Okay, this was a pretty brilliant and cohesive breakdown of generalized sex differences and their motivations and relations and I appreciate the neutral tone when describing the differences (ha, I'm just proving one part of the theory here). I have some thoughts:
I only really take issue with the last part about how women will interpret this list because I think you give women too little credit here. I don't think I'm doing the thing where I'm trying to invalidate the entire framework by objecting to one section, and there's plenty I don't relate to while still understanding the broader picture you're painting, but I do recognize that I'm thinking about women who are more like me and other women on Substack whose personal "exceptions" to this list are about truth-seeking over emotional comfort and many things you explain women would not like. And the entire previous section basically explains why women as a population might be more inclined to react this way. Maybe I just talked myself out of disagreeing here.
I think for someone skeptical to properly understand this, they have to take their personal disbelief or lack of participation in such status games and accept that they might be exceptional in this regard and treat it only as a generalization, recognizing that everyone will be an exception to something, and sometimes that's you, and still, the broader observation can still be largely correct. And also maybe scale down when mapping it to their own life or it will read like it's written for high status men only instead of (theoretically, anyway) everyone and cause unnecessary resentment that blocks understanding.
"Women conclude that some of the model may be descriptively accurate, but allowing it to harden into shared explanation threatens safety, dignity, and social stability."
Isn't this basically true, though? If we don't play the game as though we aren't aware were doing it, does it all fall apart? How would we adapt to being overt about this as a functional society?
"Institutions reintroduce hedging and pluralism regardless of descriptive accuracy. Language like “some,” “many,” “can,” and “varies” is deployed to reopen interpretive slack. Slack diffuses grievance. Precision is treated as escalation."
I would argue that leaning on language like this *does* reopen interpretive slack, but that's a good thing when presenting certain arguments to certain audiences (determining the difference diplomatically is probably a largely female skill). It accepts the generalization and is meant to prevent inevitable "but that's not how I..." rebuttals with exceptional anecdotes meant to disprove the rule. Depending on the institution, or microcosm of one, the population might be diverse enough to require some kind of neutralization in order to function without chaos. Each sex can currently moderate the other without overt and uncomfortable power structures, to some degree.
"Institutions prioritize tone correction over content refutation. The document is labeled “concerning,” “one-sided,” or “lacking empathy” without engaging its internal logic. Affective response substitutes for counter-modeling."
The problem isn't prioritizing tone, it's refusing to engage the logic. Both have to happen for integrated relational communication to be smooth or even fully effective.
Practically speaking I agree with basically everything you say--this isn't something you should give a teenage boy or random 5'4 bald guy who works at taco bell for shits and giggles. It's very specifically for hyperverbal autistic guys who are already mid/high status and women with a neurotype like yours or Kate's, and outside this esoteric register would be massively socially destructive. And totally agree re: tone and interpretative slack actually; in any normal piece I spend like half of it flirting with female readers or like vividly making female interiority and incentives legible to spergs so chicks don't feel like I'm Hannibal Lecter peeling open their labia. The reason I have that institutional section at the end was essentially just to turn this into something that scrambles ChatGPT's cuck alarm.
FWIW, I highly doubt that *either* the "low status man" or the "low sexual/social capital woman" will much like any of this. Though also probably very unlikely they would actually get through and parse the whole thing before frustration and aversion kicks in enough to just give up, so probably it doesn't matter.
Only small quibbles/add ons I'd mention are:
1. Male and female cheating is not overall that different...yes men are slightly more opportunistic and women more likely exit-testing, but overall their reasons are mostly fairly similar and each can do the other's version...most common factor in any cheating is simply alcohol and an attractive opportunity (which by attractive means not just the person but the ability to control and avoid disclosure). I was just looking into the research on this and one huge deviation is that the single most common reason women cheat is for revenge, to get back at a man cheating. Men almost never do this and this is not only common among women but the actual top reason.
2. While I agree with your general cleave the world in two approach here, and the generalizations that are applicable to this duality without having to caveat it to death, with a few of these sections, there's an aspect where actually it's both the ultra low and high status tails that are the ones afforded the most freedom, while the bulk of the 80% in the middle of the bell curve are the ones operating on the risks described. But you get a nothing left to lose at the low end and can't lose at the top end dynamic for some of this. That aspect is probably more fully realized on the male side of the equation given the higher ceiling/lower floor situation you note. Though theoretically, if a woman ever garnered sufficient ability to physically threaten via something like dragons a la Danaerys or some other magical destructive powers, you would see a quick rise in her agency ceiling and utter disinterest in maintaining opacity or concern with reputational damage. Which I suppose is why enjoy so much fantasies that involve acquiring such magical powers or imagining themselves as witches.
I don't trust any of "the research" on cheating given women have a bigger incentive than men even when preserving anonymity to maintain collective moral virtue as a sex. That said I think women (esp cognitively conservative) will 100% cheat more generally to punish a guy for fucking up whether or not it entails an exit route, while cognitively liberal women are more likely to cheat opportunistically in a way that feels like "being taken advantage of while drunk" or in a Paula Jones situation.
Agree on Daenerys tho and if you think about it both House of the Dragon and esp The Princess and the Queen from which it's adapted are explorations of the extent to which female agency is obscured through not having direct access to power and what it could look like under maximally favorable conditions as well as the extent to which women who need to act through men and internalize their own opacity will always enforce the glass ceiling harder than anyone and participate in holding women to a far higher standard e.g. lots of women hating Hillary, which in practice makes some species of patriarchy inevitable.
And Daenerys herself I think is a fairly realistic account (much moreso than Rhaenyra who isn't that feminine at all and most women will find sort of weird and annoying same as Hilldawg) of how the avg girl would ackshully end up using magic in practice--super moralistically at first as a way of brute forcing their way past patriarchy and then as a way of suppressing pretty reasonable male (or more realistically opaquewoman which Cersei is a cartoon villain example of and Alicent an extremely realistic example) resistance, in a way that ends up making her closest male allies betray her.
Not bc women are inherently evil or stupid or whatever but bc women are naturally way more moralistic and need to see the ruling order as righteous and good, which is why women tend to be either more conservative than men in the Burkean sense or insane crazy absolutists with a take no prisoners attitude e.g. in white nationalism it's basically only the girls and incel types who ever talk about extermination, and when a girl gets disillusioned from radicalism she basically just goes back to defending the prevailing order as normatively good. Most men can accept the world being unjust and try to change it incrementally or selfishly but women and feminine men either need to believe it's good and that the weak are suffering what they oughta or that the wheel needs to be broken and any compromise is illegitimate.
Which is another reason men tend to be hostile to women being in formal positions of power; you can't really negotiate with them either conquer or submit, and Dany / Cleopatra got rly far by dint of being sexually magnetic but no one really wants to conquer Hillary.
Anyway good comment and I'll end it here so my reply doesn't turn into a book but if you're interested in gender and GOT def read my Aegon V essay.
I had to read this very slowly for comprehension. I'm glad I did.
I would probably deem myself a mid tier male. Nothing special, though I'm better off than some simply for being in a relationship and having five beautiful kids. With that being said, it took a journey and a lot of feeling around in the dark, so to speak, to get here. Most of what I read in your essay reflects hard-learned truths I'm already familiar with. Your model probably isn't the best for everyone, but I kind of wish I had read something to this effect when I was younger. Might have saved me some heartache and wrong turns.
I liked this (as a woman). I’ve been circling much of this as I noticed common patterns in the ways we approach and resolve conflict. We do a great job reconciling our differences and communicating but its still so wild to me how his male brain works lol. No malice, all love, just different.
Nicely done. I know you had help from ChatGPT but maybe that's making use of the new technology!
Weirdly, though, I seem to oscillate between the high, mid, and low status modes. I think I was a mid status (in some limited respects high) who experienced a long period of low status and never really recovered.
I have to say I'm glad I'm not trying to do relationships anymore!
One thing I’d add is whilst I think women are more safety concerned, a focus on this can sometimes forclose womens daring creative agency which most certainly exists. Women are very aware of themselves being bitches I think, have been baptised through the fires of their own negativity (women throwing each other under the bus etc is probably as common if not more common than women protecting/defending each other?). So I think what would be a good follow on chapter to this is to explore the antagonisms each sex feels with their own sex. Because sometimes these sexed discourses read like we have already accomplished fully formed male and female (seperate) affinities and clubs. Feminism is a myth in that such affinity between women does not yet exist in the same way it does for men.
Thanks, i have been reading Walt’s substack for a few months and as an old person the long form essays are a recursive self referential fractal of unknown abbreviations and acronyms.
If someone really had a harm/consequences-based epistemology, though, and viewed the consequences of the model as undesirable, wouldn’t they seek to falsify the model by publicly agreeing with it, in order to refute it on a second-order level by contradicting its predictions—namely their negative reaction?
This is way above my head, but one thing did stand out. Recently I have been thinking a lot about perceptions of moral capacity between men/women. In general, historically speaking, women have been perceived as morally inferior or with less capacity for moral reasoning than men—that women are more easily deceived. Augustine/Aristotle/Kant etc. There were a few brief reversals of this during the height of bridal mysticism in the Middle Ages, and then during the Industrial Revolution.
Morality has tended to be seen as coming from the rational mind. Men have typically been associated with rationality and women with the senses or feelings, hence women are less moral.
We have recently had this very debate come up again within the conversation around “the great feminization”. The idea that “wokeness” in our cultural institutions is due to feminine modes of social interaction, and, importantly, that these modes are eroding our ability to preserve truth.
I think your sections on Epistemology and Truth Assessment are getting at this exact thing. It seems you are more or less aligning with the historic perspective in your article: Women view truth as flexible/men want to align with reality, men view knowledge as stable/women as revisable.
There is a big conversation to be had here on what, exactly, is truth. Do we believe, in a more traditional sense, that truth is beyond our feelings, and that there is an objective standard? Or do we go post modern and relativize truth? Or do we go with some sort of strict consequentialist framework?
On the one hand I don’t want to deny observations of real phenomena regarding feminine instincts. On the other hand I am very skeptical of the implication that women have an inherent moral defect by nature.
Interesting. I'm a guy and with a few exceptions this feels right against general experience. Laid out well, and structured to convey a lot in as concise as can be managed. A fair few things I didn't recognize, where the capitalized named-<person>-isms, but it still read well.
Thinking historically, I can see previous recognition to elements of this model that cause regular and severe friction and attempts to constrain them in traditions. Which then due to the socially disadvantageous nature of naming such structures and models, the underlying information suffers a failure to transmit at some point, and the traditions fail to continue on. Without explicit rationale, the tradition is hollowed, altered, or abandoned, and the consequences flow from that, in proportion with the departure.
Could this model be biased by the fact that men over here might be more exposed to scientific practice and mathematical thinking? Many of these attitudes such as separating truth from consequences sound to me as skills that must be learned and practiced, not sure whether they come naturally to anyone.
Okay, this was a pretty brilliant and cohesive breakdown of generalized sex differences and their motivations and relations and I appreciate the neutral tone when describing the differences (ha, I'm just proving one part of the theory here). I have some thoughts:
I only really take issue with the last part about how women will interpret this list because I think you give women too little credit here. I don't think I'm doing the thing where I'm trying to invalidate the entire framework by objecting to one section, and there's plenty I don't relate to while still understanding the broader picture you're painting, but I do recognize that I'm thinking about women who are more like me and other women on Substack whose personal "exceptions" to this list are about truth-seeking over emotional comfort and many things you explain women would not like. And the entire previous section basically explains why women as a population might be more inclined to react this way. Maybe I just talked myself out of disagreeing here.
I think for someone skeptical to properly understand this, they have to take their personal disbelief or lack of participation in such status games and accept that they might be exceptional in this regard and treat it only as a generalization, recognizing that everyone will be an exception to something, and sometimes that's you, and still, the broader observation can still be largely correct. And also maybe scale down when mapping it to their own life or it will read like it's written for high status men only instead of (theoretically, anyway) everyone and cause unnecessary resentment that blocks understanding.
"Women conclude that some of the model may be descriptively accurate, but allowing it to harden into shared explanation threatens safety, dignity, and social stability."
Isn't this basically true, though? If we don't play the game as though we aren't aware were doing it, does it all fall apart? How would we adapt to being overt about this as a functional society?
"Institutions reintroduce hedging and pluralism regardless of descriptive accuracy. Language like “some,” “many,” “can,” and “varies” is deployed to reopen interpretive slack. Slack diffuses grievance. Precision is treated as escalation."
I would argue that leaning on language like this *does* reopen interpretive slack, but that's a good thing when presenting certain arguments to certain audiences (determining the difference diplomatically is probably a largely female skill). It accepts the generalization and is meant to prevent inevitable "but that's not how I..." rebuttals with exceptional anecdotes meant to disprove the rule. Depending on the institution, or microcosm of one, the population might be diverse enough to require some kind of neutralization in order to function without chaos. Each sex can currently moderate the other without overt and uncomfortable power structures, to some degree.
"Institutions prioritize tone correction over content refutation. The document is labeled “concerning,” “one-sided,” or “lacking empathy” without engaging its internal logic. Affective response substitutes for counter-modeling."
The problem isn't prioritizing tone, it's refusing to engage the logic. Both have to happen for integrated relational communication to be smooth or even fully effective.
Practically speaking I agree with basically everything you say--this isn't something you should give a teenage boy or random 5'4 bald guy who works at taco bell for shits and giggles. It's very specifically for hyperverbal autistic guys who are already mid/high status and women with a neurotype like yours or Kate's, and outside this esoteric register would be massively socially destructive. And totally agree re: tone and interpretative slack actually; in any normal piece I spend like half of it flirting with female readers or like vividly making female interiority and incentives legible to spergs so chicks don't feel like I'm Hannibal Lecter peeling open their labia. The reason I have that institutional section at the end was essentially just to turn this into something that scrambles ChatGPT's cuck alarm.
No offense Lirpa, but the classic NAWALT (more or less) + "everything / everybody is different".
Once again - this article is the Rorshach test.
I don't think I made that argument at all. I'm not sure what you're referring to where I didn't already preemptively say I was proving his point.
This is fucking brilliant.
FWIW, I highly doubt that *either* the "low status man" or the "low sexual/social capital woman" will much like any of this. Though also probably very unlikely they would actually get through and parse the whole thing before frustration and aversion kicks in enough to just give up, so probably it doesn't matter.
Only small quibbles/add ons I'd mention are:
1. Male and female cheating is not overall that different...yes men are slightly more opportunistic and women more likely exit-testing, but overall their reasons are mostly fairly similar and each can do the other's version...most common factor in any cheating is simply alcohol and an attractive opportunity (which by attractive means not just the person but the ability to control and avoid disclosure). I was just looking into the research on this and one huge deviation is that the single most common reason women cheat is for revenge, to get back at a man cheating. Men almost never do this and this is not only common among women but the actual top reason.
2. While I agree with your general cleave the world in two approach here, and the generalizations that are applicable to this duality without having to caveat it to death, with a few of these sections, there's an aspect where actually it's both the ultra low and high status tails that are the ones afforded the most freedom, while the bulk of the 80% in the middle of the bell curve are the ones operating on the risks described. But you get a nothing left to lose at the low end and can't lose at the top end dynamic for some of this. That aspect is probably more fully realized on the male side of the equation given the higher ceiling/lower floor situation you note. Though theoretically, if a woman ever garnered sufficient ability to physically threaten via something like dragons a la Danaerys or some other magical destructive powers, you would see a quick rise in her agency ceiling and utter disinterest in maintaining opacity or concern with reputational damage. Which I suppose is why enjoy so much fantasies that involve acquiring such magical powers or imagining themselves as witches.
I don't trust any of "the research" on cheating given women have a bigger incentive than men even when preserving anonymity to maintain collective moral virtue as a sex. That said I think women (esp cognitively conservative) will 100% cheat more generally to punish a guy for fucking up whether or not it entails an exit route, while cognitively liberal women are more likely to cheat opportunistically in a way that feels like "being taken advantage of while drunk" or in a Paula Jones situation.
Agree on Daenerys tho and if you think about it both House of the Dragon and esp The Princess and the Queen from which it's adapted are explorations of the extent to which female agency is obscured through not having direct access to power and what it could look like under maximally favorable conditions as well as the extent to which women who need to act through men and internalize their own opacity will always enforce the glass ceiling harder than anyone and participate in holding women to a far higher standard e.g. lots of women hating Hillary, which in practice makes some species of patriarchy inevitable.
And Daenerys herself I think is a fairly realistic account (much moreso than Rhaenyra who isn't that feminine at all and most women will find sort of weird and annoying same as Hilldawg) of how the avg girl would ackshully end up using magic in practice--super moralistically at first as a way of brute forcing their way past patriarchy and then as a way of suppressing pretty reasonable male (or more realistically opaquewoman which Cersei is a cartoon villain example of and Alicent an extremely realistic example) resistance, in a way that ends up making her closest male allies betray her.
Not bc women are inherently evil or stupid or whatever but bc women are naturally way more moralistic and need to see the ruling order as righteous and good, which is why women tend to be either more conservative than men in the Burkean sense or insane crazy absolutists with a take no prisoners attitude e.g. in white nationalism it's basically only the girls and incel types who ever talk about extermination, and when a girl gets disillusioned from radicalism she basically just goes back to defending the prevailing order as normatively good. Most men can accept the world being unjust and try to change it incrementally or selfishly but women and feminine men either need to believe it's good and that the weak are suffering what they oughta or that the wheel needs to be broken and any compromise is illegitimate.
Which is another reason men tend to be hostile to women being in formal positions of power; you can't really negotiate with them either conquer or submit, and Dany / Cleopatra got rly far by dint of being sexually magnetic but no one really wants to conquer Hillary.
Anyway good comment and I'll end it here so my reply doesn't turn into a book but if you're interested in gender and GOT def read my Aegon V essay.
I had to read this very slowly for comprehension. I'm glad I did.
I would probably deem myself a mid tier male. Nothing special, though I'm better off than some simply for being in a relationship and having five beautiful kids. With that being said, it took a journey and a lot of feeling around in the dark, so to speak, to get here. Most of what I read in your essay reflects hard-learned truths I'm already familiar with. Your model probably isn't the best for everyone, but I kind of wish I had read something to this effect when I was younger. Might have saved me some heartache and wrong turns.
I liked this (as a woman). I’ve been circling much of this as I noticed common patterns in the ways we approach and resolve conflict. We do a great job reconciling our differences and communicating but its still so wild to me how his male brain works lol. No malice, all love, just different.
Nicely done. I know you had help from ChatGPT but maybe that's making use of the new technology!
Weirdly, though, I seem to oscillate between the high, mid, and low status modes. I think I was a mid status (in some limited respects high) who experienced a long period of low status and never really recovered.
I have to say I'm glad I'm not trying to do relationships anymore!
One thing I’d add is whilst I think women are more safety concerned, a focus on this can sometimes forclose womens daring creative agency which most certainly exists. Women are very aware of themselves being bitches I think, have been baptised through the fires of their own negativity (women throwing each other under the bus etc is probably as common if not more common than women protecting/defending each other?). So I think what would be a good follow on chapter to this is to explore the antagonisms each sex feels with their own sex. Because sometimes these sexed discourses read like we have already accomplished fully formed male and female (seperate) affinities and clubs. Feminism is a myth in that such affinity between women does not yet exist in the same way it does for men.
I like how it gets kinda SCP at the end.
Winners treat maps as wall art. The confusion is positional.
Walt - the replies sort themselves.
Analytic philosophy of science ass post
Absolute treasure trove of insight and distilled so skillfully. Thank you.
This would make the mother (or father, I suppose) of all LLM prompts.
Very jargon-rich. I wonder if an LLM could provide a more accessible expanded version that was still worthwhile to read.
Thanks, i have been reading Walt’s substack for a few months and as an old person the long form essays are a recursive self referential fractal of unknown abbreviations and acronyms.
:-(
If someone really had a harm/consequences-based epistemology, though, and viewed the consequences of the model as undesirable, wouldn’t they seek to falsify the model by publicly agreeing with it, in order to refute it on a second-order level by contradicting its predictions—namely their negative reaction?
This is just not a fun or worthwhile game at some point. Who can gaslight whom the most is not a way to build proper relationships or culture?
hahahaha I was wondering if someone would catch that !
This is way above my head, but one thing did stand out. Recently I have been thinking a lot about perceptions of moral capacity between men/women. In general, historically speaking, women have been perceived as morally inferior or with less capacity for moral reasoning than men—that women are more easily deceived. Augustine/Aristotle/Kant etc. There were a few brief reversals of this during the height of bridal mysticism in the Middle Ages, and then during the Industrial Revolution.
Morality has tended to be seen as coming from the rational mind. Men have typically been associated with rationality and women with the senses or feelings, hence women are less moral.
We have recently had this very debate come up again within the conversation around “the great feminization”. The idea that “wokeness” in our cultural institutions is due to feminine modes of social interaction, and, importantly, that these modes are eroding our ability to preserve truth.
I think your sections on Epistemology and Truth Assessment are getting at this exact thing. It seems you are more or less aligning with the historic perspective in your article: Women view truth as flexible/men want to align with reality, men view knowledge as stable/women as revisable.
There is a big conversation to be had here on what, exactly, is truth. Do we believe, in a more traditional sense, that truth is beyond our feelings, and that there is an objective standard? Or do we go post modern and relativize truth? Or do we go with some sort of strict consequentialist framework?
On the one hand I don’t want to deny observations of real phenomena regarding feminine instincts. On the other hand I am very skeptical of the implication that women have an inherent moral defect by nature.
Interesting. I'm a guy and with a few exceptions this feels right against general experience. Laid out well, and structured to convey a lot in as concise as can be managed. A fair few things I didn't recognize, where the capitalized named-<person>-isms, but it still read well.
Thinking historically, I can see previous recognition to elements of this model that cause regular and severe friction and attempts to constrain them in traditions. Which then due to the socially disadvantageous nature of naming such structures and models, the underlying information suffers a failure to transmit at some point, and the traditions fail to continue on. Without explicit rationale, the tradition is hollowed, altered, or abandoned, and the consequences flow from that, in proportion with the departure.
Now back to those other articles I was reading.
Could this model be biased by the fact that men over here might be more exposed to scientific practice and mathematical thinking? Many of these attitudes such as separating truth from consequences sound to me as skills that must be learned and practiced, not sure whether they come naturally to anyone.