I agree with your description of how things are for (many) men and clearly seem to them. Totally disagree with the woman side. I hate to tell you this, but women do not truly respect anyone, and certainly do not worship them. The only people women worship is their own kids. I have seen zero evidence that any woman respects, beyond the level of basic decency and empathy, any adult, and certainly doesn't worship. Those are both primarily male concepts and men have vastly greater capacity for both. They project their assumption that women have the same above/below hierarchy of respect and worship in their emotional repertoire, which they do not. Some merely play along with those expectations for other reasons, much like employees who laugh at their boss's jokes and kiss up to their boss, but make fun of and shred him apart as soon as he's not around. Women do admire, like, love, and have attraction, but respect and worship is not there. We are like cats, that's an appropriate metaphor. Dogs worship and respect, not cats. That's about how different the emotional writing is. I think men would be quite disturbed if they truly understood just how little women actually respect status. Luckily, they will mostly never believe it bc to them it feels so natural and inevitable.
FWIW, people pay tens of thousands to egg donors and select them on precisely the same metrics, favoring height, high test scores and IQ, and athleticism, just as they do when selecting among sperm donors.
Last, the most likely women to marry are the most highly educated and high in socioeconomic status. The top 15% of women on those metrics are almost 3x as likely to marry as those in the bottom 40%. If men just wanted pretty, easy-going, and nice, it would be the opposite.
Women are eugenic I suppose, depending on what traits you think qualify as eugenic. Most guys in prison are fathers and women have babies with a lot of enormous losers who they regardless find sexy and charismatic. I would not describe that eugenic, unless you're wanting to select for charismatic anti-social criminals and low-lifes.
women exercise better eugenic discretion than men. in part because they're vastly more sexually selective. due to stuff like this, that operates on a biological level: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-03414-004
> "I hate to tell you this, but women do not truly respect anyone"
and I hate to tell you this, but a lot of your remarks are equal parts the projection you think I'm doing here.
women respect authority and projections of power so readily and often unthinkingly it's frustrating. I'm not sure how you don't see this.
women don't respect status? what?? yes, all humans do. women are basically Manichean-lly deferential in defaulting to status as the trustworthy thing to look up to/listen to. it's everywhere. I could not disagree more with this statement.
"zero evidence any woman respects or worships".... "evidence"? you mean, you haven't found any anecdotes you can point to? how about my generalized anecdotes, the observations you're seeing in this essay, that come from experience, there's some evidence. how about the first image in the essay where a woman openly wishes to worship men and praises another woman who does? idk what evidence even look like here, but there's some more.
your comments seem to suggest you think women are basically functioning sociopaths, which is more commentary on the women you've encountered; same as my observations are.
this is not an evidence-based discussion. we are both essentially describing our experiences and observations about intersexual dynamics, and abstracting them. in doing so, we are both in a way telling on ourselves with our conclusions, and speaking to the kind of men and women we've surrounded ourselves with, and that we are ourselves.
I'm not projecting what all men think because I am one, because I know I'm unusual. frankly I don't have much of the "adore" gene in me. I'm aware I'm part of the substack/esoteric/online class and my preferences are atypical and not good proxies. you exist in the same sphere, you are girlboss adjacent, and I know she's not going to be happy with this post and does mostly see men as boorish stepping stones to extracting resources (...sociopathic). "well me and my NYC Product Manager substack sisters don't respect anyone so all the other women don't either"...
it's fine to object to some of these observations because I know they're not universally always applicable, but we should keep ourselves in mind when we think we definitively speak on behalf of all men or women. know when you're weird and almost certainly a misleading proxy. I'm keeping this in mind with what I write here; if I was projecting my own feelings, the 'male adoration' section would have looked dramatically different.
said with love btw. I appreciate you reading and the comments.
I think we are talking past each other and perhaps you don't understand what I mean when I say women only worship their own children and don't truly respect status. Of course they defer to authority, that's not what I meant, anyone who does not want to end up in jail or beat up or other bad things happening to them generally defers to authority.
I certainly do NOT mean that women are sociopathic, if anything I mean the opposite. It is more "sociopathic" to think that some humans are above or below others, are more important and better and worthy and deserving. I said that women DO love, like, and admire people for reasons, and also that they grant respect in the sense of how we all grant a basic level of decency and respect to everyone just for being a person. But I don't think they actually see certain people as being "above" or better than them, at least, they don't do so nearly as often or as strongly as men do, and it doesn't resonate with them emotionally the way it seems to with (many but certainly not all) men.
Let me give you some examples, that may illustrate it more clearly.
1. Men tend to actually "worship" and act like groupies for various powerful and high status males -- think Elon Musk or a sports hero or whatever titan of industry or war hero. Women almost never follow or care about those types of guys even like 10% of the amount that men do. The people women look up to are always seen as NICE, good people, expressive, artistic, and often downtrodden (even if this is BS). Look at Taylor Swift, her whole persona is basically crying constantly about all the people who have wronged her and all the ways she's an underdog. If her "brand" was I'm a tall beautiful ultra-rich powerful blonde who rules the world, women would hate her. They like her because she portrays herself as an underdog who is always being broken up with, disrespected, overlooked, and scammed. All of the celebrities that appeal to women portray themselves as nice and caring, or underdogs, or sometimes just emotional or hot. But never just powerful. Guys are the ones who go crazy for dudes just because they're rich or win wars or run counties. There are tens of thousands of ultra rich millionaire CEOs and founders and guys way up in the male status hierarchy whose names no women know, they don't chase after, and will never cross their lips or spend a second in their minds, even though they are actually high status. They're too busy pining over some guy with a man bun who's playing the guitar and singing emotional poetry at a bar somewhere even though he's basically homeless.
2. The above difference in how much resonates with power/status versus kindness and charisma/caring is very observable at a micro level in ordinary workplaces, where there is typically one or two guys who are the big swinging dicks and rain makers and they're often jerks. The younger men and underlings may hate him, but I've noticed they also usually actually respect them. The women don't, they usually hate him AND wish he would go away and would love to see him go down. I have known several secretaries to these guys who devote themselves to the BSD and one would think respect him because they serve his every need for decades, but once they retire, you can talk to them and they will have only bad things to say about what a terrible and ridiculous man he was. I've never seen one of these guys get a truly emotionally-devoted minion that wasn't a male. Men make much more devoted minions, women are entirely unreliable minions. Women do it because it's what needs to be done or what their paycheck relies on, and same with plenty of men, but there are also men who glorify and look up to the BSD and want to be him and actually have an emotional worshipful type attachment.
3. This is why all female workplaces are frequently dysfunctional and quickly fall apart. Because the entire point of hierarchy and status is to quickly sort out disagreements. Instead of having to resolve every conflict, the higher status person in charge just wins, period. That won't work with females because they DO NOT BELIEVE that the higher status person should "win" and here's my point: it's because they do not actually believe they are legitimately higher status or have any right or claim to be deferred to or receive more resources than anyone else.
4. This is also why the right-wing is composed of like 9 men for every one woman. Because one could describe the main difference between right wing and not as the right wing being comfortable with, and even insisting on, hierarchy and status differentials. If women were down with that, more would be right wing, but hardly any of them are, and the ones who are tend to EITHER have not through it nearly as much as the men have and just sort of belong in that tribe because everyone they know is, OR if they are the thought-through types, they rarely last and half the time they later come out against their former tribe.
5. Pretty much all women talk shit about their husbands and men almost never do that about their wives. I bet you could put out a poll asking men if they think their wife worships them and you would get an almost 100% "no" response, even in Afghanistan or someplace like that. I bet you would not get a 100% "no" response to the same poll asked of women. I don't want to be depressing, but I bet you would not even get a very high "yes" response if you merely asked men how many of them think their wife respects them as much as they hope. This is not a right/left thing as I think conservative women actually talk a lot MORE shit about their boyfriends/husbands. I also don't mean this as like a "women are terrible" thing, because it doesn't mean anything...women complain to each other and self-deprecate as a matter of course, but they also do NOT see their husbands as above reproach or feel inherent guilt about it being disrespectful to make fun at his expense to their friends, the way most men would feel if they did that about their wives. Not because of a differential in love/admiration but because of a differential in how each emotionally relates to the idea of "respect".
I think what you are writing about is some type of very temporary sexual infatuation that can occur in the beginning heady stages of a romance, which is about the only time that women may indeed feel worshipful and like their beau is actually better than them, or too good for them or whatever. But that's like a temporary hormonal cocktail, and men get the same way, and absolutely feel all "oh my god how did I deserve this perfect angel" about it. Again, a temporary delusion. And yes, most women will not be into the prospect of using her limited reproductive capacity to mix her genes with someone who is going to dilute them and make them worse, so on that measure, sure, they want the best they can get (but so do men with their long-term investments).
I think if you ask virtually any man regardless of his status who has been living with a woman for five + years if they think she thinks he's better than her, the answer will be no. There's a reason that even the highest status, rich and famous guys sing songs about things like "these hos ain't loyal." In a sense, that's silly because of course those guys are far LESS loyal when it comes to sexual fidelity. But what they mean when they sing that is that even they, as the guys at the very top, can't rely on women to maintain that initial hormonal "worshipful" stance. No one can, it's a silly thing to expect. But they reason they expect it is because they're the top guy, and to a man, the top guy in status deserves everyone below him to look up to him. But women don't actually think that, we simply do not believe in status hierarchies in the same hard-wired, emotionally resonant way that guys do.
Men evolved to fight in groups against other groups of men, and that results in hierarchy, which they like and feel comfortable with as it's actually a way of REDUCING violence by having a quick mechanism for resolving constant conflict. Women did not, we evolved to get along in groups via care-taking and consensus, and whenever women have more control. All mostly or all-male environments develop rigid hierarchies, while women's don't have them and when they get more power they try to get rid of hierarchies. The top men reify and make their status clear by doing things that show it. The top women constantly derogate themselves and try to show why they're not really on top. It's just different wiring and has nothing to do with girl-bossism. If anything, girl bosses are just wired and act more like men and more likely to respect and expect status. Just like some guys are wired more like women and hate status differentials and have the same pro-underdogism that desires to pull them down.
Kate has articulated her argument well, but I disagree with quite a bit of what she is saying, for instance:
Women don’t value status?
That’s actually funny. Who is richer? Who is prettier? Who is thinner? Who is in a better sorority? Who played varsity? Who has a bigger house? Whose children are smarter, more athletic, going to a better college? Who goes on better vacations? Who cooks better? Who has a career vs who is a stay at home mom? Who is a nurse? Who has better clothing, handbags, style? Who has a higher status husband?Who cares more about social issues? It’s my experience that women are just as competitive about status as men but many pretend they’re not.
I think I see what you're saying. Respect is part of hierarchy, structure, and women at a primal level don't work that way.
Is there any organizing principle at all for women? Throw a bunch of guys in a room, and the BSD is going to eventually assert dominance; then he'll come up with a mission. Throw a bunch of women in a room and... what? If it is true they are the stuff of chaos, and chaos is the stuff of them, then nothing happens. It takes a man (Perhaps ultimately The Man Upstairs) to light the spark of action. Women are the embodiment of primordial chaos. What do you think?
I can see why it might seem like chaos to you though there is a rationale to all of it. It's just not a rationale based upon capacity for violence/power (and let's be honest all power ultimately at it's most basic collapses down to capacity for inflicting violence). I think to truly *believe* in the fundamental rightness and goodness of a system for sorting out conflicts and competing claims on resources based on violence, one likely has to be in a position where one could at least hypothetically envision themselves in that position, and if one always automatically imagines oneself to not be in that position, it will necessarily seem unjust and illegitimate.
Women in groups certainly do come to a sort of "leader" though I have a hard time even using that word bc it's more like the person who will get their way most of the time in the event of a conflict, but not really a leader that either she or anyone else would admit to. Generally that would be the person with the best social skills at influencing others either in positive or negative ways (through rewards, reciprocity, offering value, manipulation, threats of social ostracism, reputational harm or enhancement, etc). But its never going to be set in stone and always subject to shifting depending on the circumstances and context. So I can see why it would just look confusing and chaotic if it's not how you're wired, but there is a logic to it. It's just the same as how the male way seems brutal, scary, and unjust if you're not part of it, much the way you'd probably view an alien species if they arrived and dominated humanity.
“I have known several secretaries to these guys who devote themselves to the BSD and one would think respect him because they serve his every need for decades, but once they retire, you can talk to them and they will have only bad things to say about what a terrible and ridiculous man he was.”
Maybe they have both tons of loyalty and tons of disrespect for them at the same tome?
"Pretty much all women talk shit about their husbands and men almost never do that about their wives. I bet you could put out a poll asking men if they think their wife worships them and you would get an almost 100% "no" response, even in Afghanistan or someplace like that. I bet you would not get a 100% "no" response to the same poll asked of women. I don't want to be depressing, but I bet you would not even get a very high "yes" response if you merely asked men how many of them think their wife respects them as much as they hope."
I have a theory about this: I think that men used to talk shit about their wives in the same way, but we discouraged that over time as a result of feminism. It's a net good for them to have done that overall, but it does lead to the asymmetry you mention. Do you think that sounds plausible?
I can't really say how they used to talk amongst themselves bc I wasn't there to hear it. Now bc of the internet we can see what other people say, I don't know what it used to be like. Certainly in popular culture there used to be a lot of sort of "ball and chain" type jokes about wives. Partly I think that reduced bc most women work now and contribute or even support the household economically, so there's less often a perception of wives as sort of freeloading dependents...perhaps the small class of men who still have never-working wives still talk like that.
But mostly I think it's just bc men are much less likely to talk about personal issues to each other period, about any topic, while gossiping about your relationships (with spouse, kids, friends, parents whatever) is an expectation with women and the primary way they relate. If you *didn't* share about your relationship and throw in at least a few sort of self-deprecating remarks and complaints (which inevitably implicate your spouse), other women would probably look askance and feel like you're either too cold and reserved or that you think you're better than them. Women like to hear about each other's troubles...they almost demand it, honestly. I think women actually amplify the extent of their troubles/problems to their women friends, as a sort of pro-social move to prevent envy and try to relate to each other.
It somehow took my parents a decade to figure this out. I do blame propaganda, but it's still mindboggling how easily supposedly educated people never question such obvious nonsense.
the boomers had their brains sauteed and melted in the most rancid gender-bender porridge for so long and it's part of what led to these conditions were in.
My parents were Genx, but I have known a handful of boomers and yes, that is true. Particularly, the 'tomboy/sassy' archetype was a huge problem as my mother learned to navigate issues through an inherently combative lens. Granted, her boomer mother was the same, but it never occurred to her why no one wanted to be with my grandmother at the end of her life.
People tolerate your 'girlboss'/being unbearable when they fear they'll be crushed if they speak out. Tragically, many women I know only figure this out when their offspring/family can ditch them without remorse.
I think this is a really thorough article concerning a certain yin/yang sexual relation mode but it is far from the only one. I love Lena del rey and also radical feminism, but I certainly went through a Lena phase in my early 20s and my feelings towards it are…that it’s less about worshiping men and more about worshiping the mystification of yourself through men. Loosing yourself through then. It’s fun to not know, to be enchanted. And lends itself well to youth (because you really don’t know certain things). Lena uses men to enjoy herself this way. This is why siren-damsel is more addiction than worship, unless ofcourse worship is addiction, which sometimes it is.
When I was enchanted and enjoying in this way, I did manage to get a poet to write an adoring text about me, crowning me as this object, a success of my then adorability. But after so long enjoying that route, I felt my own creativity was somewhat stunted. I was a maturing woman. Many women lose interest in that sole mode as they get older and also it’s sort of weird to be a siren in your 30s. You start to want to build things, and you have no time to feign a pixie like vulnerability when work is to be done. You know men are still enchanted and desire this, so you can indulge the ones you wish to please, but this becomes less the entire of your identity, it becomes only part of it, a capacity. And you begin to judge men as weak who can’t cope with the other facets of womanhood.
Still now I have access to the joyous lightness of not-knowing and unknowing, but this is within a more robust creative life purpose.
The capacity for pixie like enchantment is probably great for mothering in those playful moments, and certainly your child should enjoy moments of feeling worshipped, but a pixie alone cannot raise a child or whatever other brutal labour goes into building a life. Weaning is a necessity not just literally but psychically. So it’s probably necessary to have alternative feminine/masculine archetypes for people to grow into.
If you’re in your 20s I think it makes good sense to enjoy the worship/adoration paradigm. But things get a lot more complicated later on. The problem with feminine desire is she doesn’t worship the man, any man, she desires the ‘not-here yet’ or ‘don’t know’ of creation. There are no real kings in this universe. Only transient and whimsical crownings 👑. Enjoy the crown when you can, it is ever fleeting
this is an exceptionally good comment. you're right in that this essay and its observations are relevant moreso to particular seasons of life, not the entire cycle; this is a kind of truism of any dynamic (to say relationships change with time is somewhat implicit) but I think you emphasized and articulated how they evolve in a non-obvious, insightful way.
especially your describing how the female perspective/mentality changes with age and motherhood. that really resonated with me.
a quote I particularly love that's relevant to your last paragraph:
"beware of putting too much stock in your heroes. greatness is a transitory phenomenon. it is never consistent. the gods briefly act through men and then leave them to their ordinary fate."
thank you for reading and taking the time to write that out.
That "little bits of poetry wrapped in mortality" bit spoke to me in such a deep way. That's exactly it. That's the deep feeling I get when I'm infatuated. I'd die in a ditch taking my last breaths looking at a picture of her vibes.
mostly right except for this: “Women come out of the oven ready made for adoration, whereas men require some elbow grease to unlock their worship.”
do you have any idea how much time women spend trying to make themselves cute and quirky to attract men? it’s not a natural state of being, women are trained to spend endless hours improving our appearances and cultivating hobbies/personality traits that appeal to men. what you think is a woman just “being herself” is the careful product of an entire lifetime spent catering to the male gaze…
yeah that's a fair point. I'm referring to feminine essence, the thing men adore for being, what's highlighted in that song or the 4chan greentext: that is not a product of makeup or skincare routines, and are a good proxy for the feminine adoration I'm highlighting. that is what exists readymade for adoration. if you highlight these things, you get adored even more.
whereas the masculine is fundamentally valued (worshipped) for its actions. what it produces.
but beauty does benefit and is amplified as a result of careful female maintenance and attention. I don't mean to discount the effort that takes. same with the quirky little mannerisms that smarter women intentionally cultivate, which is really just to say "I figured out being cute and feminine gets adored, so I learned to be more cute and feminine.". which is low-key my point.
I think about the current crop of men who increasingly hold women in contempt and this rings true. I keep telling folks that balance is one of the most important aspects of life and it scales from the person up to the entire world.
The unbalance of feminism in its current form threatens to bring us back to a rather barbaric masculine backlash.
Meanwhile I am sitting here just wishing that all of us could have a woman who is cute, nice and interesting.
Female mate selection has *never* been eugenic in a single society that practiced it. One only needs to look at the state of things today, in which female choice is effectively limitless and obese men, midgets, and borderline retards are considerably more likely to have gotten laid than a man with a 130 IQ, to see this demonstrated in real time. This is why, at most, females in the past were allowed to pick from a narrow set of suitors prearranged by their community, or just told who to marry by their dad.
untrue. caricatured gynocentric nonsense is not what's being discussed here, which is also every bit a result of weak men as it is unhinged women. environment, decadence, and birth control impact this (evidence of this shared in the essay). you can find it again here (other links included in essay), in addition to the well-documented hypergamy:
all you can do is take caricatured fringes and paint it as the whole. "hey did you know Ted Bundy got a lot of love letters? I will now use this to describe all women". a warped simple mind consumed by a fallacy of composition.
you're every bit as tedious and uninteresting as if a rabid feminist wandered into my replies and starting dropping hot idiocy about men. be gone with you.
consider the environment where feminism could even manifest. it would have to be peaceful, reasonably prosperous, safe, basic needs covered, not violent, etc.... domesticated.
this is an environment where the masculine has done such a good job both domesticating himself and his surroundings, that it allows feminism to occur (no atheists in foxholes, no feminists in poverty or war), and it encourages further domestication of men by emphasizing performance to gain female submission, rather than violence to gain female compliance.
feminism can exert positive selection effects on men by exerting hypergamous pressures; this encourages men to perform to gain sexual access, and it should produce eugenic effects both by the actions it incentivizes from men, and by which men are the most reproductively successful.
however, there's always too much of any good thing. the West is not a form of eugenic feminism (you'll note I distinguish between "reasonable feminism" and "radfem"), and it needs to be curtailed. when female morality/values dominate a society and political decision making, you get an erosion of hierarchical standards and entropic behavior (by eschewing masculine-minded order).
the masculine needs to reassert his territory, because we have become so domesticated that we're supine and feckless. too much feminism yields the longhouse. but there's a right amount that is indicative of a successful society, and conducive to eugenic behaviors.
productive application of masculine values should produce the kind of success that allows the feminine to express hers; if this never happens, you are almost certainly always in some form of war or poverty. meaning you are failing in some way. feminism is a poetic indicator of economic and societal prosperity, because it can only manifest in a backdrop of relative comfort.
masculine because you have to, feminine because you get to.
Great essay and read, thanks for writing and sharing!
Reading one of your replies to a comment connected with what wanted to comment.
Generally I think what you wrote about is true. At times, especially in the first half of the essay I got the impression you were sliding into absolutes, which I think needs to be avoided. In my experience the masculine and the feminine exist in general terms and they ebb and flow like the tide, probably being strongest (in appearance) from adolescence until our youthfulness starts to give way to adulthood (which in today's world might not happen until we reach our 40s, and which anecdotally shows how screwed we've become in general terms in the greater Neoliberal order).
In general, personally I don't think there's anything wrong (per se) with a woman taking on or exhibiting masculinity; I can think of many scenarios where survival demands doing things and saying you're not willing is a luxury belief an empty stomach might protest. Wars are full of anecdotes about strong women. The problem becomes when during normal times, because of the identity we choose to wear, to exhibit, to include in our lives or even go so far as to make it a flag of our identity, we then are surprised if people are turned off and don't seek us or include us. The narratives about entitlement come to mind. You mentioned something similar in the essay. I'd also add the same thing is true in men btw, it's just that unless you inherit money or an income stream, reality hits men much faster.
I completely agree with the complementarity of the masculine and the feminine, but I would disagree with this being reduced to worship/adoration. I'm not saying it can't be expressed through these proxies, but I wouldn't reduce it to being just about this.
Another comment I often think about and doesn't seem to be discussed much anywhere is this whole "liberation through work" bullshit we've been conditioned to believe is normal (if you have a minute, read article 1 of the Italian constitution; I keep saying Italy is the gift that keeps on giving, if you know what to look for!). Obviously, I'm not disputing the whole hierarchy of needs, and (because of a lot of reasons) we're currently stuck in this narrative about money and capitalism, but it would be useful (I think) to remind ourselves that human life doesn't necessarily have to be organized in this way (and I'm not suggesting we look at the competing narratives either, I think this itself is a misdirection used to justify our present circumstances as the #1 best possible etc, to the detriment of our creativity of evolving a qualitatively better way that doesn't require coercion or violence).
This whole modern marriage of human life with work is a deleterious consequence of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. I'm not suggesting life was better before, and money and wages have existed since civilizations exist, but I suspect there's a reason if the modern world is built on top of myths about the "state of nature" (Hobbes & Locke), which was made to be really ugly and scary (and no historical artifacts of it exist) so as to posit the nation state above other forms of sociopolitical organization. And capitalism is the cherry on top: a mystified narrative about being the best thing that ever happened to the Western Neoliberal world, because progress. And everyone has to work, and everyone, including dissenters, get co-opted through welfare and pensions, because money.
I suspect these narratives soaked into the whole of society gradually across a couple of centuries, and then it exploded with 2nd wave feminism. Obviously the two world wars facilitated and normalized the presence of women in the factory and office, but this is to be expected in any emergency, and I suspect it was always true: all hands on deck and gendered roles be damned when survival is at stake.
My point is that exploring the ideas of freedom through work is important because it can sometimes showcase parallelisms with asking for liberation through enslavement. And we all take it as a "natural" given underpinning society.
I think this also partly helps explain the whole demographic crisis: until we can get back to a place where it's normal for only 1 individual in the household to work for money and the societal monetary rewards are sufficient to give a comfortable life with enough resources to the household (couple) and their 2-3 children (or more), then the short version is: "we're fucked".
So at some point we need to address the elephants in the room.
And part of accepting this dynamic is allowing the feminine to do the writing. Unless you’re willing to accept that masculine and feminine exist in harmony in both sexes, writing such as this from man comes off as a form of anima dominance…the feminine woman you describe does not go for the writer/poet…she is that. the man is the warrior. And you as a man who may like to write has to be willing to give and trust a woman with that function, while she trusts you to be a bad ass warrior on her behalf. And that’s what makes love so powerful and scary. You’re entrusting another with a part of you and becoming one and interdependent.
I agree with your description of how things are for (many) men and clearly seem to them. Totally disagree with the woman side. I hate to tell you this, but women do not truly respect anyone, and certainly do not worship them. The only people women worship is their own kids. I have seen zero evidence that any woman respects, beyond the level of basic decency and empathy, any adult, and certainly doesn't worship. Those are both primarily male concepts and men have vastly greater capacity for both. They project their assumption that women have the same above/below hierarchy of respect and worship in their emotional repertoire, which they do not. Some merely play along with those expectations for other reasons, much like employees who laugh at their boss's jokes and kiss up to their boss, but make fun of and shred him apart as soon as he's not around. Women do admire, like, love, and have attraction, but respect and worship is not there. We are like cats, that's an appropriate metaphor. Dogs worship and respect, not cats. That's about how different the emotional writing is. I think men would be quite disturbed if they truly understood just how little women actually respect status. Luckily, they will mostly never believe it bc to them it feels so natural and inevitable.
FWIW, people pay tens of thousands to egg donors and select them on precisely the same metrics, favoring height, high test scores and IQ, and athleticism, just as they do when selecting among sperm donors.
Last, the most likely women to marry are the most highly educated and high in socioeconomic status. The top 15% of women on those metrics are almost 3x as likely to marry as those in the bottom 40%. If men just wanted pretty, easy-going, and nice, it would be the opposite.
Women are eugenic I suppose, depending on what traits you think qualify as eugenic. Most guys in prison are fathers and women have babies with a lot of enormous losers who they regardless find sexy and charismatic. I would not describe that eugenic, unless you're wanting to select for charismatic anti-social criminals and low-lifes.
women exercise better eugenic discretion than men. in part because they're vastly more sexually selective. due to stuff like this, that operates on a biological level: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-03414-004
> "I hate to tell you this, but women do not truly respect anyone"
and I hate to tell you this, but a lot of your remarks are equal parts the projection you think I'm doing here.
women respect authority and projections of power so readily and often unthinkingly it's frustrating. I'm not sure how you don't see this.
women don't respect status? what?? yes, all humans do. women are basically Manichean-lly deferential in defaulting to status as the trustworthy thing to look up to/listen to. it's everywhere. I could not disagree more with this statement.
"zero evidence any woman respects or worships".... "evidence"? you mean, you haven't found any anecdotes you can point to? how about my generalized anecdotes, the observations you're seeing in this essay, that come from experience, there's some evidence. how about the first image in the essay where a woman openly wishes to worship men and praises another woman who does? idk what evidence even look like here, but there's some more.
your comments seem to suggest you think women are basically functioning sociopaths, which is more commentary on the women you've encountered; same as my observations are.
this is not an evidence-based discussion. we are both essentially describing our experiences and observations about intersexual dynamics, and abstracting them. in doing so, we are both in a way telling on ourselves with our conclusions, and speaking to the kind of men and women we've surrounded ourselves with, and that we are ourselves.
I'm not projecting what all men think because I am one, because I know I'm unusual. frankly I don't have much of the "adore" gene in me. I'm aware I'm part of the substack/esoteric/online class and my preferences are atypical and not good proxies. you exist in the same sphere, you are girlboss adjacent, and I know she's not going to be happy with this post and does mostly see men as boorish stepping stones to extracting resources (...sociopathic). "well me and my NYC Product Manager substack sisters don't respect anyone so all the other women don't either"...
it's fine to object to some of these observations because I know they're not universally always applicable, but we should keep ourselves in mind when we think we definitively speak on behalf of all men or women. know when you're weird and almost certainly a misleading proxy. I'm keeping this in mind with what I write here; if I was projecting my own feelings, the 'male adoration' section would have looked dramatically different.
said with love btw. I appreciate you reading and the comments.
I think we are talking past each other and perhaps you don't understand what I mean when I say women only worship their own children and don't truly respect status. Of course they defer to authority, that's not what I meant, anyone who does not want to end up in jail or beat up or other bad things happening to them generally defers to authority.
I certainly do NOT mean that women are sociopathic, if anything I mean the opposite. It is more "sociopathic" to think that some humans are above or below others, are more important and better and worthy and deserving. I said that women DO love, like, and admire people for reasons, and also that they grant respect in the sense of how we all grant a basic level of decency and respect to everyone just for being a person. But I don't think they actually see certain people as being "above" or better than them, at least, they don't do so nearly as often or as strongly as men do, and it doesn't resonate with them emotionally the way it seems to with (many but certainly not all) men.
Let me give you some examples, that may illustrate it more clearly.
1. Men tend to actually "worship" and act like groupies for various powerful and high status males -- think Elon Musk or a sports hero or whatever titan of industry or war hero. Women almost never follow or care about those types of guys even like 10% of the amount that men do. The people women look up to are always seen as NICE, good people, expressive, artistic, and often downtrodden (even if this is BS). Look at Taylor Swift, her whole persona is basically crying constantly about all the people who have wronged her and all the ways she's an underdog. If her "brand" was I'm a tall beautiful ultra-rich powerful blonde who rules the world, women would hate her. They like her because she portrays herself as an underdog who is always being broken up with, disrespected, overlooked, and scammed. All of the celebrities that appeal to women portray themselves as nice and caring, or underdogs, or sometimes just emotional or hot. But never just powerful. Guys are the ones who go crazy for dudes just because they're rich or win wars or run counties. There are tens of thousands of ultra rich millionaire CEOs and founders and guys way up in the male status hierarchy whose names no women know, they don't chase after, and will never cross their lips or spend a second in their minds, even though they are actually high status. They're too busy pining over some guy with a man bun who's playing the guitar and singing emotional poetry at a bar somewhere even though he's basically homeless.
2. The above difference in how much resonates with power/status versus kindness and charisma/caring is very observable at a micro level in ordinary workplaces, where there is typically one or two guys who are the big swinging dicks and rain makers and they're often jerks. The younger men and underlings may hate him, but I've noticed they also usually actually respect them. The women don't, they usually hate him AND wish he would go away and would love to see him go down. I have known several secretaries to these guys who devote themselves to the BSD and one would think respect him because they serve his every need for decades, but once they retire, you can talk to them and they will have only bad things to say about what a terrible and ridiculous man he was. I've never seen one of these guys get a truly emotionally-devoted minion that wasn't a male. Men make much more devoted minions, women are entirely unreliable minions. Women do it because it's what needs to be done or what their paycheck relies on, and same with plenty of men, but there are also men who glorify and look up to the BSD and want to be him and actually have an emotional worshipful type attachment.
3. This is why all female workplaces are frequently dysfunctional and quickly fall apart. Because the entire point of hierarchy and status is to quickly sort out disagreements. Instead of having to resolve every conflict, the higher status person in charge just wins, period. That won't work with females because they DO NOT BELIEVE that the higher status person should "win" and here's my point: it's because they do not actually believe they are legitimately higher status or have any right or claim to be deferred to or receive more resources than anyone else.
4. This is also why the right-wing is composed of like 9 men for every one woman. Because one could describe the main difference between right wing and not as the right wing being comfortable with, and even insisting on, hierarchy and status differentials. If women were down with that, more would be right wing, but hardly any of them are, and the ones who are tend to EITHER have not through it nearly as much as the men have and just sort of belong in that tribe because everyone they know is, OR if they are the thought-through types, they rarely last and half the time they later come out against their former tribe.
5. Pretty much all women talk shit about their husbands and men almost never do that about their wives. I bet you could put out a poll asking men if they think their wife worships them and you would get an almost 100% "no" response, even in Afghanistan or someplace like that. I bet you would not get a 100% "no" response to the same poll asked of women. I don't want to be depressing, but I bet you would not even get a very high "yes" response if you merely asked men how many of them think their wife respects them as much as they hope. This is not a right/left thing as I think conservative women actually talk a lot MORE shit about their boyfriends/husbands. I also don't mean this as like a "women are terrible" thing, because it doesn't mean anything...women complain to each other and self-deprecate as a matter of course, but they also do NOT see their husbands as above reproach or feel inherent guilt about it being disrespectful to make fun at his expense to their friends, the way most men would feel if they did that about their wives. Not because of a differential in love/admiration but because of a differential in how each emotionally relates to the idea of "respect".
I think what you are writing about is some type of very temporary sexual infatuation that can occur in the beginning heady stages of a romance, which is about the only time that women may indeed feel worshipful and like their beau is actually better than them, or too good for them or whatever. But that's like a temporary hormonal cocktail, and men get the same way, and absolutely feel all "oh my god how did I deserve this perfect angel" about it. Again, a temporary delusion. And yes, most women will not be into the prospect of using her limited reproductive capacity to mix her genes with someone who is going to dilute them and make them worse, so on that measure, sure, they want the best they can get (but so do men with their long-term investments).
I think if you ask virtually any man regardless of his status who has been living with a woman for five + years if they think she thinks he's better than her, the answer will be no. There's a reason that even the highest status, rich and famous guys sing songs about things like "these hos ain't loyal." In a sense, that's silly because of course those guys are far LESS loyal when it comes to sexual fidelity. But what they mean when they sing that is that even they, as the guys at the very top, can't rely on women to maintain that initial hormonal "worshipful" stance. No one can, it's a silly thing to expect. But they reason they expect it is because they're the top guy, and to a man, the top guy in status deserves everyone below him to look up to him. But women don't actually think that, we simply do not believe in status hierarchies in the same hard-wired, emotionally resonant way that guys do.
Men evolved to fight in groups against other groups of men, and that results in hierarchy, which they like and feel comfortable with as it's actually a way of REDUCING violence by having a quick mechanism for resolving constant conflict. Women did not, we evolved to get along in groups via care-taking and consensus, and whenever women have more control. All mostly or all-male environments develop rigid hierarchies, while women's don't have them and when they get more power they try to get rid of hierarchies. The top men reify and make their status clear by doing things that show it. The top women constantly derogate themselves and try to show why they're not really on top. It's just different wiring and has nothing to do with girl-bossism. If anything, girl bosses are just wired and act more like men and more likely to respect and expect status. Just like some guys are wired more like women and hate status differentials and have the same pro-underdogism that desires to pull them down.
Kate has articulated her argument well, but I disagree with quite a bit of what she is saying, for instance:
Women don’t value status?
That’s actually funny. Who is richer? Who is prettier? Who is thinner? Who is in a better sorority? Who played varsity? Who has a bigger house? Whose children are smarter, more athletic, going to a better college? Who goes on better vacations? Who cooks better? Who has a career vs who is a stay at home mom? Who is a nurse? Who has better clothing, handbags, style? Who has a higher status husband?Who cares more about social issues? It’s my experience that women are just as competitive about status as men but many pretend they’re not.
I think I see what you're saying. Respect is part of hierarchy, structure, and women at a primal level don't work that way.
Is there any organizing principle at all for women? Throw a bunch of guys in a room, and the BSD is going to eventually assert dominance; then he'll come up with a mission. Throw a bunch of women in a room and... what? If it is true they are the stuff of chaos, and chaos is the stuff of them, then nothing happens. It takes a man (Perhaps ultimately The Man Upstairs) to light the spark of action. Women are the embodiment of primordial chaos. What do you think?
I can see why it might seem like chaos to you though there is a rationale to all of it. It's just not a rationale based upon capacity for violence/power (and let's be honest all power ultimately at it's most basic collapses down to capacity for inflicting violence). I think to truly *believe* in the fundamental rightness and goodness of a system for sorting out conflicts and competing claims on resources based on violence, one likely has to be in a position where one could at least hypothetically envision themselves in that position, and if one always automatically imagines oneself to not be in that position, it will necessarily seem unjust and illegitimate.
Women in groups certainly do come to a sort of "leader" though I have a hard time even using that word bc it's more like the person who will get their way most of the time in the event of a conflict, but not really a leader that either she or anyone else would admit to. Generally that would be the person with the best social skills at influencing others either in positive or negative ways (through rewards, reciprocity, offering value, manipulation, threats of social ostracism, reputational harm or enhancement, etc). But its never going to be set in stone and always subject to shifting depending on the circumstances and context. So I can see why it would just look confusing and chaotic if it's not how you're wired, but there is a logic to it. It's just the same as how the male way seems brutal, scary, and unjust if you're not part of it, much the way you'd probably view an alien species if they arrived and dominated humanity.
Thanks!
“I have known several secretaries to these guys who devote themselves to the BSD and one would think respect him because they serve his every need for decades, but once they retire, you can talk to them and they will have only bad things to say about what a terrible and ridiculous man he was.”
Maybe they have both tons of loyalty and tons of disrespect for them at the same tome?
Well why would someone have loyalty to someone they don't respect? Loyalty as in want to keep their job, maybe, but I don't think much beyond that.
Yeah that makes sense.
"Pretty much all women talk shit about their husbands and men almost never do that about their wives. I bet you could put out a poll asking men if they think their wife worships them and you would get an almost 100% "no" response, even in Afghanistan or someplace like that. I bet you would not get a 100% "no" response to the same poll asked of women. I don't want to be depressing, but I bet you would not even get a very high "yes" response if you merely asked men how many of them think their wife respects them as much as they hope."
I have a theory about this: I think that men used to talk shit about their wives in the same way, but we discouraged that over time as a result of feminism. It's a net good for them to have done that overall, but it does lead to the asymmetry you mention. Do you think that sounds plausible?
I can't really say how they used to talk amongst themselves bc I wasn't there to hear it. Now bc of the internet we can see what other people say, I don't know what it used to be like. Certainly in popular culture there used to be a lot of sort of "ball and chain" type jokes about wives. Partly I think that reduced bc most women work now and contribute or even support the household economically, so there's less often a perception of wives as sort of freeloading dependents...perhaps the small class of men who still have never-working wives still talk like that.
But mostly I think it's just bc men are much less likely to talk about personal issues to each other period, about any topic, while gossiping about your relationships (with spouse, kids, friends, parents whatever) is an expectation with women and the primary way they relate. If you *didn't* share about your relationship and throw in at least a few sort of self-deprecating remarks and complaints (which inevitably implicate your spouse), other women would probably look askance and feel like you're either too cold and reserved or that you think you're better than them. Women like to hear about each other's troubles...they almost demand it, honestly. I think women actually amplify the extent of their troubles/problems to their women friends, as a sort of pro-social move to prevent envy and try to relate to each other.
It somehow took my parents a decade to figure this out. I do blame propaganda, but it's still mindboggling how easily supposedly educated people never question such obvious nonsense.
the boomers had their brains sauteed and melted in the most rancid gender-bender porridge for so long and it's part of what led to these conditions were in.
we must RETVRN to worshipful hierarchies.
My parents were Genx, but I have known a handful of boomers and yes, that is true. Particularly, the 'tomboy/sassy' archetype was a huge problem as my mother learned to navigate issues through an inherently combative lens. Granted, her boomer mother was the same, but it never occurred to her why no one wanted to be with my grandmother at the end of her life.
People tolerate your 'girlboss'/being unbearable when they fear they'll be crushed if they speak out. Tragically, many women I know only figure this out when their offspring/family can ditch them without remorse.
that was a powerful comment. very insightful.
This match very well my experience with my gen X mother and boomer grandmother.
My grandmother is insufferable under the fake niceness.
I am one of the last who kept making the effort to go see them but I give up, the psychological abuse is just too much.
Every generation after the Boomers as well.
Really good article! So much to unlearn.
I think this is a really thorough article concerning a certain yin/yang sexual relation mode but it is far from the only one. I love Lena del rey and also radical feminism, but I certainly went through a Lena phase in my early 20s and my feelings towards it are…that it’s less about worshiping men and more about worshiping the mystification of yourself through men. Loosing yourself through then. It’s fun to not know, to be enchanted. And lends itself well to youth (because you really don’t know certain things). Lena uses men to enjoy herself this way. This is why siren-damsel is more addiction than worship, unless ofcourse worship is addiction, which sometimes it is.
When I was enchanted and enjoying in this way, I did manage to get a poet to write an adoring text about me, crowning me as this object, a success of my then adorability. But after so long enjoying that route, I felt my own creativity was somewhat stunted. I was a maturing woman. Many women lose interest in that sole mode as they get older and also it’s sort of weird to be a siren in your 30s. You start to want to build things, and you have no time to feign a pixie like vulnerability when work is to be done. You know men are still enchanted and desire this, so you can indulge the ones you wish to please, but this becomes less the entire of your identity, it becomes only part of it, a capacity. And you begin to judge men as weak who can’t cope with the other facets of womanhood.
Still now I have access to the joyous lightness of not-knowing and unknowing, but this is within a more robust creative life purpose.
The capacity for pixie like enchantment is probably great for mothering in those playful moments, and certainly your child should enjoy moments of feeling worshipped, but a pixie alone cannot raise a child or whatever other brutal labour goes into building a life. Weaning is a necessity not just literally but psychically. So it’s probably necessary to have alternative feminine/masculine archetypes for people to grow into.
If you’re in your 20s I think it makes good sense to enjoy the worship/adoration paradigm. But things get a lot more complicated later on. The problem with feminine desire is she doesn’t worship the man, any man, she desires the ‘not-here yet’ or ‘don’t know’ of creation. There are no real kings in this universe. Only transient and whimsical crownings 👑. Enjoy the crown when you can, it is ever fleeting
this is an exceptionally good comment. you're right in that this essay and its observations are relevant moreso to particular seasons of life, not the entire cycle; this is a kind of truism of any dynamic (to say relationships change with time is somewhat implicit) but I think you emphasized and articulated how they evolve in a non-obvious, insightful way.
especially your describing how the female perspective/mentality changes with age and motherhood. that really resonated with me.
a quote I particularly love that's relevant to your last paragraph:
"beware of putting too much stock in your heroes. greatness is a transitory phenomenon. it is never consistent. the gods briefly act through men and then leave them to their ordinary fate."
thank you for reading and taking the time to write that out.
That’s a great quote about the transience of heroes. And thanks for your writing, I’m obsessed with the sexual relationship discourse
My sentiment exactly.
Lovely how you try to find healing ground for both sexes. It's together or nothing.
That "little bits of poetry wrapped in mortality" bit spoke to me in such a deep way. That's exactly it. That's the deep feeling I get when I'm infatuated. I'd die in a ditch taking my last breaths looking at a picture of her vibes.
very wholesome, brother
mostly right except for this: “Women come out of the oven ready made for adoration, whereas men require some elbow grease to unlock their worship.”
do you have any idea how much time women spend trying to make themselves cute and quirky to attract men? it’s not a natural state of being, women are trained to spend endless hours improving our appearances and cultivating hobbies/personality traits that appeal to men. what you think is a woman just “being herself” is the careful product of an entire lifetime spent catering to the male gaze…
yeah that's a fair point. I'm referring to feminine essence, the thing men adore for being, what's highlighted in that song or the 4chan greentext: that is not a product of makeup or skincare routines, and are a good proxy for the feminine adoration I'm highlighting. that is what exists readymade for adoration. if you highlight these things, you get adored even more.
whereas the masculine is fundamentally valued (worshipped) for its actions. what it produces.
but beauty does benefit and is amplified as a result of careful female maintenance and attention. I don't mean to discount the effort that takes. same with the quirky little mannerisms that smarter women intentionally cultivate, which is really just to say "I figured out being cute and feminine gets adored, so I learned to be more cute and feminine.". which is low-key my point.
I think about the current crop of men who increasingly hold women in contempt and this rings true. I keep telling folks that balance is one of the most important aspects of life and it scales from the person up to the entire world.
The unbalance of feminism in its current form threatens to bring us back to a rather barbaric masculine backlash.
Meanwhile I am sitting here just wishing that all of us could have a woman who is cute, nice and interesting.
As a deadly romantic, I adore this.
<3
Excellent piece. I wish I’d read it a couple of decades ago!
thank you friend
Female mate selection has *never* been eugenic in a single society that practiced it. One only needs to look at the state of things today, in which female choice is effectively limitless and obese men, midgets, and borderline retards are considerably more likely to have gotten laid than a man with a 130 IQ, to see this demonstrated in real time. This is why, at most, females in the past were allowed to pick from a narrow set of suitors prearranged by their community, or just told who to marry by their dad.
untrue. caricatured gynocentric nonsense is not what's being discussed here, which is also every bit a result of weak men as it is unhinged women. environment, decadence, and birth control impact this (evidence of this shared in the essay). you can find it again here (other links included in essay), in addition to the well-documented hypergamy:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-03414-004
all you can do is take caricatured fringes and paint it as the whole. "hey did you know Ted Bundy got a lot of love letters? I will now use this to describe all women". a warped simple mind consumed by a fallacy of composition.
you're every bit as tedious and uninteresting as if a rabid feminist wandered into my replies and starting dropping hot idiocy about men. be gone with you.
I see feminism as anti-domestication, not pro
consider the environment where feminism could even manifest. it would have to be peaceful, reasonably prosperous, safe, basic needs covered, not violent, etc.... domesticated.
this is an environment where the masculine has done such a good job both domesticating himself and his surroundings, that it allows feminism to occur (no atheists in foxholes, no feminists in poverty or war), and it encourages further domestication of men by emphasizing performance to gain female submission, rather than violence to gain female compliance.
feminism can exert positive selection effects on men by exerting hypergamous pressures; this encourages men to perform to gain sexual access, and it should produce eugenic effects both by the actions it incentivizes from men, and by which men are the most reproductively successful.
however, there's always too much of any good thing. the West is not a form of eugenic feminism (you'll note I distinguish between "reasonable feminism" and "radfem"), and it needs to be curtailed. when female morality/values dominate a society and political decision making, you get an erosion of hierarchical standards and entropic behavior (by eschewing masculine-minded order).
the masculine needs to reassert his territory, because we have become so domesticated that we're supine and feckless. too much feminism yields the longhouse. but there's a right amount that is indicative of a successful society, and conducive to eugenic behaviors.
productive application of masculine values should produce the kind of success that allows the feminine to express hers; if this never happens, you are almost certainly always in some form of war or poverty. meaning you are failing in some way. feminism is a poetic indicator of economic and societal prosperity, because it can only manifest in a backdrop of relative comfort.
masculine because you have to, feminine because you get to.
the environment dictates the expression.
When you’re so thoroughly “internet pornified” you can’t detect it anymore. Good god. Not a mention of the obvious and prime culprit here.
Great essay and read, thanks for writing and sharing!
Reading one of your replies to a comment connected with what wanted to comment.
Generally I think what you wrote about is true. At times, especially in the first half of the essay I got the impression you were sliding into absolutes, which I think needs to be avoided. In my experience the masculine and the feminine exist in general terms and they ebb and flow like the tide, probably being strongest (in appearance) from adolescence until our youthfulness starts to give way to adulthood (which in today's world might not happen until we reach our 40s, and which anecdotally shows how screwed we've become in general terms in the greater Neoliberal order).
In general, personally I don't think there's anything wrong (per se) with a woman taking on or exhibiting masculinity; I can think of many scenarios where survival demands doing things and saying you're not willing is a luxury belief an empty stomach might protest. Wars are full of anecdotes about strong women. The problem becomes when during normal times, because of the identity we choose to wear, to exhibit, to include in our lives or even go so far as to make it a flag of our identity, we then are surprised if people are turned off and don't seek us or include us. The narratives about entitlement come to mind. You mentioned something similar in the essay. I'd also add the same thing is true in men btw, it's just that unless you inherit money or an income stream, reality hits men much faster.
I completely agree with the complementarity of the masculine and the feminine, but I would disagree with this being reduced to worship/adoration. I'm not saying it can't be expressed through these proxies, but I wouldn't reduce it to being just about this.
Another comment I often think about and doesn't seem to be discussed much anywhere is this whole "liberation through work" bullshit we've been conditioned to believe is normal (if you have a minute, read article 1 of the Italian constitution; I keep saying Italy is the gift that keeps on giving, if you know what to look for!). Obviously, I'm not disputing the whole hierarchy of needs, and (because of a lot of reasons) we're currently stuck in this narrative about money and capitalism, but it would be useful (I think) to remind ourselves that human life doesn't necessarily have to be organized in this way (and I'm not suggesting we look at the competing narratives either, I think this itself is a misdirection used to justify our present circumstances as the #1 best possible etc, to the detriment of our creativity of evolving a qualitatively better way that doesn't require coercion or violence).
This whole modern marriage of human life with work is a deleterious consequence of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. I'm not suggesting life was better before, and money and wages have existed since civilizations exist, but I suspect there's a reason if the modern world is built on top of myths about the "state of nature" (Hobbes & Locke), which was made to be really ugly and scary (and no historical artifacts of it exist) so as to posit the nation state above other forms of sociopolitical organization. And capitalism is the cherry on top: a mystified narrative about being the best thing that ever happened to the Western Neoliberal world, because progress. And everyone has to work, and everyone, including dissenters, get co-opted through welfare and pensions, because money.
I suspect these narratives soaked into the whole of society gradually across a couple of centuries, and then it exploded with 2nd wave feminism. Obviously the two world wars facilitated and normalized the presence of women in the factory and office, but this is to be expected in any emergency, and I suspect it was always true: all hands on deck and gendered roles be damned when survival is at stake.
My point is that exploring the ideas of freedom through work is important because it can sometimes showcase parallelisms with asking for liberation through enslavement. And we all take it as a "natural" given underpinning society.
I think this also partly helps explain the whole demographic crisis: until we can get back to a place where it's normal for only 1 individual in the household to work for money and the societal monetary rewards are sufficient to give a comfortable life with enough resources to the household (couple) and their 2-3 children (or more), then the short version is: "we're fucked".
So at some point we need to address the elephants in the room.
And part of accepting this dynamic is allowing the feminine to do the writing. Unless you’re willing to accept that masculine and feminine exist in harmony in both sexes, writing such as this from man comes off as a form of anima dominance…the feminine woman you describe does not go for the writer/poet…she is that. the man is the warrior. And you as a man who may like to write has to be willing to give and trust a woman with that function, while she trusts you to be a bad ass warrior on her behalf. And that’s what makes love so powerful and scary. You’re entrusting another with a part of you and becoming one and interdependent.
Some of this is complicated by the fact that the Longhouse is the most effective way to organize large corporations to date.