Women can't struggle because women must be portrayed as powerful and competent at everything without effort. This is the outcome of the feminist conceit of having it all, of not having to make trade-offs. That is diabolically at odds with reality and ironically, women are the greatest victims of that belief.
As opposed to men, culture, institutions, meritocracy, civilization that are victims of such behavior as Lorenzo described, while many women benefit with little merit of their own? And how much pushback do you see from women being lied to like so, not in small measure by feminist women? Many women I know embrace it as deserved and sanctified truth, and now perpetuate it without much need for feminist push any more, as it is the institutional zeitgeist. And first thing that comes to your mind is being sorry for them as Greatest Victims? This is also our (formerly adaptive) instinct, to prioritize women, and it goes deep, as you can testify.
Sorry man, just pulling your leg, but really you kind of deserve it!
Oh well, i don't think we will agree here. If you read this Lorenzo's post deeper, you may realize that feminization is done by feminine-style interaction and aggression, for supposed benefit of 'women' (and 'better world'). If anyone benefits from it - most of the time undeservedly - these are are laptop class women; working women are mostly just baffled by such nonsense. Yet, everyone and everything ELSE as you phrased it "suffers the most from that".
Eventually, when things decay enough as they do, it will trickle down to laptop class too. For the last few decades, mainly such laptop class women are far from being victims; perpetrators will be more like it, whether by commission or by self-serving acquiescence. If it goes like this for another 50 or so years, with establishment of Sharia law or some other calamity, your irony will be justified, as they will be bringing it on themselves, but they sure are bringing it on all of us. Bemoaning it now is so misplaced, just admit it for once that it was your rhetorical slip.
Same for Enlightenment. There are problems and there are PROBLEMS. Are you sure you would prefer living a few centuries before Enlightenment? Or is it also a rhetorical flair?
Yes, I was so puzzled by what happened in those 'sequel' Star Wars films (I didn't bother to go and see the third one). And this as just an ordinary middle-aged mum who saw the first as a (very young) teenager and the second and third only on TV and have never seen the prequels. I fully expected Rey to persuade Ren to overcome the evil Emperor and for there to be a match between as they ruled 'happily ever after' and then I suppose Luke could have opened a Jedi retreat on Skellig instead of spontaneously combusting or whatever happened to him! That's certainly what I expected as an ordinary punter and was greatly disappointed - never again!
Not too long ago I attempted to watch the original movie again after nearly five decades, but could only stand five minutes of it. Luke the "Kansas farm boy" doing space chores? How simple-minded we all used to be!
I watched it with my kids (on TV) 20 or so years ago and enjoyed it then. But I used to wonder why 'the masses' were often (always?) shown effectively as living like feudal peasants in the midst of such advanced technology e.g. Luke living in the desert equivalent of mud huts and repairing robots, but nowadays I see the Techbro attitudes and hear the 'useless eaters' discourse and wonder less
This article strangely gives me hope. I wonder how we get to the point where the institutions realize that they can’t survive if they don’t course correct in line with the culture that supports them.
"Cultures provide their members with mythic resources, shared ways of understanding the world and handling its pressures. This is very much part of the life-strategies of self-conscious beings."
I really appreciate that you connect the "biological to the cultural" so well and so frequently.
From the US perspective, this sentence brought to mind Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory" as a strong example.
You often create a multi-word adjectival phrase to more precisely convey your views and ideas, and you continue to use it throughout your essays. In some cases they become something of a mental tongue twister. :-) But I found this phrase worked well, even with repetition:
"great-because-girl and bad-because-boy".
I was beginning to think this essay was getting rather too long for my internet impacted level of patience, but then you recovered with the following, and I kept reading to the end: :-)
"Cultural confidence gives you so much more to work with. You can build on past human achievement. You can use a shared language with audiences. You can appeal to human universals precisely because you are anchored in a particular cultural heritage and how it expresses such universals."
“Disney’s problem was precisely that the culture was not feminising.”
I am not sure that examining the entrails of Hollywood is a reasonable basis to extrapolate to the character of society as a whole.
The media is feminised. The judicial system is feminised. Governments prioritise women’s issues, health priorities are feminised ($0.75bn for women’s health, 3s 6d and a bag of marbles for men’s health).
I am not an expert on Plato’s Cave, and I suspect that you will be! But isn’t the lesson of Plato’s Cave that some people can’t be persuaded that the shadows on the wall are not an accurate reflection of reality?
I offer this as I suspect you will enjoy a discussion!
Well, I wasn’t talking about society as a whole, I was talking about the culture. (BTW The judicial system is not yet feminised, though it is heading in that direction.)
Never liked Plato’s cave as a metaphor. Just as I do not agree with Donald Hoffman’s take on human perception, which is an updated version of that idea, via Kant.
People tend to have “common sense” views,, which are patchily accurate but have to be good enough to be getting along with. Where our views get wonky is where feedbacks are weak or dysfunctional.
There are a few things going on. One is young men moving in more “conservative” directions compared to young women: how much of that is changing opinions among young men and how much among young women is an interesting question.
There are also generational tensions. Self-satisfied boomers versus locked-out youngsters, for example. Mandami is benefiting from being able to virtue signal to the former and mobilise the latter.
But sheer audience resistance to feminised offerings tells us quite a lot.
I have two x chromosomes and haven't seen any of the films you reference. They all sound boring. Women/girls generally aren't into fight scenes. My son gags at the kissing, daughter gets up to make popcorn when the long fight scenes begin. The girls don't really like any of these girl as boy films either. I tell you what the girls are super-excited about - Wuthering Heights! Being beautifully borderline on the moors is ok again and females are pretty excited. Look at girl substack. There are a lot of think pieces about how toxic it is but we do love it.
As i've said before. Feminism isn't driven by females. We are group think hive mind units, evolved to prioritize social conformity, will sell out our sisters in a heartbeat, and develop and peak early. We have a form of intelligence that is exclusive to our role as reproductive heavy machinery. We used to have a dozen kids, a high chance of dying in childbirth and are socially, financially, physically and sexually vulnerable to a degree that seeking out a high value mate is baked into our psyches as our only true goal, then it's childrearing.
So the fight scene is not engaging to us. We don't want to win the hero's journey, we want to have the hero's babies. But if the culture tells us we should want the big shiny feminism then we can also adapt to wanting that. But it isn't in our nature, and can be shrugged off like last season's fashion. We are clever and as smart as men but we have different needs to those of men and competing desires. But we must also conform to the culture. What a headfuck!
Even 'the Great Helen Joyce' who we all love, is a writer. That's what chicks do. Train as an economist, doctor, lawyer, math nerd, become head of a big corporation like, I dunno, Yahoo or Google and then leave after a few years and write a book, get a column, substack, do a podcast with hubby, etc.
Apparently, most women, even the most intelligent, work for a fraction of the years a comparatively intelligent man would in his field, and produce hardly any new insights. And I love the vacuum cleaner example. Women have been beating carpets all over the world for hundreds of years. A high school drop out, working for his dad, invented the Hoover. James Dyson perfected it and all steps in between have been done by dudes.
Because men are interested in boring detail and how things work. In general, women weren't beating the carpet thinking, there must be a more efficient way to do this; rather, that it's an opportunity to stand next to Polly and have a bitch, moan, find out information or preach, depending on your character.
So this is actually masculinizing women, then using the man/woman as a proxy for all gender dystopia, because if you're feminising things, it would all be Jane Austen and instead of fighting they would spread rumours about their rivals and kiss the competent guy who did the boring thing. The end.
Yeah, and there’s no female Jack the Ripper. Both statements are dumb because we cannot exist without each other. I could say things about certain civilizations that didn’t evolve, sure. We both live in Australia. But most of the Islamic world are stuck in the stone age, aren’t they? Can’t say women are running those societies.
Context removed but we will assume common knowledge, and I feel like I will get into trouble if I say more so I will leave it here.
Just listen. A very intelligent, talented, gifted woman made this music. About what men did and it's emotional. I don't think a man would see it this way but it still helps men to be reminded to engage the empathic faculties when doing insane war shit, for example.
And there is a gorgeous picture from the middle ages with a knight in all his armour and lance, being marched out by the King and he is bending down to kiss a woman, barefoot, in a nightgown.
Yikes, I just watched it again and realised that everyone is white. It was only 2011, which was a different political world. No way would you get away with that now. Most of those men who died were blonde haired and blue eyed. UK, America, Australia were all anglo nations. And what were they fighting for? …..
There is an argument that the West never really recovered from WWI. During my recent trip to Central Europe, it was striking how much the beauty, and a sense of an anchoring past, went out or architecture after 1918.
You need a sense of teamwork to make organisations and institutions work. Women are generally worse at teamwork than men. But the Mongols and the Nazis were really good at teams too.
Humans can find all sorts of ways to screw up. Men and women have evolved in complementary fashions. It was a powerful advantage of Roman society, and of medieval and later Christendom, that they were much better at harnessing the talents of women than their rival civilisations.
There is an encouraging phenomenon I've perceived recently where it is actually women themselves who are starting to rebel against the institutional feminisation process. I'm talking about personalities like Hanna Spier - ironic in her case as a Scandi. Another I just discovered is Aussie academic Dani Sulikowski. Forgive me if you are already well aware of her work since I've been off Sub for a while.
She really blew my mind with her recent theory that is getting traction - firstly that the underlying process is actually a form of reproductive competition called "intrasexual reproductive suppression" , and that societal collapse isn't a mere consequence of the phenomenon but actually its objective.
She claims elite women are advancing policies designed to suppress the reproductive success of competing women to ensure their own offspring remain as a dominant class.
Good, important notes, excellent culture comments.
The culture institutions are feminizing, and degrading … faster than the culture. Much faster since Obama and smartphones. But the culture is also feminizing, tho more slowly.
Like, very very few offices will have shouting matches between men, which was common in the 60s & 70s. This is two steps forward, but also one step back— less blunt, honest criticism.
Who are the heroes, and why, remain the key cultural issues & reflections of the culture.
You guys. No, no and no. Females do not have this hero's journey. We have the wedding plot. Putting women into men's roles doesn't 'feminise' society, it de-sexes it. That's the aim. If society were feminised, there would be no goals, no winners, no plot. It would be all narrative. The characters would be figuratively, not literally impotent. You still don't get it.
As it touched on Hollywood—every so often someone mentions a particular movie and the actor starring in it, followed by what that actor has done or said. I always respond: say no more.
I've long had the impression that actors make excellent blank slates, able to inhabit characters so convincingly because they lack a strong personal core. More often than not, they come across as shallow, woke, uninformed, virtue-signaling, narcissistic buffoons in their private lives. Knowing the person behind the avatar of the portrayed character can ruin many films.
Explains why there was no pushback from actors to any of this feminization over the past decade, same old great actors just merrily play another role in a flop. Now they can put it on a resume.
I hadn’t previously thought much about the mythic role of culture, despite being interested in mythologies from when I was a young lad. But I am reading Jordan Peterson’s ‘Maps of Meaning’ and while he is far from a sparkling writer, and there is a fair bit of speculative stuff in it, having someone who is up on evolutionary biology/anthropology and neuroscience writing about myths and human concept building has been enlightening. Those weird Bronze Age myths make a lot more sense, for example.
As you mentioned Maps of Meaning, that I am also presently struggling through, I thought you might be interested in Brett Andersen substack. Andersen is also greatly influenced by Peterson work. This is one of my favorite pieces from Andersen:
Another advantage of C-dramas: actors are not treated as moral gurus. There may be obvious bad reasons for that, but there are also strong cultural reasons for it. There a lot of BTS (behind the scenes) clips, and the major actors are clearly treated well—the male actors are typically a head taller than the support staff, who are typically a generation older—but also very clearly accept direction from directors and support staff just fine.
"The biggest problem with modern screenwriting is that women aren’t allowed to struggle and men aren’t allowed to triumph."
Man, you just nailed why 'Bugonia' was offputting to me, despite it doing many things right or interesting. It wasn't the bleak yet bonkers ending. It was pushed that Diversity CEO Lady was "good" and strong and clever, even though at one point she coaxes a seemingly mentally ill person to murder their own family member. Granted, it maybe said some other stuff too. But switch the main characters' genders and see if you can get that movie into theaters. I'd bet you can't.
Well, that and the hilariously overdramatic, loud orchestral music set to mundane activity, usually Teddy's. That was weird.
There is a chicken and egg problem here with regard to corporate culture. We see the same thing in our politics where the vanguard of ideas don’t have to be focused on gender roles (or wanton envy of them) but rather, simple uniformity of aspiration.
I see this as characters expecting to live twice the life in half the time the moment they cede social power over their own peer-group. They’ve finally arrived. Whether it’s a room full of bumper stickers on the back of the same generic laptop (carried by someone who is an H&M carbon copy of the person next to them) or, some Fox News lady with makeup wearing the same stupid gold cross around her neck as each of her peers… makes no difference. Yes, gender and race became more than evident 15 years ago, but the uniformity precedent by midwit corporate types is blinding. This is the Peter principal at social-corporate-governance scale. Don’t expect it to get any better, just more bland.
A tremendous, consequential analysis of our cultural plight and a prescription for how to reinvigorate story-telling before the lights go out on Western Civilization (and no, it’s not BL stories 🤣): renewed cultural confidence and the refreshed expression of our mythic heritage.
Women can't struggle because women must be portrayed as powerful and competent at everything without effort. This is the outcome of the feminist conceit of having it all, of not having to make trade-offs. That is diabolically at odds with reality and ironically, women are the greatest victims of that belief.
And here we go again: "women are the greatest victims"?
Of women lying to them? Yeah, they are.
As opposed to men, culture, institutions, meritocracy, civilization that are victims of such behavior as Lorenzo described, while many women benefit with little merit of their own? And how much pushback do you see from women being lied to like so, not in small measure by feminist women? Many women I know embrace it as deserved and sanctified truth, and now perpetuate it without much need for feminist push any more, as it is the institutional zeitgeist. And first thing that comes to your mind is being sorry for them as Greatest Victims? This is also our (formerly adaptive) instinct, to prioritize women, and it goes deep, as you can testify.
Sorry man, just pulling your leg, but really you kind of deserve it!
I have a very deep appreciation of irony, and when someone professing something suffers the most from that - well, that appeals to me.
Much like those who most ardently love the Enlightenment and don't understand how so much of our problems stem from exactly that.
Oh well, i don't think we will agree here. If you read this Lorenzo's post deeper, you may realize that feminization is done by feminine-style interaction and aggression, for supposed benefit of 'women' (and 'better world'). If anyone benefits from it - most of the time undeservedly - these are are laptop class women; working women are mostly just baffled by such nonsense. Yet, everyone and everything ELSE as you phrased it "suffers the most from that".
Eventually, when things decay enough as they do, it will trickle down to laptop class too. For the last few decades, mainly such laptop class women are far from being victims; perpetrators will be more like it, whether by commission or by self-serving acquiescence. If it goes like this for another 50 or so years, with establishment of Sharia law or some other calamity, your irony will be justified, as they will be bringing it on themselves, but they sure are bringing it on all of us. Bemoaning it now is so misplaced, just admit it for once that it was your rhetorical slip.
Same for Enlightenment. There are problems and there are PROBLEMS. Are you sure you would prefer living a few centuries before Enlightenment? Or is it also a rhetorical flair?
Yes, I was so puzzled by what happened in those 'sequel' Star Wars films (I didn't bother to go and see the third one). And this as just an ordinary middle-aged mum who saw the first as a (very young) teenager and the second and third only on TV and have never seen the prequels. I fully expected Rey to persuade Ren to overcome the evil Emperor and for there to be a match between as they ruled 'happily ever after' and then I suppose Luke could have opened a Jedi retreat on Skellig instead of spontaneously combusting or whatever happened to him! That's certainly what I expected as an ordinary punter and was greatly disappointed - never again!
Not too long ago I attempted to watch the original movie again after nearly five decades, but could only stand five minutes of it. Luke the "Kansas farm boy" doing space chores? How simple-minded we all used to be!
I watched it with my kids (on TV) 20 or so years ago and enjoyed it then. But I used to wonder why 'the masses' were often (always?) shown effectively as living like feudal peasants in the midst of such advanced technology e.g. Luke living in the desert equivalent of mud huts and repairing robots, but nowadays I see the Techbro attitudes and hear the 'useless eaters' discourse and wonder less
You´re right. But I also remember in the 8th grade arguing about Princess Leia not wearing a bra. I noticed, but not everybody did.
> if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny
Is that your line? Great distillation.
Yes. Thanks.
On the same topic:
https://open.substack.com/pub/boomerdammerung/p/why-nothing-works-anymore
Great post.
Sounds like you want equality?
This article strangely gives me hope. I wonder how we get to the point where the institutions realize that they can’t survive if they don’t course correct in line with the culture that supports them.
The institutions that are incapable of reform will invariably collapse and be replaced by functioning institutions.
"Cultures provide their members with mythic resources, shared ways of understanding the world and handling its pressures. This is very much part of the life-strategies of self-conscious beings."
I really appreciate that you connect the "biological to the cultural" so well and so frequently.
From the US perspective, this sentence brought to mind Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory" as a strong example.
You often create a multi-word adjectival phrase to more precisely convey your views and ideas, and you continue to use it throughout your essays. In some cases they become something of a mental tongue twister. :-) But I found this phrase worked well, even with repetition:
"great-because-girl and bad-because-boy".
I was beginning to think this essay was getting rather too long for my internet impacted level of patience, but then you recovered with the following, and I kept reading to the end: :-)
"Cultural confidence gives you so much more to work with. You can build on past human achievement. You can use a shared language with audiences. You can appeal to human universals precisely because you are anchored in a particular cultural heritage and how it expresses such universals."
“Disney’s problem was precisely that the culture was not feminising.”
I am not sure that examining the entrails of Hollywood is a reasonable basis to extrapolate to the character of society as a whole.
The media is feminised. The judicial system is feminised. Governments prioritise women’s issues, health priorities are feminised ($0.75bn for women’s health, 3s 6d and a bag of marbles for men’s health).
I am not an expert on Plato’s Cave, and I suspect that you will be! But isn’t the lesson of Plato’s Cave that some people can’t be persuaded that the shadows on the wall are not an accurate reflection of reality?
I offer this as I suspect you will enjoy a discussion!
Well, I wasn’t talking about society as a whole, I was talking about the culture. (BTW The judicial system is not yet feminised, though it is heading in that direction.)
Never liked Plato’s cave as a metaphor. Just as I do not agree with Donald Hoffman’s take on human perception, which is an updated version of that idea, via Kant.
People tend to have “common sense” views,, which are patchily accurate but have to be good enough to be getting along with. Where our views get wonky is where feedbacks are weak or dysfunctional.
There are a few things going on. One is young men moving in more “conservative” directions compared to young women: how much of that is changing opinions among young men and how much among young women is an interesting question.
There are also generational tensions. Self-satisfied boomers versus locked-out youngsters, for example. Mandami is benefiting from being able to virtue signal to the former and mobilise the latter.
But sheer audience resistance to feminised offerings tells us quite a lot.
I have two x chromosomes and haven't seen any of the films you reference. They all sound boring. Women/girls generally aren't into fight scenes. My son gags at the kissing, daughter gets up to make popcorn when the long fight scenes begin. The girls don't really like any of these girl as boy films either. I tell you what the girls are super-excited about - Wuthering Heights! Being beautifully borderline on the moors is ok again and females are pretty excited. Look at girl substack. There are a lot of think pieces about how toxic it is but we do love it.
As i've said before. Feminism isn't driven by females. We are group think hive mind units, evolved to prioritize social conformity, will sell out our sisters in a heartbeat, and develop and peak early. We have a form of intelligence that is exclusive to our role as reproductive heavy machinery. We used to have a dozen kids, a high chance of dying in childbirth and are socially, financially, physically and sexually vulnerable to a degree that seeking out a high value mate is baked into our psyches as our only true goal, then it's childrearing.
So the fight scene is not engaging to us. We don't want to win the hero's journey, we want to have the hero's babies. But if the culture tells us we should want the big shiny feminism then we can also adapt to wanting that. But it isn't in our nature, and can be shrugged off like last season's fashion. We are clever and as smart as men but we have different needs to those of men and competing desires. But we must also conform to the culture. What a headfuck!
Even 'the Great Helen Joyce' who we all love, is a writer. That's what chicks do. Train as an economist, doctor, lawyer, math nerd, become head of a big corporation like, I dunno, Yahoo or Google and then leave after a few years and write a book, get a column, substack, do a podcast with hubby, etc.
Apparently, most women, even the most intelligent, work for a fraction of the years a comparatively intelligent man would in his field, and produce hardly any new insights. And I love the vacuum cleaner example. Women have been beating carpets all over the world for hundreds of years. A high school drop out, working for his dad, invented the Hoover. James Dyson perfected it and all steps in between have been done by dudes.
Because men are interested in boring detail and how things work. In general, women weren't beating the carpet thinking, there must be a more efficient way to do this; rather, that it's an opportunity to stand next to Polly and have a bitch, moan, find out information or preach, depending on your character.
So this is actually masculinizing women, then using the man/woman as a proxy for all gender dystopia, because if you're feminising things, it would all be Jane Austen and instead of fighting they would spread rumours about their rivals and kiss the competent guy who did the boring thing. The end.
Camille Paglia: if civilisation was up to women, we would all be still living in grass huts.
Yeah, and there’s no female Jack the Ripper. Both statements are dumb because we cannot exist without each other. I could say things about certain civilizations that didn’t evolve, sure. We both live in Australia. But most of the Islamic world are stuck in the stone age, aren’t they? Can’t say women are running those societies.
Context removed but we will assume common knowledge, and I feel like I will get into trouble if I say more so I will leave it here.
Just listen. A very intelligent, talented, gifted woman made this music. About what men did and it's emotional. I don't think a man would see it this way but it still helps men to be reminded to engage the empathic faculties when doing insane war shit, for example.
And there is a gorgeous picture from the middle ages with a knight in all his armour and lance, being marched out by the King and he is bending down to kiss a woman, barefoot, in a nightgown.
Men are the bomb.
https://youtu.be/VO63vb1S7Cw?si=9f-K82zgQ2XhPazm
Yikes, I just watched it again and realised that everyone is white. It was only 2011, which was a different political world. No way would you get away with that now. Most of those men who died were blonde haired and blue eyed. UK, America, Australia were all anglo nations. And what were they fighting for? …..
There is an argument that the West never really recovered from WWI. During my recent trip to Central Europe, it was striking how much the beauty, and a sense of an anchoring past, went out or architecture after 1918.
You need a sense of teamwork to make organisations and institutions work. Women are generally worse at teamwork than men. But the Mongols and the Nazis were really good at teams too.
Humans can find all sorts of ways to screw up. Men and women have evolved in complementary fashions. It was a powerful advantage of Roman society, and of medieval and later Christendom, that they were much better at harnessing the talents of women than their rival civilisations.
There is an encouraging phenomenon I've perceived recently where it is actually women themselves who are starting to rebel against the institutional feminisation process. I'm talking about personalities like Hanna Spier - ironic in her case as a Scandi. Another I just discovered is Aussie academic Dani Sulikowski. Forgive me if you are already well aware of her work since I've been off Sub for a while.
She really blew my mind with her recent theory that is getting traction - firstly that the underlying process is actually a form of reproductive competition called "intrasexual reproductive suppression" , and that societal collapse isn't a mere consequence of the phenomenon but actually its objective.
She claims elite women are advancing policies designed to suppress the reproductive success of competing women to ensure their own offspring remain as a dominant class.
It is a thought-provoking theory about mate suppression. Have not been able to think through the hypothesis yet, so I am intrigued, but uncertain.
Good, important notes, excellent culture comments.
The culture institutions are feminizing, and degrading … faster than the culture. Much faster since Obama and smartphones. But the culture is also feminizing, tho more slowly.
Like, very very few offices will have shouting matches between men, which was common in the 60s & 70s. This is two steps forward, but also one step back— less blunt, honest criticism.
Who are the heroes, and why, remain the key cultural issues & reflections of the culture.
You guys. No, no and no. Females do not have this hero's journey. We have the wedding plot. Putting women into men's roles doesn't 'feminise' society, it de-sexes it. That's the aim. If society were feminised, there would be no goals, no winners, no plot. It would be all narrative. The characters would be figuratively, not literally impotent. You still don't get it.
Great post.
As it touched on Hollywood—every so often someone mentions a particular movie and the actor starring in it, followed by what that actor has done or said. I always respond: say no more.
I've long had the impression that actors make excellent blank slates, able to inhabit characters so convincingly because they lack a strong personal core. More often than not, they come across as shallow, woke, uninformed, virtue-signaling, narcissistic buffoons in their private lives. Knowing the person behind the avatar of the portrayed character can ruin many films.
Explains why there was no pushback from actors to any of this feminization over the past decade, same old great actors just merrily play another role in a flop. Now they can put it on a resume.
I hadn’t previously thought much about the mythic role of culture, despite being interested in mythologies from when I was a young lad. But I am reading Jordan Peterson’s ‘Maps of Meaning’ and while he is far from a sparkling writer, and there is a fair bit of speculative stuff in it, having someone who is up on evolutionary biology/anthropology and neuroscience writing about myths and human concept building has been enlightening. Those weird Bronze Age myths make a lot more sense, for example.
As you mentioned Maps of Meaning, that I am also presently struggling through, I thought you might be interested in Brett Andersen substack. Andersen is also greatly influenced by Peterson work. This is one of my favorite pieces from Andersen:
https://www.brett-p-andersen.com/p/psychological-entropy-and-the-hierarchical
Another advantage of C-dramas: actors are not treated as moral gurus. There may be obvious bad reasons for that, but there are also strong cultural reasons for it. There a lot of BTS (behind the scenes) clips, and the major actors are clearly treated well—the male actors are typically a head taller than the support staff, who are typically a generation older—but also very clearly accept direction from directors and support staff just fine.
"The biggest problem with modern screenwriting is that women aren’t allowed to struggle and men aren’t allowed to triumph."
Man, you just nailed why 'Bugonia' was offputting to me, despite it doing many things right or interesting. It wasn't the bleak yet bonkers ending. It was pushed that Diversity CEO Lady was "good" and strong and clever, even though at one point she coaxes a seemingly mentally ill person to murder their own family member. Granted, it maybe said some other stuff too. But switch the main characters' genders and see if you can get that movie into theaters. I'd bet you can't.
Well, that and the hilariously overdramatic, loud orchestral music set to mundane activity, usually Teddy's. That was weird.
YES! Veblen was on to this way back at the turn of the last century - you know, about alpha males going to the office to "hunt" for sales accounts.
I think the most condensed form of art turning into a vehicle for virtue-signalling has been the work of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.
He was on track to becoming this generation's Tolkien (maybe!) but threw it all away to become woke.
There is a chicken and egg problem here with regard to corporate culture. We see the same thing in our politics where the vanguard of ideas don’t have to be focused on gender roles (or wanton envy of them) but rather, simple uniformity of aspiration.
I see this as characters expecting to live twice the life in half the time the moment they cede social power over their own peer-group. They’ve finally arrived. Whether it’s a room full of bumper stickers on the back of the same generic laptop (carried by someone who is an H&M carbon copy of the person next to them) or, some Fox News lady with makeup wearing the same stupid gold cross around her neck as each of her peers… makes no difference. Yes, gender and race became more than evident 15 years ago, but the uniformity precedent by midwit corporate types is blinding. This is the Peter principal at social-corporate-governance scale. Don’t expect it to get any better, just more bland.
That’s academia.
A tremendous, consequential analysis of our cultural plight and a prescription for how to reinvigorate story-telling before the lights go out on Western Civilization (and no, it’s not BL stories 🤣): renewed cultural confidence and the refreshed expression of our mythic heritage.