And like, I think it’s a historical coincidence that industries of conquest need to be replaced by industries of sustainability at the same time as the rest of the transformations of modernity, but it’s a hell of a fuckin’ parallel. bsky.app/profile/jenk...
Ah, but who broke them? bsky.app/profile/jenk...
My working model is that gender relations were never not-broken, there just wasn’t a way (partly) out of the ongoing atrocity of patriarchy until relatively recently. It was the peace of a well-run prison, and egalitarian gender relations are still struggling to be born.
This is actually the main thrust of my theory about how the manosphere got so popular.
I don't really know how to articulate it but it's something like, they used to be broken together, and now they are broken apart. There was a unifying, if hugely unequal narrative, inescapable like a prison perhaps. Now the narrative has splintered.
Reading that essay u linked, btw, "The Crisis of Gender Relations" and came upon this line.... "More and more, women don't need men. And men haven't figured out how to adapt to that." And it made me think of something....
In the beginning, the very beginning, we wouldn't have known what men were for. Who could have guessed some kind of microscopic contribution was involved in the babies women created? All we'd have known is that hey, that ecstatic fertility ritual worked.
Patriarchy invented the purpose for men. Protection from other men. Access to resources within a system where all the resources are owned by men. Perhaps we are somehow reentering a time where we don't know what men are for now again. This is what they haven't figured out how to adapt to.