Conversation

The matriarchy is almost upon us The weird thing though is that it’s increasingly clear it will be a trad matriarchy rather than a woke one The culture theater is relitigating ill-posed feminist causes from 1970 while economic forces are concentrating power in household affairs
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What does equal pay for equal work even mean in gig-work/free agency? What does maternity leave mean under the API where you’re flex-timing and gambling with surge pricing algorithms anyway?
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Otoh incredible financial leverage now available in basic behaviors like shopping. The NYT just did a thing on how perverse incentives in healthcare are leading women doctors to gravitate to family strengthening practices like internal medicine and geriatrics etc.
Biggest forces at work: - Aging population - Healthcare eating the economy - Free agency/gig work growing, full-featured paycheck jobs in retreat - Death of the public (and social capital therefore retreating to the domestic sphere)
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This trend is much more obvious to men than to women, thanks to higher human sensitivity to losses over gains. Understandably, given they are starting from a much lower base of power, gains seem trivial and the absolute gap in agency and power still seems insurmountable.
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This isn’t the result of conscious, intentional political change. It is a side effect of unraveling of industrial era institutions and a sort of natural regrouping around institutions already dominated by women.
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Don’t expect all guys to retreat sullenly to video games, flirt with radicalization and mass shooting fantasies, or be able to participate in the last great patriarchal show: securitization and financialization of everything. The majority will attempt entryism by masculinization.
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“Bro” anything is entryist masculinization of a traditionally feminine activity. Growth hacking = bro-marketing/PR was an early example. 1% genuinely different male approach, 9% rebranding, 90% survival desperation energy showing up in a placid place.
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The essential femininity of “bro” behaviors hit me forcefully when I caught a random episode of the Bachelorette a few years ago. I was racking my brains trying to tag the dynamics and then it hit me: the word I was looking for was “catty”. The guys were competing like girls.
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I was thinking recently of Virginia Woolf’s line that to write “a woman must have money and a room of her own”. Increasingly true for men. The era of big-dick-energy male novelists writing 800 page tomes in nice wood-paneled studies while being waited on by women is over.
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There’s also an asymmetry emerging. Trad masculinity strikes me as 90% silly reactionary larping (think EDC and tacticool subcultures, MRA/MGTOW, wilderness survivslism etc). But trad femininity is not trad at all, but a refactored old stock that aligns with ascendant forces.
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If gendered subcultures were stocks, I would: 1. Short trad masculinity (it will self-destruct) 2. Go long trad femininity 3. Stay away from woke stocks like LGBTQ beyond a de minimis longshot exposure (volatile/temperamental like crypto) 4. Unwind industrial role bets slowly
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