2025-09-15
man with hands and ankles bound
Cultural Romantic in defense of romance novels, arguing that they can, contrary to claims that they are pure wish-fulfillment, can also contain useful information for women to use in navigating their relationships. It’s interesting to ask to what extent this is the exception rather than the norm, but her claim is that there is a standard structure which mirrors the hero’s journey, which implies the latter case.
Works in Progress interviews Alice Evans on feminism in East Asia. It’s a little strange, because sometimes she seems to have a nuanced understanding of why things are the way they are, like for excessive work-related drinking. But alternatively, she often defaults to the idea that the men are being misogynistic as an explanation for why systems are behaving in ways that don’t seem to make sense. In general, I feel like misogyny is rarely a direct explanation for why systems get broken. Rather, cultural norms, which may or may not be influenced by patriarchal attitudes, set incentives which people then respond rationally to1. For example, she mentions how heritage is marked purely patrilineally, but she doesn’t seem to notice the full implication of this fact. It means that both men and women in Confucian countries have internalized the idea that, rather than being a 50-50 genetic mix of both parents, a child is borne from the mother but is not of her metaphysically (in some sense turning every mother in China into a stepmother)2. It naturally follows that women should only join with a sufficiently high status provider who can properly compensate them for the pain of pregnancy and the drudgery of child-rearing, making marriage a primarily economic transaction3.
David Deek describes a paper on parental assistance to their working age children in the event of unemployment, adding an interesting implication that pensions might be supporting more than just the old. This may have implications as to why young people in France are protesting in favor of protecting the pension system, despite the average pensioner now having higher income than the average working-age adult (via the FT).
Adam Salibury in Asterisk Mag on badly run census estimates in much of the world. It’s interesting that Nigeria seems to be the go-to example for this, and it’s unclear to me if that’s because they are particularly bad, or because in their self admission of failure they are actually better than other African countries. I was also curious whether this means that fertility rates are also lower than claimed, but Claude tells me that those stats are from household surveys rather than population estimates.
Zvi linkthread.
Similarly, I don’t think “collectivism” adequately describes why people are averse to making a scene in East Asia, because people’s actions are generally not directly the result of principled decisions. People in America would look at you like you’re crazy if you don’t tip; if asked to justify why, they might say something about identification with workers, but the direct cause is because norm violations are universally objectionable. Emphasis on social harmony might explain why these norms were originally created, but once they become widely accepted, the original rationale doesn’t really matter any longer.
Edit: on that note, here is an interesting discussion between Linch Zhang and Daniel Muñoz on many topics related to moral philosophy (and political violence), including the nature of societal norms and their unusual power relative to their underlying philosophical justifications.
I don’t want to overemphasize on this, because maternal love clearly exists as a concept in China, but socially and politically speaking, there isn’t really scaffolding around it. For example, in harem dramas it’s a common plot point that children of concubines must address their father’s primary wife as mother, with alternative and lesser titles used for their actual birth mother. Likewise, even in the late 20th century, marrying someone with the same surname was prohibited, while marrying your maternal cousin was not only legal but often encouraged.
This is probably exaggerated and applies more to an elite subset of the population who lives and works in tier one cities, but Based Camp has an episode noting how this leads to high-status men being in far higher demand than supply in China, as well as a mutual sense between both genders that the other one is overly entitled.