Prestige economies are feminized ontologically because prestige is about perception, not reality. And the men in them go along with it regardless of whether women actually coerce them. Andrews remains an easily demolished strawman because she conveniently ignores credentialism and female elite overproduction, both of which I address as interrelated aspects of feminization, and not limited to the female sex. This is because Andrews is the same kind of woman she critiques, just with different tribal affiliation.
Finally, people like Silver and Klein just refuse to name that the indigo blob/blue sky/ anti-abundance are overwhelmingly women with prestigious degrees and low income ceilings who cannot depend on a man to rescue them. But they cannot say this openly because men and women will come for them. So here we are.
I basically agree but find that in places where men and women compete with each other, you get left with men fluent in these games. Rather than calling them feminized, I just point the fact that they’re not much like men in lower economics ranks or women from lower economic ranks, which is why I feel like upper middle class androgyny is a little closer to what’s going on. Ditto when you get to crazy wealth like Bezos and his lady, who can be dishy, display secondary sex characteristics.
At the striver level, men and women have more in common with each other on these competitive terms than they do with people of their own sex above or below them.
These are really excellent points that were sort of inchoate in my mind but not laid out so clearly. But yes, it's strange to me to hear all this stuff is all or mostly women when every person I've ever gotten into an argument with who was taking the very strong position that Joe Rogan and anyone who listened to him or similar podcasts was a complete moron, or that Keith Ranier deserved not only life in prison but possibly the death penalty, or that burning down Mexican restaurants was an understandable and acceptable response to seeing a video of George Floyd was a man.
Granted, I live in a weird place where on the one hand men are still clearly and comfortably dominant in most workplaces, yet they're ALSO a particularly milquetoast and ultra WASPY version of masculinity, so this stuff is hard for me to see when they still totally run the show here, yet the most they get up to is having milk with their cookies and maybe an Energy Drink and an R rated movie when they're really being bad boys. 😂
Gavin Newsom is basically the most masculine you’re allowed to be as a white guy and still be somewhat respectable to these guys. You can be large if you’re tubby but they don’t like muscles. They like fine features. No big noses. No cleavage/better have “aristocratic breasts”. Nothing in excess. No fun.
I await the next thinkpiece on Sydney Sweeney's bazookas, credentialism, and elite human capital overproduction. I'll read for the writing, of course, and not any photos...
What you're talking about isn't about what you term EHC's, it's the 'professionalization' of the workplace. This is a combo of two things: it turns out, people really don't like being sexually harassed. And also, also! Victims of sexual harassment are really, really sympathetic when they tell their stories! Enough so that in even in this dystopia of partisan warfare, even Congress could agree that the law should change. Heck victims of sexual harassment are sympathetic enough that congress even recently updated those laws, so that even people like Goldman Sachs can't hide their stories using NDAs people were forced to sign when hired or employment contracts that forced binding arbitration on victims of sexual harassment. So yes, now the workplace must be sanitized of anything remotely sexual, because it turns out businesses do not like losing money being sued for sexual harassment. So yeah, that in has lead to the great de-sexualization of the workplace, for both men and women. To avoid prosecution for sexual harassment, workplace culture has to be sexless, not just androgynous, but entirely devoid of any conflict which might lead to any party claiming harassment based on gender expression. That includes women who might claim they're being heckled and discriminated against by a good'ol'boys club, but also men who might claim they are being excluded by the Mean Girls club. That's not really left or right coded, except for some voices on the right who think they should be able to go back to the days of hypersexualized workplaces where they could chase ass all day away from the view of their wives.
Nah. Not good enough. I feel like the Helen Andrews thing already covered this in saying it takes very little women present to cause the environment to flip lopsidedly in their favor. The question here is how much is actually demanded by men to "accomodate" them. It's mostly an absence of things. Regulations going away. On the other hand effort has to be expended constantly to incorporate women into things. I don't know if she intended that to be a part of her thing or not, but the fact the needs ate asymmetrical matters a lot.
Having a certain ratio of women to men would feminize Bluesky but somehow not feminize X/Twitter? How many women are needed per institution to achieve this Schelling Point or is it somehow different per institution?
I dunno if websites are a good comparison point. You have considerable room to break or customize social etiquette online...and women online, for all their whining about misogyny, don't actually posess any innate physical difference to a male user like IRL, so I'm sure this changes things.
I’ve worked in hotels where there are massive staffs of housekeepers, all female. They don’t really behave the way Andrews describes. This seems to be a striver phenomenon.
In *every* library I've ever worked at as a librarian over the past twenty-five years, the reaction of many of the women staff has been the same: in hushed tones, they take me aside and say, "thank *God* we finally hired a man".
The striver phenomenon is absolutely correct and there is no profession that can hold a candle to this dynamic better than over-educated, under-compensated academic and corporate librarianship, where in the former many were failed would-be PhD's, and the latter those not driven enough to get law or MBA degrees.
You still gotta control for situations where women were forcefully injected into a non-woman field as part of social change. Does that really apply for housekeepers or hotel staff? I think the reason we discuss this is because it's possible cause of disenfranchisement. Hotel staff most likely have a work culture that is less disturbed by woke social experimentation. But then again I don't know, doesn't every job have the same norms around "sexual harassment"?
These are all good points. I think any job that had women injected into it, as you say, necessarily pretends at a level of prestige. I happen to think the medical biller job is basically where you put people too diabetic for slavery but because it’s in an office and you get a 401k, we pretend it’s a white collar job. We don’t do this with things like garbage collection though. When it’s all guys, even if they make $100k/yr, it will still be low prestige.
People are just too touchy about women being wholly unimpressive. I wouldn't consider the fat ladies in light blue scrubs to be any kind of figure worthy of respect but the RPG gives them a few spells that allow a nagging and scolding based build and it actually "works" in the sense you lose some kindnof battle in the public eye if one does this to yoh. Does that translate to real prestige? I argue with PHD freaks often on here. Yes they can dismiss me as a troglodyte for being a highschool drop out but then in a weird way, they actually are being lowered to my level or possibly vice versa. If they lived the real life of an academic they'd be spared my existence but the likes of me can get at them easier than ever if I so choose.
Helen Andrews can only go so far with her thesis because of who she is. She wears the woman suit thing and did all the academic stuff, she's a professional womon not playing her femininely role according to partiarchy. So being too serious about this is the same as being a gisnt hypocrite. But I do see it as getting at this in a roundabout way. Women can't be involved in things unless you want the thing to begin focusing on its own label or name and what that means and endlessly dissecting that, in other words drifting it further and further away from the thing as an actual practice and more a set of conditions. Women are positively obsessed with speech and nominal things. In this pursuit they have utterly steamrolled male status and elevated the feminine one, but it's also only so real. The dirty uncouth man pursuits as far as I'm aware offer more comparitive gain in society than they used to. That used to be 'everyday' lower mid work but now it will probably earn you a normal comfy life. It lacks the prestige and dignity and people focus on that endlessly, but again, people's PHDs no longer shield them from ugly contemplative bridge trolls either.
We both agree that both sexes are getting more androgynous for the office.
I’m not arguing what things would look like if they didn’t have to go to the office at all, which I think would result in some women becoming more feminine and others less. Basically more variance.
I’m arguing that if women still had to go to the office but they could run it as petite dictators, they would relax the competition a little. You’d see more bobs, sensible shoes, basically what k-12 teachers and administrators look like by the time they get around 50.
This is definitely an active vector of the intersection but old guys do stay kind of horny. It’s not like the average mechanic was 20 when I was younger. They just have to do business with respectable people who have more influence so the ditched the pinup calendars for the most part. Women are probably a little more susceptible to the group dynamic in ang of the scenarios we cook up.
I think most mechanics now would be scrolling their OnlyFans Instagram feeds rather than rely on a paper pinup. Even in auto body shops there would be *someone* complaining to HR about a mechanic putting a Sydney Sweeney pic on their locker door.
Prestige economies are feminized ontologically because prestige is about perception, not reality. And the men in them go along with it regardless of whether women actually coerce them. Andrews remains an easily demolished strawman because she conveniently ignores credentialism and female elite overproduction, both of which I address as interrelated aspects of feminization, and not limited to the female sex. This is because Andrews is the same kind of woman she critiques, just with different tribal affiliation.
Finally, people like Silver and Klein just refuse to name that the indigo blob/blue sky/ anti-abundance are overwhelmingly women with prestigious degrees and low income ceilings who cannot depend on a man to rescue them. But they cannot say this openly because men and women will come for them. So here we are.
I basically agree but find that in places where men and women compete with each other, you get left with men fluent in these games. Rather than calling them feminized, I just point the fact that they’re not much like men in lower economics ranks or women from lower economic ranks, which is why I feel like upper middle class androgyny is a little closer to what’s going on. Ditto when you get to crazy wealth like Bezos and his lady, who can be dishy, display secondary sex characteristics.
At the striver level, men and women have more in common with each other on these competitive terms than they do with people of their own sex above or below them.
These are really excellent points that were sort of inchoate in my mind but not laid out so clearly. But yes, it's strange to me to hear all this stuff is all or mostly women when every person I've ever gotten into an argument with who was taking the very strong position that Joe Rogan and anyone who listened to him or similar podcasts was a complete moron, or that Keith Ranier deserved not only life in prison but possibly the death penalty, or that burning down Mexican restaurants was an understandable and acceptable response to seeing a video of George Floyd was a man.
Granted, I live in a weird place where on the one hand men are still clearly and comfortably dominant in most workplaces, yet they're ALSO a particularly milquetoast and ultra WASPY version of masculinity, so this stuff is hard for me to see when they still totally run the show here, yet the most they get up to is having milk with their cookies and maybe an Energy Drink and an R rated movie when they're really being bad boys. 😂
Gavin Newsom is basically the most masculine you’re allowed to be as a white guy and still be somewhat respectable to these guys. You can be large if you’re tubby but they don’t like muscles. They like fine features. No big noses. No cleavage/better have “aristocratic breasts”. Nothing in excess. No fun.
"aristocratic breasts"
Do aristocratic women have small, thin breasts? Asking for a friend.
yes, the nobles and old money consider big bazookas tacky and low class and marry accordingly
I await the next thinkpiece on Sydney Sweeney's bazookas, credentialism, and elite human capital overproduction. I'll read for the writing, of course, and not any photos...
It's 2026, we only read such things for the writing, as photos of bazookas are readily available everywhere - even on cereal boxes
Ah - Seattle?
Life.
I refuse to stop crossing the legs
A true sign you are EHC.
In other words, our overlords are anti-human.
"deep leg crossers" also describes this. It describes it in one phrase.
Might use this. Bravo.
not to diminish your work, but I like to offer the idiot's guide versions sometimes.
Not at all. I appreciate it.
A banger.
Should we call EHC drama queens?
Definitely androgyny!
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-androgynous-mind
Great minds, Bell.
Specifically, negative androgyny. As we've discussed several times at length. The cure is positive androgyny. Also known as integration.
Completely agree—I am totally integrated which is why I don’t fit in with these lizard people. I was looking for the language. Thank you.
No snark intended.
No need for snark, mister. I'm on your side here.
What you're talking about isn't about what you term EHC's, it's the 'professionalization' of the workplace. This is a combo of two things: it turns out, people really don't like being sexually harassed. And also, also! Victims of sexual harassment are really, really sympathetic when they tell their stories! Enough so that in even in this dystopia of partisan warfare, even Congress could agree that the law should change. Heck victims of sexual harassment are sympathetic enough that congress even recently updated those laws, so that even people like Goldman Sachs can't hide their stories using NDAs people were forced to sign when hired or employment contracts that forced binding arbitration on victims of sexual harassment. So yes, now the workplace must be sanitized of anything remotely sexual, because it turns out businesses do not like losing money being sued for sexual harassment. So yeah, that in has lead to the great de-sexualization of the workplace, for both men and women. To avoid prosecution for sexual harassment, workplace culture has to be sexless, not just androgynous, but entirely devoid of any conflict which might lead to any party claiming harassment based on gender expression. That includes women who might claim they're being heckled and discriminated against by a good'ol'boys club, but also men who might claim they are being excluded by the Mean Girls club. That's not really left or right coded, except for some voices on the right who think they should be able to go back to the days of hypersexualized workplaces where they could chase ass all day away from the view of their wives.
Nah. Not good enough. I feel like the Helen Andrews thing already covered this in saying it takes very little women present to cause the environment to flip lopsidedly in their favor. The question here is how much is actually demanded by men to "accomodate" them. It's mostly an absence of things. Regulations going away. On the other hand effort has to be expended constantly to incorporate women into things. I don't know if she intended that to be a part of her thing or not, but the fact the needs ate asymmetrical matters a lot.
Having a certain ratio of women to men would feminize Bluesky but somehow not feminize X/Twitter? How many women are needed per institution to achieve this Schelling Point or is it somehow different per institution?
I dunno if websites are a good comparison point. You have considerable room to break or customize social etiquette online...and women online, for all their whining about misogyny, don't actually posess any innate physical difference to a male user like IRL, so I'm sure this changes things.
I’ve worked in hotels where there are massive staffs of housekeepers, all female. They don’t really behave the way Andrews describes. This seems to be a striver phenomenon.
In *every* library I've ever worked at as a librarian over the past twenty-five years, the reaction of many of the women staff has been the same: in hushed tones, they take me aside and say, "thank *God* we finally hired a man".
The striver phenomenon is absolutely correct and there is no profession that can hold a candle to this dynamic better than over-educated, under-compensated academic and corporate librarianship, where in the former many were failed would-be PhD's, and the latter those not driven enough to get law or MBA degrees.
You still gotta control for situations where women were forcefully injected into a non-woman field as part of social change. Does that really apply for housekeepers or hotel staff? I think the reason we discuss this is because it's possible cause of disenfranchisement. Hotel staff most likely have a work culture that is less disturbed by woke social experimentation. But then again I don't know, doesn't every job have the same norms around "sexual harassment"?
These are all good points. I think any job that had women injected into it, as you say, necessarily pretends at a level of prestige. I happen to think the medical biller job is basically where you put people too diabetic for slavery but because it’s in an office and you get a 401k, we pretend it’s a white collar job. We don’t do this with things like garbage collection though. When it’s all guys, even if they make $100k/yr, it will still be low prestige.
People are just too touchy about women being wholly unimpressive. I wouldn't consider the fat ladies in light blue scrubs to be any kind of figure worthy of respect but the RPG gives them a few spells that allow a nagging and scolding based build and it actually "works" in the sense you lose some kindnof battle in the public eye if one does this to yoh. Does that translate to real prestige? I argue with PHD freaks often on here. Yes they can dismiss me as a troglodyte for being a highschool drop out but then in a weird way, they actually are being lowered to my level or possibly vice versa. If they lived the real life of an academic they'd be spared my existence but the likes of me can get at them easier than ever if I so choose.
Helen Andrews can only go so far with her thesis because of who she is. She wears the woman suit thing and did all the academic stuff, she's a professional womon not playing her femininely role according to partiarchy. So being too serious about this is the same as being a gisnt hypocrite. But I do see it as getting at this in a roundabout way. Women can't be involved in things unless you want the thing to begin focusing on its own label or name and what that means and endlessly dissecting that, in other words drifting it further and further away from the thing as an actual practice and more a set of conditions. Women are positively obsessed with speech and nominal things. In this pursuit they have utterly steamrolled male status and elevated the feminine one, but it's also only so real. The dirty uncouth man pursuits as far as I'm aware offer more comparitive gain in society than they used to. That used to be 'everyday' lower mid work but now it will probably earn you a normal comfy life. It lacks the prestige and dignity and people focus on that endlessly, but again, people's PHDs no longer shield them from ugly contemplative bridge trolls either.
We both agree that both sexes are getting more androgynous for the office.
I’m not arguing what things would look like if they didn’t have to go to the office at all, which I think would result in some women becoming more feminine and others less. Basically more variance.
I’m arguing that if women still had to go to the office but they could run it as petite dictators, they would relax the competition a little. You’d see more bobs, sensible shoes, basically what k-12 teachers and administrators look like by the time they get around 50.
Let me add librarians to the mix (ask me about what it's like to be a straight male in a profession that's something like ninety percent female).
To take the Mad Men analogy further, an office that looks more like Peggy Olson than Joan, more Harry Crane than Don Draper.
This is definitely an active vector of the intersection but old guys do stay kind of horny. It’s not like the average mechanic was 20 when I was younger. They just have to do business with respectable people who have more influence so the ditched the pinup calendars for the most part. Women are probably a little more susceptible to the group dynamic in ang of the scenarios we cook up.
I think most mechanics now would be scrolling their OnlyFans Instagram feeds rather than rely on a paper pinup. Even in auto body shops there would be *someone* complaining to HR about a mechanic putting a Sydney Sweeney pic on their locker door.
Pinups where 100% a middle-age mechanic thing. Here in Europe we had the Pirelli pinup calendar
You make good points. Here is my cherry picked essay in my defense: https://open.substack.com/pub/kryptogal/p/femininity-is-fake-but-masculinity?r=6kh7x&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay