Via Instapundit, a 'sociological law' (subject to the same limitation as all such 'laws,' which is that they are not laws if they do not apply).
I had a crack at coming up with my own sociological ‘law’ and my first effort went as follows: “The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.” I was thinking of Ireland which, having legalised abortion in 2018, is about to impose the most draconian speech restrictions in Europe. I now propose a second law: “^Any group described as privileged is in fact marginalised; and any group described as marginalised is in fact privileged.’
A case in point is white men – and in particular cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class white men – who are now at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy of oppression in most professions. But to add to their misery, these poor, benighted souls have to pretend they’re at the top of that self-same pyramid if they’re to retain their jobs, apologising for their ‘privilege’ in front of their more powerful black, female, non-binary, gay and disabled colleagues.
The author is apparently British; he goes on to provide some data backing up that claim.
Some will think I’m being deliberately provocative, so I’ll reel off some facts and figures to illustrate this point with respect to just two groups: men and women. Their relative status is the exact opposite of how it’s usually described, making it the perfect illustration of Young’s Second Law. Some of the stats about just how underprivileged men are probably won’t come as a surprise. We all know boys fare worse than girls at school, one reason 35,000 fewer 18-year-old boys will go to university this month than 18-year-old girls. We also know that men are more likely to be addicted to drugs and alcohol, account for three-quarters of all suicides and almost 90 per cent of the homeless. But did you know men make up 96.2 per cent of Britain’s prison population and are 23 times more likely to die at work than women? Research carried out by the Future Men charity found that 29 per cent of young men feel ignored, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that we have a minister for women and equalities and a women’s health ambassador, but no minister for men.
The figures are similar in the United States, where men are on the order of 90% of the (much larger) prison population, and the majority of suicides; we hear a great deal in our media about the problem of teenage girls' suicidal ideation (which is clearly undesirable) and not much about the fact that teenage males actually kill themselves more. Men are the victims of all forms of violent crime at higher rates, including rape once you include the ubiquitous rape culture of our detestable prison system and it's 90+% male population.
What strikes me often, though, is the cultural blindness attendant to all of this. I got an ad somewhere advising me to read an article about a young singer named Olivia Rodrigo -- perhaps all of you but me know who that is -- who has a new album expressing female rage against the unfair 'expectations' of her society. "The singer-songwriter says “All-American Bitch” is “sort of about that,” and is a song she’s 'very proud of.'"
It's presumptively impolite to suggest that someone's feelings aren't valid, and she has doubtless felt such things at times. Yet it should be striking that such an expression receives not disapproval, but elevation including not only an article in People magazine but purchased internet ads distributing it so far as to have it on my desk, who must be as far from the demographic who listens to her music as is possible to get within America's context. Nor is she a rare exception to a generalized hostility to 'female rage'; the Barbie movie the sociological piece begins with is a billion dollar project; the most famous singer in the world right now, I gather, is one Taylor Swift who, I also gather having not listened to her music, made her name with a series of angry songs about men generalized to men in general. Nor is this in any way new; a generation ago (when I was more likely to hear such music) Alanis Morissette also sang about how "I'm a bitch" and made millions doing it; Tori Amos, who really was a fantastic musician capable of crafting songs of great beauty, sang about almost nothing else than her rage.
What strikes me, again, is the blindness: for decades I've been hearing this talk, and the people who are culturally aligned with it really can't see that it's not true. The world oppresses women, they repeat every year, and it won't allow women to express rage or their true feelings. Yet every year they do so to wild acclaim and success, while living in a society in which they are practically better off by all these demonstrable metrics.
Another one: we always hear about men being paid more per hour than women, and arguments about whether or to what degree that is true; we almost never hear about the fact that, since metrics were kept, women control about 85% of spending decisions. Whoever earns the money, women mostly decide how to spend it, and for that reason they have intense cultural and economic power. Every shopping mall in America has a store or three devoted to more-or-less exclusively female interests like boutiques or pedicure places; you have to go a long way to find a store that's about mostly or exclusively male interests.
Women may still be full of rage, even though they now have a vast amount of power and a significant set of advantages. I suppose they must be if they keep, generation after generation, being willing to shell out such coin to celebrate expressions of their rage. I wonder, though, how much that rage could be addressed if it were possible to have a clear-eyed recognition of their privileged position in much of American and British society; or if, indeed, there is any set of facts that would resolve the rage that arises in the female experience. It may not entirely be a product of the physical facts of the situation; there may be some core of it that is permanent and eternal.
15 comments:
I have concluded that the belief in oppression will not die at the hands of intellectual argument, because it is not sustained by intellect. It is decorated by intellect, and sometimes very intelligent commentary, but that is not the reason it persists.
I meant something more than that; not whether a presentation of a set of facts could end the rage, which is intellectual, but whether there were any facts you might live among that would. That experience would be holistic; but so far living in a society that holistically is made up of _these_ facts has not at all. Rage is still generated, still treasured, still vastly rewarded.
They CANNOT see- They are programmed. Yuri Bezmanov warned us about it, Orwell says it more succinctly.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
We just watched half the country be convinced they were likely to die from a virus with a point zero something fatality rate, and walk around in abject fear of same. If the facts on the ground were in line with their fear, we would have had bodies staked on every street corner and the Diamond Princess would have been a drifting death ship.
A friend was in the State Patrol, she pulled over some woman who went into hysterics, "don't shoot me, please don't shoot me!" The lady had been genuinely convinced any stop by a white cop was going to end in her death.
Maybe people can become addicted to fear and victimhood, I don't know. It sure does worry me though, how easily people can be made to believe something with no evidence whatsoever.
Related, at Quillette: Academia's Missing Men
https://quillette.com/2023/09/11/the-shrinking-role-of-men-in-science-and-academia/
I am reminded of a discussion in Heterodox Academy about a speaker at Lakeside School, the elite private school in Seattle that counts Bill Gates among its graduates.
A commenter who identified herself as black, female, and a Lakeside student made a comment that one of the commenters should "check your privilege." From my point of view, anyone who is a Lakeside student is rather privileged, which to me, at least, made her comment amusing. Just the white bread perspective of someone educated in public institutions of education all the way from first grade through grad school.
In any event, the Lakeside student deserved some kudos for holding her own in a discussion among adults.
And she will never be able to see her own log.
I was privileged to grow up in a two parent household with a dad who worked swing shift in a factory to put food on the table and send four of his kids to college (except for me.) One car, one two week vacation in the summer, one phone on the wall. PB+J and egg salad sandwiches. Restaurant eating? Travel? Heh.
Structural steel, logging, commercial fishing, construction work, all privileged jobs.
And not sarcastic either, all taught me a lot, especially my parents.
Raven, to my mind you provide evidence against yourself here. A million Americans did die. That would ordinarily be regarded as an extremely large number, and one we would do some reorienting about.
I think I fully appreciate that we may have reoriented inaccurately, with overkill, and I think I can even be counted as an early adopter of that opinion in 2020. We didn't need to mask or have other restrictions outdoors, for example. But the people who bring up how bad our decisions were over the Covid years simply don't even mention the million dead. Not even mentioned. It's the sort of omission that on other subjects and discussing the NYT and WaPo, conservatives count as deceptive bias.
COVID isn't the subject of this post, but the inability to see certain things definitely is; so in a way, the discussion is on topic.
I have to admit that the COVID death toll is hard for me to see. I can't think of anyone I know who actually died of COVID, though some people I knew at one or two removes were said to have. The world changed a lot, but I didn't go to any more funerals. Phenomenologically, for those whose friends mostly weren't in the high-at-risk age group there was no wave of deaths to experience.
Yet we can see in the statistics that all-cause mortality went up and remains up. Yet that hasn't affected me phenomenologically either: I don't know any recent suicides, any young men who suddenly developed and died of unexplained heart conditions, any drug overdoses, and so forth. The statistics clearly show that there's been a lot more death, but in terms of the ability to bring it into one's experience, a million deaths in a nation of over three hundred million leaves a lot of people unaffected.
That doesn't undo Raven's point about the Diamond Princess: given that we had a novel virus apparently released from a weapons lab, some initial caution was absolutely warranted. Bayesian updating as evidence like that came in, though, might have led us to back off a lot sooner (and with a lot less collateral damage).
As for the all-cause mortality, which remains high, it mostly isn't now COVID. COVID is still around, but we have more or less all been exposed to it now and developed antibodies -- in addition to whatever help the vaccines are, or were. Nobody seems to know how to explain why American deaths soared and remained high after the apparent proximate cause had passed. It's the sort of question that invites dire conspiracy theories, which I would prefer to avoid here. Yet it's one of those facts that's hard to see clearly, let alone to integrate into one's life.
A lot were killed by the treatment protocols. Sick? Go home, call us when you can't breath.
Then get admitted to a hospital that gets PAID extra for a toe tag, and you get treated with remdisiver, which is known to cause kidney failure and was pulled from earlier trials because it posed an undue risk. Talk about a perverse incentive.
Meanwhile, EVERY alternate treatment was squashed by the pharma/gov cabal.
The numbers of people who died from covid, with no serious underlying conditions, was far less than claimed. And if you look, there are actual admissions of this from the various governments. Italy said 93 percent of the covid deaths, were actually caused by other factors-covid nudged them over the edge. CDC has revised their numbers,not that I give them any credence anyway.
Remember the panic over the Teddy Roosevelt? The second floating covid petri dish?
Complement of roughly 4500? About a 1/4 got sick, about 20 were admitted to sick bay, and one died. Very similar to the Diamond Princess, but with a much healthier group.
We were conned. And the medical industrial complex made billions.
The hospitals were paid to fail. Absolutely a perverse incentive.
In the humanities, and maybe increasingly in medicine and the sciences more broadly, scholars are pushed to use interpretive frameworks that make coming to the obvious conclusions impossible. If you adopt almost any kind of feminist framework, you cannot come to the conclusion that women are not oppressed. This is supported whether one is using critical theory or Foucault, and those seem to be the only frameworks available in the academy now to look at gender.
It's also post-modernism and Barthes and the linguistic turn and all that. It's all biased against taking the obvious into account.
On the topic of COVID, I would pay good money for a book by someone who knows what they are talking about that explained what happened, taking into account all of the things that have been mentioned and anything else that was relevant. And, of course, w/o political bias.
Again here, Tom, I’m not really talking about the intellectual environment. I agree that, and have written several times about, the structure of critical theory interpretations baking in the conclusion. But the popularity of the complaint and the frequency of expressions of rage go well beyond intellectual circles. There really must be something driving these convictions and rage, which hasn’t been moved by these generations of improvements in practical conditions.
Women now get by far the largest percentage of diplomas and graduate degrees; they disproportionately occupy high paying, physically easy office jobs instead of low paying, strenuous and low status construction and labor jobs; they control 85% of the money decisions and therefore the bulk of the culture. So far that’s not reduced the feelings of rage.
Hypothesis: when expressing anger gets someone what they want, then anger will likely become a big part of their visible personality. A positive feedback look, aka vicious circle.
That’s certainly plausible as a cause of the expression; but it’s less plausible as a cause of the intense, lasting, rewarding reception of the expression. That costs the receiver money, money and time that they prove willing to spend generations along.
Leftism demands that people be enraged, and emotionally charged, so that they can be manipulated into directing that rage (justified or not) onto specified targets- generally the traditional structures of society. The media, good lapdogs of the left that they are, parrot incessantly the message that women are oppressed and should be enraged about it- so they are. Propaganda works.
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