Wondering how to make clear our cultural drift problem, it occurred to me that historical fiction, especially using time travel, could make vivid how key norms and values have actually changed greatly over time, and not always in obviously good ways.
The push back on your essays make perfect sense to me, as much as I'm a defender that it's worth thinking about these ideas and not cancelling people for them.
Rape is a type of assault. You'd similarly have people much more upset if Alex beat up Barb with a baseball bat than they would be upset from Barb cucking Alex. I think rape these days gets considered an especially heinous crime because there are 0 justified cases for it- one can never rape in self defense, one can never rape to feed their family, etc. like there might be for other serious crimes. So people are safe to virtue signal and call for the death penalty for rapists, and the pushback anyone could give is much more limited.
Meanwhile cuckoldry is a much more ambiguous offense. Many people don't consider "spreading genes" a goal at all- the desire to raise a child is entirely independent of spreading genes for a lot of people. And there are many cases that could justify it, partially or even in full. Maybe the spouse is often away, or neglectful, or even outright abusive. Before condemning cuckolders, you'd often need to check that the cuck didn't have it coming.
With the incel "right to sex", I think people just lack imagination and immediately jump to thinking it's "right to rape". Especially because you phrase the essay in sympathy to incels, who are generally a very vile group. Prostitution vouchers make lots of sense given leftist world views, and I think if the essay had a different, more leftist aesthetic to it, you would not have gotten cancelled for it.
"f the essay had a different, more leftist aesthetic to it, you would not have gotten cancelled for it." In which case I violated a "write like a leftist" norm, not a gender norm?
You violated the "Don't write like a rightist on gender" norm in my opinion. You can write like a rightist on other topics, e.g. all your other blog posts that haven't gotten you cancelled. But on certain topics, like gender, having a rightist aesthetic violates norms.
I think different factions of the right have different stances on what are acceptable vs cancellable opinions/aesthetics of various topics. I do think that outside of groups like the alt-right, many rightists do accept the leftist framing. It's something of a meme in alt-right circles, at least when I browsed them years ago, to mock center-rightists who say "The left are the real racists/sexists!". The alt-right would take pride in their racism/sexism, where as the center-right would accept the framework of leftists on such issues. The centre-right would try to claim that stuff like hook up culture hurts women and is anti-feminist, which is a leftist framing, even if the real content(anti-hook up culture) was rightist.
Are you perhaps not a parent? Or maybe on the spectrum?
People upset about cuckoldry are not offended at the effect on "spreading genes". It's the emotional trauma of thinking you have a son or daughter and then finding out that person that was one of the greatest sources of joy in your life doesn't have any relation to you except that his or her existence is the result of a serious betrayal of you.
If you ask fathers whether they'd rather be raped or never get to see one of their children again, I think the vast majority of them would at least view not seeing one of their children again as comparable if not worse to rape. That's probably a pretty good proxy for what it would feel like to know that your child is not actually yours after a decade of thinking otherwise.
I think the negative reaction to Hanson's original comment is because he was so clearly over the target. If it really were ridiculous to compare the two, it wouldn't have gotten a reaction.
Similar thing for the post on redistribution of sex. The push back wasn't because his idea was absurd, but because it was on target. There's something distasteful and low status about obsessing over other people having more of something, whether it be looks, sex, money, or status, and with how prevalent the obsession over redistributing money/status through politics is, of course he was going to get hammered for pointing out that it's a distasteful/low status trait/activity.
>That's probably a pretty good proxy for what it would feel like to know that your child is not actually yours after a decade of thinking otherwise.
And I think feeling this way, while probably pretty common, goes against the norms of how we expect people to behave. That they should care for children, especially children they've raised for years, regardless of genetic connection. That goes against actual human behaviour and feelings, but it comes up rarely enough cultural norms and normal human reactions have separated.
Cuckoldry is adultery. No need to give it a special name when it's women doing it. And rape is much, much worse than female adultery, which involves two consenting adults and deceit. Rape involves imposing sexual acts on a person who has not given consent. Infidelity leads to divorce. Rape leads (should lead) to prison. Ask Genevieve Pelicot if she thinks they're equal.
Cuckoldry is NOT adultery. Cuckoldry is having a child fathered by another man that is not your pair-bonded partner. And we can debate the Cuckoldry - Rape equivalence, but we can at least agree neither involves consent.
I think the difference to me is that one is something where the trauma is ultimately in my head, it is in my wheelhouse and I can kinda pretend it doesn't exist.
The other is permanent and immutable in a truly final way. A betrayal by the person who I deeply love that also fundamentally rewrites my life story, and also means that the child I thought was mine literally looks like the person that they cheated on me with, and the fundamental building blocks of that child belong to someone else.
I don't for a moment believe my children aren't mine either, infact the rate of father's having children who they believe are theirs but aren't is lower than the rate of male victim rape.
Ignore and disregard the opinion of men as much as you like though, you'll have a sad and bitter life.
> My main worry is that we see pretty strong patterns and commonalities across pre-modern societies in their gender roles and norms. If those resulted from cultural evolution, they were once robustly adaptive, suggesting that modern updates are maladaptive.
We also see the strong pattern that pre-modern societies didn't employ anyone as a professor/researcher but that's hardly evidence of being maladaptive -- only maladaptive in the context and given the constraints of pre-modern societies.
I think it's striking that these changes to gender roles happened after the change that made women's work outside the home as economically valuable as men's and after the handgun and police reduced the importance of physical strength for protection.
But the amount of education in our society seems maladaptive, particularly taking into account your colleague Bryan Caplan's signalling-based Case Against Education.
That's not the point. The point is there are tons of things we do now that hunter-gatherers didn't because we face very different problems and have different abilities.
Basically everything about our lives now is different and there is no reason to single out gender norms for more attention than our choice to live in large societies, to have police or to build factories -- all things hunter gatherers don't do.
The second you start saying -- but factories makes sense because ... then you have to grapple with the arguments that changes in our gender norms make sense.
I agree with Peter. A discrepancy between modern norms and norms from a prior historical era does not indicate maladaptation, even a long prior era like 100K of hunger gatherer existence or 10K of premodern agriculture. It is maladaptive to not change norms when the cultural problem to be solved has changed. The "cultural problem to be solved" is how a group can wrest a living from a specific ecosystem with a specific prior history, given the clash between individual human survival needs and the demands of social living. I have an article on this.... comments welcome.
The key question is whether there has been enough time and data to make adaptive changes. The faster is change, and the less data was available, the less plausible this becomes.
But that's a very different argument. It's not a specific argument that these norms are likely to be maladaptive but that because there have been lots of big changes some probably are maladaptive somewhere.
Fine, but there is no reason to think it's more likely to be gender norms than the choice to start wearing polyester or to stop enslaving people captured in battle or anything else in the modern world.
Though I don't emphasize the fact, recent innovations in transport, communication, and information technology are what make this eutopian project feasible, with all kinds of interesting social ramifications: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
I just disagree with you on a bunch of stuff. In this post, I largely agree, but you are committing a grave sin of omission.
The elephant in the room is the "sexual revolution", spurred by the widespread availability of birth-control pills over the summer of 1964. Everything changed. Adultery and cuckoldry, formerly much despised, are less so now, because those participating are rarely causing the "offended spouse" to support the resulting offspring; there are far fewer resulting offspring.
Though birth-control pills spurred this trend, all forms of birth control are now commonly viewed as "just fine" by the majority of the population. In my youth, condoms (then referred to as "scum bags" in the locker room) were never the subject of polite conversation, even privately between potential and actual sex partners.
Even otherwise religious people use birth control and speak of it openly, in both marital and extra-marital sexual relationships. This, I believe, is much more common than in the past. I've seen the attitude change since my youth among orthodox Jews and otherwise pious Roman Catholics. I can't speak for low-life Protestants, but, being from NYC, I don't know that many. ;-)
The acceptability of birth control also contributes to the increased employment of women in the workspace, greater demand for "equal pay for equal work" and greater acceptance of a woman's choice not to have kids.
Of course this has bearing on another bugabear of yours, population decline.
What about contraception? While I don't really believe this, I can imagine plausible sounding arguments that earlier gender norms were adaptive for situations without reliable contraception, but now that reliable contraception exists, they are obsolete.
You're not supposed to tear down Chesterton's fence unless you know why it was built. If traditional gender norms were built largely as a hedge against the risk of unwanted pregnancies, then maybe we can tear them down now?
I'd want a more detailed story explaining the connection of contraception to the list of particular gender norms. Other things changed to, like lifespans, and urban density. But why would those make the above norms more appropriate?
Daniel's comment makes me think in particular that prior gender norms weren't just targeted at unwanted pregnancy (which was certainly a benefit to women in a time of uncertain contraception) but more specifically at disputed paternity. I could see modern maladaptation happening because the most reliable and easiest to use contraceptives are almost exclusively available to women (as well as abortion) but women are rarely in doubt as to the paternity of their child. So while the gender norms that strengthened the certainty of paternity for men have generally been discarded as women gained more control over unwanted pregnancy, the ones that benefit women more generally have been retained.
Hi Christropher, I was just about to write what you just said in your post: traditional gender norms were built largely as a hedge against the risk of unwanted pregnancies AND the need for male paternity certainty. But why was male paternity certainty needed: because men wanted the reproductive benefit of having multiple sex partners. This benefit could extend from a second wife all the way up to multiple concubines and a harem situation. When men are polygenous, they aren't bedding their wife every night, because they are off with their concubines, so then they need a solution for other men going after these wives; these mothers of the children they expect to be theirs, so cultural values are needed to control female sexual agency. This is why historically under traditional patriarchy, women are so frequently controlled, required to depend on husband's income, etc. All of this is adaptive because high fertility resulted (as I said in a previous comment). Note that this high reproductive skew (some men with very high fertility and the rest with little, which happens with polygeny) was only possible for Homo sapien men *after agriculture*. So all of the cultural gender norms are only 10,000 years old. These norms that restrict women's agency are a direct result of mate guarding and women as property that arose due to the emergence of a stratified society wherein some individuals were able to hoard resources (granaries, fenced-in and grain-fed livestock), which occurred once agriculture was widespread. The scholarship on this is deep and not controversial.
I'm not sure I'd call these all gender norms. For instance your suggestion that sexual inequality was as bad as financial inequality didn't offend people because of how it related to men or women but because it violated the implicit norm that equates calling something bad with a demand that people be forced not to do the thing.
Gender related sensitivities weren't irrelevant. If it wasn't about an issue where women -- for obvious evolutionary reasons -- are super alert/sensitive to (the possibility of being pressured into having sex they don't want) it wouldn't have been as explosive.
But if we expand the notion that far it risks becoming useless since so much of all social interactions at least indirectly relate to gender and mating.
Rape is equivalent to cuckoldry? What an odd, foolish thing to say. One is a violent violation of the body, during which victims experience terror, fear of death, pain, and physical injury. The other is a form of fraud, which if publically discovered by others is humiliating and embarrassing. Rape results in physical injury, PTSD, often pregnancy and STDs., and lifelong difficulty with sexual enjoyment. Cuckoldry results in feelings of anger and, if known to others, humiliation, with a deep sense of betrayal and wariness the result. The two experiences are not comparable at all, and that you think they are does not speak well of your ability to think clearly. This is just plain dumb.
This is one of the best substack posts I have read in a long time. I have been amazed at some reactions to obvious facts. About 15 years ago I mentioned to some friends that female fertility declined with age, and that women giving birth at the age of 35 or older were called "geriatric mothers." I was yelled at and told that I was lying, and I was trying to oppress all women and force them to be bare foot and pregnant. I still do not understand how that is offensive.
If anything, I think American culture has become toxic to so many, but especially to women. I have spent time in other parts of the world, and I cannot help but to think that we made a few wrong turns over the years. Perhaps childless, status-obsessed people do not form a sustainable culture. I think a massive part of this is the bizarre obsession with work status that has plagued feminist writers over the last fifty years. Once all the constraints were removed, for some reason academics cannot tolerate the choices women make. Prestige jobs are often filled with as many women as possible, yet they leave. I have noticed it in my career. Even women who stay in the job market often prefer more leisure time and often value income less. This has been obvious for so long, but always and everywhere such preferences are described as discrimination. I am not saying that discrimination does not exist, but having worked in both male-dominated and female-dominated places, the different in work environments is striking. Revealed preferences are always better than stated, but the difference is larger than most people think.
My greatest concern is what we are losing when we focus so much attention on gender and race instead of actually advancing knowledge. I am terrified of the long-term consequences. Silly consumerism gets a bad reputation because the skills do flow over to other areas. The time spent obsessing about the status of marginalized groups appears to be a dead weight loss once regulatory impediments have been removed.
You left out the bit where women are killed by men in far greater numbers than men killed by women.
"Men are to carry items for women". Heaven forbid the stronger person do the lifting. I carry the groceries in for my 84 year old mother. Does that mean I am experiencing age-related oppression?
Keep working on overcoming your bias (and repressed resentment). You might eventually come to perceive females as being every bit as human as yourself. We can only hope.
> "I’m willing to presume the superiority of any modern innovation-promoting norm. Alas, it's hard to see modern gender norms that way."
Having males and females together in spaces of business, politics, and art means having 2 groups with different average personalities, thinking patterns, etc. It increases viewpoint diversity; more ideas get explored.
> And as I expect these norms didn’t exist a half century ago
I fear you are revealing a curious historical blindspot comparable in magnitude to Paul Graham, insofar as you are unaware of the implications of, e.g., that the Equal Rights Amendment was submitted for ratification in 1972.
Modern gender roles are "pro-job-work, which increases job-work innovation." By this, I assume, you mean encourage women to work?
I hypothesize we have this norm NOW (in contrast to the "commonalities across pre-modern societies in their gender roles and norms") because female labor has never been more valuable due to modern technology: high productivity jobs are now mental, not physical.
I am curious: what role do you think the free market plays in entrenching modern gender roles (MGRs)? Do you believe MGRs are "especially unlikely to be overturned" because they are so profitable? Or because critics to MGRs are canceled, allowing them to become culturally entrenched? Or both?
Modern technological societies have values and norms that are more similar to hunter-gatherer (100k years) than to the shorter era (10K) of settled agriculture, in terms of individualism and freedom of individual choice (individual rights, individual agency).
I'd guess 99 out of 100 americans could have told you you were stepping on a huge landmine with that one. I think you must be unusually oblivious to taboos to have missed it.
As an example of a culture that lasted thousands of years with the rare gender norm where the culture didn't care about paternity certainty, and consequently, women took lovers at will, check out this recent scholarly account of the Mosuo. My explanation of why the Mosuo were *not* invaded by neighboring groups which practiced patriarchy is that Mosuo land is mountainous, poor for agriculture, and can't sustain a large population. The author, Jose Yong, agreed with me when I wrote him about this explanation. https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2055/19/1/article-p22.xml
The push back on your essays make perfect sense to me, as much as I'm a defender that it's worth thinking about these ideas and not cancelling people for them.
Rape is a type of assault. You'd similarly have people much more upset if Alex beat up Barb with a baseball bat than they would be upset from Barb cucking Alex. I think rape these days gets considered an especially heinous crime because there are 0 justified cases for it- one can never rape in self defense, one can never rape to feed their family, etc. like there might be for other serious crimes. So people are safe to virtue signal and call for the death penalty for rapists, and the pushback anyone could give is much more limited.
Meanwhile cuckoldry is a much more ambiguous offense. Many people don't consider "spreading genes" a goal at all- the desire to raise a child is entirely independent of spreading genes for a lot of people. And there are many cases that could justify it, partially or even in full. Maybe the spouse is often away, or neglectful, or even outright abusive. Before condemning cuckolders, you'd often need to check that the cuck didn't have it coming.
With the incel "right to sex", I think people just lack imagination and immediately jump to thinking it's "right to rape". Especially because you phrase the essay in sympathy to incels, who are generally a very vile group. Prostitution vouchers make lots of sense given leftist world views, and I think if the essay had a different, more leftist aesthetic to it, you would not have gotten cancelled for it.
"f the essay had a different, more leftist aesthetic to it, you would not have gotten cancelled for it." In which case I violated a "write like a leftist" norm, not a gender norm?
You violated the "Don't write like a rightist on gender" norm in my opinion. You can write like a rightist on other topics, e.g. all your other blog posts that haven't gotten you cancelled. But on certain topics, like gender, having a rightist aesthetic violates norms.
Do you think the right agrees that only the left may write on certain topics?
I think different factions of the right have different stances on what are acceptable vs cancellable opinions/aesthetics of various topics. I do think that outside of groups like the alt-right, many rightists do accept the leftist framing. It's something of a meme in alt-right circles, at least when I browsed them years ago, to mock center-rightists who say "The left are the real racists/sexists!". The alt-right would take pride in their racism/sexism, where as the center-right would accept the framework of leftists on such issues. The centre-right would try to claim that stuff like hook up culture hurts women and is anti-feminist, which is a leftist framing, even if the real content(anti-hook up culture) was rightist.
that's a "yes, most of them"?
Yes.
Are you perhaps not a parent? Or maybe on the spectrum?
People upset about cuckoldry are not offended at the effect on "spreading genes". It's the emotional trauma of thinking you have a son or daughter and then finding out that person that was one of the greatest sources of joy in your life doesn't have any relation to you except that his or her existence is the result of a serious betrayal of you.
If you ask fathers whether they'd rather be raped or never get to see one of their children again, I think the vast majority of them would at least view not seeing one of their children again as comparable if not worse to rape. That's probably a pretty good proxy for what it would feel like to know that your child is not actually yours after a decade of thinking otherwise.
I think the negative reaction to Hanson's original comment is because he was so clearly over the target. If it really were ridiculous to compare the two, it wouldn't have gotten a reaction.
Similar thing for the post on redistribution of sex. The push back wasn't because his idea was absurd, but because it was on target. There's something distasteful and low status about obsessing over other people having more of something, whether it be looks, sex, money, or status, and with how prevalent the obsession over redistributing money/status through politics is, of course he was going to get hammered for pointing out that it's a distasteful/low status trait/activity.
>That's probably a pretty good proxy for what it would feel like to know that your child is not actually yours after a decade of thinking otherwise.
And I think feeling this way, while probably pretty common, goes against the norms of how we expect people to behave. That they should care for children, especially children they've raised for years, regardless of genetic connection. That goes against actual human behaviour and feelings, but it comes up rarely enough cultural norms and normal human reactions have separated.
Cuckoldry is adultery. No need to give it a special name when it's women doing it. And rape is much, much worse than female adultery, which involves two consenting adults and deceit. Rape involves imposing sexual acts on a person who has not given consent. Infidelity leads to divorce. Rape leads (should lead) to prison. Ask Genevieve Pelicot if she thinks they're equal.
Cuckoldry is NOT adultery. Cuckoldry is having a child fathered by another man that is not your pair-bonded partner. And we can debate the Cuckoldry - Rape equivalence, but we can at least agree neither involves consent.
In my controversial post, I made clear this is what I meant by "cuckoldry".
I'd much prefer to be raped than it turn out my children are not mine. This is the majority opinion of men.
I think the difference to me is that one is something where the trauma is ultimately in my head, it is in my wheelhouse and I can kinda pretend it doesn't exist.
The other is permanent and immutable in a truly final way. A betrayal by the person who I deeply love that also fundamentally rewrites my life story, and also means that the child I thought was mine literally looks like the person that they cheated on me with, and the fundamental building blocks of that child belong to someone else.
It isn't much of a contest to me, TBQH.
"This is the majority opinion of men" who don't for a moment believe they actually run the risk of being raped.
You have never met a significant number of men. They never admit to what happened. They cannot, especially to a woman.
I don't for a moment believe my children aren't mine either, infact the rate of father's having children who they believe are theirs but aren't is lower than the rate of male victim rape.
Ignore and disregard the opinion of men as much as you like though, you'll have a sad and bitter life.
> My main worry is that we see pretty strong patterns and commonalities across pre-modern societies in their gender roles and norms. If those resulted from cultural evolution, they were once robustly adaptive, suggesting that modern updates are maladaptive.
We also see the strong pattern that pre-modern societies didn't employ anyone as a professor/researcher but that's hardly evidence of being maladaptive -- only maladaptive in the context and given the constraints of pre-modern societies.
I think it's striking that these changes to gender roles happened after the change that made women's work outside the home as economically valuable as men's and after the handgun and police reduced the importance of physical strength for protection.
The rise of formal education seems much more explained by the rise of industrial work.
But the amount of education in our society seems maladaptive, particularly taking into account your colleague Bryan Caplan's signalling-based Case Against Education.
Agreed.
That's not the point. The point is there are tons of things we do now that hunter-gatherers didn't because we face very different problems and have different abilities.
Basically everything about our lives now is different and there is no reason to single out gender norms for more attention than our choice to live in large societies, to have police or to build factories -- all things hunter gatherers don't do.
The second you start saying -- but factories makes sense because ... then you have to grapple with the arguments that changes in our gender norms make sense.
I agree with Peter. A discrepancy between modern norms and norms from a prior historical era does not indicate maladaptation, even a long prior era like 100K of hunger gatherer existence or 10K of premodern agriculture. It is maladaptive to not change norms when the cultural problem to be solved has changed. The "cultural problem to be solved" is how a group can wrest a living from a specific ecosystem with a specific prior history, given the clash between individual human survival needs and the demands of social living. I have an article on this.... comments welcome.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388195305_Technological_disruptions_society's_corrections_and_the_steadying_force_of_fundamental_human_needs_Mismatched_environments_from_agriculture_to_robot_companions
The key question is whether there has been enough time and data to make adaptive changes. The faster is change, and the less data was available, the less plausible this becomes.
But that's a very different argument. It's not a specific argument that these norms are likely to be maladaptive but that because there have been lots of big changes some probably are maladaptive somewhere.
Fine, but there is no reason to think it's more likely to be gender norms than the choice to start wearing polyester or to stop enslaving people captured in battle or anything else in the modern world.
Though I don't emphasize the fact, recent innovations in transport, communication, and information technology are what make this eutopian project feasible, with all kinds of interesting social ramifications: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Comments welcome.
I haven't canceled you, so take heart. :-)
I just disagree with you on a bunch of stuff. In this post, I largely agree, but you are committing a grave sin of omission.
The elephant in the room is the "sexual revolution", spurred by the widespread availability of birth-control pills over the summer of 1964. Everything changed. Adultery and cuckoldry, formerly much despised, are less so now, because those participating are rarely causing the "offended spouse" to support the resulting offspring; there are far fewer resulting offspring.
Though birth-control pills spurred this trend, all forms of birth control are now commonly viewed as "just fine" by the majority of the population. In my youth, condoms (then referred to as "scum bags" in the locker room) were never the subject of polite conversation, even privately between potential and actual sex partners.
Even otherwise religious people use birth control and speak of it openly, in both marital and extra-marital sexual relationships. This, I believe, is much more common than in the past. I've seen the attitude change since my youth among orthodox Jews and otherwise pious Roman Catholics. I can't speak for low-life Protestants, but, being from NYC, I don't know that many. ;-)
The acceptability of birth control also contributes to the increased employment of women in the workspace, greater demand for "equal pay for equal work" and greater acceptance of a woman's choice not to have kids.
Of course this has bearing on another bugabear of yours, population decline.
What about contraception? While I don't really believe this, I can imagine plausible sounding arguments that earlier gender norms were adaptive for situations without reliable contraception, but now that reliable contraception exists, they are obsolete.
You're not supposed to tear down Chesterton's fence unless you know why it was built. If traditional gender norms were built largely as a hedge against the risk of unwanted pregnancies, then maybe we can tear them down now?
I'd want a more detailed story explaining the connection of contraception to the list of particular gender norms. Other things changed to, like lifespans, and urban density. But why would those make the above norms more appropriate?
Daniel's comment makes me think in particular that prior gender norms weren't just targeted at unwanted pregnancy (which was certainly a benefit to women in a time of uncertain contraception) but more specifically at disputed paternity. I could see modern maladaptation happening because the most reliable and easiest to use contraceptives are almost exclusively available to women (as well as abortion) but women are rarely in doubt as to the paternity of their child. So while the gender norms that strengthened the certainty of paternity for men have generally been discarded as women gained more control over unwanted pregnancy, the ones that benefit women more generally have been retained.
Hi Christropher, I was just about to write what you just said in your post: traditional gender norms were built largely as a hedge against the risk of unwanted pregnancies AND the need for male paternity certainty. But why was male paternity certainty needed: because men wanted the reproductive benefit of having multiple sex partners. This benefit could extend from a second wife all the way up to multiple concubines and a harem situation. When men are polygenous, they aren't bedding their wife every night, because they are off with their concubines, so then they need a solution for other men going after these wives; these mothers of the children they expect to be theirs, so cultural values are needed to control female sexual agency. This is why historically under traditional patriarchy, women are so frequently controlled, required to depend on husband's income, etc. All of this is adaptive because high fertility resulted (as I said in a previous comment). Note that this high reproductive skew (some men with very high fertility and the rest with little, which happens with polygeny) was only possible for Homo sapien men *after agriculture*. So all of the cultural gender norms are only 10,000 years old. These norms that restrict women's agency are a direct result of mate guarding and women as property that arose due to the emergence of a stratified society wherein some individuals were able to hoard resources (granaries, fenced-in and grain-fed livestock), which occurred once agriculture was widespread. The scholarship on this is deep and not controversial.
Why not treat these norm changes as Chesterton's fences?
How are you still cancelled?
I'm not sure I'd call these all gender norms. For instance your suggestion that sexual inequality was as bad as financial inequality didn't offend people because of how it related to men or women but because it violated the implicit norm that equates calling something bad with a demand that people be forced not to do the thing.
Gender related sensitivities weren't irrelevant. If it wasn't about an issue where women -- for obvious evolutionary reasons -- are super alert/sensitive to (the possibility of being pressured into having sex they don't want) it wouldn't have been as explosive.
But if we expand the notion that far it risks becoming useless since so much of all social interactions at least indirectly relate to gender and mating.
Rape is equivalent to cuckoldry? What an odd, foolish thing to say. One is a violent violation of the body, during which victims experience terror, fear of death, pain, and physical injury. The other is a form of fraud, which if publically discovered by others is humiliating and embarrassing. Rape results in physical injury, PTSD, often pregnancy and STDs., and lifelong difficulty with sexual enjoyment. Cuckoldry results in feelings of anger and, if known to others, humiliation, with a deep sense of betrayal and wariness the result. The two experiences are not comparable at all, and that you think they are does not speak well of your ability to think clearly. This is just plain dumb.
This is one of the best substack posts I have read in a long time. I have been amazed at some reactions to obvious facts. About 15 years ago I mentioned to some friends that female fertility declined with age, and that women giving birth at the age of 35 or older were called "geriatric mothers." I was yelled at and told that I was lying, and I was trying to oppress all women and force them to be bare foot and pregnant. I still do not understand how that is offensive.
If anything, I think American culture has become toxic to so many, but especially to women. I have spent time in other parts of the world, and I cannot help but to think that we made a few wrong turns over the years. Perhaps childless, status-obsessed people do not form a sustainable culture. I think a massive part of this is the bizarre obsession with work status that has plagued feminist writers over the last fifty years. Once all the constraints were removed, for some reason academics cannot tolerate the choices women make. Prestige jobs are often filled with as many women as possible, yet they leave. I have noticed it in my career. Even women who stay in the job market often prefer more leisure time and often value income less. This has been obvious for so long, but always and everywhere such preferences are described as discrimination. I am not saying that discrimination does not exist, but having worked in both male-dominated and female-dominated places, the different in work environments is striking. Revealed preferences are always better than stated, but the difference is larger than most people think.
My greatest concern is what we are losing when we focus so much attention on gender and race instead of actually advancing knowledge. I am terrified of the long-term consequences. Silly consumerism gets a bad reputation because the skills do flow over to other areas. The time spent obsessing about the status of marginalized groups appears to be a dead weight loss once regulatory impediments have been removed.
You left out the bit where women are killed by men in far greater numbers than men killed by women.
"Men are to carry items for women". Heaven forbid the stronger person do the lifting. I carry the groceries in for my 84 year old mother. Does that mean I am experiencing age-related oppression?
Keep working on overcoming your bias (and repressed resentment). You might eventually come to perceive females as being every bit as human as yourself. We can only hope.
> "I’m willing to presume the superiority of any modern innovation-promoting norm. Alas, it's hard to see modern gender norms that way."
Having males and females together in spaces of business, politics, and art means having 2 groups with different average personalities, thinking patterns, etc. It increases viewpoint diversity; more ideas get explored.
> And as I expect these norms didn’t exist a half century ago
I fear you are revealing a curious historical blindspot comparable in magnitude to Paul Graham, insofar as you are unaware of the implications of, e.g., that the Equal Rights Amendment was submitted for ratification in 1972.
Modern gender roles are "pro-job-work, which increases job-work innovation." By this, I assume, you mean encourage women to work?
I hypothesize we have this norm NOW (in contrast to the "commonalities across pre-modern societies in their gender roles and norms") because female labor has never been more valuable due to modern technology: high productivity jobs are now mental, not physical.
I am curious: what role do you think the free market plays in entrenching modern gender roles (MGRs)? Do you believe MGRs are "especially unlikely to be overturned" because they are so profitable? Or because critics to MGRs are canceled, allowing them to become culturally entrenched? Or both?
Modern technological societies have values and norms that are more similar to hunter-gatherer (100k years) than to the shorter era (10K) of settled agriculture, in terms of individualism and freedom of individual choice (individual rights, individual agency).
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/forager-v-farmer-elaboratedhtml
I'd guess 99 out of 100 americans could have told you you were stepping on a huge landmine with that one. I think you must be unusually oblivious to taboos to have missed it.
As an example of a culture that lasted thousands of years with the rare gender norm where the culture didn't care about paternity certainty, and consequently, women took lovers at will, check out this recent scholarly account of the Mosuo. My explanation of why the Mosuo were *not* invaded by neighboring groups which practiced patriarchy is that Mosuo land is mountainous, poor for agriculture, and can't sustain a large population. The author, Jose Yong, agreed with me when I wrote him about this explanation. https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2055/19/1/article-p22.xml