A Note to the Reader

This essay assumes a willingness to reason beyond instinctive agreement or disagreement. Many of the arguments presented challenge familiar narratives, not for the sake of contrarianism, but to examine whether they withstand historical scrutiny. I ask only that the same standard of critical thought be applied. Agreement is neither requested nor presumed.

This is a deliberately long, dense, and demanding essay, penned over 5,000 words. Feel free to read it in multiple sittings, revisit earlier sections where necessary, and take whatever time the argument demands. If a point appears contentious, I encourage you to continue reading before reaching a conclusion, as many arguments are developed over the course of several sections rather than within a single paragraph.

My ardent refusal to subscribe to the rather volatile framework of dismantling the patriarchy begins with the historical records some of us can’t help but confine in boxes they see fit. Which are inconvenient for the ideology than its proponents tend to acknowledge. Structurally, the agenda depends entirely on a misrepresentation of how oppressive institutions actually functioned across the documented centuries. Needless to say, inasmuch the misrepresentation is so central; the argument cannot survive without the selected slices of history it craves.

The fundamental error is one of immense attribution with little respect to the complexity and indifference of history. We are fortunate enough on this regard, for the historical records were preserved. Oppressive systems were organised by something far colder than ideology and far less susceptible to revolt. They were expressions of the apathetic logic of extraction. It need not care for the means or the maliceful perceptions it may breed. Historical exploitation had its central accomplishment defined as the requirement of bodies and labor, and cared very little about the gender of either. The feudal arrangements of medieval Europe, the tributary empires of antiquity, were brought upon by a commitment to continuation, for the only commitment power has ever reliably made. Unsurprisingly, a medieval lord’s serf owed the estate what the estate required with an absolute indifference extended towards the casualties, the behaviour of that obligation and its follow ups spread its wings with an exploitative focus that ought to trouble the narratives we have imposed on it from our considerable historical distance of centuries and incentives to suit our agendas.

Hanging by the dreadlocks of the thirteenth century, the English villein was given no better. Ofcourse, of his actual circumstances rather than the abstraction into which contemporary history has processed him. He owed the demesne several days of labor per week before he could attend to his own strips. In many regions, his marriage required seigneurial consent, and when his daughter married outside the manor, he owed a fine acknowledging that her productive capacity was an as asset of the estate rather than a dimension of her personhood.

One is entitled to raise a concern, the voices aligned with the modern narrative, reacting with reflexive combativeness to any expression of anything even remotely patriarhical, must have raised their ears for this part. For isn’t that misogynistic? A woman reduced to an “asset of estate”? No, it’s not misogynistic in the discriminative and oppressive sense, and I shall address that soon.

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Furthermore, he had no political voice, no mechanism through which a man of his station could formally articulate grievance. The patriarchal narrative assigns this man to the beneficiary class of a gendered hierarchy. But the reality and historical records that actually preserve of him suggest a different classification.

This was the prevailing condition of working-class men, and its arc extended well past the dissolution of formal feudalism. In England, universal male suffrage arrived in 1918, the same year women over thirty were first enfranchised, and the road to it had run through decades of suppressed agitation. The Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s demanded, among an abundant variety of things, the basic right of working men to vote; the state suppressed it with some thoroughness, and its demands were absorbed only partially through the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, themselves still filtered through property qualifications that excluded substantial portions of the male population from political participation. For most of English democratic history, the franchise was a function of property, and property was a function of class. The working man’s exclusion was the same structural exclusion applied to women, mediated by mechanisms specific to each; an observation that does not diminish the particular forms of disadvantage women experienced, while it does complicate any analysis that reduces the origin of that exclusion to gender.

It is worth dwelling also on impressment, that peculiar institution by which the Royal Navy solved its recruitment problem by simply taking men off the streets of British port cities, removing them from their families with little legal recourse and placing them aboard ships for years at a time. The press gang was an instrument of the state that operated explicitly on male bodies, young men, working men, men whose poverty made them vulnerable, and whose violence was entirely unremarkable to the era because the lives it commandeered were unremarkable. The men taken were subjects, in the full juridical sense. They were not the beneficiaries of a system that happened also to disadvantage women. They were the expendable material of an empire that treated human beings as operational resources, apathetic to any of the variables once may raise, such as gender.

Across the Atlantic, the gap between formal and material freedom was, if anything, wider. The Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Black men in 1870 and was nullified by poll taxes and organized violence across most of the South for the better part of a century thereafter. The Irish immigrant arriving during the famine years found freedom largely nominal; he worked in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania under conditions that made longevity an optimistic assumption, dying in the particular anonymity of the industrial poor. When the Monongah Mining Disaster killed somewhere between 362 and 500 men in 1907, the imprecision of that figure is itself a document: the individual life of the working man in industrial America was not recorded with sufficient care to generate an accurate body count after he died. He was expendable in the precise sense, his death processed as an operational incident rather than a human event requiring the accuracy of grief.

The factory floor of the industrial revolution was organized by capital, which was interested in output and cost containment and very little else. When working-class women were excluded from certain industries, the mechanism was often organised labor protecting the wage, and those who benefited were the fraction capable of leveraging collective bargaining, not men as some coherent class. Women were redirected into industries with worse conditions and lower wages, a redistribution of exploitation rather than an alleviation of it. The match factories of London and Dundee, where phosphorus necrosis rotted the jawbones of young women who inhaled the fumes of white phosphorus daily, were products of the same capital indifference that killed miners in Monongah. The system extracted from whatever body was available at the lowest cost; gender was a variable in the calculation, far from its animating principle.

The Enclosure Acts are worth pausing on. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the systematic enclosure of common land in England displaced millions of people, men and women both, who had farmed communal land for generations, pushing them into the cities and the factories and the mines. The working man who emerged from this dispossession was a proletarian in the technical sense: he possessed nothing but his labor. He had no land, no political standing, no access to the commons that had historically sustained his family. The enclosures were engineered by Parliament, which was composed of landed men, but the beneficiaries were a very specific class of landed men, and the primary victims were the laboring class of both genders. To read this as the story of men advantaging themselves over women is to fundamentally misread the class dynamics that produced it.

And then there is the question the patriarchy narrative cannot metabolize: who fought the wars.

Conscription is the working man’s position in the hierarchy made most legible. The Greek hoplite was a farmer obligated to fight because citizenship required it, and what he stood to gain from victory was primarily the right to farm again. The Roman legionnaire was often a small landowner increasingly dispossessed by the latifundia system his military victories abroad helped to enrich, his service generated the conditions of his own economic ruin. At Agincourt, the English longbowman standing in the mud had no discernible interests to defend in France. The American draftee in Vietnam, whose fate was partly determined by a lottery number drawn by strangers in Washington, stood to gain nothing from the geopolitical affairs he was being asked to serve with his life.

What the trenches at the Somme and the approaches to Stalingrad actually memorialize is the elite’s deployment of the expendable costs, it was the logic that has always treated the working man as manpower in its most literal sense, as something renewable because replaceable. To locate in these men the beneficiaries of systemic privilege is to approach the historical record with a conclusion already formed and simply harvest the evidence that fits. We call this bias cherry picking in the modern day and age.

What the convenient inference of history performs is a category error mixing up the variable of gender and an indifferent reality, it identifies men in positions of power and extrapolates backward to all men, constructing from this a systemic privilege that the average man in most centuries would not have recognised in his own life. The king and his serf shared a gender without sharing a condition; it was class that separated them, as it has always been class that separates the powerful from those they control. The elite has always constituted a small and self-perpetuating group, and their gender is far less explanatory than their access to resources and their capacity to transmit both across generations. To analyze history as the story of men oppressing women, rather than as the story of power perpetuating itself through whatever instruments were available, is to misidentify the correlation and confuse it with a causation, and an analysis built on a misidentification does not improve with elaboration.

As a category, power is indifferent to gender in the way capital is, for it uses what it finds and discards what it no longer needs. The women of premodern societies suffered under legal incapacities specific to their circumstances, such as exclusion from property ownership and the educational institutions that structured access to economic independence, among others. These arrangements must be named and analysed with utmost intellectual care and historical competence, because falling to the generalisations would be the same conduct I so strongly intend to critique. The argument her concerns the source, the beginning of the chain, which was the concentration of resources and decision-making in the hands of a few, enforced by structural violence. It was the same concentration and purposeless drive of power that produced the serf and the conscript. And yet again; to misidentify that source is to produce interventions organized around the misidentification rather than the suffering.

Speaking to the present, the deficiency is more glaring than merely theoretical. The most vocal iterations of contemporary feminist discourse are largely uninterested in the women who require actual assistance. Being more confrontational; the radicalised and supposedly feminist slogans aren’t helping the seventeen-year-old girl in the less privileged circumstances, denied access to education and living under the proximity of honor-based violence. She appears in this discourse primarily as rhetorical evidence of oppression rather than as a dignified person whose circumstances require specific intervention. The discourse surrounding the patriarchy notion is preoccupied with the language in which historical wrongs are described, with the culpability assignable to the current generation of males for systems they neither designed nor materially benefitted from.

The misallocation of attention is a structural choice rather than an accident of circumstance. Reaching the girl in need requires institutional investment and the unglamorous work of changing specific material conditions in specific places, none of which generates the social capital that symbolic intervention produces at volume and at speed. A movement that claims the relief of female suffering as its object and then directs its primary energies toward symbolic rectification, while the material circumstances of the most vulnerable women remain structurally unchanged, has made a legible choice about whose suffering constitutes the subject of its actual concern.

In simpler terms, the oppressed girl is an asset to the political and social incentives for modern day feminism. And helping her is not a priority, the agenda is, for helping her will not get as many eyeballs as an ideological pole.

If the examples I discussed above aren’t sufficient, I’ll follow with a list of further factual validation, feel free to scroll to the next section whenever you feel the pile of evidence is sufficient for your needs

• The Russian serf owed labor, taxes, military service, and obedience to institutions over which he exercised no meaningful influence. Sharing a gender with the Tsar did not grant him access to power any more than sharing a species with a wolf grants the sheep authority over the pack. The distinction that governed his life was not sex but station.

• The Atlantic slave trade cared little for modern conceptions of privilege. Plantation owners frequently preferred male slaves for the most physically destructive labor, working them to death in fields, mines, and construction projects. Their suffering was not mitigated by maleness. The market valued their capacity to produce and treated the body itself as expendable capital.

• The child chimney sweep of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was often a boy no older than six or seven, purchased from poor families or parish workhouses and forced into flues barely wide enough for human passage. Many died from suffocation, falls, deformities, and cancers uniquely associated with the trade. The system saw neither a future patriarch nor a beneficiary of power. It saw a cheap and replaceable labor unit.

• The press gangs of the Royal Navy routinely seized men from British ports and coastal towns, forcing them into military service against their will. A fisherman, dockworker, or laborer could be removed from his family and deposited aboard a warship for years. This was not the treatment of a privileged class. It was the treatment of a population considered available for state use.

• The penal colonies of Australia were built substantially by transported convicts, many sentenced for thefts that would barely warrant a fine today. Thousands of poor men were exiled across the globe and converted into colonial labor. Their relationship to the empire was not one of ownership but consumption.

• The Irish navvy who built Britain’s railways lived among blasting accidents, tunnel collapses, disease, and chronic injury. The infrastructure of industrial modernity was constructed largely upon the bodies of men whose names rarely survived in the historical record. Progress enriched investors while labor absorbed the risk.

• Coal mining communities throughout Britain buried generations of men before old age ever had the opportunity to find them. Cave-ins, explosions, toxic air, and industrial disease were accepted costs of economic growth. The miners generated wealth they would never possess and frequently died long before they could enjoy it.

• The Battle of the Somme consumed nearly sixty thousand British casualties on its first day alone. Clerks, students, laborers, and factory workers disappeared into artillery fire and machine-gun fire by the thousands. Whatever privilege is imagined to have accompanied their sex was evidently insufficient to exempt them from industrialized slaughter.

• The Napoleonic Wars drafted millions of ordinary men into conflicts whose causes were debated by emperors, kings, ministers, and generals. The peasant conscript rarely had a voice in foreign policy, yet he paid for it with blood. The state’s demand for manpower consistently outweighed his individual interests.

• The Enclosure Acts transformed millions of English peasants into wage laborers by removing their access to common land. Men and women alike lost traditional means of subsistence, but the emerging working man gained neither property nor political influence in exchange. He acquired only the necessity of selling his labor to survive.

• The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 ended with federal troops deployed against workers demanding relief from wage reductions. The state demonstrated considerable willingness to employ violence against laborers while showing comparatively little urgency in addressing the conditions that provoked the unrest.

• The Chinese laborers who built the American transcontinental railroad performed some of the most dangerous work in nineteenth-century North America. Avalanches, explosions, accidents, and brutal working conditions claimed countless lives. Capital displayed little concern for identity beyond whether the next worker could replace the last.

• The Courrières mining disaster of 1906 killed more than a thousand French miners in a single catastrophe. The men who descended into the shafts each morning generated industrial wealth while assuming risks from which owners and investors remained comfortably insulated.

• Debtors’ prisons throughout Europe routinely incarcerated poor men for financial obligations they lacked the means to satisfy. A person’s inability to pay could result in years of confinement, demonstrating once again that economic vulnerability often mattered more than gender in determining one’s exposure to coercion.

• The Cambodian genocide frequently targeted adult men first, not because they possessed power but because they were perceived as potential resistance. The same logic appears throughout history: institutions often identify particular populations as useful, dangerous, or expendable, and act accordingly.

• The Titanic evacuation remains culturally remembered through the phrase “women and children first.” Whatever one thinks of the morality of that principle, it illustrates that societies have not always treated male lives as inherently more valuable. In moments of crisis, ordinary men were often expected to accept a greater probability of death.

• Industrial workplace fatalities have overwhelmingly been concentrated among men for much of recorded modern history, not because society particularly cherished their wellbeing, but because dangerous occupations were disproportionately assigned to them. The body most exposed to risk was often the body considered most replaceable.

• The Soviet Gulag system imprisoned millions of political dissidents, peasants, laborers, and ordinary citizens. The camps did not distinguish between men who possessed power and men who merely shared a gender with those who did. The state punished proximity to vulnerability, not proximity to authority.

• The Great Leap Forward subjected millions of agricultural workers to policies devised by political elites insulated from the consequences of failure. The resulting famine consumed human beings on a massive scale, demonstrating once again that power’s indifference to suffering is often more historically visible than any commitment to a particular gender hierarchy.

• The Black Death labor restrictions imposed throughout Europe after the plague attempted to prevent workers from demanding higher wages despite severe labor shortages. Rather than celebrating the newfound bargaining power of common people, governments frequently intervened to protect established economic interests. The beneficiaries were elites; the targets were laborers.

The point is not that women were never disadvantaged, nor that legal restrictions imposed upon women should be ignored. It is that the historical record repeatedly presents power as an institution primarily concerned with preservation and extraction. Sometimes women suffered unique burdens under that arrangement. Sometimes men did. Often both did simultaneously. What history struggles to support is the assertion that the average man and the ruling elite belonged to the same functional class merely because they shared a gender. The average male, for the most part, couldn’t be farther than the oppressor.

At this point, one may return to the question deliberately raised earlier in the essay. The woman whose marriage generated a fine for the manor, whose productive capacity was regarded as an asset of the estate rather than an expression of individual autonomy; was she not suffering under misogyny?

The answer is more complicated, apathetic to one’s world view, and nuanced, than the modern narratives often permit. She was certainly suffering, for her circumstances were undeniably restrictive. But the existence of suffering alone does not reveal its source. The same institution that reduced her to an economic asset also reduced her father, husband, and sons to economic assets. The lord who collected a marriage fine from a daughter collected labor obligations from the men of the household, extracted rents from them, conscripted them for military service when necessary, and exercised authority over their lives with equal indifference. The common denominator was not gender but subordination to power.

If one insists that reducing a woman to property constitutes misogyny, then logical consistency requires a parallel question. What shall we call the reduction of a man to disposable military manpower? What shall we call the press-ganged sailor, the conscript marched into artillery fire, the miner buried beneath a collapsed shaft, the laborer worked to death in conditions deemed acceptable because another could replace him tomorrow?

Feminist discourse rarely identifies these phenomena as misandry, and rightly so.

The explanation is obvious: these men were not harmed because they were hated as men. They were harmed because they were available, vulnerable, and useful to those above them.

The double standard emerges when identical analytical principles are applied selectively. When men are conscripted, press-ganged, worked to death in mines, imprisoned for debt, or sacrificed in war, the explanation offered is generally structural, analytical, and diagnostic in nature. Historians point toward economics, state interests, military necessity, class relations, or the preservation of power. Not many serious scholars, and certainly not the honest ones, conclude that these institutions existed because society harbored a particular animosity toward men as a sex. Yet when women suffer under institutions created by the very same concentrations of power, the analysis frequently changes. The structural explanation is abandoned in favor of a gendered one to support a more convenient agenda. Then general and apathetic oppression becomes misogyny rather than authoritarianism, exploitation rather than extraction, and women become victims of men rather than victims alongside men of institutions neither controlled.

The inconsistency is not merely a rhetoric, dare I say; it’s a methodological misinterpretation of history itself. I have had my chances with a fair bunch of feminist literature, the number of pillars willing to admit a common suffrage is thin. Why? To suit an agenda, If the reduction of a man to military manpower does not constitute evidence of misandry, because the motivating force was not hatred of men but the demands of the state, then the reduction of a woman to economic utility does not automatically constitute evidence of misogyny either. The relevant question in both cases is not who suffered, but why they suffered. To assume one answer for male suffering and another for female suffering before examining the institution itself is to begin with a conclusion and work backward toward evidence.

On the same regard; during the research for this essay, I came across one work that proved particularly valuable beyond the immediate subject of history itself: The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper. The book is primarily a philosophical examination of political thought rather than a history of gender relations, but its treatment of ideology, historical determinism, and the tendency of comprehensive theories to resist falsification is remarkably relevant to the questions raised here. I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding the nature of ideology and how it perpetuates through the intellectual frameworks themselves being constructed, defended, and sometimes insulated from contradictory evidence.

This is precisely the difficulty with the contemporary framework. It frequently identifies gender whenever women are harmed and abandons gender whenever men are harmed. Even when both emerge from the same mechanism of concentrated power, the relevance of the gender variable is selective. Due to the ideological bias, the produced analysis fails to preserve a socially dignifiable conclusion, and it risks mistaking the characteristics of the victims for the motives of the system. And I am writing this essay, which is probably prolonged beyond required measure, because I’m a strong believer of the notion; history deserves a consistent standard for criticality. The woman reduced to an asset becomes evidence of misogyny, while the man reduced to a resource becomes evidence of economics, militarism, feudalism, or class hierarchy. The standard changes depending upon the sex of the victim. I am consciously repeating this point and perhaps sacrificing the quality of my essay because we need to understand precisely that such an analysis is difficult to defend logically because it applies two entirely different explanatory frameworks to institutions that frequently emerged from the same source.

The inconsistency produces one of the strangest conclusions in contemporary political discourse: that husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, who frequently endured the same systems together, should be understood as occupying opposite sides of a grand historical struggle. A narrative where men as a class were the oppressors while the women were best spared victims. Following this reductionist narrative so often endorsed in mainstream feminist theory; the peasant husband who lacked property, lacked political representation, lacked legal autonomy, and could be compelled into military service is transformed into an oppressor. His wife, subjected to many of the same structural constraints alongside him, is transformed into his victim. The estate, the crown, the landlord, the empire, and the aristocracy recede into the background while the relationship between two equally powerless people becomes the primary focus of analysis.

History offers little support for this inversion. For most men did not design the institutions under discussion. Most men could not and did not benefit substantially from them. Most men possessed no meaningful capacity to alter them. They endured them, often they endured them beside women who suffered differently, but suffered nonetheless.

Another objection emerges at this stage. Even if ordinary men lacked power, were not the powerful themselves overwhelmingly male? Weren’t males the oppressors all along?

Numerically, yes. Historically, positions of political authority, aristocratic status, military command, and large-scale property ownership were often occupied by men. Working towards a balanced sex-ratio is a fairly modern amendment. But this observation alone does not establish the conclusion typically drawn from it. To identify that kings were male and then infer that men as a class benefited from kingship is no more rigorous than observing that medieval bishops were celibate and concluding that celibates constituted a ruling class.

The relevant question is not who possessed power, but how power reproduced itself. Aristocracies preserved themselves primarily through bloodlines, inheritance, wealth, education, and exclusive access to institutions. A peasant man shared a gender with the king, but he did not share his interests, opportunities, resources, influence, or standard of living. The distance between them was greater than the distance separating many peasant men and women. Gender explains the composition of the ruling class. It does not explain the relationship between the ruling class and the people it governed.

Indeed, history repeatedly demonstrates that elites have shown remarkable willingness to exploit members of their own sex whenever doing so served their interests. Noblemen sent common men to war. Industrialists employed men in lethal factories. Politicians imprisoned men, conscripted men, taxed men, and executed men. The shared characteristic of gender consistently proved less important than the shared characteristic of power.

Therefore, the central argument of my essay is not that women were never disadvantaged. Such a claim would be as ahistorical as the narratives it critiques. Women experienced restrictions, exclusions, and vulnerabilities specific to their circumstances, many of which deserve careful examinations my next few essays will be documenting. The argument is that these realities emerged within broader structures of concentrated power rather than from a singular and universal male conspiracy against women.

History has never been the tidy morality play in a well documented arena our age so desperately wishes it to be. Throughout the ages of human existence, there’s one spectrum that has always been uni-polar, one teleology never gone with the wind. We know it now as classism, and we speak it well through our instincts perpetual.

However, that history belongs to another inquiry. My next essay will concern itself with the oldest hierarchy life has preserved.

The question of sex ends here.
The question of class begins next.

If you've read this far, thank you for giving the argument your time and consideration, whether you found yourself persuaded by it or not.

If there's a historical subject you’d like to see me write about next. I'd love to hear your suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment with a topic you'd like explored.

References

Black, J. (2011). A History of the British Isles. Palgrave Macmillan.

Bloch, M. (1961). Feudal Society (L. A. Manyon, Trans.). Routledge.

Cannadine, D. (1998). Class in Britain. Yale University Press.

Cole, G. D. H. (1953). A Short History of the British Working Class Movement. George Allen & Unwin.

Engels, F. (1845). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Otto Wigand.

Evans, R. J. (2004). The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin Books.

Figes, O. (1996). A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Jonathan Cape.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon Books.

Hobsbawm, E. (1962). The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hobsbawm, E. (1975). The Age of Capital: 1848–1875. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hobsbawm, E. (1987). The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Jones, E. L. (1965). The Development of English Agriculture. Allen & Unwin.

Keegan, J. (1993). A History of Warfare. Alfred A. Knopf.

Lefebvre, G. (1962). The French Revolution. Columbia University Press.

Linebaugh, P. (1992). The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge University Press.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. I).

McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.

Morris, R. J. (1993). Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class. Manchester University Press.

North, D. C., & Thomas, R. P. (1973). The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History. Cambridge University Press.

Popper, K. R. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge.

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press.

Tawney, R. H. (1912). The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Longmans, Green & Co.

Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. Victor Gollancz.

Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Basil Blackwell.

Tocqueville, A. de. (1856). The Old Regime and the Revolution.

Weber, M. (1922). Economy and Society.

Wood, E. M. (2002). The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. Verso.

Primary Sources

• Magna Carta (1215)

• Domesday Book (1086)

• The English Bill of Rights (1689)

• The Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884)

• The Representation of the People Act (1918)

• The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1870)

• British Parliamentary Papers relating to the Chartist Movement

• Reports of the Royal Commission on Mines (1842)

• Reports of the Factory Inspectors (1833–1878)

I stumbled upon this line of thought, through a post that intrigued my curiosity, and I engaged; for I had a doubt about the reasoning.

It is worth clarifying the nature of my original statement prior to the discourse I’m writing this essay to counter, for it was too lengthy and rigorous for a mere note. Because much of the subsequent discussion appears to proceed from assumptions that were never present in the first place.

As the screenshot attached above displays the entire text explicitly; my query is not an assertion that criticism of feminism is necessarily sincere or insincere, for the validity of the critique is tangential to the point I intended to raise. I did not defend or demolish any particular school of thought, nor did I dispute the existence of malicious agents that take-part in the discourse.

I merely introduced a hypothetical yet realistic possibility, that criticism may, in principle, stem from the intention to “emphasise a double standard, a hidden agenda, an inconsistency in reasoning, or simply adding another thought”.

• All the ideologies consist of a spectrum of representations, all the points need not be rational. Consequently, addressing the preferences and potential “double standards” is necessary for both collective good and growth of the ideology itself.

• History’s the witness, whenever political incentives took over a movement, there were agendas hidden behind a group of victims, with fascism remaining the most reliable example.

• Ideologies with linked networks of thought are broad and rigorous enough to birth inconsistencies, the nature of propaganda works in a similar fashion, along with the truth. And so, similar to the first point, it’s crucial to filter the inconsistencies through collective discourse and shared goals.

• Perspectives are layer to an ideology, without those, no worldview can improve or even sustain overtime. Feminism is notably the most curious and accessible example for this.

If you wish to read more about these four points, in the specific context of feminism. You may read my essay on the nature of feminism, linked below.

After this, mere threadbare of an exchange about logic, I received a response I found rather curious, because my initial statement wasn’t even an endorsement of a position. It was a question, as documented and explained above.

Visibly, I’ve made no accusation, no counter-thesis, no demographic blame, no declaration of hostility. Merely an invitation to consider that criticism need not necessarily arise from malice.

Yet instead of addressing the limitations of that proposition, the subject in question; embarked on a tangent about “average Indian men”, their motivations, their failures, and your inability to find enough good-faith examples. None of which actually answers the question being asked.

You ask whether I should “present myself thoughtfully”, yet your entire response rests on assumptions about the people asking the question rather than the question itself. Whether a proposition is true is independent of the demographic composition or historical tendencies of those who utter it. Arguments do not inherit validity from the moral reputation of their speakers.

You tell me to seek commentary, but then openly admit that you needn’t provide data to support your own claims because they’re “not hard to clock”. Evidently, standards of evidence are being applied asymmetrically. If observations and intuitions are sufficient grounds for your generalizations, then you cannot simultaneously condemn others for operating from impressions rather than evidence.

You say that the world has not provided enough evidence to suggest that these criticisms arise from genuine curiosity. But absence of evidence for sincerity is not evidence of insincerity. Human motives cannot simply be presumed from trends, demographics, or frequency of disagreement. Otherwise, every minority opinion may be dismissed without examination merely because one finds its proponents suspicious. You’re essentially making discourse impossible based on another unsubstantiated claim.

More importantly, you appear to be reasoning backwards. You begin with the conclusion that a large proportion of critics are acting in “bad faith”, and from there interpret criticism itself through that lens. But if one’s conclusion determines how every piece of evidence is interpreted, then the conclusion ceases to be falsifiable.

You say that “good-faith” male critics exist, yet immediately ask, “Where are they?” as though your inability to identify them constitutes proof of scarcity. But personal visibility is not a measure of prevalence. One’s own experience is not a representative sample of reality itself due to the sheer limitations of the sample size and the personal incentives one may home.

You further claim that men who genuinely wish to aid feminism exist, but then ask why they are not doing so at scale. But you conveniently do not mention the fact that scale is an arbitrary standard. A proposition does not become true because millions support it, nor false because few do. If constructive criticism exists, its existence alone disproves the premise that criticism itself is necessarily rooted in hostility. Therefore you’ve unconsciously argued against and contradicted your own claim.

More interestingly, you’ve built an unfalsifiable and logically incoherent framework.

• Men who criticize feminism are bad-faith.

• Men who support feminism but remain silent are complicit.

• Men who criticize constructively exist, but apparently not in sufficient numbers to matter.

Thus every category becomes blameworthy by definition. There is no possible behaviour that escapes condemnation. If no conceivable observation can disprove a thesis, then that thesis cannot meaningfully be tested. And then, it’s merely a wall, not an ideology or even an argument, for validation warrants engagement.

It’s worth noting that I haven’t extended my efforts to feminism yet, I’m merely following the logical chain of reasoning.

You accuse others of routing every discussion through feminism, while routing my question through “average Indian men”.
You ask me to calibrate my tone, but excuse broad demographic assertions because you “don’t need data”.
You demand healthy criticism, yet dismiss criticism by presuming motives before engaging with the substance.

And perhaps most strikingly, you answer a question about whether intent matters by explaining why you distrust the people asking it.

That is precisely the issue.

The proposition I raised was hypothetical. It asked whether criticism could, in principle, stem from a desire to expose inconsistencies or contribute another perspective.

Your answer was effectively: “No, because I do not trust the people who ask such questions.”

But distrust is not a refutation, you see.

Even if ninety-nine critics were malicious, the hundredth may still be sincere. The validity of his criticism would not depend upon the company he may keep.

Likewise, even if a thousand people weaponize criticism dishonestly, that does not logically transform criticism itself into an act of hostility. Abuse of a principle does not invalidate the principle.

You also seem to assume that criticism is only legitimate when it advances your preferred outcome. But criticism does not owe allegiance to a movement. It owes allegiance to truth alone. Its purpose is not merely to reinforce ideas but to test them. If criticism is welcome only when it arrives already agreeing with the conclusions, then it is an orthodoxy with the label of an inquiry.

And perhaps the most ironic aspect of your response is;

You speak of pattern recognition, but you don’t see pattern recognition without rigorous standards and frameworks is merely stereotype asserted with adequate confidence.

You speak of accountability, but you fail to understand collective guilt cannot ensure accountability. If anything, it only moves us farther away from the causation.

You speak of progress, but progress requires ideas to survive scrutiny, not immunity from it.

You speak of good faith, yet deny the possibility of good faith before the conversation has even begun.

By my count, your response contains at least ten major assumptions and no fewer than twelve internal inconsistencies or logical failures.

1. You assume that critics are predominantly male and predominantly bad-faith.

2. You assume motives from demographics.

3. You assume your personal observations are representative of society.

4. You assume that invisibility to you implies scarcity.

5. You assume criticism must serve feminism rather than truth.

6. You assume silence is complicity.

7. You assume scale determines legitimacy.

8. You assume distrust justifies dismissal.

9. You assume intent may be inferred from patterns without evidence.

10. You assume that your intuitions require no substantiation while others must satisfy a higher standard. Every one of these assumptions is debatable, yet each is treated as self-evident.

Moreso, you also assume the nature and rational validity of feminism itself. Which I did not count in the list because it serves the discourse little utility.

Likewise, the contradictions are difficult to ignore.

1. You ask for thoughtful discourse while stereotyping millions.

2. You reject lazy takes while offering anecdotal pattern recognition in place of evidence.

3. You demand healthy criticism while pathologizing criticism itself.

4. You insist on accountability while assigning collective guilt.

5. You acknowledge good-faith critics while speaking as though they scarcely exist.

6. You call for progress while discouraging scrutiny.

7. You condemn rhetoric while relying heavily upon it.

8. You ask others to calibrate their tone while refusing to calibrate your own.

9. You say criticism should move conversations forward while answering a question about ideas with a thesis about demographics, completely avoiding the question.

10. You speak of good faith while presuming bad faith.

11. You dismiss tribalism while framing disagreement through the lens of men versus feminism.

12. And perhaps most paradoxically of all, when presented with a hypothetical about whether intent should matter more than rhetoric, you answered not by examining the intent, but by condemning the presumed tribe behind it.

And so we return to the original question.

If criticism of feminist schools of thought may expose double standards, inconsistencies, hidden assumptions, or simply contribute another perspective, would you still care more about the rhetoric than the intent?

Because from your response, it appears that you already do, for you refused to move beyond what you want to believe.

And once motives are presumed before arguments are examined, “good faith” simply becomes a label reserved for agreement, and “bad faith” a label reserved for dissent.

Through sheer logic and utmost rational inferences, I arrive at the conclusion that you’re a textbook definition for tribalism, radicalisation, and polarisation. No pun or ad hominem intended.

This discourse started when I stumbled across this viral post. Now, I’ve never been particularly interested in football, but the sheer potency of an accusation, presented with addressing someone with the label of a “rapist”; a legal term, coming with an enormous burden of proof; stood out to me, specifically. And so, I chose to engage with the post with my opinion.

I attempted to emphasise the obvious, an accusation is ofcourse worthy of consideration, but not nearly close to a conviction. To call someone a “rapist” requires a conviction atop substantial evidence.

For the conduct in question, the post demanded I perceive it with the confidence of a conviction, but on the standards of an accusation.

To which, I received the following reply;

She’s presenting a conclusion as though presenting a conclusion as though the evidentiary issues surrounding the case simply don’t exist.

I shall not wrestle with opinions, on to the verifiable facts now.

The “she said no and stop several times” quote did not come from a court finding, police interrogation, or authenticated confession. It originated from leaked documents published by Der Spiegel. Ronaldo’s lawyer stated that the documents were “stolen and easily manipulated” and that portions had been “altered and/or completely fabricated”. The claim asserted with the sheer confidence of assigning the guilty label has never been judicially resolved.

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/45817055

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/45824263

The Las Vegas District Attorney declined prosecution in 2019 because the allegations could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s not some technicality invented by fans; that’s the burden of proof required for criminal convictions; it was the conclusion of the Clark County District Attorney’s Office after reviewing the evidence:

• https://www.si.com/soccer/2019/07/22/cristiano-ronaldo-will-not-face-criminal-charges-rape-case

• https://www.ktnv.com/news/crime/las-vegas-police-submitted-for-arrest-warrant-in-cristiano-ronaldo-alleged-rape-case-da-denied-it

• https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jul/22/cristiano-ronaldo-rape-allegations-no-criminal-charges-las-vegas

The subsequent civil case was dismissed due to misconduct by Mayorga’s attorney involving leaked privileged documents. The dismissal was not based on a declaration that rape had or had not occurred, Magistrate Judge Daniel Albregts recommended dismissal on the grounds that Mayorga’s attorney’s conduct had “tainted” the litigation and that dismissal was necessary to preserve the integrity of the judicial process.

• https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/oct/07/cristiano-ronaldo-rape-allegations-dismissal-las-vegas

• https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/15/football/cristiano-ronaldo-legal-fees-kathryn-mayorga-dismissed-case-spt-intl/index.html

The existence of the 2010 settlement agreement has never been disputed. However, settlements are distinct from findings of liability or criminal guilt. Innocent people settle civil disputes every day because litigation is expensive, public, and uncertain. And for a public figure with as much reach as Cristiano Ronaldo, a trial would be consequential to his reputation, despite the verdict being for or against him, rendering a settlement the most plausible choice. If settlements constituted confessions, courts wouldn’t distinguish between settlements and guilty verdicts.

“What would you believe more than Ronaldo’s own words?”

Actual authenticated evidence.

Because if leaked documents of disputed provenance are enough to establish guilt, then due process ceases to matter and accusations themselves become convictions.

She also went on to say “There was also no “declaration” of guilt in my post.” That is a factually incorrect, dishonest, inconsistent, and a contradictory claim to make after using the word “rapist”.

Does any of this mean Ronaldo is innocent? Well, innocent until proven guilty is the norm we must abide by to preserve social order. But there isn’t something right with a man accused of rape, isn’t it possible for Ronaldo to have influenced the trials? I’m certain many of you would agree with this theory, given the wealth, contacts, and fame he has.

The answer is a hover between yes and no. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be around Ronaldo in private spaces, because he has been accused of rape. One must be cautious. But I wouldn’t go around calling him a “rapist” with no evidence, because I cannot know for sure, and an accusation is not sufficient. For “accused”, “alleged”, “reported”, and “proved” are four very different things.

On the dangers of being around men, especially the ones attached to accusations; there is a distinction between caution and prejudice, that thin line separates you from the very hostility you intend to critique.

Special thanks to for being respectful throughout!

We all know that one person who was madly in “love” and irreversible was “heartbroken”. More often than not, the person in question, is a woman. Men suffer from the parasite at an equally interesting rate, but the study that intrigued me was the irrational willingness of a woman’s preference in relationships. The culture has been gentle with the persona; rom-coms made her a protagonist that is always irrational but never wrong or at fault, certain corners of the internet have turned the her to an aesthetic, many take pride in the identity of a hopeless romantic. One scroll on the supposedly pink corner of Pinterest would be enough to validate this cultural response to the archetype.

The lover girl rebrands emotional dysregulation, irrational extents of sensitivity, and emotional volatility, as “feeling deeply”. As if the reframing makes it any less indisciplined and unsustainable. She also rebrands limerance, dependence, lack of autonomy, and a lack of identity, as “loving deeply”. Usually, individuals tend to use the words I arrested in quotations, with some reluctance. However, I couldn’t be less concerned with hurting feelings, or bordering at invalidation for many.

Unlike the less abstruse archetypes, the lover girl has a hard time accepting her flaws beyond accompanying her mistakes with a laugh and avoidance. I interviewed 19 such “lover girl”s to get to a finding about this, and the results are as follows:

• 8 of them instantly labelled me a misogynist, for reasons one can only guess.

• 5 of them perceived the question itself as accusatory, therefore responding with passive hostility.

• The rest (6) did not bother replying.

I’m aware, the sample set I’m relying upon is inadequate, and arguably did not consist of the most reliable representatives, but so are their reasons for being at ease with dysregulation and contempt for anyone willing to critique them.

A 2014 neuroscience and biobehavioral study about Empathy & Gender Effects in Brain and Behavior shows women score higher on emotional responsivity and mirroring, explaining the female dominance in the hierarchy of perceived “love”.

But the question of collective refusal remains unanswered, because I cannot associate one gender to ideological incompetence, right? Yes, I cannot. And fortunately, I need not. However, upon further examination, I came across some rather appalling yet apathetic suggestions. Hall and Matsumoto’s (2004) study about Emotional Judgment , coupled with Thompson & Voyer (2014) Meta-analysis and Ziva Kunda’s studies about motivated reasoning itself, validate how women tend to be more incline towards motivated reasoning when provided with an incentive. This explains a part of why the lover girl is largely unexamined and therefore uncritiqued.

When an emotionally invested individual is provided with an incentive to believe something, the reasoning process bends in service of the preferred conclusion. The lover girl has an enormous incentive to believe that she is not the problem, that her suffering is evidence of her depth, that her patterns are evidence of her capacity, that the men who left were simply inadequate to what she offered. The refusal to change is the self-protective logic of someone who correctly understands, at some level below articulation, that admitting the real problem would require dismantling the only coherent self she has cultivated.

As I mentioned before, the culture is kind with the lover girl. And the essay would be deficient without precisely examining the degree to which the culture around the lover girl is not a passive backdrop to her dysfunction but an active participant in it. The rom-coms do not merely reflect or glamourise the lover girl; they instruct her, they tell her that obsession is the proof of love, that intensity of the suffering measures the significance of feeling, that the arc ends in vindication. All with the authority of narrative repetition and cognitive resonance. The narratives also like to suggest the irrational woman is ultimately right, ultimately chosen, ultimately justified by the arrival of the man she could not stop wanting.

To confess the least, all the instructions are unsustainable, unreliable, and harmful in practice. I do not fall to the notion of any of this being innocent storytelling, because to me, for strong reasons, it constitutes something closer to deliberate exploitation. The recommendation engine has discovered that yearning content performs and reinforces the emotional conditions required for it to attract eyeballs. The parasocial economy has discovered that the lover girl is a reliable consumer, of love songs, of breakup playlists, of journaling prompts, of self-help frameworks, of beauty products, of emotionally appealing aesthetics, of eventual anti-depressants & sleeping pills, of certain political ideologies, and anything that validates the wound without threatening the identity organized around it. She is not merely a person suffering from a psychological pattern that needs interruption, she has become a demographic and the market has every incentive to keep her where she is.

Prior discussed, the specifically pink corner of Pinterest did not create the lover girl. But it did build her an exceptionally comfortable room to stay in.

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She claims to have everything once she’s loved, yet she’s deficient of an identity of her own. The relationship ends, often badly, because obsession and sustenance are two entirely separate umbrellas. The lover girl grieves but does not recover, at least not without bipolar feedback loops. The obsession violently detaches from the person, hurting both the parties involved, like a stretched rubber-band, and attaches to the wound with the same undying force. After facing abandonment, she displays symptoms of destabilisation, withdrawal, and even subtle narcissism, on occasion. Her newly awakened traits are embodied by passive hostility, more unreliable & impulsive behaviours, and defense mechanisms of sorts. She often turns to a misandrist that “hates men”. And if she’s still sane enough not to illogically generalise all men, by assigning her ex the dignity of representing half the human population, based on an inaccurate perception from her lens; she’ll grow a distaste for companionship itself. Modern psychology refers to this as reinforcement of issues concerning attachment and trust. None of this is laughable, though deserving of critique. Examining the causation further, the patterns shouldn’t strike one as surprising, because women trust easily relative to men, concluded by the 2008 study about Trust and Gender by Buchan, Croson, and Solnick.

The lover girl has made love into an identity, and identity is the last thing a person willingly surrenders. This is also the part the culture around her has always been hesitant to admit. She is not someone who fell in love and got hurt. She is someone who organized the self around the act of loving; who decided, at some point that may predate any specific relationship, that this is who I am. She is the one who feels too much, loves too deep, without reservation. She is the one whose heart is always broken in some sense, because a heart that is always broken is a heart that is always full of something, and fullness, even painful fullness, is preferable to the vacancy she suspects waits underneath. Interestingly, she is also terrified of introspection without validation, but that phenomenon is better left for another essay.

She loves too much, yet is simultaneously allergic to every attempt at compatibility. Every quality that an outside observer might name as a problem she has already integrated into the mythology of her romantic depth. She wants to be held while she’s shaking at her own reflection, yet wouldn’t do a thing to improve. She says she would do anything for love, but draws the line at the unglamorous moments, at having an identity and purpose beyond love, at fixing her problematic behavioral patterns instead of being “hard to love”, then she starts getting distant with her actions, and anxious with her thoughts.

Practically, this means she cannot be argued out of the patterns. The lover girl who has made love her identity experiences challenges to the pattern not as helpful observations but as attacks on the self. To suggest that she might be choosing chaos, or worse; is chaos, is more often than not, met with a response of repulsion. Her defense mechanisms are erected against clarity and rationality itself. And so, she clings; perhaps harder every reinforcement, and clinging is not particularly a weakness or strength to her. Although she perceives “feeling deeply” and clinging to be blessings, clinging is also a perfectly logical response to what the identity requires for preservation. Because if she releases the obsession, if she stops returning to the wound, if she lets the last relationship become simply a thing that happened and is over, she faces a question she has never equipped herself to answer: _Who am I, then, when I am not in love? Who am I without the overthinking? Who am I without the “love” that allowed me to escape my relational incompetence?

The stillness secretly terrifies her more than the heartbreak, but she won’t admit because she cannot admit, for she’s a victim to her own mind and a slave to her own feelings. To her, the heartbreak has been rendered familiar, but consequential, nevertheless. The empty-handed alternative; a life not organized around romantic loss or romantic hope, feels to her like a kind of death. A life with no high or low spark would shatter her volatile self-image entirely. Her logic does not survive scrutiny, and it doesn’t need to, because it is not held by logic. For obsession need not be rational. Her framework is held by the sheer force of how much of herself she has staked on it being true.

All of this compounds to an unnamed quality of her inner life, with respect to existential reality. She has no pursuit that competes with obsession, for none is even close. This is the most uncomfortable observation one can make about the lover girl, and it is the one most worth sitting with. She could excel academically, be perceived as intelligent or truthfully virtuous. It is that the romantic obsession has occupied the psychological territory that might otherwise have been settled by a work, serious discipline, or a question that actually benefitted her. When an ambition enters her mind, it’s already competing against the undying obsession for the limited cognitive resources. The lover girl has confused the most aesthetically rich of feelings with the most meaningful of lives.

The Nature of Obsession

When Dorothy Tennov coined the term limerence in 1979, she was studying the involuntary, intrusive, cognitively totalizing state of romantic infatuation. The formation had no name beyond the vague title of “love”, with a common interpretation implying it’s impossible to be understood with clarity. Limerence is not love, though it masquerades as love, and calling it such, could not be farther than the truth. It is a neurological event of a dopaminergic flooding of the reward circuitry, driven less by the actual person one is fixated on than by the uncertainty of whether that person reciprocates, much like gambling on pleasure with an external entity being the coinbox. The distinction is crucial, because Tennov’s subjects did not fixate on people who reliably loved them back. They fixated on people whose regard was ambiguous, with a kind of exquisite torture. This is not a coincidence, nor is the gambling analogy a generalised representation. Variable-ratio reinforcement (the scheduling principle behind slot machines), is the most addiction-producing reward structure the nervous system knows. When the lover girl is most intensely, most painfully in love, she is, neurologically speaking, in a state structurally identical to compulsion. The text that might come, or it might not. The look might mean something, or might mean something else. In both the cases, along with a million possible and equally plausible variations; uncertainty acts as an engine for feeling.

Helen Fisher’s neuroimaging work contributes to this picture considerably, by demonstrating how Early romantic love activates the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus; dopamine-dense regions also implicated in cocaine dependence: further validating the hook to uncertainty. And what fMRI captures in subjects shown photos of their romantic interest looks less like personal affection and more like stimulus craving, yet both the results are identical for the spectator, through consequential behavior. But still, Fisher’s research introduced a more troubling finding. Her documentations demonstrated rejection acting as an intensifier of the neural activation, rather than extinguishing the loop and the landscape altogether. As a consequence, in a literal sense; the lover girl who cannot stop thinking about the man who left her is in the acute phase of a withdrawal whose neurological signature is indistinguishable from addiction, with the stimulus suddenly being cut.

This is why the obsession often outlasts any reasonable relationship to the person who sparked it, despite failing to sustain both the union and their mental well-being. Modestly, the brain is not exactly mourning a relationship on that record. Every revisitation of the memory is a microdose of the neurochemical that the relationship once reliably produced, much like the relapse triggers of a feedback loop. Every replaying of the argument, every rereading of old messages, or simply any re-consumption of the very stimulus enacting on the once great obsession, plays the role of a masochist within the system, sparing absolute indifference to one’s preferences.

The lover girl frames the phenomenon as purely experiential and indescribable. But I detest the escapist’s framing, and so; I shall contest it. Oxytocin and vasopressin are neuropeptides released during physical contact and social bonding, they result in the creation of what modern science calls a pair bond. It’s not exclusive to humans, but humans are no exception. It’s a biological tethering that can persist long after the cognitive relationship to a person has soured. On a more tangential note; animal studies on prairie voles, which form monogamous attachments, show that oxytocin and vasopressin receptor distribution in key limbic areas determines whether bonding occurs at all. In humans, Zeki and Romaya’s neuroimaging work found that romantic attachment deactivates regions of the prefrontal cortex associated with social judgment and critical assessment, meaning that bonding biologically suppresses the very faculties that might allow an honest appraisal of whether the relationship is sustainable or rationally plausible for the individual. Although the lover girl can be immature, her blind devotion is not solely led by naiveness alone. She is blindly devoted because the chemistry of attachment is particularly designed and optimised to override judgment in the service of bonding. Even if a relationship is devoid of any sexual or physical intent; the evolutionary conditioning and cognitive incentives for reproduction aren’t negligible. In a way, evolution contributed a fragment to the persona this essay has been surgically dissecting. Not as relevant as the other points I’ve addressed so far, but worth knowing, nonetheless.

Moreso, she’s captured by a design running in the wrong context; one of the lesser known facts about her nature.

Attachment & Childhood

One of the most prominent works in all of cognitive science and human psychology; Bowlby’s Attachment theory provides us with the second explanatory layer for the phenomenon. It also extends reliably into adult romantic relationships, supported by the studies of Hazan and Shaver in the 1980s. Attachment styles are the relational templates formed in early childhood through repeated interactions with primary caregivers. Skinner’s Reinforcement Learning Theory validates the same premise. A major meta-analysis by Benjamin W. Hadden and colleagues found that attachment insecurity becomes increasingly predictive of poor relationship outcomes as relationships endure. In other words, attachment patterns often become more consequential over time and not the other way around. Unsurprisingly, the pie-chart is dominated by individuals possessing an anxious and avoidant attachment style.

Anxious attachment is a consequence from caregiving environments that were inconsistent, yet present enough to generate need, and unavailable enough to generate fear. Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiments documented how the infant who could not reliably predict whether comfort would arrive, learns to hyperactivate the attachment system; to watch, scan, protest, cling, maximize distress signals in the hope of summoning a response.

Very often, the lover girl is an anxiously attached person who has found a new theater for an old but unconscious drama. On a side note; my peers suggested I shouldn’t use the word “drama”, because it reinforces the dramatic woman stereotype. But well, I couldn’t care less about the motivated implications of my studies. The lover girl checks her phone not because she’s particularly weak mentally, but because long ago; her nervous system learned that inattention leads to a higher risk of abandonment. Again, this hypothesis is validated by Skinner’s reinforcement learning theory.

As the diagram depicts, the behaviour is reinforced, repeatedly.

The anxious attachment is also particularly recursive, because of what the researchers call the Anxious-Avoidant Trap. Statistically, the anxiously attached lover girl does not tend to partner with other anxious attachers, who might at least share her appetite for closeness. Rather, and with maddening regularity; she tends to partner with avoidantly attached individuals. She is logistically drawn towards people whose own developmental history produced the opposite strategy; suppressing the attachment need, maintaining a distance, and experiencing intimacy or closeness as threat. The fit is perfect and perfectly destructive. His withdrawal triggers her anxiety. Her escalating anxiety triggers his deeper withdrawal. Each confirms the other’s deepest relational fear. She concludes that she is “too much”, and he concludes that closeness costs too much. And yet the attraction holds, because the anxious attacher experiences the avoidant’s emotional scarcity as the very intermittency that generates limerence, and the avoidant experiences the anxious partner’s intensity as proof that the relationship is, at least, real.

Of course, this pairing is similar to the correlation of individuals with BPD pairing with narcissists, due to each being the other’s missing piece of need. But that tangent is better left for another essay.

Mario Mikulincer’s extensive research on attachment and romantic cognition, found that anxiously attached individuals maintain hyperaccessible attachment-related memories. The literally complex term refers to mental schemas primed for constant retrieval, ready to interpret ambiguous stimuli as attachment threats. This is why the lover girl finds rejection everywhere, even where it does not exist. A delayed text, a slight change in tone, a partner who is simply tired; she perceives all of these inputs as threats, and her body reacts accordingly; with cortisol spikes, along with feelings of distress, self-doubt, and an increasing fear of uncertainty. Her perceptual system has been tuned to detect abandonment signals at the lowest possible threshold. She can be paranoid. She is also calibrated to a frequency of emotional volatility and impulsive unreliability that is objectively problematic for human connection.

Countless such works critique the lover girl through their parallel findings. A few notable examples are listed below, for I cannot discuss everything in one essay without losing 99% of the target audience.

• Object Relations Theory (Melanie Klein; Donald Winnicott; Otto Kernberg)
  Romantic partners frequently become containers for unmet developmental needs and fantasies. The intensity of attachment often reflects the strength of the projection rather than the qualities of the person themselves.

• Analytical Psychology (Carl Jung)
  People commonly fall in love with qualities they have not yet integrated within themselves. Romantic obsession can function as a projection of disowned potential onto another person.

• Shame and Vulnerability Research (June Tangney; Brené Brown; Paul Gilbert)
  Chronic feelings of inadequacy transform rejection into evidence of personal defectiveness. Love becomes less a relationship and more a search for validation strong enough to silence self-doubt.

• Rumination Research (Susan Nolen-Hoeksema)
  Persistent analysis of a failed relationship often prolongs distress rather than resolving it. Replaying the story can create the illusion of processing while preventing acceptance.

• Existential Psychology & Terror Management Theory (Ernest Becker; Greenberg, Solomon & Pyszczynski)
  Romantic love is frequently recruited to provide meaning, permanence, and significance in the face of mortality. Heartbreak can therefore feel like the collapse of an entire worldview rather than a single relationship.

• Self-Determination Theory (Edward Deci; Richard Ryan)
  Psychological wellbeing depends on autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Individuals who rely excessively on relationships for identity often struggle when intimacy becomes their sole source of meaning.

• Self-Concept Clarity Research (Jennifer Campbell)
  A poorly defined sense of self increases emotional dependence on romantic feedback. When identity is unclear, relationships become the primary mirror through which the self is experienced.

• Earned Security & Therapeutic Change (Attachment Research Literature)
  Lasting change rarely emerges from insight alone. It typically requires repeated experiences that challenge old assumptions about worthiness, intimacy, and abandonment.

The lover girl does not need to be told she’s loved, she does not need reassurance. She does not need a better man, a healthier relationship, or a more supportive community of friends who finally understand her perceived depth, to validate her mistakes. She needs an honest reckoning with the fact that she has built a life around the avoidance of a self she has never met, and that no amount of romantic intensity will produce the encounter she is actually missing. She cannot be loved into existence. Her self cannot be heartbroken into existence. It has to be built, slowly and without aesthetic reward, in the ordinary hours of an ordinary life, in the sustained attention to work that matters, in the development of a perspective that is genuinely her own, in the tolerance of uncertainty that does not reach for a relationship to resolve it. In the willingness to sit in an ordinary room on an ordinary afternoon, with no wound to tend and no text to wait for, and remain there long enough to discover whether the person in that room is someone she can stand.

Improvement is seldom a romantic project, it does not photograph well, and no corner of the internet has built an aesthetic around it. It is the least glamorous thing a person can do with their life. But it is the only foundation on which an autonomous life can be constructed and sustained.

I have been harsh and confrontational with my wording. The lover girl is sympathetic, and I hope she is available to this essay. The culture handed her a story, and her perceptions about her experiences validated the narrative repeatedly. Against everything the story tells her, this also means that its reversal is also possible; through the slow, inglorious, and entirely unromantic decision to become someone whose life does not revolve around or or in denial of a romantic catastrophe.

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1978.

Becker, E. The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1973.

Bowlby, J. Attachment and Loss, Volume I: Attachment. Basic Books, 1969.

Brown, B. Daring Greatly. Gotham Books, 2012.

Campbell, J. D. et al. Self-Concept Clarity and Psychological Functioning. University of Toronto.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. University of Rochester.

Fisher, H. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Henry Holt, 2004.

Gilbert, P. The Compassionate Mind. Constable, 2009.

Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Random House, 2015.

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process.

Jung, C. G. The Development of Personality. Princeton University Press, 1954.

Kernberg, O. F. Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson, 1975.

Klein, M. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works. Hogarth Press, 1975.

Kunda, Z. The Case for Motivated Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 1990.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press, 2007.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. Women Who Think Too Much. Henry Holt, 2003.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. Guilford Press, 2017.

Skinner, B. F. Science and Human Behavior. Macmillan, 1953.

Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. Shame and Guilt. Guilford Press, 2002.

Tennov, D. Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Stein and Day, 1979.

Winnicott, D. W. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. Hogarth Press, 1965.

Young, L. J., & Wang, Z. The Neurobiology of Pair Bonding. Nature Neuroscience.

Zeki, S., & Romaya, J. P. The Brain Reaction to Viewing Faces of Opposite- and Same-Sex Romantic Partners.

There is a lot of paranoia and anxiety concerning the integration of AI for artistic pursuits. In the modern day and age, particularly on Substack, being accused for receiving assistance from AI is the equivalent of being accused for witchcraft in the medieval era. Truthfully, I fail to bring myself to blame them, because I understand how art can be a formation for an identity. But what exactly is art? What gold standard are we referring to while making all these claims? Art is a huge umbrella, full of people willing to argue why their definition is the correct one.

On that regard, I have an unapologetic yet non conventional opinion, one I cannot confine for the headlines. Because the algorithms reward simplistic engagement, unsurprisingly. I do not believe content produced by AI systems constitutes art. I do not side with the conservative defense of authenticity or a romantic plea for the sanctity of human labour. All these positions, all the nuance, is worth addressing. And I shall not detest the confrontation. But they remain tangential to my argument, regardless.

I would prefer a fundamental recognition of what art actually is, grounded in evolutionary science and human cognition, rather than opinions. There is a distinction between AI-generated content, serving the utility of entertainment, and individual expression; what we like to refer to as art. The distinction couldn’t be farther from the catastrophe the critics from both the sides like to suggest. It is the necessary precondition for how is art followed and pursued in human societies.

The common framings of the discourse surrounding AI & art, misidentify the problem and treat their voices as sentimentally absolute and the contrary as obsolete. I propose, we decouple art & content/entertainment first, for neither the technophile claim that AI content is art, nor the technophobe claim that it will destroy art, truly understand the premise itself. The causation remains human nature, indifferent to the greatest extent. Art is an inevitable consequence of human cognition, perception, individuality and the need for emotional regulation; all the features of consciousness that remain uniquely and perhaps irreducibly humane.

The Nature of Art

Art is not a technology that can be replicated through statistical pattern-making across image databases. As I stated previously; art is an inevitable consequence of the function that emotional experience serves in human life. I am no metaphysicist with my claims, nor a relativist with my stands. My derivation concerns evolutionary science, and can be tested against observable reality across all known human societies and throughout recorded history.

We could begin with cognition and the human condition itself. The human brain possesses the capacity for abstract representation, counterfactual thinking, and the externalisation of internal states into symbolic form. The capacity emerged because it served survival functions in collective/social living behaviours, as the ability to model social hierarchies, predict others’ mental states, plan for future contingencies, and coordinate action through shared making of meaning. Art leverages all of these capacities individually, but it does not define them. A language system could do the same work, but the role of art is more specified, inasmuch to leverage these capacities in the service of perception and emotion.

Art emerges from human perception in its deepest sense. This is not an earth-shattering news, but not mere sensation, to voice the least. Cognition imposes on sensory data, and crucially; human perception is largely inseparable from emotion and belief.

• We do not see a colour as colour alone, we perceive it as charged with affective meaning.

• We do not hear a melody as abstract pitch relationships, we experience it as laden with emotional valence.

This binding of perception to emotion and belief is an evolved feature, that would have selected for humans who could rapidly assess social and environmental information by its emotional relevance and significance. Art works by intensifying this binding, by creating objects and images and performances that concentrate emotional information in forms that can be contemplated, examined, and shared.

This results in individual variation and therefore the philosophical suggestion of individuality. Each human consciousness is singular in its particular configuration of perception, belief, and emotional response. Even identical twins with identical genetics will develop different emotional associations, different ways of perceiving the world, different beliefs about what matters, and what doesn’t, and to what degrees. Individuality is constitutive to human consciousness, and art is born from this singularity. An artwork is the externalization of one consciousness’s particular way of perceiving and feeling the world, offered to other consciousnesses for contemplation. This is why instinctively, we care who made the artwork. Not for fetishistic reasons about authenticity or aura, but because the artwork is fundamentally a communication from one consciousness to another.

One of many roles art plays for the human self is regulation. Humans experience emotions, anxieties, contradictions, and existential pressures that require relevant processing and release. By externalizing internal states, by playing with impossible scenarios, by exploring emotions in imagined rather than lived contexts, art permits a form of cognitive and emotional regulation that is essential to human psychological functioning. This is why art appears in every human culture and has persisted through every technological transformation; for it serves a function of the psyche that cannot be eliminated without eliminating something central to what it means to be human.

These four dimensions; cognition, perception (bound to emotion and belief), individuality, and regulation; constitute the evolutionary foundation of art. None of them can be replicated by a system that operates through statistical inference over training data.

The Contempt of Content

There lies an exorbitantly consequential distinction between art & content, I know not if it may proceed as deliberate. But the distinction must be spared contempt, for entertainment serves genuine utility and important functions in the human life. The error is the conflation of the two categories that have become blurred in contemporary discourse, when they ought to be separated and understood in their specificity.

AI-generated images are entertainment. They are content produced by systems trained on statistical patterns in existing images, optimized for particular aesthetic preferences or prompt specifications. What AI systems do is interpolate within a learned probability distribution. They do not perceive, they lack beliefs, and they do not have emotional responses or individual consciousness. They produce images that can be statistically similar to images made by humans, but this similarity is surface-level. The structure of production is entirely different.

Entertainment requires no artist consciousness. It requires only that content be produced that holds attention and generates engagement. Some entertainment is made by humans who enjoy the process, others by humans who view it as labor, and now some by machines. The category is agnostic about the source. What defines entertainment is its functional role of occupying attention, it generates pleasure or stimulation, it may distract or comfort, but it does not require that we encounter another consciousness through it.

Art requires precisely this encounter. When you view a painting or read a poem or listen to a musical composition, you are in contact with another consciousness’s particular way of perceiving the world. This is why we care about the artist’s identity, not as a matter of prestige, but as a matter of meaning. The artwork carries information about what it was like for this particular consciousness, at this particular moment, to perceive and feel something. You can disagree with that perception, resist the emotional valence it proposes, reject the belief-world it implies, but you are in dialogue with a consciousness that is genuinely other than yourself.

AI-generated images carry no such information. They are aesthetically competent (often debatably so), but they are not expressions of anything. They are not attempts to communicate how the world appears from a singular vantage point. This is not a flaw in current AI systems that will be remedied by better training or more parameters in the near future. It is constitutive of what these systems are. A statistical model cannot have perception because perception is not a statistical inference wo begin with, it is the binding of sensory data to emotional and conceptual meaning in ways that are irreducibly individual. A statistical model cannot have beliefs because beliefs require commitment, stake, the possibility of being wrong in ways that matter. A statistical model cannot have individuality because individuality requires a perspective that could have been different, choices that were made rather than inevitable.

The consequence is that AI-generated images cannot be art, regardless of how aesthetically refined they may be. They are content, meant for consumption and entertainment. While tangential and far from catastrophic, this distinction also explains the ground on which a renaissance of human artistic practice can be built.

The Significance of the Distinction

The boundary between art and entertainment in contemporary discourse has been blurred to oblivion. The conflation is disastrous for art itself. When anything that holds attention can be called art, art loses its specificity and its power. The contemporary art world’s attempt to preserve the category of art by expanding it to include any object that a museum will display has resulted in a condition in which art has become indistinguishable from commodity production, in which the primary function of art has become the circulation of monetary value and social prestige, rather than the communication of conscious.

The emergence of the rather promiscuous AI-generated content has the potential to restore the distinction that was nearly lost. As production becomes increasingly automated, as machines can generate aesthetically competent (to some extent) images at near zero marginal cost, the economic pressure to treat human-created images as mere content will paradoxically diminish. Taking in account of certain layers of low effort crafts entering a slope to be devoured by AI; the value of art will become newly legible. This not an artist’s romantic delusion, nor a prophecy I intend to carve on stone. Tens of thousands of years of evolutionary trajectories suggest humans will not stop creating art, because the function art serves is not something the machines can perform. This is where my argument arrives at a Venn intersection with the sentimental perspective towards art. It’s not the finished piece that pleases the artist’s eye, though a part of it. It’s the nuance, the criticality, the thematic depth the artist may have made some mistakes while attempting to capture what words cannot confine and machines cannot define.

The need to externalise consciousness, to regulate emotion through imaginative means, to encounter other minds through their particular ways of perceiving the world, these are all bedrock features of the both the human psychological life and the human experience as a whole. Meaning art is a structural and inevitable formation of human existence. What will change is the context in which art is made and valued, and the cultural distinction between art and entertainment will become sharper rather than more blurred.

The reorientation deserves more emphasis than both the radical poles ever subject it to. When art is no longer pressured to function as entertainment, when it is no longer expected to generate engagement metrics or to be aesthetically palatable to algorithmic recommendation systems. Artists will create art that is genuinely difficult, because that is what humans do. Such art resists easy consumption, communicates experiences and perceptions that are singular to the point of opacity. Art will become more radical, more strange, more genuinely individual, precisely because it will no longer be optimized for mass appeal. All of this may already seem familiar, because such pieces are known as “classics” in the modern day and age.

This bifurcation is already visible in the present moment. The anxiety about AI art is not really about AI at all; it is about a collapse of economic viability in a particular form of cultural labor (illustration, commercial design, decorative image-making). All of these are problems with solutions unknown. They have earned the dignity of deserving solutions, such as universal basic income, retraining, cultural support for human makers who wish to continue. But none of this is an inherent deficiency with art itself.

Why Art is Unkillable and Immortal

The anthropological record supports this argument, for across all known human cultures, in every era, humans have made art. Even when they weren’t economically incentivised to do so, even when they weren’t trained to do so, and even when they were restricted to do so. Despite not being functionally necessary, art has had the same consistency and relevance as reproduction and even breathing across countless human societies. And this claim is not an exaggeration; art emerges spontaneously wherever humans are found, for reasons I discussed prior to this section.

Children begin to make representational marks long before they are taught to do so. Humans in situations of extreme constraint and deprivation, be it a prisoner, the isolated, or the bereaved, continue to take part in artistic outputs. Art appears in the archaeological record at the earliest moments we can detect human cognitive sophistication. In cultures that have never encountered the Western art world, humans still make objects and perform actions that serve the functions of art: the expression of emotion, the regulation of psychological distress, the communication of perception, the negotiation of individual identity within social contexts. Crucially, art functions as expression and speech in every conceivable context, including authoritarian societies, and individuals explicitly criminalised or suppressed by power structures. Illegal graffiti, prison tattoos, underground zines, prohibited murals, these demonstrate that the need to externalize consciousness through artistic form is so fundamental that humans will undertake consequential risks to practice it. Memes being a social currency for modern politics serves as a great example to this phenomenon. When a consciousness cannot speak directly, it speaks through image and symbol. When a perspective cannot circulate through approved channels, it appears on walls and in hidden spaces. Even as a survival mechanism for the identity; art persists as the only available language for experiences that power structures wish to silence. The persistence of artistic practice across all contexts, including those where it is actively prohibited, proves that art answers a need in human consciousness that no amount of suppression can eliminate.

What varies across cultures is not whether art appears but the forms it takes, the materials it uses, the contexts in which it is valued, and the relationship between artistic practice and economic life. Medieval monks, Japanese poets, Indian silk weavers, West-African mask makers, Persian miniature painters, Renaissance sculptors, Andean flute carvers; all of these made art. What unites all of them is not a formal property, or a method of production, or even a particular art form, but the fact that consciousness is being externalized and offered for contemplation.

Needless to say, AI systems do not possess a consciousness to externalise, for they have no perception in the sense that matters for art. This is the fault line along which, the coming transformation will fracture: the distinction between what can be simulated and what cannot be. Entertainment can be entirely simulated; the functions it serves (distraction, stimulation, the occupation of attention) do not require consciousness on the part of the producer. But art cannot be simulated because art is fundamentally the communication of consciousness. You can fake the surface indefinitely, but the substrate cannot be replicated. And once this distinction becomes clear, once humans have lived in a world saturated with machine-produced entertainment, the hunger for genuine artistic contact will intensify, not diminish.

What will then flourish is a cultural ecosystem in which art and entertainment are explicitly distinguished, in which both are valued but understood as serving different functions. Art will be rarer, more intentional, more demanding of both maker and viewer. Entertainment will be abundant, diverse, and freed from the false obligation to carry artistic or cultural significance. This bifurcation is the condition necessary for both art and entertainment to flourish in their specific ways.

Why Art Shall Flourish

The standard defense of human art in the age of AI argues that art will persist because it serves human needs that machines cannot meet. This is true but insufficient., for persistence is not flourishing. A thing can persist in a diminished form, marginalized, economically precarious, or even confused about its own purpose.

What makes art likely not merely to persist but to flourish is the categorical clarity that AI-generated content will force upon us. For decades, the art world has been confused about whether art is primarily a commodity, an entertainment product, a status marker, or an expression of consciousness. This confusion has been catastrophic for art itself, because it has meant that artistic practice has been subordinated to the logic of entertainment and commodity production. Artists have been pressured to make work that generates engagement, that is aesthetically palatable, that circulates efficiently through social media and commercial galleries. If this particular idea intrigues you, consider checking out my essay on the relationship between art and the algorithms.

The emergence of machine-produced entertainment that is superior to human-produced entertainment in its ability to generate engagement and stimulation will shatter this confusion. When machines can generate unlimited aesthetically competent images, the economics that treats all images as mere content will finally break, and the price of entertainment-quality images will approach zero. In simpler terms; an increase in supply with little increase in demand will deflate the economic significance. This would be the liberation moment for art.

Art serves functions that entertainment cannot, and this will inevitably become increasingly clear.

The historical parallel is illuminating. In the medieval period, before the printing press, there was no clear distinction between literature and other forms of communication. Books were scarce, expensive, and valued primarily for their material wealth and decorative beauty. But the printing press did not eliminate literature, for it could not, it clarified what literature fundamentally is and freed it to develop in new directions. Similarly, AI-generated content will not eliminate art but clarify what art fundamentally is and free it to develop in directions that were foreclosed by the pressure to function as entertainment.

Decades or centuries from now, the society that emerges from this transformation will look back on our current moment as the final era of confusion. They will marvel at how we treated art and entertainment as if they were the same thing, how we valued images based on engagement metrics and commercial potential rather than on their capacity to communicate consciousness. They will be richer in individual and artistic expression, because they will no longer be confused about what art is. They will also be richer in entertainment, freed from the false obligation to be Art. They will have both, in abundance, each flourishing in its own sphere. With the next renaissance near.

Before you jump to the comment section, to leave a resentful reply, be informed that this is not an argument against feminism. Rather, I’m here to present a structural critique that has been in my observation for some time now. I shall light the deranged edges of the patriarchy up in flames with the passion of a masochist, but not without the heartbeat of the ideology’s deficiency; at most its modern inferences.

Feminism, in-part has become synonymous with misandry, but that remains the least of my concern, for this essay shall not mistake profundity for efficacy. I have spent a considerable amount of time reading feminist literature across political theory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history. And I cannot help but notice a strangely recurring pattern online. In the modestly provocative and modern inferences of feminism, as I stated before; many of the individuals who place “feminist” most prominently within their bios, usernames, or digital identities often display an extraordinarily flattened understanding of feminism itself. They home a reductionist belief of the ideology being something singular, morally self-evident, and intellectually invulnerable or immune to scrutiny.

I’m merely pointing out my observations, of course. Just with a sample set spanning across various social medias, gathered across several years of interacting, agreeing, disagreeing, debating, and sharing spaces with the “feminists”. I don’t mean to attack feminism, in fact, I intend quite the opposite. I have a hard time being in a positive sentiment with the reduction of a historically dense, philosophically fractured, and politically evolving body of thought into aesthetic branding and slogan repetition, leveraged as another political tool with no regard to the consequences.

So far, here on Substack alone, I have encountered well over a dozen people who speak about feminism as though it emerged from history full formed with one coherent doctrine, one moral essence, one political objective, and one uninterrupted ideological trajectory. In these discussions, feminism is treated less like a centuries-long intellectual movement and more like a universally defined, universally agreed upon, and universally understood sacred abstraction.

That understanding is historically indefensible. For feminism was never one thing.

Feminism did not evolve linearly, nor did it possess unanimous goals. It was never politically unified, philosophically consistent, or sociologically homogenous. The movement has always contained internal fractures, ideological wars, competing epistemologies, class tensions, racial critiques, material contradictions, and radically different visions of what liberation itself meant. Entire branches of feminist thought emerged specifically because previous branches were seen as insufficient, exclusionary, bourgeois, biologically deterministic, Eurocentric, or politically compromised.

To speak about feminism as if it is reducible to “equality between men and women” is akin to summarising the entirety of political philosophy as “people should have rights.” Technically adjacent, perhaps, but intellectually barren.

For an instance, the first wave of feminism largely revolved around legal recognition and political participation, particularly within Western liberal democracies. Suffrage movements sought access to institutional citizenship, voting rights, education, and property ownership. Yet even here, there were tensions, which did not adhere to everyone. Many first wave movements were deeply entangled with class privilege and racial exclusion. The interests of the upper-class white women often dominated the discourse, while working-class women and women of colour remained marginalised even within movements supposedly advocating universal emancipation. How often do you see anyone talking about the sharp and imperfect edges of feminism? Presumably, that’s a question worth asking.

Already, the notion of a singular feminist motive begins collapsing under the founding figures themselves.

The second wave complicated matters further. Here feminism became intensely concerned with domestic labour, sexuality, reproductive rights, patriarchy as a structural phenomenon, workplace inequality, and the psychological dimensions of gendered existence. Yet this “wave” itself was not ideologically unified. Liberal feminists pursued institutional reform and equal participation within existing systems, whereas radical feminists often viewed patriarchy as a foundational system requiring deeper social transformation. Marxist feminists analysed women’s oppression through class relations and capitalism. Existential feminists examined womanhood as a socially constructed condition. Psychoanalytic feminists investigated gender through the structure of the unconscious mind.

These were not mere aesthetic disagreements that can be dismissed as alternate perspectives or opinions. They were active and consequential disputes about reality and the ideology itself.

Some feminists viewed biology as central to oppression, while the others viewed biological emphasis as dangerous essentialism.
Some prioritised economic structures, while the others prioritised language, representation, sexuality, or culture.
Some argued for integration into institutions, while the others viewed institutions themselves as irreparably patriarchal.

What becomes increasingly obvious once one moves beyond introductory discourse is that feminism was never merely divided chronologically through “waves”; it was also divided philosophically through fundamentally incompatible schools of thought. Again, these were not cosmetic distinctions, nor slight disagreements over strategy. They often represented entirely different understandings of power, oppression, identity, biology, economics, morality, sexuality, and even reality itself. The textual repetition is not going to be reviewed and erased because it serves a utility; to establish the flexibility and nature of feminism under the lens of scrutiny.

This is precisely why modern internet discourse surrounding feminism often appears intellectually hollow to anyone who has actually engaged with feminist literature seriously. Many people speak about feminism as though it possesses a universally agreed-upon doctrine, when historically feminism has been one of the most internally combative intellectual traditions of modern political thought.

Liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, existential feminism, post-structural feminism, ecofeminism, intersectional feminism, these are not interchangeable aesthetic labels attached to the same ideological body. Many of them actively criticised one another with remarkable intensity. Some viewed others as insufficiently revolutionary. Others viewed competing branches as authoritarian, biologically deterministic, economically reductionist, philosophically incoherent, or even politically dangerous.

To flatten these distinctions into a singular moral identity is to erase the intellectual engine of feminism itself.

To start with, Liberal feminism emerged primarily from Enlightenment ideals surrounding individual rights, rationality, legal equality, and institutional participation. Liberal feminists generally argued that women should possess equal access to education, employment, political representation, legal protections, and civic participation within existing democratic systems. Their objective was not necessarily to dismantle institutions, but rather to remove barriers preventing women from participating equally within them.

This sounds straightforward enough until one encounters criticism from other feminist schools.

Radical feminists frequently argued that liberal feminism fundamentally underestimated the depth of patriarchal power. To them, inequality was not as simple as a merely a matter of discriminatory laws or unequal opportunity, but rather a deeply embedded social structure permeating culture, sexuality, family dynamics, language, religion, and even interpersonal psychology. From this perspective, simply allowing women access to existing institutions solved little if those institutions themselves were constructed upon patriarchal foundations.

Thus, radical feminism often pursued a far more transformative critique of society itself.

And yet even radical feminism fractured internally.

Some radical feminists focused heavily on biological realities and reproductive oppression, arguing that female biology historically subjected women to structural dependency and control. Others moved toward cultural separatism or anti-pornography activism. Some framed heterosexuality itself as politically conditioned under patriarchy. Others rejected those conclusions entirely.

This alone should dismantle the popular illusion that feminism has ever possessed unanimous beliefs regarding sexuality, gender roles, or liberation.

Marxist feminism introduced another axis of critique altogether by locating women’s oppression primarily within economic structures and class relations. Marxist feminists argued that capitalism benefited materially from women’s unpaid domestic labour, reproductive labour, and economic dependency. From this perspective, patriarchy could not be fully understood independently from capitalism because economic systems shaped gender relations themselves.

To Marxist feminists, many liberal feminist projects appeared deeply superficial, merely integrating privileged women into capitalist structures without addressing the exploitative foundations beneath the facade.

A woman becoming a corporate executive did not necessarily liberate working-class women cleaning her office.
The women cleaning your floors were not present in the room when you defined liberation.
I am not going to erase the repetition, for the echo is necessary.

This critique created enormous tension between feminists prioritising representation and feminists prioritising material redistribution.

Existential feminism, heavily influenced by thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, approached gender through philosophical phenomenology and existentialist inquiry. Rather than reducing womanhood purely to economics or legal inequality, existential feminism examined how femininity itself becomes socially constructed through cultural conditioning. De Beauvoir’s famous proposition that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman represented a profound philosophical challenge to biological essentialism.

In this framework, womanhood could not be reduced to a natural state, because it was defined as a socially produced condition imposed through norms, expectations, symbolism, and historical repetition.

This perspective later became foundational for post-structural feminism, which further destabilised fixed understandings of identity, gender, and meaning itself.

Post-structural feminism, influenced heavily by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, rejected the idea that categories like “woman” possess stable, universal definitions. Instead, post-structural feminists argued that identity is constructed through language, discourse, social performance, and institutional power.

This is where contemporary gender theory becomes significantly more philosophically complicated than most online discourse acknowledges.

For most post-structural feminists, gender is not merely a social role layered atop biological sex; rather, even our understanding of sex itself becomes mediated through cultural interpretation and systems of meaning. And this wasn’t exclusive either.

For example, Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity challenged the notion that gender reflects some stable internal essence. Instead, gender was viewed as an emergent phenomenon, consequential to repeated social acts, behaviours, and discursive structures.

Predictably and unsurprisingly, this perspective generated immense criticism, not only from conservatives, but from other feminists.

Materialist feminists accused post-structural approaches of becoming excessively abstract and detached from physical realities affecting women materially. Some radical feminists argued that dissolving stable definitions of womanhood undermined political organising around sex-based oppression. Others embraced post-structuralism precisely because they believed earlier feminist frameworks imposed restrictive and essentialist notions of femininity.

Again, feminism evolving through conflict with feminism.

Ecofeminism introduced yet another framework by linking the exploitation of women with the exploitation of nature. Ecofeminists argued that patriarchal systems often construct both women and the natural world as passive resources to dominate, extract from, and control. Some ecofeminist traditions drew spiritual connections between femininity and ecological harmony, while others pursued more material critiques of industrial capitalism and environmental destruction.

Even here, disagreement emerged.

Critics accused certain ecofeminist strands of romanticising femininity and reinforcing essentialist associations between women and nature. Others defended ecofeminism as a necessary critique of domination itself as a broader civilisational logic.

Then comes intersectional feminism, perhaps one of the most misunderstood frameworks within modern discourse despite being constantly referenced online.

Intersectionality was originally articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw. A name worth noting, given the academic incompetence of most online discourse. Intersectionality emerged as a critique of feminist frameworks that universalised the experiences of white women while ignoring how race, class, sexuality, disability, nationality, and other social conditions intersect with gender. Intersectionality did not merely add categories onto feminism like decorative extensions. It fundamentally challenged the very assumption that “women” constitute a singular political experience.

A wealthy white woman and a poor black woman may both experience sexism, but not through identical institutional realities, historical contexts, or material conditions.

This sounds obvious when simplified, yet its implications radically complicated feminist theory because it destabilised any attempt to speak universally about women’s oppression.

And still, even intersectionality became internally contested. Some scholars viewed it as indispensable analytical progress. Others argued that increasingly fragmented identity frameworks risked weakening collective political cohesion. Debates surrounding hierarchy of oppression, coalition-building, and ideological fragmentation intensified.

What all of this demonstrates, unmistakably, is that feminism has never been intellectually singular.

It has never been reducible to social media slogans such as “women’s empowerment” or “equality”. Those phrases are politically marketable because they are emotionally digestible, but they communicate almost nothing about the actual philosophical disputes that shaped feminist history.

This is precisely why the modern tendency to treat feminism as a self-evident moral identity becomes deeply frustrating to anyone who has genuinely studied the subject. The movement’s internal complexity disappears beneath aesthetic performance. Historical literacy is replaced by algorithmic rhetoric. Ideological identity substitutes for intellectual engagement. And yet again, I shall let the repetition live.

And perhaps the greatest irony is that many individuals most publicly confident about feminism often appear least familiar with the literature itself.

One encounters people invoking feminism while possessing no awareness of the distinctions between liberal reformism and radical structural critique, no familiarity with debates between materialist and postmodern schools, no understanding of how race complicated earlier feminist movements, no awareness of the conflicts surrounding sexuality, labour, biology, pornography, capitalism, language, motherhood, or institutional power.

The result is not intellectual feminism but symbolic feminism, for a feminism reduced into social posture.

To study feminism seriously is to encounter contradiction constantly, and opinions on social media do not overwrite history. One feminist thinker critiques another, one framework exposes the blind spots of a previous one. Entire schools emerge from dissatisfaction with earlier assumptions. Contrary to normalised presupposition; feminism, historically, was not a cathedral built uniformly toward consensus; it was an ongoing battlefield of competing analyses attempting to explain power and liberation through radically different lenses.

This is literally what makes feminism intellectually rich and worth addressing even on disagreement.

But it requires engaging with uncomfortable disagreements rather than consuming politically convenient summaries. It requires recognising that ideological movements spanning centuries cannot be flattened into bios, hashtags, or moral branding exercises without losing conceptual integrity altogether.

The tragedy of much contemporary online feminism is not that people care about women’s rights. That concern is legitimate. The tragedy is that many people inherit the rhetoric of feminist movements without inheriting the intellectual discipline required to understand them historically.

And once a movement loses its intellectual seriousness, it becomes vulnerable to becoming aesthetic rather than analytical, emotionally performative rather than philosophically grounded.

At that point, people are no longer defending feminism as an intellectual tradition. They are defending an identity they barely understand. And yet modern online discourse often collapses all of this into motivational slogans and identity performance.

One of the most intellectually frustrating aspects of contemporary digital feminism is not disagreement, for disagreement is healthy. Rather, it is the illusion of expertise produced through proximity to rhetoric. Repetition has become mistaken for literacy. Repetition with no nuance, to be specific. Familiarity with terminology is mistaken for comprehension. People speak with immense moral certainty about feminist theory while possessing little awareness of the historical conflicts that shaped it.

There is a difference between supporting women and understanding feminism as an intellectual tradition.

The third wave itself emerged partly as a critique of the second. Many thinkers argued that earlier feminist frameworks universalised the experiences of white, middle-class Western women while neglecting race, colonialism, sexuality, and cultural plurality. Intersectionality gained prominence precisely because earlier feminist structures often failed to account for overlapping systems of oppression. Black feminists, postcolonial feminists, queer theorists, and scholars from outside Western academic traditions challenged assumptions embedded within mainstream feminist discourse.

Again: feminism evolving through criticism of feminism.

This alone should make simplistic online definitions impossible to sustain. One is entitled to ask; then why do such definitions and interpretations persist? Because social media thrives on simplification, for what is simplification if not algorithmically efficient? Nuance performs poorly, my essay is probably going to be buried beneath the same slogans and incompetent confrontations I have spent the past few hours critiquing. Historical complexity cannot compete with emotionally gratifying certainty condensed into captions, hashtags, and identity markers.

Consequently, feminism online is far from a rigorous field of intellectual engagement. To identify as feminist becomes, for many, sufficient evidence of ideological understanding. The label substitutes for inquiry. But no serious tradition survives reduction into branding without becoming distorted.

One cannot meaningfully discuss feminism while remaining unaware of the conflicts between liberal and radical feminism, the tensions between materialist and postmodern approaches, the critiques raised by Black feminist scholarship, the debates surrounding sexuality and agency, or the historical influence of class politics and colonial structures upon feminist movements themselves.

Ironically, many online discussions about feminism reproduce the exact anti-intellectual tendencies that earlier feminist scholars actively resisted. Feminist academia historically fought for theoretical legitimacy within institutions that dismissed women’s intellectual contributions. Yet now, in many spaces, careful reading has been replaced by ideological performance. The appearance of political awareness becomes more important than political understanding itself. And this phenomenon is not unique to feminism. Nearly every major ideological movement in the digital age undergoes this flattening process. Complex schools of thought become compressed into tribal identities, philosophical traditions become memes, political language becomes symbolic currency detached from historical grounding.

But feminism suffers particularly from this because of how emotionally charged gender discourse has become online. Criticism of superficial feminist rhetoric is often interpreted as criticism of women themselves, which immediately obstructs meaningful conversation. In layman terms; to criticise feminism is to hate women, somehow. Needless to say, it’s an illogical assumption, but a persistent one, nonetheless. The result is an environment where intellectual disagreement is not productive, it’s not met with analysis or disciplined critique. It’s treated with character assassinations and remarks about one’s assumed identity. Feminism itself permits and even welcomes disagreement, but the ones congratulating themselves upon being a feminist do not.

For the solution, feminism requires reading beyond slogans. My essay is just a peek into the vast and conflicted variety of dense feminist literature. Feminism requires reading people like Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Shulamith Firestone, and many others reveals something immediately obvious. That feminism is not shallow, monolithic, or reducible to internet discourse.

In fact, many of these thinkers would likely critique contemporary online feminism themselves, not because feminism or the intents lacks value, but because ideas deteriorate when converted into identity aesthetics detached from rigorous engagement.

Why am I so concerned? Why am I writing a full length and well researched essay explaining the nature of feminism? It’s not whether or not people support feminism. One is free to support whatever ideological framework they may find convincing. What frustrates me is the confidence with which people discuss extraordinarily complicated ideologies, beliefs, and histories while possessing less than little familiarity with the literature that produced them.

There is nothing wrong with being politically passionate, but there is something wrong with mistaking political passion for intellectual competence.

If one chooses to publicly identify with feminism, especially in ways that imply ideological authority, then the least one can do is engage honestly with the movement’s historical evolution, internal contradictions, and theoretical diversity. Otherwise, feminism ceases to function as a serious body of thought and instead becomes another flattened digital identity marker, which is emotionally loud, historically detached, and intellectually underdeveloped, much like an infant crying for attention. Be it an offensive remark, but I would rather be offensive rather than submitting to the theatre.

Feminism itself has become a political tool with incentives for power, serving people who couldn’t care less about the the ones affected by the consequences. All of this needs acknowledgement and change, and is deeply unfortunate, because feminism, at its best, deserves far more seriousness than social media currently permits.

I have been in circles of kinds, ranging for my own journey blooming in all colours but one, and despite the peculiar roses and thorns, a few formations are predictable, inasmuch as they are persistent. Each represents one small act of unintentional hostility, sometimes deliberate, often times unexamined and irrational.

I have been writing essays on my findings, and my previous inference of Hostility In Agreeable Speech spared a sister cell of such conduct.

The infancy of the social conduct I intend to confront today, speaks warmly, affirms liberally, and never, under pain of social death, tells you what it actually thinks. We have given this disposition a name that flatters it. Needless to say, all the praise is unearned. We call it being nice, though niceness is a quality of the spirit rather than a learned suppression, followed by a performance, of response. It’s one long education in the art of giving no offense and therefore giving very little of oneself at all.

I shall not assign niceness the dignity of sentimentality, for that may result in the same vice I intend to slaughter. The nice person has calculated, usually correctly, that the world seems to reward pleasantness or being sweet with one’s words, “seems” is the keyword here, anything else would presuppose a universal substrate of the social construct that’s absent. Similarly, they have consciously or unconsciously, analysed what means are penalised. Although they detest to contest the convenient, they do so only when they cannot consent or validate the conduct, for they have not tasted the fruits of their own unmaking. It does serve a social utility, in part civilisation runs on the lubricant of mild dishonesty and the small daily agreements that grease the cogwheels, one truth at a time.

Even amongst the clerically rebellious, it’s somewhat accepted that these presuppositions are rather dispositions of the deranged impositions of we like to call ambiguous social norms, in-part keep the society from drifting to barbarism. I do not propose we abandon these lubricants entirely, for the mechanisms seldom care for feeling. But a category of us has arranged themselves according to the calculations they found worthy of receiving an applause. I intend to question the the curious contemporary habit of confusing the capacity to be pleasant with the capacity to be kind.

The structure of this disease operates on a spectrum, just like every other practice meaning to substitute a lack of unsupported sustenance while masquerading virtue.

The more aggressive conflation of this inflation, came to be later named toxic positivity, for the imposition was a convenient verbosity, to share the fair share of society’s blame, flared for it’s aimless games, intending to act as seamless flames of a christened and enlightened keep. And though we detest to contest this framing, inasmuch to accept the defect of it’s usage, we never bother to clench or address the thirst we always digress.

The insecurity hypothesis is a reasonable approach in and of itself. Then how come the deficiency and the need to write this essay? Because the inadequacy is interpretive, arising from the framing. It fails to do justice to the terminologies it attempts to confine. many cruelties are not born from insecurity alone. Some emerge from appetite, some from ideological intoxication, some from the ordinary seduction of authority granted social legitimacy. To insist upon insecurity as the singular explanatory axis is to convert a contingent mechanism into a metaphysical principle.

The nice person rarely risks the violence of detail or precision, all the compliments are hollow and unspecific, given the minimal effort they are willing to extend. They shall comfort every contradiction so long as it permits them continued admission into the theatre of moral approval. For to say what one truly perceives is to risk exile, and exile is the great modern terror. Thus sincerity is negotiated into extinction, without the need for even an informal social contract, diluted until it resembles diplomacy more than conviction.

The concealed hostility of compulsive niceness abandons people precisely at the point where truth becomes necessary. It would rather preserve social equilibrium than participate in another person’s difficult becoming. A question can be framed here, a rather appalling accusation. Can they truly love if they prefer watching someone decay beneath illusions they are too polite to interrupt?

In the beginning, before the ring was cast and the witnesses summoned and the word trembled into the cold air between two bodies standing at the threshold of their own committing undoing, there was an ungoverned and formless emotion, that we later learned to name longing. It precedes language and outlasts reason and refuses with a geological stubbornness to be argued out of its wanting, and it is from this longing, not from heaven or the stars, nor from edict or the long finger of divine command pointing down through cloud and centuries, that marriage was built across a thousand cultures that would never speak to each other.

To name it a construction is not to diminish it in the sense of a presupposition, and let this be said with the care one brings to sacred precincts, for there are those, the philosophical scrutinizers ready to dismiss culture itself as disordered, who will hear the word construct and hear instead the word counterfeit, as though nothing made by human hands could genuinely be significant, as though the cathedrals were less holy for having been built by stonemasons who ate bread and quarreled with their wives and died in obscurity, but the stone is human, for the prayer that rises through it is divine, and therein lies the inexhaustible mystery of how mortal materials become vessels for what refuses to be mortal.

Across the long embarrassment of recorded history, the form has refuted confinement. Never did it arrive at stillness, nor did it consent to be fixed, for it was meant to shape-shift for the centuries to come, and the restlessness ought to trouble anyone who insists it was handed down complete and unalterable from some authority beyond revision, as if clerical authoritarianism was not prevalent enough, for in one civilization it was a sealing of patriarchs who were willing to bring as much exertion to love as they did to the weather, and in another it was a civil transaction of a courthouse on a Tuesday afternoon. Despite my implied interests, this essay does not intend to propose an anthropological account of the shared union, rather, for I am drawn to yet another stretch of centuries and cultures, spanning continents and millennia and the full chromatic range of human custom, it was polygyny and polyandry and arranged union and companionate partnership, each wore the face of the eternal, for they all insisted with the magnificent confidence of the newly converted that its particular assertion was the structure God had always intended, that all the other shapes were deviation or decadence of the appalling ignorance of the natural order.

But the eternal does not renegotiate its terms with every parliament, it does not revise its definitions when the century turns, nor does it expand its borders to accommodate the newly enfranchised and then claim it always meant to include them, and so the persistent, irrepressible revision of marriage across time is not evidence of its corruption but of its authorship, of the unmistakable signature of the human hand that has been earnestly, sometimes brilliantly and sometimes catastrophically at work on it all along, even in the centuries when it believed itself to be only transcribing.

If one can remain long enough in this recognition without flinching away into either cynicism or nostalgia, there is a magnificence, one that speaks not to our smallness, contrary to whatever the philosophy may prefer to suggest, but to our peculiar and irreducible greatness, the greatness of a creature that looks at the formlessness of time and with full knowledge of its own impermanence, chooses to give that formlessness a shape, to say here, in this place, between these two specific and unrepeatable lives, I will make something that did not exist before the moment I decided it should exist, which is not the gesture of a species merely subject to nature but of one that has learned, at great cost and over immeasurable time, to author itself.

Understood without the jargon, marriage refuses to be the architecture of utility or shelter alone. It warrants to be the building block of a civilization that has decided that love, being fugitive and intrinsically ungoverned and constitutionally resistant to all attempts at preservation, needs somewhere to stand, needs a form around it not to imprison it, but to make it witnessed, for the transformation of the private and evanescent into a tangible formation the community can see and therefore honor and therefore, in some cases; protect, ad the wedding vow, which no angel dictated and no prophet transcribed, written ourselves in the trembling and overreaching language of people trying to say something adequately aligned to what they felt, is among the more remarkable literary achievements of the species, for it attempts the impossible and does not mistake the attempt for an erroneous pursuit.

But insight without a cost is seldom wisdom, and to dwell only in the magnificence of human authorship without sitting, honestly and without sentimentality, in what that authorship has also wrought, the long centuries in which the institution was assembled almost entirely by men and bore, accordingly, the architecture of their comfort and the geometry of their interests, would be a submission to philosophical cowardice dressed in elegance, and this essay has no interest in elegance purchased at the price of honesty, so let it be said plainly, if plainness is still possible in a sentence of this length: for centuries, in most of the civilizations that kept records and built monuments and called themselves ordered, a woman’s legal selfhood dissolved upon marriage the way salt dissolves in warm water, with no no visible trace of what it was before the dissolving, her labor absorbed into a household she did not own, her consent a formality performed for the comfort of the ceremony rather than as a honored condition of the contract, and the language used to consecrate these arrangements was the same language, covenant, sacred bond, divine ordinance, consistently used to resist their reform, so that the very vocabulary of the holy was turned, generation after generation, against those who asked whether the house was fit for the people living inside it.

This is not an accusation against love, for love need not be confined, for it has always existed in excess of the institutions built to contain it, surviving them and outlasting them and sometimes undermining them from within, but it is an indictment of the ease with which a civilization mistakes its own peculiar structure for nature, its own preferences for permanence, its own convenience for the will of the cosmos. It’s a mistake made not out of malice, usually, for that framing would not be adequately insidious. The causation is, rather, the simple failure to remember that the formation was constructed, and constructions can be rebuilt, and that this is not desecration but the most serious form of faithfulness to the purpose the building was always claiming to serve.

The philosophers who have stood before this institution and inferred their various verdicts are themselves historical processions an inquiry must pause before. Beauvoir, typically standing at the threshold with her extraordinary lucidity, sew in marriage the characteristics of immanence, the slow and socially sanctioned erosion of a woman’s reaching-outward into a tending-inward, a life organized around the maintenance of a world she did not design for herself; Hegel, with his taste for reconciliation, found in the marital bond the first crystallization of ethical life, the moment when raw private feeling submits itself to the grammar of the social and becomes, for the first time, something more than appetite; and the mystics, those unclassifiable figures who have always refused the either/or with a serenity that irritates the systematizers, who looked at two people making promises in the full and terrifying knowledge of their mortality and found in that spectacle a remainder, a residue that survived all the critique, something luminous and irreducible at the bottom of the vessel after the sociological acid had done its work.

All of them patiently held insights homing some truth. Fragments, they were not that adds up to a whole when assembled. They were rather overlapping and co-existing lights. What, then, after all this circling and descending and careful approach, remains, what survives the recognition that the institution is ours, that we wrote the vow and cast the ring and invented the witness and constructed the entire elaborate ceremony by which two people formalize what was, before the ceremony, already true between them, which is to say, what remains of the meaning after the myth of its divine origin has been gently, respectfully set aside?

Perhaps, knowing a thing to be constructed does not evacuate it of depth, does not reach down into its center and remove the weight that makes it felt, that the person who understands grief as a neurological and evolutionary process does not for that reason grieve less when the grief arrives, that the person who knows beauty to be partly cultural and partly neurological and partly the accident of what one has been trained to notice still stands before the evening light on old stone and is stopped, awfully amazed, by something that exceeds the explanation, and that the person who understands marriage as a human institution, assembled from law and custom and economic necessity and the long, only partially successful attempt to organize desire into something livable , does not thereby find the vow lighter, the ring less energized with lasting significance, the long ordinary labor of choosing someone again and again across the unremarkable succession of days any less extraordinary in its rather silent demands.

We are the creatures who make meaning, and this is our distinction, and perhaps our burden, our particular unchosen glory, we do not only live but narrate our living, do not only love but ritualize our loving, do not only feel but insist, and our determination has outlasted every attempt to cure us of it, on making the felt thing visible, on bringing the witnesses in, on carving the momentary into something that can be stood before and remembered, and there is in this insistence the resistance of fully being absorbed into critique and even the most disenchanted philosopher must stand before the spectacle of two people standing before their community and making promises, knowing they are mortal, knowing the promises are hard, knowing the institution around them is imperfect and historical and humanly authored, still moving, still persisting, after everything that can be said against it has been said.

The construct has never been the enemy of the sacred, in every civilization that has reached toward the sacred and tried to give it a habitation, it has been the only form in which the sacred, which is always formless and always fleeing, can be held long enough to be seen, long enough to be shared, long enough to do what it has always been trying to do, which is to make two people, for a moment and perhaps for a lifetime, less alone in the vast and indifferent architecture of time.

That perennial dream has long survived every revision and every reform and every honest reckoning with what the institution has been used to do, is not something we constructed, though we have constructed everything around it, the way one builds walls not to create the warmth that will live inside them but to give that warmth, which already existed, somewhere to remain.

Marriage was built by human hands, from borrowed words and imperfect understanding, and it holds
For what we made, we could not have known,
And the lasting is the only miracle it claimed to own.

MBTI, a rather uninteresting topic, taking in account of the usual topics for my essays. But it’s worth examining, nonetheless. There is a lot of misinformation surrounding the framework, and psychology in general. So I decided to clear the fog.

Over the course of several decades, MBTI has migrated from corporate onboarding packets and lifestyle magazines into the self-identification vocabulary of millions of individuals who genuinely believe they have been meaningfully described by a methodology that is reliable. That is a remarkable achievement for an instrument with almost no empirical foundation, to say the least. The MBTI is derived loosely from Carl Jung’s typological speculations, “speculations,” is the keyword here, even with the benefit of the doubt, which I will get to deconstructing in a minute, it would be observational psychology at best, a discipline with not the best reputation for deriving reliable conclusions for cognitive states.

The framework assigns individuals to one of sixteen discrete personality types

• Extraversion/Introversion

• Sensing/Intuition

• Thinking/Feeling

• Judging/Perceiving

The appeal is not incomprehensible, although classification fails to account for the complexity of life, but it’s beneficial to establish the variables rather than dealing with floating axioms. And the MBTI flattens its recipients with specificity that is actually generic. It does not classify as science, by any rigorous or empirically informed standard. Furthermore, a disciplined analysis reveals that the methodology fails at the level of measurement theory, developmental psychology, and the fundamental logic of personality science.

The reliability problem couldn’t be farther than incidental, the dissonance is a structural necessity, a mandate for the framework. Research published across multiple decades demonstrates that between 39 to 76 percent of individuals who retake the MBTI within five weeks receive a different type classification (McCarley & Carskadon, 1983; Pittenger, 1993).

Therefore, the mathematically derived reliability of the MBTI sits at a modest 42.5% on average, and 61% with if we consider a best case scenario. For context, psychological instruments used in serious research typically aim for ≥70–80% reliability. Not even the least probable scenario with the highest accuracy is adequately considerable.

Moving on to the causation, it’s not a measurement error at the mathematical margins alone, it occurs as an inaccurate reading of the dominant signal. A psychological instrument that cannot produce consistent results across a five-week interval is not measuring a stable psychological construct. At best, it is capturing mood, social context, or the cognitive framing induced by the test’s own wording. The instrument’s binary scoring further compounds this problem. An individual who scores 51% toward Introversion and one who scores 89% are assigned identical labels, this erases the very variance that personality science is designed to capture.

In practice, continuous distributions are forced into binary containers, and the containers are then treated as natural categories, and that is factually incorrect. The literature on personality structures, from the Eysenck’s three-factor model through the development of the Big Five, consistently demonstrates that personality traits are dimensionally distributed in the population, with most individuals clustering near the center of each dimension rather than at the poles (McCrae & Costa, 1989). The MBTI’s forced dichotomies are better described as design artifacts, as they’re misaligned with human psychology.

Beyond the empirical failures, there are theoretical blind spots as well. Gordon Allport’s foundational critique of categorized approaches is precisely applicable here. Alport argued that personality is idiographic in nature, meaning each person presents a unique configuration of traits organized according to an individual motivational hierarchy, and is shaped continuously by experience, learning and developmental history. In Allport’s framework, the same observable behavioral tendency is not the same psychological phenomenon across individuals because personality traits require their meaning within the individual’s motivational and experiential context. This is not a minor implication about a qualification. Because an individual who consistently avoids social gatherings and an individual who consistently avoids social gatherings are not, psychologically, the same entity simply because their surface behavior overlaps. There are plenty of explanations, all with different dynamics, cause & affect, and implications, for the same phenomenon.

• Avoidance conditioning following repeated social failure

• Reinforcement of solitary productive behavior

• Anxiety regulation learned early in a chaotic environment

• Deliberate social selectivity developed across years of professional experience

The list is endless. However, The MBTI assigns all four the same label of Introversion, and treats this assignment as explanatory. This is not a insightful or even a helpful framing, because it explains nothing, it redescribes a behavioral surface and calls the redescription a type.

The discipline of behavioral psychology holds a critique the MBTI community has never adequately answered.

The principle is elementary in nature: behavioral outcome (x) emerging as a response to contingency (a) is not the same phenomenon as behavioral outcome (x) emerging as a response to contingency (b), even when x is observationally identical in both cases. The developmental and mechanistic pathway is not separable from the psychological meaning of the behavior.

For instance, A child who develops caution around authority figures because caution was modeled and rewarded by parents presents a fundamentally different psychological profile from a child who developed the same caution through punitive conditioning, even if the adult behavioral pattern appears indistinguishable to an outside observer, and even if both adults receive the same MBTI type classification. Ignoring conditioning history and reinforcement contingencies produces an unclear picture of personality. The MBTI systematically removes the most explanatory layer of personality assessment; the developmental mechanism, and then presents the observations as taxonomy.

The concept of functional autonomy further undermines the MBTI’s logic. Allport introduced functional autonomy to describe the way in which motives, once established through learning, can become detached from their original reinforcement conditions and operate as self-sustaining systems. A trait that began as an instrumental adaptation to a specific environmental demand can persist and generalize long after the original demand has disappeared, driven now by its own internal dynamics rather than by external contingency. This means that the same personality characteristic can, across time and individuals, be functionally autonomous in one person and still environmentally contingent in another; stable in one and shifting in another, despite being classified identically by a typological system. The MBTI has no mechanism for detecting this distinction. Its items probe self-reported preference, not motivational structure or developmental origin. Preferences, as behavioral scientists understand the term, are not equivalent to personality structure. A preference is a stated tendency under current conditions. Personality structure is the organized system of traits, motives, and regulatory dispositions that generates behavior across conditions and across time. Conflating the two produces the impression of measurement where there is, in fact, only self-description.

The validity record supports this conclusion. Controlled studies examining whether MBTI type predicts academically or occupationally relevant outcomes have repeatedly failed to produce convincing results. A comprehensive review by Boyle (1995) found the MBTI deficient in both construct validity and predictive validity relative to established instruments. The Big Five personality inventory, by contrast, shows robust predictive validity for job performance, academic achievement, relationship outcomes, and clinical risk, precisely because it measures continuous dimensions grounded in factor-analytic research rather than in typological intuition. The MBTI was not developed through the systematic study of personality structure. It was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, neither of whom held formal training in psychometrics or personality psychology. Its persistence in organizational and popular contexts is not a function of its scientific performance; it is a function of its commercial infrastructure and its appeal to the human desire for self-categorization with a flattering vocabulary.

What the MBTI ultimately instantiates is a form of soft psychological determinism. It implicitly claims that personality type is a stable, bounded entity that explains behavior across situations and time. This runs directly against the person-situation debate that occupied personality psychology for decades, and against the nuanced resolution that emerged from it: that personality traits predict behavior statistically across aggregated situations, with considerable within-person variability across specific contexts. The sixteen-type model not only misrepresents the structure of personality; it provides users with a framework for resisting evidence of their own complexity. The damage is not abstract. When personnel decisions, relationship frameworks, or therapeutic orientations are organized around MBTI classifications, they are organized around a fiction with good marketing.

None of this is even remotely controversial within academic personality psychology, where the MBTI has long been regarded with skepticism bordering on dismissal. The controversy exists only in the space between what research shows and what popular culture has decided to believe, it’s a space the MBTI has occupied with great commercial comfort for decades. That a deeply flawed instrument has become a conversational shorthand for personality itself is, at minimum, a problem worth naming clearly.

References

1. Allport, G. W. (1937). Personality: A psychological interpretation. Holt.

2. Allport, G. W. (1961). Pattern and growth in personality. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

3. Boyle, G. J. (1995). Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): Some psychometric limitations. Australian Psychologist, 30(1), 71–74.

4. McCarley, N. G., & Carskadon, T. K. (1983). Test-retest reliabilities of scales and subscales of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and of criteria for clinical interpretive hypotheses involving them. Research in Psychological Type, 6, 24–36.

5. McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1989). Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality. Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17–40.

6. Pittenger, D. J. (1993). Measuring the MBTI and coming up short. Journal of Career Planning and Employment, 54(1), 48–52.

It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged, that a man in possession of deep feeling must occasionally find himself in want of tears, though societal stigmas have long conspired to deny him the liberty of them. The modern vocabulary of sentiment, with haste and care alike, attempts to resolve the question of men and their tears. One insists upon the restoration of tears as a moral right, the other upon their restraint as moral duty. I have little patience for either faction, for I remain unconvinced of both.

Begin with the liberation narrative, because it is the younger argument and therefore the less examined. It is okay to cry is a sentence I distrust not because it is false, crying is an entirely appropriate response to intense emotional states, but because of what it does to the man who receives it as a revelation, given the argument’s alignment with the label of science and therefore reliability. The sentence in itself is structurally inadequate and arduous in nature. Unreasonably axiomatic would be closer to the truth but it would be a little tangential. It answers the question of permission while leaving entirely unaddressed the question of discernment, of when? at what cost? in service of what? toward what end? Permission without discernment does not liberate a man, contrary to what the ones trying to suffice for their deficience want us to believe. It simply reissues a new identity. The man who once suppressed feeling to sustain an image of imperviousness simply gets handed, in many progressive quarters, a new image to sustain, that of the emotionally available man. And because identity is opportunistic, it occupies whatever vacancy permission opens. Consequently, what began as a totally plausible attempt to invite authenticity and potentially foster a healthier worldview about a totally natural response to emotion, turns into a new performance as a structural inevitability. Furthermore, the man applauding himself for his openness, is structurally, in precisely the same position as the man who once congratulated himself for his perceived composure.

In the proposed framework, emotional dysregulation can easily be conflated for depth, vulnerability, or a more common sensical inference of aliveness. The man entirely at feeling’s mercy, whose emotions dictate him is not supposedly better than the man who suppresses his emotions, for that would be a misguided objection that fails to effectively solve the causation. Authenticity without discipline, introspection, and regulation, is merely a relocation of the same thinking that led us here in the first place. Emotional irresponsibility is no better than emotional suppression. Emotionally volatile individuals need just as much improvement as the emotionally suppressive ones, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

The other pole fares no better, only by leveraging different means, for it’s equally inadequate. The case for suppression has always rested upon a confusion between composure and burial, and has spent sufficient centuries mistaking one for the other that the confusion has calcified into virtue. Composure is the ideal of the man who has actually processed what might have undone him, and therefore meets the world with a steadiness that belongs to him. Burial is the precise counterfeit, the embodiment of the man who has not processed anything, has simply refused to, and calls the refusal discipline. The redirected attention, the feelings aligned neatly just to function, the priorities that leave no room for connection; these traits pass in many men as responsibility, but they are often irrational, and duty invoked as numbness is one of the more dishonest transactions the mind makes with itself, because it claims the moral authority of duty while allocating a fair sum to avoidance. That is also what makes the traditionalist claims so difficult to critique, for the man need not improve if he is constantly validated.

The philosophical incoherence both positions share beyond their structural deficiencies is that neither is actually about the man. The suppression argument wants a particular shape of the man that is beneficial to the lives of others. The liberation argument wants a different shape, but pursues it with identical urgency. Both are ideological projects conducted on a person. The man’s unrepeatable relationship to his own emotional life is precisely what neither conversation finds useful. Both have decided, in advance, what the “correct” answer looks like, and given the man an ideal to strive for.

With my utmost dissatisfaction with both the poles expressed, what does the answer actually look like? Exactly what both the poles fail to produce: emotional regulation. The phrase has been sufficiently mishandled by popular psychology to need reclaiming. Regulation is not the reduction of feeling, that would be farthest from the truth, for that would be suppression, and this is where we shall turn to science rather than mouths talking over each other. Regulation is the capacity to remain oneself while feeling. The regulated man does not experience, or to say; feel, an lesser, he is simply content enough with himself that he is not overwhelmed by his experiences, for he does not strive for a deficient idol. Strive to be the man who does not need suppression to process, and does not need display to process.

This stability cannot be adopted as the standard, because the moment it starts being perceived as the truth, it is no longer stability. It turns to the performance of stability, merely another standard to fit in to be masculine in other eyes. Which is a different and considerably less useful thing.

What’s the point? One may ask, what do I account to if I critique both the options within my reach. My answer would be none. The integrated position of autonomy is not a middle point, that couldn’t be any farther from the truth, for it’s a different axis entirely. A man who truly has authority over his emotional life does not achieve it by suppressing his feelings, nor by being ruled by them. He achieves it by understanding them clearly and honestly, so that when he responds, the response is genuinely his own, and he need not a cover for accountability. Such a man may sometimes cry, because he is aware enough to face it without avoidance or distortion.

“Never let them see you cry.”

This notion is popular in competitive and even corporate cultures. It treats vulnerability as a tactical disadvantage but that’s tangential to the discourse. Throughout my research, I’ve noticed, the ones congratulating themselves upon their lack of expression are louder than the ones embracing it. A rather strange brag, in my opinion, but real nonetheless. To tackle the common notions, I searched for analogies that resonate both excellence and expression. The first and the most popular encapsulation I came across were Jesus, followed by a long list of men that are ideal in their cultures. But atheists have a hard-time resonating with religious figures. And so, I re-routed my search to history

By the close of the twelfth century, Marshal had built a career that embarrassed all those who came after this. He served four kings, spent two years fighting at the crusades, and built a reputation so formidable that his contemporaries had, by common and unprompted consensus, assigned him the first position among knights, as conclusion rather than mere courtesy. When Stephen Langton proclaimed him, formally and before assembled company, the greatest knight who had ever lived, Marshal wept. Not with the restrained dignity of a man who has prepared himself for tribute. He wept with the completeness of a man who had not.

The detail most instructive here is not the weeping itself but what it was continuous with. Marshal had not spent his life in emotional display. He had spent it in extraordinary discipline, in service that demanded the consistent subordination of private feeling to external obligation. The tears did not contradict that life, they were his honest conclusion, the tears represented the significance of a lifetime of unrewarded service being, at its very end, rewarded. The greatest knight in history “cried like a newborn,” as quoted in the l’Histoire de Guilaume le Maréchal. The discipline and the tears were equally substantial. They were the same man. This is what integration actually looks like from the outside. It is not the managed release of feeling on a schedule that suits an ideology. It is the convergence of a life genuinely lived and a feeling genuinely arrived at, a meeting without theatre. That is the only standard I find worth keeping.

The greatest knight of his age wept when his life was, at last, named in full.
The caution against such moments now comes, more often than not, from men whose own measure of having lived is a fancy car they were able to afford.

For most of human history, the question of whether art was good was answered slowly, by discourse and disagreements over long periods of time. The disagreement itself was part of the process, the friction between a work and its resistant readers was what separated the durable from the merely admired. Nothing about this was clean or reliable; canons form badly, by exclusion and accident as much as by genuine discernment. But the inefficiency wasn’t purely ornamental. It meant that a work had to keep meaning something to people who had no stake in its success, that popularity and longevity were different measurements taken at different intervals. This is what kept the works alive, the ones we know today with the inference of “classics”. What the current moment has collapsed is that interval. A work is assessed in the first hours of its release, by the only instrument now sensitive enough to register mass response in real time, and that instrument was not built to measure what lasts, and to a greater threshold; what resonates.

Popularity has been a reliable measurement of agreement. When millions of people respond to the same work in roughly the same way, the accessibility is somewhat confirmed, its willingness to meet people where they are, to traffic in the familiar shapes of feeling rather than the unfamiliar ones, is validated without the need for an objective anchor. Despite how one may choose to interpret art, this framing is far from irrelevant. It tells us what a culture recognizes, what it finds comforting, what emotional motive it moves through most easily. However, it does not tell you whether the work will matter in twenty years, or whether it contains anything that resists being consumed in a single sitting and forgotten.

The confusion arises from democracy and the market simultaneously, for we have inherited the assumption that preference aggregates into judgment. If enough people say a thing is good, we take this as evidence that it is. But taste is not quantitative, and this is precisely where the algorithms fail. The question of whether a painting is significant is not answered by counting how many people bought prints of it. Quality in art has always been, in part, a function of what the work demands, of how much it requires the audience to bring, how much it withholds, how much remains after the first encounter has been metabolized. Popularity tends to minimize these demands as a structural necessity, or in more in a more relevant framing; as a mandate. The wider the intended audience, the more a work must sand away the individuality

Consider what individuality actually is in art: it is the presence of a sensibility that has not yet been normalized. Difficulty is not always evidence of depth, but the inverse is almost always true: work that has been designed to cause no difficulty has almost certainly eliminated something essential. The friction between a serious work and its audience is where meaning lives. Remove the friction, and what remains is the sensation of meaning, the emotional coloring without the substance.

Platforms that present themselves as havens for serious writing are no exception, and being ignorant of such conduct would be the dishonesty I do not stand for. They have, I must say, simply reshaped and covered it in a more appealing fabric. Substack’s recommendation system surfaces writing that generates rapid subscriber conversion and high open rates; what it functionally penalizes is work that leaves something unresolved, that asks the reader to sit with ambiguity rather than arrive at a shareable conclusion. A piece that opens a question and refuses to close it will underperform a piece that confirms what the reader already suspects, not because the audience is incapable of the former, but because the metric cannot distinguish between a work that provoked thought and one that simply failed to deliver. Interpretive space, the quality that separates an essay from an argument, a poem from a caption, reads, to the algorithm, as underperformance. So it gets buried, and what rises is writing that has learned to conclude with the satisfying firmness the system rewards.

This is the achievement of popular art at its most accomplished, and we don’t give it enough credit for the transition, for it produces the feeling of profundity without requiring any of the elements that made art resonate with the human race. A certain kind of film will swell the score at exactly the right moment, cut to a close-up of tears, and the audience will feel an emotional provocation. They will infer the film as effective, for it triggered a fairly appropriate response. But I would wager, the feeling was not earned by the work so much as triggered by it. Does aesthetic guarantee depth? If so, we might as well start considering the Instagram accounts that are purely driven to cultivate the aesthetic of the reader than the content and what reading actually stands for.

Dissatisfied with modern art, I may be, but dispossessed of heart, I shall never be. The ever widening gap between aesthetic central to art, and aesthetic as an integrated element for the art; dare I say, is the manipulation so practiced it has become invisible, and invisibility is what we call craft when we’re being kind and what we call cynicism when we’re being honest.

None of this is to say that popular art cannot be good, or that good art cannot become popular. Shakespeare was popular. So was Beethoven, eventually. Toni Morrison sold millions of copies. But in each of these cases, popularity followed or accompanied endless struggles, the work was not engineered for mass approval but arrived at it by other means, often posthumously, often after the culture caught up to what the artist had already understood. There is a difference between art that becomes beloved because it expanded what an audience could receive, and art that becomes beloved because it confirmed what the audience already believed about beauty, sadness, love, and justice. One leaves you altered, the other leaves you validated. And only one serves a utility beyond the aesthetic criterion we like to congratulate ourselves with.

Validation is what crowds are organized around. To be in a crowd responding to art is to have your response reflected and amplified by the people around you. This is intoxicating but not entirely dishonest, communal experience has its own reality, which is not devoid of meaning. But it is worth asking whether the work could survive outside that context, stripped of the shared energy of the stadium or the algorithm-curated playlist or the opening weekend. Much of what we call popular art is inseparable from the social conditions of its consumption. Alone, at a strange hour, with no one else to confirm your response, does the work hold?

Good art tends to hold. But how dare I classify art as “good” or “bad”? For It holds because it contains something that exceeds what you brought to it. It exposed you to a perspective you could not have known you needed to find. This is what Rilke meant when he wrote, of an archaic torso of Apollo, that you must change your life: the instruction arrives from the work, not from you, and it is not comfortable. Comfort is the enemy of this kind of encounter, for familiarity is efficient and mostly useless as a teacher. And popular art, whatever else it achieves, is almost always comfortable, or where uncomfortable, carefully controlled in its discomfort, it offers the catharsis that releases rather than the disturbance that lingers.

Our modern tastes are largely indifferent to my criticism. The most popular pieces of music are rarely, nowadays, crafted for cultivation. They are, rather, focused on the quickest hook and whether or not it would perform on the platforms that have turned music to an endless loop of consumption, to raise a generation that’s exposed to optimized content as the only mainstream adaptation of art. Art has slowly shifted from cultivation to exposure.

The painting given above, The Wedding Feast At Cana by Paolo Veronese, is a roommate to the endlessly photographed Mona Lisa, and yet; it remains lesser known.

I’m far from a communist, but capitalism has trained us to conflate attention with value, because that’s the only direct correlation between the non-tangible equity of art and the quantitative inferences. This is a confusion that serves the market well, for it renders attention quantifiable. A book can be ubiquitous before it has been read. Because the system ensures the art and the artist remain conflated in the public perception. The noise around a work is far from neutral in the modern day and age, it shapes how the work is received, what questions get asked of it, whether it is encountered as an event or as an object. Good art, encountered as an event, often reads as overwhelming. Encountered as an object, it can be assessed on its own terms. Popular art is almost always an event, it requires the noise to sustain it, and the noise is part of what gets mistaken for quality. Needless to say, this is precisely why the modern exegesis of art is more about marketing than the craft.

The harder admission is that we are not reliable readers of our own responses. The feeling of a certain emotion evoked by exposure isn’t insignificant, but it does not distinguish between what moved us and what triggered us. Most of us have cried at films we know are manipulative and sat unmoved through films we know are great. Our emotional responses are far from a clean index of value, a record of our histories would perhaps he closer to the truth, they are testaments to our formations, our most accessible wounds. Art that knows where those wounds are and presses on them with precision will always feel powerful. With the help of a subtle analogy, we could frame a question of whether it found those wounds by honestly exploring something, or whether it mapped them the way a market researcher maps a demographic.

What separates the two is not that one is sincere and the other cynical, plenty of calculated work is inspired and backed by expression and plenty of sincere work is made without considerable thought. The more precise distinction is between work that was altered by its own making and work that arrived at completion without having been surprised. A painting that changed what the painter understood about what he was painting carries that change inside it as a structural irregularity no permutation or algorithm can imitate, it’s a mark where the form bent under pressure that wasn’t aesthetic, and yet it served the viewer an aesthetic experience, for it leaves room for interpretation. The work beats the mark of creation and the mark of individuality, without that, it’s nothing more than content that just so happens to possess all for formal properties of art.

And yet, for all this, I refuse to be optimized.
Not everything that matters can be surfaced, nor persuaded into immediacy.
And if my voice must fail, let it fail unaltered.

I have been for some time now in excellent company, and have consequently had the occasion to make an observation. The most injurious sentiments in polite society are invariably those which arrive draped in the finest linen. In the delicacy of social intercourse, for all its intrinsic formations, there is a conduct so refined effortlessly refined in its execution and so elusive to accountability, that it may pass as nothing more than exemplary civility to the untrained eye. Yet, upon closer and contemplative inspection, one can notice the restrain running the show is hostility masked as politeness.

Presumably, it is the most gentle form of dissent for those who are either unwilling or unable to engage in open confrontation. For what is directness, if not a vulgar exposure of sentiment? In all of its perceived and supposedly infinite wisdom, society has long discouraged the explicit declaration of displeasure, especially among those who pride themselves on refinement. And so, individuals of a certain disposition find themselves compelled to communicate dissatisfaction through implication rather than assertion, through suggestion rather than statement.

I speak of passive aggressive civility, the modern inferences prefer to call it “toxic positivity”, a rather descriptive label, I must say. It’s an art practiced with such intricate dedication, that the people inclining towards it would sooner expire than confess an unkind thought. What compels my notice is the theological dimension of the enterprise. At some necessarily fundamental stratum of conviction, the passive aggressive practitioner has resolved that hostility is a venial sin but its expression a mortal one. Feeling itself is permitted; articulation is the transgression it ceases to be. Accordingly, the raw censure passes through an alchemical internal refinement that transmutes opprobrium into compliment, contumely into concern, and emerges at the lips in a form so thoroughly anodyne that the speaker may, in genuine self-exculpation, deny that any ill was intended.

Less spoken of, in the polished society, is the ingenuity of the practitioner; the individual whose every utterance is, by the strictest grammatical account; inoffensive, yet whose cumulative effect upon the recipient is one of thorough excoriation. One cannot arraign them. One cannot produce the offending sentence before any tribunal of common sense and demonstrate its malice, for malice is precisely what the sentence has been constructed to expunge; or rather, to conceal beneath a lacquer of solicitous expression so even and so lustrous that scratching at it appears the act of a querulous, ungrateful mind.

“You cannot become a peacemaker without communication. Silence is a passive aggressive grenade thrown by insecure people that want war, but they don’t want the accountability of starting it.”

―Shannon L. Alder

The position of the recipient is itself instructive. To take umbrage is to appear captious, litigious in one’s sensibilities, constitutionally inclined toward grievance. To parry in kind is to descend into the same murk, to become a fellow practitioner, and that is the catastrophe most insidious thresholds of sincerity fail to account for. To absorb the remark without retaliation is to tacitly ratify the transaction, to signal to the aggressor that the channel remains open and well-maintained. None of these options are evidently helpful. The person who traffics in veiled reproach has constructed a situation in which every available response is, from the respondent’s position; injurious.

Yet, I cannot help but question the true merit of such conduct. For all its refinement, it accomplishes little in the way of resolution. The grievance remains unaddressed, merely translated into a form more palatable to public sensibility. The recipient, if perceptive, may detect the underlying sentiment, but is afforded no legitimate means of response, for to acknowledge the hostility would be to violate the same codes of civility that necessitated its concealment. Thus, both parties are confined within a performance of unawareness, each aware, yet neither willing to admit.

I have sometimes thought the habit originates in a profound cowardice of an unwillingness to be known as one actually is, to be found accountable for one’s intentions. There is safety in the ambiguous sentence, for the two-edged compliment is armored. The passive aggressive person is not a villain, I think, that would be a misguided objection. They are a coward in exorbitant clothing. For the oblique reproach commits one to nothing. It can be retracted, reinterpreted, and declared a misapprehension of a perfectly benevolent expression, followed by an empty apology.

Directness, transparency, plain unvarnished sentences, assertions unadorned by ulterior implication; these are the qualities I mean to cultivate. For years, with all sincerity, I have intended to excise the reproach from my own conduct, and for years, I shall.

Despite our reflections, the immaculate inconclusiveness subverts
And so, we depart unoffended in appearance
The exchange concludes without incident
Which is to say without truth, and therefore without end

Comfort is one of the languages, by which the common sensical inference of love, prefers to communicate . It comes unannounced, and undetected, it damps into the walls of what we call a bond. We have an abundance of ubiquitous names for this formation. We call it devotion, admiration, closeness; in a more modern sense, or the age old art of obsession.

Abstruse is the nature of attachment, and arduous it’s critiques. At its inception, attachment does not resemble a disease, long has it been idealized and demonized, for all its degrees. Attachment is unreservedly formed from feelings which we cannot invalidate as unsubstantial, from tenderness, from need, and the human awareness of impermanence.

To be barren of attachment is poverty, for it’s a freedom so unencumbered it has nothing to carry and nowhere to belong. The problem does not reside in anchoring and anchored souls. Love is as old as time, and as natural as breathing. The causation first appears when presence slowly turns to necessity, and then to dependency.

The counterfeits are impeccable in numbers. But at its most meticulous construal, dependency is attachment that has stopped being a choice. When one remains not because they have weighed the circumstances and found it worthy, but because leaving would cost more than staying; then they have been spared the luxury of making a decision, because one has been made for them. The distinction holds more significance than we usually permit, because we spend a great deal of our emotional life convincing ourselves that staying is a virtue, when often it is simply the consequence of having no viable exit. We dress captivity in the language of loyalty, and call it depth.

The analogy of two people walking through the woods is kind to our needs. One extends their only weapon as a proof of trust. The gesture is as moving as all the gestures of emotional vulnerability are. But the woods contain more than the person beside you. They contain weather, and chance, and bears that arrive without introduction. To surrender that instrument of protection would be an abdication of one’s own continuity, offered up as evidence of love, when love had required nothing of the sort. The confusion between surrender and devotion is far from pristine, and persistent and almost universally flattering to whichever party receives the gun. The submission of one’s esteem is not love, for it has no utility.

The most democratic form of dependence is far from desperation. For all the forms soaked with the glamour of obsession, external validation bleeds the least, yet cries the loudest. It’s a dependence entrenched so deeply in nature; in connection, in co-regulation, in society, that to name it vaporous, would be exitial. It is native to the existence of perception, to the condition of living among souls who have opinions and the capacity to voice them.

Calm is no antithesis to feeling, it is the capacity to feel without being entirely at feeling’s mercy. Dare not say suppression, for such precious feelings, lost forever? The peculiar dependence on emotional stimulus, of begging, of crying, of obsessive re-reading, emulated aliveness. It produces sensation at a volume one can at least locate. The equanimity can be perceived as numbness to the untrained sensibility. This is the oldest confusion in the literature of interior lives, that intensity is evidence of meaning. It is not, for it is merely the evidence of instability, in the person feeling it, or in the situation it is being directed toward, or in both simultaneously.

An unstable boat is a commitment to drowning at an undisclosed moment, it is too often mistaken for a mere inconvenience. One may board it with full knowledge, and there is something almost admirable about the acceptance of that risk. But one should not mistake the boarding for a guarantee of safe passage, or confuse the duration of one’s presence aboard with proof that the vessel has become seaworthy. Boats that have always listed do not stop listing because they are loved. People who have always been volatile do not become stable because they are depended upon. The placement of an adequate dependence at a deficient uncertainty, does not fortify the foundation. It simply ensures that when it gives way, more will be lost in the falling.

The open door is not indifferent to insecurity or the fear of abandonment. To keep the door open, to remain because the remaining is freely chosen, to allow departure without engineering its impossibility, is in fact, the only form of presence with dignity. Because a person who stays when leaving is possible is making a choice. And a choice, renewed each day in the face of alternatives, is the only thing in human experience that varitably represents commitment.

Long have I contested the connoted exegesis of love. But I must admit; arriving at zero dependence is implausible. For it is the condition of being porous enough to love anything at all. Discernment is a more beneficial home than elimination.

Which dependencies have I built because they are nourishing and freely arrived at? And which have I constructed because the alternative, the terrifying openness of a door that swings both ways, was simply too vast to look at directly? The answer to that question is rarely comfortable. It rarely needs to be.

What stays past that door, that alone; I call love.
For man is porous enough to love. But not whole enough to remain.

I stood too tall to see the ground give way,

And called it strength when I refused to bend;

What felt like truth was only my own say,

A closed-loop thought that would not let me mend.

Pride needs no proof, for it writes its own decree,

And falls the moment doubt is set free.

It builds a throne, but calls a void it’s peace

For pride is a sin, and loneliness; it’s kin

For this evening, I have been thinking upon the nature of pride, and I find it being a subject most men only congratulate themselves upon their lack of it. I suspect, this is pride’s most reliable adaptation to the illusionary identities we have formed to masquerade humility.

Throughout the years of advancement, I have been sceptical about the reliability of theological analogies. I’ve found the reason and balance of the power dynamics, in those narratives, rather diminutive and erroneous. There is some bad, and some good; both reason each other, have reasoned each other for most of human history, with the same lenses they tend to deconstruct. Despite all its deficience, the fall of Lucifer relates deeply to the way pride inevitably falls. He was dispossessed of greed, lust was inadequate to conquer him. But he fell to the ambitious virtue, we now know as pride.

The sin is not the simple love of one self, as common preachers would have it. That is a prodigiously convenient re-framing of the virtue. The ego is more resourceful than one may like to admit. Because more often than most, we prefer an identity devoid of ego, as if redirecting the river stops it from flowing. Humility in the modern interpretations and embodiments, is often conflated with self-belittlement. Hollowing oneself out, refusing to acknowledge one’s capabilities, is the same sin elevated enough to resemble greatness from a distance.

The most troubling abstraction of pride is not the mere distortion of the man’s relation to himself. For that is a far more common occurrence, and to isolate it to be pride would be far from the truth, despite all the convenience it may wager. To be genuinely known by another soul requires the willingness to be seen in one’s incompleteness, in one’s contradictions, in one’s reversals, and one’s unglamorous failures. Pride curates his presentation with the fastidiousness of an archivist, by admitting only those portions of himself which sustain the desired impression. We may call it self-sufficiency, or perhaps discernment. In truth, they’re simply trying to balance pride and the exorbitant human desire to not feel alone. One may choose to take pride in responsibility, but without the insightful cushioning; they’re merely alone.

A more easier interpretation of pride, and arguably the most reliable, is the fragility of its extremity. The proudest men are the thinnest. Pride stakes the entire interior edifice upon a fixed and inviolable self-image, and consequently, the smallest criticism, the mildest implication of inadequacy in any room one might have not traversed, is as a catastrophe. And wounded pride does not bleed quietly. It retaliates, or it retreats, and in either motion it confirms what it most fears.

To a greater threshold, I have come to suspect pride and shame are bodies sharing the same blood but different faces. They are the same affliction regarding itself from opposing mirrors. Beneath the cultivated manner and the studied indifference and the towering certainty, there is a very early and private conclusion of one’s insufficiency.

I write this in the knowledge that the examination itself may be another form of the disease, that even now, pride watches from the corner of this very page, pleased to be the subject of so careful a study. Because pride refuses to dissolve from recognition. There is, perhaps, no clean shore from which to observe the flood one is standing in. For pride takes rise from the same corpse we mistake for moral adequacy.

For pride is a sin, and the sinner, I have always been.

The human social constructs have consistently ensured all the natural causations remain surrounded, with peculiar interpretations, for which they wager some truth, but they fail to sustain all the relevant variables, and respecting the continuity, sex isn’t spared the scrutiny.

Sex is an essential component of human existence, dare I say, it’s a form of art, one that is rather polarized across societies. We flinch at a mainstream representation, yet one of our categories takes pride in its liberated freedom. Beyond the function, we attribute pleasure to sex for the experience, nature is more intricate, sex is followed by oxytocin, dopamine, and a cascade of neurochemical releases. These are all incentive structures for sexual reproduction. The nature of life, for an axiomatic reason, needed organisms to pursue reproduction, and so; incentivization of sex ensured species survival for mammals. For which, humans are no exception.

The religions tend to heavily regulate sex, almost like an authoritarian government, often by restricting it to marriage, indifferent to the typical motives of a collective identity, with no regard to the psychological realities of the individuals involved. One could argue that stable sexual norms are helpful for stable families, clear lineage, and predictable social structures, but the external imposition does not deliver an unambiguous net-positive. By treating sex as something that must be contained or delayed, these frameworks often suppress the very real psychological and emotional dimensions of sexual experience. It does, very often, result in repression, guilt, an unhealthy relationship with the natural desire which was never pathological to begin with.

On the other hand, modern culture moves in the exact opposite direction, especially in its more “sex-positive” forms. It frames sex simply as expression and consequence free, it even glorifies the idea through the feeds. Again, this position isn’t devoid of truth. Removing unnecessary shame & repression from something inherently natural, and allowing autonomy, is undeniably beneficial. But this practice repeats the same problem it aims to resolve, it misidentifies the biological attributes of sex, and treats it as disposable. It downplays the biological and psychological significance of sex. It reduces sex to an intercourse, to an exercise, to be precise.

The cultural reframing isn’t devoid of tangents either, it comes with hedonism in the prioritization of pleasure, materialism in the subtle commodification of desire, politics in the language of autonomy and identity, and even escapism in the use of perceived intimacy as a distraction from dissatisfaction elsewhere. All of these exploit the incentive structure that prevents us from going extinct; of sexual reproduction.

As paradoxical as both the ideological standpoints sound, none of the poles fail to misidentify the variable and form a volatile equation, and needless to say; to be inadequate at a rational, reasonable, and sustainable life.

Sex only appears conflicting because we conflate two things that are structurally, and experientially, distinct, intercourse and intimacy, and then wonder why the outcome unsettles us.

Intercourse, devoid of emotional continuity, compatibility, and even basic self awareness, inevitably turns to just another regulation mechanism, and indifferent to all the regulatory neural loops, it creates dependencies.

It’s extremely easy and convenient for a dysregulated nervous system to develop a dependence on sex, the same way it’ll latch on to the first regulatory exercise it gains access to, be it consumption of sugar, reliance on screens, or anything that interrupts distress. This is a predictable neurobiological outcome, and we do not talk about it with anywhere near the seriousness it deserves.

Sexual intimacy involves a relevant emotional dynamic and a potential reproductive acknowledgement. And the difference between intimacy and intercourse is where the conflict lies. Perhaps, we don’t talk about it enough. Intimacy compounds and connects one to themselves, and to their partner. A hedonistic intercourse, on the other hand, depletes both the mind and the body.

Intimacy has got nothing to do with the label attached. I asked a Catholic scholar once, to give me a list of things I can do married and cannot do unmarried, that exist outside of morality, as that’s yet another social construct when we consider faith to be the deterrent of morality. The list never came, because it doesn’t exist. Marriage, at best, is a public agreement & acknowledgement of companionship and commitment. The concept of marriage in association to various traditions is rather deserving of scrutiny, for it fails to reason itself beyond the self-claimed and axiomatic moral grounds it stands on, but dissecting that further would be immaterial to the central theme of this discourse.

In conclusion, sex has an undeniable biological & psychological function and significance, treating it as any lesser or anything more only births destabilizations the human society isn’t prepared to dissolve. Embracing lust doesn’t mean letting it take over, regulating lust doesn’t mean suppressing it. For that sort of thinking is what led us here in the first place.

Marriage has never looked the same twice across any sufficient stretch of centuries, which ought to disturb us more than it does, because if the institution were simply the natural expression of a truth about human love, one would expect it to have arrived at a more stable form by now, the way mathematics arrives at proofs or water arrives at its level. Instead, what we find when we look at the record is an astonishing restlessness of shape: polygyny in one millennium and strict monogamy in the next; arranged unions brokered between families who understood marriage as an alliance of property and bloodline; companionate marriage arising slowly in the wake of Enlightenment ideas about individual sentiment; same-sex unions criminalized, then pathologized, then gradually and unevenly permitted, the institution remaking itself continuously, absorbing the pressures of each age while presenting to each age the face of permanence and natural order, as though it had always been exactly this, as though the centuries had only been clarifying something that was always clear.

That restlessness is the first thing worth attending to, and not merely as historical curiosity, but as evidence about what the institution has actually been in service of, which has rarely been love and nearly always been something more anxious than love: the consolidation of property, the legitimation of children for purposes of inheritance, the organization of labor along gendered lines, the management of female sexuality in a world where paternity could be claimed but never, until very recently, verified. These are the bones of the institution. They were laid down long before romance entered the architecture, and they were never fully removed, even as the walls around them were repainted in the warmer colors of companionship and mutual affection. To say this is not to say that no tenderness has ever lived inside marriage, or that the people who have built their lives within its framework have been somehow deceived, tenderness has always lived inside it, which is precisely the complication. The question is whether the tenderness belongs to the institution or preceded it, whether love required the frame to exist or simply found the frame available when it looked for somewhere to settle.

Emerson wrote that institutions are the lengthened shadows of great men, by which he meant that every structure we inherit was once a response to a particular human pressure, and that the structure outlasts both the pressure and the people who built it. Marriage fits perfectly into this framework, the lengthened shadow of necessity, extended so far from its origins that the shadow no longer resembles the thing that cast it, and we have long since forgotten what cast it, forgotten with the particular thoroughness of people who have decided that forgetting is more comfortable than remembering, that the institution’s current form is its essential form, that what marriage is now is what marriage was always becoming. The forgetting is itself a kind of argument, and an argument is always more reassuring when it masquerades as evidence.

For most of human history, marriage was not a relationship between two people who had chosen each other, it was a property arrangement in which a woman moved from the legal custodianship of her father to the legal custodianship of her husband, her consent a formality so recently installed in law that living grandmothers could remember the world before it. She did not merely take his name; she ceased, in most legal systems in most places, to have an independent legal existence at all, could not own property in her own right, could not enter contracts, could not retain her own earnings, could not claim her own body against what the law called conjugal rights, a phrase whose syntactic gentleness is itself a form of violence, dressing compulsion in the vocabulary of reciprocity. Beauvoir saw this clearly and said it without softening: woman has been defined historically in terms of her relationship to man, and marriage was the primary mechanism through which that definition was enforced and reproduced, the institution through which women were kept legible to a world that required their dependency in order to function economically, socially, and symbolically.

This is not ancient history that we have safely outgrown. The coverture laws that extinguished a woman’s legal personhood upon marriage persisted in England until the Married Women’s Property Acts of the late nineteenth century, within two lifetimes of this sentence, and their residue, in custody arrangements, in economic dependency made possible by wage structures that assumed a male breadwinner, in the cultural expectation that a woman’s ambitions be organized around her husband’s trajectory, did not dissolve with the legislation but persisted in quieter social forms, the way any long-standing arrangement persists even after its formal justification has been revoked, because the arrangement has by then become the furniture of ordinary life and ordinary life does not notice its furniture. And alongside this long dispossession, ran a parallel history of exclusion that was more nakedly contemptuous, because it did not even bother with the language of protection: the love that the institution refused to recognize at all, the love it could not metabolize, whose existence it denied across centuries with a confidence available only to institutions that have confused their own preferences with the structure of reality.

What the institution said to those it excluded was not merely that it would decline to ratify their love, it was that their love was not love, that it did not count, that it occupied no legitimate space in the human world and that the people in whom it lived were, by virtue of its living in them, a kind of error in the social fabric. This is worth staying with longer than is comfortable. It is worth asking what it means that an institution built, as tradition insists, to honor and consecrate love made this pronouncement so confidently, for so long, about so many people whose experience of love was, by every account that actually matters, by the account of the people inside it, as total and as transforming as anything the institution claimed to consecrate. An institution that can be so wrong about what love is, and where it lives, and who is capable of it, has lost the authority to define love’s terms.

Which brings the inquiry to the question that sits at its center and is harder to answer than it first appears: what, precisely, does marriage confer that did not already exist before the ceremony?

The legal answer is relatively clear, though it varies by jurisdiction and has changed across eras, rights of inheritance, arrangements around taxation, hospital visitation in medical crisis, the shared legal claim on property accumulated during the union. These are genuinely significant, worth wanting, and the struggle to extend them to people long excluded from the institution was a struggle worth pursuing. But legal rights are separable from the institution in principle, even when they have historically been bundled with it in practice, and most liberal democracies have spent the last century in the slow work of unbundling them, extending various protections to various configurations of partnership without requiring any ceremony. Then, the legal are accidental to marriage in the philosophical sense, they attach to the institution, but they are not intrinsic to it, and the fact of their attachment does not tell us what marriage is for at the level of meaning.

The religious answer, that marriage is a sacrament, a covenant made before God, that the ceremony does something metaphysically rather than merely legally, that it invokes a presence beyond the social and binds the couple to something larger than themselves, carries genuine weight for those within the traditions that hold it, and this essay has no quarrel with the sincerity of that conviction. The sacred dimension of marriage is real for many people who have been married inside it. But an institution that now extends across secular law, civil ceremony, and dozens of non-Christian traditions worldwide cannot be adequately understood in the exclusive terms of any one theological framework, and the argument from sacrament is, in any case, a closed argument: it is available only to those who already accept its premises, and its premises cannot be established without faith, which is itself unavailable to argument. The sacred and the civic have shared a house for centuries without ever quite becoming the same family.

What remains, once the legal and the sacred have been acknowledged, is something harder to name precisely because it operates at the level of social meaning rather than legal or metaphysical fact: the ratification, the legibility, the act of translating a private bond into a public category that a community can recognize, organize itself around, plan for. Marriage makes love visible to others in a particular way, a codified way, a named way, a way that comes with a known set of social scripts and mutual obligations attached. It says to the community: these two people are a unit, and the unit has a name, and the name activates certain social recognitions. This is what the ceremony actually accomplishes, at its most elemental, it does not create the love, and no one in attendance truly believes it does; it announces the love to the world in a form the world knows how to receive.

And here the question turns on itself. Because if what marriage actually confers is legibility, if it is, at its core, a translation service between the private and the social, then it is performing a function that the love itself, by definition, does not require, because love is already intelligible to the people inside it, with a precision that no social category can improve on. Two people who have found each other, who have moved through the world together with full recognition of what they are to each other, who have built a life that is genuinely shared in the daily sense of shared, be it shared attention, shared worry, or shared laughter at things that would mean nothing to anyone else, they have the thing. The ceremony is the announcement of the thing, addressed not to each other but to the world around them, and the world is a third party whose recognition matters enormously to the institution and is, from the perspective of the love itself, neither here nor there.

This is the distinction the institution has always struggled to maintain, and struggled to maintain it because maintaining it cleanly would undercut the institution’s own claim to authority, the love and the marriage have always been two different things occupying the same space, the way a river and its banks are two different things, the river doing the actual work of being a river while the banks define the shape the world will see. The ceremony is the banks. The love is the river. And rivers do not require their banks in order to be water moving toward the sea; the banks only determine the form in which the world receives the water’s arrival.

Baldwin, writing about love in a very different context but with the precision that attends his best prose, observed that love was not merely a feeling but a moral achievement, a form of attention so sustained and so honest that it transformed both the one who gave it and the one who received it, that to love someone was to see them clearly enough to be accountable to what you saw. He was right, and what he was right about suggests something about the chronology of love relative to the institutions built to house it. Love of this description, love as achievement, as sustained attention, as mutual transformation, does not await institutional ratification to begin its work. It begins when it begins. It has its own chronology, entirely indifferent to the calendar of planning and ceremony, and the people inside it almost always know this, which is why they so often describe the ceremony itself as strangely anticlimactic, as something that felt less like arrival than like announcement, less like creation than like confirmation of what they had already, privately, thoroughly established.

The mystics understood this intuitively, because the mystics were always more interested in the experience of union than in its social administration. The Sufi tradition’s mapping of longing onto the relationship between the soul and the divine, Rumi’s poetry of love that burns through every form it touches and leaves behind it only the thing itself, none of this requires a ceremony, and all of it describes a completeness that precedes and exceeds any official recognition that might follow. The mystic’s union is already complete before the world knows it has happened. The world, in this tradition, is perpetually catching up. What the mystics describe about spiritual union and what two people who have genuinely found each other know about human love are not the same thing, but they share a structure: the thing arrives whole and sufficient in itself, and the forms through which the world apprehends it come after, approximate, necessarily inadequate to the original, because the original is intimate in a way that social forms, by their nature, simply cannot be.

The traditional defense of marriage, that it provides stability, that it creates a recognized structure for the raising of children, that the commitment it demands is morally formative rather than merely legally convenient, is a defense with content, and the essay would be dishonest to wave it away. Commitment does hold moral significance. The decision to build a life with another person and to declare that decision publicly is not a trivial act; the declaration carries an unambiguous and authentic identity of accountability that pure privacy does not, because to have spoken it before others is to have created witnesses, and witnesses change a person’s relationship to their own word. There is something in this that tradition has understood correctly, and understanding it correctly is different from understanding it completely.

Where tradition’s argument strains is in its conflation of two things it would rather not separate: the moral weight of commitment and the institutional form through which that commitment is expressed. The commitment is what has moral weight. The institution is one container for the commitment, the dominant historical container, weighted with centuries of social infrastructure, but a container nonetheless, and the container does not manufacture the moral weight of what it holds; it inherits that weight from the thing itself. People who have spent decades together without ceremony have honored their word to each other with as much fidelity as any couple who stood before witnesses and a register. The institution does not own the moral force of love’s promises. It has borrowed that force from the promises themselves, and the borrowing has accumulated, across centuries, into a cultural authority that now presents itself as origin when it is, in fact, always subsequent.

The question tradition cannot answer without deflection is why the commitment requires the institution’s ratification to be fully real, why the private decision, the private declaration, the private architecture of years built in fidelity and care, should be somehow incomplete without the ceremony. The answers that arrive tend to be theological, sociological, or pragmatic, God requires it, the community requires it, children require the stability of a recognized unit, and all of them answer a question about what marriage does for others while staying silent on what it does for the two people at its center that those two people could not have done without it. The silence is informative.

There is a kind of thinking that proceeds by accumulating evidence against a conclusion it has already reached, one the modern language likes to call motivated reasoning, and this essay has tried to resist that shape, tried to follow the argument where it actually leads rather than where it was sent. Where it actually leads is somewhere unconventional, than argument usually goes, somewhere that feels less like a verdict and more like an acknowledgment.

Two people who have found each other, in the way that occasionally happens between people and that those people recognize without being able to explain why recognition feels like return, as though they are arriving at something they were always already approaching, those two people arrive at each other through a process the institution did not inaugurate and cannot own. Whatever they recognize in each other, whatever they call by the name of love or home or necessity or the one word that belongs only to them and has no public equivalent, that recognition is complete before anyone else enters the room. It was complete before the invitation was written, before the date was chosen, before any of the apparatus of social legibility was assembled around what had already assembled itself. It was complete, if they are honest about it, in some ordinary and undramatic moment that neither of them can afterward reconstruct with precision, but that both of them know was the moment, the way you know the exact place where the water changes color as you walk into the sea, even though you cannot mark it on any map.

What the ceremony gives them is a story the world can follow, a date they can name, a form that allows their community to organize its understanding of them and its response to them. These things have value, shared dates and public stories and communities that know how to respond are the connective tissue of social life, and to dismiss them entirely would be a different error than the one this essay has been tracking. The ceremony is not nothing. But it is not the origin, and it does not bestow what it appears to bestow, because what it appears to bestow was already there, already known, already built in the small daily architecture of two people’s full attention to each other, in the way one of them remembers how the other takes their tea, in the way they have developed, without discussing it, a shared language for their own private world, in the accumulated weight of all the ordinary moments that are unremarkable to everyone else and, to them, are the whole of it.

The love that precedes the institution does not require the institution’s permission to exist or its ratification to be complete. It requires nothing from any century’s accumulated authority, no tradition’s blessing, no community’s witness, no signature at the bottom of any document. It exists in the way that certain things exist which have no need of external validation because they contain their own evidence, the way a true sentence is already true before anyone reads it, the way water at a certain altitude will always find its level regardless of what the surrounding landscape prefers, the way two people who have arrived at each other fully and without remainder already constitute, between themselves, everything the ceremony will later announce.

The ceremony, at its most honest, has always known this. The best ceremonies have always known it, there is a moment in them, familiar to anyone who has attended or stood in one, when the formal language and the borrowed dignity of the occasion fall briefly away and something more naked comes through, something that has no place in the official script: the recognition, shared between the two people at the center, that what is being witnessed already happened, that what is being promised was already kept in some earlier form, that what is being declared was already true in a less performative version of itself, in a room with no witnesses, on an afternoon when nothing was signed and nothing needed to be, when the only thing that passed between them was the ordinary, unrepeatable recognition that this is the person, and this is the life, and everything else, the ceremony, the tradition, the institution, the centuries of accumulated human effort to make love legible to a world that has never been quite certain it could trust what it could not name, everything else is the world, taking its time to catch up.