In Defense of Trashy Bitches

Contra Eurydice on Civility

Yesterday the formidable

Eurydice

published a tract entitled Bring Back Respectability Politics: Right Wing Edition, whose thesis largely comports with what it says on the tin.

To wit:

We’re all exhausted with a certain cadre blaming every possible bad thing on Trump, but I do think it’s more accurate than not to suggest that Trump’s low behavioral standards played a major role in nOrMaLiZiNg a certain type of behavior for a much higher social status than it ever had before.

It was unequivocally better, for the left, for the right, for the nation, when ascending to power and holding a big microphone was gatekept on the basis of behavior, including politeness, social skill, and yes, class. RETVRN.

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It will likely surprise many of you to learn I actually agree with many of the sentiments Eurydice expresses here—hence me writing something broadly similar last April so resplendently institutionalist it practically convinced Dave Green I was a fed.

In fact (and as her fellow WASP

Theon Ultima

can attest) my only stance on object-level politics for the better part of a year now has been that nothing interesting can happen so long as that fat orange game show host retains absolute power within the GOP—you can’t really have shared epistemics let alone coherent “plans” when literally everything sits downstream of the whims of some capricious old pedophile scarcely two clicks less demented than the last one.

That said I also feel the particular direction in which Eurydice takes her argument here conveniently sidesteps a number of hugely important factors that make the decline of things like “manners” and “restraint” sort of inevitable.

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First and most obvious is the sexual element.

Eurydice points in particular to an uptake in overt intrasexual competition between women, citing I guess some instance where tradthots on Twitter roasted each other over engagement ring size in a manner one might expect from poor or black chicks.

She quite rightly observes that such behavior is all but unheard of among more affluent women, who basically never engage in transparent status-jockeying among themselves, let alone overtly seek male approval, and tend to view the working class broads who do that sort of thing kind of like how union guys used to see black people who cross the picket line. To use her words:

…being a pickme outs you by tax bracket.

The idea seems to be that right wing digital media ecologies have created localized status hierarchies where you’re seeing a kind of affected downward cultural mobility in middle class White girls who’d never break ranks like that under NPR standards.

What Eurydice fails to do, however, is explain why any of this is bad.

The implicit rhetorical move (perhaps unconscious, if we’re being charitable) is rather to assume the interests of elite white women are simply desirable ipso facto, while relying on the fact that no elite White man will ever argue against that supposition because to do so reads as scarcity-minded and therefore Codes as Low Status.

It’s sort of just priced in—the highest status fellers don’t really see women and minorities as competition and will always structure society to pull up the ladder on their actual rivals… which means downplaying the collective interests of men is just the game theoretic resting point for guys who aren’t committed to an asymmetric strategy of sexual arbitrage e.g. age gaps or brown women or Dunkin Donuts pussy—so much so, in fact, that NOT adopting a maximalist stance backing female interests is kind of just telling on yourself, and any POV that isn’t “girls get whatever they want” becomes incel-coded and sort of stinky, because if you aren’t an incel then girls want YOU so what exactly is the problem killah?

The issue is that soon turns into a rather severe collective action problem, because in a frictionless opt-in sexual ecology barreling towards post-scarcity the most elite and desirable women lose basically all respect for the ability to navigate masculine status hierarchies, and sort of just demand that men act like lesbians.

Which seems like a pretty great time to note Eurydice herself is married to a woman.

Now, part of me would really like to play the Chud here and say that clearly disqualifies her from having any opinions worth taking seriously about hetero courtship norms… but in the spirit of today’s topic I’ll try to be genteel and just observe the following:

• Much of Eurydice’s oeuvre consists of relationship advice / theorycrafting that strikes me at first glance as Great for Lesbians—musings that make a lot of sense if your spouse has the same type of mind as yourself, but usually don’t track in a hetero context because they flatten or sanitize away a lot of the deepest and most fundamental Mysteries of Eden.

• Main thing on that count is men and women can’t really ‘negotiate’ with each other in ‘good faith’ or rely on a friendship bond to ballast a relationship—falling into that dynamic with a broad is basically always poison in the well. At least with pre-procreative heterosexuality there’s always this inescapably adversarial element where passing her shit tests and pulling her into your frame and taming her with your cock is kind of just an essential part of the bargain. Simple as.

• Men and womyn also lie about totally different things and manipulate each other in completely different ways… and tbf it’s probably important the exact details of this remain broadly illegible to the hoi polloi, because when that’s not the case it seems to turn girls into prostitutes (or, indeed, lesbians) and the fellas into incels.

• Moreover the significantly greater fluidity of female sexuality (the vast majority of girls being functionally bisexual) means past a certain level of safety and affluence womyn have the option of opting out of all intercourse with masculinity. Part of that will manifest as overt Lesbian Separatism (and men severely underestimate the threat of this—it’s not at all uncommon for feminine and desirable Zoomettes to enter into years-long and exclusive relationships with each other in a way that would have been unheard of for Millennials), and part of it will involve women even in the context of hetero dating ambiently subjecting men to quasi-sapphic dating norms because they are less physically and mentally aroused by masculinity.

• Part of the above likely just stems from birth control and other endocrine shit—gay frogs and all that. But there’s also just the inconvenient reality that women are turned on by men directly in proportion with how much they need us. And no that isn’t just some calculated transactional hooker shit; it’s deep and libidinal, a lot like how your cat is a lot more lovey whenever you forget to feed it. Around a rich dude trailer trash girls are kind of just vivacious and juicy… they’ll ask you to finger them in a movie theater etc. and often you’ll be the one telling THEM to calm down. Brown girls are kind of the same deal (NEAsians having more or less attained parity with Whites at this point), whereas UMC White girls are generally only like that for a small handful of men (often those atop cognitively feminine status hierarchies), or only act that way behind closed doors in rigidly bespoke scenarios; the norm in polite society is a kind of NPR-coded hetero-lesbianism.

And that’s where I crash into a brick wall and can’t say much else without consigning myself to the Incel Concentration Camp, because there’s just no escaping the reality that male self-advocacy is tautologically self-defeating and the attendant collective action problem just aprioristically unavoidable, such that in practice the way high status fellers ackshully pursue their interests is by pulling a Huberman and nailing five or six single moms on the DL while simultaneously cosigning the absolute gayest NPR shit.

That or (circling back to the topic at hand…) by ambiently encouraging pick me behavior and intrasexual competition in midstatus girls—think spergy / BPD sort-of-hot broads a bit too socially maladroit and malebrained to be Girl Popular who are looking to trade on their looks / femininity for clout in some male-coded status hierarchy—which in a hyper-political age like ours means libertarianism or rationalism at the high end and various and sundry MAGA poopoopeepeecoin grifts at the low end.

Which is where Eurydice’s Subaru gets rather ensconced in the mud, because if you just take a step back and consider the broader subtext of this situation it becomes abundantly clear that large swathes of men are simply expressing their revealed preference for a “trashier” kind of femininity than their ostensible status would ever allow them to own publicly—sort of analogous to when the chickadees find violent criminals hot.

Because we want to pursue girls like men—not like lesbians.

We want asymmetry. We want to be needed. And we want to fucking penetrate someone deeply and fundamentally distinct from ourselves; not a bestie we finger sometimes.

We DON’T want some anodyne frictionless NPR slop where it’s culturally permissible for bae to walk at literally any time because her fat friend Jessa said you were grooming her or w/e and the game theoretic optimum is eternally some kind of maximalist fake and gay performative disinterest script.

Yet most guys also don’t particularly want to Huberman or miscegenate or wife some bih with no degree who expects him to watch Duck Dynasty or something. Whereas supporting a girl who acts a bit volatile and girlish for her social class in a way that specifically makes him feel wanted and cool? Well, that’s a different proposition.

Now obviously the specific example E cited of those chicks fighting over ring size is kind of just retarded, but that’s more what this looks like at the lower end—I’m more talking about embracing overtly asymmetrical roles both in and outside the bedroom; leaning into a dynamic of male protection / provisioning more than is strictly needed simply to cultivate eros; both men and women sexually competing a lot more openly (especially at higher echelons of status); lightly flirting with basically everyone age-appropriate of the opposite sex as a matter of course…

All of these things will of course result in an overall lower trust society than you’ll find on Ann Romney’s apple orchard, but kindly observe that “low trust” doesn’t HAVE to mean Detroit or some cousin-fucking Appalachian holler.

It could just mean Miami.

Wealthy Castizos in Florida are trashy and volatile as shit, but it basically works out because they’re also agentic, capable, and high energy—and also deeply hierarchical in their clannishness, in a way Vance’s and my own Borderer kinfolk decidedly are not.

Loathe as I am to cite Thomas Sowell like some insipid Boomercon, he was basically correct that the Scotch-Irish and Blackpeepo have functionally identical values.

And make no mistake—the American Right most certainly should NOT be defined by the anarchic and niggerish sensibilities of West Virginia’s berserker caste.

But neither should it embrace the soggy castrated funeral potatoes ideology of BYU.

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Which brings me to the ethnic element of this discussion.

In practice it’s nearly as thorny as the sexual element, because generally I’ve found that WASPs (and cishajnals more broadly) rather despise the idea that “values” and “beliefs” have any predictable ethnic valence, being disposed by temperament and culture to methodological individualism and a libertarian perspective on free will.

Objectively such cultural technologies make WASPs a lot more successful than more fatalistic peoples. They’re also catastrophically poor heuristics for understanding the world, which induce WASPs to solipsistically universalize their own distinctive preferences as normative (invariably behind tedious pretensions of “taste” or “morality”) in loads of situations where a bit more pluralism would serve even their interests

And to be fair Eurydice herself sort of calls this out:

I do think it’s useful to model class as a culture, and I also think that some cultural artifacts are definitively better than others. Acting with dignity in public is one of them. There’s an obvious risk here - that I’m being a culture chauvinist, in much the way siderea (very lightly) criticizes in her piece. Of course I think that behaving with what I’m calling dignity and what some might call false, stuck-up WASPish remove is better. There’s probably at least some truth to this.

The problem is she then goes on to frame it as a choice between elite libtard NPR values and the ethos of the trailer park / ghetto:

The new right is ineffective, catty, and poorly organized, much like the eponymous hillbillies of JD Vance’s memoir. They’ve imported a culture of gnawing scarcity and vicious, open Manichaeism into much of the highest echelons of media and political machines. In a world where the right cared about hierarchy as much as it claims to, they would demand better of their own.

The upshot is that the right now acts like a socioeconomic culture that the American right has spent decades criticizing at length. A race to the bottom, of course, means using the behavior you like least in your opponents to justify acting the exact same way.

This is a hilariously Protestant move of her (and tbh kind of Mormon in particular) given that in practice there are tons of gradations and flavors of trashiness in between those poles in the wider world of Hispanics and Ellis Islanders.

That nuance is pertinent because the realignment of 2016 - 2024 involved at its core four essential elements:

• Elite WASPs (especially womyn) broadly shifting Left—the Romney-Clinton voter

• Borderers and Borderer-adjacent White Proles at last beginning to vote GOP in the same way Blackpeepo vote Democrat

• Ellis Islanders slowly trending Right (this one’s underdiscussed and will take a while to germinate, but notice Trump’s relative performance in 2016 was by far strongest in the Northeast, and also look at his recent gains in NJ etc.)

• Hispanics as a whole slowly reverting back to pre-Obama voting patterns, with Tejanos and Florida Cubans in particular going blood red practically overnight

The consequences of this were entirely predictable: the Democrats became fussier, faggier, and stridently anti-male, while the GOP grew trashy, corrupt, and retarded.

Thing is Mawmaw and Pawpaw are trashy in a very different way from Tony Soprano / Montana; the latter can cooperate with other factions and think strategically over the long term, whereas the former… well, can’t. Not even by dint of IQ in this case so much as pathological stubbornness / aggression—like our Bantu brothers the Scotch-Irish never evolved past that cattle rustling honor culture, and their turnout for Trump is almost entirely a product of Big Man tribal loyalty (not unlike how blacks saw Obama).

Except the Dems also have an enormous infrastructure in place to ensure black turnout never falls below a certain floor, even when cursed with a dogshit candidate like Hilldawg—think church ladies handing out sandwiches at the polls chanting vote blue no matter who, ballot harvesters scouring every crack den in Philly and Detroit, astroturfed podcasts like the Breakfast Club, and so on. It’s a modern Tammany Hall that in practice goes against the spirit of high-minded republicanism at least as much as Trump’s bullshit—just more opaquely and with a hell of a lot more professionalism.

But that sort of infrastructure is hugely difficult for Republicans to mirror with their own proles given that Oxycontin Uncles are significantly more spread out than Blacks—a fact that’s forced the GOP to activate its own base through e.g. histrionic mass text campaigns from Laura Loomer and the MyPillow guy.

Hardly a good look… but it basically worked.

Yet I somehow doubt those same Oxy Uncles will feel all that inclined to show up for Vance, native son though he may be, because absent Blumpf’s larger-than-life pedophile charisma your typical low conscientiousness White boy will probably just scratch his balls and say voting is gay. Sure, the more ideological half of them will likely stay activated, but I’d hazard that over the long term they’ll lose preeminence in the GOP as the party develops a plausibly deniable infrastructure to coopt them much as it’s long coopted evangelicals and the Dems reliably coopt blacks.

…at which point I predict the GOP will sort of just become The Catholic Party at its higher echelons, relying increasingly on middle class Hispanics and Ellis Islanders while managing White Proles in much the same way AWFLs manage Blackpeepo.

Of course, it goes without saying that such a formulation will be a hell of a lot better at “demanding better of its own” than the anarchic messiness of Mawmaw Thought.

But in practice I kind of suspect Eurydice will like it even less than what we have now.

…as may I, frankly.

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In the 2010s it was exceedingly common for Black leaders to talk about civility as a tool of the White devil or whatever, and this instinct was straightforwardly correct.

At the end of the day it’s always and everywhere Inside and Outside; House and Field; Have and Have-Not; Federalist and Democratic-Republican; GOP and Tammany Hall; WASP and Wog; Stacy and Incel; classy broad and trashy uppity spergy pick me bitch.

The meta for the former is always and everywhere to insist it’s ackshully not a status thing or tied to identity in some essentialist way but chosen; principled; higher order—note that most of the time they’ll sincerely believe this (and in a liberal democratic order any elite cohort that doesn’t believe it usually won’t stay on top all that long).

Meanwhile the meta for the latter is to engage in asymmetric trickster strategies—self-promotion, arbitrage, haggling, grey area Tammany Hall Mafia Shylock bullshit— while simultaneously raising cane over each and every visible inequity so as to ensure the Beautiful People have no choice but to acknowledge their suffering.

Then in response the Pretties have three options:

• Buy off the Uglies through overt accommodation / handouts / patronage—think how AWFLs handle Blacks or Corporate America handles hillbillies—so as to ensure they accept a tacitly subordinate Votecow position and refrain from the most aggressive kinds of asymmetric maneuvering against the Pretties

• Sort of just otherize / dehumanize them like Republicans do with Blackpeepo and Democrats do with “racists” / incels—maybe taking on a handful as genuflecting Black Republican types to performatively soyface over to keep up appearances

• Obfuscate hierarchies through superficial honorifics and headpats—this is how high status White women avert hostility from lower segments of womenkind by e.g. talking about how gorgeous Michelle Obama is or complimenting fat friends

It’s all priced in—a perpetual ambient balancing act forever shifting back and forth as marginal edge cases defect thermostatically in accordance with perceived interests circa the current moment. The Pretties are always trying to centralize power while remaining opaque and plausibly deniable about it by promoting a predictable linear symmetrical monoculture, while the Uglies are always trying to cut the best deal they can through asymmetric wheely-dealing (or, at times, to look as pretty as they can by tactically compromising on their own material interests in a faux-flattened coalition).

Sometimes the Pretties overstep and you get a Jefferson / Jackson / FDR / JFK / Trump situation; other times the Uglies do the same and you get a Lincoln, Nixon, or Reagan.

That said if you think the object-level content matters you have Down Syndrome—it’s all a structural facet of power exchange. The proper nouns matter only by contingency.

Though even epistemically it’s not symmetrical given the Pretty meta largely depends on gumming up the wheels with proper nouns—levelling platitudes for useful idiots, fake and gay moralisms to distract people from their self-interest, and so on.

And of course the Uglies lie too—and always in a manner more overt and stinky than the corresponding Pretty Lie, though also more compelling and “emotionally true.”

Hence “Michelle Obama is beautiful” will precipitate “Michelle Obama is a tranny.”

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At the end of the day it’s sort of just insulting to everyone’s collective intelligence to petition anyone to ‘argue in good faith.’

By definition all rational actors will always and everywhere argue in whatever manner strikes them as game-theoretically optimal, and that’s always going to entail quite a lot of deception both outward and inward—particularly amidst a cascade of bidirectional epistemic defections like we’ve observed over the past decade.

But on some level I’d argue that America has never really enjoyed a longstanding era of “civility” in the way it’s oft conceived—the closest thing was probably between WW2 and the Days of Rage, and even then you had the Red Scare fucking it up.

And for the record that’s a good thing—promotes vitality. If you want substantive thoroughgoing civility at a national level you’d almost certainly need something like Dutch Pillarization, which would defeat the entire purpose of America.

Generally the closest you can get to ‘civility’ is transactional negotiation with broadly apolitical shared epistemics and minimal volatility / brinksmanship in the short term.

To whatever extent real negotiation and persuasion are possible it’s gonna be between edge cases who could go either way, and will usually involve some kind of complex intersectional triangulation and longtermist probabilistic reasoning thing.

And it actually isn’t clear to me yet whether that’s possible with Eurydice.

On one hand the gal clearly sees the world in sharp relief, and strikes me as far too much the sperg by disposition to ever permanently align herself with the NPR People.

On the other hand, she doesn’t seem to understand the extent to which the ipso facto delegitimization of male interests creates a gargantuan incentives alignment problem—one that’s manifestly begun to seep into every nook and cranny of modern culture.

Thing is I don’t really see in her anything approaching an impulse to meet men where we are… which if we’re honest makes perfect sense given she’s a lesbian for Pete’s sake!

And let it be known I respect a proper lesbian separatist; that’s a coherent position.

But that’s not her, and never will be. Eurydice has her opinions about how we men ought to conduct our affairs—and boy, does she like to fuckin complain about us.

Only not at all hatefully like Dworkin... nor deceptively a la Butler.

Rather she reminds me quite a lot of the character Femme Fatale from Powerpuff Girls:

Eurydice very clearly doesn’t hate men—the register is more ‘annoyed we’re not acting how we’re supposed to,’ which is honestly a little endearing and even sort of literary?

Like even her takes that annoy me are objectively quite fun to read.

And perhaps it’s a bit of a strawman to say she wants every man to act like a lesbian… it’s prolly more she wants every man to act kind of like Mitt Romney (which tbf reads as pretty much the same to the modal Italian or Cuban guy).

Point is though if Eurydice is serious about civility it has to be a two way street.

When men no longer feel as though there’s any way to straightforwardly advocate for themselves without losing massive amounts of status—like they’ve lost access to the basic organs of cultural interchange and societal dispute resolution—then you can’t really act surprised when they start to encourage a certain volatility in women.

…or start to lean on heavily deceptive asymmetric sexual strategies sub rosa… or create meanspirited ghibli art of deported Mexicans… or despite not especially caring about kids one way or the other start voting in tradcaths who want to fuck around with surrogacy rights… or continue doing whatever tf else it is you disapprove of.

You really want men to stop acting uncivilized?

Then give them more of a stake in civilization—real skin in the game.

Not in some abstract theoretical equity sense, either. I mean take a good hard look at the basic architecture of womanly desire and how it’s changed over the past decades, and listen to what actual men want on their own terms without first ensuring the frame structurally centers female priorities and implicitly tanks the status of any dissenters.

None of that will happen, of course—at least not in any way that makes a difference.

There are times in history when the Inner Party simply grows possessed by a certain species of Hyper-Optimate Calhounism that starts to get off on its own intransigence and over the long term can beget nothing but ad baculums from both sides.

Of course, Eurydice is always free to prove me wrong on that point by appearing on my podcast and engaging me in a wholesome and civicminded exchange of ideas… perhaps even with

Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)

to moderate, since the Grande Dame of Substack has already expressed interest in this discussion taking place?

As a token of goodwill I’ll even promise not to flirt with her / say the n-word.