In the first essay in this series, I argued that gender functions as a kind of cognitive shortcut that sacrifices accuracy for efficiency. I showed that the qualities assigned to each sex have shifted over time—sometimes flipping entirely. The lesson was simple: what we take to be natural expressions of male and female nature often turn out to be contingent arrangements.

Yet an inevitable objection follows. Perhaps gender feels unstable today because modern life has distorted it. Maybe the system made more sense in the past—before modern institutions, before feminism, before liberal gender ideology.

This is the intuition behind some of today’s tradlife nostalgia. The story goes something like this: in more harmonious times, men worked outside the home, women stayed inside it, and together with their children they formed the basic unit that, according to a Daily Wire piece, is the “very foundation of human civilization itself.” And today’s inversion of that model, where women not only work but even helm institutions, “poses a threat to civilization” according to Helen Andrews.

This essay examines these assumptions. When we look closely at how households actually functioned before industrialization, the familiar story begins to unravel.

A brief note on scope. This essay focuses primarily on Europe, especially England, and later the United States. That is partly practical, given my own language constraint. But this focus also fits the argument. The tradlife nostalgia circulating today overwhelmingly draws on images of Western history, particularly the 19th and 20th centuries.

Before we dig in: If you like what you read, please take a second to show it! Click like, comment, restack it (with a note!)—that breaks through the algorithm and helps people find my writing.

Subscribe now

Before industrialization: fluid families, household enterprises

The concept that a man ventures forth outside the home and a woman stays within would have been unrecognizable to preindustrial Europeans. For them, all life and work centered in the house (or haus, maison, casa, or huis), which meant not just the building but the social and economic enterprise within it. The household included its head — usually male, but could be a widow — and any spouse, children, servants, apprentices, and laborers.

In English, the word family came later in the 14th century and roughly meant the same as household. In the 1600s, when a diarist wrote about “the first that marryed out of my family” he was talking not about his son or daughter but a female servant.1

The household was the center of everything; this was true from the poorest cottager up to the king or queen. The household of Henry VIII at times expanded to 1,200 people. These weren’t just domestic servants and courtesans; they included an army of clerks, stewards, scribes, and specialists. When you were monarch, your household was the administrative state.

A family’s enterprise determined its composition. Households on large farms needed laborers; crafting households included apprentices. In the household of an eighteenth-century shopkeeper, “at least eleven different individuals […] came and went in the course of eleven years.” Each was acknowledged as a member of his “‘family,’ including his wife, child, siblings, nephews, mother-in-law, and several non-related persons.”2

Today’s concept of the commute didn’t exist. Generally, you slept in the same place you worked. In Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, the merchant’s counting-house — where records and cash were kept — sat above his bedroom, so that upon waking he went “up” to work.

In short, as scholar Jeremy Goldberg has written, “gender was not an especially significant factor in the organization and use of space” in medieval England.3

Children did not always live in the households of their parents. “Binding out” meant placing a child — boy or girl — into service with another household. Children as young as 7 were bound out, and they stayed with their new family until they came of age. This could be voluntary on the parents’ part or forced: under Poor Laws, local officials had the power to take children from poor households and contract them out. Apprenticeships worked similarly except they were limited to boys, and generally the boy’s family was well-resourced. The purpose was to attain valuable skills.

At the moment, I’m re-reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I lingered over the telling of Rafe Sadler’s apprenticeship, which began around 1515 in both fact and fiction. “Somewhere in his maze of obligations and duties,” Mantel writes, Thomas Cromwell “met Henry Sadler, and agreed to take his son into his household.”

He arranged to collect Rafe on his way back from business in his part of the country, but he picked a bad day for it: mud and drenching rain, clouds chasing in from the coast. […]

Mistress Sadler glanced fearfully outside, and down at her child: from whom she must now part, trusting him, at the age of seven, to the weather and the roads.

As Rafe reaches adolescence, Mantel depicts his relationship with his apprentice master as something between a son and an employee in a family business. And that’s exactly what these households were: family businesses. In historical fact, Rafe Sadler remained loyal to his master long after Thomas Cromwell’s political fall and execution, defending Cromwell’s legacy just as he took the Holbein portrait into protective custody, preserving it from destruction.

As we’ve seen, family composition was malleable as children, servants, apprentices, and extended kin came and went. Although gender roles existed — partly determined according to practical considerations: driving plough teams, felling timber, and shearing sheep demanded the strongest hands on offer to keep pace and avoid injury — how strictly they were kept varied.

On farms, women pitched in during labor-intensive periods, helping to ensure both figuratively and literally that the family would “make hay while the sun shines.” The work cared not for who was around to perform it, but simply that it got done.

More officially, a woman’s role was to produce; she turned raw materials into consumable goods. The late medieval Book of Husbandry (1523) described women’s responsibility for marketing butter, cheese, poultry, ale, and other produced goods, as well as taking grain to the mill. Peasant gardens were tended by women, who peddled their surplus produce in baskets carried through villages and town centers.4

But don’t mistake me; women’s work counted as physical labor, too. Brewing, harvesting grain, laundering heavy linens, tending livestock, and hauling fuel were all punishing tasks — and all of it was women’s work. By the way, brewing presents one of those stark gender flips I wrote about in my first essay. It used to be almost entirely women’s work, part of the larger pattern where men produced the raw material and women refined it into consumable goods. Now, brewing is heavily associated with male culture.5

Just as women shared in economic production, men shared in domestic work. In many households the father instructed children in reading, arithmetic, and catechism. Apprentices — almost always boys — swept floors, scrubbed pots, hauled chamber waste, rocked infants, and slept in the same crowded rooms as the family whose trade they were learning.

When a husband died, his wife often took over as head of the family business. This was particularly true of crafting households. Guilds generally excluded women but made exceptions for widows, who could inherit and operate their husbands’ shops. Women-headed households were normal in the Middle Ages, not aberrational. Again we see that gender roles were contingent rather than absolute: the kind of work you did depended on who else was around. It’s not that women were strictly excluded from commercial activity, it’s that priority went to men. Medievalist Eileen Power said in the early 20th century that women enjoyed a “rough-and-ready” equality with men, and though some scholars say this overstates it, I take “ready” to mean this: when an authority gap opened, women were eager to fill it.6

But these were not egalitarian times. Yes, women had a degree of agency and autonomy, but it was bounded by a cliff’s edge. In the 14th century women monopolized brewing because it was seen as low status; as commercial brewing developed (a precursor to industrialization), it became higher status and thus the domain of men. In 16th century Essex parish records, widows who lived alone and engaged in small-scale commercial activity were disproportionately accused of witchcraft. In Germany, women who controlled small property or earned income from midwifery and healing — practices outside male control — were especially vulnerable. As too were widows embroiled in inheritance disputes with male relatives. Conveniently, if a widow were convicted of witchcraft, she was disqualified from inheriting.

In the centuries preceding the formal beginning of industrialization, and as centralized production sprang in pockets of industry, laws were already starting to change in a way that reduced women’s property and political rights and narrowed their scope to domestic affairs.

Industrialization pushes the sexes into “separate spheres”

Then: industrialization. When production moved from disparate household enterprises to centralized factories, taking off in large scale around the 1790s, collaboration among householders gave way to individual wage competition. Jobs were finite, and employment was zero-sum. The personal cost to you of a neighbor obtaining one of those factory jobs couldn’t be ignored. Society shifted from a community mindset to a more individualistic one.

Family members no longer offset their costs by contributing to the household’s enterprise. When in-home production vanished in lieu of outside wage-earning, additional dependents became net drains on resources. So, households shrank. By 1850, the average white woman in the US had about five children, half as much as her great-grandmother.7

As the household’s centrality evaporated, the term family shifted to how we use it today: a unit of parents and their dependent children. Stripped of economic and productive significance, the family became sentimentalized. This is when the conceptually distinct spheres of public commercial activity on the one hand, and private domesticity on the other, took hold.

Industrialization did more than reorganize labor; it reorganized imagination. The industrious, commercially-active women of preindustrial times became the delicate middle-class flowers of Victorianism, too feeble in body and intellect to participate in the roughness of the market.

In The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, a seminal text from 1919 and one of the earliest academic treatises written by a woman, Alice Clark investigated the shift in women’s roles. Writing of her own “modern” day, domestic work now fell entirely on mothers, who “remain in a state of dependence and subordination — an order of things which would have greatly astonished our ancestors.”

Subscribe now

Initially, women were not discouraged from participating in the new manufacturing economy. Early industry in the United States and England relied heavily on female labor. The first textile mill owners hired entire families to work in factories together.8 But formerly independent farmers did not adapt well as a group to factory discipline. Pivoting, mill owners targeted the unmarried daughters of New England farmers for recruitment, whose household labor was no longer as vital given technological improvements and shrinking household operations.

As competition intensified, mill owners cut wages and worsened conditions, provoking strikes. One such strike was spurred by a factory owner’s decision to cut wages by fifteen percent. A worker who tried to organize a protest was fired, which incited the very protest the owner had sought to suppress. As reported by the Boston Transcript, nearly 800 female workers

marched about the town, to the amusement of a mob of idlers and boys, and we are sorry to add, not altogether to the credit of Yankee girls.

The strike failed, as did others, such as one demanding (only) a 10-hour workday.9

Thinking of these overworked women marching for fair and equal treatment as onlookers jeered, my insides twist. How can you hope to battle political power when you can’t even vote?

For their part, mill owners defended the low wages because women did not have dependents to support. But the premise wasn’t true. Women had children, husbands, parents, and siblings who needed support. Instead, the mill owners were making a normative argument. Women shouldn’t be supporting families, and so we won’t pay them enough to do so. Because of this wage discrimination, women couldn’t support dependents — which was then used to argue that women were incapable of providing.

As women became ever more overworked and underpaid, those who could leave the workforce, did. They left in droves, providing more fuel for the “separate sphere” ideology. It’s important to remember that these women weren’t leaving jobs that were neutrally available to either gender on the basis of merit. They were leaving inhumane, low-paid jobs specifically structured for women.

But women never fully left the paid workforce, especially immigrants and unmarried mothers. Factory owners benefited from paying these women one-third to one-half of the prevailing male wage. This created a trap where women were hired on the cheap, and then socially stigmatized for working such demeaning jobs.10 Working for wages ultimately became an emblem of low status for women.

A man’s ability to keep his wife at home became a signal of his own success and contributed to his sense of self-worth. The corollary is that a working wife threatened these things.

It wasn’t just the factory owners and their well-heeled allies who closed rank against women workers. Male workers and their trade unions saw them as competition. Unions excluded women and demanded in labor negotiations that women be banned from factories. They championed the concept of a “family wage,” a wage high enough for a man to support a non-working wife and children. Despite its name, the family wage was available only to men who supported families, not women — more aptly, they were organizing for a “men’s wage.” Direct gender conflict had existed in preindustrial times, but in more episodic settings: inheritance disputes, marital laws. Now, the pitting of men against women was a pervasive condition of the new wage economy.

Reinforcing these battles playing out on factory floors, a new gender ideology defined women through the virtues of social cooperation and submission: gentleness, sensitivity, altruism, empathy, and tenderness. These purposefully contrasted with the new masculine virtues that were steeped in competition: ambition, authority, power, vigor, and calculation.

During the industrial era, in 1865, John Ruskin wrote sentimentally about man’s “rough work” in the “open world” and woman’s gentle place “within his house,” where she was protected from “the anxieties of the outer life.”

In the same vein, The Angel in the House is a 19th-century narrative poem by Coventry Patmore that fictionalizes his wife as the “ideal” woman and offers rich evidence of the new Victorian paradigm. A woman’s role was to be subservient to her husband, to soothe him and boost him so that he could better compete in the wage-earning world outside: “Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure…” The wife existed to absorb, uncomplainingly, her husband’s stress.

I look over at our dog, curled up like a donut. I’m not as regular with her walks as I should be. And when at last I take her, she doesn’t complain. Bygones are bygones; she is simply delighted about the walk ahead. The wife in The Angel in the House is expected to show a similar disposition:

While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes.

Some object to our modern term “emotional labor,” but this is something very much like it in verse form. The wife is meant to absorb the psychological damage produced by the competitive male public sphere.

On wings of love uplifted free,
And by her gentleness made great,
I’ll teach how noble man should be
To match with such a lovely mate.

Here is classic Victorian feminine morality. The woman’s virtue elevates the man. She doesn’t act in the public sphere; she inspires the man who does. As for her life’s goal, her “wish” is “to be desired” — nothing more.

Reflecting later on how society’s expectations interfered with her writing, Virginia Woolf lectured about her own Angel in the House, an internalized version of Patmore’s:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. … She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. … In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel.11

Woolf, born in 1882, grew up when Patmore’s Angel was the culturally dominant model of femininity. Her parents were among the first generations fully formed under this Victorian public-private divide, and they followed its strictures to a T. But for Woolf, the inner Angel of her upbringing chafed: “It was she who […] so tormented me that at last I killed her.” Woolf’s generation was the first to revolt publicly against that model, even as many middle- and upper-class women continued to embrace it.

Pause for a moment to consider the order in which this all happened. It wasn’t that the identification of women with genteel domesticity came first, and because of that, only scattered and demeaning work was offered. Instead:

• The shift from household production to wage-earning spurred individual competition.

• Men saw women as direct economic competitors, prompting them to demand women’s labor exclusion and wage suppression — which factory owners supported.

• As women’s working conditions worsened, they fled the workplace if they could, hardening the nascent “separate spheres” and making paid work a sign of low female status.

• For married women who worked, that low status reflected back on husbands, who competed even more fiercely for jobs that paid enough to support non-working wives.

Competition and dog-eat-dog status contests largely made society what it was then, and what it continues to be today.

When you see how the dominoes fell, you also see that it didn’t have to be that way. None of these outcomes resulted because women are intrinsically incompetent, too delicate to work hard, or more “naturally” suited to sweeping and caring for children. Women had worked competently and vigorously for centuries — on farms, in workshops, in taverns, managing household logistics and organizing servants’ workstreams — where they balanced competing demands, thought both strategically and pragmatically, and made constant calculations on what to prioritize and how to problem-solve.

From the time industrialization took root, it only needed a short doubling back into the past, a brief retracing of steps, to reenter a time when everywhere men were found, women were too, working alongside them.

The 20th-century womanly identity: creative homemaker, moral exemplar

The shift away from women’s traditional role as economic co-producers gave rise to a new ideology, one that recast women’s shrunken domestic role as an expression of their nature. By the mid 19th century, middle-class women were cast as the “moral guardians of civilization,” even though, as revealed in my last essay, traditionally women were believed to have worse morals than men.

Pundits cited women’s “delicate sensibilities,” lack of physical stamina, and even “small brain[s]” to argue they were unfit for the public sphere.12 This reached its peak in the 1950s, when women were heavily pressured to find “complete pervading contentment” in motherhood and “creative homemaking.”13 Women who could not adjust to these domestic roles, or who sought independence or abortions, were pathologized as “unnatural,” “neurotic, perverted, or schizophrenic,” and some were even subjected to institutionalization or electric shock treatments.14

In practice, this new womanly ideal was reserved for white, native-born, middle-class women. For every middle-class woman protected within her “separate sphere,” there was an Irish or German girl scrubbing another woman’s floors, a black woman doing another family’s laundry, and Italian or Jewish daughters working in sweatshops to sew another family’s clothes. These women were not thought to be too delicate to work outside the home; apparently, class and race were higher-order categories that stamped out natural feminine delicacy. What’s inarguable is that these women’s suppressed wages and poor working conditions facilitated the higher quality of life that other families enjoyed, and that many look back on today as a lost paradise.

In the first half of the 20th century, there were periods when native-born and middle-class white women returned in large numbers to the paid workforce.

During the Depression, more married women sought employment as their husbands were laid off. And as it had during the early days of factory work, the scarcity of jobs meant that women’s labor participation was again met with concerted, institutional pushback. In the 1930s, federal laws and business policies discouraged the hiring of married women and mandated that they be first fired in cutbacks. Twenty-six states passed laws prohibiting their employment.

And then the resulting state of affairs was seen as evidence of women’s inherent inferiority. Women cannot support families, so they must be inferior. Women can only work menial and low-paying jobs, so they must be inferior. If women are so inferior, then why are laws and other structural oppositions against women’s work needed in the first place? Surely their inferiority would — on its own — ensure they received only low wages and were relegated only to menial work. Right?

But rhetoric and policy outcomes were different when jobs weren’t scarce. During World War II, women returned to the workforce in droves, and for the first time, they weren’t confined to undesirable jobs. Governments enacted policies that actually supported women in the workforce. For instance, the U.S. federal government also financed daycare centers for working mothers. At their height, these centers supported 1.5 million children. This experience of working in high-impact, desirable roles “gave thousands of women who had already been working their first experience of occupational mobility and the rewards of challenging, well-paid work.”15

But when the men came back, women were cut loose. They were laid off or reassigned to less desirable jobs, despite polls showing that the majority wanted to continue working.

Here’s what gets lost in today’s tradlife nostalgia: the day-to-day reality beneath the 1950s ideal. There was discontent.

In Blue-Collar Marriage published in 1964, most housewives polled believed that women had it harder than men in marriage, with responses including: “She is more tied down”; “She is practically in jail.”16 One-third of the housewives of blue-collar workers who participated in research expressed a “strong desire” to work, “often simply ‘to get out of the house,’” though earning their own wages was also seen as a strategy to have more say in household decisions.

To cope with feeling “trapped” and miserable, many women turned to substance abuse. The consumption of tranquilizers (known as “mother’s little helper” pills) soared by hundreds of thousands of pounds in the late 1950s to treat “housewife’s syndrome,” and observers noted a sharp increase in women’s drinking.17

As we’ve seen, the denial of fair wages and the availability of only undesirable jobs resulted in middle-class women fleeing paid work for the home. But this “separate sphere” wasn’t a sustainable solution, either. Women’s profound isolation and reduction of necessary household tasks pushed them back into the workforce in massive numbers — a shift that was well under way before the feminist movement reemerged. By the end of the 1950s, and before the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, 40 percent of women over sixteen held jobs, and increasingly, their stated motivation was “self-esteem and personal fulfillment as well as for economic needs.”18

As these women sought self-determination and financial independence by earning their own money, they crashed into gender discrimination at every turn, including wage discrimination, sex-segregated jobs, and husbands who refused to share domestic labor. The feminist resurgence of the 1960s arose from women’s frustration with this inequality. It was not the original cause of women leaving their separate sphere.

Today’s tradlife nostalgia is the stuff of historical fiction

When you see people claim that the traditional place for women is at home, you can point out that this was the traditional place for everyone. For a thousand years or more, no one worked outside the home. The home is where you worked.

I am not saying that gender divisions didn’t exist; of course they did. But any belief that women are innately internal and domestic, and men are external and economic, rests on a misreading of history. As Alice Clark wrote in 1919, industrialism’s public-private, commercial-domestic gender divide is an “order of things which would have greatly astonished our ancestors.”

The nuclear family with its male breadwinner and female homemaker is not the foundation of civilization, no matter what the Daily Wire says. It was a societal adaptation to changing macroeconomic conditions and to the institutional structures that resulted.

If laws had prevented the power imbalances that left capitalists earning astronomical returns while everyday workers were paid pittances; if women had the right to vote such that their concerns about working conditions held political sway; if workplaces had been forced to accommodate childcare demands placed more squarely on both parents and not only on mothers… then industrial society, and our postindustrial world today, would look very different.

Ultimately, the 1950s nuclear family model “contained the seeds of its own destruction,” as historian Stephanie Coontz has put it. It was an inherently unstable arrangement that self-imploded because its success depended on female subordination, the exploitation of minorities, and the suppression of individual women’s true natures. “Natural,” it is not.

History’s greatest utility is to reveal that things we take as inevitable were anything but. Everything depends; everything hinges on something else.

This marks the close of my second essay in this series. But what if we go further back in time? Then surely we’ll get closer to how humans are naturally supposed to be, right? Before the pillars of the modern world cast their long shadows. Such notions of human nature — as inferred from pre-agricultural societies — is what I’ll be tackling in my next essay.

I brace myself when I see a Substack post on motherhood. Most end up arguing a personal view on how women should be. Because to talk about mothers, after all, means talking about gender.

Through my kids, I know what it is to have your heart go walking around outside your body. Even still, I don’t recognize myself in these posts. I never wanted to breastfeed. Too much touch feels overwhelming. I didn’t want a year of maternity leave; returning to work felt restorative. I’m not naturally suited to the daily work of childcare. I’m a lawyer, and my job is far easier than our nanny’s — at least to me.

But this essay isn’t about my personal perspective or contemporary debates. Instead, it steps back to ask a more basic historical and philosophical question: what work the category of gender has been asked to do, and why public discussions among women, about women, so often feel unsatisfying and incomplete.

The authors of these posts are incredibly different from each other; women are a varied bunch. By treating them as a singular group, they — and we — are making a category error.

The idea that being a woman means that, at some essential level, we feel, think, desire, and burn out in the same ways and in contrast with men collapses under the lightest scrutiny — just check reactions in the comments. Yet it remains the unspoken premise of our contemporary discourse.

Before we dig in: If you like what you read, please take a second to show it! Click like, comment, restack it (with a note!)—that breaks through the algorithm and helps people find my writing.

Subscribe now

Organizing ourselves by gender is an ancient practice. Indeed, gender has not just survived over millennia, but flourished as our go-to model for explaining human behavior, despite forceful efforts by thinkers like Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir to dislodge it.

By gender, I mean the social category a person is placed in based on perceived biological sex. It is sex-based in origin but social in operation: a classification system that assigns expectations, roles, and meanings, expanding far beyond the reproductive imperatives of biological sex.

Once an individual is placed into such a system — and we all are — a reaction happens. The classification may fit well enough, producing a sense of ease or coherence. Or it may chafe, like wearing ill-fitting shoes. It is here, at the point of collision between person and category, that questions of identity arise. We may embrace the category we are assigned, resist it, reinterpret it, or orient ourselves toward another altogether.

Gender, in this sense, floats over sex like a balloon: tethered, but loosely.

Mapping opposite qualities onto man and woman goes back eons: Adam and Eve; yin and yang; mother earth and father sky. Their durability has lent gender distinctions an aura of inevitability and profundity, encouraging the sense that human nature is fundamentally gendered.

But this isn’t just a matter of cultural inheritance. Our attraction to such models reflects something deeper about how the human mind works.

As humans, we’re drawn to models that put people into categories: the simpler, the better.

We love compression models. Human cognition is optimized for speed and efficiency, not accuracy. Rather than evaluate each situation or person on the full set of available facts, we rely on cognitive shortcuts: rules of thumb that allow us to assess quickly and move on.

These shortcuts are all around us. Astrology, which is enjoying a resurgence, offers a colorful example. Faced with a difficult decision — take the job, start the business — you could carefully weigh every last variable. Or you could consult your horoscope.

Religion works similarly, supplying a preloaded decision tree. You obey your parents not because they are right in every instance, but because a commandment establishes the hierarchy. You oppose gay marriage not because you’ve examined the issue afresh, but because a religious authority instructed you to. There is deep comfort in outsourcing judgment, especially to models that promise clarity by dividing a complicated and fractious world into right and wrong, good and bad.

Other compression models operate without our knowing it. Decades of research on implicit bias show that we are primed to explain human behavior through categories like race. The actual causes of our decisions frequently remain opaque to us; the brain supplies post-hoc justifications that create the illusion of deliberate choice.

This has been the consistent finding of split-brain research, in which a command to do something (like laugh, or draw a banana) is given to just one side of the brain. The person complies, laughing or drawing a banana, and the brain’s other side is asked why they did it. Rather than answer “I don’t know” it creates an entirely fictitious reason for doing what the person did, believing it to be true: I laughed because you guys are so funny! Rather than admit we lack access to the reasons for our behavior, our brain convinces us we’re fully aware and in control.

We also cling to compression models long after their flaws are apparent. Across disciplines, this truth emerges. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously demonstrated that humans are not rational actors, but systematic users of biased heuristics. Cognitive neuroscience arrived at a parallel conclusion. Karl Friston and Andy Clark have shown that the brain functions as a prediction engine, seeking to minimize surprise by developing early, coarse-grained models that harden in place.

Most relevant to this essay is work in developmental psychology on essentialism bias. Susan A. Gelman has shown that humans instinctively treat certain categories as reflecting deep, underlying essences, and that we do not treat all categories equally. When explaining a person’s behavior, we privilege categories like gender and race over innumerable alternatives: profession, education, birth cohort, or personal history.

Jean-Paul Sartre once described a woman who claimed her dislike of Jewish people stemmed from a bad experience with Jewish furriers. Why was the lesson to distrust Jews, Sartre asked, rather than furriers? Gelman’s research helps explain why certain categories serve as explanatory magnets.

It also helps explain why Sartre — and the rest of us — often default to gender when referring to an unnamed individual. Rather than profession, nationality, age, or simply the neutral label “person,” we most readily identify people by gender. That’s the descriptor we consider most illuminating. In Sartre’s anecdote, it was specifically a “woman” who distrusted Jews.

Developmental research shows that this tendency arises early. As The Social Brain: A Developmental Perspective puts it:

A number of laboratories have found that for the category of gender, essentialism emerges early and in robust fashion across a range of societies, whereas for other categories, including race, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, or team membership, essentialism arises inconsistently, and often only at a later age if at all. It is notable that gender and race are treated differently from one another, given that both have visible correlates that children detect from an early age.

Essentialist stereotypes are easily acquired, the research indicates. But as Kahneman, Clark, and others have shown, once in place, they are dislodged only with great difficulty.

Leave a comment

It’s no surprise then, that gender, sitting at the top of our explanatory hierarchy, has accumulated more and more explanatory freight over time.

But you might be surprised by how, at various points in history, the strong gale of gender stereotyping has changed direction.

Take friendship. Aristotle believed that only men were capable of it. Women lacked the necessary rationality and individual agency to form friendships. This stereotype lived on through the Renaissance, when Michel de Montaigne wrote his famous essay “On Friendship.” Montaigne wanted his readers to know that none of the essay’s beautiful passages applied to women, because they were incapable of “this sacred bond.” It wasn’t until the 19th century that the stereotype began to reverse. Today, women are widely supposed to be better at friendship, based in turn on the stereotype that they are more socially and emotionally attuned (the reverse of what Aristotle and Montaigne believed). Men — heterosexual men, is the unstated qualifier — are thought to be relationally challenged and dependent on women (wives, girlfriends) for emotional connection. Aristotle and Montaigne would find our modern thinking incoherent.1

Or, take morality. Women used to be considered fundamentally immoral. Plato described earth as a moral proving ground for men and those who failed life’s morality test were punished by being sent back to earth as women. Women, under this view, were morally defective men. Today, women are more often cast as the moral spine of society — more ethical, more responsible, and more self-regulating than men.2

Relatedly: sexual urges. In Europe, the belief that women were more lustful and unfaithful than men persisted for centuries. Witchcraft manuals like Malleus Maleficarum claimed that women were more sexually driven: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” Society wrung its hands over the problem of women’s insatiable lust. Yet by the Victorian era, elite European societies increasingly believed the opposite. Women were accepted (and thus expected) to be naturally uninterested in sex. Men, by contrast, needed to “sow their wild oats.” Today, women are often considered more naturally monogamous, while men are excused as naturally wayward — a near inversion of the medieval view.

How about fashion? In early modern Europe — especially France — elite male fashion was far more elaborate than female fashion. That flipped in the late 18th and early 19th century in what historians call the “Great Male Renunciation,”3 after which ornament, color, and display were deemed to be frivolous and became coded as feminine, while sober apparel was coded masculine.

It’s thought today that wanting to wear a dress or skirt is an inherently feminine impulse, but there’s no logic to this. Pants are a recent convention. From the classical Greek and Roman perspective, pants were worn by tribal peoples (both men and women, particularly on horseback) and thus deemed barbaric. In western culture, pants as exclusively masculine attire didn’t harden until the late 18th and early 19th century.

It’s almost as though any human quality must be set up as a diametric and then divided by gender. If men are strong, then women must be weak. If women are nurturing, then men must be neglecting. If men are ambitious, then women must be unassuming. If men desire power, then women must desire subordination. The way the qualities are divided isn’t as important; the vital thing is that a divide is made.

Oddly, the two-party political system in the US works the same way. Once a cause is linked to a party, the anti-cause is linked to the other. This is such a well-grooved track that people worry that Republicans’ pro-natalism will produce anti-family positions on the left. We see how irrational this is, yet politicians and the politically-active fall in line. Habitual polarization is bad enough in politics; when used to define the nature and limits of individual lives, it’s destructive.

Anthropologists have documented this dynamic in other cultural contexts as well. In the 1930s, Gregory Bateson described how groups come to define themselves through opposition, amplifying differences that began as minor or contingent. Once contrast becomes identity, behavior follows. If a society organizes itself by gender, the performance of aggression by men may be countered with a performance of meekness by women — not because either is essential, but because each becomes defined against the other. Over time, the contrast hardens.

These examples offer a clear caution: don’t mistake society’s gender mappings for inherent truth. They are contingent constructions.

Once you begin to appreciate the inconstancy of gender conventions, this next assertion should not be surprising: There have always been people who did not conform to gendered expectations — and societies have always had to figure out what to do with them.

What’s interesting is how nonconformity has been handled at a structural level.

Three strategies recur: expanding the gender categories, moralizing deviation, and pathologizing difference. Together, they illuminate today’s gender wars, ranging from how families should be constituted and distribute labor, what forms of gender discrimination are acceptable, what kinds of relationships should be legally recognized, what we should tell our children about gender, and more.

Expanding the gender categories

A popular talking point is that there are only two genders, and that claims to the contrary represent a radical, hyper-modern break from tradition. That’s wrong. Across cultures and centuries, humans have repeatedly created additional gender categories for people who did not fit the man-woman binary.

In traditional Hawaiian and wider Polynesian societies, the māhū were people typically assigned male at birth who occupied a distinct social category associated with women’s roles, labor, and forms of social life. They were not simply treated as women, nor as men, but as something else — a recognized category with hybrid characteristics. What’s striking is how widespread this category was across Polynesian cultures.

Rather than arguing over whether a male-assigned person “really” counted as a man or a woman, these societies abandoned the strict binary itself. The binary remained useful, but it was not treated as exhaustive.

European observers who encountered the māhū in the late 18th century reacted with fascination and revulsion. A British naval officer writing of Tahiti noted:

They have a set of men called māhū. These men are in some respects like the eunuchs of India but they are not castrated. They never cohabit with women but live as they do. They pick their beards out and dress as women, dance and sing with them and are as effeminate in their voice. They are generally excellent hands at making and painting of cloth, making mats and every other woman’s employment.

Similar solutions appeared elsewhere: the hijras of South Asia, the Navajo nádleehi, and the Lakota winkte. In each case, societies explicitly made room for exceptions to the man-woman binary.

For these groups, the two-gender model functioned as a tool, not a dictate.

Moralizing deviation

Christian Europe took a different approach to gender nonconformity. Conformance with gender expectations was treated as a moral and religious matter. To enforce the moral and religious authority of Christian institutions, nonconformance would not be tolerated.

There were various tools for enforcing the two-gender binary and its dictates. Consider witchhunts. Witches were usually unmarried women who were economically independent, intellectually curious, and sexually irregular. They failed to conform with gender rules, and their failure to conform was the very evidence that condemned them.

Thus, unlike the cultures above, which defended the essential validity of gender categories by allowing them to bend and expand, European Christian societies demanded that people adhere to the man-woman model — or else.

Or so it appears. But look closer and you’ll see that Christian Europe also made room for exceptions. Not in terms of labeling, but by authorizing a non-conforming life path.

If a woman remained unmarried and childfree in medieval Europe, she was seen as socially suspect and morally unstable, a potential witch even… unless she married Christ. In that case, her childfree status became a sign of religious devotion.

Convents permitted women to be childfree without censure. They could also pursue education, create art, take leadership roles in their community, and engage in countless other activities that were discouraged or forbidden for secular women.

For men, religious orders offered an alternative to the masculine script of the era. Men were expected to marry, reproduce legitimately, defend land and honor through violence, and perform social obligation. For some men — especially elite younger sons — this included military service in Europe’s frequent wars. A man who had a nonviolent nature, did not desire marriage, or simply wanted a quiet life outside society, found refuge in a monastery.

Convent life was not paradise. But as paradoxically as this seems to us today, for many women and men, a convent afforded a measure of freedom and acceptance. They offered a gendered exit ramp.

This is not just a modern gloss on history; people actually made this calculus. Take Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Born illegitimate to an indigenous woman and a European soldier in Mexico, then the colony of New Spain, she possessed a Leonardo-like hunger to master the world through understanding.

She knew that to live how she wanted, she’d need to game the rules. As a child, she even proposed dressing as a boy to attend university. Her mother laughed. But she honed her strategy. She saw that to pursue a life of study and creativity — free from the interruptions of family obligation — she must become a nun.

Inés de la Cruz is an extraordinary case. As a nun, she wrote poetry and plays that her supporters published across the ocean in Spain to great acclaim. Like Sappho before her, she became known as the “Tenth Muse.” Most of us are not an Inés de la Cruz, but it would be wrong to conclude that she was wholly unique. Other nuns were reading, writing, composing, and painting but in most cases their pursuits — like they themselves — remained cloistered behind walls.

Of course, religious orders weren’t free-for-alls. Nuns and monks traded the secular gender conventions for a different set of conventions. But something was gained. Taking orders unlocked a realm beyond the prevailing dictates of man and woman. They offered socially acceptable channels for gender nonconformity: a kind of life-path exemption.

Pathologizing difference

Though western societies gradually broke free from the church’s authority, they were still conditioned by its dictates. The gender binary, on which every aspect of society had been built, was not to be discarded. For medical, legal, and social authorities, its validity was taken for granted. But lacking the church’s prerogatives of faith, they needed a new rationale to defend traditional gender categories.

A solution emerged: treat deviations as defects of the individual. Pathologize them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, females who did not desire motherhood were diagnosed as disordered. Males who desired men were classified as diseased. Female aggression was medicalized as hysteria.

Pathology replaced sin as the regulatory model, offering a secular mechanism for enforcing the same boundaries.

The new system works on multiple levels. First and most effectively, disease carries stigma. To avoid the shame of disease, you mask your “symptoms.” Men cross-dress in private. Women stifle anger under forced smiles. Before any explicit intervention, people fall in line through self-regulation.

Next, those who don’t suppress their difference are officially marginalized. Diagnoses are made, justifying all sorts of corrective measures: institutionalization, sterilization, forced therapies. The population is cut in two again: there’s the healthy, conforming majority, and the unhealthy, deviant margin.

Because no third category is permitted, ambiguity cannot be tolerated. The binary is enforced at our earliest moments, as when “intersex individuals are surgically transformed as infants to ‘fit’ into a single gender category.”

Though it claims to be based in science, the pathologizing strategy bypasses the threshold question of whether the binary model is valid. The engine is circular. If you don’t fit your conventional gender category, then by definition, you’re disordered. And if the people who don’t conform are all disordered, then conformance must be natural and right.

Under this third path, when exceptions to the binary model emerge, it’s not evidence that the model is flawed. It’s evidence that the individual is flawed. Though different in specifics from the moralizing path, it serves the same function: preserving the integrity of the two-gender model.

Share

My goal so far has been persuading you that gender nonconformity has long existed, and that’s because gender has long been used to compress human variation into overloaded social categories. Yet in today’s iteration of this ongoing tug-of-war, one aspect is unprecedented.

Society today is the collision of the three paths

Though methods for dealing with gender deviation have differed, past societies have more or less agreed within themselves on the method to use. Individual dissent must have been present, but there was broad agreement on the norms. This meant society didn’t get tripped up over questions of gender. It had a method for summarily dealing with them.

That’s not true of society today. In the present-day US, all three strategies co-exist, and they collide in law, society, and politics.

Debates over whether someone born as a “woman” can truly be a “man,” whether homosexual relationships should be ratified by the state, whether the unapologetic lifestyle of a gender nonconforming person is a danger to children, and so many others, can never be resolved so long as the debaters hold different views on what nonconformance means — whether it’s a natural and inevitable deviation from categories that are merely descriptive, whether it’s a sign of failure against a static moral code, or whether it’s a mark of individual disorder.

If you detach yourself from your instinctive path — expanding, moralizing, or pathologizing — and simply witness how these paths inevitably collide, you’ll be rightly pessimistic that our present debates are resolvable. So long as gender remains society’s central organizing category, and so long as we disagree over what nonconformity signifies and how it should be accommodated or dealt with, these debates will continue to intensify.

Final thoughts — for now

Nonconforming people have always existed. What has changed is how societies respond to this fact, and how much explanatory weight we ask gender to carry.

Today, we are trying to patch a model that was never equipped to explain who we are, why we do the things we do, and how we should be. We argue endlessly over the significance of gender and where to draw gender boundaries. It’s dialectical quicksand. The more we organize our thinking around gender, the more stuck we become.

My aim is to persuade you that our reliance on gender as an explanatory framework is the flaw upstream of the downstream debates.

At this point, a routine counterargument suggests itself.

Maybe the problem isn’t the use of gender itself; maybe the problem is modernity. We’ve overcomplicated these questions. If gender no longer works today as an organizing principle, perhaps it made more sense once — before modern excess, before abstraction, before everything became so overwrought.

That objection has intuitive appeal, and it’s the next thing that needs to be examined.

Looking further down the road, once that question is settled, a harder one follows: if gender was never the stable foundation we imagine, what kind of model would serve us better?

The next essay in this series examines whether gender divisions worked better in the past — and how nostalgia veils us from reality:

Before you go: If you liked what you read, please take a second to show it! Click like, comment, restack it (with a note!)—that breaks through the algorithm and helps people find my writing.

A decade ago, I was walking near Union Station in Washington, DC with a friend and we passed a bronze statue of a woman holding a torch, looking determinedly ahead. Her circular plinth was inscribed: To the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty.

“That’s strange,” I said. “An economic philosophy didn’t kill those people. Totalitarian regimes did.” C’est moi, ever the literalist.

My friend turned on me swiftly. “Yes, it did. Communism is evil.” We argued: was the problem communism itself, or the way power had been abused under its banner? I didn’t think much about communism or capitalism then — I was just that boorish type (great at parties) who demands precision, and my only objection was to the plinth’s sloppy phrasing.

What I see now, with the benefit of an emerging interest in philosophy, is that most of us have been misled about Marx and communism. When Marx was writing in the mid-19th century, he was reacting to what he saw as the evils of another economic philosophy: capitalism. And if you read him closely, the problems he identified in capital-based economies echo our modern complaints with surprising force.

Case in point: The recent viral post “The death of the corporate job,” which argues that much of modern white-collar work is meaningless performance — meetings about meetings, strategies for strategies, and a whole “Great Pretending” in which no one believes in their role but everyone keeps playing it. The author, Alex, contrasts this emptiness with a growing trend of workers using corporate jobs as financial scaffolding while pursuing side projects that feel like real work.

The frustrations Alex describes aren’t new. Marx was describing them in the 1800s. His writings link capitalism directly to this kind of hollowness that Alex depicts. Which suggests it’s worth taking a second look at Marx, and what he diagnosed as the root of the frustrations that we still feel today.

In his essay, Alex shares a friend’s account of his typical day at a London bank:

He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn’t point to a single tangible thing.

Instead, the work day is a cascade of intangibles. After endless meetings and plans, Alex writes: “Months later, something might happen. Usually, it's a minor adjustment that could have been made in an afternoon by anyone with common sense.”

Everyone knows much of corporate work is theater, he says. And the pandemic could’ve been a turning point for reinventing how we approach work, but we let that opportunity slip by. Instead, we’re back in offices, pretending again. This time, though, the pretense feels different: more conscious, more exhausting.

Alex’s complaints resonate with Marx’s writings on alienation, which Marx says is the condition of labor under capitalism. That alienation is the result of four conditions: separation from the product of one’s labor; from the act of production itself; from other people, who are treated as means to an end; and from our own human nature, which includes the drive for community and for self-directed creative work.

Subscribe now

Alex’s essay resounds with the existential hollowness of corporate work today. That hollowness is what Marx was diagnosing, too. Capitalism’s treatment of labor as just another input among many dehumanizes us and deprives us of the ability to create holistically, leaving a sense of futility and ineffectualness in its place.

Or as one London banker put it:

“I enable decision-making,” he said, then caught himself. “Whatever that means.”

The hyperspecialization of today’s corporate milieu is the biggest contributor to this disconnection. Each worker has a tiny role and no clear impact — to the extent that another of Alex’s friends couldn’t even describe in practical terms what her job was.

Alex paints a picture of:

back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They’re managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They’re creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.

That last notion is central to the scheme: improving things that are working fine. As Marx pointed out, capitalism is excellent at achieving its extremely narrow goal: producing things in greater numbers and more cheaply. Even if we don’t need another version — slimmer, bigger, 2.0, 3.0, ad nauseam — we’re getting it, because in the end, we’ll buy it, using the money we earned as labor.

If a single person builds a bicycle start to finish, it might take twenty hours of labor. But if hundreds of workers each specialize in a single detail — one shapes the gears, another attaches spokes, another threads chains — a factory can turn out hundreds of bicycles in the same time. The product is cheaper and more abundant, and capitalism produces incentives that drive ineluctably toward this kind of specialization.

But for the worker who spends their days stamping the same gear or threading the same chain, what pride or connection is there to the finished bicycle?

Marx believed that work is a human need, a means of self-realization — but not the kind of work where your input is so divorced from any recognizable output that you see yourself in nothing. That severed condition of work (depicted satirically in Severance) is widespread in today’s economy and is, per Marx:

external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

On Substack, a growing chorus blames feminism for the alienation that some women feel in the workforce. They say that feminism sold women out when it encouraged us to join the men at their own game. Some women are leaving the workforce and explicitly tying that decision to ideas of femininity and traditional gender roles. (Though the scientist and writer Elena Bridgers, whose article was part of the chorus and whose work I respect, has pointed out that actually, as gatherers women were the main providers of calories in hunter-gatherer societies, disproving the idea that only men were traditional providers.)

But it’s not just women who are dissatisfied with work. Men are, too — as noted by Marx generations ago and given modern framing in Alex’s essay. I think the alienation that Marx described may be at the root of some women’s workplace dissatisfaction, which is being miscast as gender mismatch. In reality, this is a problem that crosses gender lines.

Share

Companies talk about the “flywheel” strategy of corporate profits, where each step propels the next in self-sustaining momentum.

Capitalism itself is a flywheel. As companies grow more profitable, they buy political influence to keep themselves that way — and to grow richer still. Perhaps the US perfected this with Citizens United, which declared the First Amendment rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on influencing elections and policy. Corporations have more money than any of us and far narrower goals. So we end up with politicians advancing paradoxical ideas — like for-profit companies being more trustworthy than the government we elect to run prisons — or auctioning off national forests to strip them bare. Meanwhile, the little guy cheers, convinced that private companies’ uncapped profits are a public good.

Alex describes “ecosystems of mutual nonsense,” and he’s right. Nonsense flywheels are everywhere: automated products, automated incentives, automated thinking. Companies build things we don’t need, then spend fortunes marketing them back to us. And those multimillion marketing budgets? They’re not funded by venture capitalists — they’re funded by us, every time we buy what we’ve been persuaded to want.

The problem with capitalism is that there’s never a moment in the flywheel to stop and ask: what is this all for? The supreme principle is to acquire more capital. Today, companies hunt for profit opportunities in gradations of difference — the tiniest marginal improvements to efficiency. More, more, more. “Record profits” are celebrated as triumphs.

But what if profits weren’t the only, or even primary, incentive? What if we rewarded employee wellbeing, positive community and environmental impact, innovations that reduced suffering or improved health not because they could be commodified but simply because they mattered?

We’ve been in capitalism’s grasp so long that we’ve been trained to think these things are impossible. But why should they be?

One reason we don’t entertain other possibilities is that many of us are complicit in preserving the status quo. As Alex writes,

It's like a corporate version of the emperor’s new clothes, except everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we’ve all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it.

Capitalism is entrenched in every layer of our lives — our society, culture, politics, laws, and most urgently, our livelihoods. That entrenchment creates an enormous sunk cost, and in this case there’s no fallacy in viewing it that way. To upend what sits at the root of everything would mean pain and havoc, not just for those at the top but for everyone.

Think of a ship that capsizes and sinks, littering the ocean floor with synthetic debris that slowly leaches toxins. Over decades, a local ecosystem forms around the wreckage. Ideally, you’d remove the contamination — but to do so would mean destroying the life that has grown to depend on it.

Capitalism’s focus on profits above all is a kind of wreckage: a capsized ship leaking poison. Yet ecosystems of life have built up around it. To clear it away would mean tearing apart what survives there. That’s the dilemma — the wreck is poisoning the water, but it has also become the structure that sustains life as we currently live it.

Share

There’s a saying that capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others. This reflects common acknowledgement that capitalism does have problems, but there’s no better option.

A simultaneous benefit and curse of capitalism is that the profit motive optimizes output. Taken to a point, that’s positive, insofar as it makes consumer goods more accessible to more people. But it quickly leads to a state where we accumulate heaps of stuff. We throw out that stuff when it gets unfashionable, worn, or broken, in the process rendering extinct the repair professionals who once made a living through the satisfaction of making the unworkable work again.

What is the true bargain behind our cheap goods? It’s greater material comfort in exchange for unfulfilling jobs, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety, consumer mindsets that are nearly impossible to break, and relentless abuse to natural environments. Did we ever agree to that bargain? Do we agree today?

Though if we don’t agree, what’s the replacement? The current system is engraved into everything. And even if it weren’t, the key problem I see is this: there are certain jobs that need to get done but no one would choose them if they had meaningful alternatives.

How could we ever create a fair system that supports people in doing work that’s fulfilling but also ensures that we have waste management workers, meatpacking workers, and other roles that are at the bottom of the preference ladder?

I’m offering more questions than answers. Because I want to emphasize that my point here is not to suggest that replacing our current system would be easy. It wouldn’t be — and in fact, I’m personally quite comfortable under capitalism. There are downsides and tradeoffs to every approach. But it’s clear that the current system is failing us as a society. And I have to believe that there’s a better option out there.

Leave a comment

Capitalism’s durability is complicated. Just as communism became associated with evil in the 20th century such that we have statues memorializing its victims, capitalism became a metonym for freedom, democracy, and liberal values. What a trick, right? I have to wonder whether we’d be so deeply ensnared if Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot hadn’t worked such horrors while railing against capitalism. As the saying goes, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

There’s no easy solution but first we need to agree there’s a problem. If we can collectively get out from under the haze of profits = good, then maybe we’ll get somewhere. And as we look ahead to the future, we might as well look to the past and see that we’re not the first to think about these issues.

If Marx could see us now, nearly 200 years on, would he recognize our frustrations? Undoubtedly. The better question is: do we recognize that the root of many of our frustrations with work is our capital-based economy?

Whew! I did not intend to write about capitalism (or communism) this week but the spirit — really, Alex’s essay + my philosophical readings — moved me. I’d love to hear your reaction to all this.

Leave a comment

Did you enjoy this post? Ways to support my work—for free!

1. Subscribe for regular updates and 2. Tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Subscribe now

Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• What fish can teach us about mental disorders

• Divine inspiration, creative possession: how insights emerge fully formed

Share

Stay curious,

Laura

Read on…

I used to abandon my judgment too quickly. If a pronouncement wore the right costume—confident tone, institutional sheen, vocal adherents—I let it tell me what was true, even about things that were plainly arguable. That mantle of authority can be hypnotic: it invites you to put down your skepticism and pick up someone else’s certainty.

I would tell myself, I can trust this person—even more than myself. The gap between what I thought and what the author declared became proof that my instincts were flawed. I learned to treat my internal compass as unreliable because it diverged from what arrived in sleek official formats.

But for a variety of reasons, as I’ve grown older, I’ve started to distrust that mantle of authority and to recognize that my instincts have value.

Writing here on Substack is part of this emergent recognition. I still hesitate to offer pieces that are strictly matters of opinion, because who should care about my opinion? Yet I feel with each piece I’m growing more confident, less tentative.

Share

A byproduct of this newfound confidence to push back on the intellectual authorities is that I have a lot of catching up to do. Allowing myself freedom to challenge entrenched ideas means I'm seeing things to challenge everywhere, mostly in the past.

The world has moved on yet I'm knocking on the door saying, I heard there’s a party here. Meanwhile the place has changed tenants three times. I’m arguing with ghosts.

Often, while reading texts, I feel a sharp reaction to that brand of self-assured certainty I described above. I bristle at pronouncements on genuinely debatable matters that proceed as though no justification is necessary. I get irritated, because I know how stifling that posture is for people (like me; like women; like people with mental “disorders”) who are made to justify their views by society.

Barthes’s influential essay “The Death of the Author”

Here’s a ghost I’ve been arguing with recently: Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” For decades it’s been taught and admired because it seemed to free readers from the obligation to consider what the author of a text intended the text to mean.

Barthes’s claim in the essay is simple and sweeping: the modern cult of the author has trained us to hunt for a single, authorized meaning—whatever the author supposedly intended—and to treat all other readings as mistakes.

There is a kernel of a useful corrective there. But Barthes goes much farther than offering a corrective in his essay. He enacts a law.

I not only disagree with most of Barthes’s assertions in the essay, which I’ll write about elsewhere, but I’m repelled by his manner of asserting them.

He never uses “I think,” but only “we know,” indicating there is only one possible view. His assertions are unequivocal; there is no nuance, just an all-or-nothing choice. A right way and a wrong way. This authoritative tone reaches its zenith in the concluding sentence:

We are no longer so willing to be the dupes of such antiphrases, by which a society proudly recriminates in favor of precisely what it discards, ignores, muffies, or destroys; we know that in order to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author.

This sentence universalizes a personal stance—Barthes’s—as a mandate.

The god trick and situated knowledge

My instinctual aversion to this kind of writing was reflected back to me when I encountered Donna Haraway’s brilliant 1988 essay, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.”

Haraway, a founder of Science and Technology Studies, names in this essay the rhetorical posture I’ve been reacting to. She calls it the god trick: speaking from nowhere while claiming to see everywhere. A disembodied voice, belonging to a person who feels no pressure to situate themselves as a specific person. No impetus to acknowledge their subjectivity, because authority is their natural and proper state.

This pretense of an all-knowing, all-seeing perspective—a universal view—is a trick.

She asks us to consider the metaphor of glossy space photos presented as reality. Here is the Milky Way, a magazine says, gesturing toward an image.

But there’s no neutral view: even in the realm of photography, an image is not an unassailable depiction of reality. Each image is the product of particular instruments, choices, and positions. These are all mediations—things that come between Reality or Truth as it’s being presented and us, the viewers. The trick occurs when a speaker pretends that these mediations don’t exist.

Although an authority figure may claim to show us the Milky Way—equivalent to Barthes’s action in declaring that the Author-God must be killed to properly interpret texts—in truth, an authority figure can offer only a specific lens. A reality bounded to a single perspective.

Claims that arrive shorn of context—no method, no standpoint, no “here’s how I got there”—ask us to treat a partial view as universal. And that’s where trouble lies.

Haraway’s point isn’t “nothing is real.” It’s this: if you want to claim objectivity, you must show your work. Tell us where you’re standing, what tools you used, what you left out.

As she puts it:

There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds.

Haraway’s key insight is that “only partial perspective promises objective vision.”

Partial perspective is an accountable vision—one you can call to account because you’re engaging not with a vague voice with no point of origin (with which discourse is, of course, impossible), but with a specific voice coming from a specific location.

Haraway calls this situated knowledge.

Applying the god trick to literature and lit criticism

Although Haraway’s particular focus is scientific discourse, I believe the same god-trick framework can apply to literary discourse, which was Barthes’s terrain.

While some fiction presents itself as simple entertainment, many authors claim a deeper purpose: to reveal the truth about our present reality.

Consider Joseph Conrad’s argument that the fiction writer aims, like the scientist, to reveal “what is enduring and essential” about the world:

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal.

I find Conrad’s description of the novelist’s project to be valid. Novels do circulate as social knowledge; they shape what readers take to be plausible or typical about people and places and causal relationships.

If we follow Barthes and kill the author, then, contrary to his argument that we’re killing a “God,” we’re actually performing an apotheosis. We’re pretending that the view the text provides is a universal one—the Milky Way—as opposed to a specific vision of the world tied to a specific author’s lens.

The god trick, then, lends a conceptual counterargument both to the way Barthes expresses his views in “The Death of the Author,” and to the views themselves.

Subscribe now

The god trick as a feminist philosophy

Haraway, an influential feminist who transformed the philosophy and history of science, tackled all this from a feminist viewpoint. The god-trick had led certain voices to be marginalized and excluded in scientific discourse, including voices of women.

But what I love about her essay is that she doesn’t do the thing that Barthes does in his. He replaced one myth with another by toppling the author and enthroning the reader. Haraway’s handling of her issue is far more nuanced.

To be sure, Haraway offers a qualified argument that marginalized viewpoints should be privileged. But this is not as a matter of reparation, or vengeance, or some sort of ascendancy of the downtrodden.

Her argument is based on reason. We should prefer perspectives from “below” (that is, from the position of subjugated, marginalized people), she says, because they’re less likely to perform artificial objectivity. Less likely to buy into the god trick and perpetuate it. They’re not more likely to be right, but they’re less likely to deceive us into believing they’re right. And thus, they more effectively advance discourse.

Consistent with this careful take, she warns against romanticizing marginalized viewpoints.

“The standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions,” she writes. They are authoritative only when they stay answerable—open to critique, method, and mediation—rather than claiming a disembodied right to speak for all and without challenge.

Thus, her god-trick warning cuts in both directions: against the powerful who pretend to speak from nowhere, and against any of us who might smuggle in a new kind of untouchable authority under a banner of marginalization.

Extending Haraway’s argument outward to everyday discourse

Haraway’s theory helps me understand why the no-excuses, no-questions-asked authoritative tone taken by Barthes and others grates on me so much.

It also, I think, points to why women and other marginalized people are more likely to notice and be distracted by such tones of voice, even to the point, as in my case, of irritation.

In Western culture, the performers of the god trick have been traditionally white men. Let me be careful here: Not all white men communicate this way, but of the people who do, they have been more likely to be white men.

Other categories of people may internalize that this style of discourse is unavailable to them. I certainly did. Women start emails more often by saying “I’m sorry,” or are more likely to qualify their views with “I think” and “I believe.”

Society has traditionally seen this manner of speaking as a negative tic that should be fixed. But there’s another way to see it. I think these qualifiers support Haraway’s argument that marginalized people, such as women, are less likely to perform the god trick. Which is a good thing.

I also see a link to the concept of “mansplaining”—that presumptuous, superior way of explaining things. Men do this to each other all the time (I’ve observed it with interest), but it rolls off other men like water off a raincoat. For those of us not used to wielding that kind of conversational authority, it soaks in and weighs us down.

A counterpoint to Barthes: the partial perspective of Wayne C. Booth

While working on this essay, I happened to be reading The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth, a foundational literary criticism text that examines how authors communicate their views to readers.

Booth, like Barthes, was highly influential in the field of literary criticism. They were contemporaries; The Rhetoric of Fiction was published in 1961, six years before Barthes’s essay.

While reading, I noticed how Booth’s style avoids the godlike stance of Barthes’s, and how nourishing that feels to me as a reader.

For instance, Booth wrote in the book’s Preface:

The fun will come in testing what I say, not against any given theory you have learned, but rather against your own experience of Boccaccio’s “The Falcon,” of Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” of Joyce’s Portrait, of Austen’s Emma—of whatever story you have recently enjoyed and would like to recommend to me.

Here, Booth is acknowledging his partial perspective, one that the reader can “test” themselves. And he’s going further. He’s admitting that the canonical works he uses to illustrate his theories are not authoritative. The reader can not only disagree with Booth’s views, but also with the selection of stories that supply the testing material. He demonstrates his openness by acknowledging that the reader has the authority to recommend their own examples to him.

I like it when someone converses with me in this way. They are meeting me more truthfully, more directly, with less pretense. Yes, it turns out being more verbose (by inserting “I think” and “I believe,” by devoting a Preface to the limitations of your book’s analysis) can amount to being more direct, because you’re making explicit what’s not always implicit. These are thoughts and beliefs that I have, and I recognize that others may not share them.

Share

So here’s the essential point: To reverse the harm wrought by the god trick, we should keep the makers and the making of text in view. We shouldn’t pretend that text speaks from nowhere.

If the god trick is the seduction of placeless certainty, then the antidote is modest, locatable confidence: here is where I’m standing; here are the methods I used; here is what I can and can’t see.

Otherwise, all we have are voices shouting into the air, untethered and unaccountable.

To take a highly unscientific poll, I’m curious—do you notice and react when a writer uses the god trick? Alternatively, do you notice but not mind, or perhaps not notice at all? And of course, I’d love to hear your other thoughts and reactions to these topics.

Leave a comment

Did you enjoy this post? Ways to support my work—for free!

1. Subscribe for regular updates and 2. Tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Subscribe now

Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• The root of storytelling is pattern

• Divine inspiration, creative possession: how insights emerge fully formed

Share

Stay curious,

Laura

I had heard about the MAX docuseries A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read enough times that, although I don’t do much true crime, I tried it one Sunday night.

I watched two episodes straight before prying myself to bed.

The show kicks off with an intriguing exchange between Karen Read — accused of murdering her boyfriend — and a producer:

Producer: So, did you drive your car into John?

Karen Read: I did not drive my car into John. Didn’t reverse it… did not hit John with my car.

Producer: Is there any chance this was an accident?

Read: There’s zero chance this was an accident. There is zero chance John was hit by a vehicle.

*smirk*

Producer: [Reacting to Read’s smirk] You’re tired of it, you’ve spent so much time … You know I have to ask.

Read: No, I just — No. I’m not tired of it. I hate answering it because —

I feel like I’m being so scrutinized, like did she blink three times or twice? And did she like smirk or look to the right and down and up and left and whatever and it just feels so, like fake, even though it’s true. I’d rather like explain everything else. And like I did not hit John with my car. I can’t make it sincere enough.

*smirk*

I hate saying it.

The camera fixes on Read closely, reality-TV-confessional style, while we hear the producer’s questions off camera.

The series is actually sympathetic to Read, and follows the events of her first trial for the murder of her boyfriend. (The second trial is happening now).

But the question propelling the series is: Did she do it?

From that sneery introduction, your first impression as the viewer is that Read is guilty and doesn’t care. The rest of the series gives you reason to question that. Onlookers are divided, but I think she’s innocent.

My autism diagnosis earlier this year was an aha! for so many things. Such as why I show different emotions outwardly from what I’m feeling inside.

I laugh at moments of high tension. In high school, I scraped my parents’ car backing out of our driveway – pretty badly. I sat them down in the living room to break the news. I felt terrible and wanted them to know that, but all I could do was laugh as I told them what happened. Why am I laughing? I wondered, frustrated.

The same thing has happened in other fraught moments. These are moments when I feel bad inside — ashamed, embarrassed, sorry — yet I can’t stop awkwardly smiling.

It’s not just shame or embarrassment. When I’m feeling deep joy in the presence of another person, I don’t know how to express it. If I try, it’s awkward. (Luckily I’ve never had trouble expressing joy and love with my children, which is an interesting difference.)

When I’m really, really angry or frustrated, I might yell at first but the overwhelming physical expression is deep, shaking sobs.

None of this has ever made sense to me. My inner emotions and the way I express them are all mixed up.

If someone judged how I feel based solely on how I behave, they’d draw the wrong conclusion every time.

I’ve tried to research the neurological basis for this trait, but I’ve turned up only research reporting that the challenge exists, not why. It may relate to alexithymia, which most sources define as being unaware of your emotions. I have that too, but it’s different from what I’m talking about here: a mismatch between my internal emotional state (which I do recognize) and my external behavior.

Alexithymia is sometimes used more broadly for assorted challenges with emotion, including “expressive and affective challenges.” That seems to be what I experience — expressive challenges.

This is an under-examined aspect of autism in the research. Yet other people with autism report similar challenges. Julia Maher’s thoughtful piece on emotional challenges in autism concludes that, “Ultimately, my external appearance does not always reflect my internal reality.”

False accusations disproportionately affect people of color. There are many reasons this is so: racism; racial bias in perception and memory, leading to mistaken eyewitness IDs; policing practices; charging disparities; and unequal access to legal resources.

As a white woman, I’m insulated from many of these risks. The figure of wrongful imprisonment I relate to most is Amanda Knox. She wasn’t a victim of racial profiling. Her entanglement with the Italian justice system stemmed from how she behaved — strangely and coldly. According to prosecutors, the media, and Kercher’s friends, Knox’s behavior was not that of an innocent woman.

For that, she spent four years in prison and eight years being pursued by prosecutors. She was robbed of her youth and gaslit about who she was and what she was capable of.

The evidence at Knox’s trial was mostly about what happened after the murder:

• Knox and her boyfriend kissed not far from the crime scene, which was seen as indifference.

• Knox sat on her boyfriend’s lap at the police station and made faces at him, which was proof that she didn’t mourn Kercher’s death.

• One of Kercher’s study-abroad friends testified that Knox “showed no emotion” after the murder, when everyone else was visibly distraught.

• Another friend of Kercher’s sought a consoling hug from Knox, but Knox rejected it, evidence of her “cold” behavior.

• When another Kercher friend said she hoped Kercher didn’t suffer, Knox responded: “How could she not have suffered? She got her fucking throat slit!” That, too, was taken as evidence of a lack of empathy.

• Knox didn’t attend Kercher’s memorial service and other public gatherings of mourning, which she later said was because she was afraid to go alone and of awkward conversations, but was cited as evidence of “strange coldness” and “odd detachment.”

It’s striking how much trial evidence condemning Knox’s behavior came from Kercher’s friends, Knox’s own study-abroad peers.

Amanda Knox has never said she’s autistic. Neither has Karen Read.

This means that even apparently neurotypical people stumble in performing their innocence. Because when you’re accused of a crime, that’s what innocence becomes: a performance that you can fail.

Sociologist Erving Goffman’s view is that all social behavior is a performance. Not just for neurodivergent people; for everyone. When we interact with others, Goffman said, we are performing, even if we’re not aware of it.

Accepting Goffman’s framework, the difference for autistic people is that we’re highly aware we’re performing. The performance is at the forefront of our minds, which makes it less natural and more tiring.

Read’s statement at the start of this piece — “I can’t make it sincere enough” — and Goffman’s interaction-as-performance theory links to yet another MAX docuseries: The Rehearsal, which critics are raving about during its second season. (The Guardian called it “TV’s most fascinating show.”)

(Read my Note explaining why The Rehearsal is an autistic amusement park here.)

In season 2 episode 4, Nathan Fielder says:

I’ve always felt sincerity was overrated. It just punishes the people who perform it better than others.

Read’s struggle — “I can’t make it sincere enough” — illustrates the very problem Fielder identifies in his theory of performed sincerity.

If Goffman is right that all social interaction is a performance, then what separates a successful performance from a flop? Logically, the way to deliver a convincing performance is to study people who’ve been believed in similar situations, and mimic them.

But where are the models for how to act when falsely accused of murder? I can’t think of any.

Even though Knox hasn’t identified as autistic, I wonder: could Knox have been experiencing emotional delay in the aftermath of Kercher’s murder?

It’s an autistic phenomenon in which a person doesn’t process the emotional significance of an event until later — days or even months.

I recently made a connection between emotional delay and my own issues. I was talking with my husband about autistic meltdowns, where a person can go from 0 to 60 and absolutely lose it. Just unleash an angry, emotional outburst. I’m embarrassed, ashamed, to say that I have a history of this.

These outbursts seem to come from nowhere. I feel fine one minute, and then an irritation occurs — my husband is late again, my husband corrects my phrasing again (it’s always my husband these days, but there’ve been others), and suddenly a cascade of related irritations bears down.

Whatever the nature of the irritation, suddenly it seems that it has always been present and always will be present; a psychic disruption without end. And I explode.

I now wonder: could my meltdowns be the build up of unexperienced emotion finally bubbling to the surface? Caused by a delay in processing emotions from earlier, related events? I’m finding this a convincing explanation for why everything seems fine… until suddenly, in the face of some fairly ordinary provocation, it’s not fine at all.

In writing this, I wonder if this kind of processing delay might explain Knox’s behavior too. Doing a cartwheel after a murder might seem utterly different from a meltdown when your husband’s late again — but maybe they’re not so unrelated.

So, could it be that Knox was simply slow to process the emotional significance of Kercher’s death? That her behavior wasn’t just a strange way of reacting, but a failure to react in the first place — because the emotions hadn’t reached her yet?

Knox herself would probably reject that idea. For her part, she doesn’t think her behavior was all that strange:

Some people have made claims that I am histrionic or autistic, because it might explain strange behaviour. I think people have exaggerated how strangely I reacted. I was not concerned with what people were thinking.

I’m as sympathetic to Knox as a disinterested observer can be. I even boycotted traveling to Italy as protest for the government’s treatment of her. I’m also neurodivergent.

But even I think Knox’s behavior was odd.

If there’s a parting message from this salad of ideas, it’s this:

In our justice system, innocence isn’t a state of unchangeable reality, no matter how much we want to think it is. Innocence is a subjective performance. One that is difficult to carry off no matter who you are, since there’s no playbook.

For autistic people who find themselves falsely accused, the outlook is bleak. Our everyday performances are already arduous and fraught. And in the courtroom, that difference can be fatal.

Did you enjoy this post? Support for my work for free: Subscribe for regular updates and tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Subscribe now

Looking for more? Check out these past posts:

• When you see yourself in your child—and start worrying for two

• Before vaccines, we blamed fairies

When I think about immigrant families in the US without documentation, I don’t think of criminals. Nor do I have a vague sense of faceless persons, of mannequin-like figures who accumulate as statistics in news stories.

Instead, I see the hard-working Mi’kmaq family from The Berry Pickers, little six-year-old Joe and four-year old Ruthie, who migrated from Nova Scotia to Maine each summer to pick blueberries for American landowners.

I see the title character of Grace, a 14-year-old girl forced to take harsh roads during Ireland’s Great Famine in search of meager sustenance.

I see Laura, Pa, and Ma Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie, traveling by covered wagon towards a better life in Kansas’s Indian country.

Narrative teaches us about the world.

A good story harnesses fundamental patterns of human behavior and reveals those patterns in specific incarnations. The best fiction writers are pattern-seers. Yes, they create something new, but to reflect meaning back to us readers, that newness must be constructed on a foundation of timelessness.

When we encounter a work of fiction we don’t like, it’s often because the characters aren’t believable. What makes us disbelieve a character?

It happens when they have no footing in realistic patterns of behavior. Their desires, motives, fears, and behaviors don’t interact in a coherent way.

To be believable, characters must act according to unspoken rules (what we sometimes call human nature), even as great fiction reveals those rules and therefore teaches us about our fellow human beings.

Fiction is a delicate push-pull between familiarity and discovery.

Fiction is also an acutely recent genre of storytelling, which has been part of the human experience since the beginning. We are driven to understand, and storytelling is our oldest tool for processing facts and events to grasp an understanding.

The clear distinction we recognize between fact and fiction didn’t always exist. Truth was not synonymous with what really happened in ancient times. Hearers of Homer’s Odyssey would not have questioned whether it was factual; that was beside the point. The Odyssey revealed things about the world, like what happens when you violate ethical codes and in doing so, displease the gods. These revelations were, for listeners, the Truth. The same can be said of ancient Icelandic sagas, which narrativize conflict and vengeance among clans. The characters in these legends confronted exaggerated conflicts – menacing giants appeared on Icelandic battlefields – through real patterns of jealousy, deception, anger, rivalry, love, grief, loss.

A successful story is a sleight of hand, causing our real-world surroundings to dissolve like Max’s bedroom in Where the Wild Things Are, where the forest grew, and grew, and grew… “until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around.” We step into the story, which becomes a kind of simulation of other ways of being.

Through the events of the story and the characters’ reactions to them, we experience an existence outside our own. We don’t just feel for the characters, we feel what it is to be them.

This is only possible if there is an underlying pattern of real humanity on which the author draws.

Subscribe now

The science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin understands this. Her novels are set in imagined dystopian worlds, but they are inhabited by humans who behave like we do. To research a novel set amid cataclysmic natural disaster, Jemisin turned to end-of-day-survivalists to probe how people respond to environmental stress. It is the realism of her characters that makes Jemisin’s novels meaningful, despite the unrealism of their surroundings.

Studies have shown that inhabiting literature – getting “lost” in a story – enhances the reader’s empathy. Empathy is a product of literature’s fluency in real patterns of living. When we merge with characters on the page, identifying with their plights, we are primed to spot their real-life doppelgangers and understand something of what they’re going through.

I’ve felt this firsthand. While writing this piece, I scanned through lists of my past reads, pausing on novels and memoirs that particularly illuminated humanity’s mysteries.

• A decade ago, I read the anonymous memoir A Woman in Berlin. It narrates the arrival of the Soviet army in war-torn Berlin at the end of WWII. I brought my knowledge of history as baggage to the reading: the people of Berlin, I knew, were complicit in Nazi atrocities, and the Soviet army liberated concentration camps. It is easy to cast the Berliners as the bad side; the Soviets as the good. Yet, the reality is far more complicated. This work shattered the simplistic binary of good and evil through which I had viewed these events, and illuminated patterns of moral compromise, cyclical trauma, and victimhood. My experience with A Woman in Berlin shaped how I see contemporary conflicts, including the Gaza war.

• More recently, Small Things Like These reminded me how easily people numb themselves to horrific things happening on their doorsteps. This slim novel is about abuses perpetuated by the Church in a small Irish town and the community that overlooked them. We see our neighbors publicly going about their business and think: Things really can’t be that bad if people are carrying on as normal, so I’ll carry on too. This quietly devastating work reflects a pattern of collective denial and complicity, reminding us that we can blind ourselves to moral crises unfolding in plain sight.

• Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which I read as a teen long ago, caused me to reflect shamefully on how I have avoided and stereotyped marginalized individuals, like the deaf protagonist John Singer. McCullers reveals the pattern of overlooking and underestimating quieter, different voices and the psychic costs of that pattern. The great beauty and tragic events of the story teach us to walk with curiosity and compassion.

I’m certain that the best literature – the best storytelling – illuminates hidden truths about ourselves. I was thinking about this in connection with how institutions use narrative storytelling to predict and plan for humanity’s future.

This is not a modern phenomenon. In ancient and pre-modern times, narrative-driven history was used as a map to the future.

Historians like Sima Qian (c. 145-87 BCE) and Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 CE) extrapolated patterns from historical events and used those patterns to predict what would happen next. Khaldun, for example, constructed a theory of dynastic rise and fall which, he argued, foretold how current dynasties would fare in the future.

Their methods parallel how fiction has more recently used patterns of human behavior to forecast future societies.

For instance, in the 20th century, writers imagined how emerging forms of society and government would progress. Works such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale carried modern trends forward to their possible outcomes.

The enduring truths these stories revealed are echoed in news headlines:

• “We Live in the Reproductive Dystopia of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’” blares a New Yorker headline (excavated from the distant past of 2017).

• “Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World should be read in tandem to understand today’s trouble times,” is the alarm-ringing title of an essay published in Conversation earlier this year.

If fiction reveals existing patterns of human behavior, it also helps us plan for what lies ahead.

Earlier this year, the UK government hired science fiction writers to brainstorm how things might unfold and what might go wrong. “Taking a very character-based approach can help reveal aspects of future scenarios that you might not necessarily get from a more pulled-out approach,” said novelist Emma Newman at an event organized to prepare for threats ranging from pandemics to cyber and nuclear attacks.

A similar approach comes from the Scenario Game, which was developed by the Bavarian Foresight-Institute, an organization focused on anticipating and preparing for future challenges. The Scenario Game is a toolkit that guides teams to imagine potential future events, for which they then “co-create narratives that are both imaginative and firmly rooted in real-world contexts.”

Understanding potential scenarios is especially urgent today, as we feel ourselves hurtling towards an unknowable future faster than ever before.

When you consider potential futures, what do you envision?

You might have ideas about what could go wrong in the years ahead. I certainly do, shaped by novels like Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (adapted into an excellent HBO series) and films like Children of Men, with its depiction of societal breakdown in the face of infertility, Her, which explores loneliness in a tech-saturated world, and even Wall-E, which offers a satirical but sobering vision of environmental collapse.

Though these works are fictional, they resonate because they rest on realistic human behavior. If (or when) such challenging futures arrive, we may find certain aspects familiar, reminiscent of stories we’ve read or seen on screen. And perhaps, in some small way, we will be better prepared.

Thanks for reading Strange Clarity, where I write about neurodivergence and the hidden patterns of cognition.

If this post sparked something, help others discover it:
→ Leave a comment: even a simple “I was here” makes a huge impact!

Leave a comment

→ Share it with someone thoughtful. Substack makes it easy.

Share

More to read:

• Personal essay: When you see yourself in your child — and start worrying for two

• Commentary: Artificial intelligence isn’t replacing me — it’s extending me

Strange Clarity is reader-powered. If you’d like to support my work, the best way is to subscribe, comment, or share a post that resonated.

With curiosity,

Laura

Some in the autism community were warmly receptive of RFK Jr.’s promise to find the “cause” for autism by September. But, there are reasons to be cautious.

This month, the Trump admin proposed to cut the Dept. of Health & Human Services’ discretionary 2026 budget by 30%.

We now have details as to how that cut might be spread across existing programs.

According to an internal proposal for how to cut the Biden admin’s “wasteful spending”:

• The AHA Maternal and Child Health Program - Autism and Other Disorders will be eliminated. This would wipe out the CDC’s dedicated autism public health programming as we know.

• The proposed allocation for the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD) autism research and prevention efforts is $23.1 million, which is a nearly 20% reduction from 2024 funding. I can’t find data on 2025.

• Other related eliminations include funding for ADHD, Fragile X, and early hearing detection, which are typically bundled with autism support.

• Numerous program-level cuts under the AHA Environmental Health Program, which calls into question RFK Jr.’s commitment to finding an environmental cause for autism.

The document refers to targeted eliminations of funding streams within the reorganized Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) framework.

Importantly, this new framework transfers autism oversight and funding from the CDC, which has overseen autism research for decades, into the new AHA organization.

• It’s not clear whether existing CDC staff will be retained by AHA or laid off. The staff includes career scientists, clinicians, statisticians, and policy advisors with specialized expertise.

• These staff are associated with the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network and its National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD), which have spearheaded autism work in the U.S.

• Already, 2,400 CDC employees have been laid off as part of the broader HHS restructuring.

On top of everything going on, I’ve developed cyclical chin breakouts. (Bear with me.) I’m dimly aware that hormonal birth control can help with this. So, I explained the situation to ChatGPT and asked, Would birth control help? Yes, but be careful if you’re over 35. And so we discussed tradeoffs: HBC can lower certain cancer risks (endometrial, ovarian, maybe colorectal) but increase breast cancer risk. Given my family history, and the fact that breast cancer is already far more lethal than the cancers with reduced risk, I decided treating my acne with HBC wasn’t worth it. I made an informed decision, and I feel good about it.

This is a common occurrence for me these days: turning to ChatGPT for help figuring something out.

The mind beyond the brain

Our notion of human intelligence is too “brain-bound.” That’s the argument of The Extended Mind, a 2021 book by Annie Murphy Paul. Using an array of evidence, Paul shows that our minds achieve deeper insights when they interact with our bodies, our spaces, and fellow humans.

For instance, Paul highlights stock traders who perform better when they focus on their heart beats, which signal – better than the traders’ conscious thought – market opportunities. These results were confirmed in studies.

Another study found that radiologists who remained seated while reviewing scans spotted on average 85% of irregularities, while radiologists who were walking identified 99%.

She gives example after example of how the mind’s powers are augmented by interactions outside the brain.

Where AI fits in

Early in the book, Paul shares an anecdote.

It was 1997, and researcher Andy Clark left his laptop behind on a train. Being separated from his laptop felt like being severed from part of his mind, and it propelled him to pursue the question of where our mind ends and the rest of the world begins. He ended up developing the extended mind theory. It’s really just a concept, a framework, but it helps us see how our thinking improves when our minds receive feedback from external components.

The book just missed the artificial intelligence craze. In 2025, four years after its publication, the book seems incomplete without a discussion of AI. It’s an unfortunate misalignment of timing, because the extended mind theory is an apt model for how we interact with AI when we use it on a personal level.

AI & me

I use AI all the time; I was an early adopter. Yes, I experience angst when I think about how fast the world is changing, and how inscrutable the future looks when I try to picture my kids graduating and starting jobs. (What careers will be left?)

But the practical and knowledge-seeking sides of me recognize the clear benefits.

ChatGPT and I discuss many things: what to cook for dinner using ingredients on hand; difficult parenting situations that don’t fit advice I’ve read in books; whether estimates by HVAC repairers are reasonable; how to confront a carpet bug infestation; how to soften my very direct communication style when sending emails (ChatGPT is an expert at turning my autistic bluntness into NT-friendly missives); how to interpret Department of Labor unemployment data; how to get Adobe Illustrator to do just about anything…

These consultations are engaged discussions. They’re collaborative. ChatGPT will answer a prompt, and then I’ll ask what evidence backs up that response, point out a counterargument, or build on the response with a new idea. When I interact with ChatGPT, I’m not just passively receiving information. It’s more than that: I engage in a creative, iterative, generative process that’s far more enriched than if I thought through these things alone.

Look, I’m not arguing that AI is unconditionally positive. There are lots of things to be concerned about, which thankfully other people are covering. But as with so many things, AI is neither wholly good, nor wholly bad. It’s technology, and what matters is how we use it.

Subscribe now

Technology is about tradeoffs

I read a compelling essay where the author argues that ultimately the role of technology is “alleviating the very hard trade-offs that humans have had to make since the dawn of time.” The piece talked about women in demanding fields, who want to achieve both professional success and bear children. The problem is that both goals require a huge amount of time, focus, and energy during a specific period in a woman’s life: her 30s. Advances in technology – specifically, fertility treatments – allow women to postpone having children into later years, after their careers are more established.

I think that framing is useful here too.

The trade off when I use ChatGPT is also about time: the limited amount of time we’re afforded on each screen of this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game we call life. I need to make decisions and move on. Or, I want to think deeply in the too-short moments I have to engage my natural curiosity.

By consulting with ChatGPT, I get to the heart of the matter more quickly. Instead of Googling open-ended terms and circling around the real concern, I can zero in within minutes: when it comes to hormonal birth control, breast cancer is the risk I personally need to weigh most carefully. (Of course, Google itself was a huge leap forward. The more information at our fingertips, the more agency we gain over our lives.)

When I talk about getting to the point quickly, I don’t mean hyper-optimization. This is not a self-help pitch, contending that we should calibrate our lives down to the minute in pursuit of maximum efficiency. Efficiency taken to its extreme would forbid the many conversations I have with ChatGPT pursuing random things for curiosity’s sake.

What I’m talking about is the trade off between the vast richness of the world and our limited time in it. I enjoy finding and figuring things out. I enjoy asking questions and getting answers and pressure-testing those answers.

Also, in these conversations, what I’m not doing is outsourcing thinking to AI. I’m still thinking. I’m actually extending my capacity to think through things more deeply, more deliberately, and more autonomously. AI gives me the opportunity to figure more things out for myself, more richly than I otherwise would.

What AI art critics miss

I think about this too in the context of AI art. There is a lot of pushback against AI-generated images; some say they’ll boycott publications that use AI art. Of course, people can do what they want, but I think this binary view overlooks that there’s still a human agent generating the art.

It’s a creative act. An extension of the mind.

There are valid counterarguments. A common one is that it’s a bad thing to replace human creation with AI creation.

Here, I think context matters. For instance, most Substack writers are not in a financial position to commission illustrated work. In the context of this newsletter, for instance, AI art is replacing free stock imagery (before I created this dinosaur I was considering a bland photo of a birthday cake with candles). So yes, we should worry about paying artists to create work. But not all AI is replacing paid opportunities.

I also take issue with the argument that AI creation is not human creation. Critics sometimes suggest that unless a human personally executes every brushstroke (or pixel), the work lacks authenticity. But that’s a narrow – and historically inaccurate – view of authorship.

Renaissance masters didn’t paint every inch of their canvases. They worked with apprentices in ateliers, guiding the composition, correcting errors, and bringing vision to form through collaborative effort. And yet, we still credit the art to the masters. There are modern day equivalents, too: artists, architects, and fashion designers who attach their name to works that they envisioned but someone else executed.

Likewise, the use of AI to generate an image doesn’t have to mean that an artist has been swapped for a computer. Instead, it’s a new form of art. When I generate AI art, the subjective choices are still mine: what mood, what subject, what color palette, what to reject and revise. Just as we’re able to tell “bad” human art from “good” human art, so too can we distinguish “bad” AI art from “good” AI art. And setting those imprecise categories aside, I suspect we’ll also be able to glimpse something of the creator in the AI art itself – just as we do with human art.

Using AI doesn’t have to be an abdication of human creativity. It can be creatorship, extended.

The point of all this

My point is not to argue what other people should do when it comes to using AI.

My point is that deeply personal use of AI is the extended mind theory in action. When we use it, we don’t need to become thoughtless automatons.

Instead, we can extend our minds outwards through the medium of AI, so that we may, consciously and with intention, engage with more ideas and problems and discoveries and creations than we would otherwise.

Did you enjoy this essay? Please support my work: Liking and comment on this piece, which will highlight it for more readers, and subscribe (for free!) to my newsletter, Strange Clarity.

Subscribe now

Until now, I’ve never written publicly about my life, society, or medical research and science. It feels like one shouldn’t just waltz into such weighty topics, but here I am, diving in.

Some rules of the road seem appropriate; guidelines for approaching this work, especially as it relates to autism, a complicated subject that deserves a tender approach.

Subscribe now

It so happens that I’ve formed some firm beliefs in the course of examining what autism means for me and society. These principles, I realize, can form the basis for a thoughtful approach to my writing here.

Publishing these guidelines will keep me accountable and enable me to reflect on them later, once I’ve carved my place more firmly into the ground. Do they hold? Are they enough? How are they influencing my work?

Here, then, are the principles I’ve come to believe in—anchors for the writing I’ll be doing in this space, and tools for thinking clearly as I go.

Principle 1: We all (autistic and non-autistic alike) have the same traits, just to different degrees

We’re all more alike than we are different. Although certain things are exaggerated in autism, nothing (as far as I can tell) is autism’s exclusive domain. We don’t own anything (just like the reverse: people who don’t have autism don’t own their traits either).

Case in point: Deep research. Profound investigations of a topic are a telltale sign of autism. In her book The Autism Brain, Temple Grandin attributes this to a focus on the “trees” instead of the “forest.”

However, exhaustive research is not exclusively autism’s domain. I couldn’t put it any better than Mariam Mahmoud’s piece “The Lost Art of Research as Leisure,” which persuasively argues that “research is not a rarefied academic exercise. It is a fundamentally human activity, an adventure, a craft, a conviviality that assembles culture.”

The same case can be made for other autism-aligned traits: the desire for routine, orientation toward patterns, social discomfort and awkwardness, amassing collections, and literal thinking. In autistic people, these traits can be pronounced—but they exist, in varying ways, in everyone.

Viewed this way, the autism spectrum is one segment of the human spectrum.

I don’t say this to discount autism but to remind myself that these things are part of the human experience, which we all share.

Principle 2: My autism is not their autism

Conversely, each of us is a world unto ourselves. Like Whitman, we all “contain multitudes.” As someone writing publicly about autism through the lens of my own experience, I must take care not to speak for anyone but myself.

There is so much diversity within autism. There’s the famous spectrum, which mostly gets at how pronounced the overall condition of autism is. Still, there are other layers of the spectrum, too. The category of sensory issues, to take one, manifests in so many different ways. Some people are overwhelmed by bright lights or loud noises; others seek out intense sensory input, like strong flavors or constant movement. Some can’t tolerate tags in clothing, while others barely notice pain.

So, not only are there differences in the overall severity of the condition, but also in the details.

Why does this matter? It matters because erasure is soul-crushing.

If I suggest that my experience is exemplary, I’m taking something away from those who have entirely different experiences from mine. In a way, I’m discrediting them while at the same time challenging them to declare themselves and stake their own territory.

Adrienne Rich writes of erasure in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: “When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”

And bell hooks writes of the same with biting irony in marginality as site of resistance: “No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself.”

These are not dynamics I want to support.

A conflict is currently broiling within the community about how to view autism. For every person who argues that autism is not a disorder or disability, there is a person who feels disabled by the condition. A person who feels they are missing out on essential elements of life.

At first, I was drawn to the idea that autism isn’t a disorder, but a cognitive profile. I have a job, a marriage, children. Autism has brought challenges, yes—but also strengths. That framing, as something descriptive rather than limiting, made sense to me. But I’ve come to see that as a narrow view, shaped by my own privilege. Many autistic people long for deep relationships, meaningful work, or independence, and find those things painfully out of reach. For them, I imagine the rhetoric of “difference, not disability” can feel like a double erasure.

Within all marginalized groups, there will be people with more and less privilege. Autism is no different. There is an inequitable distribution of resources among us, and justice and fairness demand that we recognize it.

Share

Principle 3: I aim to hold multiple truths at once

A research and writing project about autism could easily tempt me to claim definitive answers. I’m at risk of trying to attain and defend a position of authority on the topic. In some ways, that’s the easier route: it's tidier to profess a solution to this or that quandary and move on.

The harder task is resisting that impulse. Nothing about, or within, the human mind is simple. We need only look at our struggles within ourselves. We think we know who we are, and then life shows us we don't. We give voice to this complexity when we weigh an issue and say we’re of “two minds.” Conflicting versions of ourselves and the world inhabit the same space.

Cognitive profile and disorder. Beauty and pain.

Karl Popper, a leading 20th-century philosopher of science, cautioned against certainty in Conjectures and Refutations:

Intellectual intuition and imagination are most important, but they are not reliable: they may show us things very clearly, and yet they may mislead us. They are indispensable as the main sources of our theories; but most of our theories are false anyway. The most important function of observation and reasoning, and even of intuition and imagination, is to help us in the critical examination of those bold conjectures which are the means by which we probe into the unknown.

So, although I’ll propose ideas and suggest answers, I want to avoid orthodoxy. Offering a hypothesis is a good way to deepen inquiry, but no investigation can be truly completed in this realm. It can only be examined, and then put back on the shelf, to be picked up again another day.

Principle 4: Don’t be afraid to show joy

This one is highly personal. I’ve always been uneasy with expressions of happiness or pride when they involve me. I feel moments of profound exhilaration but struggle to acknowledge them—even to the people sharing those moments with me. Receiving a heartfelt compliment makes me want to hide. My instinct is to downplay joy, and I don’t fully know why. Part of it, I think, is a desire not to seem frivolous. Part of it is simply a natural lack of bubbliness. But something deeper is at work, too, and I haven’t figured it out.

Still, I know this: I don’t want that discomfort to follow me into my writing.

So much of life is hard. It sometimes feels easier to dwell there. But I want to speak fluently about the opposite, too: beauty, sublimity, joy.

Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Brief for the Defense” gives voice to this aim: “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

I want to notice what is worth celebrating, not just intellectually but emotionally, and I want to allow myself to celebrate it.

These pillars don’t map out a writing plan. Much like autism itself, they provide a framework, but they don’t dictate an outcome. What they do offer is a lens for thinking and writing about the topics I’ll cover in Strange Clarity: belonging, identity, biology, evolution, and history, both personal and collective.

They’re the rudders I’ll use to steer this boat—steadying me as I navigate uncertain waters.