Reasons for not moving right like young men

[Warmlight1]

Are women put off the right because of outright boorishness and right wing female Mps who are promoted withing a very constrained patriarchy and consequently end up not making sense? Is it also to do with the ingressing on women's right by the ultra religious?
Are public services more important to women than men? Was specifically female leadership significant in New Zealand during the pandemic and ultimately safer and was that about gender?
Or something else?
Brexit?
Why is there a difference of direction?

It could be that the diffrences were always there, but people felt compelled to deny them as society made attempts to flatten them out in the name of equality.

If you read this paper carefully it becomes clear that the root of the matter is that women are still expected to carry the lion's share of domestic work and childcare, regardless of how much paid work they do. In other words, the actual remaining sexism lurking under the egalitarian legislation. Women may work; but men haven't reciprocated by adjusting the burden at home. (And doesn't Denmark have a notably high rate of domestic violence too?)

The authors are arguing that in a low-tax, low welfare economy, women both can and need to ease this burden by buying in domestic and childcare services and continuing to work/work more hours. So women's careers are less disrupted. Whereas in the high welfare, high tax Nordic economies, she has less available earned money to pay for services, and so doing the domestic/childcare herself, wholly or partly supported by the state, is the more viable option.

In other words, it's not about women's innate preferences, it's about the effects of different economic approaches on what is viable for them.

Also Nordic societies tend to be slightly. flatter in terms of pay etc and have a strong welfare state. They aren't completely equal, there are a lot of billionaires but it's seen as cards to talk about how much you earn etc. Therefore you can choose a job that would be lower status/lower paid with fucking your life or your children's lives up. Mysteriously lower paid or lower status jobs tend to be the ones associated with women. So women have the freedom to choose more stereotypically female roles if they want.

In countries where life is tougher or had been tougher in the past or where there is more emphasis on profession and income as a sign of success you have less freedom to goose what you want to do. Not surprisingly women like men want autonomy and to be regarded with respect

The people bringing this up as a gotcha never want to talk about the pay gap in those countries though in other situations they are keen to portray the gender pay gap as a being natural and a result of women choosing lower paid professions. Actually the fact that women are more likely to choose certain professions when they aren't massively underpaid proves the opposite.

That's a good point. There's still issues in Norway but the welfare state also enables women to take on those kinds of jobs.
Cato Institue of course has a strongly libertarian ethos so that effects their views on Nordic countries.

Sorry to change topic, but Re DV, this is true re Denmark and disturbing. Why ?

It's true for other Nordic countries too.

Some theories as to why : ' This is a result of the paradox of gender equality as manifest in the post-WWII welfare state building project, according to Suvi Ronkainen, a professor at the University of Lapland whose research has focused on sexual violence.

“We do not do open feminist politics,” Ronkainen told openDemocracy 50.50. “Our welfare state wasn’t an open feminist project. It wasn’t even a project for the affirm women’s rights, it was part of nation building.” Ronkainen stresses that any policy development like free daycare, or even abortion, is presented to the family as “pro-family,” rather than pro-women.“Our political arena and the practices within each are such that if you want to do something that could be called good for women, it has to be presented as something that is good for others.”

Women’s equal rights are protected in the public sphere but not in the private sphere, says Paivi Naskali, a professor of Gender Studies at the University of Lapland. “The welfare state has given many rights to women, but this policy has concentrated on the labor market and womens’ ability to participate in working market, not equality in private life,” she said.

As a result, mediation, rather than the judicial system, is still considered the best means of coping with domestic violence. '

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/finlands-paradox-of-equality-professional-excellence-domestic-abuse/

https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/whats-behind-the-nordic-paradox

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795361630140X

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08974454.2021.1905588#d1e1025

Apparently, despite high happiness and wellbeing rankings, Denmark also has high drinking rates and Norway a significant drug (esp ketamine) problem in some areas, so that may be part of it.

Not at all. Women keep striving for better conditions. Do not let division define you.

The Nordics present trad conservatives with a problem. It’s hard to dismiss state provision of childcare as a dire threat to the family, the economy, Western civilisation and so on when the entire Nordic bloc seems to be doing pretty well. In fact, on metrics of productivity and growth, they’re out-performing the rest of Europe.

This, in turn, leaves conservatives with a choice. See the failure of their own model, or find a way to frame the Nordics as failures.

By measuring Scandi economies against solidly American values - the proportion of women in private-sector, big-boss, top-earning positions - the folks at Cato have made a heroic attempt at the latter.

Predictably perhaps, the Nordics perform badly against this metric. Which most Scandinavians, male and female, would welcome. Their whole economies are engineered to prevent the dominance of a tiny rich elite.

So what if Norway hasn’t produced a caste of power-babes? No Norwegian woman has to choose between a job or a family. That’s a far better outcome than the position here, or in the US.

Good point: Arguably Nordic values typically don't frame 'girlboss'/lean in style roles as ideal for either sex. The Law of Jante & similar fit into this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LawofJante

As you note, they astutely framed pro-woman reforms as pro-family. The downside is that this didn't do enough to tackle DV and SA more generally, as they note in the articles, but hopefully this is changing.

I would note though that trad conservatives aren't a monolith. Some welcome more state support for families at least to some extent. And the libertarians at Cato are really not trad conservatives socially at least. In fact they arguably live up to the worst stereotypes of libertarians (that they're a bunch of privileged mainly men who want to do whatever they want) when they profile people like the pimp Maggie mcNeill approvingly as advocates of 'sex work is work'.

Aha, that makes sense. I don't know much about Clark but I like the little I do know of her.

I do partly agree with this (' Maybe because they are women who display more obvious' masculine' characteristics and have leadership qualities' but can I ask : would you then argue that good leadership qualities can only be traditionally masculine ones? Surely some are, I would agree on that.

The right's platforming of women & minorities who are willing to confirm their talking points is particularly effective in terms of role model persuasion & guilt assuagement. The right's weaponisation of such individuals not only provides cover for racism, sexism & homophobia by getting non white, straight, males or females to more convincingly do their dirty work but right leaners can 'sleep easier' with the comfort of knowing 'representatives' of women & minorities agree with them. In other words, their elevation simply performs as a vehicle to maintain the hierarchal status quo.

The very concept of leadership is suggestive of someone who takes command of a situation and directs it ( coded masculine). What might a 'feminine' leadership style look like?

Facilitating a sharing circle? At some point a decision and an action has to be taken, and this can not always be done by a committee. I guess some people might be more attuned to a collaborative style where everyone's view is listened to - but at some point a decisive action or a decision must still be made.

Pimps as “sex workers” - yuck. And no, the religious right wouldn’t like that at all. But what ties them together to hardline liberals like Cato, in the US at least, is the insistence on a small state. Rugged individualism is the glue that holds America together.

Which, of course, is also why - despite their deep ideological differences - both camps are equally offended when women presume to speak for themselves. Neither the small state nor the big church have been a friend to women.

We all breathe man-made air, which is why we imagine that laying down boundaries and taking charge of situations is a male thing. And yet mothers do this every single day, all day long. You can't be an effective carer without the ability to show leadership. I trained as a doctor and have also spent years as a SAHM, & the skills involved are surprisingly alike.

"Femininity", on the other hand - the pose of softness, tenderness, edged about with helplessness - is a time-honoured way to coax men into providing support. I'm not knocking it: in a world where women are blocked from earning, it's a useful skill. Mothers teach it to daughters. But it isn't a female thing: it's an economic thing. It's a pose.

This hurts everyone, but it hurts young women particularly. No wonder they are all so confused and so angry. They can see right through the pink-and-purple girliverse, but they also see that the language of rules and power has long since been co-opted by men. The reality of caring - the toughness of it, the hard-won power that it can hold - is kept hidden away. Nobody, least of all men, wants to acknowledge just how strong women can be.

"Coded masculine" doesn't imply that only men have this characteristic, though. There are plenty of very strong, forthright women who are comfortable with management, directing and leadership. And plenty of men who are not so competent in that way.

I think that ultimately the roots of such societal coding lies in the body and in the biological and physical function: The female genitalia is more internal, not so 'outer directed' or visible; the female body has softer lines, is less muscular and so on; and the female biological function is to carry and nurture new human life, and then feed it after birth. If we look at male and female bodies and functions and then extrapolate qualities and characteristics we end up with societal codes and stereotypes.

Certainly agree that women and men have very different bodies, which creates real difference in their functioning.

By the logic of the second point, though, strong and forthright women would have to possess stiff, out-popping vulvas; gentle men would have floppy, spongy willies. Not sure this measures up to reality.

I think you're correct in that possessing the capacity to nurture new life does shape the capabilities of women. But nurturance is a very, very tough gig.

I was talking about how differences in the body translate into psychological symbolism with cultural resonance. It provides an explanation for the reason that different characteristics and qualities are coded 'masculine' or 'feminine'.

Agree with this.

Great post

Hmm...I see what you mean but what are your implications? That on average men are more suited to leadership? That men on average should take the lead in the family home, not women? Or something else?

'The female genitalia is more internal, not so 'outer directed' or visible; '

• that's true. But should it then follow that on average women should be less outer-directed and visible in public life?

I think you need to be able to distinguish between the origins of symbolism ( included what is coded as 'masculine' or 'feminine') and everyday reality in which we all share in pretty much the full human spectrum of possibility and characteristics. Though it does seem to be the case that males, in general, tend to predominate for certain types of characteristic, and females for others - when it comes to the extremes of expression.

I don't know how many times you want me to explain how symbolism works?
Must you take everything so literally? You seemed to want to understand why some characeristics are coded as 'masculine', and some as 'feminine'.

Can you offer an alternative explanantion Where do you think differentiations between male and female, masculine and feminine come from in the first place?

Cultural resonance is the key phrase here. Culture is a function of power; it varies from place to place. In China, having bound feet once signalled femininity; in the Middle East and Africa, femininity requires circumcision. Neither of these procedures arise from biology. They are the product of cultures that measure women wholly by their price on the marriage-market, and so give women no option but to comply with their standards - and, indeed, to enforce them.

Symbolism and psychology, as you say, shape what humans see. But they change with the humans who are doing the seeing. Physiology, on the other hand, does not. Smudging the former into the latter is the oldest trick in the patriarchy playbook - but these days, it's a trick that persuades only the very young and the very naive.