The Gender Wars are Class Wars

Of course we'll never agree. We're living in different realities.

If you spent time around on Twitter, or even other social media sites, you’ve probably come face to face with the Gender Wars, which I’ll abbreviate as GW. It’s not quite as simple as “men versus women,” because you’ll find all sorts of wacky contingents fighting together on behalf of their gender. Radfems and normie women might team up with trad Christian women to fight a pickup artist, a red pill man, and an incel (no, red pillers and incels aren’t necessarily the same thing and I hate that I know this.) You’ll also find anti-feminist women like Pearl Davis fighting on behalf of men, while happily married men or male feminists might join the women’s fight.

The GW discourse can be conjured from nearly anything. A woman taking part in any sexual behavior—anything from refusing a drink she didn’t trust to having sex with 100 men in a row—is enough to trigger a Gender Skirmish. While I’d say most of the arguments start with a woman’s behavior (perhaps the algorithm just favors it) men’s behavior doesn’t go ignored. For a full day, the GW raged over a man filming himself from his car, complaining about being abruptly rejected at a coffee shop. Even something as innocuous as a potentially mismatched couple or a couple with a ten-year age gap is enough to trigger a battle in the GW.

Feels like an overreaction idk

I’ve unfortunately been steeped in this stuff for over ten years, which is one of the more embarrassing things about me, second to the fact that I once took part in a college charity fashion show where I was told to dress “fierce” only to discover everyone else was wearing goofy Sesame Street costumes and breakdancing on the runway and I was wearing a Bebe bodycon dress with six-inch heels—and then we had to measure the winners based on applause and nobody clapped for me because I looked like I was taking it way too seriously. Sorry, this is bringing up a lot of trauma for me. Back on topic.

Anyway, one of the things that has stayed constant for those ten years in the GW trenches is that for the most part, the women and men arguing with each other can’t seem to agree on the basic realities of how the world works. It’s not even an issue of men being better than women, or vice versa—nobody expects to align on that. It’s the fact that these two groups simply cannot agree on what the world is like, value judgments aside.

There are obviously many problems with the GW—plenty of people on each side of the GW genuinely just have a lot of hatred and anger in their hearts and aren’t ever going to engage in good faith. But the biggest identifiable problem I’ve noticed—and the reason that nobody can agree on the fundamental realities of life—is that these arguments aren’t really about gender at all—they’re about class.