Binches be talking

Genderslop, chisme, and the women who like to make their voices heard

I was trying to leave my genderslop life behind when I got pulled back in for ONE MORE MISSION. This is where I embark.

My prediction

Earlier this year I predicted that there will be a backlash to feminism that both has more teeth than previous iterations we’ve seen since the peak of raunch culture in the late 90’s and early 2000’s (think The Man Show, American Pie etc.) and simultaneously accomplishes very little, save for the people leading the backlash who often have good reasons for leading them without being entirely self-interested. The backlash, I predicted, would be led by women. In fact the women leading the charge of antifeminism will be an almost mirror reflection of the same types who remain staunch feminists even in the year of our Lord 2025, when American women have it better than almost any class of women in history, both in terms of freedom and financial/material wealth, and yet there are still women (mostly upper middle class) who think we haven’t gone far enough. In fact, the closer you are to the upper middle class ideal of Master’s/PhD, mommy identitarianism, and a 401k, the more likely you are to participate in agitating for more resources under the guise of feminism.

However, just as history shows that most revolutions are actually waged between elites and counter elites (who fund the rebels), you should expect similar training and tactics between feminists who wield entrenched institutional power and antifeminists who are basically former feminists, who played all the games, mouthed the pieties, and got shoved out. This accounts for the hissing sound you hear when the two engage each other. It’s the feline Krav Maga variant known as Binchitsu. It only occurs during intra-class, intrasexual violence (typing).

What happens is feminists want more material gains (resources and social control), mostly supplied through coercion and social engineering, but they dress it up as freedom, fairness, equality, what’s moral, what’s right, and often for babies, which no one could possibly oppose. In fact, they think you are already coercing them by not giving them their way. But the thing is, some women get frosted out by the very same women allegedly fighting for team women. They are competing for the same sorts of jobs in the symbolic knowledge economy or whatever, the same money, and the same men. Since this cohort, sometimes called NLUGs (not like the other girls) , sometimes called pickmes, often called nothing at all, are already cut out of the upper middle class cool-girls group, they begin pointing out how some of the pieties are bullshit (wage gap, 1/5 campus sexual assault stat, etc.) but also how female social control mechanisms work (shame, covert competition, consensus, etc.), and you get a clash.

In August, I began framing my hypothesis in Why is there so much gender-slop all of a sudden? , arguing that women will produce more genderslop articles as an impotent reaction to feminism/gender theory’s current disfavor with younger generations born after the employment and academic worlds already began eclipsing sexual parity and cruising towards greater female participation than male. I continued detailing my hypothesis more thoroughly in a Blahcast I recorded with Anuradha Pandey called Antifeminism with a Feminine Touch. And when Darby Saxbe recently called out Pandey for critiquing the norms enforced by elite women under the guise of feminism, I naturally began bragging about my ability to predict the future, which I do rarely but with impeccable results. Then Rohan Ghostwind called me out, asking if I couldn’t put a finer point on my theory. Maybe I could better define my prediction and the mechanisms that guide its fruition so my critics and loyal subscribers can figure out just how psychic/schizo I am.

I have no clue what Andrews was on about. All I see is the pursuit of truth and women helping women.

Time to party

I’ll start by making an analogy. When I go to a party with my wife, I can’t guarantee that we’re going to get stuck in a threshold saying goodbye (to the very people we just spent hours talking to) for an additional 40 minutes. Having said that, I can predict that if we’re going to get stuck on premises, drifting toward the car at a glacial pace, that it will most likely be the result of her agreeableness and ability to chisme with other ladies and lose track of time rather than my ability to do so. The ability to stay an extra 40 minutes to talk shit, after you’ve already resolved to head home, in no way reflects whether I have friends, whether I can get sidetracked, or whether my verbal capacity or social abilities are compelling or charismatic enough to support it. In fact, I can run my mouth better than 95% of the human population and yet, you don’t see me hanging out when I already said I was going to dip. And while I don’t think all couples do this, of couples who seem to hit quicksand every time they try to evacuate a shindig, it’s okay to presume it’s the wife’s fault. You would have to go out of your way not to notice something like this.

Similarly, men only have so much stomach for writing certain kinds of screeds. They may write about World War II, or the cassowary, they may write about having sex across Europe or North America, they may write about immigration policy, guns, IQ, the economy, The Red Pill or some other male variant of gender-slop, but feminism has been around a long time relative to the age of anyone reading this (one more wave and you guys are really going to nail it) and opposition to feminism has been pretty stagnant until recently, neither contracting nor expanding, just remaining in a weak state, shouting “stop!” as more and more concessions are made in favor of feminism, which has institutional backing, something its opposition lacks.

I joked about the card game Fair Play last week, writing that, “When men design games you get shooting, jumping, woman with big bobbs. When women design games you get Kitchen Grievance. Men like doing war crimes. Women like calling everything men like war crimes.”

Note that I am not limiting the topics women write about to Kitchen Grievance/Barbie stuff. I also think women write about war and giant birds. They definitely write about sex, immigration, guns, the economy, and The Red Pill. But they write about feminism way more than men because by constantly defining what issues face women at large, they can smuggle in their pet viewpoints, scale them, and try to universalize them. Many of these other issues, when argued by women, are argued for on feminist terms and across its framings of justice rather than lower down at the object level and, from a descriptive standpoint, men don’t have the pull as a collective because it doesn’t work and comes off as whining. Given the option to argue for something as a woman and argue for something because you’re a woman, the latter is often used so that one can shoehorn niche issues into it because society has no good defense against it. As Hilary Clinton once said, “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.”

Politics is about doing what you were going to do anyway and coming up with a reason for it

It’s true: Every conflict is an opportunity for power and advocating for your thing just-because is never going to work. You have to argue for it on behalf of a client group facing an injustice. Feminists argue for their particular brand of health, wealth, and assorted benes as recompense for a combination of biology and multi-thousand-year blocks of history that neither living men nor living women have ever experienced, but this is how you create a political formula. Environmentalists know that getting people to be colder and poorer is a lot easier to pull off if you scare them about rising sea levels. Similarly, increasing patronage, social welfare, and employment benefits is a lot easier if you invoke the long arc of history rather than saying you feel you are owed something due to the biological accidents of having a vagina.

Fair Play

As I posted earlier this month, the game Fair Play capitalizes on women’s desire to have men do things without asking. If it’s international law, it can’t be her job to tell him. Conveniently enough, feminism capitalizes on the idea that you can codify all your pet peeves into a 1,000-point list that means you never have to personally negotiate anything with any man again. You can just show your husband all the likes you got on your post and then demand he recognize the authority of CathyJane42069 (pfp is head-on shot of her greasy forehead) and her long track record of liking your other posts and agreeing with you despite the fact that she is a 63 year-old woman several decades removed from the touch of a man. If you just get the right jury in the right jurisdiction, everything you don’t like about your material circumstances can get blamed on the patriarchy but offloaded onto real men with heartbeats and social security numbers and desires, as opposed to the abstract ones you invented under the guise of patriarchy.

To restate: It’s not that men don’t write screeds attempting to relitigate the continuing battle of the sexes—it’s that they don’t write as many and their arguments have been known for a long time because their arguments read closer to someone asking to stop things where they are than they are about threatening to chain women to radiators. The very desire to make all antifeminist arguments into The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates how unserious most feminists are about responding to legitimate criticism. They only know how to fight from the fetal position.

The men fighting bad ideas with more bad ideas

To point out what could plausibly look like a pair of exceptions to my theory of female antifeminists, Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway are two male voices, who also do much to promote themselves, but do very little for the cause of men (in the same way Al Sharpton does a lot for Al Sharpton but not much for black people). Both would probably loathe to be called antifeminists and I don’t count them among those I would call antifeminists mostly because they just can’t get enough of feminism. I don’t think I’ve ever read or heard either make a single critique of it despite feminism appearing to be very much at odds with certain aspects of male flourishing–for instance, lecturing men who don’t use slurs in the workplace about not using slurs in the workplace—this seems like it’s bad for men’s spirits.

Ostensibly, Reeves and Galloway are out there fighting for me but they really claim to be fighting for guys doing a lot worse than me, guys with less money, no wife/gf/mami to call their own, and no property. Theoretically they’re advocating for these guys but they don’t account for any tradeoffs between giving into feminist demands and helping men, which just seems practically impossible, in the true sense of practicality–both men expressly say they have techniques that will never ever hurt women’s position relative to men; they also overlook that much of what has put men at such a disadvantage is the distinctly Progressive flavor that persists through our preferred brand of feminism and they want to fight failed Progressivism with more Progressivism. Plus, there’s the whole idea of rival goods. What you give one person you cannot give another. Economists acknowledge this and politicians lie about it. This is why feminists (and open borders advocates) who accuse you of using “zero sum thinking” are usually politicians.

The one thing Reeves and Galloway are really settled on is that whatever solutions they have for men 1) have to be Progressive and 2) conform to women’s approval. In their world there is no possibility of a solution that isn’t compatible with the norms of people who brought you compulsory and constantly evolving sensitivity trainings, gender pronouns, and Title IX kangaroo courts among many other contemporary humiliation rituals enforced expressly through institutions. I’m not talking about some random barista with a septum piercing making demands of you. I’m talking about what’s enforced through all-of-society initiatives, Human Resources Departments, EEOC and civil rights law, disparate impact, preferential grants and scholarships, ESG, and business loans for women—not what a random person thinks but what all of us are forced to deal with on behalf of an idea of women at large. The way special interest groups like feminists put corporations up to bullying unsuspecting people on their behalf and the way corporations defer to a legion of bullies to sanitize their reputations.

Some parties just suck

Enter yet more women—other women versed in PMC/HR/consulting language who learned it, tried it, and were found wanting. In the same way, you can imagine a conservation of people getting stuck in doorframes pretending to say goodbye (people multiplied by time spent), that if you cut the quantity of parties in half, that you would get a batch of the same exact women hanging out for twice as long. But a more likely way of conserving the chatty Cathy situation would mean they just find/make other situations in other places to chisme on their own.

Feminism, along with DEI/Affirmative Action, ESG, transgender ideology and many of the incrementalist fronts on which Progressivism advances its footholds are experiencing a backlash, which means their parties aren’t as fun and there are a lot fewer of them now that they just lost a big election largely through having bad, schoolmarmish, language-policing vibes and trying to cover it up with a Charli XCX tweet. So, you still have the same amount of women who want to litigate our social norms but there are fewer slots to do it in favor of Progressive causes (which people find extremely annoying right now) and so, rather than just talking twice as long at the same parties or just accepting other women frosting them out of the conversation, some women like Pandey Janice Fiamengo, and Helen Andrews start other parties.

No kings, no queens

Some of these newly liberated women must take up the side of the heel (me/men). They have to argue on behalf of men or at least people who feel like these Progressive causes have lost their sheen, that they went too far, that they are incapable of introspection, pumping the breaks, asking if they aren’t actually hurting the people who complain about them because no one wants to listen to you when your cause is that you personally feel entitled to litigate social norms. Something that is true of both sides, feminists and antifeminists alike. Nominally no one is self-interested; rather, everyone is interested in what’s best. Except for my loyal readers who know I am the only person who can adequately adjudicate social norms and other matters of societal import.

You will encounter women on the vanguard of antifeminism, not because feminism is good or bad but because we have overproduced the kind of woman who wants to enforce her norms on the world and the amount of slots available to argue in favor of feminism are filled, in the same way that there is absolutely no dynamism on the left and I wouldn’t suggest anyone submit an application to Black Lives Matter or whatever Olivia Julianna is up to anytime soon. Even if Curtis Yarvin turns out to be an absolute crank, at least he had something new (old) to say as opposed to more black and white photos of Civil Rights leaders, another epic poem about Abundance (how Democrats should do business as usual while rebranding) or how we need more mommy leave (the same thing women have been asking for and getting as various work benefits for decades on end). Just because the girl gossip at a party sucks doesn’t mean that it will result in men sharing pictures of their kids and vacation all of a sudden—you’re just going to get different women, women like Pandey and Andrews, starting their own parties and the other women, who aren’t invited to them, are going to get mad and start talking shit, occasionally couching it in concern that their opposition’s subscriber-count is so large. Sometimes they’ll get jealous of the coed conviviality on the side that’s more welcoming toward men and less welcoming to the frigid, anxious women who like to control them.

To revert back to a weather analogy I used in Why is there so much gender-slop all of a sudden?: If you think of feminism as a storm front, it’s hitting cooler waters because the country has bigger issues to worry about than sensitivity trainings and pronouns. Plus, the whole pussy hat thing everyone wants to forget about looks like a national embarrassment in retrospect BUT that doesn’t constrain the amount of people jocking for you to hear their voices and it doesn’t mean there aren’t other avenues for pursuing one’s ends. Galloway and Reeves are basically attempting feminism but for men, which is to say they are invoking feels, therapy language, and wishcasting for their ends (while booking media gigs and trying to steer men into voting Democrat). Conversely, antifeminists are attempting to dislodge some of the insufferable speech norms and flicking-the-light-switch energy feminists have wielded over the population for the last 60 years, which would certainly be a win for all but the most insufferable, hedging, fake-polite, weak but self-motivated people among us. And it may very well have some downstream consequences for men at large but I predict this will primarily furnish the discourse with new voices, not material gains for men. There aren’t a lot of new angles by which men can argue against feminism so they will be argued by many of the women who, like Pandey, used to argue in favor of feminism. Women who will be called pickmes by the incumbency of “I’m with her” era professional women incapable of imagining a good person who holds substantive disagreements with them.

Conclusion

I’m pretty partial to many critiques against feminism but the question I want to answer is about why I think we are going to hear more antifeminist voices, especially from women, and I think it’s just a question of supply and demand. There have always been women with aversions to some of the items constituting feminist platforms but there are now enough of them with enough issues that, even those who are not moved to write about them, will eagerly read them. Feminism and identity politics in general have been annoying many people who just wanted to keep their head down and now these movements have generated many enemies through aggressive purity-testing and shame campaigns. Because they have silenced so much speech, they are not yet prepared to deal with counterarguments to their project. They have successfully stifled dissent by labelling it inhumane and immoral and by hijacking most men’s chivalry and desire not to compete with women, especially when they’re using emotions to get what they want. Now there is a great wailing and gnashing of teeth but we’re no closer to getting home or leaving the party. There’s a hissing in the air. The exits are congested. And the SWAT team is nowhere to be found.