Even if you are skeptical that there ARE differences between men and women, it is still an interesting article. vittorio quotes data from peer-reviewed research and offers mechanisms based on evolutionary biology.
Some excerpts:
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| Men did not shift conservative toward "toxic masculinity". Women shifted progressive and blamed men. |
Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can't hunt pregnant. You can't fight nursing. (A woman's) Survival required the tribe's acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get (biological) hardware that treats social rejection as serious threat.
Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.
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The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.
This machine (social media + smartphones) wasn't designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.
Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.
FIRE's campus speech surveys show the pattern clearly: students self-censor, report fear of expressing views, cluster toward acceptable opinions. This isn't unique to women, but women are more embedded in higher education than men now, and the fields they dominate (humanities, social sciences, education, HR) are the most ideologically uniform.
Feminism told women their instincts and biology were oppression and wrong. Wanting children was brainwashing. Wanting a provider husband was internalized misogyny. Their natural desires were false consciousness installed by patriarchy.
Many believed it. Built lives around it. Career first. Independence. Freedom from traditional constraints.
Now they're 35, unmarried, measuring declining fertility against career achievements. And here's the trap: the sunk cost of admitting the ideology failed is enormous.
ERJ notes "Not Yet" becomes "NEVER". Never marry. Never have kids or grandkids. If you outlive your husband, which is highly likely, there will be nobody to visit you when you are old, in a nursing home, dying.
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I should be honest about something: men weren't immune to capture. They were captured differently.
Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn't "believe this or face social death." It was "here's an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real."
(Repeat of link to the article)
A lot of sad truth here. And some might say the world wars did a LOT of damage to the risk taking breed of men.
ReplyDeleteLook around, where are the Churchills of today? There is a lot of genetics in folks that dare and do.
Modern life has successfully replaced a great deal of get her done with "likes" on the dopamine express (aka social media).
One of the sub-themes of the article is that men are more resilient to criticism which is common in results-oriented environments.
DeleteI slightly disagree. Social media seems to feed Cluster B personality disorder traits. Young men seem to be almost as sensitive to feedback as young women.
I was talking to the police chief of a small town nearby. He was shaking his head in disbelief. One of his officers quit because the chief didn't give him a personal atta-boy and pat on the head EVERY DAY. The chief replied "I give you atta-boys all the time. They are called "a pay-check."
So it isn't just women. And it isn't hypersensitivity to criticism. It evolved to hypersensitivity to lapses in constant positive attention.
Citing fundamental differences between him and her doesn't explain the graph. Why did the gap widen so much, so suddenly? That's what needs explanation.
ReplyDelete