Two steps forward, one step back

I - Spawn point

Historically, all civilizations developed institutional mechanisms to regulate the negative externalities of male competive behavior - murder, theft, rape, physical coercion and violence, property destruction. The characteristic costs that unconstrained male intra- and intersexual competition impose on their environment were the targets of legal codes everywhere they developed and subject to millennia of evolution in political institutions, law, policing, religious prohibition, and codes of honor. Though these structures did not eliminate male aggression, they imposed costs on its expression, preventing individual incentives from cannibalizing the collective. Further societal adaptations succeeded in channeling male competitive energy into domains where it built rather than destroyed collective wealth - commerce, exploration, innovation, institutional and academic advancement, industrial scale. The same drive that once expressed itself in raiding parties expressing itself in trading companies. The same dominance hierarchies that once sorted through combat, sort through rank, fame and wealth - which have and will forever provide preferential mate access.

This worked mindbogglingly well. The surplus generated by societally directed male competition provided the stable, prosperous conditions that enabled successive generations to accumulate ever more prosperity across all domains of life. A species of millions of monkeys transcended to a species of billions of monkeys. Constitutional governance. The guillotine. Circumnavigation. Smallpox eradicated. Nuclear energy. Semiconductor fabrication. SpaceX. The entirety of modernity is downstream of successfully regulated male competition in groups larger than Dunbar’s number.

Female-type negative externalities — coalition warfare, strategic victimhood, reputation destruction — were not subject to equivalent cultural innovations running on institutional calcification. They did not need to be. They were contained by circumstance.

Historical regulation of female-type externalities was never more than local, informal and ephemeral, because subjugation constrained their impact to local groups, because the strategies are indirect by nature and leave little permanent evidence, because the vocabulary to articulate them only developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and because women occupied a protected status as mothers, as subjects of male protective and provisioning instincts, as beneficiaries of chivalric and religious traditions that rendered them simultaneously subordinate and sacrosanct — shielded from corrective feedback by the very structures that constrained their freedom.

We did not inherit institutional frameworks for regulating the negative externalities of female competitive strategies at scale.

II - Discombobulation

For millennia, Women operated within a stable matrix of constraints. Religious frameworks provided archetypal models — the Virgin, the Mother, the Saint — that channeled female status competition into forms legible to the community and accountable to shared moral structure. Traditional family dependence meant that a woman’s material security was bound to her and her families reputation within a local network of kin and neighbors, imposing direct costs on antisocial behavior. Hormonal cycles operated naturally and unmodified. Occupational activities happened predominantly within or adjacent to the household.

The least century saw each of these constraints dismantled in sequence. The death of God removed the archetypal images that had oriented female identity for thousands of years — no replacement emerged with comparable depth or authority. The welfare state socialized male provisioning, transferring female material security from husbands and kin to anonymous institutional structures with no capacity to regulate social behavior in return. The pill — the first mass hormonal intervention in human history — decoupled reproduction from sex and gave women conscious control over fertility, but also introduced exogenous hormones into systems calibrated over evolutionary time, with psychological and behavioral effects still poorly understood. The expectation of full economic participation inserted women into dominance hierarchies previously structured for male competition, creating novel psychological pressures with no ancestral template and no cultural scaffolding.

Then social media happened. Coalition size expanded from fifteen to millions, with attribution dissolving across thousands of anonymous participants. Algorithms aligned platform profit with outrage, pile-ons, call-outs, defector punishment, and self-sexualization - structurally incentivizing hoeing. Victimhood claims reached audiences of millions with zero independent verification capacity — emotional intensity substituting for evidence, the accuser controlling the narrative, the platform rewarding engagement regardless of accuracy. Propagation accelerated from weeks to seconds — reputation destruction now outruns any possible defense. Digital indexing made damage permanent - gossip used to decay, the internet does not. The intrasexual competitive field exploded from twenty local peers to millions of algorithmically curated images, with no downtime — every phone unlock a comparison event — against a perceived baseline skewed to the ninety-ninth percentile because the top percentile generates engagement. The calibration mechanism was destroyed.

Social media did not create or change female inter - and intrasexual competitive strategies. It amplified them by many orders of magnitude while preserving every structural feature that prevents their regulation, at a point in time where previously stable constraints had been recently removed. The result is a disregulated asymmetry with significant externalities. Male antisocial behavior is institutionally constrained. Female antisocial behavior is institutionally, technologically and socially amplified.

Western civilization spent millennia building regulatory infrastructure for male violence. It then dismantled the constraints and overthrew the fitnessfunction of female competitive strategies within three generations and handed those liberated strategies global reach via information technology and real-time rich-media communication.

VIII - Future History

Every agricultural civilization — Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome, the caliphates, feudal Europe, feudal Japan — manifested male-preferential inheritance and female legal subordination. No exceptions across ten thousand years and every continent.

The fitness function that selected for patriarchal structures was real. Societies where property passed through male lines, where men controlled female fertility, where legal codes subordinated women to fathers, brothers, and husbands — these societies outcompeted alternatives. Not because patriarchy was moral. Because it solved coordination problems that agricultural civilizations faced: paternity certainty, inheritance stability, defense against external threats, channeling of male aggression into productive competition and internalizing negative externalities. Good is what works in context.

One civilizational tradition — and only one — developed the theological, legal, economic, and political infrastructure that produced universal suffrage. Western Christendom and its offshoots.

The Western exception emerged from a specific confluence of factors: Judeo-Christian theological payloads, Greco-Roman legal and philosophical frameworks, the competitive pluralism of fragmented European polities, Protestant emphasis on individual conscience and direct relationship with the divine, industrial economies that made female labor force participation advantageous, and total wars that required total mobilization.

Judeo-Christian theological payloads provided the normative foundation. Genesis 1:27 established imago Dei: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Every human bearing irreducible dignity no earthly authority could revoke. Galatians 3:28 established spiritual equality: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The prophetic tradition established that existing power structures could be radically wrong and that speaking truth to power was obedience rather than rebellion.

These payloads did not produce equality automatically. The same tradition justified patriarchy for centuries using other texts. What the payloads did was ensure the patriarchal settlement was unstable, always carrying within itself the arguments for its own dissolution. They shifted the burden of proof. First wave feminist writings successfully invoked these and similar passages in arguing for universal suffrage.

Greco-Roman legal and philosophical frameworks established individual rights as a concept. Rule of law rather than rule of men. Citizenship as a status with defined privileges and obligations. These provided the institutional grammar within which equality arguments could be formulated and implemented.

The Protestant Reformation shattered the mediating layer between individual and divine. Direct relationship with God without priestly gatekeeping. The priesthood of all believers — individual conscience as the final seat of moral authority. If every Christian stands before God without intermediary, if every believer can read and interpret scripture, if salvation is between the soul and its maker — on what grounds can any believer be excluded from collective deliberation about the earthly order?

European political fragmentation created a competitive selection environment with no parallel in Chinese, Islamic, or Indian civilizational history. Competing states, competing churches, competing legal traditions, no universal empire capable of freezing institutional evolution. Rulers who protected subjects and property attracted capital, talent, and military capacity from rulers who did not. The Huguenots expelled from France built Prussia’s economy. The Jews expelled from Spain built Amsterdam’s. Institutional innovation was rewarded because institutional stagnation was punished — by conquest, by capital flight, by demographic loss to more attractive jurisdictions.

The Church’s independence from secular authority created a dyarchy that prevented the total subordination of moral claims to political power. Kings could not simply declare themselves the source of law. This structural pluralism — messy, violent, inefficient — was the selection environment that produced the institutional innovations no monolithic civilization generated independently.

Industrialization shifted the fitness function of inter-societal competition. Production moved outside the household. Literacy became economically necessary. Total war required total mobilization — countries deploying women in factories outcompeted those that did not. The second wave was adaptation: liberation of economic potential, wartime necessity, competitive advantage.

The first wave of women’s suffrage (1893-1920) was almost exclusively a phenomenon of white, predominantly Protestant, settler-colonial or Northern European societies. Christian theological infrastructure provided resonant arguments. Industrial economies created material conditions making female participation advantageous. Frontier environments lowered institutional inertia compared to the established, entrenched central European monarchies and democracies. The pattern was not incidental — it was the outcome of specific cultural inheritance.

The votes to extend suffrage were explicitly male. The British Parliament — entirely male — passed the Representation of the People Act 1918. The United States Congress — entirely male — passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919; thirty-six state legislatures — overwhelmingly male — ratified it. New Zealand’s Parliament — entirely male — passed women’s suffrage in 1893. Men, operating within Judeo-Christian moral frameworks that made exclusion philosophically untenable, voted to share power. This happened nowhere else independently. No other civilization but the Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian descendant attempted and succeeded in instituting universal suffrage. Equally true for the abolition of slavery.

No other civilization independently developed this combination. The spread of universal suffrage beyond the West occurred through colonial export of Western norms or through post-colonial constitution-writing that adopted Western frameworks wholesale. India did not develop universal suffrage through centuries of internal agitation by women within indigenous democratic institutions. India received universal suffrage as a package deal at independence, drafted into a constitution modeled on Western precedents.

The third wave operates under different constraints. Information technology removed ancestral constraints on female competitive strategies while providing no regulatory infrastructure. The liberation that male-built and male-regulated institutions enabled is now being used to degrade those same institutions and the liberator.

Millennia to build the regulatory infrastructure. Decades to overwhelm it. From the Seneca Falls Convention to the Nineteenth Amendment: seventy-two years. From suffrage to female majority in higher education: approximately sixty years. From the pill to sub-replacement fertility across the developed world: approximately forty years. From social media saturation to scaled coalition warfare: approximately ten years.

Systemically, women are new to power and power is new to women.

IIX - Biological Clock

To inspire imitation, we need to be beautiful, we need to be powerful, and we need to be healthy into old age.

Civilization had millennia to develop accountability structures for males. The process was slow, painful, incomplete — but the structures exist and their valence is apodictic. They emerged through iteration of norm-enforcement mechanisms. Societies that failed to regulate male violence collapsed or were conquered. The survivors carried institutional DNA encoding solutions that worked. This was not planned. It was selected. It grew. It took time.

No equivalent selection process has operated on female competitive strategies at scale. There was no need. The strategies remained bounded by their ancestral parameters until this century. Now we are running an experiment in real time and time is running out.

Morality is not independent of fitness — high-trust societies require shared moral frameworks precisely because trust is functionally advantageous. Good is what works in context. When compassion-coded policy undermines the conditions that sustain high-trust societies, the morality invoked in justification becomes its own negation. A value system that destroys its host cannot be moral. A population that does not replace itself does not survive its advocates. Sub-replacement fertility is the demographic expression of a recessive gene — maybe pleasurable for the carrier, non-hereditary by definition, eventually dominated by the populations that do not carry it. Every civilization currently below replacement is running a cultural and political policy stack whose beneficiaries will not exist in sufficient numbers to perpetuate it. The societies that persist will be those that solved the coordination problem differently. Their conclusions about the advisability of universal suffrage will be drawn from our competitive performance.

If the regulatory asymmetry proves fatal — if cannibalization degrades civilizational capacity faster than adaptation can compensate — then today’s record becomes the permanent case against universal suffrage. Every data point is stored. Every event recorded in 4K. Future civilizations will see this pattern: liberation enabled by male-built institutions, exploitation of those institutions through female competitive strategies, degradation of institutional quality, failing fertility, civilizational decline. They will draw the conclusion that universal suffrage is not viable long-term and limit female political and economic participation accordingly. Not because feminism was wrong in principle - it’s not. Not because the theological payloads that justified equal dignity were false - they aren’t. But because the implementation proved unsustainable — a choice whose beneficiaries did not reproduce in sufficient numbers to perpetuate it, whose coalition dynamics degraded the society that hosted it, whose feedback arrived late, whose adjustment wasn’t. A recessive gene. Pleasurable for the carriers. Eliminated by selection.

The feminists of today may become the face of the permanent case against feminism.

The biggest losers of today’s failure would be tomorrow’s women. The Marie Curies who never get a laboratory. The Emmy Noethers who never get a blackboard. The J.K. Rowlings who never get a publisher. The Ada Lovelaces who never get to write their first programs. The Camille Vasquezes (call me) who never get a courtroom. The millions of exceptional women — sharp, driven, capable, hungry — who will never get to express themselves, never get to contribute, never get to compete on merit, never get to make their own choices and mistakes, to struggle and fail and grow. And the billions of women who will grow up as property — under theocracies, in slavery, under systems that refuse to make the same mistake the West made, veiled and voiceless and bred, because the one civilization that figured out how to do it differently collapsed under the consequences of its achievement. The most profound moral achievement in human history, squandered by its beneficiaries.

IX - Beach Ball

Wave zero was universal bondage — every agricultural civilization, no exceptions. Wave one was the singular achievement of one civilization and demographic, Western men voting within Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian legal and moral frameworks to extend equal rights to women. Wave two was the sweet spot and an adaptation to changed fitness functions — industrialization liberating economic potential, total war requiring total mobilization. Wave three is parasitic cannibalization — the organism consuming the substrate that birthed and supports it. Wave four is inevitable due to the unsustainability of the third.

Two steps forward, one step back. The question is when and where the arithmetic zeroes out.

ps. Structurally, the same argument is to be made about the current cultural consensus around slavery and abolition. They are older than writing, older than money, older than Europe (and by extension a lot older than America - sorry ‘cuz), and was ended by white men of Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian descent who forced this change down the throat of every society within their sphere of influence (yay colonialism), at great cost to themselves, and on purely moral grounds. Yet, somehow, slavery is their fault.