I’m a male young millennial who, around 2011-2012, was strongly and passionately pro-feminism in most respects. In recent years, I turned fairly strongly against it. Now, having moderated somewhat, and after many long discussions and arguments with a female cousin, I’ve attempted to “steelman” both sides of a few key debates. This dialogue is an experiment, to see what happens when 2011-me and 2021-me go head-to-head within my own brain. In general, Angelica represents a mixture of my own positions a decade ago and the positions of my cousin. Alexius represents a mixture of my positions a few years ago and those of a few online critiques of feminism that I’ve found compelling (even if I didn’t end up agreeing with them). Beyond that, I’ve occasionally tried to steelman positions that neither I nor someone I trust ever believed, but I’ve mostly avoided doing this. So when Alexius and Angelica agree on something, it means the rejection of that thing is a position I’ve never understood, nor has my cousin, nor has a case for it been persuasively made to me. Since this happens reasonably often, the dialogue may be of limited interest to those who do hold to such a rejection.
Beyond that, my focus has been to present opposing attitudes faithfully, rather than definitely resolve issues. And by “feminism”, I simply mean the general cluster of attitudes found in 2010s-era users of the term, with no more precision than that.
General
ALEXIUS: Hi.
ANGELICA: Um, hi. Well, I'm a feminist.
ALEXIUS: And I think feminism is destructive and toxic, and does nothing but hurt and oppress men. Let's begin the debate.
ANGELICA: All right, let's. I'm a feminist because I believe women are consistently mistreated, brutalised, and oppressed. I believe strident feminism is just and necessary in the world we're living in.
ALEXIUS: Why?
ANGELICA: Honestly, where do I start? Okay, first is the unfair double standards, there are so many of them, and they're just so unfair. Men having sex is admirable, women having it is shameful. Men speaking up assertively is encouraged, women doing it is condemned. Fathers can have careers but mothers should devote their lives to their children. Boys will be boys but girls need to act proper and all that. How can anyone defend this kind of thing? It's the definition of unfairness. It's repugnant to reason itself. And who can deny these attitudes are extremely widespread if you interact with people a tiny bit? Have a consistent principle one way or the other! But people won't do that. We need feminism to make them do the basically fair thing.
Second, the amount of violence inflicted on women is just astronomical. Just look at the news every day. The amount of domestic violence, of sexual violence, of sex trafficking, of media exploitation, and of routine dehumanisation of women by men. Just look at locker room talk, look at unmoderated internet comments sections, look at how juries aquit rapists because "she was asking for it", look at how women are harassed and hated in so many fields and subcultures. Nothing remotely like this, at this scale, happens to men. How can you possibly deny that? In a remotely civilised, just world, women, being usually physically weaker would be given MORE protection by society, rather than LESS. How is it not the most evil thing you can imagine, a world where untold millions of women are beaten regularly, or raped regularly, or stuck in abusive relationships terrified they'll be killed if they leave, or their children will? How is it not the most evil world, where huge sections of society, police, workplaces, street culture, are committed not to protecting them but to all these prejudices excusing their abuse? How can you possibly say we don't need a really militant strong movement to stop all this evil happening? And how can you POSSIBLY say men are "oppressed" in any meaningful way by comparison?
And third, all the prejudices about what women can't do, and the gender roles they're forced into, and the discrimination accompanying that. Do you have any idea how hurtful it is to not be encouraged in your talents, but discouraged and pressured into giving up your dreams because all you're fit for is getting married and having children? To see your male classmates and coworkers get every assistance and encouragement that you're denied? To see that nearly every "hero" of history, and nearly every famous fictional character, is a man?. To never be judged as an individual but always as "the girl"? I don't think you have any idea at all what this is like! Do you honestly believe this happens just as much to men? I mean, apart from maybe a handful of very feminine fields and being a stay-at-home parent. That's it. In the vast, vast majority of careers and hobbies and areas of life, men are assumed to be fit and capable, women are not. How can you possibly say both sexes are oppressed equally, or that we don't need feminism?
ALEXIUS: Hmm, okay. I see your points somewhat, and I see how my original statement was misleading. I suppose I don't think feminism "oppresses men" in the collective sense you're talking about. What I would instead say is the following four points.
First, strident feminists are, in general, the worst people in the world! I'm not even exaggerating. They seem to lack every single virtue and possess every single vice magnified to the extreme. They are utterly consumed with rage and hate. They are vulgar and hedonistic, seeming to lack any concept of beauty or compassion. They are the most proudly selfish people I've seen, saying "I want" and "I demand" and "I don't give a fuck about your feelings" an unimaginable amount. They are childish and juvenile, completely unempathic, sadistic and love scapegoating people and hurting them as much as they can (men who are extremely feminist but slightly disagree on one thing being their favourite targets), they are stupid and mathematically illiterate and PROUD of that, and I could go on and on. Even if your theoretical feminism were impeccable, I'd refuse to endorse the label until I can look at the average prominent self-described feminist and see someone with something resembling a conscience.
Second, women just aren't meaningfully oppressed in most of the West. Maybe they used to be (though I think the conscription issue might have counteracted all of that) but definitely not now. The wage gap is a myth: if you examine the data and adjust for the CHOICES women make (to work less hours for example) it disappears. Domestic violence is taken very seriously, so seriously that ordinary due process rights are uniquely stripped away in that particular context. I could agree that feminism was necessary 50 years ago or 100 years ago but it definitely isn't today, where WE are.
Third, this leads on to the fact that in all the places where what you describe is indeed the reality, where horrific violence and misogyny is the norm, the feminist left not only doesn't care about stopping it, they ACTIVELY STAND IN THE WAY of doing anything about it! The Islamic world, for example, is full to the brim of just the evil you describe. I'd guess one small set of average Muslims contains more violent misogyny than all the West put together! And yet the feminists do everything they can to STOP us fighting that, and to call it racist to even mention it, and to totally shut down discussion of every aspect of the issue! What...the...fuck! Seriously, what the fuck? And it's the same with black rap culture misogyny, and East Asian misogyny, and misogyny in various indigenous groups. How can you possibly deny that this is all a billion times worse than what happens in white Western culture? How can you possibly deny that woke feminists do everything they can to shut down discussions of that? And how, therefore, can you deny that feminists don't actually give a fuck about vulnerable women suffering, and care only about privileged rich white Western women and their comparatively trivial problems?
Fourth, about oppressing men. What I mean is not that men as a whole are oppressed by feminism, I agree that's ridiculous. What I mean is that vulnerable men, unpopular men, low-status men, are oppressed by feminism. That feminism and feminist policies provide a tool for doing horrible injustices to these types of men, a horribly successful tool that's almost impossible to resist or even talk negatively about! It's a reliable weapon that women, whenever they have a problem with a man of lower status or lesser individual power than themselves, can use to get their way, to demonize their rival no matter the merits, and to shut down any challenge to what they’re doing by deeming it sexist or patriarchal.
ANGELICA: All right. On your third point, I have nothing to disagree with. I totally agree that misogyny is a billion times worse in the Islamic world. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight the misogyny we have in the West as well, but it absolutely does mean we should be focusing heaps of attention and scrutiny and condemnation on the Islamic world and doing everything we can to end their evil practices and their brutal treatment of women. I don’t think the feminists who ignore that fact are at all as numerous as you imply, but I agree they exist and I can’t possibly defend them.
I completely disagree with your second point. Just because some problems are taken more seriously than in the past, doesn’t mean they don’t still exist to a huge extent. Domestic violence happens all the time. Most of it goes unpunished. Whatever the reason for a wage gap, there is one. And that creates inequality.
As for feminists being aggressive and cruel, I agree they can be. It’s not ideal, obviously, and I wish they were more rational and compassionate, on the whole. But the key thing you’re ignoring is that when there’s this huge powerful system of harmful and oppressive practices that has existed for so long, anyone wanting to fight it is going to have to use a lot of aggression and anger. That’s just what a fight is. Also, it’s a bit hard for me to take too much concern from a few men being occasionally mistreated by feminists. I agree it’s wrong. But, given how much women have suffered at the hands of men, and for how long that has been the case, it really seems like a kind of justice for there to be a bit of a reversal.
ALEXIUS: Justice? That’s like saying because Jews oppressed Christians in 1st century Judea, it’s justice for Christians to oppress Jews in 15th century Spain. The people who did the atrocities and the people suffering are different people.
ANGELICA: Well, I didn’t say it was literal justice, did I?
Sexual harassment
ANGELICA: So what about sexual harassment? In, like, the vast majority of fields, women are harassed. Not all women, sure, not all the time for the ones who are. But a lot of us are harassed, and for some it really is all the time. How can you defend this?
ALEXIUS: Who says I defend it?
ANGELICA: Well how can you say a strong response isn’t necessary? Are women supposed to just accept this risk, every time they start a new job, every time some new people start working with them, as just the price of existing? Are the ones being harassed just supposed to take the daily fear, and daily humiliation?
ALEXIUS: Can you define harassment?
ANGELICA: Behaviour that makes someone feel terrible? I think you know what I mean by harassment, and I hope you’re not trying to rules-lawyer me or play semantics.
ALEXIUS: No, I swear I’m acting in good faith here. I think the definition is crucial. Why don’t I give mine and you tell me what you think? I’d say harassment, sexual or otherwise, is a kind of bullying that requires the intent to make someone upset. As long as it’s defined like that, I will whole-heartedly condemn it and call for its eradication from all schools and workplaces.
ANGELICA: So you’re saying it has to require intent?
ALEXIUS: Yes and that most of the feminists explicitly reject this requirement.
ANGELICA: Well it all depends what you mean by good intent. If you honestly didn’t know something might ever be a problem, and as soon it’s pointed out you stop? Or, if you knew it would upset her, but your “official intention” was just to make a joke or arouse yourself, so you did it anyway? Those two are very, very different.
ALEXIUS: I’d include all cases of the first, and some of the second, under good intent. “Making a joke” doesn’t cut it, because that almost always means laughing at someone, which by its nature is a nasty intention. But genuinely wanting to go on a date with someone, knowing she might be angry at being asked out but giving it a try, and she gets angry…I’d say that’s her problem, if she takes a good faith expression of natural human affection as somehow offensive.
ANGELICA: The thing is, she might have some kind of trauma. It might actually be really stressful for her to be asked out, even if it’s done politely.
ALEXIUS: So therefore what?
ANGELICA: So therefore it’s important to be very sure something like that is wanted, or not unwanted, when you’re in an enclosed environment that the woman can’t easily leave. Like a workplace.
ALEXIUS: It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that something so desired by the vast majority of the population, romantic love, should be denied to them in many contexts because there are a few people with hang-ups and traumas. Shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the latter to clearly telegraph that they don’t want that? Instead of expecting others to read their minds? Or only ever asking people out who have already made clear they want to be asked out?
ANGELICA: The harm done by having something done to you is far greater than the harm of not getting something you want.
ALEXIUS: But the number of people who consider that a “harm” is much, much smaller I would think. So the consequentialism evens out. Plus, there are suicidally lonely people. Does that latter fact upend your moral calculation?
ANGELICA: No because that’s even rarer.
Abortion
ANGELICA: Abortion? Are you against it?
ALEXIUS: Against it? Uh, yes I am. With a few narrow and compelling exceptions. Killing another human being, let alone a baby, for your own convenience is…I honestly can’t find the words.
ANGELICA: Okay, do you think it’s wrong to eat chicken?
ALEXIUS: I don’t think so, no. Are you trying to make a moral equivalence between a baby and a chicken?
ANGELICA: Well, hear me out. You’re calling it a baby, which I’ll accept for the sake of the discussion to avoid stupid semantic games. It seems to me there are three ways you can argue that a chicken and a human baby are morally different. First, you could say that God created humans, but not chickens, in his image, and commanded us not to kill humans only in whatever holy book. But that’s entirely unpersuasive to anyone who doesn’t share those religious beliefs, and a secular state surely shouldn’t have laws that make sense only from a particular religious perspective.
ALEXIUS: That definitely isn’t the basis of my objection.
ANGELICA: Second, you could say that because we are humans, we have special obligations to fellow human beings, which we don’t have to other species. But how is this any meaningfully different than saying that because we are white, we have special obligations to other white people that we don’t have to other races?
ALEXIUS: Hm.
ANGELICA: The argument has literally the exact same form!
ALEXIUS: All right, I’ll accept it, but it seems like a weird analogy. I can’t prove why though.
ANGELICA: So that leaves a third reason, which is I think clearly the only defensible one. Human beings have vastly greater intelligence, memories, emotions, desires for the future, and so on. That justifies treating an ordinary human and a chicken completely differently. But a baby in the womb, even at a late stage, possesses none of these properties that distinguish us from chickens. It probably possesses far less of these than a chicken! I adapted this argument from Peter Singer, and I think it shows that there is no morally defensible basis for being pro-life but eating meat.
ALEXIUS: Is that the entirety of your reason for being pro-choice?
ANGELICA: What do you mean?
ALEXIUS: I mean that that’s an argument strictly from a lack of sentience in an unborn baby. I disagree with the argument, and I’ll explain why in a moment. But I want to say that I can respect the argument (and that I don’t think it’s evil, only misguided) in a way that I can’t respect the standard feminist defences of abortion. Which are usually pretty explicitly clear that they don’t consider it relevant whether or not an unborn child is sentient, and that a woman has an unconditional right to kill her baby even if it’s fully or partially sentient, even if it’s in horrible pain, for any reason at all, or none! And I find that…quite possibly the most evil sentiment I’ve ever heard a person express to my face.
ANGELICA: Well, there is the Violinist Argument that’s often used as an additional defence of abortion. Is that what you’re referring to?
ALEXIUS: That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m referring to. I think that argument is horribly flawed in numerous ways, not least of which that it only works (and was only originally intended) for abortion in cases of rape. But more fundamentally than that, I just can’t comprehend how any decent person could be emotionally capable of accepting that conclusion. To look at an innocent, infinitely vulnerable person connected to them and coldly think only of themselves. Just, who could think like that?
ANGELICA: Hm, okay, I think there are some things you’re skirting over here. First, I see the Violinist Argument as not a central part of my reason for being pro-choice, but as an additional useful point, and I see the point primarily as the fact that most men would not accept the moral obligation to stay connected to an innocent person themselves. I think it’s telling how few pro-life men actually bite the bullet and say you should stay connected to the violinist. If they did that, instead of weaselling around trying to say the cases are totally different, then I would feel very differently. It’s all about the hypocrisy for me. Now I want to make clear that I don’t think the pro-life movement is built on hatred of women--that’s a stupid claim. (I think it is mostly built on religion: you can hardly find a pro-life organisation that can resist mentioning God or the Bible on a regular basis, or that they’re also against homosexuality or something else that has nothing whatsoever to do with saving babies, and this is the main thing that makes it difficult for me to take their moral claims seriously.) But I do think it’s grounded in certain male-centric perspectives. I do think pro-life thinking, whether currently expressed by men or women, was formulated by men as abstract moral reasoning that, for the men formulating it, was understood implicitly as something that would never apply to them. It’s very easy to abstractly argue that some consideration has no moral relevance when you’ll never be affected by it. I see the Violinist Argument as exposing that deficit, showing how many who dismiss bodily autonomy when it’s relevant only to women suddenly give it much more weight when they can imagine a scenario where it would apply to them. I think this greatly strengthens the pro-choice position, but the foundation of that position is still very much the lack of foetal sentience.
ALEXIUS: Look, I disagree with the sentience argument for three reasons. First, we don’t possess perfect medical and scientific knowledge. No matter what modern medicine says about the existence of consciousness at a specific stage of development, it’s always possible that future research could show we were wrong about that, even if currently can’t see how. This has happened innumerable times throughout history. So running the (perhaps small, perhaps not; we don’t know what we don’t know!) risk of murdering millions of partially conscious human beings for reasons of convenience (or any other less-than-compelling reasons) is unconscionable. Second, even if unborn babies at that point aren’t at all sentient, institutionalizing the principle that it’s okay to kill humans if they lack certain abilities or faculties is so incredibly dangerous, for what I hope are obvious reasons. How much easier will it be to further extend this lack of legal protection to other humans, on other grounds than lack of consciousness, as long as we have this precedent of making such broad exceptions? And third, to move away from these strictly consequentialist arguments, I see it as fundamentally evil, in a virtue-ethical sense, to kill a fellow human being (let alone your own child!) for minor or selfish reasons. A lack of consciousness does not stop this being an intrinsically vicious act. And if you do so openly not caring whether the child is conscious or not, calling that a completely irrelevant consideration—very explicitly the position of most feminists, regardless of what your own position is—that makes the viciousness infinitely worse!
ANGELICA: I think we have to go with what science actually says, not what it might say in some hypothetical universe. There’s an obvious unbridgeable difference between a lack of consciousness—the possession of which is what it means to be a being—and a lack of any other property. And this “benefit of the doubt” argument is not one we apply in pretty much any other context. We don’t ban cars and electricity on the basis that running the risk of killing human beings is never justified for reasons of “convenience”.
ALEXIUS: I think there is an unbridgeable moral difference “doing an action that has a small risk of killing a sentient human being” and “deliberately killing a human being who has a small chance of being sentient”. Only the most naïve utilitarianism—the kind that says failing to save lives in Africa is exactly moral equivalent to murdering people—could suggest those things are in the same moral universe.
ANGELICA: Of course, you’re also greatly downplaying the actual effect on women of having to carry a baby. This is never in the remote ballpark of “mere convenience” and it’s telling that you would describe it so.
ALEXIUS: It is close to mere convenience on the scale from nothing to death. That’s what my objection is: not to saying that there are significant moral interests in women avoiding unwanted pregnancies, but to saying that these totally outweigh the moral interests of babies in continuing to live! To the extent that the latter is of no significance at all!
ANGELICA: Look, even if there are a lot of feminists who talk like that, and ignore the sentience issue, how does that change the fact that the sentience issue does exist? You’re basically saying that because a position has some bad arguments made for it, that we should reject it even if good arguments can be made for it.
ALEXIUS: Well I do have some issues with the “good arguments” as well. But I agree the sentience ones are somewhat principled and morally coherent, and not evil. But I disagree that the existence of the evil arguments doesn’t matter. This isn’t just “some people” making these arguments; this is the entire movement dedicated to maintaining legal abortion being grounded in the assertion that an entire class of human beings, based solely on where they are, have no rights whatsoever. That is what “bodily autonomy” means in this context! There’s a hardly a feminist on the planet who doesn’t endorse “bodily autonomy” in the context of abortion, and that phrase by logical definition implies that an entire class of humans have no rights whatsoever! I think such an ideology is so fundamentally repugnant to any moral or civilized society that it needs to be maximally opposed, by all decent people, at all costs.
ANGELICA: It’s easy to make that characterization. The reason it’s easy is that, for most of human history, women’s interest were not taken into account by law and morality at all. And so, you can look at the moral doctrines that were formulated over that time and see no distinction made between human beings, of questionable sentience, in the womb, and unquestionably sentient human beings outside the womb. And because no such distinction was reliably made in past moral thinking, you can look at modern feminists trying to institutionalize this enormous distinction and see a terrifying movement aimed at stripping away previously recognized rights. But the only reason this looks terrifying is because it’s so new, and the only reason it’s so new is because there was no motivation to make the distinction in the past, since women’s interests had no weight.
The reality is that abortion is a unique kind of moral situation. The bodily autonomy of women in this case isn’t at all comparable to bodily autonomy in other cases, I grant you that. But also, the right to life in this case isn’t at all comparable to a right to life in almost all other cases. It’s a unique situation that in an ideal world would have been heavily debated and analysed throughout history. In our imperfect world, where women were ignored until a century ago, it got hardly any debate, and so the current situation looks terrifying. But I maintain that once you put aside that apparent horror, which exists only because centuries of moral doctrine was formulated only be men, feminists are making a case for a coherent position that extends women the autonomy that men take for granted, with the tradeoff being removing a “right to life” from a group of beings that, we argue, it never made much sense to ascribe that right to had all sentient interests been properly taken into account.
ALEXIUS: I feel like this reasoning can be used to justify nearly any radical human-threatening and rights-threatening movement. Maybe the only reason Jews are considered human is because of biased Jewish-controlled history. Maybe the only reason kings aren’t allowed to rule their subjects like slaves is because the last few centuries have been maligned by an unfair disregard for the natural rights of kings. My position, and I’m firm on this, is that a morally decent political movement is not going to ground itself in the elimination of the previously-acknowledged rights of a particular group. Humane people, with humane goals, will always have ways of reforming society without doing such a thing.
Nice guys
ALEXIUS: Okay so the Nice Guy issue. What do you think of that?
ANGELICA: They’re not really nice.
ALEXIUS: How can you say that?
ANGELICA: We’re talking about men who are “nice” to women and then get angry when they won’t sleep with them! Being “nice” to someone only to get something from them is not being actually nice at all. And I don’t think you have any idea how hurtful it is to find out that he was only nice to you to have sex with you. And to then be condemned for not “rewarding” this fake niceness!
ALEXIUS: Okay there are two problems with your characterisation. The first is that the average Nice Guy is actually nice, generally speaking. That’s how I and many others use the term, not for someone simply feigning niceness. It still seems to be clearly the case that such men are generally unattractive to women. And that creates enormous problems for the entire project of feminism.
The second is that even if we’re talking about merely instrumentally nice men (which we’re usually not), the complaint is not that these men deserve a date or whatever for simply acting nice. It’s that they deserve more, or at least as much, as someone who approaches women and doesn’t even attempt to treat them nicely. And yet the empirical evidence seems to show that they get treated worse.
I agree there are some men who complain that being nice doesn’t get them a date, full stop. But the standard grievance is simply this: if I’m nice to you and you reject me, that’s fine, but don’t then go and date the other guy who treats you like shit!
ANGELICA: So wait a minute, first of all, why exactly does this create “enormous problems” for feminism?
ALEXIUS: Basically, feminism tells men to treat women respectfully. If you have a state of the world where men who do that are consistently less attractive to women than men who disregard respect, and less likely to get dates, then you are, first of all, causing the men who do the right thing to be disadvantaged for it, which is intrinsically unfair. But second and most importantly, you teach men that obeying feminists gets punished and ignoring them gets rewarded. I can’t think of anything more destructive to the cause of feminism!
ANGELICA: Okay. Well, I could challenge you on the factual basis of this claim that genuinely nice, respectful men are less attractive to women. I could point out three things. First, that most of the “evidence” for this claim comes from personal anecdotes and the collections of these anecdotes and complaints that accumulate on very biased platforms (where men whose experiences don’t fit the trope at all have no incentive to speak up, and every reason to think they’ll be attacked for lying or “whiteknighting” or whatever), so they are nothing remotely like a fair sample. And trying to do surveys or polls with this sort of thing is almost impossible, because of the sheer number of confounding factors many of which (e.g. looks, charisma, previous social interactions with the same person) are all but impossible to accurately survey or control for. Second, anyone who has been rejected by a love interest in favour of another person has an extreme vested interest in viewing that other person as a horrible asshole, since they are a rival. I don’t even know if it’s possible to overcome this overwhelming psychological bias, and that makes almost all these anecdotes compellingly flawed. Third, there is a type of “bad boy” who women frequently find highly attractive, but I don’t think it’s what you think it is. It’s a hero who is moral and kind but also strong and brutal against bad people, i.e. a protector. I think most women would say the kindness is the most important part, but that given that, a strong kind man is more attractive than a weak or somewhat cowardly kind man. But many men think that means a strong abusive man is better than a weak kind man, which is completely wrong!
ALEXIUS: Well, you make some insightful points, but I’m not sure there isn’t still a lot of evidence for my claim, even controlling for all that.
ANGELICA: Maybe, maybe not. My point is really that you can’t be sure, your confidence in the claim is unjustified. But resolving factual questions definitely is not really possible here. So let’s move on to the theory.
ALEXIUS: I agree, and in any case, I’d be quite reasonably happy if you insisted that you don’t believe this rejection of nice guys really happens, but that if it did it would be a very bad thing that needs to stop. That’s what most of us want, for the grievance to be acknowledged and not shut down. If women did routinely prefer assholes to nice guys, do you acknowledge that they need to be in some sense shamed for that? They’d be doing more damage to women’s rights than almost anything men do, because they’d be creating an overwhelming incentive for men to not respect women.
ANGELICA: Well I already pointed out the view that many of these Nice Guys are actually feigning niceness to get you in bed. And even if they’re not, even if they think they’re genuinely nice, if they are expecting a reward for it and upset if they don’t get it I’d question how nice they truly are. Actually nice people don’t expect to be rewarded for basic decency! I see no reason why feminists should agree to shame women for resisting such sexist manipulation!
ALEXIUS: As I said above, there are many men who really are nice (to everyone, not just to the women they want to sleep with), and you’re doing this unfair thing where you create a category that does exist (men feigning niceness for sex) and then exploit the similar wording shared between the fake and genuine case (“Nice Guys” with capitals) to trick people into lumping the latter into the former. It’s a rhetorical trick.
But I’m particularly bothered by the second thing you said, that you’re not really nice if you get upset that your niceness isn’t acknowledged or reciprocated. This is so psychologically cruel it’s hard to describe. Imagine a cult that demands perfect morality of its members, and you’re a member and you try so hard to be perfect, but you’re told you’re probably going to hell anyway. And despite this you keep trying, and even when you see the cult leaders being hypocrites and violating all their own rules you keep your head down and keep trying to be good anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. Then one day you can’t stand it any longer and you politely point out unfair it is that no matter what you do you’re still dammed, and that the leaders don’t even try and are somehow rewarded. And the leaders tell you that this proves you were never really moral to begin with, and that you were only doing it for a reward and so now you’re definitely going to hell and you’ve proven you deserve to. This is the kind of psychological abuse that your thinking amounts to here.
It’s eminently reasonable for a genuinely good person to be upset when their good behaviour is not acknowledged or reciprocated. It does not in any way prove that they weren’t genuinely good. And again, what most of us are asking for here is absolutely not that being respectful to women should get us a date. It’s that it should help, even if only slightly, and above all that it shouldn’t in any circumstances harm us!
ANGELICA: All right, I’ll admit that saying “women shouldn’t date insufficiently nice men” is a much better take than “women should date me, because I’m sufficiently nice”. I think the first problem is that you greatly understate how much of the Nice Guy discourse really is the second one. And even if it currently isn’t (which I think is clearly false) normalizing the first claim makes it far too easy to normalize the second one, and I hope you can see how harmful that would be. “If I tick these boxes, you’re obligated to date me” is so contrary to everything feminism stands for that I hope it’s understandable why feminists would fight tooth-and-nail against permitting any attitudes that have even a possibility of turning into that.
Beyond that, I think you mischaracterize feminists if you think they are in favour of women dating disrespectful or abusive men. Most feminists would say that’s a terrible thing for a woman to do, and that she should be encouraged not to do such a self-harmful thing. Some would be against “shaming” her nonetheless, due to what a shaming culture can lead to (see my previous point) and some would shame her as normalizing such behaviour and harming women generally. The one thing they’ll agree on though is that the harm of such a thing is towards women. The thing that makes the Nice Guy discourse so repugnant is that it presents nice men as the ones being harmed. And it’s hard to view this as anything other than men thinking they’re entitled to be dated just because they’re sufficiently nice.
ALEXIUS: As I explained, it’s not that. It’s harmful to women, for obvious reasons, and harmful to men due to the psychological harm of being disadvantaged for doing the right thing, and seeing those who do the wrong thing rewarded for it. You’re greatly underplaying this psychological harm. I, at least, would be perfectly happy if the world changed so that not a single nice guy gets any more dates, but all the not-nice guys stop getting dates. That would be a perfect solution.
And I don’t perceive that feminists are remotely interested in making that happen. Why don’t you want to make that happen?
ANGELICA: I think, ultimately, that this discourse has such potential harms, as I mentioned, and has become so toxic, that it needs to be avoided. These discussions, about women tolerating abusive treatment and how men are supposed to interpret and relate to that fact, can be held in different terms and with different vocabulary. Avoid the term “Nice Guy” and all its associated lore, and avoid centring men as the primary ones being harmed, and maybe these discussions would be more fruitful, and feminists would be less likely to think you’re implying things you may not be.
ALEXIUS: That sounds exactly equivalent to a demand that the word “feminism” should be retired, and that discussions of sexual equality should be held without any of the confrontational tones of modern feminism. I struggle to see any meaningful difference.
Privilege
ALEXIUS: Do you think men are “privileged” over women?
ANGELICA: Of course. I don’t even know how you could deny it. Do I have to list average income, representation in legislatures and on company boards, traditional religious doctrines, social judgements on sexual behaviour, leads in movies, physical safety in public, and on and on and on?
ALEXIUS: Well what about custody and crime and, historically, conscription?
ANGELICA: Those are a handful of examples in the pro-female direction. In the pro-male direction, we have thousands! That’s what we mean by privilege.
ALEXIUS: All right, let’s talk about privilege. I find the feminist discourse on privilege so outrageous and obnoxious, because there’s this fundamental incoherency in the definition of privilege that they use: they have two different definitions, and they switch between them whenever convenient, and whenever it allows them to be most indifferent to the suffering of people other than them.
The first definition, which makes perfect sense on its own, is the following: A is privileged over B if A is, all things considered, better off overall than B. This is a fine definition of privilege, and one that captures what people usually mean by the term. But feminists aren’t consistent with it at all. As soon as you point out that a homeless man is obviously less privileged than a rich and powerful woman, they insist that that doesn’t count, that the former’s male privilege is not in any way negated by his lack of some other kind of privilege. So they’re denying that it’s a matter of being better off overall.
Well, there’s a second definition that allows that response, and it’s also a reasonable definition on its own. Which is that A is privileged over B if A is, in some areas of life, advantaged over B. On this definition, you can insist that a homeless man has privilege over a rich woman, on the basis that there are certain areas in which he’s still advantaged over her, despite the much larger number of areas in which it’s the reverse. But feminists don’t stick to this definition either, because it would imply that while men are privileged over women (due to things like domestic violence and representation in high positions), women are also privileged over men (due to things like child custody and criminal sentences). So, as far as I can tell, feminists have no consistent definition of privilege. They rely on the first definition when it suits them, switch to the second definition when it suits them, and in both cases to dismiss the grievances of anyone other than the affluent women who run their movement.
ANGELICA: Well, look, as a preliminary point I want to note that it’s perfectly possible to construct a coherent definition of privilege that excludes both of your cases.
ALEXIUS: Yeah, sure, you can construct a convoluted ad hoc definition—like, A is privileged over B if and only if A belongs to a different demographic group than B, and it’s one of the demographic groups that has been deemed to matter and not one of the ones that hasn’t, and that demographic group is overall better off, but only in the areas of life that have been deemed to matter, and when comparing demographic groups their precise unique circumstances need to be carefully considered and not rounded off to which one is better off overall, but when comparing individuals they need to be rounded off to the overall position of their group and their precise unique circumstances ignored—but that’s pretty meaningless I think. You can also construct a long convoluted ad hoc justification for why most mistreatments of women are justified for non-sexist reasons (e.g. “a person is allowed to beat up a person weaker than them, but only when they’re living together in a traditional marriage, and only when no weapons are used, and only when both are able-bodied and of average strength for their sex—so allowing domestic violence has nothing to do with sexism!”). I think if you go well beyond the limits of intuitive and elegant definitions, you’ve lost all claim to having meaningful moral principles.
ANGELICA: Okay. I can agree with that in principle. But I don’t think your specific examples of feminist thought are incoherent or convoluted. First, because well-off feminist women do demonstrably concern themselves with the welfare of groups other than themselves—black and gay men for example. Second, because there really are principled reasons for excluding both “wealthy woman over homeless man because of overall position” and “women over men because of custody and crime” as meaningful examples of privilege. I don’t at all agree with you that this is a “convoluted ad hoc definition”.
ALEXIUS: Well, what definition—what natural and intuitive definition of privilege that excludes both cases but includes the often-very-first-world stuff feminists want to talk about—are you using?
ANGELICA: I would say it’s all about history and social structure, basically. Men and women are natural categories both biologically and because of such historical commitment to rigid gender roles. Races are meaningful categories because of society’s historical commitment to separating them. However, some aspects of class are not as significant as categories, because they’ve sometimes been a lot more changeable, depending on the time and place. And one thing that’s definitely not really comparable to sex and race, which you’ve previously made a big deal of, is “social status”. It’s already a vague term, and it’s almost completely context-dependent and very changeable.
So I think there is a real need for categories to differentiate a specific kind of disadvantage—one grounded in innate differences that society has a long history of discriminating on. It’s particularly important to acknowledge that two people similarly situated with respect to one more temporally variable characteristic—like being homeless—can be treated profoundly differently based on their difference with respect to one of those innate ones.
ALEXIUS: Don’t you see a problem, when one demographic group (or collection of demographic groups) can seize control of the public discourse and institutionalize certain idiosyncratic definitions of moral categories that are specifically and deliberately designed to favour their particular demographic circumstances and override or disregard the circumstances of other groups? The definition of privilege you are using has been formulated by explicitly political purposes.
ANGELICA: Well, yes it has been. Living in a democratic society means that social discourse and social change is, in fact, created by political groups with political purposes, often sharing demographic characteristics. If one demographic doesn’t advance its interests, is someone else going to do it? The fact that feminists use a particular definition of privilege, formulated in a specific way for feminist purposes, doesn’t stop other groups from formulating their own concepts to express their own grievances. It doesn’t mean they need to demand our grievance framework should cover theirs, though.