Your three features may help explain sex differences in our volunteers who conduct Bible studies on the topic of addiction.
1) A cause that appeals to compassion for the vulnerable (the care/harm foundation, to use Jonathan Haidt’s expression), tapping into women’s greater average agreeableness.
It is my impression that female volunteers tend to see homeless addicts as vulnerable people; rather than people who have made selfish and terrible life choices. They could be both vulnerable and selfish, but female leaders tend to emphasize the vulnerable and downplay the selfish, terrible choices side of things.
2) A cause that emphasises fearful threats, tapping into women’s greater average neuroticism and risk aversion.
Females seem less inclined to let addicts face the consequences of their actions. Or at least, more likely to have sympathy for them. Men are more likely to see the value in letting a person suffer the consequences of their decisions. This isn't a stark contrast, but men do seem more comfortable with addicts getting some bumps and bruises if that's what it takes to make a change.
3) A cause that offers collective emotional experiences, given that women are more vulnerable to social contagion, and particularly to outbreaks of mass hysteria.
Females seem to be more impressed by and worried about trauma and secondary trauma in addicts and in their stories. They more likely to say they feel exhausted, drained, or secondarily traumatized after a Bible study. Men are less likely to say they need to process or debrief after a Bible study.
I could be totally wrong. And I might just be an insensitive man who isn't in touch with his feelings.
Interesting. I think you can expand this to health care more broadly, a majority female field. In the U.S., the "Harm-reduction" movement perfectly overlaps with Haidt's Care Foundation. We so desperately want to shield you from harm that we actually enable folks struggling with addiction.
Just as we can become zealots for a political party, I think we can become zealots for moral intuitions- taking our desire to care for the vulnerable too far...
I don't think women are innately left wing. As Louise mentions, women were big fans of the Nazi party. I do think that women are innately much more aware of what the prevailing acceptable ideology is according to the high-status people, and in the past few decades that has been left-wing progressivism. We learn as little girls not to question what the popular girls dictate; if you find yourself at odds with the "queen bee" in third grade you will find yourself being shunned and no one will sit with you at lunch. So as adults, if the popular people (celebrities, journalists, "smart" people with Ph.Ds, etc.) say absurd things, we know it is best to agree with them.
Women have always been the main enforcers of whatever the prevailing mores are. The women in 1692 Salem had no qualms about accusing their neighbors of witchcraft; and ladies were the main enforcers of Victorian rules of decorum and morality. In the 19th century American Western settlements, where women were very few in number, the madam of the local whorehouse was often a respected and influential member of the community - but back East, madams were shunned by the respectable ladies and kept out of polite society.
While women are not innately left-wing, we probably are much more susceptible to the current left-wing victimhood ideology.
Men, in general, seem to be hard-wired to not want to appear to be weak or a victim. It's distasteful; no one wants to be THAT guy. In a group of men, no one respects the weak guy who is complaining and whining about things. I notice that my male mountain bike buddies are fine with a not-very-skilled rider showing up for our group rides as long as he doesn't complain and is trying; but if a rider keeps complaining that the trails are too hard or the pace is too fast he is not going to be accepted by the group.
However, a lot of female bonding is done via complaining about things. In fact, it never goes over well to overtly appear to be significantly better at something than the other women. On men's sports teams, the captain is usually the best player - but on women's sports teams that is not generally the case, and in fact the best player often is the least popular member of the team. So I suspect women are hard-wired to be much more tolerant of people claiming to be victims, and our higher empathy and motherly instincts lead us to feel upset on their behalf. And unlike men, we don't find the idea of being a victim to be particularly distasteful or dishonorable.
When you combine that empathy for victims with the fact that progressivism is the prevailing ideology amongst the elites (aka the cool girls), you end up with a lot of
Well yes. Except I think you are missing the key distinction today. It's non-married women who are innately left wing. When you control for marriage, the differences between male and female, while still statistically significant, don't diverge to such an extent. What is driving female leftism is the fact that they are not married. Unmarried women are the issue. Not women.
I have a pet theory that it is being childless rather than being unmarried that is the causal factor. The two are no doubt correlated. Your article turns on the idea that men and women who cohabit will better understand each other and that deradicalizes women. My theory is that when women have children their own children become the focus of their empathy / caring etc - in effect, wokeism is a displaced maternal instinct. It is of course possible that both play a role. The are some differences in predictions - the children theory would suggest that women who are in childless marriage are more likely to be left-leaning, while the marriage theory implies there will be no difference between married women w or w/o children. I don't know if there is survey data that breaks out by # of children in addition to sex.
One obvious source is the voting habits of the various demographic groups. Out of married men, married women, single men, single women, the only group that Kamala won in America was unmarried women (source AP VoteCast and Edison Research)
It’s a Peterson observation that young women who are at their most fertile divert their maternal instincts away from actual motherhood to concern for others.
I suspect feminine politics are primarily a philosophy of extending the rules of childcare to the broader world, as if the broader world consisted of children in need of care as well.
Children are all equally perfect in the eyes of their mother, and merit is not a factor in how you treat them—leaving no room for meritocratic hierarchy.
The pains of a child are felt deeply by their mother, and thus thus the world must be made safe—both emotionally and physically—for those children—and for herself—as a way to defend against their inherent vulnerability.
Children require constant care, and said constant care is not provided by a massive coalition of flawed men putting aside their differences to accomplish a grand goal, such as winning a war—no, a mother needs to find just one or two other women she can trust with the lives of her children. Thus, moral purity is paramount—and this makes women more religious because they need to constantly prove their morality while using the religion to test the morality of other women. So, in feminine politics, virtue tests are endless, and being factual is far less important than signaling your commitment to the beliefs that bind the family together.
By contrast, I think masculine politics are primarily a philosophy of extending the rules of an effective military unit to the broader world. Merit-based hierarchies are critical to success. Pain is unavoidable, and something you must be prepared to both suffer through, and to inflict on others. Morality is negotiable, so long as you can pull your weight and your bad impulses can be channeled towards the enemy. Etc.
A good post, but I would add a few practical points. Young women have been for decades socialized and educated to cultivate a victimhood mentality, to which leftwing politics caters, even as they receive social and practical benefits in settings where young men are often shortchanged (DEI policies). Say what you like about the "manosphere" and "mgtow" podcasters, they have no trouble documenting entitled behavior by young women, and institutionalized denigration of young men.
Sure, but what’s interesting to me is that men have been largely resistant to this propaganda. Partly it’s the anti-male message, but it’s also the package that it comes in.
Good article but Nazism is/was Left wing. I know many nowadays like to call it Far Right but that is only to try to shift the blame from them and their kind.
The 2016 Democratic primaries in the US between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are a very interesting test of this because Bernie was obviously the more left-wing candidate, yet his candidacy was characterized (and often denigrated) as too male. People even came up with dumb terms like "Bernie Bros" and "brocialism."
The actual stats showed that Bernie did very well among young women, but perception is also just as important. All this talk about how the left just naturally repels men, and not just a decade ago, there was this political movement that nearly toppled the mainstream Democrats and there was no issue with getting young men involved.
The key was that Bernie 2016 was leftist without being so-called woke. "Woke" is a purposely nebulously term, but to me, the most universal definition of it is: the utmost prioritization of the self-esteem of certain sub-groups under the guise of political ideology. On the left, this means mostly metropolitan progressive women (many woke issues have undercurrents of their dating concerns), LGBTQ, minorities (though WOC are allowed to say things about MOC that if any white person said them, they'd be called a Nazi). There's also the anti-woke, which is the mirror version of this, except it coddles the hurt feelings of mostly young white guys.
So essentially, if leftism is infused with this wokeness, which means it caters primarily to the self-esteem of women, of course women are going to be drawn to that ideology. And conversely, men will be repelled by it. Self-esteem between the genders is often a zero-sum affair. For example, making women feel great about themselves will likely mean they'll raise their standards for suitable boyfriends and husbands (and vice versa). And we wonder why politics is become gender-polarized.
The support for immigration is more of a byproduct of all this. Wokeism also reflects a Tumblr teenage girl's sense of justice. There is nothing worse than social ostracization for a teenage girl, so there is much sympathy towards outcast minority groups. But these minority groups are also safely at a distance, whether physically or culturally. Such sympathy does not extend to, say, so-called incels, because they more directly affect these women's lives and despite incels' very low social standing, no such sympathy can be granted because of this overt familiarity.
Isn’t there also just the fact that women have a story told by feminism that they were once (and sometimes still are) marginalised and oppressed and therefore it is in their personal interest to support the oppression/liberation Left story? Whereas (white) men do not feel that - rather they were/are the oppressors to be liberated from? The generally conservative women in my family still get riled up when the place of women historically is mentioned.
Fascinating history here. You should consider making some version of this public as a warning to those who think that feminine traits can only bring good things.
That said, I'm not sure that wokeness has no appeal to the negative aspects of masculinity. It's certainly been used to justify violence, whether that be the "punching Nazis" trope after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, or the pro-Hamas/anti-Semitic protests after October 7, 2023. (That said, while I don't have statistics to either support or refute this, I've seen enough clips of women being violent in the name of woke causes that I get the sense that the percentage of this violence perpetrated by women is probably at least somewhat higher than for violent crime as a whole.)
I think a better way to look at this is that women are more likely to gravitate towards COLLECTIVISM - which is not a uniquely left-wing phenomenon (cults, Socialism, communes, theocracies, Confucianism, Fascism, Czarism are all collectivist).
Due to being physically weaker and more vulnerable than men, women would naturally prefer the safety that comes with being part of a group (single-sex or mixed-sex), especially if the group is united by a shared moral cause or set of norms, institutions and processes (e.g., a shared religion, culture, government, etc.).
Ironically, collectivist cultures are often terrible to women because horrific practices (e.g., foot-binding, genital mutilation, widow-burnings, etc.) can become normalized through shame, groupthink and an inability to speak up. (Said practices become more likely/prevalent the larger the group gets, because more people -> more possible threats -> more paranoia -> more indirect, feminine forms of bullying and interpersonal competition (e.g., ratting each other out to the patriarchs and/or sabotaging each other's social standing). But I digress.
However, something important to recognize is that the far-left is INHERENTLY collectivist - Leftism, IMO, is the desire to create a peaceful society where anyone may be welcomed in and everyone feels cared for (i.e., "nobody gets left behind"). This inherently entails that every individual person voluntarily sacrifice many of their personal freedoms for moral/altruistic reasons. This is why the line between Democratic Socialism and a Socialist Dictatorship is so thin, and why left-libertarian movements ALWAYS either: 1) fall apart in a short time or 2) evolve into totalitarian regimes like those under Lenin, Stalin or Mao.
The far-right, however, is not ALWAYS collectivist, because it is divided between both Fascists (collectivists) and extreme libertarians (e.g., Vikings, pirates, nomadic warriors, warbands, etc.). Both share a masculine, socially Darwinian worldview - i.e., "Life is difficult; suffering makes you stronger; you must to be strong if you wish to survive; competitive hierarchies (systems which reward success and punish failure) are essential to building large societies and/or fighting off outsiders."
However, the libertarian right is individualistic (individuals act/cooperate only out of personal/mutual self-interest), while the authoritarian right is collectivist ("We must all obey the King/Czar/Fascist Dictator because he cares about his subjects and knows how best to keep us alive").
This is because of both greater male variability and the fact that males are slower to mature/"grow up" than females are. The difference between right-libertarians vs. right-authoritarians is the difference between reckless young males who are socially inept, disagreeable, impulsive, fearless and drawn to risk-taking (young male syndrome) vs. older, 'strict father' figures who can no longer afford to be selfish or risky and must instead focus on keeping the family safe from threats and disciplining his wife/kids so that everything remains stable.
You can visit a typical family where on most issues father and son tend one way and mother and daughters tend the other. Ironically social progress seems to make gender differences more pronounced, or more than we expected in our liberal idealism. The men see issues through structures, ideas, statistics and principles. The women see victims, suffering, and bad actors making everything worse. There should be a balance between the two perspectives but a tilt one way or the other does not end well.
Your three features may help explain sex differences in our volunteers who conduct Bible studies on the topic of addiction.
1) A cause that appeals to compassion for the vulnerable (the care/harm foundation, to use Jonathan Haidt’s expression), tapping into women’s greater average agreeableness.
It is my impression that female volunteers tend to see homeless addicts as vulnerable people; rather than people who have made selfish and terrible life choices. They could be both vulnerable and selfish, but female leaders tend to emphasize the vulnerable and downplay the selfish, terrible choices side of things.
2) A cause that emphasises fearful threats, tapping into women’s greater average neuroticism and risk aversion.
Females seem less inclined to let addicts face the consequences of their actions. Or at least, more likely to have sympathy for them. Men are more likely to see the value in letting a person suffer the consequences of their decisions. This isn't a stark contrast, but men do seem more comfortable with addicts getting some bumps and bruises if that's what it takes to make a change.
3) A cause that offers collective emotional experiences, given that women are more vulnerable to social contagion, and particularly to outbreaks of mass hysteria.
Females seem to be more impressed by and worried about trauma and secondary trauma in addicts and in their stories. They more likely to say they feel exhausted, drained, or secondarily traumatized after a Bible study. Men are less likely to say they need to process or debrief after a Bible study.
I could be totally wrong. And I might just be an insensitive man who isn't in touch with his feelings.
Interesting. I think you can expand this to health care more broadly, a majority female field. In the U.S., the "Harm-reduction" movement perfectly overlaps with Haidt's Care Foundation. We so desperately want to shield you from harm that we actually enable folks struggling with addiction.
Just as we can become zealots for a political party, I think we can become zealots for moral intuitions- taking our desire to care for the vulnerable too far...
Probably
I don't think women are innately left wing. As Louise mentions, women were big fans of the Nazi party. I do think that women are innately much more aware of what the prevailing acceptable ideology is according to the high-status people, and in the past few decades that has been left-wing progressivism. We learn as little girls not to question what the popular girls dictate; if you find yourself at odds with the "queen bee" in third grade you will find yourself being shunned and no one will sit with you at lunch. So as adults, if the popular people (celebrities, journalists, "smart" people with Ph.Ds, etc.) say absurd things, we know it is best to agree with them.
Women have always been the main enforcers of whatever the prevailing mores are. The women in 1692 Salem had no qualms about accusing their neighbors of witchcraft; and ladies were the main enforcers of Victorian rules of decorum and morality. In the 19th century American Western settlements, where women were very few in number, the madam of the local whorehouse was often a respected and influential member of the community - but back East, madams were shunned by the respectable ladies and kept out of polite society.
While women are not innately left-wing, we probably are much more susceptible to the current left-wing victimhood ideology.
Men, in general, seem to be hard-wired to not want to appear to be weak or a victim. It's distasteful; no one wants to be THAT guy. In a group of men, no one respects the weak guy who is complaining and whining about things. I notice that my male mountain bike buddies are fine with a not-very-skilled rider showing up for our group rides as long as he doesn't complain and is trying; but if a rider keeps complaining that the trails are too hard or the pace is too fast he is not going to be accepted by the group.
However, a lot of female bonding is done via complaining about things. In fact, it never goes over well to overtly appear to be significantly better at something than the other women. On men's sports teams, the captain is usually the best player - but on women's sports teams that is not generally the case, and in fact the best player often is the least popular member of the team. So I suspect women are hard-wired to be much more tolerant of people claiming to be victims, and our higher empathy and motherly instincts lead us to feel upset on their behalf. And unlike men, we don't find the idea of being a victim to be particularly distasteful or dishonorable.
When you combine that empathy for victims with the fact that progressivism is the prevailing ideology amongst the elites (aka the cool girls), you end up with a lot of
Well yes. Except I think you are missing the key distinction today. It's non-married women who are innately left wing. When you control for marriage, the differences between male and female, while still statistically significant, don't diverge to such an extent. What is driving female leftism is the fact that they are not married. Unmarried women are the issue. Not women.
I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago https://open.substack.com/pub/louiseperry/p/fraternising-with-the-enemy?r=3j6hy&utm_medium=ios
I have a pet theory that it is being childless rather than being unmarried that is the causal factor. The two are no doubt correlated. Your article turns on the idea that men and women who cohabit will better understand each other and that deradicalizes women. My theory is that when women have children their own children become the focus of their empathy / caring etc - in effect, wokeism is a displaced maternal instinct. It is of course possible that both play a role. The are some differences in predictions - the children theory would suggest that women who are in childless marriage are more likely to be left-leaning, while the marriage theory implies there will be no difference between married women w or w/o children. I don't know if there is survey data that breaks out by # of children in addition to sex.
Interesting observation. Do you have sources for that? Would like to read more
One obvious source is the voting habits of the various demographic groups. Out of married men, married women, single men, single women, the only group that Kamala won in America was unmarried women (source AP VoteCast and Edison Research)
It’s a Peterson observation that young women who are at their most fertile divert their maternal instincts away from actual motherhood to concern for others.
Thank you
I suspect feminine politics are primarily a philosophy of extending the rules of childcare to the broader world, as if the broader world consisted of children in need of care as well.
Children are all equally perfect in the eyes of their mother, and merit is not a factor in how you treat them—leaving no room for meritocratic hierarchy.
The pains of a child are felt deeply by their mother, and thus thus the world must be made safe—both emotionally and physically—for those children—and for herself—as a way to defend against their inherent vulnerability.
Children require constant care, and said constant care is not provided by a massive coalition of flawed men putting aside their differences to accomplish a grand goal, such as winning a war—no, a mother needs to find just one or two other women she can trust with the lives of her children. Thus, moral purity is paramount—and this makes women more religious because they need to constantly prove their morality while using the religion to test the morality of other women. So, in feminine politics, virtue tests are endless, and being factual is far less important than signaling your commitment to the beliefs that bind the family together.
By contrast, I think masculine politics are primarily a philosophy of extending the rules of an effective military unit to the broader world. Merit-based hierarchies are critical to success. Pain is unavoidable, and something you must be prepared to both suffer through, and to inflict on others. Morality is negotiable, so long as you can pull your weight and your bad impulses can be channeled towards the enemy. Etc.
Sounds plausible. Nicely put.
Hitler and wokery. You always come at things in a way that's thoughtful and fresh.
I heard your baby! Perfect article. No notes <3
Love the baby noises in the background!
A good post, but I would add a few practical points. Young women have been for decades socialized and educated to cultivate a victimhood mentality, to which leftwing politics caters, even as they receive social and practical benefits in settings where young men are often shortchanged (DEI policies). Say what you like about the "manosphere" and "mgtow" podcasters, they have no trouble documenting entitled behavior by young women, and institutionalized denigration of young men.
Sure, but what’s interesting to me is that men have been largely resistant to this propaganda. Partly it’s the anti-male message, but it’s also the package that it comes in.
Good article but Nazism is/was Left wing. I know many nowadays like to call it Far Right but that is only to try to shift the blame from them and their kind.
The 2016 Democratic primaries in the US between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are a very interesting test of this because Bernie was obviously the more left-wing candidate, yet his candidacy was characterized (and often denigrated) as too male. People even came up with dumb terms like "Bernie Bros" and "brocialism."
The actual stats showed that Bernie did very well among young women, but perception is also just as important. All this talk about how the left just naturally repels men, and not just a decade ago, there was this political movement that nearly toppled the mainstream Democrats and there was no issue with getting young men involved.
The key was that Bernie 2016 was leftist without being so-called woke. "Woke" is a purposely nebulously term, but to me, the most universal definition of it is: the utmost prioritization of the self-esteem of certain sub-groups under the guise of political ideology. On the left, this means mostly metropolitan progressive women (many woke issues have undercurrents of their dating concerns), LGBTQ, minorities (though WOC are allowed to say things about MOC that if any white person said them, they'd be called a Nazi). There's also the anti-woke, which is the mirror version of this, except it coddles the hurt feelings of mostly young white guys.
So essentially, if leftism is infused with this wokeness, which means it caters primarily to the self-esteem of women, of course women are going to be drawn to that ideology. And conversely, men will be repelled by it. Self-esteem between the genders is often a zero-sum affair. For example, making women feel great about themselves will likely mean they'll raise their standards for suitable boyfriends and husbands (and vice versa). And we wonder why politics is become gender-polarized.
The support for immigration is more of a byproduct of all this. Wokeism also reflects a Tumblr teenage girl's sense of justice. There is nothing worse than social ostracization for a teenage girl, so there is much sympathy towards outcast minority groups. But these minority groups are also safely at a distance, whether physically or culturally. Such sympathy does not extend to, say, so-called incels, because they more directly affect these women's lives and despite incels' very low social standing, no such sympathy can be granted because of this overt familiarity.
Isn’t there also just the fact that women have a story told by feminism that they were once (and sometimes still are) marginalised and oppressed and therefore it is in their personal interest to support the oppression/liberation Left story? Whereas (white) men do not feel that - rather they were/are the oppressors to be liberated from? The generally conservative women in my family still get riled up when the place of women historically is mentioned.
Fascinating history here. You should consider making some version of this public as a warning to those who think that feminine traits can only bring good things.
That said, I'm not sure that wokeness has no appeal to the negative aspects of masculinity. It's certainly been used to justify violence, whether that be the "punching Nazis" trope after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, or the pro-Hamas/anti-Semitic protests after October 7, 2023. (That said, while I don't have statistics to either support or refute this, I've seen enough clips of women being violent in the name of woke causes that I get the sense that the percentage of this violence perpetrated by women is probably at least somewhat higher than for violent crime as a whole.)
I think a better way to look at this is that women are more likely to gravitate towards COLLECTIVISM - which is not a uniquely left-wing phenomenon (cults, Socialism, communes, theocracies, Confucianism, Fascism, Czarism are all collectivist).
Due to being physically weaker and more vulnerable than men, women would naturally prefer the safety that comes with being part of a group (single-sex or mixed-sex), especially if the group is united by a shared moral cause or set of norms, institutions and processes (e.g., a shared religion, culture, government, etc.).
Ironically, collectivist cultures are often terrible to women because horrific practices (e.g., foot-binding, genital mutilation, widow-burnings, etc.) can become normalized through shame, groupthink and an inability to speak up. (Said practices become more likely/prevalent the larger the group gets, because more people -> more possible threats -> more paranoia -> more indirect, feminine forms of bullying and interpersonal competition (e.g., ratting each other out to the patriarchs and/or sabotaging each other's social standing). But I digress.
However, something important to recognize is that the far-left is INHERENTLY collectivist - Leftism, IMO, is the desire to create a peaceful society where anyone may be welcomed in and everyone feels cared for (i.e., "nobody gets left behind"). This inherently entails that every individual person voluntarily sacrifice many of their personal freedoms for moral/altruistic reasons. This is why the line between Democratic Socialism and a Socialist Dictatorship is so thin, and why left-libertarian movements ALWAYS either: 1) fall apart in a short time or 2) evolve into totalitarian regimes like those under Lenin, Stalin or Mao.
The far-right, however, is not ALWAYS collectivist, because it is divided between both Fascists (collectivists) and extreme libertarians (e.g., Vikings, pirates, nomadic warriors, warbands, etc.). Both share a masculine, socially Darwinian worldview - i.e., "Life is difficult; suffering makes you stronger; you must to be strong if you wish to survive; competitive hierarchies (systems which reward success and punish failure) are essential to building large societies and/or fighting off outsiders."
However, the libertarian right is individualistic (individuals act/cooperate only out of personal/mutual self-interest), while the authoritarian right is collectivist ("We must all obey the King/Czar/Fascist Dictator because he cares about his subjects and knows how best to keep us alive").
This is because of both greater male variability and the fact that males are slower to mature/"grow up" than females are. The difference between right-libertarians vs. right-authoritarians is the difference between reckless young males who are socially inept, disagreeable, impulsive, fearless and drawn to risk-taking (young male syndrome) vs. older, 'strict father' figures who can no longer afford to be selfish or risky and must instead focus on keeping the family safe from threats and disciplining his wife/kids so that everything remains stable.
You can visit a typical family where on most issues father and son tend one way and mother and daughters tend the other. Ironically social progress seems to make gender differences more pronounced, or more than we expected in our liberal idealism. The men see issues through structures, ideas, statistics and principles. The women see victims, suffering, and bad actors making everything worse. There should be a balance between the two perspectives but a tilt one way or the other does not end well.
We should be grateful that there is balanced between fanatical left and fanatical right, so we can all slowly and steadily progress into Europistan.