to-every-aspect-of-life is an inherent tendency of the Dialectical Faith of progressivism. A faith formulated by Marx, particularly in his early writings, such as the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marxism represents the first set of inferences, by Marx himself, from that Dialectical Faith. Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) is not Marxism in the usual meaning of the term, but its core is profoundly Marxian. It is the latest in a series of spin-off iterations of the Dialectical Faith, as is very clear if you read foundational documents and follow the intellectual history.

2. Medieval and early modern Christendom was much less patriarchal than Islam, Brahmin or Confucian civilisation: the comparatively elevated status of women in Christian societies was something that Muslim observers regularly commented on. It is precisely because it was much less patriarchal that the West generated the women’s movement.

3. In the xianxia (high fantasy) genre, I can recommend Love Between Fairy And Devil, Ashes of Love and, if you think great aesthetics and chemistry between the stars can make up for the odd plot hole, Till The End of the Moon. In the wuxia (martial arts) genre, I can recommend The Blood of Youth, My Journey to You and, if you don’t mind a slight obsession with mechanical devices, Mysterious Lotus Casebook. If you can cope with very vivid giant spiders, Douluo Continent also. In the guzhuang (costume) drama genre, I can recommend Story of Kunning Palace and Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty. For (very chaste, this is CCP China) danmei bromances, I can recommend The Untamed and, with double entendres flying thick and fast, Word of Honor.

4. C-dramas and Russian novels suggested that screwed-up families can generate great stories.