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!
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."
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.
“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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
Prog-sexism is even more thin-skinned and pathetic than you describe:
If you criticize men, it’s feminism; if you criticize feminism, it’s misogyny.
One need ever say a thing about women directly.
Rey exemplifies everything that was terrible about this era of script writing. A flawless heroine, with no character arc whatsoever. Embarrassing tbh.
Well, I just imagined her as Nurse Ratched with a sword.
Naturally I fully endorse the paean to C-Dramas…
I converted you to the C-side …
“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.
Thebonly solution is male segregated education
More male teachers certainly. A pattern I like is single-sex classes in secondary school, but mixed sex playgrounds.
As someone who grew up being educated in Catholic male only schools I very much like the idea of 'mixed sex playgrounds'. LOL