Schrödinger's Feminism — The Oscillating Position

A coherent position is one that can be held in front of an observer and remain the same shape. Galileo's claim that the earth moves was a coherent position: cross-examination by the Inquisition did not change it, and his interlocutors could agree or disagree with the same proposition each time they returned to it.

A great deal of contemporary feminist political rhetoric is not coherent in that sense. It is a superposition — two contradictory propositions held simultaneously, with the position the observer encounters depending on which question is being asked. This is not a failure of the rhetoric. It is the operating mode of the rhetoric. The shorthand for this on the internet is Schrödinger's feminism: the cat is alive and dead until you look.

This essay is not an argument against any individual position. It is an observation about the structural shape of the discourse, and about what that structural shape does to the possibility of honest engagement.

The catalogue

A partial list, restricted to claim-pairs that appear in the same publications and from the same speakers, often within the same paragraph:

• Women are fully equal to men in every respect — and — women require special legal, educational, and economic protections that men do not require, indefinitely
• Women are strong, capable, and need no protection — and — all men are responsible for women's safety in public space
• Women want career independence above all else — and — the gap between women's revealed preferences (part-time work, lower-stress roles) and high-status career outcomes is itself evidence of structural injustice
• Female sexuality is empowerment expressed — and — female sexuality is a vulnerability requiring societal accommodation
• Women should not need a man — and — the shortage of marriageable men is a male-caused societal failure
• Men and women are biologically indistinguishable in capability — and — female-specific health, wellness, and reproductive concerns require dedicated infrastructure men do not need
• Catcalling and approach behaviour from men is unwanted aggression — and — the contemporary collapse of male initiative in courtship is a male failing
• Equality of opportunity is the demand — and — measured equality of outcome is the only acceptable proof that the demand is met

A note on steelmanning. Several of the pairs above can, by a charitable interpreter, be parsed as non-contradictory: "equal in intrinsic worth, with different practical needs," or "strong in capacity but vulnerable in specific public contexts." The steelman parse is not unavailable to the position; a coherent observer can construct it. The structural problem is that the public articulation of the position does not stabilise on the steelman. The steelman is invoked when the contradiction is named, then released when the political work resumes. The pattern is not that the contradiction has no resolution; the pattern is that the contradiction's resolution is withdrawn as soon as the question moves on. The steelman is a temporary defensive structure, not the held position.

With that qualification, the taxonomic point holds: the collapse happens at the moment of measurement. The observer asks the question, and the wave-function resolves to whichever pole is unfavourable to the observer's challenge. Then the observer leaves, the wave-function reopens, and the next observer encounters the other pole.

Why this works

The mechanism has a name in twentieth-century political theory: strategic ambiguity. The doctrine — traceable in the dialectical materialist tradition, and associated with the Frankfurt School's immanent critique — holds that the goal of political rhetoric is not the propagation of true propositions but the achievement of political ends, and that a position that can occupy contradictory shapes as needed is operationally stronger than one that cannot.

The Vedic tradition has a parallel: maya — in the Advaita Vedanta reading, the power that makes the non-dual substrate appear as a multiplicity, the world's tendency to show the seeker different faces depending on which side of the seeker is doing the looking. The classical recommendation is to look past the maya to the stable substrate. The strategic-ambiguity discourse inverts this: the goal is not to dispel the duality but to weaponise it.

The result is a position with two features:

1. Survivability under cross-examination — any specific challenge is met with whichever pole rebuts the challenge most cleanly
2. Unfalsifiability — there is no observation about the world that could in principle disprove the position, because the position is whichever shape the observation requires it to be

This is the same epistemic shape Karl Popper identified in psychoanalytic and Marxist discourse over six decades ago (his Conjectures and Refutations, 1963, is the canonical treatment — PDF, errorstatistics.com). The shape is older than feminism and survives in many other political and ideological positions; it is named here because it is currently the most consequential carrier of the pattern at the level of mass culture.

What this does to engagement

A man (or woman) attempting to engage the position in good faith encounters a problem that has no good-faith solution. The categories of response available are:

• Pin the position down — produces the immediate complaint that the questioner is failing to understand the nuance (this is the cover term for the superposition)
• Accept the position as currently stated — produces the next observer encountering the contradicting pole and treating the present interlocutor as having misrepresented the position
• Disengage — is treated as confession that the questioner has no answer, since the wave-function reopens behind the disengager

The structural shape of the position is a refusal of the conditions under which contradiction can be productive. Without a stable position to disagree with, there is no disagreement, and therefore no movement.

This is, on the framework of this site, the cultural-rhetorical mirror of the depletion system documented in the physiological register. Both produce a state in which the conditions for orientation — for the cultivation discipline at the physiological level, for honest contestation at the discursive level — are continuously displaced, and in which the displacement is rendered invisible to the person being displaced.

What this is not an argument for

It is not an argument that women, individually or collectively, are dishonest. The structure described above is a property of the discourse, not of the individuals who participate in it. Many women who use the rhetorical patterns described here would, on examination, hold a stable underlying position; the superposition is supplied by the discourse, not by them.

It is not an argument that no part of the feminist tradition is salvageable as a stable position. The historical demands that produced the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century suffrage and property-rights movements were coherent positions in the Galileo sense, defensible under cross-examination, and were granted on those terms. The argument here is about the contemporary form, not the historical tradition.

It is not an argument for the symmetrical position from the other side. The "men's rights" rhetorical environment has its own Schrödinger patterns and is not the recommended alternative.

What follows

The classical traditions documented across this site describe a paired cultivation discipline — male brahmacharya, female rajas conservation, each oriented toward the sage and the oracle function respectively at its highest expression. The discipline assumes that both poles can name their positions clearly and engage from those positions.

When one pole's discourse occupies a structurally ambiguous shape, the paired discipline cannot complete. The first step toward whatever pairing replaces the present situation is the recovery, by either pole, of the capacity to say a thing and continue to mean it five minutes later.

The rest is downstream.