Testing a Cultural Theory with Little Pieces of Flying Metal

If you’ve never watched this, it takes less than two minutes, and it’s a nice piece of framework:

In her much-discussed essay a few months ago, Helen Andrews argued that American institutions have been feminized. Talking about tendencies and averages — “feminine patterns of behavior” — rather than all men and all women, Andrews argued that a transition from masculine control to feminine control produces radical changes in our shared culture:

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition….

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

That last part is quite interesting, today, as we look at video from the Renee Good shooting that shows the immediate aftermath and the loud reaction of Good’s Justin Bieber-lookalike signal-wife who she wasn’t married to:

“Why did you have real bullets?”

I should probably render that sentence in 90-point type, with bright flashing letters and boldface and italics and the sound of trumpets blasting as you read it.

She screamed this, anguished, at the ICE agents. Why did you do a real thing? In an unusually unguarded moment of shock and horror, she said something unplanned, unpracticed, and unfiltered: Why physical reality? Why did the props department not equip you properly for this scene?

They were performing, quite consciously, doing a bit for the cameras. “Drive, baby, drive!” and “I’m not mad at you” (hits gas pedal). Remember: “Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments.” I’m not mad at you, but I’m hitting you with my car. It’s the apotheosis of passive-aggressive nicespeak. They were theatrically establishing a narrative by which they could undermine or ostracize their enemies, until their accidental scene partner in the improv workshop waged conflict openly, apparently not understanding that he was only being performance hit by the car.

1. Performance performance performance

2. Bullets in the face

3. OH GOD NO, YOU’RE APPLYING THE WRONG NARRATIVE PREMISE

The flood of video pouring out of Minneapolis mostly shows men in ICE and Border Patrol uniforms being surrounded mostly by activist women, with a light-to-medium sprinkling of high-thespian Lost Boys. Almost invariably, ICE arrests are met with loud incantation: “Let him go! Let him go! Let him go!” Spoiler alert: They don’t ever let him go. Watch this one, an amazing variation on the theme, but TURN YOUR SPEAKERS DOWN before you click on that link, scrreeeeeeeeeech.

Related, in a video I again can’t find in an embeddable format so you have to click to watch it, a woman who regards herself as high-status engages in theatrical status demarcation with an ICE agent she regards as low-status, telling him her salary as she shames him in a parking lot. Status status status, she signals, Mean Girls 101. She sits at the table with the cheerleaders. His response is as masculine as her shaming ritual is feminine.

Word people perform words at doing things people, while the doing things people keep doing things, disregarding the words. They take the nail out, to the endless befuddlement of their cosplay opponents. It seems clear to me that Helen Andrews has been vindicated: The conflict in Minneapolis is quite distinctly gendered. Talk me out of it. Again, the point is average behavioral tendencies and group dynamics, not woman bad / man good.

See also, in an unusually clear contrast of competing ideas about the meaning of language:

This scene is just “It’s Not About the Nail” with different dialogue and actors.

One of the implications is that the outcome of the 2026 elections is going to turn on who shows up to vote, as a gendered political chasm widens.

I almost always reject “unprecedented,” because not many things are new. But the growing gender divide in American politics is at least unusual. It colors the public sphere at the foundation, starting way below “what’s the solution?” It orients the discussions we have at the most basic level, starting with our effort to figure out what we’re talking about. What’s the problem? What do we mean to do? What direction are we trying to move?

Not knowing a course and an intended destination, we can’t place ourselves on the map. The Atlantic, which I always turn to as the most reliable barometer of hysterical American dipshittery besides NPR, warns now that America is plummeting into darkness. Everything is not just getting worse, but getting so much worse so rapidly that it’s like we’re in the express elevator to hell. The nation is eroding, collapsing, imploding, dying. History will judge us harshly.

Meanwhile, America is experiencing economic growth that appears to be accelerating, violent crime is becoming significantly less common in a hurry, Venezuela is releasing political prisoners, the Iranian theocracy is tottering, and the Trump administration is quite plainly solving a problem it set out to solve:

The difference is not in thing itself, in the physical reality of the place we used to call “meatspace,” IRL, but in the interpreted world of applied narrative. The question, of course, is how much the people doing the “darkness rises” storytelling believe that it’s true. But I struggle to believe they live in a mental space in which “true” competes with “false,” living instead in theaterworld. “Why did you have real bullets?” may turn out to be a cultural epitaph, either for them or for all of us.