How men would benefit from a less sexist world

Nov 22 JDN 2459176

November 19 is International Men’s Day, so this week seemed an appropriate time for this post.

It’s obvious that a less sexist world would benefit women. But there are many ways in which it would benefit men as well.

First, there is the overwhelming pressure of conforming to norms of masculinity. I don’t think most women realize just how oppressive this is, how nearly every moment of our lives we are struggling to conform to a particular narrow vision of what it is to be a man, from which even small deviations can be severely punished. A less sexist world would mean a world where these pressures are greatly reduced.

Second, there is the fact that men are subjected to far more violence than women. Men are three times as likely to be murdered as women. This violence has many causes—indeed, the fact that men are much more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of violence nearly everywhere in the world suggests genetic causes—but a less sexist world could be a world with less violence in general, and men would benefit most from that.

Third, a less sexist world is a world where men and women feel more equal and more comfortable with one another, a world in which relationships between men and women can be deeper and more authentic. Another part of the male experience that most women don’t seem to understand is how incredibly painful it is to be treated as “Schrodinger’s Rapist”, where you are considered a potential predator by default and have to constantly signal that you are not threatening. To be clear, the problem isn’t that women are trying to protect themselves from harm; it’s that their risk of being harmed is high enough that they have to do this. I’m not saying women should stop trying to play it safe around men; I’m saying that we should be trying to find ways to greatly reduce the risk of harm that they face—and that doing so would benefit both women, who would be safer, and men, who wouldn’t have to be treated as potential predators at all times.

Feminists have actually done a lot of things that directly benefit men, including removing numerous laws that discriminate against men.

Are there some men who stand to be harmed by a less sexist society? Sure. Rapists clearly stand to be harmed. Extremely misogynist men will be pressured to change, which could be harmful to them. And, to be clear, it won’t all be benefits even for the rest of us. We will have to learn new things, change how we behave, challenge some of our most deep-seated norms and attitudes. But overall, I think that most men are already better off because of feminism, and would continue to be even better off still if the world became more feminist.

Why does this matter? Wouldn’t the benefits to women be a sufficient reason to make a less sexist world, even if it did end up harming most men?

Well, yes and no: It actually depends on how much it would harm men. If those harms were actually large enough, they would present a compelling reason not to make a more feminist world. That is clearly not the case, and this should be obvious to just about anyone; but it’s not a logical impossibility. Indeed, even knowing that the harms are not enough to justify abandoning the entire project, they could still be large enough to justify slowing it down or seeking other approaches to solving the problems feminism was intended to solve.

But yes, clearly feminism would be worth doing even if it had no net benefit to men. Yet, the fact that it does have a net benefit to most men is useful information.

First, it tells us that the world is nonzero-sum, that we can make some people better off without making others equally worse off. This is a deep and important insight that I think far too few people have really internalized.

Second, it provides numerous strategic benefits for recruiting men to the cause. Consider the following two potential sales pitches for feminism:

“You benefit from this system, but women are harmed by it. You should help us change it, even though that would harm you! If you don’t, you’re a bad person!”

“Women are harmed most by this system, but you are harmed by it too. You can help us change it, and we’ll make almost everyone better off, including you!”

Which of those two sales pitches seems more likely to convince someone who is on the fence?

Consider in particular men who aren’t particularly well-off themselves. If you are an unemployed, poor Black man, you probably find that the phrase “male privilege” rings a little hollow. Yes, perhaps you would be even worse off if you were a woman, but you’re not doing great right now, and you probably aren’t thrilled with the idea of risking being made even worse off, even by changes that you would otherwise agree are beneficial to society as a whole.

Similar reasoning applies to other “privileged” groups: Poor White men dying from treatable diseases because they can’t afford healthcare probably aren’t terribly moved by the phrase “White privilege”. Emphasizing the ways that your social movement will harm people seems like a really awful way of recruiting support, doesn’t it?

Yes, sometimes things that are overall good will harm some people, and we have to accept that. But the world is not always this way, and in fact some of the greatest progress in human civilization has been of the sort that benefits nearly everyone. Indeed, perhaps we should focus our efforts on the things that will benefit the most people, and then maybe come back later for things that benefit some at the expense of others?

How to hurt allies and alienate people

Aug 9 JDN 2459071

I’ve been wanting to write this post for awhile now, but I have been worried about the reaction I might get. Ultimately I realized that this is precisely why it needs to be written. Especially since Slate Star Codex is offline for the foreseeable future, there don’t see to be a lot of other people willing to write it.

The timing could be questioned, I suppose; when we are in the throes of a historic pandemic and brazen creeping authoritarianism, perhaps now should be the time for unconditional solidarity. But I fear that unconditional solidarity is one of the most dangerous forces in human existence: Politics is the mind-killer, arguments are soldiers, and the absolute unwillingness to question one’s own side is how we get everything from the Spanish Inquisition to Vladimir Lenin.

And since this is about not simply being mistaken but alienating allies, perhaps these desperate times are when we need the correction most: For we simply cannot afford to lose any allies right now.

“All men benefit from male violence.”

“It’s impossible to be racist against White people.”

“I hate White people.”

“Men are pigs.”

“All I want for Christmas is White genocide.”

Statements like these have two things in common: One, they are considered appropriate and acceptable to say by most of the social justice left; and two, they are harmful, alienating, and wrong.

All men benefit from male violence? You mean that male rape victims benefit from male violence? The thousands of men who are assaulted and murdered by other men—at far higher rates than women—benefit from that, do they? Did Matthew Shepard benefit from male violence?

It’s impossible to be racist against White people? Then tell me, what was it when a Black woman told me that melanin is the gateway to the soul and all White people are soulless snakes? Swap the colors, and it sounds like something only a diehard KKK member or neo-Nazi could say. If that’s not racism, what is?

The insistence that racism is “prejudice plus power” is a disingenuous redefinition of the concept precisely in an attempt to retroactively make it true that it’s impossible to be racist against White people. This is not what the word “racist” means to most people. But even if I were to allow that definition, do you think Black people never have power over White people? There are no Black managers who discriminate against their White employees, no Black teachers who abuse their White students? I’m not aware of Barack Obama discriminating against any White people, but can anyone deny that he had power? White people may have more power on average, but that doesn’t mean they have more power in every case.

What’s more, I don’t really understand what leftists think they are accomplishing by making this kind of assertion. Is it just an expression of rage, or a signal of your group identity? You’re clearly not going to convince any White person who has been discriminated against that White people never get discriminated against. You’re clearly not going to convince any man who has been brutally attacked by another man that all men benefit from male violence. It would be one thing to say that White people face less discrimination (clearly true) or that most White people don’t face discrimination (maybe true); but to say that no White people ever face discrimination is just obviously false, and will be disproved by many people’s direct experience.

Indeed, it seems quite obvious to me that this kind of talk is likely to frustrate and alienate many people who could otherwise have been allies.

The left has a counter-argument prepared for this: If you are alienated by what we say, then you were never a true ally in the first place.

The accusation seems to be that alienated allies are just fair-weather friends; but I don’t think someone is being a fair-weather friend if they stop wanting to be your friend because you abuse them. And make no mistake: Continually telling people that they are inferior and defective because of their race or gender or some other innate aspect of themselves absolutely constitutes abuse. Indeed, it’s nothing less than a mirror image of the very abuse that social justice is supposed to exist to prevent.

To be sure, there are cases where people claim to be alienated allies but were never really allies to begin with. Anyone who says “Wokeness made me a Nazi” obviously was far-right to begin with, and is just using that as an excuse. No amount of people saying “I hate White people” would justify becoming a Nazi or a KKK member. This isn’t them genuinely being alienated by the left being unfair; this is them saying “Look what you made me do” as they punch you in the face.

But I think the far more common scenario is more like this: “I want to support social justice, but every time I try to participate in leftist spaces, people attack me. They say that I’m defective because of who I am, and it hurts. They don’t seem interested in my input anyway, so I think I’ll just stay away from leftist spaces to preserve my own mental health.” These are people who broadly agree with social justice in principle, but just feel so frustrated and alienated by the movement in practice that they decide they are better off remaining on the sidelines.

Is it really so hard to understand how someone might feel that way? Why would anyone want to interact in a social space where most of the time is spent disparaging people like them? To stay in such a space, one either needs to have very strong moral convictions to sustain them against that onslaught, or needs to be masochistic or self-loathing.

Maybe it is self-loathing, actually: Liberal White people are the only group that systematically exhibits a negative in-group bias. The further left you are on the political spectrum, the more likely you are to suffer from mental illness, especially if you are male. I’ve seen some right-wing sources use this to claim that “liberalism is a mental illness”, but the far more sensible explanation is that the kind of collective guilt and self-hatred that the left inculcates in liberal White people is harmful to mental health. It may also be because concern about the injustice in the world makes your life generally harder, even though you are right to be concerned.

There really does seem to be a lot of pressure to confess and self-flagellate among White leftists. I think my favorite is the injunction to “Divest from Whiteness“; it’s beautiful because it’s utterly meaningless. If you really just meant “fight racial discrimination”, you could have said that. Better yet, you could have recommended some specific policy or belief to adopt. (“Defund the Police”, for all its flaws, is an infinitely superior slogan to “Divest from Whiteness”.) By saying it this way, you’re trying to bring in some notion that we are morally obliged to somehow stop being White—which is of course completely impossible. Frankly I think even if I got gene therapy to convert my body to a West African phenotype people would still say I was “really White”. Thus, Whiteness becomes Original Sin: A stain acquired at birth that can never be removed and must always be a source of guilt.

So let me say this in no uncertain terms:

It’s okay to be White.

It’s okay to be straight.

It’s okay to be male.

It’s wrong to be racist.

It’s wrong to be homophobic.

It’s wrong to be sexist.

No, it isn’t “covertly racist” to say that it’s okay to be White—and if you think it is, you are part of the problem here. People do not have control over what race they are born into. There is no moral failing in being a particular color, or in being descended from people who did terrible things. (And it’s not like only White people have ancestors who did terrible things!)

Yes, I know that there are White supremacist groups using the slogan “It’s okay to be White”, but you know what? Stopped Clock Principle. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Nazis believe many things that are wrong, but the mere fact that Nazis believe something doesn’t make it wrong. Nazis also generally believe in Darwinian evolution, and Adolf Hitler was a strict vegetarian.

I am not denying that privilege and oppression exist. But there is a clear and absolutely vital moral distinction between being a member of a group and oppressing people who are not in that group. Being White is not the same thing as being racist. Being straight is not the same thing as being homophobic. Being male is not the same thing as being sexist. Indeed, I would argue that being a member of the privileged category is not even necessary to participate in oppression—you can oppress people of your own group, or be in one underprivileged group and oppress someone in another group. Being privileged certainly makes it easier for you to support oppression and more likely that you’ll do so—but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Another common response is that this is just “tone policing“, that complaining about alienating rhetoric is just a way of shutting down dissent in general. No doubt this is sometimes true: One of the more effective ways of silencing someone’s argument is to convince people that it has been delivered in an overly aggressive or shrill way, thus discrediting the messenger. (This was basically the only major criticism ever leveled against New Atheism, for instance.)

But it clearly takes the notion too far to say that any kind of rhetoric is acceptable as long as it’s for the right cause. Insulting and denigrating people is never appropriate. Making people feel guilty for being born in the wrong group is never fair. Indeed, it’s not clear that one can even argue against tone policing without… tone policing. Sometimes your tone is actually inappropriate and harmful and you need to be criticized for it.

In fact, some of the people that harsh rhetoric is alienating may harbor real prejudices that need to be challenged. But they aren’t very likely to make the intense effort to challenge their own prejudices if every interaction they have with the social justice community is hostile. If we want to change someone’s mind, it helps a great deal to start by showing them compassion and respect.

I’m not saying that fighting for social justice is never going to upset people. Social change is always painful, and there are many cherished beliefs and institutions that will have to be removed in order to achieve lasting justice. So the mere fact that someone is frustrated or upset with you doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong. But you should at least consider that people might sometimes be upset with you for genuinely good reasons, that when they say your aggressive rhetoric is hurtful and alienating that might be because it’s actually true.

On compromise: The kind of politics that can be bipartisan—and the kind that can’t

Dec 29 JDN 2458847

The “polarization” of our current government has been much maligned. And there is some truth to this: The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans in Congress is larger than it has been in a century. There have been many calls by self-proclaimed “centrists” for a return to “bipartisanship”.

But there is nothing centrist about compromising with fascists. If one party wants to destroy democracy and the other wants to save it, a true centrist would vote entirely with the pro-democracy party.

There is a kind of politics that can be bipartisan, that can bear reasonable compromise. Most economic policy is of this kind. If one side wants a tax of 40% and the other wants 20%, it’s quite reasonable to set the tax at 30%. If one side wants a large tariff and the other no tariff, it’s quite reasonable to make a small tariff. It could still be wrong—I’d tend to say that the 40% tax with no tariff is the right way to go—but it won’t be unjust. We can in fact “agree to disagree” in such cases. There really is a reasonable intermediate view between the extremes.

But there is also a kind of politics that can’t be bipartisan, in which compromise is inherently unjust. Most social policy is of this kind. If one side wants to let women vote and the other doesn’t, you can’t compromise by letting half of women vote. Women deserve the right to vote, period. All of them. In some sense letting half of women vote would be an improvement over none at all, but it’s obviously not an acceptable policy. The only just thing to do is to keep fighting until all women can vote.

This isn’t a question of importance per se.

Climate change is probably the single most important thing going on in the world this century, but it is actually something we can reasonably compromise about. It isn’t obvious where exactly the emission targets should be set to balance environmental sustainability with economic growth, and reasonable people can disagree about how to draw that line. (It is not reasonable to deny that climate change is important and refuse to take any action at all—which, sadly, is what the Republicans have been doing lately.) Thousands of innocent people have already been killed by Trump’s nonsensical deregulation of air pollution—but in fact it’s a quite difficult problem to decide exactly how pollution should be regulated.

Conversely, voter suppression has a small, if any, effect on our actual outcomes. In a country of 320 million people, even tens of thousands of votes rarely make a difference, and the (Constitutional) Electoral College does far greater damage to the principle of “one person, one vote” than voter suppression ever could. But voter suppression is fundamentally, inherently anti-democractic. When you try to suppress votes, you declare yourself an enemy of the free world.

There has always been disagreement about both kinds of issues; that hasn’t changed. The fundamental rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people have always been politically contentious, when—qua fundamental rights—they should never have been. But at least as far as I could tell, we seemed to be making progress on all these fronts. The left wing was dragging the right wing, kicking and screaming if necessary, toward a more just society.

Then came President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration, at least more than any administration I can remember, has been reversing social progress, taking hardline far-right positions on the kind of issues that we can’t compromise about. Locking up children at the border. Undermining judicial due process. Suppressing voter participation. These are attacks upon the foundations of a free society. We can’t “agree to disagree” on them.

Indeed, Trump’s economic policy has been surprisingly ambivalent; while he cuts taxes on the rich like a standard Republican, his trade war is much more of a leftist idea. It’s not so much that he’s willing to compromise as that he’s utterly inconsistent, but at least he’s not a consistent extremist on these issues.

That is what makes Trump an anomaly. The Republicans have gradually become more extreme over time, but it was Trump who carried them over a threshold, where they stopped retarding social progress and began actively reversing it. Removing Trump himself will not remove the problem—but nor would it be an empty gesture. He is a real part of the problem, and removing him might just give us the chance to make the deeper changes that need to be made.

The House agrees. Unfortunately, I doubt the Senate will.

Pinker Propositions

May 19 2458623

What do the following statements have in common?

1. “Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries.

2. “Black men in the US commit homicide at a higher rate than White men.

3. “On average, in the US, Asian people score highest on IQ tests, White and Hispanic people score near the middle, and Black people score the lowest.

4. “Men on average perform better at visual tasks, and women on average perform better on verbal tasks.

5. “In the United States, White men are no more likely to be mass shooters than other men.

6. “The genetic heritability of intelligence is about 60%.

7. “The plurality of recent terrorist attacks in the US have been committed by Muslims.

8. “The period of US military hegemony since 1945 has been the most peaceful period in human history.

These statements have two things in common:

1. All of these statements are objectively true facts that can be verified by rich and reliable empirical data which is publicly available and uncontroversially accepted by social scientists.

2. If spoken publicly among left-wing social justice activists, all of these statements will draw resistance, defensiveness, and often outright hostility. Anyone making these statements is likely to be accused of racism, sexism, imperialism, and so on.

I call such propositions Pinker Propositions, after an excellent talk by Steven Pinker illustrating several of the above statements (which was then taken wildly out of context by social justice activists on social media).

The usual reaction to these statements suggests that people think they imply harmful far-right policy conclusions. This inference is utterly wrong: A nuanced understanding of each of these propositions does not in any way lead to far-right policy conclusions—in fact, some rather strongly support left-wing policy conclusions.

1. Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries, because Communist countries are nearly always corrupt and authoritarian. Social democratic countries have the lowest poverty and the highest overall happiness (#ScandinaviaIsBetter).

2. Black men commit more homicide than White men because of poverty, discrimination, mass incarceration, and gang violence. Black men are also greatly overrepresented among victims of homicide, as most homicide is intra-racial. Homicide rates often vary across ethnic and socioeconomic groups, and these rates vary over time as a result of cultural and political changes.

3. IQ tests are a highly imperfect measure of intelligence, and the genetics of intelligence cut across our socially-constructed concept of race. There is far more within-group variation in IQ than between-group variation. Intelligence is not fixed at birth but is affected by nutrition, upbringing, exposure to toxins, and education—all of which statistically put Black people at a disadvantage. Nor does intelligence remain constant within populations: The Flynn Effect is the well-documented increase in intelligence which has occurred in almost every country over the past century. Far from justifying discrimination, these provide very strong reasons to improve opportunities for Black children. The lead and mercury in Flint’s water suppressed the brain development of thousands of Black children—that’s going to lower average IQ scores. But that says nothing about supposed “inherent racial differences” and everything about the catastrophic damage of environmental racism.

4. To be quite honest, I never even understood why this one shocks—or even surprises—people. It’s not even saying that men are “smarter” than women—overall IQ is almost identical. It’s just saying that men are more visual and women are more verbal. And this, I think, is actually quite obvious. I think the clearest evidence of this—the “interocular trauma” that will convince you the effect is real and worth talking about—is pornography. Visual porn is overwhelmingly consumed by men, even when it was designed for women (e.g. Playgirla majority of its readers are gay men, even though there are ten times as many straight women in the world as there are gay men). Conversely, erotic novels are overwhelmingly consumed by women. I think a lot of anti-porn feminism can actually be explained by this effect: Feminists (who are usually women, for obvious reasons) can say they are against “porn” when what they are really against is visual porn, because visual porn is consumed by men; then the kind of porn that they like (erotic literature) doesn’t count as “real porn”. And honestly they’re mostly against the current structure of the live-action visual porn industry, which is totally reasonable—but it’s a far cry from being against porn in general. I have some serious issues with how our farming system is currently set up, but I’m not against farming.

5. This one is interesting, because it’s a lack of a race difference, which normally is what the left wing always wants to hear. The difference of course is that this alleged difference would make White men look bad, and that’s apparently seen as a desirable goal for social justice. But the data just doesn’t bear it out: While indeed most mass shooters are White men, that’s because most Americans are White, which is a totally uninteresting reason. There’s no clear evidence of any racial disparity in mass shootings—though the gender disparity is absolutely overwhelming: It’s almost always men.

6. Heritability is a subtle concept; it doesn’t mean what most people seem to think it means. It doesn’t mean that 60% of your intelligence is due to your your genes. Indeed, I’m not even sure what that sentence would actually mean; it’s like saying that 60% of the flavor of a cake is due to the eggs. What this heritability figure actually means that when you compare across individuals in a population, and carefully control for environmental influences, you find that about 60% of the variance in IQ scores is explained by genetic factors. But this is within a particular population—here, US adults—and is absolutely dependent on all sorts of other variables. The more flexible one’s environment becomes, the more people self-select into their preferred environment, and the more heritable traits become. As a result, IQ actually becomes more heritable as children become adults, called the Wilson Effect.

7. This one might actually have some contradiction with left-wing policy. The disproportionate participation of Muslims in terrorism—controlling for just about anything you like, income, education, age etc.—really does suggest that, at least at this point in history, there is some real ideological link between Islam and terrorism. But the fact remains that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists and do not support terrorism, and antagonizing all the people of an entire religion is fundamentally unjust as well as likely to backfire in various ways. We should instead be trying to encourage the spread of more tolerant forms of Islam, and maintaining the strict boundaries of secularism to prevent the encroach of any religion on our system of government.

8. The fact that US military hegemony does seem to be a cause of global peace doesn’t imply that every single military intervention by the US is justified. In fact, it doesn’t even necessarily imply that any such interventions are justified—though I think one would be hard-pressed to say that the NATO intervention in the Kosovo War or the defense of Kuwait in the Gulf War was unjustified. It merely points out that having a hegemon is clearly preferable to having a multipolar world where many countries jockey for military supremacy. The Pax Romana was a time of peace but also authoritarianism; the Pax Americana is better, but that doesn’t prevent us from criticizing the real harms—including major war crimes—committed by the United States.

So it is entirely possible to know and understand these facts without adopting far-right political views.

Yet Pinker’s point—and mine—is that by suppressing these true facts, by responding with hostility or even ostracism to anyone who states them, we are actually adding fuel to the far-right fire. Instead of presenting the nuanced truth and explaining why it doesn’t imply such radical policies, we attack the messenger; and this leads people to conclude three things:

1. The left wing is willing to lie and suppress the truth in order to achieve political goals (they’re doing it right now).

2. These statements actually do imply right-wing conclusions (else why suppress them?).

3. Since these statements are true, that must mean the right-wing conclusions are actually correct.

Now (especially if you are someone who identifies unironically as “woke”), you might be thinking something like this: “Anyone who can be turned away from social justice so easily was never a real ally in the first place!”

This is a fundamentally and dangerously wrongheaded view. No one—not me, not you, not anyone—was born believing in social justice. You did not emerge from your mother’s womb ranting against colonalist imperialism. You had to learn what you now know. You came to believe what you now believe, after once believing something else that you now think is wrong. This is true of absolutely everyone everywhere. Indeed, the better you are, the more true it is; good people learn from their mistakes and grow in their knowledge.

This means that anyone who is now an ally of social justice once was not. And that, in turn, suggests that many people who are currently not allies could become so, under the right circumstances. They would probably not shift all at once—as I didn’t, and I doubt you did either—but if we are welcoming and open and honest with them, we can gradually tilt them toward greater and greater levels of support.

But if we reject them immediately for being impure, they never get the chance to learn, and we never get the chance to sway them. People who are currently uncertain of their political beliefs will become our enemies because we made them our enemies. We declared that if they would not immediately commit to everything we believe, then they may as well oppose us. They, quite reasonably unwilling to commit to a detailed political agenda they didn’t understand, decided that it would be easiest to simply oppose us.

And we don’t have to win over every person on every single issue. We merely need to win over a large enough critical mass on each issue to shift policies and cultural norms. Building a wider tent is not compromising on your principles; on the contrary, it’s how you actually win and make those principles a reality.

There will always be those we cannot convince, of course. And I admit, there is something deeply irrational about going from “those leftists attacked Charles Murray” to “I think I’ll start waving a swastika”. But humans aren’t always rational; we know this. You can lament this, complain about it, yell at people for being so irrational all you like—it won’t actually make people any more rational. Humans are tribal; we think in terms of teams. We need to make our team as large and welcoming as possible, and suppressing Pinker Propositions is not the way to do that.

How to respond to dog whistles

Oct 21 JDN 2458413





How should we respond to this kind of coded language?





1. Ask for clarification.


What exactly do you mean by that statement?”










2. State your own positive case.





