3 MINUTE MONDAYHi friend, I spent 70 hours in the UK last week. Ate many digestive biscuits. Thanks for having me. I’m coming back to the UK & Ireland with a brand new live show - in 5 weeks! Get your tickets now - https://chriswilliamson.live/ In 2023, a study called “The Myth of Man the Hunter” set out to challenge the traditional idea that men hunted while women gathered. It reported evidence of women hunting in 50 of 63 societies (79%), and large-game hunting in 33% of societies where women hunted. But a subsequent paper by 15 hunter-gatherer researchers re-examined the work and reported sample-selection bias and numerous coding errors. The critics wrote that “multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction”. Basically, the people who wrote the paper, did some fuckery with the data in order to prove their preferred conclusion. In the abstract, the authors said their results “aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm”. Which leaves us with an interesting question… why would a team (led by a self-described feminist researcher) be so motivated to make ancient women behave in male-coded ways? This is the Soft Bigotry Of Male Expectations. Many attempts to elevate women assume that the only achievements worth celebrating are the ones traditionally associated with men. There is a misogynistic undertone in Girlboss Feminism which says that anything typically masculine-coded is high status and desirable for women to pursue, while anything typically feminine-coded is low status and undesirable for women to pursue. For instance, in this assessment of hunter-gatherer data, there’s something deeply patriarchal about trying to prove women’s equality by rewriting history to make women more like men. Why was “women did hunting too” seen as more emancipatory? Why didn’t the study conclude “perhaps gathering, childcare, food processing and maintaining the social unit were every bit as civilisation-critical as spearing an animal”? The scandal isn’t just that researchers overstated female hunting, it’s that they apparently needed women to be hunters for women to seem impressive. It says: Hunting is high status. Gathering is low status. Killing mammoths is impressive. Raising the people who kill mammoths is not. Male-coded contribution is the standard and female equality is established by proving that women could meet those standards. This makes for a strangely insulting compliment: “Don’t worry, women are just as valuable as men. Look, they did man stuff too!!” Moving into the modern world, I have a friend who had her first two kids while she was a working mother at a huge tech company. Through a combination of sleeplessness, nannies and the ol’ double-shift, she managed to succeed at both her job and the raising of her humans. Then Covid happened and she had her third, a baby boy. She regretted not being there for her first kids’ upbringings so she decided not to go back to work after Covid and became a full-time stay at home mum. A few months ago she moved to a new town for her husband’s work and went to a meet-up for mums with young kids in the hopes of making some new friends. All of these mothers had jobs alongside raising their babies. After a few weeks, one of the mothers turned to my friend and said “I wish I’d known you when you were still working. You know, when you still had a lot going on.” Remember that my friend is a woman who had ascended to the peak of her career; a hugely prestigious, busy as heck, high paying job at one of the biggest companies in the world. But because she was “just a mum” in 2026, she was seen as less-than by working mums who were still living the career life that she’d already completed. I struggle to see how this worldview is anything other than deeply misogynistic. There is a certain kind of status-obsessed Girlboss Feminism that seems unable to imagine female empowerment except as women becoming more like high-status men. It celebrates the female CEO, soldier, hunter, founder and breadwinner, but has surprisingly little to say about elevating the status of motherhood, caregiving, homemaking, emotional labour or other traditionally female pursuits. This creates an interesting question: How much supposedly pro-woman rhetoric is actually built on an unexamined contempt for femininity? Girlboss Feminism was born out of getting women equal access to the opportunities men had, but ended up denying women’s prestige from the pursuits that they already excelled at. Male-typical pursuits become something women ascend into; while female-typical pursuits becomes something women fall back on. Then everyone acts surprised that femininity feels low-status. I’m not saying that the career path, tradwife life, or a mix is more preferable for women. That’s evidently individual and constrained massively by things like economics and age. What I am saying is that prestige only seems to flow in one direction from certain corners of supposedly pro-women thinkers. The Soft Bigotry Of Male Expectations is even more visible when people who hold Girlboss Feminist beliefs criticise men for behaving stereotypically in a feminine way. “You cannot believe this ^ without believing that women are inferior.
The only way debasing a man for being in a position you consider feminine works is if you think of femininity as degrading.
It speaks more to your perception of your own worth than it does about his.” — Hloma
If you believe that becoming more feminine makes a man seem weaker, that accidentally reveals what you think femininity means. These people are so eager to insult men that they fail to see that they’re insulting women. Am I high here or is all of this kind of impossible to unsee once you’ve seen it? I get it, for a long time women didn’t have any other option than to work around the home and raise children. Even if women WOULD have elected to spend their years being a homemaker, it doesn’t feel like a fair choice - because there were no other alternatives available. That fact shouldn’t mean that in a modern world where women DO have alternative choices, a woman who decides to pursue the typically feminine path should be seen as less-valuable. If all stay at home mums are rubes who have been conned into domestic servitude by the patriarchy, that doesn’t feel like an equality-informed way to judge the life-choices of a huge number of women. And probably the life-preferences of far more. Girlboss Feminism doesn’t elevate women by increasing the status of feminine-coded contributions, instead it only focuses on proving that they can participate in masculine-coded ones. And there’s something revealing about a movement that treats women entering male roles as progress, women entering female roles as pitiful and men entering female roles as punchlines. I have loftier goals for my future daughters than for them to simply try to emulate my life. And after all “women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.” — Timothy Leary MODERN WISDOMI do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent. This week’s upcoming episodes: Monday. Thursday. Saturday. THINGS I'VE LEARNED1. Golf courses in America use around 30.5× more water than all data centres combined. Golf courses: ~531bn gallons/year. Data centres: ~17.4bn gallons/year. 2. Almost 1-in-4 gamble daily. 1-in-4+ use porn daily. 26.6% do none of them. 3. But in reality it conditions people to use emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail as a normal way of engaging. To the point where earnestness and directness are seen as an affront. — HalfPostModern LIFE HACKYou probably don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables, this will help. I’m a massive fan of supplementing micronutrients to help with energy, digestion, brain health and to fill in the gaps in my diet, even though I try to eat as well as I can. AG1 is the most comprehensive all in one drink I’ve ever used and the absolute staple of my supplement regime every day. Plus it’s got 4 clinical trials showing its massive effectiveness. And a 90 day money back guarantee so you can use it for 3 months straight, totally risk-free If you’ve been thinking about starting to use a greens supplement, now is the time. Get a 20% discount, a free welcome kit and that 90 day money back guarantee when you first subscribe at http://ag1.info/modernwisdom Big love, Try my productivity drink Neutonic. PS |