Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. I’m a writer working on decriminalizing and destigmatizing all things sex. I use evidence and stories to interrogate existing power structures to propose better ways of relating. To support my work,
I think the reason for engaging with someone like Indian Bronson is not because his ideas and solutions have merit, but because there is a certain percentage of men who wholeheartedly share them. Reading this interview it's hard to know where to start addressing what is essential a mix of misogyny, misinformation and outright fantasy.
Men are going to college in fewer numbers than in the past. And, the reason is discrimination based on their gender coupled with an academic environment that has been "feminized." The answer from his perspective is to force women out academia and give preference to men. Essentially the system that existed for most of American history.
In his telling, men sound like fragile snowflakes who must be given a safe space in which they feel comfortable fighting, farting, puking and harassing (the fewer) women allowed to be in their presence.
The problems facing men are real and complicated. So it's not surprising that when faced with issues that have no easy solution, it's attractive to find a simple answer -- particularly one that allows you to shift the blame to someone else. (In this case women are the new Jews it seems.)
Getting more men to go to college isn't going too be easy. There are all kinds of issues just around cost, value and access that discourage college attendance. And, there's also the question of just who should attend college and how to create other avenues to workforce participation like technical schools and apprenticeships. None of the real issues have much to do with how many women are on college campuses.
Sadly, the grievances and misconceptions he promotes are a part of the problem. If you're a young man who believes that you don't have a chance with women or because of women, that belief can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
1) Only 15% through the recording but I feel like I’m hearing Jordan Peterson lite.
2) As for for ‘controlled or structured’ environments/instructions being more conducive and welcoming to women’s success, that is certainly not reflected by faculty demographics in higher Ed.
3) aren’t male wages higher than female wages for comparable jobs? Isn’t that an issue that is seen as a problem now?
4) are we dismissing developmental differences between genders? Perhaps enforce a “gap period” devoted to ‘structured work’ mid way through secondary and tertiary education.
5) there are far more male chefs and patriarchal biases in food service. Julia Child had enormous difficulty being allowed to study in France.
6) gender imbalance due to an affinity for dogged persistence?
7) “it’s just a joke”
8) I’m very dubious that the behavioral obstacles exist after 30 years in higher education.
9) are the been who succeed in a feminized environment “actually the best men?” Really? Judged how?
10) please provide the data supporting gender preference in mates. Nature/Nurture clearly affects this.
11) most births are happening out of wedlock — Q why is marriage less attractive now?
SUMMATIVE QUOTE:
“There are many things that are very nice about tall women, mainly their legs…”
If you set some of Bronson's lazy stereotyping aside, there is an interesting and difficult pair of implicit questions here:
1. Do prestigious/high-status social institutions today require a higher degree of agreeableness and conformity to decorum norms than they used to?
2. If so, is that on net bad for human flourishing?
(1) is difficult because how the heck would you even try to measure that? But there's a plausible intuitive case that the answer might be yes, and recent anecdotes about people getting fired for transgressing decorum norms are part of that case.
(2) is difficult because there are multiple plausible effects cutting in different directions. On the one hand, it is again intuitively plausible that exceptionally productive and creative people are more likely to be disagreeable, so lower tolerance for disagreeableness deprives us all of the fruits of their genius. People who bemoan the fates of David Sabatini and Roland Fryer are in part appealing to that intuition, for example. On the other hand, disagreeable people sometimes impose productivity costs on others around them, so getting rid of them has benefits too. It's not obvious which effect is bigger, and it probably varies from institution to institution and time to time.
Note that none of this depends on whether you believe men are more likely to be disagreeable, or whether exceptionally productive people are more likely to be men, or whether women are more likely to place a higher value on agreeableness when they have power to set institutional norms, or whether any of the above differences (if they exist) are biologically rooted.
I'm interested in, and ambivalent about, these questions partly because I've seen the double effect of changing agreeableness standards as a parent. The schools in 2020s San Francisco are far more assiduous in enforcing agreeableness norms than the schools in 1980s upstate NY where I grew up. There are way too many confounders to tell whether that's part of a general social trend, but it sure is a difference. And it makes for a lot less bullying, but also a lot more difficulty for kids who have problems conforming to behavioral expectations. Often the kids who reap the benefits and those who bear the costs are the same kids.
I think the reason for engaging with someone like Indian Bronson is not because his ideas and solutions have merit, but because there is a certain percentage of men who wholeheartedly share them. Reading this interview it's hard to know where to start addressing what is essential a mix of misogyny, misinformation and outright fantasy.
Men are going to college in fewer numbers than in the past. And, the reason is discrimination based on their gender coupled with an academic environment that has been "feminized." The answer from his perspective is to force women out academia and give preference to men. Essentially the system that existed for most of American history.
In his telling, men sound like fragile snowflakes who must be given a safe space in which they feel comfortable fighting, farting, puking and harassing (the fewer) women allowed to be in their presence.
The problems facing men are real and complicated. So it's not surprising that when faced with issues that have no easy solution, it's attractive to find a simple answer -- particularly one that allows you to shift the blame to someone else. (In this case women are the new Jews it seems.)
Getting more men to go to college isn't going too be easy. There are all kinds of issues just around cost, value and access that discourage college attendance. And, there's also the question of just who should attend college and how to create other avenues to workforce participation like technical schools and apprenticeships. None of the real issues have much to do with how many women are on college campuses.
Sadly, the grievances and misconceptions he promotes are a part of the problem. If you're a young man who believes that you don't have a chance with women or because of women, that belief can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
1) Only 15% through the recording but I feel like I’m hearing Jordan Peterson lite.
2) As for for ‘controlled or structured’ environments/instructions being more conducive and welcoming to women’s success, that is certainly not reflected by faculty demographics in higher Ed.
3) aren’t male wages higher than female wages for comparable jobs? Isn’t that an issue that is seen as a problem now?
4) are we dismissing developmental differences between genders? Perhaps enforce a “gap period” devoted to ‘structured work’ mid way through secondary and tertiary education.
5) there are far more male chefs and patriarchal biases in food service. Julia Child had enormous difficulty being allowed to study in France.
6) gender imbalance due to an affinity for dogged persistence?
7) “it’s just a joke”
8) I’m very dubious that the behavioral obstacles exist after 30 years in higher education.
9) are the been who succeed in a feminized environment “actually the best men?” Really? Judged how?
10) please provide the data supporting gender preference in mates. Nature/Nurture clearly affects this.
11) most births are happening out of wedlock — Q why is marriage less attractive now?
SUMMATIVE QUOTE:
“There are many things that are very nice about tall women, mainly their legs…”
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/05/sex-and-the-single-girl-manual-roe/629868/
If you set some of Bronson's lazy stereotyping aside, there is an interesting and difficult pair of implicit questions here:
1. Do prestigious/high-status social institutions today require a higher degree of agreeableness and conformity to decorum norms than they used to?
2. If so, is that on net bad for human flourishing?
(1) is difficult because how the heck would you even try to measure that? But there's a plausible intuitive case that the answer might be yes, and recent anecdotes about people getting fired for transgressing decorum norms are part of that case.
(2) is difficult because there are multiple plausible effects cutting in different directions. On the one hand, it is again intuitively plausible that exceptionally productive and creative people are more likely to be disagreeable, so lower tolerance for disagreeableness deprives us all of the fruits of their genius. People who bemoan the fates of David Sabatini and Roland Fryer are in part appealing to that intuition, for example. On the other hand, disagreeable people sometimes impose productivity costs on others around them, so getting rid of them has benefits too. It's not obvious which effect is bigger, and it probably varies from institution to institution and time to time.
Note that none of this depends on whether you believe men are more likely to be disagreeable, or whether exceptionally productive people are more likely to be men, or whether women are more likely to place a higher value on agreeableness when they have power to set institutional norms, or whether any of the above differences (if they exist) are biologically rooted.
I'm interested in, and ambivalent about, these questions partly because I've seen the double effect of changing agreeableness standards as a parent. The schools in 2020s San Francisco are far more assiduous in enforcing agreeableness norms than the schools in 1980s upstate NY where I grew up. There are way too many confounders to tell whether that's part of a general social trend, but it sure is a difference. And it makes for a lot less bullying, but also a lot more difficulty for kids who have problems conforming to behavioral expectations. Often the kids who reap the benefits and those who bear the costs are the same kids.