Women and Wokism and Other Unhoused Tangents

First, housekeeping: Please note that this newsletter is now located on my own domain, newsletter.sarahhaider.com, all in order to get past the highly annoying link suppression on Twitter. Hopefully it works, but subscribers might have to log in again using their substack credentials. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Second, I was on Josh Szeps’ podcast “Uncomfortable Conversations” recently, and we covered a lot of things, including my 2020 discussion with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (here) about wokism. Josh seemed to like that I defined “woke” as more of a process than a value system, but I am less sure about that definition now, so we argued about it a bit.

I also blamed the increasing number of women for (at least some) of the ideological shift in elite institutions, although that part might have been paywalled.

You can also catch me making the same argument on the most recent episode of my podcast with Meghan Daum. Meghan thinks that “only women can stop this” (this meaning the various manifestations of wokeism—cancel culture, DEI complex, etc)—and I mostly agree, except that I think they almost certainly won’t. We have to reckon with the fact that this is a politics that suits (or at least exploits) female psychological disposition very well, and this means that we can expect to see a bias towards it everywhere women are in power. It is possible, but I think highly naive to imagine that the same group that is contributing to the growth of something will somehow turn it all around and lead the charge for its destruction.

As it is in our interest to keep women engaged and involved in society—we must get creative in terms of solutions. I think the first step is acknowledging that men and women are not the same, and that our institutions were created to suit the psychologies of men and not women, so it is likely that when women are introduced into the picture in large numbers, some of these institutions can begin to function abnormally—especially those whose “missions” involve practices that are uncomfortable for women. 

For example, a vast majority of the polling of student opinions of free speech that I am familiar with finds that female students are reliably more censorious than males, and have a stronger preference for “diversity and inclusion”. This matters, because women now make up a majority of students and and even bigger majority of graduates—which means that our future elite is going to become more and more female. 

If wokeism is simply a feminization of liberalism, then we cannot approach the problem as simply one of “bad ideas” that have to be “challenged”. Persuasion for the liberal side is going to get harder, not easier, as time goes on.

Bizarrely enough (for me, anyways!) I do see the faint glimmer of hope. In the past, I did not have a working theory as to why institution after institution “fell” to insipid woke-logic, I could not understand how so many seemed to have “found the light” of the new religion simultaneously. Now I think I am closer to a working model, with this being one of the more important legs, so that is some kind of progress. It is possible, in my mind, to create institutions with incentives that counteract natural tendencies of the people in them, or to work with those tendencies in a positive way—much like how capitalism can turn human selfishness into societal progress, if instituted correctly. 

So while “changing minds” sounds very nice to liberal sensibilities, the solution is probably going to involve changing systems.

Subway Masturbators and Radicalized Singles

Lastly, on a totally unrelated note, I’ve been looking into reading more social science published *prior to the 60s*, because it is my understanding that that is when it all went to hell. I would love recommendations, particularly esoteric ones!

That’s all for now. Happy Monday.