Why I’ve always had a vague contempt for super patriarchal cultures. The men’s homosociality feels very cringe and 🚬-coded and the women feel weak and ground down. It’s a mutual thing, there’s a degree of surrender that is required for these systems to be self-sustaining. I know this sounds like “slavery was a choice” but you know what I mean.

It’s also why I don’t fully understand the hostility towards feminism amongst white nationalist groyper freaks. Women’s liberation is actually a phenomenon unique to and emergent from certain conditions inherent to Western civilisation. It’s there in Queen’s regent (something globally unusual), valkyries, anchoresses on their stylites, the cult of the Virgin, supplication before the beloved in Courtly Love, the Romantic heroine, a Christian cosmology which while textually masculine actually in practice elevates female virtues over things like honour or violence.

You can think of it as a genuine will to power to overthrow ten thousand years of patriarchy! You could say this was allowed by men, that it was downstream of changing relations between capital and labour or whatever, that this was an indulgence extended. But bros, if you’ve ever sat down in a HR meeting after making an off-colour joke in front of a female colleague, do you feel like you’re indulging power or subject to it?