The Libertarian Movement and Women -- It's not just a Robin Hanson thing

 This article from Tyler Cowen has been catching a lot of online flak.

Under pretty much any circumstances, complaining—even jokingly—that none of the actresses you see on screen are virgins is in questionable taste. But when you look at the details in this case, it gets much, much worse.

We’re talking about an animated and depiction of a woman who appears to be somewhere in her mid- to late teens. This is not made better when you learn that Tyler Cowen is 63 years old.

At this point, we are edging into the territory of fanboys insisting online that Sailor Moon needs to be “sexy but not slutty.” This is not a good corner of the internet.

Obviously, Cowen was going for mildly edgy snark. While that might cut him some slack (or might not—that’s a debate for another day), the comment looks considerably worse when taken in the context of what Cowen and others in his movement have been saying for years.

The fixation on virginity has been something of a recurring topic.



Discussions of virginity and purity are closely tied to the even creepier obsession with cuckolding. The most notorious example is the hat-tipped Robin Hanson’s argument that it might be more moral for a man to “gently” rape an unconscious woman than it would be for her to commit adultery.

 Any discussion of the libertarian movement's attitude toward women has got to address what Peter Thiel said in a widely disseminated Cato Institute essay from 2009. (Ever since then, Thiel and his apologists have been dancing around what he said about women's suffrage. It's best to ignore the distractions and focus on his actual words.)

The Peter Thiel connection leads us to seasteading and other plans for libertarian utopias, which in turn bring us to another disturbing aspect of this story. While I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here, when you read the proposals from people pushing these sovereign states of unlimited freedom, one common refrain is that there should be no age of consent. There is no context in which this is not troubling, but as part of a larger pattern, it is particularly damning.

 Though they are two distinct groups, there’s a great deal of interconnection between the George Mason libertarians and the Silicon Valley alt-right. They share many common roots and have a symbiotic relationship and something of a mutual admiration society. Tyler Cowen, in particular, has done more than his share to build up the reputations of people like Elon Musk.

Here's some relevant context on tech bro culture.

Becca Lewis writing for the Guardian:  

At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote the longtime technology journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s”.

Their voices were largely drowned out by the techno-enthusiasts of the time, but Malone and Borsook were pointing to a vision of Silicon Valley built around a reverence for unlimited male power – and a major pushback when that power was challenged. At the root of this reactionary thinking was a writer and public intellectual named George Gilder. Gilder was one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal evangelists, as well as a popular “futurist” who forecasted coming technological trends. In 1996, he started an investment newsletter that became so popular that it generated rushes on stocks from his readers, in a process that became known as the “Gilder effect”.

Gilder was also a longtime social conservative who brought his politics to Silicon Valley. He had first made his name in the 1970s as an anti-feminist provocateur and a mentee of the conservative stalwart William F Buckley. At a time when women were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, he wrote books that argued that traditional gender roles needed to be restored, and he blamed social issues such as poverty on the breakdown of the nuclear family. (He also blamed federal welfare programs, especially those that funded single mothers, claiming they turned men into “cuckolds of the state”). In 1974, the National Organization for Women named him “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year”; Gilder wore it as a badge of pride.

 

 As far as I can tell, there’s nothing innate to libertarian philosophy that leads one to have a problem with women, and I certainly don’t want to generalize about its followers. But there is definitely something going on with the George Mason/Silicon Valley chapters of the movement, and it’s getting difficult to ignore.