Coyote Blog

On my first read I found this Substack post from Michael Magoon, "How a Generation of Young Women Moved Left after 2010—And Why" both fascinating and off-putting.  Fascinating because he has crafted a pretty believable theory why Western women -- the free-est, most liberated, most educated, and richest women with the most personal agency in the history of the planet -- have been radicalized towards the Left and particularly to Marxism.

There are a lot of parts to his theory and he shares a good bit of data, but the theory boils down to certain psychological traits amplified via social media.  The article is worth a read -- I think it is firewalled but can be accessed with a free registration.

But, as I mentioned, it was also off-putting, for a couple of reasons.  First, I don't really like robbing individuals of their agency by talking about them in groups, and besides I know a number of young females who don't match these descriptions at all.

More importantly, though, the whole thing felt to me on first read like an ammunition dump for future ad hominem attacks -- eg we don't have to take what you say seriously because you are just another neurotic female.  And really, there is not much need for ad hominem attacks on Left anyway when you see gays for Gaza marching in the streets -- you know right away they are intellectually bankrupt without having to do a Meyers-Briggs on them.  Yes, I realize this somewhat puts me out of touch with the world. After all, the woke/Marxists causing chaos on the Left all absolutely argue via ad hominem attacks on the group (eg you are white/male/cis/American/Christian/Jewish so you are inherently evil and we don't have to respond to you).  As an aside, I always found it ironic that Progressives have so much vitriol for white supremacists when in fact white supremacists are the one other prominent group that shares the Progressive intersectional assumption that an induvial is defined first and foremost by their race and other hard-coded personal traits, rather than their beliefs, arguments, or actions.  The white supremacists share the same fundamental intersection assumption, they just root for a different team.

But I had occasion to think about this article again the other day thanks to the new Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani when he promised New Yorkers he would "replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

My first reaction was what the actual f*ck?  Who could have the benefit of learning from the 20th century and say any such thing?  Was this the warmth of Nazi book-burning bonfires, or of the Soviet Siberian Gulags, or maybe of the tropical Cambodian killing fields?  I and many other greeted this slogan as laugh-out-loud ridiculous.  Give me rugged individualism all the way.

But I had to think again.  This guy got elected out of nowhere, with a resume that included not much more than grad school struggle sessions, so let's assume he is a good marketer.  And then it hit me -- the "warmth of collectivism" is absolutely a precision-crafted slogan for the demographic described in the article above.  If we think of that article as political market research, and if it were correct, then this is exactly the slogan a politician would offer.  Here are a few selected bits from the piece:

Social incentives further amplify vulnerability. Women tend to have higher levels what psychologist call Agreeable. That is women are more likely than other demographic groups to be:

• more socially attuned,
• more sensitive to peer approval, and
• more likely to conform to perceived moral consensus within their networks.

Unlike Neuroticism, which declines with age, Agreebleness increases. In tightly connected social environments—especially digital ones—ideological alignment becomes a prerequisite for social belonging.

Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies offer a ready-made moral identity that signals compassion, awareness, and virtue. Adoption of that identity is rewarded socially, while deviation carries reputational risk. For individuals already sensitive to social threat, the cost of dissent can feel existential rather than merely intellectual.

further

Modern progressive ideology is articulated in terms that resonate strongly with traditionally feminine moral intuitions: care, safety, inclusion, protection, and emotional validation [ed-- the warmth of collectivism]. These values are not inventions of ideology; they reflect real differences in moral emphasis that have been documented across sexes. When an ideology elevates these values to absolute status and frames disagreement as harm, it becomes especially compelling to those already oriented toward preventing suffering and maintaining social harmony.

Taken together, these factors help explain why young white unmarried women are not merely participating in Post-Modern Left-of-Center movements but often occupying their emotional core.

He explains why this can still occur despite women being more empowered and materially secure than ever in history:

In a world where material constraints have loosened but meaning has thinned, vulnerability is no longer defined by poverty or exclusion. It is defined by exposure:

• exposure to threat narratives,
• social pressure, and
• moral systems that convert personal distress into political certainty.

This vulnerability does not predetermine radicalization, but it makes it far more likely when the surrounding environment consistently rewards emotional alignment over skepticism and moral intensity over restraint.

Those of us aware of the disaster that socialism always wrecks on populations see Mamdani selling an obviously failed prescription.  But looked at in the context above, it makes more sense that he is not selling policy, he is selling inclusion and belonging and approval and threat-protection -- essentially the same as a cult with -- come to think of it --the same mass death waiting somewhere at the end.

Prostitution is a person selling sexual services of their own free will.  Trafficking is a form of kidnapping and slavery, when someone is forced to provide sexual services by someone with power over them.

All or even most prostitution is not trafficking, but many in the media and political sphere use these two a synonyms.  I have seen it all week surround the Robert Kraft bust for seeking a private happy ending even before his team played in the Superbowl.   I see this as a victory of traditionally anti-prostitution folks on the Right who have found a way to take advantage of a division on the Left, and specifically a division within feminism, to rebrand prostitution and bring some folks on the Left over to their side.

I am not an expert on feminist politics, but what I do know is the prostitution has created a divide among feminists.  You remember the old abortion chant that feminists wanted the government to keep its laws off their body?  That what a woman did with her body was an eminently private affair and should not be subject to government regulations?  Well, feminists who followed up on this thought in a consistent manner generally supported legalization of prostitution.  Bans on prostitution were seen by these folks as just another example of the male-dominated system limiting women's choices and ability to make money the way they choose.

On the other side more modern feminists see everything through the prism of male power over women.  This is the "all sex is rape" group and for them prostitution has nothing to do with women's free will and everything to do with yet another channel through which men objectify and dehumanize women.  From here it's only a small step to thinking that all prostitution is slavery.  And thus by attempting to rebrand prostitution as trafficking, the Right found new allies on the Left in their campaign against sex work.

Those who read me a lot know I come down on the side of women being able to exercise choice, and I think the only real dehumanizing going on is the denial by modern feminists of any agency among most women.

But real abusive trafficking certainly exists.  How much of prostitution fits this category is impossible to really know as a layman because the media and activists do so much to blur the line in their reporting.  But I will say this:  To the extent trafficking exists, it is not enabled by society somehow being soft on prostitution, in fact it is enabled by the opposite.  By making prostitution illegal, we give unscrupulous people leverage to abuse those in sex work.  Women being abused by men at, say, Wal-Mart have many legal outlets to air their grievances and seek change or compensation -- no one talks about trafficking in Wal-Mart greeters.  But abused sex workers cannot go to the legal system for redress of abuse because they themselves are treated as criminals in the system.  Contributing to this is our restrictionism on immigration.  This is why many real trafficking cases revolve around the abuse of immigrant women, because abusers know these victims have not one but two impediments to seeking legal help.

For a short time 5-10 years ago I thought we might be near a breakthrough in softening the penalties on women voluntarily seeking to make a living through sex work.  Now, my optimism has dimmed.  The success the Right has had in enlisting parts of the Left in rebranding all prostitution as slavery has polluted discourse on this issue and means a lot of women will still be left outside the law.

When Mathew Vassar built the original main building at Vassar college, he made the hallways of this college for women extra wide.  While there is an apocryphal story that he did this so he could later convert the college to a brewery if the whole educating women thing did not work out, the actual explanation is a window on Victorian-era thinking about women.

People of the time were convinced that women were subject to hysteria, and that one way to potentially defuse such hysteria was through exercise.  The extra-wide hallways were so women in their hoop skirts could walk back and forth in bad weather.  (Interestingly, Vassar and other women's colleges also played a role in the early history of baseball, fielding teams for a number of years until men decided that the unseemlyness of women playing sports trumped the fight against hysteria).

Whenever this story is told, we laugh today at Victorians' condescending, even misogynist views of women as subject to hysteria or fainting or the vapors when encountering the slightest bit of stress.

Which is why I never would have believed that it would be 21st century feminists dredging up these old attitudes with fears of "triggering."  Women are once again being treated as if they will get the vapors if difficult topics are discussed in class.  I suppose we are now supposed to leave these to men in the smoking room after dinner?

In the future, historians will draw a line somewhere in the last decade to mark the point where feminism switched from empowering women to treating them like children.

Disclosure:  My wife attended Vassar College and is still convinced the brewery explanation is the correct one.

Massachusetts liberals up the penalties for women (and men) using their bodies in ways the government does not like.   Proving once again that the women's groups' motto, "keep your laws off my body," was in fact a fake libertarianism, aimed at exactly one thing -- abortion -- and nothing else.  Those on the Left who mouthed this slogan seem to be A-OK with regulating consensual sex, salt and soda pop consumption, access to medical procedures, health care choices, etc.

Also, this seems to be yet another law that purports to promote women's rights by treating them like they are ignorant rubes unable to make the smallest decisions for themselves.  The implicit assumption in the law is that all prostitutes are in the profession solely due to male compulsion.  This is consistent with a certain philosophy among feminists that all behaviors of women with which they don't agree are not due to a normal excercise of free will by people who simply have different preferences, but are due to some sort of enslavement by the patrimony.

But one high-priced online hooker said she’s no victim — and she doesn’t know any women who are.

“If you are an escort, you go into it of your own free will,” she said. “Absolutely no one is forced into doing this. You don’t have to be affiliated with any agency. I’m not forced to do anything I don’t want.”

What’s more, the new law’s focus on johns, she said, will hurt her lucrative-though-lawless trade.

“If that’s the law that’s been written, then yes, it’s going to impact business,” she said when read the new penalties.

There is no doubt that some women get into situations where they are abused or forced into work or have a large portion of their earnings taken.  But this tends to be a result of the profession being underground, giving women no legal recourse when they are abused and defrauded.  If one really is worried about women's working conditions, the best thing to do is legalize prostitution, instantly giving them access to the legal system to redress wrongs.