Women, Power, and the Collapse of Reason

How to integrate logos again in the self and public sphere

New readers, welcome to my corner. Everyone else, thank you for your enduring willingness to engage with uncomfortable ideas. As I’ve gone deeper into analyzing feminism, I’ve lost some people, but the new people who replaced them are warmly welcome, because you pushed through the discomfort anyway. The highest compliment I can get is sharing these heresies with others who know something is wrong but can’t quite put their finger on it.

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Life has become a contest of emotional performance. Logic is violence, disagreement is harm, and women—trained in the economy of social capital—are both the architects and casualties of this new regime, all justified by feminist solidarity.

i. Female competition & the death of logos

Being a woman for me has been an unending status game based on emotional performance (pathos) and morality (ethos) in competition with other women. Logos has no place in the feminine experience; it is held with suspicion and contempt because anything masculine coded is problematic. Without logos, however, women are left to become emotionally indulgent chasing a false moral righteousness. Logos is the faculty of reason, coherence, internal order, or clarity in the fog of emotion. I climbed out of depression through the integration of logos with ethos and pathos within.

But, the competition may never be named, and feminism is invoked when I raise these concerns as an exculpatory mechanism. The competition never happens on logical terms, always emotional and moral. “Oh, she’s just got internalized misogyny” they’ll say, or “women uphold patriarchy” rather than holding these women to higher standards of behavior. The result is excusing the worst behaviors born of evolution to neutralize judgment. Feminism is about shielding women from accountability for their actions among both individuals and institutions.

Women pathologically compete with each other for social capital because it was a winning survival strategy, i.e., evolution. In a world of consumer capitalism, the accumulation of social capital is along the vector of morality, or ethos, backed by emotional aggression, or corrupted pathos. Because we have relatively less of actual capital, we can compete for moral capital.

Status competition among women has intensified because we are the majority of the overproduced elites. Not all of us can be absorbed into professional class and afford the lifestyle we assumed we’d have. Thus, the evolved behavior of indirect competition becomes a kind of soft psychic sabotage done in the language of care. The stakes are high, so all knives are out. Those like myself who favor direct competition, with risk tolerance and social sensitivity are disadvantaged when female social norms govern a space. Competing with women is psychologically tortuous because the competition can never be acknowledged, so the gaslighting can’t be named when it inevitably comes.

Ardhnarishwara represents the integration of the feminine and masculine principles.

ii. Truth loses to emotional safety

Women’s natural tendency to protect the vulnerable and compete indirectly has led to relational aggression to cut other female rivals down while cloaking it in righteousness. This tendency is magnified in women by social media, which encourages us to be our worst selves. Feminism serves as a moral license for women to both cancel rivals and to demand that the workplace be ordered according to their communication and social norms. Pathos and ethos displaced logos in the public sphere and at work.

I experienced competition with women along the lines of ethos and pathos, where the loser was always logos. Opinions conferred capital, regardless of their validity or soundness. Rob Henderson has called these ‘luxury beliefs’, status markers for those espousing them while harming the people to whom those opinions pertain.

Social groups and the workplace are governed by pathos and ethos at the expense of logos. If emotional safety and group morality are paramount, truth loses. It gets buried under hemming and hawing of relativism (”That’s your perception, and everyone has theirs”). The application of logic and insistence on clarity over enforced harmony is social suicide for a woman - I know because I’ve lived it. Intellectual honesty in a group of women (or mixed) is impossible. Accepting uncomfortable social truths forces you to change your self image, your alliances or your opinions. I see patterns of feminine bullying in almost all my social spaces, relational aggression in the name of kindness. I’m always the problem for naming it, even though these are well documented behaviors. Humans are products of evolution, and behavior is no exception. We are not blank slates.

Feminism precludes intellectual honesty and reaching a different conclusion even if you use its own tools to get there. Feminism is always lurking in our psyches with an excuse for our failures of discernment and discipline - it can’t be deployed to force accountability on a woman, only as a shield from it to protect our often fragile, unchallenged egos. Indeed, several readers have said they simply don’t challenge women ever because they’d rather not deal with the emotional performance following. I, too, was once that kind of woman.

iii. The triumph of pathos in the public sphere

As I gained actual capital, moral capital by way of social competition became less important. As I became intellectually sovereign, my tolerance for emotional performance collapsed. I was forced by looking in the mirror. My indulgence of pathos kept me chronically depressed longer than it should have.

When I see pathos in the public sphere displacing logos, I feel like all my inner work was for nothing, and that I have to resist the culture that keeps trying to pull me back into the trap of weaponizing emotion. Women tend to be more easily disgusted by moral breaches, which would explain their contempt for Trump voters. And for those breaches, they socially exile the offenders. In the past ten years, cancellation was this. It doesn’t have to be public; it happens in any group governed by female relational norms (all groups are, unless they’re exclusively male). A community into which I poured years and too much energy was stolen from me by a woman who enforced feminine behavioral norms privileging emotional safety over truth with the help of her cabal. This event was the catalyst for the current me insisting on saying these things aloud.

This is why I don’t hate Trump supporters for their misguided attempt to reassert logos on pathos and ethos run amok. The vessel, however, was wrong. Harris said a vote for her is a vote for joy, and Trump said one for him is a vote for competence. He is indeed incompetent, but Harris represented more unrestrained ethos and pathos; the Democratic party is, after all, in thrall to professional class feminine interests as they are its most powerful voting bloc. If there was any logos on the left, they’d have won. But we know they see logic as white male supremacy.

iv. A post-feminist call to action

It is my greatest wish that will never come true that women compete directly and integrate logos with the pathos. The culture encourages us ever toward fragility, infantilization, and emotional indulgence. This was me before philosophy.

The current me was forged in the fire of discipline and rigor. I chased self-mastery, the path for which came from philosophy and religion. I developed discernment of what emotions should be expressed in a situation and how to minimize social strife. I also learned to control my mind when depression and anxiety started to overtake it. Now if I have a bout of acute depression from disruption in routine I know it’ll feel better after exercise and reading because I have the muscle of discipline in those areas.

Discipline isn’t toxically masculine, but human. Without discipline, creativity itself would die. Logic doesn’t belong to men, like emotion doesn’t belong to women. Women need the integration of logos with pathos and ethos and men the integration of pathos with logos and ethos. Emotion is vital to the human experience. I’m highly emotional under the analytical exterior but I had to force order on my psyche by integrating logic and emotion where I once felt like they were constantly warring in my mind. It would be easy to call my screed one of anger and bitterness. I present clarity hard won through pain and reasoning.

What I described above isn’t just about my need to name things we refuse to discuss about women. I feel a deep need to shed light on how women are holding ourselves back from self mastery by not transcending the behaviors we’ve evolved to display. I’m calling for women to truly seize our autonomy from how we’ve been socialized by refusing to engage in the behaviors at all. Feminism gives women a shield from discomfort. I’m offering a sword.

How have you seen emotional safety displace (uncomfortable) truth in your life?

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Bonus: Substack live appearance

Baz

of The Split Ticket generously invited me on to discuss feminism after my last post, Wokeness isn’t dead because feminism lives. We had a wide-ranging conversation. I said I might be a feminist, but only aligned with the aims of the first wave for material equality. After that, they had me for decades and finally lost me when I realize I could never integrate logos within me while I believed that I was oppressed.

Afternoon Tea & Politics: Feminism and the Democratic Party w/Anuradha Pandey