Fake Charity Nerd Girl

Think not that it has escaped the attention of your author that in the two or so years since she left the Bay Area and cast off the mantle of “Bay Area trad girl,” it has been taken up, and in no small way–on the contrary, there seems to be a growing base of support for a sort of trad worldview among the Silicon Valley set.

The chief difference, I think, from the way that I was trad in my youth is that the thing I was reacting to was “hookup culture.” For whatever reason, that was big in the magazines and such at the time in a way that it isn’t today, accompanied by lots of hand-wringing. But more than that I actually experienced it some: not firsthand, but many friends were participants, and seeing its effects on friends and acquaintances was part of what pushed me toward trad at the time.

I think it’s not even quite that I came to think I was wrong about that part of trad (other parts, maybe) as much as it just became less salient to me as I got older and hookup culture became a less common feature of life.

The people involved are older, so it makes sense that the new Silicon Valley brand of trad would be older, too: the depredations it’s reacting to aren’t those of hookup culture but those of serial monogamy. Its tenets:

• contemporary dating culture encourages:
• serial, monogamous, multi-year relationships with no strong expectation of or timeline for marriage
• high expectations and a search for “the one”
• this is dumb
• you don’t need several years of dating someone to know if you’re compatible: if you’re optimizing for finding that out you can do so relatively quickly
• an excess of choices leaves people unsatisfied/always holding out for something better
• serial monogamy norms waste a lot of time and emotional energy
• people are better off, more secure, and more able to build stable connections in a relationship they know is intended for the long term
• therefore people should
• date with marriage in mind
• optimize for determining compatibility quickly and then either get married or break up
• plausibly use a matchmaker, or have arranged marriages

What do I think about all this? I don’t know; honestly it just feels a bit boring to me these days now that I’m out of my trad phase. But it seems probably at least kinda right.

in the same sense that BAP is feminism for men, default friend is the incel movement for women

“we need to bring back arranged marriages because i can’t get a man to commit to me” rhymes with “govt-issued gfs”

hmmmmm fair I think that’s part of what was giving me a weird vibe about this

otoh Moldbug has been endorsing it lately

does bridgerton like, do novel unique things or does it play it totally straight? it seems more popular than i would expect if its latter

I have no idea but god I’ve seen so much discourse about “is this historically incorrect thing in bridgerton due to carelessness or are they doing a bit” discourse

ok honestly I think what they did with Bridgerton is kind of brilliant:

> want to make a high-production-value Netflix miniseries based on a pure guilty pleasure romance novel, the kind whose appeal is ultimately premised on sexism, classism, etc
> remember that it’s 2021 and that might be a problem
> so you make some of the main characters black
> and have one throwaway line in like episode 3 about how by the way King George declared racism over so that’s not a thing anymore
> this is kind of absurd but doesn’t actually detract from the story
> and meanwhile you can still offer pure soap while getting glowing reviews for being progressive

but yeah aside from that conceit there’s really nothing novel. imo it’s just quite well-executed fluff; reminds me of Gossip Girl.

@rosetintedkaleidoscope

anne is wonderful! she’s literally one of austen’s best heroines morally

maybe not the most sparkling but definitely not the least, either (fanny price??)

haha sorry, obviously your opinion is valid too, I just really like this book…

oh yeah, definitely Fanny Price is worse, we can all agree on that.

I think my problem with Anne is not exactly that she’s not “sparkling” but that she doesn’t have any backbone. I was especially enraged by her speech at the end, where one might expect her to realize something like “maybe my elders are fallible and I shouldn’t listen to them 100% of the time,” and instead she comes up with “I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.”

Just like, being self-sacrificing isn’t inherently good; in fact, it’s inherently bad because it involves someone suffering, and is only worth it if you’re creating more value with your sacrifice than you’re destroying. But sacrificing yourself to please your family that sucks is just stupid, and it bugs me that she maintained up until the end of the book that it was the right thing to do.

i don’t actually see it as about self-sacrifice, but as about… idk, taking the outside view? learning from older people you trust?

like, she doesn’t listen to just any elders; she doesn’t trust her father’s opinion the way she does lady russell’s. but lady russell is someone whose judgement she agrees with on many other things. the ability to listen to people who think similarly to you & value similar things (which she clearly sees lady russell as) and learn from their opinions is good!

also like… she was very young! we (well, presumably, idk, maybe you’re super into youth rights) question it when anna gets engaged to a man she just met in frozen (i just saw that movie); is this that different? anne and wentworth had only known each other for a couple months iirc. which is plenty long enough to form an engagement at that time, but… they’re young, and young people do all sorts of stupid things when they think they’re in love, so why should anne be any different, if she tries to look at it objectively? for girls who get married at 19 to someone they passionately love, when their most trusted older friend is against it, and his profession is uncertain and her father threatens to cut them off, what would you guess is the ratio of happy marriages to bad marriages?

the book sets it up so as to give a kind of conflicted message about whether she should have listened or not: on the one hand, there’s the interlude with louisa, where louisa is too willful and gets hurt because of it. on the other hand, the narrative speaks for willfulness in anne’s love story, because lady russell’s fears turn out to be unfounded.

would your opinion on this change if the events in the book actually turned out differently? what if wentworth had died at sea? what if he’d returned alive but impoverished? (we see the epilogue of a similar story where it went badly in mansfield park, with fanny’s mom, and she doesn’t seem happy at all. but maybe anne is a different kind of person, or maybe wentworth is so inherently talented it was inevitable that he’d succeed)

this is not to say that i agree with lady russell, but that i can see why anne listened to her, and why she doesn’t regret it.

(wentworth is DEFINITELY at fault for not coming back as soon as he reasonably could, but i do understand that too)

hmmmm

I guess her speech sounded to me like it was more about some ideal of virtue than about the outside view: eg the mention of “duty,” the fact that her counterfactuals are not “he might have died at sea” or “he might have been poor” but “I should have suffered in my conscience” (if she’d ignored Lady Russell)

buuuuut I definitely like your reading better! 

or I guess maybe the trad thing to say would be that separating these out doesn’t make any sense, and that the entire point of these social structures and rules is to draw on outside-view wisdom to keep young people from making mistakes

anyway, you’ve convinced me, I now feel somewhat more positively toward Anne and this book

@rosetintedkaleidoscope

anne is wonderful! she’s literally one of austen’s best heroines morally

maybe not the most sparkling but definitely not the least, either (fanny price??)

haha sorry, obviously your opinion is valid too, I just really like this book…

oh yeah, definitely Fanny Price is worse, we can all agree on that.

I think my problem with Anne is not exactly that she’s not “sparkling” but that she doesn’t have any backbone. I was especially enraged by her speech at the end, where one might expect her to realize something like “maybe my elders are fallible and I shouldn’t listen to them 100% of the time,” and instead she comes up with “I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.”

Just like, being self-sacrificing isn’t inherently good; in fact, it’s inherently bad because it involves someone suffering, and is only worth it if you’re creating more value with your sacrifice than you’re destroying. But sacrificing yourself to please your family that sucks is just stupid, and it bugs me that she maintained up until the end of the book that it was the right thing to do.

(Disclaimer: Most likely this is all deliberate and I’m just too dumb to understand Houellebecq.)

Houellebecq’s Submission reads like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -style porn parody remix of a much better book. It’s full of really brilliant passages, and has a luminous core about the poverty of modern life and the transcendent power of spirituality; but then like 80% of the book is about the protagonist’s sexual conquests, and the positive power of spirituality and social order is heavily thematically linked to the idea of, like, “how cool would it be to live in a society where you can just force teenage girls to fuck you?”.

I guess you couldn’t get away with dodging the issue of patriarchal sexual control entirely; but the way Houellebecq presents it makes the whole concept of secular anomie and a return to traditionalism seem like a sex predator’s scam.

Which is a shame, because otherwise he had me pretty well convinced!

see I loved this because I felt like it was acknowledging that 90% of lofty arguments on social issues about the poverty of modern life or whatever are actually just elaborate rationalizations for fulfilling someone’s kinks

which doesn’t mean the arguments aren’t beautiful and convincing and they could even be right! but also, come on

I have no idea if this was intentional or not

apparently I wrote about this back when I read the book

(Disclaimer: Most likely this is all deliberate and I’m just too dumb to understand Houellebecq.)

Houellebecq’s Submission reads like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -style porn parody remix of a much better book. It’s full of really brilliant passages, and has a luminous core about the poverty of modern life and the transcendent power of spirituality; but then like 80% of the book is about the protagonist’s sexual conquests, and the positive power of spirituality and social order is heavily thematically linked to the idea of, like, “how cool would it be to live in a society where you can just force teenage girls to fuck you?”.

I guess you couldn’t get away with dodging the issue of patriarchal sexual control entirely; but the way Houellebecq presents it makes the whole concept of secular anomie and a return to traditionalism seem like a sex predator’s scam.

Which is a shame, because otherwise he had me pretty well convinced!

see I loved this because I felt like it was acknowledging that 90% of lofty arguments on social issues about the poverty of modern life or whatever are actually just elaborate rationalizations for fulfilling someone’s kinks

which doesn’t mean the arguments aren’t beautiful and convincing and they could even be right! but also, come on

I have no idea if this was intentional or not

When applying to residencies, there’s a thing called the “couples match,” where you and your spouse/paramour/best buddy can set it up so as to guarantee that you’ll end up in the same city, at the risk of getting into a slightly less prestigious program in their chosen specialties. As it turned out, about half of the couples in my senior year of medical school broke up rather than enter into this match, an especially mind-boggling fact because the gain from breaking up was so small. After all, people graduating from a residency at no-name hospitals can get private practice jobs like anyone else. Going to a prestigious program only makes a difference to the small minority of people looking to practice in academic institutions.

Sidestepping the moral question on abortion for the moment, I think it’s a reasonable inference that the sexual marketplace among young professionals, too, would collapse without easy abortion available as a backstop. Careerism is too brittle and risk averse, and birth control in practice is too fallible, for the kind of risk aversion that young professionals maintain.  To embrace the risk of having a kid and getting your zero-slack professional life derailed is a radically countercultural move - as countercultural as eating vegan, observing the Sabbath, or, apparently, keeping your girlfriend when a slightly more prestigious residency is on the line.

If there was no recourse for accidentally “catching parenthood,” the white collar mating marketplace would be fundamentally upended.  In the best case, replaced by something else, in the worst case, replaced by nothing.  This is probably not irrelevant to the current stalemate on the Abortion Question.

1) I would generally interpret people breaking up in senior year of medical school not to mean that they value the small gain in career prestige over their relationship, but that “doing the match together” is a signal of commitment that one or both parties were not willing to make. Maybe I’m wrong.

2) If you have a contraceptive implant, your probability of pregnancy is 5 basis points per year. (According to the CDC, I haven’t dug into the literature or anything.) That’s like, pretty unlikely. (That makes an implant more effective than abstinence alone given that rape is a thing, according to the extremely back-of-the-envelope calculation I just did.)  If I were listing the top 100 most likely things that might derail my career, I doubt that would make the list. I literally had a discussion with my coworkers about the probability of an earthquake destroying our office two days ago–I spend a lot of time thinking about tail risks–and even I don’t think that’s worth worrying about. (And not to get into sex ed, but if 5 bps does worry you there are lots of great methods you can combine with hormonal birth control.)

Obviously, most women don’t use the maximally effective contraception. But if we’re positing that these ambitious professional women are low-time-preference enough to be driven to celibacy for the sake of their careers, you’d think they’d at least consider some other options first.

WE USED TO MARRY OFF OUR DAUGHTERS AGAINST THEIR WILL AND THEY SELF-REPORTED HIGHER HAPPINESS LEVELS APPARENTLY

And in the least convenient world where women married off against their will are literally happier and healthier, what do you do? Are you only capable of living in a world that does not offend your sensibilities? Must you live in fantasy, forever denying every fact that opposes your dearly held views? For I cannot see how any humane being can look at the world as it stands and not be horrified to the point of despair. But neither despair nor outrage will make the world better.

First you must know the world as it is, in all its horror. Then you must decide how the world should be, fraught with every peril and self-serving trap such involves. And then you must build a bridge from the former to the latter. Your delusions don’t help the suffering. They may help you, to the degree that they’re politically useful and keep you from being ostracized. But that don’t help you figure out how to make the world a better place. So long as you deny the world as it is, your plans to fix it will keep failing to move the world to where you want it to be.

ah so I have agency and it’s cool if I act against other people’s expressly stated preferences if I know it’s for their own good, that’s reassuring and not terrifyingly exploitable at all.

It’s just a protocol that we’ve adopted to solve a problem forced upon us. I don’t see what the big deal is.

mmm okay I’m done actually.

If arranging marriages makes women happier, tell women, “you can marry as you choose and have freedom, or you can marry your parent’s choice and have happiness”. Some people prefer happiness and some people prefer freedom; let each have the value they prefer.

You know, I have been trying to follow this argument as best I can, and I have no idea what it’s about. Near as I can tell, @lambdaphagy posted a graph purporting to show that despite the victories of femminism since 1970, women in the US have become less happy while men have become more happy. Then @argumate said it was stupid to conclude that freedom is bad if it makes women unhappy. Then @inferentialdistance said hey, if we don’t judge freedom by its consequences, then what do we judge it by? And then everyone had a strong opinion on whether people should be thrown into volcanoes, which was a proxy for various policies about the role of women in society, even though no one expressed support for changing any policies regarding the role of women in society.

Maybe there’s some previous argument in which inferentialdistance staked out a position in favor of restricting freedoms on women, and maybe that’s in part what argumate is reacting to. But I don’t see any of that in this recent exchange.

So, inferentialdistance, are you taking a position against any of the freedoms women have gained since the mid-twentieth century?

And argumate, do you have any reason to believe that inferentialdistance wants to roll back any of the freedoms you’re in favor of?

Or should I just go ahead and throw myself into a volcano for even asking this?

I’d like to hop in briefly to clear my plate of this discourse.  I posted that graphic as a pars pro toto for the various ways in which the much-sought “After The Revolution” has failed to materialize.  In doing so I tied this point to the field of happiness research in general, and to one study in particular.  This was a weak move, and I regret it.  It is apparently disputed whether self-reported subjective well being (SRSWB) is even decreasing (per @somnilikes), and it seems that the most methodologically conservative conclusion to draw would be that feminism has not budged SRSWB much one way or the other.  (I’m confident that this compromise that will please everyone.) 

I don’t think that studying SRSWB is completely worthless, but I do agree with detractors in this thread that it is a rather low-fi (and unfortunately bike-sheddy) construct for the thing we’re trying to get at, so consider the point withdrawn.

Since then the thread has spun off into remarkably ahistorical territory, and I admit I have not much kept up with it.  As for what I actually favor, I endorse this post by @samueldays and, even more so, this one by Sarah.

I’m intrigued that both of your links are about the changes in marriage, while when I think about declining female happiness the first thing I think of is the expectation that women be successful both inside and outside the domestic sphere and the extent to which women end up being both full-time workers and full-time homemakers/mothers.

Obviously my perspective is biased by living in an upper-middle-class trad bubble of low divorce rates and high fertility rates.

But like, I reeeeeeally don’t see the case for marital rape being a good thing.

I read the comments on the slatestarcodex article about men being harassed and honestly I am disgusted by the number of anti-SJ people in that thread rationalizing why men being harassed is ~*~less bad~*~

guys, you get to score a point against feminism AND be a decent person? I don’t understand why this is difficult for you?

honestly scott should just close comments on that sort of thread preemptively 

sure, you could score a point against shitty oppositional-sexist feminism-as-it-actually-exists

or you could save your energy for Platonic gender abolitionist feminism, which is certainly less dumb but ultimately the greater threat