Liberation of Love

TL;DR

My experience is that whatever the Patriarchy is, it's more disorganised than organised, more spontaneous than convened. Patriarchs are decentralised and fully distributed with multiple redundancies, like plant cells, not snake heads.

If my experience was to have the ring of truth, then pound for pound, the single best way to domesticate patriarchy into something progressively benign, would be mate selection. Not an easy task, it is definitely not as simple as being like "well society is patriarchal, high-status males will be the most patriarchal, low status males will therefore be the least patriarchal."

However, I think this intuition of mine, is a paradox of liberty - understanding feminism as women's liberation, I can see this confusing vortex that emerges from the agency & autonomy range of feminism that rules out combating patriarchy through mate selection. 

Because if women are to be free to choose the romantic partners they want, then if they wish to choose a man an the basis of attraction, who has a history and/or predisposition to either or both covert and overt violence against his partners, then to preserve her liberty it is incumbent upon him to deny this part of herself - only then is she free to pursue her hearts desires.

It makes sense to me, but strikes me as...well, fucking stupid IF patriarchy is largely disorganised, which I have a privileged position to observe to be the case. Like, worthy of ridicule, ridiculous. That's what this post was about.

Preramble

I want to disclose up front, that I have my own process of what I call progressive learning - and this process often involves learning that I don't even know what something is. For me that is progress, and it might also be referred to as "unlearning" - like the opposite of a magic eye, imagine staring at a picture until the figure dissolves into static noise. 

This post I'm going to be exploring, not even ideas, I'm going to start with words that hover in a wordcloud around feminism, because feminism is one of those things I've unlearned an assumption that if I say feminism and you say feminism we know what we are talking about.

Feminism is obviously not "just a word" to say "feminism is just a word" would be a deepity. But it's not well defined either. So a few years back, Judith Lucy made a series for our national broadcaster, and in one section she got made up to "pass" as male, in order to sit around a pub talking to men and asking if they were feminist. Judith defined feminism as "a belief that men and women are equal."

That is a definition I can get on board with, but clearly it's not a universal definition. The things I immediately notice, is that it isn't particularly informative - what does "equal"? Mean, what I'd hope, is that if I asked Judith "do you mean equal in dignity and respect? To be equal under the law?" that she'd say "yes, that's right" and I'd be all like "sure" because its true. But she may not, she may hit me with "equal means equal" and I'd be like "you mean literally equal? Like the same thing?" and if she said "yes" to that, I'd have to say "on those terms, then no I'm not a feminist, I think the categories have utility."

And then there's the implied passivity of Judith's definition, I think that men and women are equal therefore I am a feminist by sitting on a barstool, holding a belief in my head to be recalled when questioned by a national treasure comedian and strategic sarcasm reserve, and a beer in my hand. And that part in the documentary, I found hard to credit, largely because by my recollection of the segment, the dressing as a man was a bit of a gimmick, something to do, but I think Judith was trying to prove that a bunch of men don't realise that they are feminists, so there may also have been an implied activity to Judith's definition, because if you believe men and women are equal, why don't you get off your fucking barstool and make it happen in the real world.

However, Judith wasn't really asking these blokes if they were feminists in good faith then, to risk being topical, this is like asking anyone in a NATO, ANZUS, AUKUS whatever alliance country in early 2026, "do you support the Iranian regime?" and what, something like 98% of the population of the free world is going to say "No, come to think of it, I don't support an autocratic theocracy..." fair enough, but it doesn't follow then, that anyone can reasonably conclude from the premise "I don't support the Iranian regime" that they therefore "Think operation 'Epic Fury'" was a good idea worth supporting.

I don't want to pick on Judith either, that show was sincere pap made for a generally crappy broadcaster that is the second best Australia has had for decades behind SBS.

Looking at the word Feminism

Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes.[4][5][6][7][8][9] Feminism holds the position that modern societies are patriarchal—they prioritize the male point of view—and that women are treated unjustly in these societies.[10] Efforts to change this include fighting against gender stereotypes and improving educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women. A person who advocates for feminism is known as a feminist ~ Wikipedia English, "Feminism" page opening paragraph.

All pretty reasonable, and citations out the wazoo. 

The word "feminism" I'm going to hazard a guess predates the Sex-Gender distinction which appears to have been popularized by New Zealand man John Money in his book "Man & Woman, Boy & Girl" in the 1970s, given that the first non-proto but formal feminist appears by wiki-consensus to be Olympe de Gouges, and maybe feminism as a term comes from her 'Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne' ("Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen") in 1791.

Now I don't want to be like one of those idiots who thinks that prior to the invention of colour photography, human eyesight was monochromatic, or prior to Newton's laws of motion, gravity didn't exist. Whatever the Sex-Gender distinction can be usefully applied to, probably predates our ability to draw that distinction in several languages including English. 

I'm not an expert, I acknowledge that there's people who don't believe in a Sex-Gender distinction in terms because men are men and women are women, I've heard them, I know they exist, I've heard their arguments, I'm not compelled by them. I suspect, but don't know, that there might be serious people who take seriously the Sex-Gender distinction from the other direction, suggesting that Sex is nothing, Gender is everything and all of it is performative. But I don't know.

This distinction allows, maybe in the aforementioned "range of social movements" an interpretation of feminism that is not so much "pro-femalism" but simply, pro-femininity. On the gender side, the performativity side, or whatever language may prove necessary for clarity in communication, secondary or tertiary sex characteristics, uncoupled from dependence on primary sex characteristics - the language part I'm going to flounder with.

But feminism has I believe within the scope of interpretation - a position of "it's okay to be feminine" and a discrete specific application of such an interpretation might be "it's okay to wear lipstick."

Here simply would be advocating for "equal validity" of self-expression, but this interpretation creates the problem of categorization - what is feminine? what is masculine? and is that binary sufficient or necessary?

I took a tour of a Pre-Columbian archealogical site in Mexico, and our tour guide mentioned that the society that lived there used to demarkate class-and-or-vocation by hair style. So there's be like the peasant cut and the priest cut. Given how easy then, it would be to forge credentials, who has what haircut would need to be policed. So I think there is an interpretation of feminism that advocates for equality of the expression of femininity, so that women aren't policed into wearing lipstick, while men are policed out of it in order to establish greater and lesser roles in society.

For example, I think of this Iggy Pop meme, discussed here on reddit. I think that while I'm sure Iggy is still  beloved by pretty much everyone, the meme wouldn't be considered up to date, just going by the pictures this seems like a Y2K Iggy Pop, but if there's scope in just the word feminism, the concept of feminism, that would include 'pro-feminine' then Iggy's old meme would be a feminist meme because it's saying 'I'm not a woman, dressing like a woman is fine, women's aesthetics are fine. They are legit.'

And maybe not, maybe such an interpretation of 'feminism' will never rise to the level of social convention, it cannot be interpreted as a pro-feminity movement, but the Venn diagrams of feminism the range of feminism, all has to be inside the circle of woman, with no independence from the gender underpinning the associated behaviours we call in English, feminine. 

In which case, it's a liberalism issue - freedom of self-expression. Your rights end where mine begin and so you can't police my expression of femininity.

The point of all that elaboration and exposition, was hopefully to illustrate the lack of an intrinsic meaning that renders the word 'feminism' as easily intelligible. This is not to make the error of conflating the unintelligible with the unintelligent, my sense is that broadly people 'know' what most people mean when they say feminism, even if on request they discover they can't put it into words. 

But though the unintelligible can be intelligent, like direct experience of phenomena as Susan Sontag and before her Simone Weil argues, it can have this limitation of being hard then to discuss, and hard to establish a shared understanding of meaning.

Before I move on, my best effort to render feminism intelligible, is that a plurality of my friends and loved ones, would expect me to understand it to mean the struggle to render the experience of women (cis and trans) as materially equal to that of men, under a grab-bag of outcomes.

And again, that's approximating a common center with very fuzzy boundaries. My totalitarian friend for example, regard any dedication to men's issues as counterproductive to the point of being anti-feminist, instead of being something more akin to independent like say climate change...and I'm sure more extreme than my friends, there's a unifying theory of feminism and ecology, which would argue that fighting catastrophic climate change and the patriarchy is the same thing, even if most lay people could not connect the dots of necessity between closing the pay gap and restricting global warming to beneath 2 degrees.

The point isn't to mock or ridicule the parts of the range of feminisms that I don't personally understand or even vibe with, nor even to foist upon feminism an etymologically asynchronous burden to promote femininity. Just that there is a range, and it's potentially confusing to those with little realised investment, on a barstool whether we've had the conversation or not.

It's a big feminist world out there.

The Word "Liberation"

Liberation is easier for me at least, to understand, it means to be freed of something. Again though, that's a wide remit, and perhaps the best illustration is the widely used and little understood economic jargon "neoliberalism" or "new-liberalism" which has very little to do with political liberalism, best mapped out in John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" 

No, neoliberalism refers to "the freedom to take production surplus" basically, it used to be if you paid someone to make pies, they earned money through wages and the owner of the oven (bakery) through profit or rent. Let's say the baker makes 10 pies an hour, sells them for a dollar a pie, they sell out every hour, and the baker is paid $8 an hour and the owner keeps $2. (In the spirit of reductive oversimplified economic stories, these are "air" pies that involve no ingredients to be priced in) 

Now the owners all like "what if we upped pie production?" or alternatively "What if we upped the price?" and relax, I'll do both. For a brief period, the "post war" period, if the baker worked an extra hour at the owners request to make 10 more pies and bring in $10 more the only way he'd agree to that was for $8, and by the 70s the additional hour a day may have required $9 extra or even $10 extra rendering the owner's ambition pointless. Otherwise, with a strong bakers union, and possibly even conditions of full employment, the baker could refuse, walk out, have the owner over a barrel.

Or if there was suspected surplus demand, the owner could be like "the price of a pie is going up 10c" and if they still sell out every hour, the baker isn't going to not notice, and again would walk out or quit or whatever unless the owner promptly agreed to increase his wages to $8.80 an hour.

The point being, that prior to Neo-liberalism, economic growth was divided up between capital and labour (to be reductive) a very ahistorical period in the wake of World War II up until the late 70s, 1980s where there was massive social mobility, real wage growth, a growing middle class, increasing home ownership in a lot of nations.

Neo-liberalism "freed" capital to capture the economic growth. It ran programs of deregulation (making more behaviour legal like mergers, creative book keeping, foreign ownership, gig work, sunday trading etc.), privatisation (getting rid of public sector competition not only in the provision of goods and services, but as competing employers), deunionisation and a bunch of other shit.

And again, why it happened and whether even some reform was necessary I believe to be controversial and I don't have the grasp of history nor lifespan to comment on that. What's generally agreed is that real wages have stagnated across wealthy nations since about 1978 and wealth inequality has risen since that time and is now destabalising societies across the world even where in large chunks, the asset class have been successful at pointing the finger at immigrants for people's worsening prospects especially in the face of catestrophic climate change.

So yeah, liberalism as a word, can get very weird in application. So let's finally get into it:

Liberating Love under or over Patriarchy

I now feel confident to start talking the shit I wanted to talk about. But only in a clarity sense, not an authority sense.

See Patriarchy is another nebulous word, ripe for Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical strategies where I'm seemingly having a conversation about a vast conspiracy until I seek clarity, and it turns out we are just talking about a statistical emergent status quo with unknown and undetermined causes.

If you couldn't parse that last sentence, relax, the question of Patriarchy is: "how organised?" and I think this is a valid question worthy of investigation. Personally, while I would never deny aspects of Patriarchy are organized, the 'manosphere' for example, it's not a random collection of podcast clips, their are podcasters producing the content, there's a formula for success, there's target markets, there's a press circuit, there are diplomatic efforts to interfere in the legal status of manosphere personalities.

But I'm overwhelmingly of the opinion, that Patriarchy is mostly disorganised, almost overwhelmingly disorganised. And Patriarchy when it is it's more boring but defensible form of simply describing outcomes that favour men and disadvantage women, is a very big tent that anyone can participate in regardless of sex or gender.

For example, a mother can use her unrivalled access and opportunity to shape her children's attitudes to sex and gender, to raise sexist sons and daughters. Historically, this might have been attributable to a working class Catholic living under a regime where the whole community would deliver a runaway wife back to their husband. If dad came home in his singlet after a whole day grinding pepper at the pepper mill and his daughter Princessa told him that mum had made her brother Machismaximo do the dishes after lunch because there was no such thing as 'women's work' and 'men's work' mother Orthodoxia-Virginia-Sagrada would have got popped in the eye by an arm swol with manual pepper grinding by her husband Cesaro.

But right now in the 21st century, you have mothers doing the modern analogue messaging of "boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses" when they participate in the daughter's body dysmorphia simply by setting the example of dieting, wearing athleisurewear and disposing income on botulism. 

And it takes someone with I don't know maybe a masters in economics, or cybernetics or anthropology or something to apprehend that the indirect consequences of a mother befriending a daughter on the mutual interest in beauty & "wellness" to attain status in intrasexual competition, while simply affirming her son, a relative stranger to her who disappears on weekends into team sports is "very handsome" regardless of how pimply he is, and he could even be reading The Female Eunuch and The Second Sex for recreation, and be creating a consumption-income gap as she raises her daughter to view "preventative botox" as a necessity, and her son just needs enough calories to run out a full soccer match.

Right? It is too hard for me to paint how big this picture is, and all the causal chains, and the presence or absence of malice, specifically misogyny or internalised-misogyny. And I'm not the person to do it, but also not a person tempted to get reductive. 

Disorganised Patriarchy is hard, it is unconscious, emergent, spontaneous in my opinion, it is why depending on the definition of Patriarchy, but taking it as at core, any societal organised around male enforcement of property rights - no non-Patriarchal society has ever been observed or discovered by anthropologists and archaeologists and historians in the history of humanity - whether society was hunter-gatherer, archipelago fishing-based, agricultural settlements, nomadic pastoralist. No exceptions among the ancient river-civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria, China and the Indus valley, not found in isolated tribes of the Amazon, the arctic circle, Australia etc.

So my presupposition is that male-secured property rights is just this simple solution humans gravitate towards to create something remotely stable to organise their lives around, and it could possibly be demonstrated and replicated via some kind of economic game experiment but I'm not an academic. There is a cybernetics (the study of systems, not the building of terminators) principle that in any system whatever component has the most options defacto controls the system. What I take this to mean, is that if you have a bunch of control knobs, and all bar one go up to 10 and one goes up to 11 in its settings, then the "master-knob" even though its effect might be weak, is the knob that goes up to 10. 

And that's what or why I'd guesstimate that patriarchy can crop up regularly in a disorganised fashion (not centrally planned) based on a general relative additional option available to men rather than women, caused by sexual dimorphism (which Chimpanzees share with us but Bonobos less-so) of recourse to violence. Now, I want to stress I'm not advocating a genetic-fallacy argument here, that because that's where Patriarchy likely comes from, therefore Patriarchy is the natural order, therefore good. I am describing what you are up against, if you are up against Patriarchy. A starfish not a snake.

Maybe, maybe among Bonobos, an ape genus we are as closely related to as Chimpanzees but I find books like "Sex at Dawn" dumb with their subtext that we simply chose the wrong apes to most closely resemble, that's not how history happened nor happens.

Now, I've somewhat poisoned the well, but I have no problem coexisting with much louder and much more organised voices exploring the idea that Patriarchy is organised, which is to say, it resembles an organised religion as an institution and can be approached as such. Youtube channel "Breaking Down Patriarchy" has a video "Where does Patriarchy come from?" whose title implies a social-construction premise and another, "Is Male dominance in our DNA?" that I feel, are good enough steel-man explainers on Patriarchy being organised or disorganised from a radical intersectional feminist.

In terms of disorganisation, while religions certainly have played a role in perpetuating Patriarchy, it seems apparent to the naked eye, that Patriarchy much more successfully and efficiently replicates everywhere than the world's major religions that pour tremendous time and energy into replicating themselves and are incredibly inefficient at doing so given they are prone to splintering into sects, and post enlightenment, post Darwin, prone to having to abstract themselves into near secular meaningless to survive coexistence with an education system, or otherwise just see interest and attention dwindle with each passing generation, with each passing year.

There's this entertaining but ridiculous post-apocalyptic movie "The Book of Eli" where Denzel Washington is in possession of the sole remaining copy of the Christian Bible, and he's on a mission to get it to San Francisco where it could be transcribed and replicated, and Gary Oldman needs to capture it because he thinks with it he can seize control of the new world order. 

It is absurd because I think it is impossible at this point to eradicate all copies of the most circulated text in the history of literacy. Even if a nuclear bomb went off in every major city in Continental United States there would be a bajillion copies of Gideon's bible in motel room drawers in the middle of nowhere.

But supposing if, all holy texts were destroyed, and all clergy were abducted by aliens. Some religion would almost certainly be invented in the vacuum I'm sure, people are just wired to be superstitious and solipsistic, but the odds that someone in isolation would ever recreate any of the specific religions we currently have on earth is zero. I assert this because there's only one way Christianity, or Hinduism, or Scientology could be recreated and that is via revelation God would have to send another prophet or incarnate another avatar to repeat what he'd said.

Religions are almost universally received wisdom, based on an epistemology of revelation, not say empirical scepticism. 

If we destroyed all scientific knowledge, which we are doing constantly through the scientific process anyway, but retained the scientific method of discovering knowledge, we would arrive at the exact same conclusions with the only thing changing being time (and accreditations). With science, people will invent powered flight, flying buttresses, submarines, salted caramel again even if we destroy all the recipes. 

And I think, if Patriarchy were to be smashed, it would crop up again spontaneously everywhere and anywhere because its so disorganised.

I am not advocating a resignation to Patri-fatalism, I'm persuaded by the evidence, that scientific progress is cumulative, but moral progress is not, hence why there are an alarming number of people in the world who want to give fascism and like, Stalinism another crack, and such enthusiasms for bad ideas likely correlate to distance from the historical moral lesson measured in time.

(Recently I heard a commentator on the SCOTUS decision to render inert the Voting Rights Act, compare a justice's opinion to umbrellas - where it was asserted that the argument went 'we don't need umbrellas because look we are dry.' having forgotten that we are dry because the umbrellas keep rain off of us. Which I think describes the difficulty of moral progress, if a generation are born under umbrellas they grow up not realising what rain is. Hence we get BIZARRE turns of history like the young left becoming anti-free speech.)

If you will, religions need to be organised, we fucking call them "organised religion" there's a coordination effort to keep the community together and to indoctrinate the young. Religiosity is disorganised I think it exists in the structure of human consciousness, animism is instinctive we recognize patterns even when there are none and attribute motives to unconscious phenomena.

Organised religion is eroded by education, defensively, I haven't done the survey but would guess, that most Christian sermon's try to avoid the subject of cosmology, because when push comes to shove, an indifferent universe will shove intelligent design around like a ragdoll, the evidence is fucking stacked.

And on this front, I think, that the best way to resist and pacify and dismantle disorganised patriarchy as an individual female in this world, is likely to be - via mate selection.

The Fallacy of Division and Composition

I'm just going to pull a bunch of examples of the fallacy of composition off of Wikipedia, because who has the energy?

"Every brick in the wall is rectangular-cuboid-shaped. Therefore, the whole wall is rectangular-cuboid-shaped."

"If someone stands up from their seat at a cricket match, they can see better. Therefore, if everyone stands up, they can all see better."

"If a runner runs faster, that runner can win the race. Therefore, if all the runners run faster, they can all win the race."

 The fallacy of composition is where you make an inference from a component, a part, and apply it to the whole, as you can see above. It's opposite is the fallacy of division and here's some examples of it, again taken from wikipedia because who has the time?

The second grade in Jefferson Elementary eats a lot of ice cream

Carlos is a second-grader in Jefferson Elementary

Therefore, Carlos eats a lot of ice cream

Society may well be patriarchal, but it does not therefore follow that your household is patriarchal, that your classroom is patriarchal, that your relationship is patriarchal, that you are patriarchal. At the same time, if you get on a protestant tract of "doing the work" to root out your internalised misogyny rid your own mind of patriarchy and it doesn't follow that this is the path to society ridding itself of patriarchy - which would be the fallacy of composition.

It is more that particularly in wealthy democratic countries, there is vestigial institutions of the 20th century project of open societies, giving us space to have private lives, personal lives, individual choices.

What I would say is that I have friends that grew up in matriarchal households, I have friends that in adulthood partnered into matriarchal relationships, and much rarer egalitarian partnerships. I have seen relationships that were patriarchal in surprising ways, as in the male dominance of the relationship was attained through things like whining and sulking and having panic attacks.

Suffice to say, there are such a variety of outcomes within the personal power of the individual, that I struggle to imagine a way that personal power could be denied.

I conceptualize it as a kind of "fit your own oxygen mask first" application of that range of feminisms, and while that may seem so obvious that on my part it condesends to the point of mansplaining, but for me an example would be "Men Have Called Me Crazy" the memoir of Anna Marie Tendler ex-wife of comedian John Mulaney who is current husband of Olivia Munn whom Time magazine listed as one of 2025s "Women of the Year"

I have not read, nor intend to read "Men Have Called Me Crazy" because I saw Mulaney's post-rehab comedy special, and had seen his previous special where he did a massive bit on "my wife" referring then to Anna, while presumably he was desperately shoving cocaine up his nose. Like to me its transparent that Mulaney is living at a nexus of bad choices, and his graduation from rehab to fatherhood with a different woman might be a material improvement for him, but does not vindicate him as a great choice made by either Anna Marie Tendler nor Olivia Munn.

But they are free to.

What I did do was listen to an hourlong review of Anna Marie Tendler's autobiography, hoping, nay expecting that it would be a sober reflection by an adult woman on the fucked up situation of having your celebrity coke-fiend husband leave you for another woman to have the child he told you he never wanted - like I was expecting to hear about the memoir of Rebecca from Ted Lasso, instead it was someone who didn't realise their power to live their own life and seems to have had since their 20s a series of relationships with wealthy men as a beautiful peripheral to accomplishment. 

I don't wish to assert that it was, or should have been obvious to Anna Marie that she was making bad choices. I'm asserting that from the outside I'm doing this silent maths that seemingly accomplished men are chasing after the hair and makeup artist not their female peers, and I am fully projecting a more banal setting that would render this more obvious where Ted the CFO is in a relationship with Christine the CTO whereas Bob the COO is always hitting on and taking out to lunch and dating the young female interns. 

I wont deny the existence of fundamental romance that arises from two personalities coming into contact with one another regardless of circumstances, but Anna Marie stands as an example of a pattern of behaviour of buying into the composition of Patriarchy, and perhaps Olivia Munn too who now is possibly bringing her life experience to her role in AppleTV series "Your Friends And Neighbours" 

The odds are stacked, admittedly, against celebrities and subsequently their partners simply because they are desired and in many ways unparrallalled in their freedom to choose the worst partners possible for them.

But Anna Marie, based on the review of her book I watched, allegedly blames men, hates men, for what they have done to her, in a very pronounced way, and as alleged by the reviewer, demonstrates no real evidence she takes any personal responsibility for choices she made in her life. 

Which gives me, what I suspect, is the counter-approach of women's liberation, and I'll use a cartoonish example due to the limits of my ability to express an unintelligible idea like attraction - it is the freedom to date an obsessed failed MMA fighter with cool sleeve tattoos and not have his violence directed at and enacted on you.

Even Steel-Men Rust

The Australian government is currently running an advertising game promoting conversations that each individually "bring us a step closer to a world without child sexual abuse."

Destigmatising taboos around the subject I think is a noble effort that likely will lead to some and maybe even significant reduction in child abuse and exploitation. 

In the Brothers Karamazov, a claim is made that "if God does not exist, then everything is permitted." and I think it is important to just acknowledge that this quotable quote isn't actually an argument for God, certainly not the Christian God Dostoevsky seems to think is the answer to everything he writes about.

In an uncharitable literal interpretation, because humans are bound by the laws of physics, we can infer a God that does not permit us to fly, to build perpetual motion machines, to contravene thermodynamics etc. That God that exists has everything to say about the motion of bodies and nothing to say about morality. 

But more charitably, if we assume that it is referring to what is permissible with respect to morality, then an observer might notice that everything is permitted. At least by god. Not by society.

What isn't permitted generally requires some form of policing, and effective policing at that. Societies have variously permitted or denied divorce, permitted or denied homosexual intimacy, permitted or denied the borrowing of funds for money.

Some things, a society can somewhat effectively forbid - like homicide, on account of forensic evidence once murder can only be got away with by effectively hiding a body, homicides begin being measured at rates per 100,000 population. Other crimes, like fraud are extremely difficult to effectively forbid, because certain types of fraud are forensically identical to a failed business - someone gets a business loan, buys inventory, sells inventory says I can't repay the loan, I have no money, I'm bad at business. Now whether they stole the proceeds of selling the inventory or simply had costs exceed revenue is pretty difficult for investigators to determine.

But even in the case of more forgiving forensic based law enforcement, the difference between reducing the homicide rate of the wild west or prohibition to that of the 21st century, and reducing it from the rate of the 21st century to zero grows exponentially more onerous, we are talking about incredibly intrusive police states to bring about a world in which nobody can ever end the life of a fellow human being, a solution to homicide that isn't even theoretically possible - see Tom Cruise's 'Minority Report' and its exploration of pre-crime.

As such, women being free to love dangerous men, I lack the imagination to steel man. It posits a super-organised patriarchy that has some kind of "good/evil" switch in its back that just needs toggling. It appears to have no basis or foundation in social sciences like psychology, history or literary criticism.

I do not personally understand it beyond a wanton demand, and would analogise it to "I want to fill the executive position with my next of kin (nepotism), but I want to be liberated from the possibility that my next of kin will be incompetent."

It might feel like a strawman, but technically such a demand demands something of the next of kin you wish to elevate through nepotism, like they need to "pull their socks up" to quote Hannah Gadsby and endeavour to pull nepotism and meritocracy together by exerting the effort to not just be the next of kin, but to be the best candidate.

Here enters the "nice guy" made famous as the self-deluded "nice guys of OKCupid" precursors to Incels, but far more normalised. This was in my opinion, an unfortunate cultural observation, and while originally something specific to OKCupid, curated and meeting a specific criteria I think is demonstrated to beyond reproach, contemporary to its moment I had conversations with female friends about the generalised "nice guy" and the unfortune I began to percieve through these discussions.

My original position, was a reasoned one, that "the friendzone doesn't exist" but a confident female friend assured me it was very real, and generally, another's confidence causes me to lose confidence, but in a more involved conversation with a less confident, more open minded female friend, I feel we converged on the friendzone being plausible - something to do with you can risk dating a stranger because if the relationship fails and you become estranged, no loss, whereas if somebody becomes a valued friend, then if a relationship fails and you become estranged, you lose a friend.

I feel this is plausible so long as it remains unintelligible, because the friendzone remains functionally irrational if one thinks that valued friendships can't develop independent of relationship status. For most people what makes breaking up hard is the losing the friend part, often the best friend.

I never sought to deny however, the existence of these "nice guys" they demonstrably existed, and the terminology of distinction was "guys who are nice" vs "nice guys" with the test being how a guy treats people he doesn't want to have sex with. 

Because the nice guys of OKCupid were transactional and entitled. I think, even though the tumblr that was NiceguysofOKCupid was taken down fairly early, the meme was successful, or maybe I just aged out of hearing nice-guy-esque complaints and frustrations.

Believe it or not, it used to be so ingrained that SNL parodied it in the sketch "Not Getting Any" where Michael J Fox and the SNL 'Bad Boys' early 90s cast, seemed to method act the straight male nice guy roles, and probably in the case of 5 comedians that got cast in a life-changing show, they probably didn't do that well in high school or college in the 80s. But such complaints were much more normalised, I think without high school dating dynamics far removed from contemporary ones (although I believe in recent times in terms of dating and romantic relationships, it's never been less available to teenagers than right now, nobody is hooking up.)

Part of this phenomena that has now polarized into a more concentrated fringe of incels, and hollowed out the middle of mildly frustrated guys that crushed on a female friend but never had a relationship or intimate encounter for various reasons, was a credulity gap. It was my speculative theory, that in general guys do try to become desirable to women they are interested in, and part of that involves listening to what women self-report as desirable traits. These self-reported preferences may however, be reported because they are socially desirable, and thus something someone might want to believe about themselves for example, that they are not superficial, that looks don't matter to them.

It may also be possible, that the self-reported preferences were true, but with an implicit caveat - these traits were desirable in men they were attracted to. The difference between "I want a man who is smart and funny" and "I want a man who is tall, smart and funny." Speaking of SNL, Gilbert Gottfried wrote a piece on this exact complication in a PLayboy Magazine Op-Ed "Women Say They Want A Guy With A Sense of Humour. (They Don't)" of which I can't find a link to the original, and maybe Playboy magazine went bust already, but it is written up and broken down with greater complexity on the linked Dr. Nerdlove post.

This is to say, it's hard for me, not to strawman the thesis of liberating women from patriarchy such that they don't have to choose someone to romantically pursue with consideration to their own participation in perpetuating patriarchy as a result of that choice.

Fundamentally, I believe that choice exists. And I speak as someone superficial who has been incredibly choosy about the women I got in relationships with. In my own case, there are women whom I like as a person and am physically attracted to, their are women I do not like as people and am physically attracted to, and their are women I am not physically attracted to but like as people. I pursue the former, ignore the middle and friendzone the latter. 

I also believe that as a male I have been in educational and business institutions where I had the privileged vantage to see female colleagues make bad choices, when there were not creepy entitled unfuckable niceguys, but nice guys available to them.

I am not priveleged to have the vantage of women taking on male partners as an individual renovation project, I only have on hearsay that it is a common cliche to think "I can fix him." But I can certainly relate to it albeit from the opposite gender alignment so find it very plausible.

The liberation this post is about though, is to delegate that renovation project to society. A collective effort to raise men and boys so their are no "fixer-uppers" just as there are no incompetent or sub-par nepo-babies.

Maybe that communal project is possible, but I feel like a reno, it will likely be reversable if not constantly maintained, and the foreman with the most powerful incentive to drag mankind to this liberated future, is most likely in my opinion, a woman directing her own choice of mates.

"Envidiosa" A Case Study in Liberation through Restriction

I continue to watch my way through Envidiosa, the Argentine Rom-Com that is often frankly confronting. The series protagonist Vicky, is a cartoon character, and as such where she departs from her grounding in reality is in her ability to constantly say the quiet part out loud.

Episode 1 of Season 1 features Vicky's meet-cute with Mattias, the only character Vicky has chemistry with. But love triangles persist because Vicky is victim to comparison hence the series name "Envidiosa" or "Envious" for those who cannot make the connection. 

Emotionally as a watch, it is probably more akin to the original BBC series of "The Office" where Gervais' David Brent makes us constantly cringe as he indulges his own compulsions to be unprofessional. 

We see Vicky relentlessly spurn Mattias to pursue material triumphs she feels necessary to impress her friends and former lovers. We see Vicky waver and lose the epiphany she needs, when she gets derailed by her female friends' "accomplishments" for example, her sister deciding to move with her partner to a house in a gated community, ideal for raising children, puts Mattias further from Vicky's mind.

Having just concluded season 2, I feel I have to say Envidiosa is a very good show, coming from the diminished budgets of outside the Anglosphere. 

Where I relate to Vicky, is that she intuits that if she could just exert enough control over her environment her emotional issues would be rendered inert.

The last panic attack I had, alarmed me, and my initial impulse was that I needed to remove the anxious from my life, because their anxiety and coping strategies were what brought out the behaviour in me that I panicked over. 

It was however, fortuitously obviously unfeasible. You cannot excise the anxious from your life without becoming some kind of hermit, which itself isn't really feasible in property obsessed Australia. Gone are the days where you could just head into the mountains (which Australia also lacks) and establish a hermitage in a cave. I also have neither the hunting nor gathering skills.

Anyway, where I could find agency, was in handling my own shit, bounding my own behaviour.

What I think might surprise you though, after this case study that suggests that Vicky Mori is me and I am Vicky Mori; is my conclusion.

The Talk that Boys Need to Have

And probably girls too.

Even if women can never be liberated from the patriarchy, I do fundamentally believe in bodily autonomy arguments, and as The Cruel Sea informed us in Blackstick "heart is a muscle and it pumps blood Like a big old black steam train My veins are the tracks And the city is my brain My stomach is the ocean and it swallows up the sun At the end of a summer's day My breath like a breeze Blows all those storm clouds Away..." 

Okay I let that run too long, but the point being I don't believe in a mind-body dichotomy, and nor, as those lyrics suggest an individual-environment dichotomy. It all interplays and interrelates, and in respecting that, I think boys need a talk delivered with suitable gravitas, sobriety and authority to inform them, that women's choices need respecting.

That you child, may like women, and may like a woman, and she may knowingly or unknowingly choose someone other than you. And you may possess the clarity of mind to see down her road and see the tracks are set to divert her from what she expects and what she'll experience.

That the young man may feel confident of what expectations they could achieve together if she'd only choose him. 

And with all this, in mind, it is upon him, to respect her decision, her choices, her judgement and most of all, her freedom.

That respect entails feeling your feelings, and an ethical obligation to allow her to succeed or fail in the relationship on her own, without any intervention or undermining on your part.

What that respect doesn't entail is evaluating her judgement, judging her judgement which not only can you do, but should you do, because you enjoy the same liberty to choose wrong yourself, and sometimes it takes others to show us ourselves.

It likely also doesn't entail you to intervene to ensure the success of her choosing by dismantling patriarchy especially to make it incumbent upon you to dismantle what she is propping up. 

That's on the other guy.