the "childless white women treat Oppressed Minorities as surrogate children" hypothesis would also help explain the way they infantilize the people they try to champion, and the way they deny the moral agency and responsibility of these surrogates for their own actions
also i'm one of those childless white women and yet i fucking hate this woke shit -- and i also dislike children, and the thought of having kids horrifies me. anecdotal, but it's an interesting correlation all the same
i've often noticed that my whole moral psychology seems very unusual compared to the female norm in the west, and i've never been sucked into the Hive Mind either. i have this theory that there are two broad categories of women, mothering and non-mothering.

women of the former category love kids, feel an actual internal *compulsion* to reproduce biologically (and not even just adopt), that can sometimes be crushingly intense. their moral psychology is very distinct from men, and they prefer to copy the beliefs of other trusted women uncritically rather than come up with their own. they avoid overt competition, and their world revolves almost entirely around people and children. if they work outside the home by choice, it's probably with kids or young adults. their hobbies tend to either facilitate engagement with other people or offer simplistic distractions with little intellectual depth to them. the vast majority of women fall into this category.

women of the latter category don't have irrationally positive feelings towards children, don't engage in ritual baby-sniffing, tend to see pregnancy as undesirable if not outright body-horror, and have a more masculine moral psychology. sometimes we even have more masculine-ish patterns of interest (though i've yet to meet a woman who was *more* interested in things than people), and tend to think more independently (though most of us still not as independently as men). we are more likely to have technical and/or overtly competitive interests, like engineering or sports (i have the former, but not the latter - competition is very off-putting to me). i think we tend to get along with & understand men better as well.

i wonder if it's a brain-glitch, a sex hormone imbalance thing, or if it evolved to fulfill a particular purpose. whatever it is, i'm convinced it's immutably hard-wired.

@velartrill I think you are kind of trying to reinvent "Gender Differences In Personality And Interests" (reference: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ab, lighter reading with similar conclusions to yours: slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/ more lighter reading on the same topic, with more references inside: slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/). Note that this is still statistical, and rather than looking at this as a thing that only differentiates among women, it's probably better to consider it a general difference in human personalities, although one that is unusually strongly correlated with gender. In particular I definitely know women who are more interested in things than in people, and the correlation with attitudes toward motherhood is also definitely not as strong as you imply.

@timorl > Note that this is still statistical, and rather than looking at this as a thing that only differentiates among women, it's probably better to consider it a general difference in human personalities

i have no idea what you're trying to say here

> I definitely know women who are more interested in things than in people,

and they are a statistical anomaly. humanity is a very diverse species with a lot of mutation and variability going on, and anomalies happen all the time. the statistical trends remain extremely strong nonetheless

(also: are these cis women or trans women you're talking about here? because there tend to be some dramatic differences between the two groups)

@velartrill
> i have no idea what you're trying to say here

Yeah, sorry, that wasn't clear at all. I meant to say that when you look at the statistics then interests are heavily correlated with gender, but there are still significant minorities which have the opposite interests than their gender would suggest (I don't remember exactly but it was 10-30%). This also answers your second objection I think, although it's good to remember that people in general skew towards being more interested in people than systems, so women literally interested in systems more than people will be pretty rare (I still expect at least a couple percent).

I was thinking about cis women. The only trans woman I knew was definitely more interested in people, which kind of makes sense -- trans people usually end up closer to their identified cluster in those kinds of research, although they definitely also skew towards the other gender within that cluster.

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