-"Thomas" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that "hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men". (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, in feminist communities, the female person would win a priestly battle, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. She[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
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-[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects that "Thomas" and I felt free to use natal-sex pronouns for nonbinary people in our private conversations. I don't misgender people in public! But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
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-I mentioned that there was a woman who had been hanging around the "rationalist"[^scare-quotes] community despite being mildly contemptuous of our disrespect for academic philosophy who was a bit trigger-happy with sexism accusations. I privately thought would be less respected if she were a man making similar-quality arguments, but there was no way to give her feedback without alienating her. I supposed that in a neoreactionary (_i.e._, evil) space, they would probably say, "Who cares if you alienate her?". But she was a _woman paying attention to us_.
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-[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
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-"Thomas" summarized the neoreactionary response:
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-> 1. Women should never have been weaponiz[ed] by democracy into being cultural/corporate commissars
-> 2. Why is an unmarried woman making a nuisance of herself in a mostly male community? Where is her family? Why is she not married yet?
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-I said that #2 still seemed monstrously unfair to the non-nuisance women contributing to the community's shared endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than any problem solved by excluding them. (Worse with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death.)
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-"Thomas" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperament to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to be busybodies, cause drama, and test males as mates. This wasn't something "Thomas" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have interpreted certain behavior in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.
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-I said that I was done pretending to be stupid; I didn't want to not see the pattern if the pattern was there, even if I wasn't going to adopt the solutions of our ancestors.
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-("Restore patriarchy!" "_Never!_ I mean, I see the point you're trying to make, but the real solution is embryo selection for more nerd girls!")
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-When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" said that it was a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the traditional (_i.e._, evolutionarily stable) strategies of relating had been relabeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
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-He advised me that if I did find an androgynous woman I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a dab of patriarchy works better than none.
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-(What I really wanted was to have this kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was now having with "Thomas", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
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-I wasn't immediately sold on all these heresies—but I was listening. Even if I didn't like the theory and didn't trust the theory, I admitted that it was refreshing that someone _had a theory_, which was more than you could say for the blank slate.