Gender Wars in Unigender World (Speech Transcript)

By: Sam Vaknin, Brussels Morning

According to a recent study by Pew Center, among heterosexuals, 63% of men and 34% of women under age 30 self-describe as single. Things are not much different in the LGBTQ+ communities: 62% of males and 37% of females, respectively. One fifth of Gen Z identify as queer. The situation is much worse in countries like China, India, Japan, South Korea, and even the UK and Russia. Only 21% of men and 41% of women talked to a friend in the previous week, according to a study in 2021.

57% of singles in all age groups avoid even casual dating (read: sex). This is an increase of 20% since 2019, driven largely by disaffected single men. Even so, men are 50% more likely than women to be looking for a committed relationship.

There are six trends that brought us to where we are: a raging war between increasingly more wary, belligerent, and hostile men and women.

There is animosity between the genders. A conflict that sometimes devolves into hatred. It’s really bad out there. And it’s bad in all age groups, which I think is a first in human history.

The growing inter-gender problem is a kind of virus and, so it affects all age groups. You can find women age 65 and 45 and 25 saying exactly the same thing about men and vice versa.

There are six reasons to this deterioration in civility between the sexes.

The first one I call: invulnerability signaling.

I think the two genders are signaling to each other: I don’t need you, I’m self-sufficient. I’m autonomous. I have my goals and I’m focused on them. I don’t have emotions. I’m uninvolved. I’m not vulnerable.

So while in the past, until let’s say, 40 years ago, people were signaling to each other their vulnerabilities in order, for example, to have sex or to date, people are now signaling to each other their invulnerability. It’s a kind of F off message or signal.

And this has become an ossified ideology: it’s cool to be invulnerable.

The second trend is what Barbara Risman described as gender vertigo.

Gender vertigo is the outcome of having dispensed with classical, traditional gender roles (men, women). They haven’t been modified: they have been eliminated in favour of what I call a unigender world. This transition has had a devastating effect on behavioral scripts, including sexual scripts.

So today, you don’t know what it means to be a man, for example when dating or having sex.

There are no sexual scripts. There are no dating scripts. There are no gender roles. There are no guidelines. This yields enormous confusion regarding what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior and what is a code of conduct to be adopted and emulated or modeled.

Today, every relationship has to be negotiated from scratch. My mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, when they had met and were on the way to becoming a couple, when they were in this process, they were guided by codes, by gender roles. They didn’t need to embark on a thousand mile march. They just needed to traverse the last mile.

Today, if you start a new relationship, you have to negotiate everything: what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman, what is and is not acceptable behavior, what constitutes infidelity, boundaries…

Everything has to be negotiated from scratch in every single relationship and this destructive. It creates friction. And it’s exhausting.

And so this onerous process leads to avoidance, withdrawal, and schizoid atomization. People give up. People are tired. They don’t want to do this anymore. They stay at home.

2016 was the first year that a majority of women and a majority of men in the USA didn’t have a single meaningful contact with a member of the opposite sex, with the exception of pizza delivered.

Now, the next trend is what is called the stalled revolution.

Stalled revolution means that women describe themselves increasingly more by using traditional masculine terms: seven out of eight self-descriptive words are traditional masculine adjectives.

Unigender is a single masculine gender. Femininity has been abolished. There are men with penises and men with vaginas. But we’re all masculine. Women are breadwinners. Women have surpassed men in a variety of areas. Women are more educated than men, etc. So women had become men and aspire to be men, or more precisely narcissistic and psychopathic men.

So there is a convergence of men and women. And the politically correct media, mainstream media adore this uniformity, embellish and promote it.

Consider the moronic phrase: pregnant people. The CNN and the New York Times no longer use the word pregnant women. It’s pregnant people. It’s like saying people with testicles. You know, not men, God forbid. We are all people. We are not men. We are not women. We are people. And some of us mysteriously get pregnant.

Eliminating this beautiful difference between the genders, the source, the engine of attraction, of sex, sexuality, the engine of fecundity and fertility and procreation and recreation, made us so much poorer. We are utterly impoverished nowadays.

Gradually the concept of sex is equally being erased via the concept of sex fluidity.

To make clear: transgender and transsexual people do have their innate experience of not belonging to their biological sex. And there’s no reason for them not to act on this innate feeling and change sex.

But gender fluidity and sex fluidity as ideologies have nothing to do with gender dysphoria. Negating one’s biological sex or social and cultural gender as patriarchal, evil, malevolent constructs intended to enslave women is propaganda, not evidence-based science or policymaking. It’s the ideological crust above all these changes that renders us stultified and nullified.

The next trend is what I call defiant agency.

There’s big brouhaha about being agentic, reacquiring agency, self-efficacy. And of course, agency and self-efficacy are healthy. They’re markers of mental health. But the contemporary variants have been imbued with aggression and are euphemisms for it. People are transitioning from assertiveness to reckless defiance.

So now people display their agency or their self-efficacy by trampling on other people, by acting recklessly, by being violent and aggressive, by becoming abusive.

There’s always been a healthy tension between men and women. There’s always been a discourse between genders. True: women were really mistreated and enslaved. But in the last 150 years, it’s no longer true. All intergender discourses have ultimately proven to be essentially benign and constructive.

Had the discourse been malevolent and malignant, women would not have been where they are today: more liberated and emancipated.

So, it seems that men had participated in the discourse in good faith, judging by the outcomes.

The intergender dialogue had been corrupted and contaminated, became malignant, owing to this defiance in lieu of agency.

The last trend is what I call the enshrined double standard.

Now, there’s always been a double standard. Women who behaved in a certain way sexually were castigated as sluts. Men who behaved the same way were studs.

But what happened is an amazing thing: Women have adopted the male double standard. Women tried to conform to chauvinistic male stereotypes of sexually emancipated women.

Now there is slut pride. Women don’t realize that to be a slut is to conform to the most extreme misogynistic male stereotype. If you’re proud of the raunch culture, you are a chauvinistic man’s wet dream. You conform to his worldview.

Women claim to be empowered. But there are multiple studies, for example, by Lisa Wade, by Kerry Cohen, that demonstrate that the women who claim to be empowered the most, are the women who had adopted and internalized and introjected the double standard.

For example, these women told the researchers, I’ve had 40 sexual partners, but don’t tell anyone, because it’s shameful. So they are emancipated and empowered stealthily, secretly, surreptitiously. Why? Because men will think badly of them had they known about their body count. They had adopted the male double standard.

And this duality, this self-denial, this self-deception are driving the genders apart because women are conforming to stereotypes held by narcissistic, misogynistic men.

The majority of men find this very off-putting because most men are not chauvinistic, psychopathic, or narcissistic. Threse typical men are beginning to find women disgusting, repulsive and off-putting — the way they find narcissistic, psychopathic men repellent.

So there is a break, a schism between the genders because women are acting the part that actually the vast majority of men don’t want them to act. And men are acting the part that now women are rejecting because it doesn’t sit well with the alpha male, narcissistic, chauvinistic, psychopathic kind of guy, the bad guy.

Women are rejecting themselves, they have internalized and introjected the double standard. When you say, I’m a slut, supposedly it’s a proud self-designation, but actually deep inside you feel shame.

This inner dissonance creates self-harming and self-trashing behaviors. The incidence of sexual self-trashing and other forms of self-harming among women is much, much higher than 40 or 30 or 20 years ago.

For example, the incidence of depression among teenage women under the age of 25 is up by 300%. Anxiety disorders among teenage women have skyrocketed by more than 550% (according to studies, especially by Twenge and Campbell, conducted between 2008 and 2018).

This started long before COVID. The influence of social media and the exposure to screen have been postulated as possible etiologies. But I believe that the fact that women feel bad with having internalized male chauvinistic psychopathic narcissistic stereotypes of themselves. They feel ego-dystonic. They feel ashamed. They feel guilty. They act this way because they’re expected to act this way because they are “empowered”.

But deep inside, it sucks. They feel bad. They feel they are not themselves. They feel they are acting. It’s a role play. I consider it a form of self-harming and self-trashing: self-punishment for not being you, for succumbing, for giving in, for falsifying and betraying yourself. Not all women are Madonnas and not all women are whores. But, we can safely generalize, statistically speaking.

A true feminist would encourage women to free themselves of the male gaze altogether rather than adopt the gaze of the psychopathic narcissistic male, the predators who are having a field day with female promiscuity.

As to men: why would they choose to be monogamous? Monogamy is a cost. Why would you pay anything for something you get free? It’s not nice to say, but women were trading sex. Women have been trading sex for stability, longevity of relationships and child rearing. That was a deal. And now they’re giving it free. It’s totally self-destructive and they’re calling it self-empowerment.

Anything that is commodified is devalued. Women feel pressured into engaging in sex acts, which in the past used to be reserved only for intimate partners.

Women and men have always maintained a kind of inventory: these acts I’m doing with strangers and these acts I reserve for intimate partners. I never kiss with a stranger, for example. There are some things I never do with a stranger and I do them only with my intimate partner so that my intimate partner can feel special.

And now this is gone. The specialness is gone. The mystery, it’s so sad. It’s especially sad for people my age because I had witnessed and experienced it before.

The assumptions of the intergender dialogue have changed. Everything is kept on the surface, real intimacy is shunned. This harks back to the first trend, invulnerability signaling. If you let anyone in, they’re going to spot your vulnerabilities and you don’t want them to realize your vulnerabilities because then they can hurt you and they’re going to hurt you for sure. It’s a given. So you’re not going to let them.

And there are new trends. For example, as of a few years ago, the majority of women had renounced men psychologically in the sense that they now are actually looking for what the manosphere call beta males. The majority of women in studies since 2018 report that they are actually selecting beta males as partners even for one night stands because women have adopted narcissistic and psychopathic male role models. And so now they want to feel superior. They want to feel in control.

Recent studies show that there has been a shift in preference for the first time in human history from alpha, successful winners to beta losers.

Men on the manosphere are denying this, but they are simply not updated.

Many women now have careers and are self-sufficient economically. They actually seek beta males that they can kind of tame, domesticate, and subjugate at home, lord over or even bully.

I reiterate: women have adopted narcissistic and psychopathic male role models rather than good, healthy, constructive male role models. I am not sure why women adopted male role to start with, but they definitely chose the wrong ones.

Same sex relationships and sexuality are going to become more common. Why would a man go for a poor imitation of masculinity, if he can access the original?

Same applies women: why would you go for an effeminate sort of masculine men? Just head straight for a woman.

At the same time, there is going to be a lot more atomization. We are already seeing this. For example: the frequency of sex and dating among people younger than 35 and especially among people younger than 25 is much lower than in their parents’ generation and their grandparents’ generation. People under the age of 25 date far less and have sex fewer times and with fewer partners than in previous generations. Dating had declined within 10 years by 60%. Even hookups are on the decline.

So, people have cynically given up on each other. They gravitate into same-sex relationships or into experimental, kinky sex, or into celibacy. We have a surge, for example, in swinging (the Lifestyle), in open relationships, open marriages. About 3% of dyads self-identify as being in open relationships and open marriages. 3% sounds like a small number, but it’s an enormous leap from the 1950s.

Ultimately, we will end up being ensconced and cocooned in our abodes, interact digitally, and find sex substitutes.

The consumption of pornography is through the roof, five times higher than only five years ago. There’s a book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which documents this phenomenon. Pornography by now is definitely the main substitute for 3D sex, as far as men are concerned and the main source for sexual education among the young.

Men consider pornography to be a full-fledged substitute to the real thing. Women are not there yet, although they’re gravitating towards pornography. Sex dolls and digital sex with tactile haptic input are next.

People just gave up on any viable alternative, they settle for what they can get, for arrangements like friends with benefits.

Lisa Wade, in her studies, describes conversations with young girls between the ages of 15 and 30. These young women said to her: the worst thing you could do is show emotions. You should never cling. You should never ever write to your sex partner after the first sex, the first one night stand.

They mock other girls who do this. They say that it’s a common practice for men to send them SMSs or text messages saying: don’t call me again, don’t contact me again. It was a one-time thing. They say that there’s a code of behavior where both sides intentionally get drunk so that they can blame the drink and say: there was nothing there. It wasn’t emotional. It wasn’t even sexual. We were just drunk. So, drinking alcohol has become a kind of alibi or excuse. This is not a subculture: it encompasses, according to Lisa Wade, about 81% of young women.

Now, Lisa Wade is a prominent scholar. She says that about four-fifths of young women adhere to this code, which is a code of rejection, a code of alienation, a code of cold detachment, a code of cynicism, and a code of what I call signaling invulnerability.

I’m not interested in you. I have no emotions. I’m not even sexually attracted to you. I was bloody drunk. Don’t ever call me. Don’t dare to write to me. You clingy, needy, codependent, disgusting nonbeing. And this is the intergender dialogue among the young.

Another phenomenon is self-phonography. So growing numbers of people — mainly women, but also men — generate pornography and just give it away, put it out there. They turn on live cams, not for money. Self-phonography is a transient substitute for a connection. A momentary faux intimacy via self-objectification. Sexting with strangers is driven by the same psychological motivations and needs as camming.

So today, a woman who refuses to masturbate on camera needs help, something’s wrong with her, she is a prude who is denying her own sexuality.

This empowerment thing is all male dictated and male oriented. It’s ironical. It’s crazy. It’s mind blowing. It’s a male’s wonderland.

Women are converting themselves into a commodity, objectifying themselves. And then they are giving themselves freely to men who demand it because they have stereotypes of promiscuous women and then these women proud of it.

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is a former economic advisor to governments (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, North Macedonia), served as the editor in chief of “Global Politician” and as a columnist in various print and international media including “Central Europe Review” and United Press International (UPI). He taught psychology and finance in various academic institutions in several countries (http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html )