Oh fuck no, I am not reading Cathy Young for a rational take on this.

A critique of the theory.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/right-grand-unified-theory-blame-women-helen-andrews-great-feminization

The Right’s New Grand Unified Theory: Blame Women for Everything

www.thebulwark.com/p/right-grand-unified-theory-blame-women-helen-andrews-great-feminization

THE [LATEST INTELLECTUAL BUZZ]is about a Compact magazine essay that boils down to ‘Women ruin everything.’ —is, you could say, the modern-day equivalent of sixteenth-century Scottish preacher John Knox’s celebrated polemic. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women*. But where Knox inveighed against what he saw as unnatural rule by female monarchs, Andrews has a much broader target: the rise in female political and social power in Western societies.

Now listen, that's not to say males are doomed to being limited by their evolutionary roots. Far from it. They can become fully functioning human beings, maybe even active fathers.

I agree we as a species require numerous skills to support survival that's why we are complex adaptable creatures but that doesn't change the fact that crucial to survival is reproduction. All the resource acquirement in the world is of zero importance if the species doesn't replicate.

Now listen, that's not to say females are doomed to being limited by their evolutionary roots. Far from it.

There's a very interesting study on Rhesus monkey's MRA's just love to tell you about you have probably heard where the male & female monkeys were given 'gendered toys' dolls & trucks. Much was made about how the male monkeys exclusively played with the trucks but the females didn't. What they don't like to tell you about is how the female monkeys split their time 50 50 which points to multi skilling of females.

MRA's also make great hay out of women being more likely to be employed in 'caring' professions like nursing & teaching as opposed to more 'technical/thing' based jobs . What they don't seem to understand is both teaching & nursing require elements of both.

All this is to say, 'evo devo' isn't the devil to women's rights you think it is & in fact supports it.

The argument of this article is just misogynistic nonsense. It sounds plausible, but it’s merely speculation with not much evidence to back it up. It’s also extremely reductive and generalising.

“Cancel culture” is all new and the fault of us women is it? 🙄

what did we call it when men in the past didn’t like someone so had their head chopped off?

Regarding Phoebe W-B — she’s just well-off and well-connected!

"This article is just the evo-devo just so story with a new woke twist."

Look, I totally appreciate "evo-devo" being weaponised against women by the New Right. But by the same token, MRA's weaponise 'socialisation' theory as well when they are only to quick to tell you if it weren't for feminism 'brain washing' women into ambition, women would still be 'contented care takers'.

Bottom line, either way, perceiving women as 'programable robots' at the mercy of culture sans autonomy kinda smells like textbook sexism.

The continuation of the species requires the ability to adapt to build shelters, understand and exploit the environment etc etc.
The knowledge and skills necessary to send people into space has nothing to do with reproduction. Women are whole complex unique individuals.

Survival kinda entails the continuation of the species & that's always been a constant regardless of the environment.

Actually the mind/brain evolved
for survival. What develops the brain is a complex interaction between environment, individual genetics and culture.
This article is just the evo-devo just so story with a new woke twist.

That the body evolved for reproduction & the mind didn't seems naive at best.

The thing is, a lot of those apparently 'feminine' behaviours might stem from female socialisation to be gentle, kind, caregiving - all of which is a direct result of patriarchy. They're not inherently female behaviours. So if their evaluation of wokeness is correct I you could suggest that it is because socialisation hasn't kept up with the progress of legal/financial/workplace equality. That's assuming we take those feminine behaviours to be negative, of course .

Not saying I agree with their take on wokeness; I actually think the generational argument may hold more water. Either case would really require more investigation to prove though.

Ironically the start of the article predicates the beginning of wokeness on the idea that women didn't like being told they were 'naturally' inherently weaker and less capable than men. It's logic is rather circular on that score.

Because those ills as in cancel culture didn't occur in a vacuum. They are essentially a reaction to patriarchal injustices not being addressed. James Damore comes to mind. 'I'm only stating facts' might superficially seem reasonable hence all the sympathy he got but effectively it was attempting to maintain the patriarchal status quo by refuting responsibility for female advancement & making females look emotionally unreasonable.

I'm not justifying cancel culture btw as I wouldn't justify terrorism rather explaining how injustice breeds 'vigilantism'.

I think there's also the production time lag when it comes to course correction. I can't remember who said this, but it was a good point - if there's a casting decision that looks really baffling, look at who was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly two years ago.

So with Captain Marvel, it wasn't just the flaws in the script and concept - they could have got away with that if they'd cast a beloved genre actress like Katee Sackhoff or Michelle Rodriguez instead of Brie Larson, a dour indie actress who seemed to have little interest in the project. Why was Brie Larson headlining? Because she'd been cast two years earlier when she'd just won her Oscar and was the hottest thing going.

So in the nature of things, a terrible film coming out today will probably have been greenlit four or five years ago. Bob Iger could u-turn today and we wouldn't start seeing the results until 2029.

I think what will change things is financial pressures. Even Disney is feeling the pinch. The streaming boom where they hired tons of writers, many of whom weren't very good and many of whom were more interested in being activists, that's over. A lot of the dead wood didn't come back after the writers' strike.

And I don't think pinning everything on the giant effects-laden blockbuster makes sense, because budgets are becoming so bloated it's almost impossible to make a profit. And in the streaming world the big event movie seems to be declining.

Something that puzzles me is the disappearance of unpretentious medium budget films that probably won't be mega-hits but will stand a good chance of making a tidy profit. Detective stories, military actioners, romcoms, cheap and cheerful horror, they've almost disappeared. If I were advising them I'd say, get back to basics.

@SionnachRuadh, re the nepo babies: I find it endlessly tiresome that “famous people” of whatever stripe think that being famous somehow qualifies them to write children’s picture books. There is so much dross now in that field it’s depressing.

I think that was a Critical Drinker thing (when he was on Triggernometry maybe?) - I find he's often very insightful when he does interviews, maybe more than on his own platform.

My go-to example of a writer who's lived the live is Paul Dehn, because in the space of three years in the 1960s he worked on the screenplays for Goldfinger, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Deadly Affair. They're quite different from each other, but as spy movies go, that's a stellar output. I don't think it came out until after his death that Dehn was not only a WWII veteran but was a covert ops man who did assassinations.

I'm not saying we need trained assassins writing films, but a bit of life experience would really show through. I struggle to think of any actors or writers below retirement age (except JKR!) who've come into the entertainment business after experiencing hardship or doing working class jobs. It's mostly nepo babies these days, and it really shows.

Why not?

I think the bigger puzzle for me is how some of the basics of storytelling have been lost. I think part of that is down to political trends, like denying differences between the sexes, but there are some things that genuinely puzzle me.

I was thinking of when Marvel began to introduce young female versions of established male characters, and some worked and some didn't.

X-23 is an example of it being done well, at least in early versions before they started doing dumb things with her, because you could tell they'd thought about the character. A female version of Wolverine, with the claws and fighting ability and regeneration, has visual appeal, but Wolverine is also a very distinctive character with lots of quirks, and they put some work in making her in some ways the opposite of the original. If Logan is the man without a past who can't remember the terrible things he's done, Laura remembers too vividly and can't escape her trauma history. It's an intelligent way of doing a female version.

Of course then they ruined it by trying to make Laura the main Wolverine, which nobody was interested in.

The unsuccessful version I can think of is Araña, not because the books were horrible (I read and enjoyed them), but because the nature of Spider-Man is that Peter Parker is an everyman character, and Anya is also an everyman character, but young and female and Hispanic, and that feels more like checking boxes than having a dramatic contrast with the original that you can use to build up the new version.

I don't have a worked out thesis, but I think the loss of creativity has a few institutional and financial and demographic factors involved. More female representation might be a factor at the margins, and in some specific cases, but even then I'm cautious, because it might be (like Kathleen Kennedy) one specific woman in the wrong job, and the same problems could be caused by the wrong man in the job.

What I really don't believe is that ESG is a major factor. The guys at Kotaku In Action (the Gamergate subreddit) discovered ESG and made it their theory of everything, and it just doesn't work. It might encourage companies to do a bit of performative wokeness, but it doesn't explain why Russell T Davies went so badly off the rails, or why BBC casting directors believe that the UK population is 40% black and 25% gay.

It was trash @HeMann and OP is largely incoherent, and I am cheered by the radical feminist responses.

I thought it was an excellent article. Saddened to see that people on this board are so defensive. Some self reflection is needed after the Filia disasters. But no, that’s not gonna happen