Cancel Culture Is Girl Culture

I am not entirely persuaded by her analysis-- what else is new?-- but I believe that Louise Perry has lit on an important and overlooked aspect of cancel culture.

Her insight-- it is basically girl culture. It has come from academia and the media as these have been occupied by more and more women.  

Of course, this leads us to raise an issue we will not solve here. Namely, how much of the horror of the Chinese Great Proletarian Culture Revolution can be ascribed to the fact that the person in charge was Chairman Mao’s wife-- Jiang Qing. Was she not the first member of the gang of four that was put under house arrest after Mao died?

Naturally, Perry needs to define the difference between men and women. I will take some minor exception with her conceptual framework, but that does not mean that I disagree.

Perry begins by defining the stereotypical woman, which turns out to be a woman like herself. Fair enough.

When it comes to most of the major psychological sex differences, I am typical of my sex. I am more agreeable, risk averse, and neurotic than the average man, and I also have a restricted sociosexual orientation (or, colloquially, I like being monogamous and vanilla). I’m generally more interested in people than in things. I regard spending time with my children as more important than my career, and have turned down a lot of professional opportunities as a result (one of the causes of the gender pay gap). I cry easily, particularly in response to the suffering of vulnerable people and animals. I enjoy sewing, interior design magazines, and cooking. I have no interest in watching sports. 

Were we called upon to synthesize her collection of characteristics, we would say that she, as a woman, is designed to function within a home, not within a marketplace or a battlefield. And we would add that she possesses God-given qualities that are useful when dealing with children.

We have previously remarked that empathy, everyone’s favorite emotional fetish, is mostly useful when dealing with babies. For that reason, pregnancy enhances the development of the brain’s empathy circuits. 

Similarly, a mother dealing with a young child, a child who is not yet perfectly proficient in social interaction and who has not mastered social rules, will make use of an intuitive sense of what the child wants or does not want to communicate. That is to say, feelings are of greater importance when dealing with a human being who is not yet fully socialized.

Moreover, Perry suggests that women are more prone to kindness than competitiveness. They are more likely to communicate such values in their interactions with other women. One might suggest that they do so because they want to know whether or not they can trust each other to care for their children. 

As Nancy Chodorow argued in her book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, only women mother, though the mother in question need not be the birth mother of the child in question.

Perry suggests that men are more concerned with truth than with kindness, and this feels just a bit too vague. Men are designed to form groups to compete outside of the home, in the marketplace or on the battlefield. They wear uniforms to show that they belong to the team and they follow the rules of engagement, strictly.

Once it is clear that a man knows how to follow the rules and once he has shown himself to be trustworthy and reliable, the group will not care whether he is kind or caring or even empathetic. They will not care about his views about hotbutton political issues. They want to know whether they can rely on him in the heat of battle.

When women go out in the world of business or the world of war, they are obliged to function according to the same principles. And yet, when we compare women’s fashion with men’s uniforms we see clearly that whereas men want to show that they belong to the group and that they have suppressed their individuality in favor of group interest, women try to make clear, through fashion, that they are not participants in the battle. 

The male world involves competition, sometimes for advantage, sometimes for territory, sometimes for life itself. In that world social cohesion matters enormously and everyone is supposed to contribute to it by wearing the uniform and following the rules, strictly. 

Perry suggests that men are wedded to a search for the truth while women care about how you feel. I find this to be less than adequate, but allow us to examine the view presented by Cory Clark, via Perry:

Men are more likely to say that pursuit of truth is the principle goal of science and we shouldn’t be negotiating that goal against other priorities like psychological safety or social equity, whereas women are more likely to say that we should be balancing pursuit of truth against moral goals. And similarly, I see that women are less supportive of academic freedom than men, so men are more likely to think that we should be free to study anything regardless of whether it causes offence, and women are more likely to say ‘we should support academic freedom so long as it doesn’t cause offence.’ 

Apparently, women care more about hurt feelings than about scientific truth. They care more about empathy than about experimental results. They care more about whether another person has the emotional flexibility needed to deal with children, small and big, than about whether the person is trustworthy and reliable.

If we are dealing with scientific truth or even the results of competition, we judge according to objective, agreed-upon standards. You win or you lose, you come in second or fourth, regardless of how you feel.

So, Perry continues an argument proposed by Cory Clark. They explain that the influx of women into academia has changed the culture:

Cory argues – and I think she’s right – that the cultural changes we’ve seen in academia over the last few decades are primarily a consequence of the influx of women into the profession, bringing with them their female-typical preferences and perspectives.

More women has meant more intolerance of different opinions.

When everyone uses the same manners, wears the same uniform and follows the same rules, a group will cohere and be socially harmonious. When no one cares about these objective, observable behaviors, the threat to group cohesion multiplies. 

Trying to cement relationships on the basis of an infusion of kindness and empathy is unstable-- you never really know what other people feel and whether or not you can trust them. It is needed when dealing with children, but otherwise should be avoided.

Other effects are bad, like the persecution of heterodox thinking within academia. Notice that the disciplines that have witnessed the most aggressive attacks on free speech – feminist philosophy, for instance – are those most dominated by women, whereas male-dominated disciplines like maths and engineering have so far proved to be mostly immune. 

STEM subjects have objective criteria. Feminist theory does not. Feminist theory has notable dimwit Judith Butler, who cannot think and cannot write. If academic had standards people would laugh at Judith Butler.

So, female academics have become scolds. They cannot take jokes and react badly if you dare contradict their cherished beliefs.

I’ve heard anecdotally from several male academics that this gendered pattern has not gone unnoticed, and that the presence of a woman in the room tends to produce a spontaneous stifling of casual discussion: less boisterous, less edgy, less intellectually adventurous. 

In the girlosphere the important thing is affirming a belief, and especially a belief that supersedes reality, or empirical verification. Reality takes a back seat to having the right feelings.

Perry emphasizes the point in relation to transmania.

Almost no one actually believes that gender identity trumps biological sex. Every adult knows how babies are made. “Trans women are women” is a powerful political phrase precisely because it is untrue, which makes its repetition a particularly persuasive display of loyalty.

Nowadays, the ability to overcome reality in favor of belief counts as virtue in a certain feminized wold:

… mentally ill misfits inspire compassion in women, particularly childless women looking for an outlet for their maternal instincts. When women view trans people are hyper-vulnerable – and trans activists have worked very hard on promoting that view – women are about as likely to call a trans woman “a man” as they are to call a disabled child “a retard.” The whole issue comes to be regarded as a basic test of kindness, and people who fail that test – particularly other women – risk being socially ostracised. 

Perry concludes that the culture of silencing dissent is a girly culture. Overcoming an objective reference is the key to feeling the right feelings. Anyone who does not feel the right feelings will not be a good person to care for children, to say nothing of babies.

No, the weird thing about our culture of silencing dissidents is how extremely girly it is. The gallows and the gulag are the usual masculine tools of repression. The feminine tools, in contrast, are far less direct: spreading rumours, badmouthing in private, disinviting or otherwise excluding wrongdoers, the “you can’t sit with us” school of politics. All of which are abundantly evident on Twitter, a platform that, by foreclosing the possibility of physical aggression, channels its users towards the use of non-physical aggression instead, encouraging them to behave like women. 

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