Astral Codex Ten

feminism

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feminism

Article

feminism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 10, 2021 and August 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Discussion of feminism plateaued from 2014 - 2016, then declined”; “Feminist ideas are age old, but their Internet version was something new and more aggressive”; “the rise of the feminist movement pretty closely”. It most often appears alongside 4chan, alt-right, CIA.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: August 10, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
I chose these as especially obvious terms. But other gender-related terms (eg “sexism”) show mostly the same pattern as feminism, and other race-related terms (eg “white privilege”) show mostly the same pattern as racism.
Discussion of feminism plateaued from 2014 - 2016, then declined. Discussion of racism peaked in 2016, then declined - until the George Floyd protests of mid-2020, when it came back with a vengeance. Far from these topics increasingly dominating the discourse, they seem to be in decline - or, in the case of racism, to have been in decline until events intervened. This pattern is surprising enough to deserve further analysis.
We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten.
Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
Feminist groups online have generally pivoted to focus on trans issues. I think this is the missing part of the analysis. I was a reader of the feminist website The Toast until it was shut down. The commentariat migrated to a group Slack. The Slack focused on all women's issues at first, but, as time went on, it became more and more focused on trans issues. Eventually, it got to the point where members were forbidden from using terms as trivial as "lady parts" to refer to their own body parts, to saying more weighty things such as "cis women are oppressed differently from trans women, and their experiences are not always equivalent." A lot of women fled the group. It eventually tore itself to pieces over moderation disputes. I have not found any feminist spaces in the last few years that do not center trans issues. Groups that do focus on cis women's issues are often banned from their platforms. I think this is why you see the decline in the use of feminism terms.
This sounds a little like the TERF-branded analysis that trans people took over women’s spaces, but I think you could also take it in a different direction, the same point I was trying to make with the section on “white feminism”. Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them. This makes it kind of hard to sustain a feminist movement; you’re selecting for people who have accepted the social justice paradigm where issues should be about how oppressed relevant groups are, but you also want to focus your energies on a less-than-maximally-oppressed group. This makes it easy for other people to chide and hijack you, and it sounds like feminism keeps getting chided and hijacked.
Socialism wasn't allowed to beat wokeness, like feminism beat atheism and anti-racism beat feminism, because unlike the latter conflicts, the powers that be actually had a stake, and they used their control over things like legacy publications, news media etc. to pump up wokeness as a shield against socialism.
A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures
August 10, 2022 · Original source
One way for this to happen is institutionalization. A movement rises. It founds some groups to promote its agenda. The fires of excitement die down, and the groups remain. Feminism is no longer as big a deal as it once was, but we still have NOW and Planned Parenthood. These institutions have stopped being social Ponzi schemes. You join them as a day job. You expect to work hard, and at best get a position commensurate to your talent and diligence. It’s not really worth criticizing the leadership, because everything happens through formal governance structures which are hard to affect. Most people who want to be feminists have already decided to support Planned Parenthood and not you. And you cannot take over Planned Parenthood unless you win over their Board of Directors, which you won’t.