Ask A Genius 927: Women’s Increasing Domination in Key Industries

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/21

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we are continuing to see women take over key Industries: medicine, law, and some areas of science, which has been a trend happening more rapidly progressively in the last three decades, maybe four, where women are more educated, and they are picking more relevant industries for sort of long-term employment in society and the knowledge economy, and this is having many impacts. Women have their own money; they’re making more than their partners if they have them in many cases, so men aren’t necessarily being displaced. They’re having to reorient themselves to this changing dynamic about gender. So, how do you think men are taking this in different ways: positive, negative, neutral?

Rick Rosner: So, there’s a more general idea of not just the gender landscape but the landscape of all different demographics. However, you want to slice humanity. The old guard of cis white males is slowly losing its dominance to the distress of cis white males and the people who politically exploit their anger, but my deal about DEI, diversity, equality, and inclusion is that you don’t have to worry about it if you don’t suck. I’ve had tremendous advantages probably that I don’t even realize from being a cis white male. At the same time, I’ve been pretty good at many of my jobs. Everybody’s job is being threatened, whether white male or not, by technology, and it’s talked about more now, but it’s still not talked about enough. Politicians, especially right-wing politicians, like to blame the other party’s policies for job losses, but what gets ignored is that it’s tech that’s displacing people. So, to that extent, we all should be worried, and what I just said is that you don’t have to worry if you don’t suck; well, no, you do have to worry because of tech but diversity is something that is a to some extent a straw man. 

For instance, Boeing has had many mishaps lately, and idiots on the right were quick to blame it on diversity hiring policies at Boeing, and this was quickly debunked. What happened was Boeing merged with McDonald Douglas, and Boeing had a culture of safety, which you would want. You want to sell reliable products because if you’re selling freaking kitchen wear, safety isn’t as much of an issue as it is with freaking planes. You can sell plates that might be more breaky than you’d want a plate to be, which have fewer disastrous safety implications than if you sell a plane that breaks. So, Boeing quite reasonably had a culture of safety, and then they merged with McDonald’s Douglas, which was a much more crash company, and the corporate culture of McDonald Douglas took over Boeing, and they had Boeing move its corporate headquarters from, I think Seattle where Boeing makes the planes, to Chicago and there was less oversight. Over the past 10-15 years, they’ve taken many shortcuts with disastrous results, which has nothing to do with DEI: diversity. It has everything to do with management being shitty.

Anyway, back to the changing landscape. So, one thing is like the guardians of cis white male dominance like to argue that cis white males are just genetically more talented and have higher IQs and better brains than anybody else. That’s anybody who tries to make an argument about the IQ of an entire demographic except Trump supporters is an asshole with a creepy agenda, and I would argue that you can say about the thinking abilities of hardcore MAGA Republicans because it’s known that over the past 50 years, Republican think tanks have helped the Republican party target low information voters which is a euphemism for dumb people, they’re more manipulatable. So, in that case, you can say, yeah, many MAGAs are dumb. However, when you’re arguing about the IQs of entire countries, the creepy guys who read The Bell Curve, which was this famous book from 30 years ago that made all these arguments about the brains of entire Nations, those people are creeps and generally making bullshit arguments and also let’s say for the sake of argument that some of these things are true, some groups of people might be dumber than other groups of people. It doesn’t matter anymore because we all have devices that, if used reasonably, make us smarter, which is excellent for the world. 

It may not be great for individuals who are forced into these crappy half jobs like Uber driver by technology, but in general, more intelligence in the world and the ability to take your ‘eh’ brain and supercharge it by learning how to work with technology is a good thing. So, there is increasing inclusion; the arguments against inclusion are increasingly crappy, but along with growing inclusion is a backlash that the cynical demagogues of the proper ferment. Make America Great Again is the idea of taking America back to the 50s when white guys were in charge, they were the heads of households, and wives had to listen to them, even though this doesn’t reflect an actual reality that the dad worked, the mom stayed home; everybody had a house and a car in the suburbs, and everything was excellent. This doesn’t reflect reality for most Americans, even in the 1950s, but that’s what the backlash against diversity presents. Some of this is driven by the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice, and some is driven by tech for the reasons I just laid out. Also driven by tech is an erosion of standard gender roles where people are having less sex because there are a ton more things to do that are entertaining beyond having sex. 

As I have said a million times, the 70s were freaking boring and the only thing that didn’t kind of suck was sex if you were cool enough to have sex and attractive enough. Again, helped along by tech, there’s an erosion of the association between sex and sexual attraction and sexual attractiveness that tech has brought us an avalanche of porn. I haven’t looked at studies, but I would guess that a majority of people in their sexually active years consume porn; I mean, indeed, a majority of males look at porno, and I would think that either a majority or a near majority of women look at porno at least occasionally. 

Jacobsen: Women probably use literature more than them when men probably use audiovisual stuff.

Rosner: I mean, women are said to be less visual in their porn consumption than men. Maybe so, but even so, if there’s a ton of that stuff out there too though it’s a little more complicated to find but I would guess that 60% of women in their sexually active years have; this is just a wild guess, have looked at porn at least once in the last year. So, what that means is much jerking off, and if you can have satisfying jerking off experiences that can lead to incels, the guys who give up on being sexually attractive enough to get a girlfriend and doing the work to get a girlfriend, they’re just kind of vaguely satisfied just looking at porn and jerking off. Two, for people in the marketplace or hooking up, there’s less emphasis on having a perfect face and body, with everybody having a spank bank. I mean, it used to be in regular times that you relied on the sensory information you were getting from having sex with a flesh and blood person to power your horniness to give you a boner or a lady boner, and the porn was in short supply. Now, we got a ton of porn, and everybody has a spank bank, a library of images that they can turn to in their imagination even when they’re having sex with an actual person. 72% of Americans are overweight, and half of those people are obese. I would guess that overweight Americans having sex aren’t exclusively attracted to overweight people and that many people are overweight or with other things that make them, not Farrah Fawcett, Megan Fox or Bradley Cooper are turning to images in their imagination.

So, you’ve got more masturbation, less sex between two people, and less having to conform to old standards of hotness, which, to a great extent, powers gender roles. It probably is still true that the more redneck the city in America, the more people conform to gender roles, the more women still try to be super-hot and dress hot, and guys try to be buff and have the buff lifestyle of the big truck and the tattoos and biceps and all that but there’s been a general erosion of that. You’ve got the rise of trans awareness and then the cynical, politicized rise of backlash against trans. Trans people are 1% or less of the population. So, it’s a standard strategy of demagogues and fascists to drum up hate against a small, relatively powerless group. Muslims: 1% of the American population. Jews: 2% of the American population. Trans people: 1%, but on the other hand, you have people who are feeling increasingly free to explore being trans if they feel that they are not entirely aligned with the sex they were born with.

Besides the backlash and the hate and the threats to your safety from being trans or from people who hate trans people, I guess you can’t blame the victim; there is an issue with your genitals. If you believe yourself to be trans, some changes are relatively easy to make. If you’re questioning your gender as a teen or even before you’re a teen, there are puberty-blocking drugs that give you time to decide, and then the backlash to those are conservative assholes saying that those drugs cause permanent changes. I haven’t read the studies to see if there’s anything to the studies that say that puberty blockers cause permanent changes, which is what you don’t want; you want to delay puberty so you have time to make a decision. I assume if I read the studies. Do you know anything about the studies on puberty blockers?

Jacobsen: I know one person who has gone through that. You should wait until someone is biologically an adult before using certain things. At the same time, to what degree do we respect someone’s self-identification during the growth process? That’s an open discussion right now.

Rosner: Well, some kids are physically intersex; they have the sex characteristics of both sexes. Those kids are by far in the minority than one-quarter of 1% of everybody, but in those people, increasing awareness of trans people has stopped a lot of the harm done near birth where people freak out. A kid is born with both sets of genitals or some version of that, and the doctors and the parents freak out and say we have to decide for the kid right now so they can grow up as the sex we think they are of the two possible sexes they could be. That will lead to much harm because once you operate on a kid, that kid is screwed. So, just leaving a kid alone until they’re much older and can help decide what to do, if anything, is more helpful. However, with puberty blockers, I assume the studies would say that they’re safe and do not cause permanent changes, mainly if only used for a few months in the vast majority of people who are giving them with 5%, and I don’t know I’m just guessing at the percentage of people experiencing some degree of what they think are permanent changes but I don’t know. But if puberty blockers are harmless ways to gain time to decide, that’s good. 

People realize they might be trans at various points in their life. Some trans people identify as the gender that they weren’t born as from the point where they can express themselves and know the difference between being male and being female. Carol has an acquaintance whose kid has identified as a girl though was born with the body of a boy since that kid was before kindergarten and has never been ambiguous about it. So, when that kid gets to be, I don’t know when puberty kicks in these days, but let’s say 12, that kid may reasonably be prescribed puberty blockers. Say that kid’s younger than 18 or being operated on, which is almost entirely not true, and nobody under 18 should have gender-conforming surgery because a) you can wait and b) because anything like that gives demagogues of the right way too much ammo. Anyway, I took a long time to get to my point, which is that one problem with being trans that is not entirely political is the brutality of bottom surgery.

Jacobsen: 100%.

Rosner: It’s a massive surgery, and it requires lifetime maintenance like you have to use a dildo or a speculum, I believe, for the rest of your life. If you’ve had a vagina construct to make sure your vagina doesn’t tighten up or close down, I don’t know, but it’s a big deal. Well, there are two trends; one is actual, and one is I’m speculating about. The actual trend is that as there’s more acceptance of trans people, there are more people who are accepting of just leaving the bottom alone. You get the top surgery; you take the hormones. It’s the Caitlyn Jenner strategy of body modification, where you do all the reasonable and easy stuff to look female, but you don’t mess with the bottom. Now, Jenner is probably pushing 70, and she says a lot of anti-trans stuff. So, you don’t want to follow her politically necessarily, but many people, I think, are following that same idea that what your genitals are is nobody’s business, that if you want to present as a male or present as a woman, what your genitals are shouldn’t like be a big issue with that. And I’m waiting. At some point in the next five years, there will be a big, flashy celebrity who has a straight relationship with a transperson who it’s suspected hasn’t had bottom surgery. On Twitter, I follow some very hot trans women because I follow a ton of people. 

Jacobsen: Some of the hottest people on Tinder are trans.

Rosner: Yeah, and these are women, I’m pretty sure, and again it’s none of my business, but these are hot women who probably have the penises they were born with, and I believe that like, there’s some pop star who’s like blazingly hot, some singer who I’m sure hasn’t had bottom surgery and these women if they’re straight if they’re cis-trans women, they date men and eventually one of these super-hot trans women is to have a celebrity relationship with a celebrity guy. Everybody’s going to be curious about that, and there’s going to be much interest, and then, like, the right-wingers will throw up their hands, but eventually, everybody will freaking calm down. So, that’s one thing that it’s great that we’re increasingly able to accept people regardless of whether their genitals conform to their gender.

Thing two is that I would assume that in the future, there will be improvements and advances in medical science that make it possible to transition your genitals with less butchery. I don’t know how soon that’ll be, and when that happens, maybe it involves, if you’re fully adult, maybe there will always be some butchery, but let’s say that you’re somebody who’s known they were trans since they were like five or six years old and now, you’re 10 or 11 or 12 and you can get in there with crisper technology, gene tweaking to transition you or at least stop your transition. I assume that it’ll be more accessible, right? 

Jacobsen: There will be an increasing sophistication of the medical technology of the social culture in free societies. In closed societies, you’ll find much more of what they call cognitive closure as an accepted thing. So, simplistic arguments around gender, around sex such as merging them as one probably having it buffered by religious orthodoxy, the sort of stuff that’s already happened forever, yeah, but I think with the increasing sophistication of technology in the free societies, you’ll see a growing decoupling of standard modes of representing oneself, and people will generally understand. Then, the higher order stuff around partnership, sexual orientation around sex and gender; those assumptions will erode, and then you’ll see an increasing fluidity.

Rosner: People won’t be coupled in the medium to far-ish future… You can move your consciousness out of your body when it gets old and fails; iff you want to try walking around in a different body, that technology will eventually exist. Also, in the near to medium future, it is living virtually. If you’re lying someplace living with a rig on your head and sensory input all over your body, but you’re lying in a recliner and living virtually for 18 hours a day, if you’re trans, it doesn’t matter what your genitals are, if you’re living virtually as the person you want to be most of your waking hours. That’s thing one.

Thing two is Lance, whom I have argued with for 20 years and argued on video for seven years, bemoans our culture’s loss of masculinity. He thinks it’s the end of civilization if they lose their set gender roles and tolerate homosexuality, and I call bullshit on that. I’m not sure what’s to be gained from a rigid male are masculine, females are feminine society. We were talking about war and how war will be increasingly uncoupled from humans in combat.

Jacobsen: May I add two glancing blows to this cultural phenomenon two? One is the increasing single population. I think relationships as we know them for a large chunk of the population, maybe not the majority, but a significant minority, will not be part of their life path. Another medium to long future will be decoupling the creation of new people from the human body. I’m talking about something more extreme than working at a horse farm; there’s nothing natural about reproducing high-end horses now; it’s all done in very controlled and selective ways. I’m talking about the reproductive machinery being outside of a body independent of a conscious person but to make more people. I think that it may become a resort for certain societies to go to as a development in technology as we have a sort of replacement for people’s problems.

Rosner: Right. So, I just started watching and then quit watching because it wasn’t a good movie, a movie where everybody reproduces outside of their body if they have the money for it because pregnancy is harsh on your body. So, everybody still has babies, but if they have the money for it, they have them raised in artificial wombs so they don’t have to go through pregnancy, which would maybe be a choice for people in the future. People are choosing 25% of the world’s nations now have declining populations. By the end of the century, according to people who study this stuff, it’ll be three-quarters of the world’s nations, and the world’s overall population will plateau, which is terrible for near-term economies because we don’t know how to have successful economies that aren’t built on growth. However, we’ll have to figure it out, but it’s good for the planet because one solution to climate change is for people to have a smaller carbon footprint and the fewer people you have, the smaller the carbon footprint. 

So, you have three things going on. One is telecommuting; that people just staying home and doing everything they need to from home, not everything but going out less, traveling less, that’s trend one. COVID-19 hurried that along. You don’t want to own stock in office buildings because these buildings unless you own stock in a company that converts office buildings to residences, which is tough to do, but if somebody comes up with like easy ways to do cheap ways to do that, that’s a reasonable company. So, people’s carbon footprint is being reduced by less movement. The population is stabilizing and just developing technology to mitigate our effect on the climate, and all these three things together will at least address climate change and some other stuff. 

Jacobsen: I’ll only push back on the phrase good for the planet. I see this in the left commentary. The earth doesn’t care; the world doesn’t feel anything, it doesn’t think. So, what we mean by that is a planet that is good for us to persist and survive as a species or individual.

Rosner: It is suitable for diverse species.

Jacobsen: Yeah, which is good for us in an aesthetic sense.

Rosner: Yeah, and we’ve talked about the Disneyfication of the planet’s future, which is that it won’t just be trying to return the climate to the way it was before 200 years of burning a ton of fossil fuel. It won’t be all laissez-faire; there’ll be much control of local environments and ecosystems of engineering. We already do a ton of species engineering; we breed some species and study other species to find out their numbers, and if they’re endangered, we breed them. So, we already do a lot of that stuff and’ll increasingly do that to make the world friendly but also curated, Dysnified. Much of it’ll be done via swarms of robots that get out there and terraform. So, we’ve talked about much stuff. 

Jacobsen: Let’s leave it there and reconvene later.

[Recording End]

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