> Your gender equality is made of petroleum.

That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?

I think the idea is that rights for women (along with other traditionally disadvantaged groups) are only sustainable in a prosperous society driven by cheap energy, and that as soon as resources become scarce, there will be a powerful revanchist backlash aimed at rolling things back to a more patriarchal and traditionalist way of life.

I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.

The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”