There’s certainly truth to the idea that the right wing both buys into and perpetuates the “lefties are ugly” stereotype. While Twitter: Class of 2025 might reach for well worn pejoratives such as the “blue haired enby” or “male-feminist cuck” the right wing commentators of our mother’s generation would’ve likely been more at home with terms like the “ugly feminist” (who hates men because she can’t get one) or the metrosexual “man” who doesn’t know how to use a hammer. (In either case, the worst thing a woman can be is ugly and the worst thing a man can be is a woman, some things never change <3).

Subscribe now

However, the severity of stigma against lefties that Stella implies in her piece feels so at odds with my *lived experience* that it’s difficult to reconcile.

They use the words “socialist” and “communist” interchangeably. They do it to fear-monger- make left-wingers sound sinister- but also to make anyone identifying with the left feel like a LOSER.

If you dare identify with the left, they want you to feel socially humiliated.

Pardon me? In what real world social scene is it seen as “socially humiliating” to identify with the left? Academia is almost entirely left-wing as are most relevant celebrities. High quality left-wing coded media seems much more common and influential than the reverse (so much so that poor Ben Shapiro had to start his own production company!) There are always culturally relevant right-wing figures, sure, but very few who could be described as remotely ‘cool’. As Ross Douthat recently suggested, the best conservatives can hope for is Sydney Sweeney declining to apologize for having great jeans. While there are plenty of “edgy” comedians who code right in the current climate, that association only adds to the claim that the left is culturally dominant. The impulse is counter-cultural, a rebellion against The Man, and right about now The Man just happens to be a tofu eating male feminist.

Setting aside The Culture in general, my experience is that life in a major city is quite cozy socially for those with left wing views (I’ve been in New York for 9 years, I assume London is not too far afield.) While the lefties I know sashay around Brooklyn in bright yellow Zohran bandanas I’m mentally calculating whether it’s worth pushing back on the claim that “the use of food delivery services by the able bodied is unethical” lest I ruin the vibe at bookclub (and yes I did push back, and yes I did ruin the vibe at bookclub).

And anyways, as with most stereotypes, the stigma that exists is probably not purely the result of some intentional smear campaign. Stereotypes very often have a grain of truth; perhaps that grain here, at least regarding the purported link between the left and misery, is the higher self-reported incidence of mental health issues among lefties. Similarly, the “right wingers are dumb” trope isn’t an artifact of left-wing propaganda. Though popular depictions of right wingers as backward may reinforce it, conservatives really are, on average, less educated. Of course, you could push back on both claims: maybe right-wingers underreport mental health problems due to stigma, or maybe conservatives are just as smart as liberals but don’t waste their time signaling with excessive education. My point is simply that whatever association exists, it can’t be so easily chalked up to “successful anti-Marxist propaganda.” And anyways, it’s really no mystery as to why socialism would attract some losers.

Write it out on the blackboard 100 times: Incentives Matter. Incentives Matter. Incentives Matter…

I infer that ‘Loser’ as applied here refers to someone with “low agency”, someone who blames the world for their problems or who perpetually identifies with their victimization. It’s not hard to see how a movement that emphasizes systemic oppression, and believes “that people should not be blamed for their circumstances” could be attractive to such a person (which, to be clear, says nothing about the empirical question of whether systemic oppression exists or how extensive it is). “The left” is not alone here of course, it attracts losers for the same reason any movement which places the cause of your misery outside of your individual control might. While the libertarian right, admonishing us all to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, makes itself inhospitable to ‘losers’, the populist right welcomes them with open arms and plenty of assurance that it’s not them (it’s the Jews).

Many of the people who lead movements will be impressive, socialism included, but incentives matter, and the composition of a movement’s followers will reflect them. While it’s true, as Stella suggests, that proponents of free markets benefit from associations with freedom and protection from coercion, that isn’t the strongest argument for them. It’s that figuring out how to best allocate resources is only a simple problem in theory, and that in reality free markets are the closest we can get to a solution.

The Use of Knowledge

As Hayek explains in The Use of Knowledge in Society, central planning fails because the information relevant to such planning is not, and cannot be, held and acted upon by a single individual (or group). Instead, this knowledge, including “the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place”, is dispersed among all individuals. Decentralized decision making is therefore beneficial because it enables the use of the “unique information” which each individual possesses and “of which beneficial use might be made, but [...] only if the decisions depending on it are left to him”.

The central idea is that the major economic problem we face is not actually how we would allocate resources under conditions of perfect knowledge, but rather “what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people”. The assumption is that “[w]hich of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge.” Markets work because they do not require anyone to see the whole picture; instead prices efficiently communicate the key information required to act.

We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function [...]. The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

The failure to recognize the gravity of the problem of the use of knowledge, Hayek contends, leads us to judge the efficiency of markets against an unrealistic standard:

I fear that our theoretical habits of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.

This isn’t to say that there is never an argument to be made for central planning, but it is to suggest why those arguments should have a high bar to clear (arguments for some amount of redistribution are much easier in my view). Free markets may leave much to be desired relative to imagined utopias but in reality they perform exceedingly well against the other systems we’ve actually tried. The problem with socialism isn’t that it attracts “losers”, or that its adherents fail some aesthetic test. It’s that it assumes away the hardest constraint we face: the limits of our knowledge.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

This came up for me a few months ago after Lily Collins put out a sponsored post with Vogue and Calvin Klein. The series of photos highlighted a shockingly concave mid-section, and generated a lot of very strong feelings. While some expressed delighted envy for her “abs” others expressed disgust, concern or anger.

Comment category 1: Aesthetic approval or disapproval

1 A) Delighted Envy: “You are a beautiful kweeeeeen how can I look like you hot, strong mama!!”

1 B) Aesthetic Disgust: “Ew!! Skin stretched over bones, how can anyone find this remotely appealing, please just kys”

Comment category 2: “Genuine” Concern

2 A) Concern *for Lily*: “I’m scared for you, I know you’ve struggled with EDs… please get help!”

2 B) Anger at Lily, motivated by Concern *for Society*: “I love you and I hate to comment on women’s bodies, but this is not ok - you are a role model to young girls and these images cause literal harm.”

Comment category 3: Commenters telling off other commenters

3 A) Reactionary backlash to aesthetically motivated disapproval: “OK so now we think a healthy, fit body is upsetting LOL, pfft, this is the predictable result of toxic body positivity!”

3 B) Attempted edification of those Concerned: “Hey there you self-righteous, self-appointed judges of the acceptability of women’s bodies! If you were *actually* a feminist, you would KNOW that it is NEVER ok to make a negative comment about a woman’s body!! Just let women LIVE!”

Personally, I think Lily looks underweight in these photos. I also think she very likely wants to look like that, i.e. very thin, and that the brands that worked on the shoot styled her to highlight her thinness. It’s also plausible to me that young girls who like her and see those photos might walk away with a slightly less healthy body ideal than they had before seeing them.

Subscribe now

Taking it for granted, for the sake of argument, that she appears underweight, the question is: what is the appropriate response to such a post? Is criticizing Lily, or the brands working with her, for implicitly endorsing anorexia really just the other side of the coin of accusing a larger woman in a bikini of “glamorizing obesity”?

Is Lily “glorifying” anorexia? Or is she just a very thin woman posting a photo?

In her (in?)famous post, Question for the culture, Lana Del Rey complained about being impugned for “glamorizing” abusive relationships:

I’m fed up with female writers and alt singers saying that I glamorize abuse when in reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all around the world.

Lana’s complaint asks us to distinguish artistic representation from actual endorsement. There’s no question that her music and image are influential, but she rejects the idea that she bears responsibility for the manner in which her viewers respond to them. While it’s hard to draw a bright line here, it seems reasonable to assert that “influencers” bear more responsibility for the outcomes that follow from what they actively endorse than they do for the myriad interpretations of, or behaviors inspired by, merely encountering their work. So… is Lily glamorizing extreme thinness? Or is she just a glamorous woman who also happens to be very thin?

A parallel debate plays out constantly in body positive spaces. You can find endless examples of larger women who’ve posted photos of themselves in a bathing suit, or some other relatively revealing outfit, only to be yelled at on the internet for “glorifying obesity”. A common response to this is to point out that in reality… these women are often just sharing photos of themselves living their life, making no claims at all about obesity. Sharing a photo like this, on my read, implies at most a lack of shame for your body, not a glorification of it.

I do think posting implies some sort of endorsement. I just don’t think it implies endorsement of the specific element which is perceived as problematic. Lana’s writing and performing songs about abuse doesn’t imply endorsement of abuse, it implies endorsement of her art. Likewise, posting a photo of yourself in a bikini doesn’t imply endorsement of your body, at least not in the sense of wanting to influence others to attempt to achieve it. Perhaps you’re endorsing the outfit, or the setting, or the memory being captured - the body itself may be incidental.

The same could be said about Lily. This was her body at the time those photos were taken. She didn’t tell people they should aim at it, the post isn’t paired with a guide on how to eat and exercise to look like her, if that’s what a viewer takes away is that really on her? And moreover, if she does have an eating disorder, does she therefore have a moral obligation to hide herself and her body as a result? Do brands have an obligation not to work with her because they deem her body unhealthy? Would the same logic apply to working with someone who had a body that was larger than the optimal healthy size? How strict would we expect these brands to be? Can they work with someone who’s only chubby? Or just a teensy bit underweight?

Asymmetric shaming

While there are several attributes which skinny shaming and fat shaming share, particularly the claim from some that the criticism is driven not by hate but by concern, I think there is a real difference between shaming Lily, or the brands working with her, for glorifying anorexia and shaming e.g. Lizzo for glorifying obesity. In the case of fat shaming, what seems to trigger outrage is less a perceived glorification of obesity than a belief that the person is not exhibiting enough shame. If you think shame is an effective incentive (at the margin) for maintaining a healthy body weight, then a larger woman showing her body without explicitly rejecting it feels threatening (A view I disagree with, as discussed here.).

While it is common to reject intentional weight loss within body positive spaces, it’s not common to recommend, or claim to aim at, intentional weight gain. Fat acceptance is about just that, *acceptance* of how your body is, not glorification or endorsement of a particular body type. This follows in part from the fact that gaining fat is really easy for most of us, it’s not something people typically have to try at.

The same is not true of extreme thinness. So when you see someone who is extremely thin it’s rational to assign a higher prior to the likelihood that they’ve intentionally made their body look that way. And that intentional effort can more plausibly be interpreted as implying endorsement.

Beyond the presumptive effort that Lily put into being thin, she was also (arguably) styled and posed to showcase her thinness. This, I think, is why these photos drew so much attention: to many viewers, Lily didn’t appear simply as a glamorous woman who happened to be thin. The images read more as a glamorization and endorsement of thinness itself. And if you’re publicly endorsing harmful behaviors, or at least the probable outcome of such behaviors, don’t you bear some responsibility for the associated impacts on fans and viewers? Even if Lily herself bears limited responsibility, especially under the assumption that she struggles with disordered eating, presumably the brands working with her can still be held to account.

The case for criticism

Overall, I think aiming some negative feedback at the brands involved is reasonable. Growing up in the ’90s and ’00s, the beauty ideal, at least in terms of body fat percentage, was often well below what is optimally healthy (and also well below the typical male ideal). The Kardashian-era shift toward an ideal of structured curves may not have been any more attainable, but in my view it was still a meaningful improvement, because the behaviors one would typically employ in pursuit of that ideal (lifting weights, fueling with protein etc.) were significantly healthier than those encouraged by the heroin chic era. Criticizing brands for promoting a return to extreme thinness seems justified in that context.

But beyond that, I’d argue that some negative feedback can also be genuinely useful, not just for young viewers or society at large, but also for Lily herself. Anecdotes about the onset of eating disorders often highlight early weight loss that’s reinforced by copious amounts of praise. Is it really better for Lily to see only comments about her “enviable abs” and none expressing concern?

Now personally, I’m not the type to spend my Instagram hours concern-trolling skinny women—I’ve got way too many cat videos to get through. But at a time when extreme thinness feels ascendant again, a post like this receiving only positive comments strikes me as a worse outcome than the pile on.

I guess my point is that while skinny shaming and fat shaming have some similarities, they differ in a meaningful way: the reasonable expectation of endorsement. With fat shaming, the criticism targets not so much glamorization, but rather a lack of shame. Simply existing in a larger body without explicit self-reproach is treated as dangerous. With extreme thinness on the other hand, the baseline assumption is that the person has actively pursued that body and therefore, to some degree, implicitly endorses it.

Blame for insufficient shame feels quite different to me than blame for perceived endorsement. And that’s why these phenomena don’t feel symmetric, because the sort of skinny shaming discussed here is, in a sense, criticizing someone for something they like about themselves, something they intentionally cultivated, while fat shaming is criticizing someone for having the body they happen to have while failing to display the “correct” amount of shame about it.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

It’s almost certainly true that most parents would say their family and children are more important and bring them greater fulfillment than does their job. This is especially obvious when you consider that not everyone is a well paid knowledge worker performing intellectually stimulating or impactful work. A lot of jobs are just jobs. And a lot of people would stop working in a heartbeat if they didn’t need the money. Given all of that, having the option to be a stay at home parent, or to only work part time at a low stress job can be attractive to many.

Subscribe now

The “trad” marriage set up, where the husband performs most of the necessary paid work and the wife performs most of the necessary unpaid work, works well for many couples. Having one parent as the primary caregiver and the other as the primary breadwinner has efficiency benefits (especially if you have lots of kids)—it’s certainly easier to succeed at work if you don’t also have to manage tons of domestic responsibilities, and since child and elder care needs often conflict with being out of the house and unavailable from 9-5 it’s much easier to manage those if you only need to perform part time or flexible paid work rather than having a full time high-stress job. These traditional norms, while certainly not right for everyone, can provide a rough guide for how couples might benefit from division of labor within the family.

But… there’s an unavoidable tension between maximally benefitting from division of labor within a family and each (adult) member of the family being maximally functional as individuals. And the degree to which each member of a couple could be functional on their own can affect incentives and power dynamics in a marriage.

There’s a big difference between a woman with earning power ultimately deciding to get off the most high-intensity career track available to her after having kids (and after spending years with her husband) and a woman who chooses to forgo developing the skills or gaining the accreditations necessary to give her earning power in the first place who is searching for a husband from that position. The second woman might end up getting a “good deal”, but she’s also a lot more vulnerable.

I think it’s pretty clear that as women have gained economic independence (and the option for no fault divorce) marriage norms have in many ways improved for women. Men now do more housework, more child care and less wife beating and marital rape. Sure, some of this change is cultural, but it also reflects the fact that most men simply can’t get away with that stuff anymore. And I think that’s at least in part because their wives are much less vulnerable to a dissolution of the marriage.

Of course, women didn’t get these changes for free, they now perform significantly more paid work, even after kids, but many find this to be a worthwhile trade. And women who do choose to be full-on SAHMs also get to benefit from most of these norm changes. But… would we maintain these changes if women in aggregate opted out of education, massively reduced the amount of paid work they perform and if divorce was made less accessible? I’m not so sure we would.

The Case for Marrying an Older Man

About a year ago, an article by Grazie Sophia Christie, The Case for Marrying an Older Man, generated a lot of buzz in my corner of the internet, including many concerned and/or irritated tweets coming from other (mostly older) women. The article outlines the heroic tale of a woman who overcame social judgement and front-ran all of us in the trade of a lifetime, one which her peers irrationally refused to take (presumably because of feminism?): marrying an older man before you’ve hit the wall, forgoing career development and living a life of affluence and peace.

Sure, it’s possible that some of these tweets reflected other women’s jealousy at the easy and luxurious life she described, one in which she only performs paid work which she finds fulfilling. But they also illustrated rational concerns about encouraging young women to leave themselves vulnerable to male kindness by forgoing building personal optionality. She notes the sort of questions her relationship generated when she, a 20 year old undergrad at the time started dating a 30 year old MBA student:

Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita: “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

And while Grazie briefly acknowledges that there are costs to her set up…

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there [...]

… she quickly moves on to conclude that the benefits she gets, the ease of her life, blow such concerns out of the water. But for a lot of women, what’s implied by there being limits on what you can be angry with your partner about is an unacceptable price to pay just so that you can be lazy in your 20s.

It’s not that I don’t believe she’s happy, it’s just that I (and probably many of the other older women readers, who chose romantic partners rather than romantic mentors) recognize that she got very lucky. Her husband may be kind enough not to remind her of her vulnerability too often, not to take advantage of the relative power it gives him, but he could (it just floats there). And many other men in the same situation would. I could be wrong, but my intuition is that there’s likely a correlation between being the sort of older man who wants to support a younger woman financially (well before they start having kids) and being the sort of older man who would take this sort of advantage. And my intuition is also that many 23-year-olds wouldn’t necessarily be experienced enough to be able to tell the difference.

Grazie doesn’t just describe why this relationship dynamic works for her, she also recommends it to other women, making the case that “same-age same-stage relationships” too often end up with a “woman who is doing too much for too little.” But while many women could of course snag a guy a little bit older, the lifestyle she married into is simply not available to every cute, smart 20 year old (there are a lot of them after all!)

This piece doesn't so much make the case for an age-gap relationship as it does for a wealth-gap relationship (which is admittedly easier to find if you’re open to an age-gap). If some random undergrad followed her advice, sneaking into grad parties to look for their own eligible bachelor, they’d likely be disappointed to find that most recent MBA grads do not live the life she describes (bi-continental with a “cleaner thrice a week”).

Much of her article amounts, in my view, to giving women the “advice” that they ought to marry a kind, handsome, rich man who will take care of them without limiting their freedom. But… there’s a very limited supply of such men who are both single and looking for a romantic mentee (“My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend.”) The reason few women are taking the deal Grazie took is not “feminism”, it’s a supply / demand issue. And it’s a recognition that most “deals” that look too good to be true… are.

Failure modes

The obvious failure mode of a relationship in which the woman forgoes developing the skills and gaining the experience necessary for her to have independent earning power, and the one which people tend to focus on, is abuse and mistreatment. Perhaps, as Grazie alludes to in her article, a woman’s youth can equalize a wealth imbalance, but even if that’s the case it’ll only be the case for so long, by definition. And if you don’t intend to work, that means that relative to a working peer you’ll only be able to consider dating men who meet a higher income threshold—which of course means you can’t be as selective on all the other metrics you care about, including his desire to have power over you.

But the other obvious failure mode is financial distress. If at some point in your marriage your breadwinner fails to bring in enough bread… there’s not that much you can do if you don’t have any marketable skills of your own. This isn’t to say that you should be so risk intolerant that you insist both partners make as much money as possible all of the time. There are many cases where it’s very reasonable to have one partner scale back their career or stop working entirely. But still, being someone’s mentee might be cute when you’re in your 20s and still have “high breasts, most of [your] eggs, [...] a flush ponytail, a pep in [your] step that ha[s] yet to run out” but it probably won’t be so cute if your husband ever falls on tough times. Then he might really wish that he had a partner.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

ACAF book club on Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution will be on 12/27 at 5:30 pm EST. The event will be for paid subscribers who RSVP on this google form and I’ll send out Zoom details the day of. Hope you can join us!

A lot of relational conflict, or really conflict in general, is downstream of unstated value differences. One that comes up frequently in hetero relationships is having different minimum standards for the cleanliness and overall aesthetic presentation of the home, with women tending to care more than their male partners. This raises the question of how the work required to maintain that standard should be split up. For tasks which both people in a couple agree are necessary, the fair thing to do is to split them up roughly equally so that both partners are putting in similar total effort while taking into account differential skill sets and proclivities—this is pretty uncontroversial. But what to do when one partner values something the other doesn’t?

In Let’s be honest about the second shift, I noted that survey data indicates that married parents tend to put in similar total working hours. On average fathers work a few more hours a week outside the home and mothers work a few more hours a week inside the home, but overall neither men nor women appear to be getting an obviously unfair deal in aggregate. I’ve often heard people discuss the concept of the “second shift”, which refers to mothers who work full time but nevertheless end up taking on most of the childcare and household tasks, without it being acknowledged that not all “full time jobs” are equivalent. If you’re working 35 hours a week and your partner is working 45 hours and bringing in more income… yeah, you should be taking a relatively more onerous “second shift”.

Subscribe now

From my perspective work is work, so paid work responsibilities are always relevant to what a “fair” split of housework looks like. And this was my criticism of a recent article on the subject (which also wrote a very good note on). In the post a woman describes her frustration when, during a negotiation with her ex-husband on how to share household tasks, he brought up his paid work responsibilities (she was not doing paid work at the time). She had initiated the discussion and wanted to use a card game which was designed to organize these conversations. The card system is meant to help the couple explicitly identify all relevant responsibilities so that both partners can understand what the other is doing, making invisible work visible, so that relative effort can be roughly quantified:

Can we discuss a few other items? He asked.

He then pulled up a spreadsheet of all he did for his clients, all the tasks he was tasked with at work. He felt like his paid work, and how much bandwidth that required, should be factored into the equation.

Let me stop and pause here. My reaction, in the moment, was dumbfounded shock. […] If you are the sole one earning a paycheck, it certainly gets you out of a number of cards, […] But we were each performing jobs during the day. I was managing the household and the children (and launching a new career), and he was managing clients. Then, when we each “clocked out” of that daytime job, we shared the job of parenting and household management in the evenings.

If our conversation hadn’t taken so long, perhaps I could have sat there and listened as he went line by line through his spreadsheet without losing my shit. But the presence of the spreadsheet signaled to me that he was missing the point.

[…] I wanted more support once he got home or on the weekends or with big picture tasks like what are we eating this week? and what are we getting the kids for Christmas? and should we give up on sending holiday cards because Lord knows he isn’t willing to do that?

I was asking for more buy in on family life in general, asking for him to learn to see and value things that he thought were unnecessary, or were simply invisible.

So I told him I didn’t think the list of work tasks was relevant to the discussion today, perhaps we could find another time to talk about it. And then I went to put the children to bed.

It’s not that I can’t at all understand where she’s coming from. Perhaps if they had considered all of his responsibilities, and the stress he was bearing by being solely responsible for providing for the family’s material needs, they would’ve realized that he wasn’t doing his fair share of evening and weekend work or managing big picture tasks. But you’d still need to take his paid work into account to find that out. And scolding him for thinking a spreadsheet was appropriate in a conversation where you’re using cards to organize and aggregate your contributions seems entirely unfair. If she wanted to have an emotional and open conversation about her needs and their values mismatch I’d have a lot more sympathy. But come on lady, you’re the one who brought the cards to the table!

What I think was really going on is summarized in this sentence:

She wanted him to have values which were more similar to hers. She wanted him to want to send out Christmas cards. Don’t we all! This dynamic is not at all uncommon, you can find plenty of “couples comedy” bits that address exactly this. Another great example is that scene in The Breakup where Jennifer Aniston tells Vince Vaughn: “I want you to WANT to do the dishes” to which he responds: “Why would I WANT to do the dishes??” When one partner, often the wife and mother, has higher standards for the state of the home (and often the quality of food the kids eat or just their general standard of care) it’s easy for resentment to build up.

The partner with higher standards (who I’ll assume is the woman for the rest of this piece, but it can certainly go the other way and of course this dynamic is also relevant in non-hetero relationships) ends up doing most of the work required to maintain them. And it’s understandable that she might wish her husband would pick up more of the slack. But it’s also understandable that the husband in this situation finds it irritating that his wife keeps nagging him to do what he sees as completely unnecessary tasks that add little to no value to his life.

When you’re negotiating about tasks both partners think need to be done, both partners have a stake in the outcome. But when you’re talking about tasks which only the wife sees as necessary… it’s easy for the husband to say, “listen, if you want to do it, you do it, I don’t care if it doesn’t get done and so I’m not going to spend time on it.”

This sort of negotiation is most often discussed with respect to married couples, but it can arise between any two household members. For example, in this clip Bryan Caplan (who, btw, I will be debating feminism with on a Moral Mayhem podcast to be released in the first week of the new year, so subscribe here to be notified when that comes out!) tells Richard Hanania an anecdote revolving around his mother’s insistence on waxing the floors and his reluctance to help:

I think Bryan was being completely truthful. I believe him that his reluctance to wax the floors didn’t at all reflect disrespect for his mother’s time. What we’re seeing here is a clash of values. Bryan’s mom valued the floor being waxed­—she felt this was something that needed to be done. Bryan did not value the floor being waxed­­—and he can’t comprehend why anyone else would, he didn’t think anyone would even notice!

Now, I probably wouldn’t notice, but I bet he’s wrong that no one would. Wouldn’t his mom notice? Wouldn’t other women like his mom notice? Could it be that the sort of women who would notice are exactly the sort of women who exist within his mom’s social circle? Might these sorts of women mildly judge or esteem one another on the basis on how well the floors were waxed (among other markers of being a good homemaker)? And might it be reasonable for his mom to care about her status in the eyes of her peer group?

[Important Disclaimer! I have no knowledge of what Bryan’s mom’s social circle was like or how she spent her time, so this is not about this particular case, the video clip is just a helpful reference for starting a more general discussion.]

Now, what do we do when we have a value clash with our loved ones? We might try to resolve the value clash by clarifying relevant facts—sometimes doing so will reveal that we don’t actually have a real value clash, we just had different beliefs… and one of us was wrong. Maybe Bryan’s mom valued waxing the floors not because she wanted people to notice, but because it keeps the floors in better shape, saving them time and money which otherwise would’ve been needed for future repairs or replacement. Maybe Bryan just didn’t understand that waxing the floors had this sort of utility.

On the other hand, maybe Bryan is right… maybe waxing the floors only marginally decreases the pace of wear (such that the effort is a bad investment) and doesn’t even look that much better. Maybe the task of waxing the floors is more of a habit than it is something his mom actually cares about. Maybe maintaining waxed floors was net negative for her, even if she hadn’t realized it until he interrogated her reasoning.

Or… maybe waxing the floors isn’t so much about waxing the floors but about signaling. Signaling to the other moms who come by the house that you’re a good homemaker. That you’ve got your shit together. And if you have a more “traditional” family structure, one where the mom stays home and takes care of all the household tasks so that it’s as easy as possible for her husband to pursue his paid career and as easy as possible for her kids to succeed in school and at life, valuing this sort of status seems super reasonable to me! (Again, I don’t know if this was the case for Bryan’s family, but it is the case for many families.)

A mom in this sort of family structure has essentially given up most of her avenues for accruing personal status. Sure, she can get some secondhand status from the success of her husband and her children. But still, while taking on a supporting role might have been desirable to her and may have been entirely her choice, it’s a sacrifice in this sense. If she’s structured her whole life around trying to help her family members succeed, which also amounts to helping them accrue status in the realms they operate within (even if status isn’t the primary goal), it seems pretty unkind to scoff at her desire for social status in her circles and to refuse to help her attain it. And this is true even if you think her social circle shouldn’t value waxed floors!

Plus… does he really not value the waxed floors??

I also think a more minor part of what causes women to feel resentful in these situations is that they don’t really believe their family members when they claim they don’t value these things. I think there’s often a feeling that their husband would actually hate to live at what he claims is his “comfortable standard” and is refusing to acknowledge this so that he can free ride in their beautiful, clean and orderly home. Or they think he’s being dishonest about how much these things are a benefit to the kids, something he should be equally invested in with her.

For example, what’s a mom to do if her husband insists that he doesn’t value holiday cheer? If he claims that making Christmas special is just her preference and so if she wants to spend a bunch of time and energy creating joyful memories for their kids, she’s on her own and shouldn’t expect excessive praise or assistance.

This example came up in a recent post by on “emotional labor”, where she acknowledged that some moms really do create their own misery. After all, as she says “nobody dies from having inadequately layered garland, and if it feels like you’re doing way too much, you can probably dial it back a bit instead of being a martyr over Elf on a Shelf.” But, still, she acknowledges that it’s possible for someone’s standards to be unreasonably low, both for the holiday season and life in general:

Now, some husbands will shrug at everything that isn’t 100% essential and say they’d be happy to have Christmas with a three foot tall Amazon tree with zero ornaments, order a rotisserie chicken for dinner, and wear their Steelers jerseys on Christmas morning while not attending any gatherings or eating any treats. This is belligerent Scrooge-ass behavior. Even if some of the Christmas stuff seems a bit over-the-top, don’t be an asshole. Try to meet in the middle. No, you do not need four separate Christmas desserts, but you should at least have one, and the very least you can do is say thank you.

I think the radical take away here is… don’t be an asshole! On both sides! If you haven’t seen Love is Blind DC I’m sorry for this reference, but you really don’t want to be the Hannah in the relationship, constantly criticizing Neeik because he hasn’t vacuumed in the past 7 hours. And you also don’t want to be the Neeik… so dysfunctional in the kitchen that you don’t know that the fridge is not the place to search when your girlfriend asks you to get the pasta (no, he was not confused because he thought it was fresh pasta, I promise you).

Assuming you really love your partner and don’t just see your relationship as one giant transaction, the fact that they care about something should already be enough reason for you to care, at least somewhat. After all, loving someone means something like having their utility function internalized as a component of your own. What makes them happy should make you happy too, and what hurts them hurts you.

Either convince them that you’re right OR ask for a favor, otherwise… do it yourself

That said. I think a lot of this comes down to asking for help in the wrong way and refusing to be vulnerable. Ideally, we don’t have value differences with our family members. And as I suggested above, it’s possible that what appears to be a value difference isn’t, and that all you need to do is explain to them why you think the task needs to be completed in order to convince them of its necessity.

But sometimes that doesn’t work. And in those cases, asking your loved one to spend time on something you value (and which they don’t) should be framed as a favor you’re asking them to do for you rather than as an obligation they’re failing to meet. Telling someone they’re failing you brings out defensiveness, but oftentimes asking the same person if they’d be willing to help you out elicits an entirely different and much more positive reaction.

You really don’t need to convince your son that waxed floors are objectively important, he’s probably not going to be convinced, but you can frame it as something you value and tell him you’d be thrilled if he’d help you get it done. And unless it’s something he really, really hates doing, he might be happy to do it for you even if he’d never agree that it “needs” to be done.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Still, when I was in high school “basic” wouldn’t have been much of a “burn”. The popular girls were wearing Abercrombie and Fitch. No one was boiling over with jealousy at your “cool vintage clothes and vacation photos”. Thrifting was not a marker of your commitment to sustainability and original style… it just implied you were poor. And conformity was in during my university days as well1—it felt like every other girl on campus had been given a winter uniform along with their tuition dues: Hunter boots (with the cute cable knit socks), Canada Goose jacket, maybe an infinity scarf, Lululemon yoga pants and a Longchamp tote in which to carry their Macbook and a vitamin water.

Obviously basic girls continue to sit atop many hierarchies; not all subcultures reward originality or punish conformity, just look at the DCCs who tirelessly strive to embody the archetypal cheerleader that exists in Kelli’s mind with every ‘yes ma’am’ and hip destroying jump split. Still, as Mina points out “in creative cities like New York and in online spaces” basic is an insult. But… what exactly is basic?

Subscribe now

In Mina’s video she uses the term to refer to relatively simple outfits made up of mostly basic pieces which the majority of people would think look “good”. But I think the term has a different connotation better captured by an old comment on r/femalefashionadvice which explains that “basic” implies dressing in a way which is “trendy while not being boundary pushing or novel in any way whatsoever.” And that it involves “only deciding to wear something once it's been 110% vetted by everyone else on earth”.

The trend cycle

Trends are started by people we’ve already collectively decided are cool. These are the trendsetters—the “hot internet girls”. Most of them are attractive… but there is an oversupply of pretty girls, so it’s also “definitely a je ne sais quoi kind of situation”. When these cool people wear something most other people aren’t wearing, that thing becomes endowed with a little bit of their cool energy. People who are paying the closest attention to what the cool people are doing notice, and some of them decide to copy it because doing so makes them feel cool too.

(“I saw Regina George wearing army pants and flip flops, so I bought army pants and flip flops”)

The group that begins copying the trendsetters first occupies the inner circle of trendiness right next to the trendsetters themselves. But they’re surrounded by concentric circles of trend followers who are paying successively less attention and/or are successively less willing to risk looking stupid by wearing a trend they “can’t pull off”. Most of the time the trend burns out before it reaches the masses, because a lot of trends are objectively ugly (and are seen as such in retrospect even by many of the people who participated at the time).

In fact, something being objectively ugly can be a positive for a trendsetter. A way to flex. Proclaiming to the world “Actually, I’m so cool (or hot) that I don’t even worry about presenting beautifully, I just wear whatever I find and you can’t help thinking I look good.” (See. for example: Is it a fit or is she just skinny?)

I had planned to use the ripped shirt look, which I associate with Kanye West and Justin Bieber circa 2016, as an example of a trend too ugly to have had a real shot at becoming basic… but there’s both an Urban Outfitters and a Temu version of it, so maybe it made it further than I realized. Regardless, the point is that a lot of us think that people who uncritically adopt every trend look silly, and this is a large part of why people discourage trend following—it’s expensive (and wasteful) to keep up with, and there’s a very good chance that you’ll look bad not only to your contemporaries but also to your future self.

But in some cases a trend will spread further and further out, until it’s no longer “boundary pushing or novel in any way whatsoever” because it’s been “vetted by everyone else on earth”. And at this point, those still wearing it will be advertising that they’re “basic” while the trend setters and fashion bloggers will have long ago moved on to something else. (Although these days the time it takes for a trend to go from signaling cool to signaling basic can be insanely short due to the sped up nature of trend cycles which the combined power of social media + SHEIN has enabled.) I took a shot at representing this visually below:

I set “classic” dressers apart from the concentric circles of individuals who drive the trend cycle. Of course, you can’t ignore the slower moving changes in norms of dress without just looking weird, so what’s considered classic (or “timeless”) is in reality still somewhat dependent on time and place. But I think “classic style” implies outfits that look good “objectively” or which draw on styles which have been popular for a very long time—the fact that classic and timeless are often used synonymously highlights the intuition that styles which have “stood the test of time” have generally done so because they’re objectively pleasing.

So my interpretation is that when we say an outfit is “classic” we mean that it’s in some way naturally pleasing to the human eye, using cuts and proportions which flatter the body (where “flattering” implies garments that make your body appear strong and slim and healthy) while also being context appropriate. People who promote dressing in a “classic” way often point out how this allows them to buy more expensive clothing items (they call this investing lol) which are made with higher quality materials and better techniques since they have relatively low closet turnover and often wear simpler pieces which can be incorporated into many different outfits. They also avoid the “bad trends” and so arguably look better to most people most of the time than their trendy or basic girlfriends do.

While basic is generally an insult, classic is often a compliment. The reddit comment I mentioned above, for instance, which had attempted to define basic, was in response to a post from a woman who said she dresses “classic” and “chic” but would “want to avoid "basic," obvi”. (Obvi!) And the comment also stressed that “being basic” is “not to be confused with dressing in basics which is used to describe plain, simple cuts of clothing that are usually non-distinctive and not especially detailed”.

Finally, I also set the eccentrics aside in their own little bubble (quirky probably fits there too as a toned down version of an eccentric). These people are defined specifically by wearing things which are in some way context inappropriate. They do this (I suppose) either because they have very strong preferences for what they like and those preferences just happen to be very different from those of the mainstream, or because they are especially uninterested in the opinion of others, don’t mind weird looks, and enjoy experimenting. These people often look interesting… but they don’t normally look fashionable or cool, at least not unless they’re already cool for some other reason. And it’s easy for their outfits to feel “costumey”.

Taste

But this model of the trend cycle misses something crucial to a discussion of fashion and style. Taste. Some trendsetters are themselves considered basic by people who, while they may not be as influential, nevertheless feel in a position to judge the quality of the tastemakers to the masses. Hailey Bieber comes to mind as an example of someone who’s undeniably a major trendsetter but who is a frequent target of the complaint that the “style icons” getting the most attention aren’t the ones coming up with looks that are particularly novel or interesting or beautiful.

Now, maybe you’re suspicious of the concept of taste. Maybe you think “good taste” is simply determined by (and a signal of membership within) something analogous to a high priesthood. Or maybe you think that “taste” is about more than signaling, that it refers to a “capacity for deep aesthetic pleasure, and the discernment to judge whether a given thing is capable of inducing deep aesthetic pleasure”. (Or maybe you think both are somewhat correct, they aren’t necessarily inconsistent.) Regardless, we can all agree that there are some people who are at least believed to have “good taste” and plenty of influencers who… are not.

This means that trends can catch on even if no one who’s considered to have “good taste” thinks they’re interesting or would be eager to copy them. And so trends can sometimes completely skip over the concentric circles of bloggers and ”in the know” fashion girlies to almost immediately become oversaturated and “basic”.

But “alternative” and “taste-having” subcultures also have trends and trend cycles. So how should we think about the sort of conformity you can find within subcultures whose members prize themselves on originality? Can someone be basic qua a taste-having subculture? Is the form that “basicness” takes context dependent?

Another genre of basic

A few months ago Brooke LaMantia wrote an article for the Cut about her revelation that her carefully crafted “personal style” maybe “wasn’t so personal” after all:

Last summer, my best friend and I were drinking an Aperol Spritz in Dimes Square when I noticed scores of women walking by in different iterations of the same outfit: an oversize tee, a skirt, white socks, sneakers or loafers, and some kind of embellishments in their hair. I looked down. I was wearing an oversize button-up, a maxi skirt, white Nike socks, and vintage loafers. Suddenly, everywhere I looked, I saw myself, and it felt mortifying. Who was I to think my outfits were better, or less basic, than anyone else’s?

It felt mortifying! It’s one thing to look like everyone else intentionally, but for Brooke, who had been trying her hardest to look original, realizing she looked like every other girl she’d be likely to hang out with was deeply embarrassing. Especially because she thought she had soundly escaped her previous basicness:

After I moved to the city, I spent my late teens and early 20s on a grimy block primarily occupied by college-age kids and fresh to New York young adults. I adopted their uniform: jeans, black tops, Air Force Ones (or whatever the trending sneaker was of the year), and an expensive yet uninspired purse.

(I feel attacked!) She was once basic too, but then she intentionally made a choice to try harder… so that she could appear as though she wasn’t trying: “I wanted my style to communicate that I knew what was cool, but I didn’t care too much.” But importantly, she wanted to look like she “knew what was cool” specifically within the context of her subculture, accounting for what was considered “cool” within that community.

This touches on what I was getting at in The Gaze of Your Subculture. Even if you’re not dressing for “the male gaze” almost all of us (Agnes Callard aside) are dressing for others. We’re trying to communicate something to some relevant group of people, it’s just that when what defines that relevant group is that they’re generally similar to you it can feel pretty close to “dressing for yourself”:

Fashion is a form of aesthetic expression. The act of intentionally selecting an outfit (and when I say outfit I’m including the hairstyle, makeup, accessories etc.), is a way of communicating with others through self-presentation. Constructing an initial context about who you might be or where you’re coming from before you even start an interaction, one which can’t help but be picked up on by those around you, even if only unconsciously.

By becoming “a whole other genre of basic” Brooke was very, very clearly signaling her membership in the group she wanted to signal membership within. So while it may have felt mortifying to realize it, she was actually succeeding entirely in presenting herself as she had intended, as if she “knew what was cool”. And she more or less comes to this conclusion in the piece:

What I realized was that in the age of social media, a sense of uniqueness is damn near impossible to find. And maybe it’s overrated. We are all getting our style from somewhere; why not let it be from other queer kids my age?

But there is at least one major difference between the “genre of basic” which Brooke ended up embodying and what we generally mean when we talk about someone “looking basic”. Effort. While I appreciate the self-awareness she displays when she recognizes that her harsh judgements of other’s fashion choices were mostly unfair, I’d argue that Brooke really is much more stylish than the typical basic girl.

Finding all those perfectly imperfect vintage pieces takes a lot more work (and thought) than buying out an Aritzia does. And even if you’re hostile to taste and think it’s simply about “knowing the rules” within a relevant subculture, the rules she learned were a lot more complex and difficult for outsiders to parse and recreate than the implicit rules that basic girls follow are. If you’re a little more sympathetic to taste you might also think that Brooke’s closet building journey encouraged her to develop a deeper ability to appreciate fashion such that it could better “induce deep aesthetic pleasure”. After all, she probably wouldn’t have gotten so into it if she wasn’t enjoying this outlet for self-expression.

We tend to praise originality as if it’s something all of us should be aiming at but, as I mentioned above, people who dress in a really original way don’t typically look like fashion icons, they just look… eccentric. To be fashionable requires you to be present in the here and now. To understand the cultural signals you’re putting out and how they’ll be received in the relevant context. Because again, style is a form of communication.

Dressing super eccentric is sort of like walking into the bar, seeing your friend and being like “smok agay dau?” rather than saying “hey, how you doing?” simply because you thought it sounded better and didn’t mind being weird. But everyone else is like… ok that’s fine, you do you girl(!) just know that we don’t know what you’re trying to say and you probably aren’t being perceived as intended!

So my conclusion is something like… to be considered fashionable and stylish (as a normal person, not as someone whose job is fashion) you pretty much need to conform to some genre of basic or else dress mostly in classic, timeless pieces, whatever that might look like in your specific environment2.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I had planned to discuss Mina Le’s video more in this piece and I also wanted to reference some of derek guy’s commentary on twitter… but this is getting long. So for now, you can just enjoy these pictures of Mina and accept that originality is mostly overrated for the other 99% of us.

Quick announcement: Thank you very much to everyone who attended the first ACAF book club, it was a blast and the level of discussion exceeded my already high expectations! As such, I will be hosting another one on December 27th at 5:30PM EST which will discuss (drumroll please) Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. The event will be for paid subscribers who RSVP on this google form and I will send out Zoom details the day of. Hope you can join us!

I see no-fault divorce as analogous to debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws: both place a floor under how bad things can get when you make a major commitment and things don’t go according to plan. Both lower the risk of signing life-altering contracts, whether it's a marriage contract or a loan agreement, by guaranteeing an escape route—rules-bound but accessible—in case your future self comes to feel that your current self made a mistake.

And when we lower the risk involved in doing something… the result is that we’ll get more people doing the thing in question all else equal (which I recognize it often is not). So just as debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws can encourage risk taking and entrepreneurship while also providing some level of protection against predatory lending, the availability of no-fault divorce should, at least in theory, encourage higher rates of legal marriage (as well as higher rates of divorce).

Subscribe now

Of course the acceptance of no-fault divorce also reflects a shift in how we view marriage as a society. And It undeniably reduces the level of commitment that marriage represents, making modern marriages less binding than past marriages which faced more restrictive exit options. While I fully support encouraging marriage—given its association with various positive life outcomes and its effectiveness as a framework for raising children—I’ve argued before that the optimal rate of divorce is not zero. Divorce before having kids, in particular, doesn’t really strike me as much more tragic than a long-term breakup without any legal dimension.

But another way of looking at the acceptance of no-fault divorce is through the lens of paternalism. Essentially, it implies that we don’t trust people to make truly binding lifelong marital agreements. So we give them this backup option whether they ask for it or not. But… what if marriage which could be ended through no-fault divorce was kept as the default option, but we also allowed individuals, should they so choose, to enter a marriage which can only be exited in extreme circumstances, where it can be proven that one party has broken the basic vows involved.

This is the idea behind the “covenant marriage” versions of which are offered in three states, Arizona, Arkansas and Louisiana. States which offer covenant marriages allow couples to opt-in to harder to exit marital contracts which can only be dissolved under exceptional circumstances. From the linked NYT piece:

Traditional marriage allows a couple to enter the union by filling out a marriage license (among other state requirements), but with a covenant marriage, which is often rooted in religious or moral convictions, the couple must complete premarital counseling with a clergyman or therapist ahead of time. State laws vary, but often one spouse must prove adultery (with photos, videos or witness testimony), physical or sexual abuse, abandonment for more than a year, or imprisonment in order to file for divorce.

And couples who are already married also have the option to upgrade their flimsy modern marriage into something more binding. As I suggested, the absence of this option elsewhere reflects a kind of paternalism: a belief that even when two adults want to commit themselves to something they really can’t take back, they shouldn’t be allowed to, for their own good—or perhaps for the good of society. And frankly, given the seriousness of making a lifelong commitment that you can’t exit (barring provable adultery or physical abuse), I don’t think this is a crazy place to be paternalistic. But I also generally favor more freedom of choice… so I’m not sure where I land—what do you think?

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

So when it comes to women’s sports and the debates over trans and intersex inclusion, I’ve heard many people wonder: “Why don’t the men have to get tested? Why is it only women’s bodies that we’re comfortable monitoring in this way?” Or, in response to the new World Athletics rules (the governing body for track and field)—which require some intersex athletes to lower their testosterone levels to the top of the female range in order to be eligible to compete at the elite level—I’ve heard the complaint that: “There’s no top of the male range, why is it only femininity that we feel comfortable interrogating and defining, isn’t this just another way of denying women’s diversity?”

Subscribe now

No. It’s not. But I get the intuition behind these questions. Men and women should be treated equally, so testing women but not men feels unfair and discriminatory to women, especially because such testing primarily impacts women who don’t conform to traditional beauty standards or expectations of femininity. And sports is all about celebrating outliers, so who are we to say that a woman’s testosterone is “too high” or that she has too much of a “natural advantage”? Isn’t that the whole point of elite sports? Celebrating the genetic freaks among us?

Read more

Subscribe now

First, let me just say that the notion that legislating who can legally use shared bathrooms—which have never been meaningfully secured against men or predators and won’t be in the future—will have a significant impact on women’s safety is absurd. But that doesn’t imply that coming to a societal consensus on this issue is pointless. Implicit in decisions about who can use which bathroom are underlying assumptions about how gender is defined, the relative importance of gender versus sex, beliefs about the prevalence of violent crime among different groups, and how to balance the trade-offs between the impact on the median individual in a population vs. vulnerable outliers.

Defending Feminism makes the point, as others have as well, that bathroom access decisions have always been made on the basis of someone’s apparent sex, which is really their gender (at least from the perspective of others). We decide if someone should be using a women’s bathroom based on how they appear to us: which of the two broad groups of “men” and “women” our brain immediately and unconsciously slots them into. Gender in this sense is not purely determined by biological sex (even if gender and biological sex are very highly correlated with one another) but also by relevant social cues.

Referencing an intersex woman who looks typically female (and has lived as a female since birth) but who has XY chromosomes she asks the GCs: do you really think this blonde chick should be forced to use the men’s bathroom?? I think she’s right to assume that their answer would be no. And I also think she’s right to say that this implies they do hold a social constructivist view of gender, even if it doesn’t imply they agree with the most progressive take on trans issues and trans inclusion:

A social constructivist view of gender, which argues that women are those people who grow up being seen as female regardless of whether they are actually female, provides a consistent theory that can accommodate intersex cases fairly while also allowing for a wide range of positions on questions about transgender identity.

What this really comes down to is not biological sex but passing. For a trans woman, passing refers to whether strangers typically assume you’re female or are typically immediately aware that you are a trans woman (regardless of whether they agree that trans 👏 women 👏 are 👏 women!). No matter what the law is around sex segregated bathrooms, unless the plan is to install pussy inspectors at the door of every shared bathroom in the nation (which I’d venture to say would probably represent a bigger threat to women’s safety and privacy than sharing the bathroom with trans women would… but to each their own) if you pass as a woman you’ll be able to continue to use the women’s bathroom.

So, aside from the personal attack on McBride, the issue is really about whether trans women who don’t pass should be able to use the women’s bathroom. The maximally trans inclusionary view is that individuals should use the bathroom which they feel most comfortable in, regardless of how their doing so affects the comfort level of others. And the maximally trans exclusionary view is that women’s bathrooms are for females, and so if any subset of females feel uncomfortable with trans women (or intersex women) sharing the bathroom, they have a right to force them into the men’s room, regardless of the potential consequences for the trans and intersex women.

But as has observed many times, passing has only gotten harder as a result of trans visibility. The more people know trans people are out there, and the more examples they see of trans women in the media and elsewhere, the more refined their radar for trans women gets. This has even led to cis women like Ilohna Maher being accused of being trans.

And passing is very subjective, so even if you don’t consider internal gender identity (vs. how someone is perceived by others) to be a meaningful factor for deciding which spaces someone should be permitted access to, you can’t really make a bathroom bill on this basis. Say you legislated that only individuals who “pass as women” can use the women’s bathroom—but then who gets to judge whether they pass? Anyone who happens to be in the bathroom with them? Some kind of reasonable person standard?

Personally, I couldn’t care less about the bathroom issue. I actually don’t get the fear, but maybe that’s the result of my living in New York where mixed gender bathrooms are not at all unheard of anyways (Ok, I will admit that a recent experience sharing a mixed gender bathroom with two Hasidic men in full garb was a bit awkward, but a trans woman wouldn’t phase me). I don’t really want to get into this debate, because frankly I think a lot of the women who are terrified about bathrooms appear to be severely traumatized by men in a way I don’t have the ability to fully empathize with. But if a man is going to come and attack you in a bathroom I guess I just figure he’ll do it whether trans women are allowed in bathrooms or not?

Admittedly, the concern over changing rooms does make more sense to me, because I can much more easily imagine how a creep could benefit from ambiguous rules in that context. After all, women are changing in changing rooms, in full view of other people, and I suppose being able to slap on a wig and gain access could motivate some men to try to enter these spaces in order to enjoy the show. But then, changing rooms are not separated based on sexual interest anyways, so this is really about inappropriate ogling: if a lesbian woman was sitting all day in the changing room and staring at boobies I’m sure she’d eventually be asked to leave too.

Defending Feminism notes that some GCs simply avoid dealing with concerns about how bathroom bills fail to account for intersex people by claiming that it’s only a “fringe issue”. True. But in the realm of trans debates everything is a fringe issue(!) since as DF notes “both intersex cases and trans cases involve a tiny fraction of the population; most human beings are uncontroversially men or women.” She’s right. But then we have to ask why are GCs so newly concerned about this fringe issue? It didn’t seem like we were having all that much trouble integrating intersex people a few decades ago (although the debate around intersex individuals in sports is much older).

Both intersex women and trans women represent a tiny minority of the population, but uncontroversially intersex women represent an even tinier minority1 and the difference is really the rate of change. The gender critical position is a reaction to the increase in the number of trans people as well as an escalation in demands for inclusion and a redefining of what being “inclusive” entails. Pew data suggests there’s been a nearly 10x increase in the percentage of adults who identify as binary trans when looking at adults 30 and over (0.3%) relative to adults 18-29 (2%).

And it’s not crazy to think that the size of the class in question (i.e. women who are in some way ambiguous with respect to their gender or sex and want to use women’s only spaces or participate in women’s only activities) matters to how inclusive you’re willing to be. With track and field for example, World Athletics research indicates that the frequency of individuals with DSDs associated with athletic advantages, while still very rare among elite women’s athletes, “is around 140 times higher than you will find in the general female population, and their presence on the podium is much more frequent even than this.” And if trans women are an order of magnitude (or two!) more common than women with the relevant DSDs, and if the athletic advantage which a trans woman who has gone through male puberty has is similar to the advantage that comes with these DSDs, it doesn’t actually seem to be fearmongering to note that inclusive policies could result in elite women athletes being majority trans.

This frequency issue is certainly less relevant to the bathroom issue than it is to elite sports where tail effects dominate. But, I do think we should acknowledge the escalation I mentioned above and how it relates to passing. Some females will be uncomfortable having visibly trans women in women’s spaces. I can claim that those feelings are unjustified in various contexts, and we can try to convince these women that they should feel differently, but at least when it comes to the sorts of female spaces which exist primarily in order to make women feel more comfortable in them, women’s feelings about who should be included have to matter, right?

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

And check out my earlier piece about trans and intersex inclusion in sports:

And yet, while MFT can be descriptively useful and may well capture something valuable about human moral reasoning, there are compelling critiques which suggest that some findings related to MFT may be tautological (as we’ll discuss). Also, MFT doesn’t just claim to provide a useful framework for understanding differences in the sorts of moral judgements which are most salient within our particular cultural context, it claims to uncover fundamental, bottom-up truths about human morality, a high bar! Instead, I think it offers a sometimes helpful model (which could actually be getting at something fundamental), but which is also unavoidably shaped by the researchers’ assumptions, at least in part.

Read more

Sure, it may also, or even primarily, be a way of communicating with yourself— helping you to inhabit a certain mode of your personality, or to embody aspects of some archetype which inspires you, or to remind yourself of your value through the knowledge that you’re draped in beautiful and expensive things, or to raise your confidence by just knowing that you look attractive (to whom though?)

You might not care about how your outfit ultimately affects others, as in you’re probably not trying to look hot (or cool, or whatever you’re going for) as some sort of public service. Although I have heard that idea before—that we owe it to one another to make some attempt to positively contribute to the visual scene by dressing well—I don’t think this describes the motivations of most fashionable women. 

But even if it’s true that your motivation for dressing up is to create a certain feeling for yourself, an internal vibe, with no concern for how your fashion choices affect the visual experience of others, and no external objective (like hoping to get a date or a new friend), all of this self communication still requires you to be seen. I mean, how we dress kind of has to be for others because we can’t actually see how we look!

The energy we’re creating comes from the imagined gaze of others. We simply don’t put this kind of effort into how we dress when we’re home alone (and even if you do, I’d suggest that a lot of the pleasure you derive from it is coming from the imagined imagined gaze, what you imagine people would think if they could see you). And this imagined gaze is not constructed by us alone, it’s some distillation of the general cultural milieu we exist within. Maybe you feel powerful when you strut down the street in high heeled pumps, a classy trench coat and big sunglasses. But that’s only because you have good reason to believe that other people will think you look powerful, or at least that you would think you look powerful if you were viewing yourself.

Read more

So, what axis of variation explains the maximum amount of relevant and salient differences in the worldviews of individuals within a given population and time period of interest? Or alternatively, since it’s not obvious that there’s always one dominant foundational divide, how could we identify a manageable set of largely independent factors which together explain a significant amount of salient differences across individuals in the context of interest. 

Well, it really depends on what the context of interest is and what sorts of differences (variance) you want the concept of a worldview to explain. Maybe you want to deeply understand the key axes along which feminists differ1, or maybe you want to understand current divisions on issues in national politics, or maybe the divisions most relevant in the Western world over the entire post Enlightenment period, or maybe the differences which divide various cultures across all of recorded history, or maybe differences in the outcomes at the societal level (in terms of scientific progress, wealth production etc.) that a culture’s general position along certain axes predict. Or maybe something else.

Subscribe now

In the previous post on this topic, Foundational Divides, I introduced the concept of an individual worldview as being represented by a single point in a very high dimensional “worldview space”:

Let’s assume that at a given point in time each individual has a set of values and beliefs, whether implicit or explicit, which provide them with a general framework for understanding and analyzing specific problems and deciding what the “right” thing to do is (i.e. what is their position on a relevant issue). We’ll call this finite, but very large, set of values and beliefs their individual worldview, and assume that if we knew all the relevant factors that construct their worldview at a given point in time, we’d be able to perfectly predict their position on any specific issue.

We can think of each relevant value or belief as identifying a spectrum along which individuals vary (in terms of how strongly they agree with or oppose the value or belief). Collectively, these value/belief spectrums define a high-dimensional space in which each relevant spectrum represents a single dimension, or vector within the space, and in which each actual or potential worldview is defined by a single point. Individuals who have very similar worldviews will be described by points which are very close to each other in this high dimensional space, while those who have very different worldviews will be described by points which are far apart.

The total “worldview space” could in theory be reasonably well approximated by a much lower dimensional model. Such a model would necessarily exclude important details, but could nevertheless be useful for communication and prediction. We can draw an analogy with the Big 5 personality factors, which represent a low dimensional model of the “personality space”, the origins and supporting assumptions of which I described in detail in Mapping the Mind. While having someone’s Big 5 scores is very unlikely to help you understand them better if you already know them well, it likely would tell you something relevant about someone you just met, and it provides a useful albeit incomplete framework for discussing and studying personality. 

There are various models which aim to do this for worldviews too, after all we humans have a deep urge to categorize ourselves, especially into binaries—just think about how many versions of “there are two kinds of people in this world….” you’ve heard before. And in Foundational Divides I summarized three potential contenders for a primary or dominant worldview axis: progressivism vs. conservatism, the constrained vs. unconstrained vision (quite strongly related to progressivism vs. conservatism), and pomo vs. rationalist epistemology (which currently divides both the political left and the political right to the endless confusion of poor Sam Harris). 

The structure of a worldview

Each of these provides an intelligible axis along which people differ, and which can be argued to be the primary cause of other, largely derivative, beliefs or opinions. However, the idea that there’s a core, fundamental axis suggests a specific model of how worldviews are formed and organized. One which resembles a decision tree, where your position on the fundamental axis constrains your range of possible beliefs, values, and views on a whole host of seemingly unrelated issues2. While there will be significant ideological differences among people on the same main branch of the tree, the set of options on which they’ll disagree is still bounded by what’s available given their chosen branch, by what’s consistent with the deeper shared value. 

This underlying worldview structure is core to the argument made in Against The Popcorn Theory of Cultural Drift, in which pushes back on what he sees as Hanson’s overly pessimistic view of our situation (which we discussed in depth in a recent Moral Mayhem episode). Rick argues that while many of the issues which Hanson notes as examples of drift are concerning, they aren’t at the core of the worldview which has made our culture so successful, and protecting and defending that core is the high leverage way to guard against a truly maladaptive (and Rick would argue, necessarily revolutionary) shift in values. Summarizing Robin’s argument that low selection pressures lead to drift and what he thinks it misses Rick says:

The memetic fitness landscape in which these new values thrive is decoupling from the old vicissitudes of hard work, discovery, improvement, and fecundity. The price of neglecting those vicissitudes used to be that our men got killed and our women got kidnapped by new husbands. But with the monoculture, there's no price for neglecting the old ways. So we drift. [...]

What’s going wrong here, I submit, is what often goes wrong with such arguments—the assumption of zero correlation. We don't need to defy probability theory, we only need some kind of correlation pattern among our values. Maybe “our values” is not just a grab-bag of isolated objects that all face cultural selection independently. Maybe there is some kind of hierarchical structure they're all a part of. Not a perfectly rigid structure, but one that connects them and makes them push and pull on each other when outside stresses get applied.

The core which Rick sees as in need of defense can be more or less summarized as “enlightenment rationality” as opposed to postmodernism (on the left and the right), as we touched on last time. But whatever you think the fundamental axis is given such a hierarchical structure, you’d need to make the argument in its favor on the basis that it explains more salient and relevant differences than other contenders.

Revisiting contenders for fundamental axes 

For instance, if you think objective truth is out of reach, that truth claims, and claims to authority or expertise in general, simply reflect the latest winner of a power struggle, and that there’s no objective way to compare these claims on their merits, you’re going to evaluate evidence and arguments very differently from someone who thinks we can design processes which, while imperfect, at least approximate or bring us closer to truth, and that we can use reason to evaluate these processes and their results. When these sorts of differences aren’t made explicit, it can lead to very frustrating conversations, something I touched on in Has the right gone woke?

[I]f you believe that systemic forces bias all available empirical evidence in favor of certain preferred conclusions, the ones which benefit the powerful, why would you trust such evidence to support or disprove your claims? Under those circumstances anyone with power and anything which legitimates the position of the powerful is suspect. [...]

I’ve experienced this maddening dynamic in real life conversation. As you unearth various sources of evidence which fly in the face of the claim being made by your interlocutor, their never-ending cynicism invalidates each one until, exhausted and confused, you finally realize that there is nothing you could provide which they would see as legitimate evidence to falsify their claim. Because, they respond, of course that’s what the data would say because that’s what they, the powerful, want it to say!

From this perspective you can see how a postmodern conception of truth, paired with who you view as holding the power, will invalidate or validate a multitude of other claims. For instance, vaccine mandates and safety claims—outcomes of the scientific process, or convenient vectors to control and subordinate the population? Or the likely effects of housing deregulation—more positive sum transactions, and more housing for all income levels, or just another way for the fat cat developers to get rich at the expense of the common man? Etc., etc., etc.

Subscribe now

Admittedly, many people who hold the beliefs I’m identifying with a postmodern conception of truth may feel that objective truth is possible in theory, it’s just that our current system is totally corrupt and therefore… revolution is necessary. And in general, to disagree with the postmodern conception of truth doesn’t imply that you think power is irrelevant. Just that you believe it’s at least possible to construct rational or adaptive processes for finding truth and designating authority, and that it’s possible to compare such systems and to evaluate truth claims in light of the processes that produced them. So while rationalism doesn’t preclude criticism of power structures, it does constrain the bounds and style of the criticism.

But there are other frameworks to consider. Thomas Sowell argues that individual worldviews are shaped by your vision of human nature and belief in the potential for radical progress. Those with a constrained vision see human nature and selfishness as a fixed trait that social and political systems must account for. In contrast, those with an unconstrained vision see such human flaws as correctible and believe injustice is not inevitable but the product of unjust systems. According to Sowell, these differing visions influence many seemingly unrelated beliefs and explain the alignment on so many issues within each political “side”. As he says in A Conflict of Visions:

One of the curious things about political beliefs is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education, Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again. [...] A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. These different premises—often implicit—are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous unrelated issues.

Sowell contends that those with the constrained vs. unconstrained vision hold entirely different conceptions of morally relevant concepts like “equality”, “freedom” and “justice”. Is “freedom” simply “the absence of externally imposed impediments” or does it also imply the absence of “circumstantial limitations which reduce the range of choice”. And while anyone can observe the very significant differences in income and wealth among individuals, on its own that observation implies nothing under the constrained vision in which “equality” is seen as a “process characteristic” (everyone is treated equally), but is proof positive of injustice in the unconstrained vision, where equality is seen as a “result characteristic” (everyone achieves equal outcomes)3. 

Left vs. Right identifies fundamental differences but with strategically grafted on values and beliefs specific to a particular context

So the observed consistency of views among individuals who identify with a particular “side” can often be explained by their holding some more primary vision or epistemological framework in common. And it’s this more fundamental commonality which causes them to agree on these seemingly unrelated but actually largely dependent beliefs rather than this simply being evidence of social pressure to conform with an ingroup (although this likely plays a role as well). Still, as I mentioned in the last piece, left vs. right isn’t easily explained by means of a single axis:

While there are core values and themes which are consistently associated with each side, precisely what these terms reference shifts over time. Rather than identifying a clearly interpretable axis of difference, what counts as left vs. right is in part determined by what will separate individuals into two broad (and typically similarly large) clusters, such that most of the population can be roughly identified with one or the other.

I see the left-right binary as determined to some degree by how people differ in terms of a consistent ideological vision, but with the additional influence of context-dependent strategic alliances, such as the one between libertarians and religious conservatives on the American political right. And these strategic alliances mean that the baskets of beliefs we identify with the left vs. right are not all explainable as the outcome of a shared vision or a shared belief about truth or a shared understanding of the potential for progress. 

The analogy with personality continues…

This multi-level understanding of worldviews, where deeper levels of core values are causally related to other observed positions, beliefs and behaviors strongly resembles models of personality. Quoting myself from Mapping the Mind:

[T]here are various theories related to the general structure of this personality system, the most well-known of which is probably the Freudian model. Freud emphasized the interplay between forces that shape personality, dividing it into three components: the id, ego, and superego, which represent unconscious drives, conscious awareness, and internalized social and cultural values, respectively.

This multi-level structure, whether in personalities or in worldviews, could complicate a data-driven approach to measuring the variance of relevance. Similar surface-level personality characteristics (or beliefs or values) could theoretically be motivated by different core drives (or fundamental visions or epistemological frameworks) which have been processed differently as a result of how they combine with intermediate traits (or facts or experiences) specific to that individual.

For example, Is someone a libertarian because they believe that individual freedom is a fundamental human right that must be respected unless there’s a very good reason not to do so, or are they a libertarian because they think the incentives created in such a system, in light of our imperfect and incalcitrant human nature, lead to more prosocial outcomes than do those implicit in other systems?

As it applies to personality, Raymond Cattell, whose early factor-analytic work laid the foundations for the eventual development of the Big Five model, noted the potential difficulties with teasing out the core, stable personality factors that could arise given such a structure. As he explains below, it’s possible that the same core drive could nevertheless manifest in very different outward expressions4:

The basic generalization we wish to stress here is that, among individuals possessed of equal endowment in a particular drive, different manifestations will vary inversely and be negatively rather than positively correlated. The situation may be explored more fully by means of Fig. I, in which we take a minimum population of two persons, possessing differing endowments in the basic erg (in this case sex drive) and differing amounts of investment in different manifestations.

And he includes the below diagram intended to illustrate the multilevel structure by which the outward personality expressions can be traced the to core “ergs”, similar to the decision tree structure I discussed above with respect to worldviews.

Cattell ultimately defined personality as “that which permits a prediction of what a person will do in a given situation”5, which limits the concept to things which can be observed, regardless of what the underlying structure looks like. But he expected that a properly defined factor analysis could indirectly detect the strengths of these “deeper, non-overt levels of dynamic integration” just as a “plumber could deduce the volume of water running through street conduits merely from observing the faucets in use in many houses.”6 And he implies that understanding this deeper structure would improve your ability to predict observable behaviors.

What’s the equivalent of the lexical hypothesis?

I’ve introduced the idea of both personalities and worldviews as residing in a very high dimensional space, as well as the goal of finding a low dimensional model for each space. But how do you define such a space, a step that precedes the work of determining an efficient lower-dimensional model for it, in an unbiased way?

The key assumption underlying the research program which ultimately led to the Big 5 was the lexical hypothesis: basically that any important personality trait, anything which describes a salient source of difference between individuals and which is relevant to the concept of personality, would’ve been given a name in any well developed language. Expanding on this point in Mapping the Mind, I noted that:

Once again, a core assumption underpinning the lexical approach is that, since the concept of personality is very important to us, we can assume that the set of all personality-relevant adjectives in a well-developed language with a large vocabulary will cover most if not all of what we care about. Therefore, we can assume that the set of vectors defined by these adjective-antonym pairs forms a “spanning set” for the space of personality. In other words, they will ‘cover’ (almost) all of the high number of dimensions which in aggregate define the personality space, and they will certainly cover the dimensions of personality which are most relevant or salient to us.

The assumption that our language spans the personality space is incredibly important since, if it holds, it provides us with an unbiased starting point from which to search for the most explanatory independent dimensions of personality. If a researcher was tasked with creating a personality questionnaire from scratch or with listing a set of relevant dimensions along which individuals could be ranked, it would be impossible to avoid baking in their personal biases. The questions they’d choose to ask or the dimensions they’d list would reflect their existing beliefs about the core drivers of personality, and so the results of any related analysis would also reflect those beliefs. (Previewing the next piece… if we were to approach the question “what is a worldview?” we’d want to think through what the equivalent of the lexical hypothesis for this application would be.)

So… what could potentially play the analogous role for worldviews that the lexical hypothesis played in personality research? I don’t know. Maybe you can examine the history of ideas, philosophy, the scientific method etc. But unlike with personality, where most of us have well developed vocabularies for describing the inner and outer characteristics of ourselves and others, and an intuitive understanding of the relevant ways in which people differ, most people’s worldviews and those of their interlocutors are never articulated. And so it’s not nearly as clear that the set of “worldview relevant” or “philosophically relevant” vocabulary or ideas would span the entire “worldview space”, nor is it clear that individuals could directly judge where people they know, even those they know very well, fall along the relevant axes. 

And, depending on what the context of interest is, we might not have access to people who differ on the most meaningful axes. Particular cultures and societies are likely defined by only a narrow slice of worldview space which everyone in their population occupies. As Hanson has said, we tend not to tolerate much intra-cultural diversity on sacred values. Of course this is an issue with personality too, environmental and social factors affect the expression of your constitutional traits, but worldviews feel much more culturally determined than do personalities, and the total range of possible worldviews feels less constrained.

A worldview is some sort of complex, multi-layered construct that shapes and constrains our beliefs, values, and positions on a wide range of issues. And the parallels with personality research suggest some directions for further exploration, but also various potential pitfalls. Just as the Big Five model offers a low-dimensional framework for understanding personality, identifying analogous principles for worldviews could illuminate the foundational differences in our perspectives.

I don’t have answers, but I do find this framing helpful, and I hope some of you did too! If so, please consider subscribing or upgrading to paid—and if you’re interested in talking more about Sowell’s constrained vs. unconstrained vision please RSVP here for the upcoming book club event (for paid subscribers only) on Monday November 25 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm EST. Hope to see you there!

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I’m sure they’re right! Being part of a couple affects so many things. To have a partner is to have someone to celebrate and to mourn with, someone to rely on when things don’t go according to plan, someone to share the burden of basic everyday tasks with and to temper the mundanity of daily life. To have a partner also precludes a degree of self-focus and ability to explore options that many people view as central to self-development during their youth. You have to think about how your actions, goals and decisions impact your partner and your relationship, you have to negotiate competing desires and make compromises. You can’t just decide to take a job in another city, you have to have a discussion. You might be able to get away with being bad at some basic life skills (the power of division of labor!), but you also take on additional obligations to your partner and their larger family network.

But are these bad things? Are these not “wisdom promoting”? Are these not exactly the sort of skills you should be practicing if your goal is to have a family with someone in the future? Are we supposed to be convinced that relationship stability is only possible for people who have first thoroughly practiced not being in a relationship? Is there reason to believe that you need years of total self-focus, unconstrained by the needs or concerns of anyone else, in order to eventually be ready to prioritize your future family? And… isn’t relating to and compromising with another person a great way of learning about yourself and your priorities? 

While I acknowledge that there are certain experiences and skill development opportunities which you’re more likely to miss out on if you’re in a serious relationship throughout your 20s (or a series of serious relationships with little time in between), the reverse seems clearly true as well. Of course people who’ve spent a significant amount of time single have had experiences I haven’t, some of which have been very valuable to their self development. But so have I! 

Subscribe now

For one thing, while I’m not much help to friends who are navigating the early stages of dating, once they’re in a relationship I can be a great chat! After all, I lived with and compromised with and navigated conflict with a partner for over a decade, and most of the other people they’re close enough to talk to about such things have only had a year or two of such experience. Obviously every relationship is different, but simply spending time in relationships opens your eyes to the reality that… things are often complicated and two-sided and that your friend might be part of the problem actually and not just a victim in need of your comfort! 

The biggest relative benefit (I think) I provide with respect to relationship advice, despite not having actually been in many relationships, is not any special wisdom but simply that I’m more likely to respond with empathy for both partners rather than with aggressive love for them and judgment for their boyfriend (who is obviously failing to realize what a prize he has in my amazing, beautiful and perfect friend who can easily get another better guy whenever she wants!) I think many young women struggle to talk about normal relationship challenges for fear of receiving the response that you “deserve better!” and should therefore “dump his ass!” And being able to talk to someone who enters the conversation assuming the goal is to improve the relationship, rather than to perfect it or end it, can be a lot more productive.

But back to the point. I’ve heard from several people that spending a significant amount of time single forced them to “face themself and life on their own” which helped them to confront certain issues, learn to self-soothe, incentivized them to develop deeper and more meaningful friendships, and gave them confidence in themselves and what they want in life. I think this makes a lot of sense. Successfully being single is a clear signal to yourself that as much as you might want to find a romantic partner, you ultimately don’t need one. You’re already ok on your own and you’re looking for a good match rather than the first person who’ll take you. And approaching dating with this stance is likely helpful, both for attracting the person you’re looking for and avoiding the ones you’re not.

All that sounds great, but frankly, until you’re in a serious relationship it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that you’d be a perfect partner if only you were, while going through life blissfully unaware of how crazy you really are and how hard you actually are to deal with sometimes! As Alain de Botton said: 

Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Read more

No one was against me marrying young; after all, everyone in my family agreed that I was mature for my age. But at the time, no one in my circle would’ve suggested this was a generally good idea for young educated women. However, things have started to shift. More people are getting woke to declining fertility rates. And as more people have started to worry about the impacts low fertility might have on our social and economic future… they’ve been looking around for cultural culprits. And one of those potential culprits is the norm of getting married later in life. After you’re educated. After you’ve dated a bit and been single a bit and have gotten to know yourself and what you want. After you’ve gained some financial stability. After you’ve focused on your career, and have made sure you’re on the “right track”. After you’re a fully formed, functional, emotionally regulated adult.

Subscribe now

Cartoons Hate Her recently wrote a popular post on the subject, The Men Who Sabotage Women’s Fertility. She argues that we’ve unreasonably pathologized marrying young and that we should normalize young women asking for early proposals, clear timelines etc., particularly in light of women’s much shorter fertility timeline. Her point is that it’s reasonable for a young woman to want to know if the guy she’s with will eventually marry and have kids with her well in advance of her bumping up against the limits of biology. Speaking from her personal experience as a woman who wanted to get engaged right out of college, she describes how those around her reacted to her concern that her boyfriend (now husband, her fertility was not sabotaged) wanted to wait. Apart from telling her to “enjoy being young” and assuring her that he likely just wanted to to be “financially stable” first, she says:

The comment that stuck with me the most was the one about our ages—never mind that we had already been dating far longer than is necessary to know if you want to marry someone, but if Nick was “too young” to propose, then that inherently meant he was too young to decide whether I should be his wife. Was the idea that I had to give him time to decide? Decide on what, me? I should tolerate that the man I 100% knew I wanted to marry wasn’t 100% sure he wanted to marry me? I knew we were young, but marriage wasn’t about needing a wedding, a ring, or “half his stuff.” It was about having some kind of definitive promise that he had chosen me. And if I was simply his live-in girlfriend indefinitely, I wasn’t being chosen. I was being tried out.

This shift in age at marriage norms is often summarized as a shift from cornerstone to capstone marriage. The cornerstone marriage sees partnering up as a foundation upon which you can build a life with someone while maturing and developing together. The capstone marriage sees partnering up as something to do once you’ve built your own life and once you’ve experienced enough to know what you really want and need. Both can clearly work—this article from IFS presents data which found there was only a mild disadvantage to marrying young in terms of relationship stability which was counterbalanced by a mild advantage in terms of perceived relationship quality. But… it didn’t work out for me, and it didn’t work out for precisely the reasons people bring up when they warn younger people about making such commitments!

Read more

But what do we mean by a worldview? When it comes to understanding political disagreements, we tend to rely heavily on the left-right binary. This binary does capture something important, and it can be thought of as an attempt to identify clusters of values and beliefs along which individuals differ, collectively providing a broad way to categorize people into two similarly sized groups. However, it remains woefully inadequate for capturing the nuances of moral and political views at a level detailed enough to reliably predict relevant differences with high fidelity.

Subscribe now

These terms are also often underdefined, which opens up the arena for arguing about who is the true leftist or right-winger. You can hear many individual commentators express frustration in response to the perception that their party has shifted, moving on to supporting new and inconsistent causes, while they’ve been standing still. For instance, those who self-describe as classical liberals can be heard complaining that the woke left fails to appreciate the importance of free speech and has lost confidence not only in liberal values but in objective truth itself. Meanwhile the (increasingly rare) never Trumpers are horrified at their fellow conservatives apparent willingness to support an amoral, vulgar candidate who has no compunctions about disrespecting the most sacred of American institutions. 

These individuals, who notice that they’ve suddenly been left politically homeless and don’t enjoy being out in the cold, often lament that their party is no longer their party while explaining why their views better represent the values their party is “supposed” to uphold. For example, I just read Matt Johnson’s book How Hitchens Can Save the Left, in which he argues that Hitchens’ pro-interventionist views were expressions of his consistent leftist principles. Principles which Johnson believes Hitchens upheld more successfully than many of his horrified critics, who viewed his support of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as evidence of his shift to the right. Rather, Johnson contends that these were expressions of Hitchens’ long-standing internationalist, pro-democracy values in combination with his greater confidence in the potential of US foreign policy to advance goals related to these values. 

This sort of book can be politically useful—if you’re a committed leftist and strongly prefer the overall set of policies that the typical Democratic candidate brings to the table to those of the typical Republican, but think most other leftists have badly misinterpreted how best to express your shared set of values in a particular area (in this case foreign policy), it makes sense to argue only to your in-group. But in general, it seems to me a bad use of time to worry about whether a position is left or right. And the fact that there’s a debate at all, as mentioned above, is a strong hint that there are other important binaries driving political disagreements not sufficiently captured by the left-right spectrum.

Worldviews as residing in a high-dimensional vector space

Let’s assume that at a given point in time each individual has a set of values and beliefs, whether implicit or explicit, which provide them with a general framework for understanding and analyzing specific problems and deciding what the “right” thing to do is (i.e. what is their position on a relevant issue). We’ll call this finite, but very large, set of values and beliefs their individual worldview, and assume that if we knew all the relevant factors that construct their worldview at a given point in time, we’d be able to perfectly predict their position on any specific issue. 

We can think of each relevant value or belief as identifying a spectrum along which individuals vary (in terms of how strongly they agree with or oppose the value or belief). Collectively, these value/belief spectrums define a high-dimensional space in which each relevant spectrum represents a single dimension, or vector within the space, and in which each actual or potential worldview is defined by a single point. Individuals who have very similar worldviews will be described by points which are very close to each other in this high dimensional space, while those who have very different worldviews will be described by points which are far apart (as defined by, for instance, the Euclidean distance between them).

Differences in individual positions on a wide range of political or moral questions (or whatever represents the variance which you want the concept of a worldview to identify, which I’ll touch on more in my next piece) can be explained by rankings along the full set of vectors defined by these values and beliefs. Since some values and beliefs are downstream of other, more fundamental, ones and since some determine only a few, relatively unimportant positions, while others determine many, relatively important ones, it’s intuitive that some will do more work than others in terms of explaining salient differences in worldviews. It’s also intuitive that many relevant spectrums will be correlated, to various degrees, with one another, even if they also bring independent information relevant to defining a worldview. 

Modeling Worldviews

In my last post I did a deep dive on the research program which produced the Big 5 personality factors. As with the concept of the high-dimensional worldview space, we can think about a high-dimensional personality space. This space is defined by the (very large) set of all personality-relevant descriptors, each of which represents a spectrum along which individuals vary. The Big 5 is then the low-dimensional model of this very high-dimensional personality space. While such a model will always fail to capture many important features of any particular personality, it can nevertheless do a reasonably good job of explaining the most salient individual differences and has been validated across multiple populations in various contexts. 

We can think of an analogous project which would seek to find the Big N Worldview factors (where N is ideally somewhere between 2 and 10). The goal would be to find a relatively small number of axes which together do a reasonably good job of describing differences in worldviews across large and diverse populations, and across different times and places. These axes, or factors, would represent a simplified, low-dimensional model of the worldview space, just as the Big 5 represents a simplified, low-dimensional model of the personality space.

We’d like this model to give us a parsimonious way to describe political coalitions and to understand why they hold certain positions, and so we’d prefer that these axes map on to pre-existing, or at least intuitively interpretable concepts relevant to political ideology, moral philosophy etc. And since we’d like our model to be as parsimonious as possible, we’d want to select (mostly) independent factors, such that each represents a (mostly) distinct or unrelated worldview-relevant dimension.

Candidates for a fundamental explanatory axis

Putting aside the idea of finding a low but multi-dimensional model, we can first ask: is there a single dimension which is primary to individual worldviews. The left-right binary certainly tells us something about what defines the most important axes, but, as I mentioned above, it’s often under-defined and at least somewhat context dependent. While there are core values and themes which are consistently associated with each side, precisely what these terms reference shifts over time. Rather than identifying a clearly interpretable axis of difference, what counts as left vs. right is in part determined by what will separate individuals into two broad (and typically similarly large) clusters, such that most of the population can be roughly identified with one or the other. So what interpretable axes correlate with the left-right divide?

Progressivism vs. Conservatism 

There have been various attempts to define the most significant factor driving differences in worldviews across large populations and diverse contexts. The one which is probably most familiar, given its association with the left-right spectrum, is progressivism vs. conservatism. As explains in his piece Psychomagnetic Reversal:

Progressivism and conservatism themselves can be traced back to two strands within the Enlightenment heritage, epitomized by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke respectively. Both of these thinkers accepted the Enlightenment ideal of cultural progress through the application of human reason, tempered by historical experience. There was, however, a crucial difference in emphasis.

Paine emphasized the progressive potential of individual rationality — an innovative mind breaking free from the vagaries of tradition. While Burke emphasized the need to conserve the fruits of collective rationality — the hard-won knowledge embedded within tradition, having emerged through incremental improvement of existing norms, generation by generation, and stood the test of time.

As he points out, both conservatism and progressivism as generally understood within the post-Enlightenment context imply that progress is possible, and that making progress is a worthy goal. But they disagree about how easy it is to make progress and how likely it is that you can figure out ahead of time what changes will be beneficial. And so conservatives tend to favor making slow, incremental changes, gradual enough to allow for evaluation of their impact before proceeding with larger changes. 

How conservative vs. progressive you are is at least in part dependent on how good you think the current system is and how bad you think alternatives can get. If you believe that we've built a surprisingly functional and resilient system—capable of producing great abundance against pretty bad odds—that the progress we've made can be lost, and that regaining it would not be easy or inevitable, you’ll probably be drawn to the conservative worldview. We can call these two groups conservative-progressives and radical-progressives and add the anti-progressives, who have recently returned to relevance, to capture the trads and retvrn set.

The constrained vs. unconstrained vision

A closely related fundamental binary is suggested by Thomas Sowell, who in his book A Conflict of Visions seeks to answer the question: “What are the underlying assumptions behind the very different ideological visions of the world being contested in modern times?” Sowell argues that two different visions of human nature—the constrained vision, which treats human selfishness as a given which social and political systems must therefore account for, and the unconstrained vision, which sees human selfishness as correctible and a product of unjust social and political systems—provides the most powerful lens for understanding broad political divides.

As he explains, individuals who hold the constrained vision tend to talk in terms of incentives and trade-offs. The focus is on designing systems (moral, economic etc.) which serve to produce desirable, prosocial behaviors and outcomes, within the constraints created by our imperfect and largely intractable human nature. The constrained vision “sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choices available” and processes are evaluated based on whether they are “conducive to desired results, but not directly or without many side effects, which are accepted as part of a trade-off.” 

In contrast, the unconstrained vision assumes that “foolish or immoral choices explain the evils of the world—and that wiser or more humane social policies are the solution.” Those who hold it tend to “view human nature as beneficially changeable and social customs as expendable holdovers from the past.” Those with the unconstrained vision also tend to be insensitive to the “process costs” of achieving their aims, since “every closer approximation to the ideal is preferred. Costs are regrettable but by no means decisive.” Sowell contends that these different visions lead to vastly different interpretations of our present world:

The great evils of the world—war, poverty, and crime, for example—are seen in completely different terms by those with the constrained and the unconstrained visions. If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomena virtually cries out for explanation—and for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized. While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law abiding society. In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institution's, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.

The constrained vs. unconstrained vision provides a useful conceptual framework that touches on key aspects of current ideological debates. As Sowell notes, if human nature is perfectible, then “efforts must be made to ‘wake the sleeping virtues of mankind.’” The urgent need for people to “get woke” to the unjust systems we inhabit and “do the work” to deconstruct their ingrained biases is a direct statement of this message. The constrained vs. unconstrained vision also shows up in various gender and sex related issues, particularly the debate between sex-realists and social constructionists—it’s not hard to see how the unconstrained vision is implicit in phrases like “toxic masculinity” which suggests male aggression is the product of socialization rather than something which must be tamed via socialization. It’s also possible to interpret some strands of right-wing conspiracy thinking as expressions of the unconstrained vision: the oppressive systems often cited by the woke left are here replaced by nefarious individuals or identifiable groups, but the overarching belief in a hidden structure that subjugates people remains, as does the call to 'wake up' to the malevolent forces at work.

Epistemology: Rationalism vs. Postmodernism

However, Rick, who I referenced above, suggests that the (relatively) recent epistemological shift toward postmodernism on the “woke left” reveals a more fundamental, underlying divide—one we may have failed to appreciate coming out of a period of broad liberal consensus. Describing this consensus he notes that:

Progressives and conservatives during the liberal consensus, despite what seemed in the moment to be grave differences in world-view, at least spoke the same language. They largely submitted to the same analytical standard, the one bestowed by their common Enlightenment heritage: rational argument from observed facts.

This shift on the left, he argues, has now been met with “a new force” that “has seized and transformed the right: the equally conspiracy-minded, nativist, anti-Enlightenment alt-right.” And that therefore “the deeper distinction now is not between wokists and liberal progressives. Wokism is at odds with both sides of the liberal consensus. Fundamentally it’s wokism vs. liberalism.”

Conclusion

We've explored a few contenders for the "most fundamental" axis driving differences in worldviews—from progressivism vs. conservatism to the constrained vs. unconstrained vision, to rationalism vs. postmodernism—but we haven’t yet discussed contenders for low-dimensional models more analogous to the Big 5. In the Big 5 research, the focus was on finding a small number of axes which more or less spanned the entire personality space rather than on determining a single axis which is the most “important” in the sense of explaining the highest proportion of salient differences in personality and associated behaviors. But even if we approach the question of modeling worldviews with the assumption that one axis is much more important than the others, finding what the others are, (i.e. what directions of difference does the most fundamental axis miss entirely?) is still worth doing.

In my next piece on this topic, I’ll sketch out two ways of conceptualizing the high-dimensional worldview system we’ve been discussing, specifically asking: are worldviews better understood as baskets of beliefs and values that can be combined in countless ways or as branches on a decision tree that narrows possible combinations with each choice? I also plan to discuss how Jonathan Haidt’s work on Moral Foundations relates to this project in a future post. Until then, thanks for reading!

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Particular manifestations of feminism may become popular at certain points in time such that you can predict someone’s views on a diverse array of subjects reasonably well just by knowing they identify as a feminist. But assuming that whatever flavor of feminism is currently ascendant defines feminism in general would be a mistake. There are always pockets of disagreement and when you take a historical view it becomes painfully obvious that feminism is not comprehensive enough to form an entire worldview. Rather, the core feminist beliefs, which I’d summarize as being actively anti-sexist and feeling that reducing sexism is an important priority, are compatible with a wide range of worldviews. 

But then that got me thinking… what exactly is a worldview, or a political ideology, anyways? What are the most relevant dimensions or poles which predict individual views or behaviors across a wide range of relevant situations? What should count as a relevant situation (i.e. what sort of variance across individuals should be explained by their worldview)? And how could we go about investigating these questions without biasing the results such that the answers are predetermined? 

I’m planning to explore these topics in my next free post, and then I’ll finally get back to my promised cataloging of feminist types. But to set the stage, I did a deep dive on the research which resulted in the Big 5 personality dimensions. This research was an attempt to answer analogous questions about personality to those I laid out with respect to worldviews above. And getting a deeper understanding of the approach in what is a relatively familiar example can help motivate intuitions around the purpose of, and theory behind, dimensionality reduction in general1. So, without further ado…

Subscribe now

What is a personality?

We can think of personality as the system which predicts or determines behavior, internal states, and reactions across situations and environments as of some moment in time. We assume at least some aspects of this system are stable, or else that they evolve relatively slowly, since for personality to be meaningful requires that we can, at least to some degree, predict future actions or internal states on the basis of previous knowledge about an individual. Importantly, the domain of personality encompasses how people differ from one another—traits shared by all individuals describe human nature, personality describes human difference2.

So, our conception of personality encompasses internal states, desires, emotions, and behaviors, all of which influence one another. And there are various theories related to the general structure of this personality system, the most well-known of which is probably the Freudian model. Freud emphasized the interplay between forces that shape personality, dividing it into three components: the id, ego, and superego, which represent unconscious drives, conscious awareness, and internalized social and cultural values, respectively.

But regardless of the causal structure underlying personality, our perception of others depends on what we can observe and what they choose to reveal. Raymond Cattell, whose early factor-analytic work laid the foundations for the eventual development of the Big Five model, defined personality as “that which permits a prediction of what a person will do in a given situation”3. 

Subscribe now

While Cattell distinguished between core 'source traits,' which give rise to observable 'surface traits,' and further categorized traits as 'constitutional' (biologically driven) or 'environmental mold traits' (shaped by experience and culture)4, his approach assumed that internal psychological traits, at least those which are most relevant for personality research, ultimately manifest in observable behavior. Therefore, people who know you well are assumed to have insight into your ‘real’ personality traits.

Of course, each person is unique, and therefore, each personality is one of one5. But despite the fact that individual personalities are to some degree irreducible, we can nevertheless observe consistent patterns in how people differ. And over time, we’ve constructed language to refer to these differences, providing us with a rich set of personality-relevant descriptors6. When we say an individual expresses some common trait, we’re intuitively clustering related behaviors, and defining someone as “having the trait” if they exhibit those behaviors more often than most others do.

The Lexical Hypothesis

Since we’re a very verbal species, and since personality is important to us—being able to understand and predict behavior seems very likely to be fitness promoting in a wide range of contexts—we can assume that anything which people see as an important aspect of personality, and along which individuals differ sufficiently, will have been given a name in a personality-relevant term7. This is a core assumption of what’s called the lexical approach to the study of personality, which was the basis for research which ultimately resulted in the Big 5 model. 

The size and density of the vocabulary relevant to personality (or any other category) can therefore provide information about what is most important to us, and differences across languages can similarly reflect cultural differences in focus. The fact that Inuit languages have many more words for snow than do languages developed in more temperate climates, is quite clearly a reflection of the much greater relevance of snow to daily life in arctic environments. This greater relevance justifies maintaining a much more fine-grained set of terms to refer to specific categories of precipitation which can communicate, in a single word, meanings that would require an entire sentence in English8.

Similarly, the finding that a higher percentage of German personality-relevant terms pertain to experiential states, while a higher percentage of English personality-relevant terms describe behavioral states, may point to cultural differences in focus (although this result can also be at least partially explained by quirks in the languages' lexicalization rules)9. Additionally, if you look for synonyms of personality relevant terms, you’ll find that there are more words to refer to certain broadly similar characteristics than others, possibly reflecting the greater salience of those categories.

Searching for the dimensions of personality using factor analysis

But enough with the rough overview of personality theory (which is not at all my area of expertise) and onto the factor analytic approach to studying it. Let’s say we’d like to be more precise and objective about defining and understanding personality. There are at least two broad goals related to this project:

1. Uncovering the most relevant dimensions along which individuals vary significantly, where relevance is determined by the ability to predict a wide range of behaviors across contexts and populations. The more behavior you can explain and the fewer dimensions you need to do it the better. And so, the goal is to find dimensions that are largely independent of one another, so that each brings personality-relevant information which the others have not yet covered. But, if this is to be practically useful you also want the dimensions you uncover to either map on to existing concepts or to reveal implicit concepts which are recognizable, and so some degree of independence can be sacrificed for the sake of interpretability. These will be referred to as personality ‘factors.’

2. Another goal, which is related to but distinct from the first, is to identify personality ‘types’ or common combinations of traits around which some percentage of individuals tend to cluster. You can think about these personality types as revealing identifiable archetypes which many individuals can be slotted into at least somewhat well. The better you can do in terms of categorizing individuals by type and the fewest distinct types you need to do so the better. These will be referred to as personality ‘clusters.’ I’ll explain the relationship and difference between the two goals a little later, although the evidence for personality ‘types’ is far weaker than that for personality ‘factors’.

I’m going to describe how, in working towards the first goal, personality researchers eventually developed and validated the Big 5 factors of Openness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Assertiveness and Neuroticism based on the lexical approach and with the use of factor analytic methods. And I’ll also briefly touch on how this relates to the second goal of understanding personality types or common archetypes.

I won’t delve into the specifics of how to go about performing factor analysis, matrix decomposition, or the particular techniques involved. Instead, I’ll focus on explaining the metrics used to measure personality, and how data was collected, as well as on conceptualizing the goal of factor analysis in this context and discussing some of the parameters relevant to evaluating potential solutions in general.

Personality as a high-dimensional vector space

The starting point is to think about all possible human personalities as residing in a very high dimensional vector space where each actual personality is defined by a single point. Individuals who have very similar personalities will be described by points which are very close to each other in this high dimensional space, while those who have very different personalities will be described by points which are far apart (as defined by, for instance, the Euclidean distance between them). 

We would need a very high number of dimensions to completely define the personality space because there are so many ways in which individuals can vary, some of which are relevant and important to describing most people in a wide range of common situations and others of which are descriptive only for a smaller subset of individuals in a narrow range of uncommon situations. We want to figure out a way of determining which dimensions are most important for describing crucial aspects of most people’s personalities. 

As we’ve already discussed, every individual’s personality is unique to them. But we’re a verbal species and we’ve developed a whole host of adjectives to describe specific characteristics of personality, at least approximately. Each such personality-relevant adjective10 and its antonym can be seen as defining a vector in our high dimensional personality space, where, again, each point in the space is a potential (or actual) individual personality. These vectors define a spectrum between two poles, with each one cutting a line through the personality space, intersecting the origin at the neutral midpoint between the two opposite traits. 

Once again, a core assumption underpinning the lexical approach is that, since the concept of personality is very important to us, we can assume that the set of all personality-relevant adjectives in a well-developed language with a large vocabulary will cover most if not all of what we care about. Therefore, we can assume that the set of vectors defined by these adjective-antonym pairs forms a “spanning set” for the space of personality11. In other words, they will ‘cover’ (almost) all of the high number of dimensions which in aggregate define the personality space, and they will certainly cover the dimensions of personality which are most relevant or salient to us.

The assumption that our language spans the personality space is incredibly important since, if it holds, it provides us with an unbiased starting point from which to search for the most explanatory independent dimensions of personality. If a researcher was tasked with creating a personality questionnaire from scratch or with listing a set of relevant dimensions along which individuals could be ranked, it would be impossible to avoid baking in their personal biases. The questions they’d choose to ask or the dimensions they’d list would reflect their existing beliefs about the core drivers of personality, and so the results of any related analysis would also reflect those beliefs. (Previewing the next piece… if we were to approach the question “what is a worldview?” we’d want to think through what the equivalent of the lexical hypothesis for this application would be.)12

Many of these adjectives will be near synonyms of other adjectives in the set, for instance you could describe someone as being a “diligent” or “conscientious” worker without much difference in meaning. Even if we assume that there are no perfect synonyms, we could nevertheless drop many similar adjective-antonym vectors without losing much in terms of our ability to describe someone’s personality. In addition, some of these adjectives can be defined via a combination of other personality-relevant adjectives—instead of describing someone as “assertive,” you might say they’re “confident” and “dominant”. So, in vector space terms, we’d say that “assertive” can be represented as a linear combination of “confident” and “dominant”.

Below is a visualization of the sub personality space represented by only these five adjectives13:

I’ve represented assertiveness as a vector formed by equally combining dominance and confidence. And I’ve shown confidence and dominance as being related but substantially different. On the other hand, dutifulness and conscientiousness are pointing in an orthogonal direction from the other three terms, representing that they are independent of them.

Technically, while I’m claiming that a linear combination of dominance and confidence covers most of the individual difference described by assertiveness, it probably brings in some additional connotation not fully covered by these two, even when used in combination. So, to represent that, I’ve colored it blue so that ‘blueness’ can be thought of as representing the extra (but probably not very important) dimension which assertiveness brings in and which isn’t already covered by dominance and confidence. Dutifulness is shown as lying along the same direction as conscientiousness, since it’s a near synonym, but since we’re assuming there are no perfect synonyms I’ve once again used red to represent the additional (but probably unimportant) dimension of personality which this term describes.

Since many adjectives are near synonyms to one another or can be adequately described by a combination of other words, as discussed above, we could drop many of the terms in our set of vectors and still have something close to a spanning set. And if we did that for all of the relevant terms we’d be left with a set of adjective-antonym vectors which approximates a basis for the personality space. This implies that the set of vectors span the space but are also linearly independent of one another (such that they cannot be represented by any combination of the other vectors in the set).

Subscribe now

Parsing dictionaries

So where would a researcher who wanted to study personality on the basis of the lexical hypothesis start? With the dictionary! In 1936 Allport and Odbert published their list of 17,953 words “descriptive of personality or personal behavior” from the 1925 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary14. Since personality describes human difference, as mentioned at the outset, they focused on terms that describe and differentiate individuals:

The criterion for inclusion consists in the capacity of any term to distinguish the behavior of one human being from that of another. Terms representing common (non-distinctive) behavior are excluded, e.g., walking and digesting, whereas more differentiating and stylistic terms applied to these same activities, such as mincing and dyspeptic, are included. In many cases the application of this criterion involved a considerable degree of arbitrariness. In deciding doubtful cases the dictionary definition was followed: if in any of its meanings a term might be differentially employed in characterizing personal behavior it was admitted.

They separated these terms into four categories: 

1. Personal traits: Those that “symbolize most clearly "real" traits of personality. They designate generalized and personalized determining tendencies—consistent and stable modes of an individual's adjustment to his environment.”

2. Temporary states: Those that “characterize a person's mood, emotion, present attitude, or present activity (but not his enduring and recurring modes of adjustment)”

3. Social evaluations: Those that are evaluative, which would affect whether we “judge a man as worthy”

4. Metaphorical or doubtful terms: Basically, all those that don’t fit into the three prior categories.

Constructing Cattell’s basis from Allport and Odbert’s spanning set

The first group of Allport and Odbert terms, containing 4,504 words that “symbolize most clearly “real” traits of personality,” went on to form the starting point for the first systematic factor analyses related to personality, performed by Raymond Cattell. His 1943 paper15 describes how two judges—“one a psychologist, one a student of literature”—reduced the original list of 4,504 terms with some additions and subtractions (the spanning set), to 171 trait clusters (the basis), by grouping near synonyms and, where appropriate, their opposites16, comparing their results, and discussing further in the relatively few cases of disagreement:

After the work of classification had proceeded for two or three months it was found that the two workers were converging toward very similar synonym lists, both with regard to the number of categories, which seemed likely to approximate two hundred, and with regard to the disposal of particular words. But it was also found, and particularly where there were disagreements, that the categories in fact sometimes passed continuously one into another, in one or more directions. The term "surface" was thus seen to be more than a metaphor, for in these cases it became necessary to carve the categories by arbitrary incisions out of an area of evenly distributed terms. At this point, the judges and other psychologists were brought together for discussion of the situation. In this way it was usually found that some natural nuclei for categorization suggested themselves and were generally agreed upon, so that finally a single list of categories emerged and one in which everyone agreed on the place assigned to particular words.

They found that the number of synonyms in each category varied significantly, “[f]or example the synonyms clustering about the key word "talkative" numbered 48, those in the category of "frank" numbered 24, and those under "clever" only six.” This variance in the number of terms per category could be interpreted as reflecting the relative importance of each category, if we assume that more words are developed to describe attributes that are most salient to us, or most predictive of other attributes (as with the number of words the Inuit have for snow). Regardless, Cattell notes that: 

[T]hat there are reasons other than utility and necessity accounting for the prolificness of language in particular personality areas is well illustrated by, for example, the perennial coining of semi-slang terms for "intoxicated" and for "impecunious." Having regard to our main purpose, therefore, we decided not to make further investigations of these differences of synonym frequency, considering them irrelevant to the question of factor space.

But while a massive improvement on the more than 4000 terms they started with (assuming this smaller set of distinct terms is still able to more or less span the full personality space), 171 terms is still a lot! So, they collected data from a relatively small sample of 100 individuals, each of whom were rated by an acquaintance as to whether they were above or below average on each of the 171 traits. Correlations across trait ratings were calculated using the resulting data set and these “were set out for inspection on a table 14 feet square” with the aim of identifying commonalities across trait clusters in order to further reduce the set of categories so that larger analyses could be performed in the future17.

As an aside: I encourage you to reflect with gratitude on how the glory of modern computing has saved us all from having to analyze correlation matrices by observing them on giant 14’ square tables!

The final result was a set of 60 clusters, grouped based on the sample of individual’s scores being at least 45% correlated with all other items included in the cluster. These 60 clusters included 147 of the items in the original trait list, and so were assumed to safely cover most of the descriptive space formed by the original 171 terms.

Cattell’s factor analysis

Cattell then used this set of terms to perform a larger survey and factor analysis, the results of which he published in 194518, but had to cut them down once more before beginning to get a relatively manageable set of 35 clusters on which individuals could be ranked19.

Cattell went on to recruit a group of 208 men20 from a variety of backgrounds organized in groups of 16 members each. For each group, two judges, both of whom were longtime acquaintances of the individuals in that group, independently ranked the participants as to whether they were above or below average on each of the 35 trait clusters. This formed the data set for his larger factor analysis, which resulted in the below set of 12 provisionally named factors:

I sure would love to see someone in HR explaining to an employee that they were scored as “boorish” as opposed to as having a “trained, cultured mind” on the workplace personality test.

Subscribe now

Reviewing the objectives of a personality factor analysis

But what are the conditions which we would want a factor solution to ideally meet?

Once again, we can imagine that the range of possible personalities is represented by a high-dimensional space spanned by the original set of adjective-antonym pairs, with each point corresponding to a particular personality profile. The goal of factor analysis is to reduce this high-dimensional space by identifying patterns of correlation among the variables, allowing us to define common sources of variance that can predict multiple related traits.

It's certainly intuitive that many personality traits are related—someone who’s described as ‘talkative’ would often also fit the description of being ‘gregarious’ or ‘friendly.’ While each additional personality-relevant term may add a subtle, independent nuance (since even near-synonyms have slightly different connotations and usages), many terms clearly cluster around the same core trait, as discussed above. 

If you were tasked with choosing just three terms or trait clusters to use which would allow you to describe the maximum breadth of personality differences, you surely wouldn’t select the set defined by: ‘gregarious,’ ‘talkative,’ and ‘friendly,’ because they all point to the same underlying trait: Extraversion, as defined in the Big Five model. (This trait is probably closest to Cattell’s surgency vs. desurgency, labeled as "Factor F" above). Instead, you’d want to select terms that describe distinct and highly salient aspects of personality—traits that are mostly independent of one another—so that each term adds new descriptive power, uncovered by the others.

Therefore, the goal of factor analysis in this specific context is to identify a set of mostly independent dimensions (or factors) which explain as much variance in individual personalities, as measured by ratings on the 35 trait clusters, as possible. These factors should also map onto interpretable, if not pre-existing, concepts related to personality. The hope is that the structure of the correlation matrix derived from the data will reveal a manageable number of distinct personality dimensions21, which in combination are predictive of many more specific traits or behaviors (such that it’s possible to describe a meaningful proportion of individual difference using only these factors), and which correspond to “the 'real' traits or factors underlying the correlations”22.

As I said earlier, I won’t attempt to explain the specific methods used to arrive at factor solutions, but hopefully I’ve clarified the general objectives we’d like such a solution to achieve: it must identify a manageable number of dimensions that span a significant portion of the space, such that they are useful in predicting variance along a wide range of other dependent variables, these dimensions must therefore be mostly independent of one another to avoid redundancy, and they should correspond to real, interpretable unities rather than to superficial or spurious associations that do not represent meaningful shared variance.

Factors vs. Clusters

I want to briefly revisit the distinction between personality ‘factors,’ which we’ve been discussing, and personality ‘clusters’, which I mentioned earlier. Personality ‘clusters’ are distinct from personality ‘factors’ and refer to common combinations of these mostly independent traits that can be identified in various populations, allowing us to recognize personality types relevant to a significant proportion of people. 

We haven’t yet gotten to how later researchers developed the Big 5 model on the basis of Cattell’s factor analysis and trait clusters, but I’ll reference that factor solution since it’s familiar to most people. As mentioned earlier it includes: Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness. Following the description in the 2018 Gerlach et al. paper23, which analyzed several large Big Five datasets to with the aim of identifying stable personality types, one way to think of clusters is as being “centered in regions [of the personality space] where we observe a substantially larger fraction of respondents than expected from a random null model”. 

Even though the factors are largely independent, it's still possible to observe non-uniform patterns in how people’s scores cluster together. For example, imagine that extraversion and agreeableness are almost entirely independent of one another, such that individual scores across a population on these dimensions are uncorrelated, but that among highly extraverted people there are two distinct clusters of those with high vs. low agreeableness. If this were true, the profile of scores on these two axes might create three distinct clusters, such that they could be seen in a plot of (simulated) data meant to reflect individual scores along these two axes24:

The above is for illustrative purposes only, and I won’t delve into personality types or the evidence for clusters which define them any further, but hopefully this helps to make clear the distinction between the search for factors vs. the search for clusters. 

Building on Cattell and validating the Big 5

Cattell later analyzed similar data for a group of male students and was able to largely confirm the general factor structure he had found in his initial study25. He then also extended his analysis to a sample of female students and again found factors which he described as “overwhelmingly similar” to those found in the male data26. 

In 1961, researchers Tupes and Christal re-analyzed two of Cattell’s data sets, as well as two data sets from another researcher, Fiske, who had carried out a similar analysis to Cattell’s in 1949 (but among individuals trained in clinical psychology, with longer assessment periods and with more fine grained assessments on each relevant measure) but the results of which were difficult to compare to Cattell’s27, and four additional sample data sets they collected from groups in the Air Force28. 

They found that “[i]n each analysis five fairly strong rotated factors emerged” which they termed: Surgency (or Extraversion), Agreeableness, Dependability (or Conscientiousness), Emotional Stability (or low Neuroticism) and “Culture” (probably close to the Big 5 Openness factor) which they described as “the least clear of the five factors identified by the eight analyses”, “defined by the variables Cultured, Esthetically Fastidious, Imaginative, Socially Polished, and Independent-Minded”.

This five-factor structure was replicated by Warren Norman in research published in 196329. And later work by Costa and McCrae in the 80s found that self-report questionnaires could also be used to measure Big 5 personality dimensions. To test this they collected self-report questionnaire data from participants in addition to peer ratings on trait clusters (once again validating the five factor structure found by previous researchers) and their results showed that self-reports and peer ratings showed substantial agreement30. Later research has found that the Big 5 measures are also predictive of outcomes across a range of domains including in job performance31, important life events32 and academic success33.

The reason people differentiate the Big 5 as being ‘more real’ or ‘scientifically supported’ relative to other sorts of personality classification methods is because the general model has been successfully replicated across a wide range of sample populations and domains. And the decades of research related to the Big 5 has validated that the lexical approach combined with factor analytic methods appears to have been able to successfully identify stable traits which predict significant variance in personality ratings, behaviors, and outcomes across diverse populations. 

If you’re still with me I hope you enjoyed this long romp through the history of the Big 5, or at least have a slightly improved intuition for the goals of factor analysis in such a context. I’ll be revisiting these concepts again in some upcoming pieces, but until then thank you for reading and if you enjoy my writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, I so appreciate it!

Leave a comment

23

Gerlach, M., Farb, B., Revelle, W., & Amaral, L. A. N. (2018). A robust data-driven approach identifies four personality types across four large data sets. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(10), 735–742. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0419-z

They find four clusters, which to varying degrees map on to those found in earlier research:

The least robustly identified cluster [...], which we denote the ‘average’ type, is characterized by average scores in all traits [...]. The remaining three clusters can be roughly organized along the two dimensions of neuroticism and extraversion. One of the most stable clusters [...], which we denote the ‘role model’ type because it displays socially desirable traits, is characterized by low scores in neuroticism and high scores in all other traits. [...]. By contrast, the two other clusters are characterized by traits that are less socially desirable when compared to the characteristics of the ‘role model’ type. One of the clusters is marked by low scores on openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, whereas the other cluster shows low scores on neuroticism and openness.

The average and standard deviation of scores for individuals identified with each cluster are plotted above, where the letters at the bottom represent Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness respectively.

While we may want assurance that our partner would still love us if we were ugly, or poor, or whatever, we don’t actually expect them to love us no matter what. As I pointed out in my earlier piece: It’s much more common to ask, “would you still love me if I was ugly” than “would you still love me if I was deeply unkind.” Someone who loves you no matter what is completely undiscerning, there’s nothing left of you for them to love and so their love could only be of the impersonal variety. But most of us don’t want that Buddhist sort of “love” from our romantic partner. We want a particular and personal and maybe even a possessive sort of love. And we want our partner to be discerning enough so that receiving their love actually means something. Hence my conclusion that “no, they wouldn’t still love you if you were a worm. But that’s ok, because you probably wouldn’t want to be with them if they would.”

Subscribe now

The tension here is that when we try to list out what makes us, personally, lovable, the list of traits we come up with are things that other people also have, and that many other people have much more of than we do! And the specter of this person, someone who has all the traits that make us lovable and then some, even if we never encounter them, still leaves us ultimately insecure. We don’t want our partner to leave us if they meet someone 20% better than we are, we want to be irreplaceable to them!

We want them to care about us, not only for what we are or what we can do for them, but simply because we are us. Which brings up the topic of my most recent post, where I discuss what makes a relationship non-transactional, differentiating this from unconditional relationships, which, as suggested above, I think are unrealistic and, actually, not even aspirational. In that post I pushed back on the claim that “all relationships are transactional”, differentiating transactional from non-transactional relationships as follows:

What makes a relationship or an interaction non-transactional, or at least not purely transactional, is that you value the welfare of the other person and consider how your actions will affect their welfare above and beyond self-interested concerns at any time scale. In my view, Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” is intimately related to non-transactional relationships.

Where love, as so defined, is present and is acted upon by both parties, the relationship ceases to be transactional. When one has a “will to extend oneself” to nurture “another’s spiritual growth” you have left the paradigm of attempting to maximize what you can personally get out of a series of interactions on a game theoretic basis. You’re now additionally motivated to bring about positive outcomes for the other person, the person who you love.

And after writing this, I started to think that our desire for non-transactional partnership and our non-neutrality around what we want to be valued for are likely connected. In addition to wanting to feel special and secure in our relationships, and wanting our partner to share our values (including in what they look for in a partner), I think we intuit that being valued for these classically “shallow” traits is unlikely to lead to “real love” and that without “real love” we’re likely to remain in a largely transactional relationship.

Basically, I think that we find it harder to imagine that physical beauty, or other “shallow traits”, relative to traits like intelligence or integrity, will generate “the will”, in our admirer or potential partner, “to extend [them]selves for the purpose of nurturing [our] spiritual growth”. And so, part of the reason we prefer not to be loved for our beauty (or other “shallow traits”) is that we don’t really believe that an appreciation of our physical beauty can inculcate the sort of love that we most desire, but rather, is more consistent with being valued in an instrumental way.

So, to summarize, I think that there’s at least three sorts of considerations that affect what we want our partner to value in us: those related to security, those related to our personal and ethical values, and those related to our view of love and transactional relationships:

1. Security: How does what they value us for impact how secure we feel in the relationship? If they value us for traits that we could, or will surely, lose it’s difficult to feel secure in the relationship, and if they value us for traits that are not particularly unique we worry that they’ll leave us if they find someone who has more of those traits (assuming such a person would also want to date them).

2. Values: Do they value us for things that we think someone should value in a partner? Or, relatedly, do they value us for things we value in ourselves? As I wrote in the original piece, we often want our partner “to appreciate, in particular, the characteristics which we are most proud of in ourselves”. And we also want what our partner looks for romantically to be consistent with the goal of building a stable, long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.

3. Love and lovability: Do we believe the things they value us for are things that can plausibly form the basis for a deep and loving bond? And how does that affect our view of how transactional the other person is likely to be in the relationship? I think we intuit that certain traits are both valuable and lovable, while others are only valuable, and we want our partner to appreciate our lovable traits especially because if they don’t, a non-transactional relationship is probably not possible.

Even in the realm of the more legible and objectively valuable traits, we generally prefer to be valued for things that are to some degree a reflection of characteristics we’re proud of and feel are core to us. So we might not want to be valued for money or earning power in and of itself, but we might, at the same time, want our partner to be proud of our career success. Success which we feel is proof of our intelligence, tenacity, personality etc., in other words, which is an external manifestation of our most lovable traits or perhaps of the traits we feel demonstrate our moral value.

After I wrote The Desire to be Objectified, commented:

I’m puzzled by the idea [that] loving for beauty is seen as more ethically suspect than loving for some other trait. [...] Everyone knows that a young man won’t be attracted to an 80 year old woman for purely aesthetic reasons. So why can’t he admit to differentiating between women of his own age and his romantic attraction being based on that? 

And I think I have a better answer now than I did then, so I’ll conclude with that. Women know that men value physical beauty, and there’s nothing pathological about that, however physical beauty, on its own, is an unstable base to build a relationship on because:

• It fades. If your partner’s affection is based on your beauty then why would you expect it to last? How can this be a good basis for a long term relationship? Richard acknowledges that men won’t be attracted to an 80 year old for purely aesthetic reasons, and so to be neutral as to whether your partner loves you primarily for your looks vs. for other, more persistent, traits seems irrational. I think this position makes a lot more sense if you believe that there’s limited correlation between what your relationship is based on when you get married vs. decades later, which is not unreasonable given that arranged marriages can work out very well. But given the way relationships form in our culture I think being neutral to your partner valuing you mainly for your looks would be strange.

• It doesn’t feel core to most people’s sense of self, and so being “loved” for your beauty doesn’t provide the feeling of deep acceptance and understanding that being loved for (what you see as) your more defining traits does. Assuming you think this is a poor basis for a relationship, you might also look down upon people who place excessive weight on physical beauty when choosing a partner, since you think it reflects poor judgment, or at least values which are inconsistent with your own.

• And because, depending on what you mean by love or what you’re seeking in a romantic partnership, you might not think that your beauty, even if you’re aware that it’s something your partner values (or even if you’re delighted that it’s something they value), is a realistic candidate for forming the basis of “real love”. You might not believe that someone appreciating you aesthetically, on its own, is enough to engender the sort of love that you’d like your partner to feel for you. The sort of love that leads them to value your welfare as an end in itself rather than seeing the relationship in more purely transactional terms.

So with that, I’ll just say: whatever you most value in a partner, I hope you find someone who has it, and whatever you most want to be valued for, I hope you find someone who sees it in you.

Leave a comment

Unfortunately, convincing yourself of the 'truth' that “all relationships are transactional” risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy since, as phrased it on a recent episode, “you’re putting yourself in the transactional corner”. And at least in some cases, those who talk about relationships in this way, rather than brutally uncovering a reality most of us are afraid to face, instead publicly reveal how loveless their lives are. But first…

What is a transactional relationship?

Transactional relationships involve ongoing transactional exchanges. And transactional exchanges are interactions in which each party consents to giving up something of value to the other in order to get something of value to themselves. The qualifier ‘transactional’ implies that each party is trying to get the best possible deal for themselves. And it becomes a relationship when you expect to have many future exchanges with the same counterparty. 

While you may be totally self-interested, the ongoing nature of exchanges in a transactional relationship means that being fair to the other party is often rational. We don’t have to have a 100% guarantee that we’ll transact again in order to incentivize cooperation, but the more likely future transactions are, the more incentive there is to not screw the other person over, i.e. to exchange with them in a way that’s beneficial to them as well as to you, taking into account opportunity costs since there are likely other people you each could’ve exchanged with instead. 

Transactional relationships aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, they’re mostly good, and some of them can even look similar to non-transactional relationships so long as incentive structures are well aligned. But the classic examples of transactional relationships are those in which trades are made explicit and which involve money from one party being traded for goods or services provided by the other.

Read more

This is a fair question. While I maintain that feminism is consistent with anti-sexism, including anti-misandry, feminists have, and continue to, primarily focus on issues relevant to women. The feminist project has almost entirely been the result of women organizing, theorizing and writing on behalf of women and about issues that most directly affect women. The fight for women’s legal equality was necessarily a fight focused on the demands of women. And although feminist theory on the restrictive nature of socially enforced gender norms raised issues relevant to both men and women—sometimes even resulting in feminist activism on behalf of men's rights, such as with the push for rape laws which protect men equally—these issues were largely examined through a female lens, and with a primary focus on women. (Ironically, despite feminists being responsible for many of the legal protections men now have against sexual assault, they are nevertheless accused of “not caring enough” about male sexual assault. Who, I ask, cares more than the feminists? Because it certainly doesn’t seem to be the straight men.)

But the focus on women was not random! All that theorizing and consciousness raising was in response to a social environment which, even after granting women equal legal rights, continued to see their rightful role as a supporting one. One in which they would nurture, care-take and ready the stage for others—their husband, their children—to succeed and to pursue their individual passions. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with taking on such a supporting role, in fact the core motivating drive for many women (and many men!) is supporting and bettering their family and community, whether financially or emotionally. But in a culture that is deeply invested in rigid gender roles and reinforces them constantly, taking on such a role wasn’t a real choice for many women.

As an aside, I think the attempt to normalize women prioritizing individual pursuits, and in particular to reduce the stigma faced by mothers who pursued meaningful goals outside of their family, arguably went too far, flipping the script so that we started to react to SAHMs with pity, automatically assuming they’re burdened by ‘false consciousness’. These assumptions only served to devalue the work SAHMs performed and the contributions they made to their families.This ties into what I call the ‘paradox of feminist self selection’, where feminism disproportionately attracts gender non conforming women. These women then struggle to fully recognize or attend to the issues most relevant to the median woman, since they and most of the women they associate with are outliers in terms of personality and lifestyle preferences.

But this is all in the past, should someone like me, in 2024, continue using the gendered term feminist, or adopt a more neutral term, something like anti-sexist? I’m not totally sure. Much of my writing is pretty squarely anti-sexist, not necessarily focused on women as a special interest group. In fact at least a few of my posts “defend men” for lack of a better phrase, or contextualize apparent evidence of women’s oppression in light of what I believe is good evidence for small average sex differences in abilities and proclivities. 

But still, if you went through all my posts you’d likely notice I’m more focused on issues relevant to women, even if my message is sometimes to encourage them to be stronger, or to push back on what I think is an unreasonably uncharitable view of men. This focus is not born out of female supremacism or because I think it’s obvious that women are clearly worse off than men, but mostly because… I’m a woman and so have more to say about things that matter to women. It’s also because a reasonably large portion of the content which informs my views is clearly feminist. It might be that anti-sexist is a better descriptor for my writing than feminist, but beyond my little blog I think there remain reasons to support the existence of a feminist movement, focused especially on how sexism affects women and which articulates women’s concerns.

As I argue in Do be a feminist, if you believe that women’s underrepresentation in business, politics and other centers of power is not wholly the result of explicit discrimination or limiting gender norms, but is related to average sex differences in abilities and proclivities, compounded by the differential demands of motherhood vs. fatherhood, then it seems like you should expect that a movement which identifies and communicates the issues most relevant to women would have social value.

I see myself as primarily committed to anti-sexism. But I think it would be dishonest to reject my feminist identity, not only because my writing on gender issues often builds on ideas and thinkers that almost everyone would agree are feminist, but also because women’s equality seems to me precarious. I see a lot of misogyny and a lot of misandry given the spaces I interact in online. But the truth is that the misogynistic content is more threatening. 

Misogynists can write about why we need to repeal women’s right to vote as if it’s a live issue because it actually is way closer to being a live issue than the reverse. Women were “granted” the right to vote, and implicit in that “granting” is the threat that it could be taken away. People act like it’s absurd to worry about such things, to worry that women’s rights could be rolled back, as if a few decades of legal equality eclipses millenia of subjugation. But it’s not random that women’s freedom was restricted and not the other way around. Men and women aren’t equally at risk of a future in which their liberties are restricted on the basis of sex. And feminists know this just as well as male-supremacists do.

In We Should All be Feminists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie answers precisely this question:

And when asked why use a gendered term, feminism, rather than focus only on gender equality: Some people ask, "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general – but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem should acknowledge that.

I have to agree. Men are physically stronger, sexually less vulnerable, men don’t give birth or nurse babies. Their sexual expression is not limited by the threat of pregnancy, something women have only recently gained any meaningful control over. Men did not historically spend significant portions of their adult lives tied to their babies and therefore vulnerable, and with less ability to produce for themselves, leaving their welfare in large part dependent on whether they were lucky enough to have kind and respectful men in their life. 

Most historical societies have not denied rights to men on the basis of their maleness, have not taken away their agency and given it to their mothers. Have not transferred that agency to their wives, upon marriage to a woman they did not choose and who would feel empowered to rape them when they pleased, because that was was his duty to her, after all. Men have not universally been expected to efface themselves in order to stay in “their place”, a place that supports and enables the goals of others and rarely their own. In other words, patriarchal, not matriarchal, societies have been the norm across diverse civilizations throughout history.

While women in patriarchal societies also reinforced gender roles and the sexist beliefs used to justify the legal and economic restrictions placed on women, it was also women in patriarchal societies who fought for their rights. In some cases at great personal sacrifice, with suffragettes enduring horrifying force feedings in British prisons, and sometimes resorting to militant tactics.

This is not to say that men have generally had it easy nor to claim that gender has been the only or always the most relevant axis of oppression. I’m not going to attempt to do the utilitarian calculus for how bad going to war was relative to childbirth, or how bad men’s working conditions were relative to women’s or to try to determine whether men’s negative relative utility in particular areas justified refusing to grant women liberty.

Of course men, throughout history, were also given limited and often unappealing choices around work and marriage, were expected to perpetrate violence, and were more likely to die a violent death, whether in war or through working in a dangerous occupation along with many other hardships. There were many axes of oppression, class, race etc., which affected both men and women. But it is to make it very clear that men and women do not have equal reasons to fear their liberty being restricted on the basis of sex. And the term “feminism” is, in part, a recognition of that fact.

Leave a comment

We could say it’s “the patriarchy” but what do we actually mean by that? Is it that men demand women perform this Beauty Work? Is it that they primarily value women based on how they look? Is it that women are constantly bombarded with media, advertisements and subtle implications that their beauty is their most valuable asset?

Subscribe now

I think most people would agree that, relative to hetero women, hetero men are less likely to date someone who they don’t immediately find to be physically attractive. Looks are treated as less fungible with other attractive attributes which women bring to a relationship. While a woman might over time warm to seeing a man who she finds physically ugly as a romantic prospect in light of his humor, intelligence etc. this seems to happen much less frequently for men. This point was humorously made by Jared Freid, on an episode of Girls Gotta Eat when he observed that it’s not uncommon to hear women, recounting their early relationship with their now husband or long term partner, say things like “oh, I was NOT into him at first, he wasn’t the kind of guy I’d go for, but he grew on me!”. But that you’ll never hear the same sentiment from a man talking about his wife.

The way I see it is that the average man has an “attractiveness bar” below which he’s

Read more

I can’t remember whether it was the MRA himself who brought it up, but at some point the conversation shifted to discussing gender equality in the West. Nothing all that spicy was said, but my interest level rose when I heard the MRA pushing back, very tactfully and very respectfully, on someone who had made a comment implying it was obvious that women remain disadvantaged here in America. I could tell he was a bit nervous, but he also seemed practiced, as if he’d navigated this minefield many times before, memorizing the most dangerous spots so he could tiptoe around them and reach his conclusion without triggering any explosions. He seemed reasonable, with no hint of the misogynistic anger that is often found lurking just below the surface of MRA talking points.

Subscribe now

After the office hours I introduced myself to him. I told him I was a feminist, but that I agreed it’s not necessarily obvious women are “worse off” than men in the West, or that our society is “unfair” to women. Still, I thought feminism was relevant regardless, and in fact, that many of the men’s issues he was likely concerned about were symptoms of a society which was still struggling with the negative side effects that are part and parcel of a commitment to patriarchal values. He responded that he doesn’t believe we live in a patriarchy in the West, as men aren’t controlling everything or prioritizing men’s interests at the expense of women, even though the term is still relevant for describing many other contemporary societies.

Our conversation was cut short before I could clarify my point, but the interaction led me to reflect on whether using the term ‘patriarchy’ typically contributes to effective communication, particularly when in conversation with someone who doesn’t self-identify as a feminist. Clearly, it’s heavily burdened by cultural baggage, transmitting different images, emotional valence, and content based on who the audience is and what they’ve been exposed to. And, as I’d just discovered, its intended meaning in a given context could easily be misinterpreted. What I was actually trying to say, as I explained later online, was something like: 

Patriarchal values, for example that ‘men need to provide to feel worthy’ or ‘women need to remain sexually pure to be good wives and mothers’, still hold some sway, although much less than in previous generations, in the West. Investment in these values can be leveraged to support rigid and morally weighty gender norms, which can cause harm to both men and women for whom those norms are a poor fit. And, since feminism has been almost entirely a movement of women, with roots in the fight for formal legal equality, the ways in which these norms harm women have been interrogated more thoroughly than have the ways in which they harm men. A movement focused on men’s concerns is not only not incompatible with feminism, but can, in fact, often be supported by feminist theory.

What I did not mean was that “men are running everything” or that “society is explicitly structured for men at the expense of women”. Noticing the distance between what I had wanted to say and what I had ultimately communicated convinced me to mostly abandon use of the term. Rather than lazily using the word ‘patriarchy’ as a catch all, I now generally attempt to more precisely specify the cultural value, norm or trope I’m referring to. 

But the term feminist also carries cultural baggage, and so I also was forced to reflect on what its use communicates to various audiences. I had noticed myself saying “I’m a feminist but…”, immediately jumping to explain how my use of the term likely differed from his immediate association with it before he could respond. A similar observation had motivated me to stop identifying as a Catholic back in my early 20s, after the list of ‘buts’ which followed “I’m a Catholic…” became so unwieldy I had to admit “oh, I’m actually… not a Catholic”. 

But feminism is not like Catholicism. There’s no pope, there’s no Catechism. No one has the authority to baptize you and no one has the power to excommunicate you. There are lots of things feminists disagree on and there have always been lots of things feminists disagree on. It’s not at all uncommon for a feminist to call other feminists anti-feminist if they promote a view she disagrees with. But the thing that makes it a disagreement between feminists is that the disagreement is around whether a particular course of action, or a change in norms, laws etc. would lead to greater gender equality. 

I continue to identify as a feminist, but I think there are plenty of reasonable critiques of what I’ll call ‘mainstream contemporary feminism’ for lack of a better term, several of which I’ve made myself. I don’t know exactly what defines ‘mainstream contemporary feminism’, or rather it’s not easily definable since there’s no particular person or organization which is recognized as its obvious leader. But, by the term, I mean to refer to whatever it is that non-feminists are talking about when they criticize feminism or discuss its effect on our society. I’m talking about the vague sense of what feminism means which emerges from popular culture and from observing commonalities among those who claim to be feminists. I’m talking about the cloud of associated concepts coming out of things like the Barbie movie, MeToo, wage-gap discourse and Captain Marvel (I can only assume, since I would never subject myself to a Marvel film).

One of the most obvious critiques of mainstream contemporary feminism is that the degree to which women have an unfair deal (at least in a Western context) is often exaggerated while men’s problems are diminished. This leads to an overexpansion of scope, where gender analysis is applied far beyond its useful limits, and common human experiences—such as the difficulty of finding a great partner—are incorrectly assumed to be a burden only one gender must bear. Online, and in pop culture, I find that the reasonable recognition that women’s historic struggle for equal rights means that casual use of misandrist language is often less harmful or upsetting to men than misogynistic language is to women, is abused to greenlight demonizing men for fun. 

But, probably most importantly, the cultural changes mainstream contemporary feminists demand are often presented as if they’re zero-sum—men against women, pure sex war—rather than justified by claims that they would benefit society in general. Feminists, it seems, have stopped writing for and speaking to men, stopped trying to convince men, stopped trying to convince anyone, really, who isn’t already in the choir. 

If the term feminist were simply defined as: a person who finds common political cause with most other people who currently call themselves feminists, then it wouldn’t suit me particularly well. And this realization is why some women, like , have simply stopped using the term—just as many men who care about men’s issues might distance themselves from ‘men’s rights’ lest they be associated with angry incels. But this is just not a reasonable way of adjudicating whether someone is a feminist, particularly because there have long been deep ideological differences among feminists. Feminism, relative to men’s rights, has a longer history and a far more developed and diverse literature such that it can’t be boiled down to what any group of people is doing or saying right now.

To get more clarity, I’d like to pull apart the difference between being ‘a feminist’, being a part of a particular feminist movement (of which there are generally several at any point in time based on different and often contradictory ideological premises) and participating in feminist analysis. This is a work in progress, so comments and critiques are more than welcome:

To me, participating in feminist analysis entails analyzing society with a view to identifying the ways in which we’re failing to achieve gender equality, articulating why that failure is a problem, and suggesting ways to change the status quo in the direction of greater gender equality. Gender equality entails that men and women are not subjected to gender based prejudice, whether internalized or external. The precise vision of what a gender equal society would look like, however, will vary widely based on a whole host of other beliefs, which will be the subject of my next post.

Note on 9/14/2024: after writing I realized that the term gender equality, as used here, encourages a focus on “fairness” or tallying up harms and benefits to women vs. men. While this phrase is one of the most commonly used in definitions of feminism, feminists generally want more than simple equality but rather social conditions which liberate women from sexism. I think a better way to phrase this is therefore anti-sexism, promoting a culture where fewer individuals hold and act upon unjustified sexist beliefs. I’ve also added definitions of feminism from various sources below123456.

A failure to have achieved gender equality means more than ‘women are treated unfairly’, although that has most often been the basis for feminist complaints historically. In feminist discourse, this failure more broadly refers to our society being at a suboptimal gender equilibrium. When feminists articulate the ways in which over-emphasizing narrow conceptions of strength as defining of masculinity impacts the degree to which men seek mental health support, for example, they’re participating in feminist analysis. The feminist project is not completed when men can tally an equal number of complaints to those of women, but when gender norms, laws, and relations are serving the interests of women, but also men and society at large without dehumanizing or restricting the liberty of individuals.

Being “a feminist” implies that you think the goal of achieving gender equality (edit - by which I mean ending or reducing sexism), or improving the gender equilibrium, is an important priority—one which informs your political views and how you interpret your own behavior and that of others. (This gets at part of the definition suggests in this piece, and which I’ll come back to, but swaps out advancing women’s interests with advancing gender equality or improving the equilibrium with respect to gender relations.) Being a feminist does not require you to be an activist on behalf of women as a special interest group, even if the vast majority of feminist activism is indistinguishable from that.

The historical position of women legally, economically, socially and politically is why feminism has focused on women, but this focus does not imply a goal to raise women above men, or to harm men on behalf of women. It may be true that some feminists believe men would be worse off if we were to achieve their imagined feminist utopia than men are given the status quo. But other feminists, such as bell hooks, while noting that patriarchy harms women more than it does men, also contend that it does in fact harm men and suggests that men would also be better off in a world with less sexism. Unjustified sexist prejudices are not conducive to happy and healthy heterosexual relationships, something most of us want to engage in, and a world that limits the flourishing of half its members seems unlikely to get us anywhere close to an “optimal gender equilibrium”.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in We Should All be Feminists justifies use of the gendered term “feminism”, which some take to imply female supremacy, despite having a broader goal of gender equality:

And when asked why use a gendered term, feminism, rather than focus only on gender equality: Some people ask, "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general – but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem should acknowledge that.

Note - added italicized text and above quote on 9/14/2024

Finally, being ‘a feminist’ is a more general identity than is being a part of a particular feminist movement. This explains why the most ardent feminists are always arguing, and mostly with one another! What beliefs and goals define the most ‘mainstream’ or high profile parts of the feminist movement will change over time, and it’s not uncommon for the group that’s part of the mainstream to claim other feminist movements are anti-feminist, actually. This can even be a fair claim if by it they mean that the ideas these other feminists promote, which they believe will increase gender equality, will actually achieve the opposite result. But there really are contradictory movements, all of which can rightly claim to be feminist, happening at the same time. We like to separate out “first wave” and “second wave” etc. but within each wave were individual feminists whose beliefs rested on incompatible ideological bases. The result was often bitter infighting, some of which I’ve covered in previous posts with respect to debates around statutory rape, porn, sexual assault and consent.

So how does this framework interact with some recent attempts to define or critique feminism? asks: what beliefs do people who identify as feminists share in common which most other people don’t, and concludes that being a feminist means that you think society is unfair to women. I disagree with this definition and its implications as I discuss in my post ‘Do be a feminist’ but I think Amos does a better job of explaining why that definition can’t work, since it would include individuals who no one would consider to be feminist:

[S]uppose there were a Society of Patriarchs, comprised of evil men, controlling the world, whose job it is to make sure society treats men more fairly than women. Assuming they succeed in this, the patriarchs would believe that society treats women less fairly. By Caplan’s definition, the patriarchs would be feminists. But the patriarchs would not be feminists, because they actively promote unequal treatment.

For this reason, feminism can’t merely be the belief that society treats men more fairly than women. The definition also needs a normative element, saying something to the effect of, ‘feminists find this fact regrettable and support its undoing’.

So, as Amos points out, being a feminist isn’t just about what you believe about the state of the world with respect to sex and gender, but also implies that you advocate for societal changes on the basis of those beliefs. If society is unfair to women, being a feminist requires not only that you acknowledge that fact, but also that you think it is unjustified and that we should push to change it.

As I mentioned above, the things feminists advocate for are generally things that they believe will most directly benefit women, and this is often justified by a belief, implicit or explicit, that women are either worse off than men, or that women are less free than men. As such, feminist activism on behalf of greater gender equality has historically taken a form which looks very similar to activism on behalf of women as a special interest group. 

But while most people who would be motivated to advocate for societal changes which benefit women as a special interest group are motivated, at least in part, by a belief that our society is unfair to women, you can still be a feminist and not hold this belief. As Amos points out, activists who are focused on promoting societal change in order to benefit women but who acknowledge that women aren’t treated unfairly could still be called feminists:

Suppose there’s another world war—I think we’re on our third—and all fighting-age men are drafted. Suppose the remaining adult men are kept at home, but ritually humiliated and beaten for their lack of bravado, and all under-age boys trained in sub-human conditions for the day they’ll eventually be drafted.

The women and girls, by contrast, are treated as they’re treated now. No unjust burdens placed on women and girls are abolished; no new ones are added, either.

In this scenario, the moral priority would be to make things better for the men and boys, and the majority of society’s attention would be on ending the war, the draft, the beatings, etc. But suppose that a group of activists got together who reasoned as follows: “Obviously, society treats men more unfairly than women. But there are still ways that society treats women unfairly. Since almost all the attention is focused on the men’s issues, we are going to prioritize women’s issues, and focus on those in our activism. Abortion, violence against women, respect in the workplace—those are our priorities.”

Question: What would this group of activists be called?

Answer: Feminists, no?

Maybe… if their reasoning is that, as women who have studied women’s issues deeply, they are, as a group, better positioned to focus their activism on women, but also recognize that men’s issues are of higher importance at that time and are glad other groups are focused on them, then yes, I’d call them feminists. But if they opposed ending the mistreatment of men, or were even neutral on solving those issues, they would not be feminists but would be female supremacists (or women-supremacists depending on how they view the importance of sex vs. gender). And in fact, the issues men face in this imagined scenario are precisely the sorts of issues that feminists have a lot to say about, rooted in rigid and traditionally patriarchal (I think its use here is justified!) gender norms.

There are certainly many female supremacists who think they’re feminists, probably most notably, at least for my audience, twitter personality RadFemHitler (RFH). But RFH is no feminist, she’s a bitter misandrist with a great sense of humor and an obvious gift for poasting. We can enjoy her content, but she is rightfully excluded from even the very broad understanding of feminism which I’m attempting to articulate here. The views she promotes are just deeply, deeply sexist.

Note on 9/17/2024: After talking with who recently published a response, I’m less clear on whether RFH, or someone like her, who frequently expresses sexist opinions but also engages with core feminist issues should count as a feminist or not. I think clear expressions of misandry or definitive claims of female superiority are clearly not feminist actions, but Amos successfully made the case to me that this doesn’t immediately disqualify someone from being a feminist. If someone were to speak only about feminist issues, ways in which women are discriminated against etc. and then were to say one single misandrist thing, most people and most feminists would still consider them to be a feminist. But if all they do is misandrist speech, speaking about how men are inferior and essentializing men, they’re not a feminist even if they claim to be. But where to draw the line is not obvious. That said, RFH is not part of any movement within feminism that I would want to be associated with.

In my next post, I’ll outline the axes that I see as most relevant to understanding intra-feminist arguments past and present, supported by some historical examples which illustrate just how obvious it is that a small set of well defined empirical beliefs will not be sufficient to differentiate who is or isn't a feminist. As frustrating as it may be to Bryan Caplan, a belief in gender equality, which is now reportedly shared by almost everyone in the West, is one of, if not the only, legible beliefs which unites all feminists. The presence of this belief alone can’t tell you if someone is a feminist or not, but its absence guarantees anti-feminism. Anti gender equality is anti-feminist. But what you believe needs to be done on the basis of a belief in gender equality is what differentiates feminists from pro gender equality non-feminists.

In a recent post criticized two dogmas which I agree are held to be true by most people who would call themselves feminists today: extreme confidence that women are treated worse than men and only caring about harms to women. I think he’s right on both points, that, at least within an educated coastal social context, women being overall worse off than men is assumed to be obvious (I have a friend who was broken up with for saying he didn’t think upper middle class educated women in the West were overall worse off than their male counterparts) and that feminists seem to only pay attention to gender inequalities that harm women.

I’ll address his critiques more fully in a future post on ‘What Feminists Owe Men’, but if you have actionable ideas around that please share them in the comments. For now I’ll just say that while I agree that prison rape jokes are unacceptable and reveal a greater callousness to men’s suffering relative to women’s, feminists are not the ones making those jokes! Men are! Feminists are actually the ones receiving eyerolls from men, being told we’re too uptight and that we don't have a sense of humor (women just aren’t funny amirite!) when we tell men off for making them. Believe me! That said, I do think feminism needs to do a better job of talking to men and addressing their issues. That belief was one of the reasons I started this blog, so how can I do better?

Subscribe now

Leave a comment