Guided by these common-sense principles, the European Union therefore banned the sale of single-use plastic straws and cutlery in 2021. The initiative is commendable, except that it curiously omits another disposable item, just as polluting and likewise inserted into the bodies of its users: the tampon applicator. The omission is all the more striking given that an applicator contains, on average, four to five times as much plastic as a simple straw. Worse still, even before the straw ban, a European Commission study had already painted an alarming picture: on European beaches, pollution from menstrual products exceeded that from straws. How, then, can the preferential treatment afforded to tampons be explained?

The LFE offers an answer so obvious as to be almost boring: leftism is the political expression of female preferences. Female comfort therefore naturally takes precedence over environmentalism. This interpretation is further supported by market research. In the United States in particular, tampons with applicators accounted for 91% of sales in 2005, with almost two-thirds featuring a plastic applicator. Even in France, where they have traditionally been less popular than across the Atlantic, they still accounted for 65% of the market in 2014. Women therefore regard tampons with applicators as more convenient and more hygienic than their alternatives. Yet nothing would in principle prevent these devices from being made from materials more sustainable than plastic.

The industry has in fact already tried to adapt by offering cardboard applicators or compostable alternatives. These environmentally friendly solutions, however, run into a wall: women reject them. A comparative study, for example, asked around one hundred women to rate eighteen models of vaginal applicator. Where did the only cardboard model rank? Dead last. Unsurprisingly, the top spots went to smooth plastic applicators. Needless to say, the market will not save the environment.

To keep up appearances, the European Union nevertheless resigned itself to regulating tampons. Not by banning plastic applicators, but by requiring brands to indicate their presence with a logo displayed on the packaging. Thus, whenever female comfort is at stake, leftism prefers awareness-raising to coercion.

Conversely, leftization is sometimes achieved through the rigorous application of environmental principles, provided that they penalise a male preference. The ban on plastic plates and cutlery, for example, complicates the daily lives of young single men by depriving them of a pragmatic means of escaping the chore of washing up. Even the ban on single-use plastic bags can be interpreted through the LFE as an alignment with female preferences. After all, it forces both men and women to bring their own bag when shopping. Yet carrying a bag remains, even today, a behaviour strongly associated with femininity. A French researcher has even quantified this phenomenon in an urban setting. His findings are unequivocal: on the street, 94% of the women observed were carrying a bag, compared with barely 46% of the men.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the bags carried by women were handbags, carried over the shoulder, in the hand, or in the crook of the elbow. The female bag therefore ties up at least one hand or restricts movement. Men, by contrast, favoured backpacks and laptop bags worn across the body. That is, bags that are more likely to leave both hands free. But what does the ban on disposable plastic bags actually accomplish? It forces everyone to anticipate their purchases and, as a result, to burden themselves with a tote bag or a bag for life when shopping. These bags are also generally carried by hand or over the shoulder, rather than across the body or on the back. The ban therefore penalises the man who, with his hands in his pockets, normally carries nothing but his phone, keys and bank card. In short, it encourages everyone to adopt a feminine behaviour. Exactly as the LFE predicts.

Before answering this question, a few amusing observations are worth making. First, the axis running from pet to food is oriented from left to right, in almost too perfect an agreement with the LFE. Next, the cat is positioned furthest to the left on the poster, as though to confirm its status as the most leftist pet one can own. Finally, which animal sits furthest to the right? The duck: a bird certainly appreciated by women for its cuteness, but one that no one is particularly reluctant to eat. Especially during the holiday season.

The image nevertheless contains an obvious inversion that will escape no lover of gastronomy: the rabbit appears to the left of the horse. Yet, of the two meats, horse meat is clearly the one that has already disappeared from our plates. In France alone, in 2025, households consumed ten times more rabbit meat than horse meat. Horse-meat consumption even fell twentyfold between 1970 and 2020, which says it all. It therefore took less than fifty years to move the horse from food to pet.

This cultural evolution has nevertheless yet to find expression in law. In France, a bill did indeed propose reclassifying the horse as a “companion animal”, but it has so far failed to pass. Its stated objective? Quite simply to ban the slaughter of horses and the consumption of their meat. In short, formally drawing the line to the right of the equid. Had this measure managed to prevail, it would have swept aside, with a wave of the hand, a well-documented anthropological reality: human beings have been eating horse meat for more than 480,000 years. By contrast, horses have been used as draught animals or mounts for barely 5,000 years. How, then, can this rather recent sacralization of the horse be explained?

The LFE offers an answer almost too simple to be true: leftism is the political expression of female preferences. If this hypothesis is correct, the leftization of modern societies should then be accompanied by a progressive alignment of eating habits with those same preferences. Yet all surveys agree on one point: women are far more reluctant than men to eat horse meat. In France, in particular, a 2012 Ipsos MORI survey showed that only 39% of women considered it acceptable to eat, compared with more than 61% of men. These disparities are in fact by no means unique to France and can be observed identically in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Female attachment to equids can also be seen in the changing demographics of horse-riding participants. Still in France, the share of women among licensed members of equestrian clubs rose from 53.4% in 1975 to nearly 85% in 2022. It was therefore at the precise moment when horse riding established itself as an eminently female pastime that the horse disappeared from our plates. Funny coincidence.

There is, however, one major omission from the original poster: fish, and salmon in particular. Why this omission? Because without salmon, women would have to bid farewell to a dish they are particularly fond of, namely sushi. Indiscriminately banning all animal flesh, fish included, would therefore push female attraction to living things far beyond its natural range. The vegetarian diet consequently does not maximize the level of leftism. Rather, it is a synthetic diet in the sense of the the previous essay on leftist inconsistency: a rationalization that ultimately contradicts the preferences it initially claimed to defend.

What, then, of the vegan diet? It is more extreme still than vegetarianism, since it goes so far as to prohibit the consumption of eggs and milk. Suffice it to say that, to comply with it, women would have to give up the cupcakes, lattes, fruit tarts, and other cheesecakes they adore. And that is without even considering the fact that it is neither practical nor healthy. Thus, rather than being leftist, the vegan diet is so synthetic that it ultimately turns against women’s everyday pleasures. It is therefore a communist diet, in a very precise sense, belonging to radical environmentalism.

As for the most puritanical version of veganism, namely raw veganism, it advocates an exclusively raw diet and proves so extreme that even leftism now openly fights it. Its leading French promoter, Thierry Casasnovas, is moreover being prosecuted for quackery. Leftism therefore does not even tolerate its own synthetic excesses.

So where does leftism draw the line? To the right of the horse, obviously, while at the same time making sure to reduce the consumption of red meat, processed meats, and barbecue-grilled meat. After all, these foods are consumed by men up to twice as much as by women. It is therefore flexitarianism that embodies the most leftist diet.

As proof, campaigns encouraging people to consume ever more fish and white meat, and less red meat, are multiplying across all social-liberal societies. France goes further still, requiring school canteens to serve at least one vegetarian meal per week. One vegetarian day a week for leftism, then, versus every day for syntheticism. As for the rabbit, women regularly describe it as “cute” and “adorable”. Rabbit-meat lovers should therefore hurry to stock up before it disappears in turn. At least if the LFE is correct.

Each of these inconsistencies is then paraded like a trophy: a kind of gotcha supposedly capable, all by itself, of invalidating the opposing camp’s ideology. To its critics, the inconsistent nature of leftism proves that it ultimately does not deserve to be taken seriously. And yet, this charge of hypocrisy does not trouble its supporters in the slightest. Leftism mobilizes, legislates, and continues to shape society as though nothing were amiss.

This raises a question: can leftism rationalize itself without betraying itself? The purpose of this article is to show that it cannot. If, as the LFE claims, leftism is the political expression of female preferences, then the rational application of any grand principle will inexorably end up conflicting with those female preferences. Even when that grand principle was itself deduced from the LFE, that is, from female preferences themselves.

The defense of biodiversity, an obviously female interest, is one such example. From a strictly rational and ecological standpoint, that is, setting our emotional responses aside, it is in fact insects and other invertebrates that play the most fundamental role in sustaining ecosystems. By comparison, mammals occupy a far more secondary place within them. If leftism applied its defense of biodiversity consistently, it should therefore protect insects first and foremost.

Yet women do not generally like insects. Whether spiders, cockroaches, or other arthropods, these small creatures that crawl, sting, or buzz trigger a visceral reaction of fear or disgust in a large proportion of women. Conversely, cute mammals such as the fox, hedgehog, or squirrel, the seal, or the dolphin, as well as small, colorful, melodious birds, are particularly prized by women.

If the LFE is correct, it is therefore these popular species, rather than those that are ecologically useful or genuinely threatened, that leftism should protect first. Leftist choices would ultimately be driven not by reason, but by female preferences themselves. Is that in fact the case?

That, at any rate, is what the European LIFE programme appears to show: projects devoted to protecting vertebrates receive up to six times more funding than those devoted to invertebrates. Once this gap is adjusted for the number of species concerned, the disproportion becomes simply enormous, amounting to several hundredfold.

Even other principles to which leftism lays claim, such as the precautionary principle or the protection of public health, do not in fact stand a chance against female preferences. The example of neonicotinoids is revealing in this respect. This class of insecticides was initially introduced in the 1990s as a less toxic alternative to older products, as well as a means of promoting so-called precision agriculture. Neonicotinoids would thereby have reduced health risks for mammals and farmers, without compromising agricultural production. These substances do, however, have one major flaw: they kill a social and matriarchal insect particularly prized by women, namely, the honey bee.

It was therefore by invoking the risks posed to pollinating species, including honey bees, that the European Union decided to severely restrict the use of neonicotinoids. The argument appears consistent, except that the vast majority of pollinating species are wild. Solitary bees, which are less prized by women, thus contribute far more to pollination than honey bees do. When it comes to protecting these solitary bees, however, leftism becomes much more discreet. Worse still, it even contributes to their decline by constantly favoring the honey bee: beehives installed on the rooftops of large cities, for example, increase competition between species and reduce populations of wild pollinators. Is it therefore biodiversity that motivates these leftist choices or, rather, the female attraction to the honey bee?

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At times, the grand principles in which leftism takes pride nevertheless appear to be applied rationally, that is, as strictly as leftism claims. This is notably the case with opposition to the death penalty, which the European Union in fact imposes as a necessary condition for membership. In France, its prohibition was even enshrined in the Constitution in 2007, which says something. Yet according to the LFE, capital punishment was abolished above all because it conflicts with a strong female preference, not solely out of humanitarian concern.

Indeed, every opinion survey agrees on one point: men support the death penalty far more than women do. Even in the United States, where it remains in force in several states, two-thirds of women prefer life imprisonment without parole, compared with only slightly more than half of men. Moreover, opposition to capital punishment perfectly illustrates what a strongly leftist trait looks like. Whether in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, or Canada, rejection of the death penalty is systematically stronger among left-wing men than among right-wing women.

And yet this female aversion to the death penalty disappears in one specific case: when the victim is a child. A YouGov survey conducted in seven European countries shows, for example, that support for capital punishment soars as soon as the crime in question is the murder of a minor. In the case of child sexual abuse, the gender gap is outright reversed, according to an American study: women suddenly become more punitive than men. If the LFE is correct, modern societies could consequently reintroduce the death penalty, or at the very least life sentences, but only for crimes committed against children. In the meantime, they could settle for making the release of child sex offenders conditional upon chemical castration, even though such a measure conflicts with another principle to which leftism lays claim: bodily autonomy.

If leftism is the political expression of female preferences, a similarly context-sensitive approach should then apply to mandatory minimum sentences, otherwise known as sentencing floors. Yet here again, left-wing movements prefer in practice to invoke grand principles: human rights, rehabilitative rather than punitive justice, individualized sentencing, judicial discretion... Opinion surveys further show that this context-dependent approach to justice is more strongly supported by women than by men, in accordance with the LFE. It is precisely when these leftist principles are applied rationally and uniformly, that is, irrespective of context, that they ultimately come into conflict with female preferences.

In France, for example, the 2007 Dati Act introduced mandatory minimum sentences for all repeat offenders, regardless of the crime they had committed. Then, in the name of a consistent conception of individualized sentencing, these mandatory minimums were ultimately abolished by François Hollande’s left-wing government in 2014, through the Taubira Act. Had the French left remained faithful to the context-sensitive nature of female preferences, however, it would not have abolished all mandatory minimum sentences. Instead, it would have removed those applying to theft, destruction of property, drug offences, urban violence, or ordinary homicides, while preserving, or even strengthening, those applying to rape, violence against minors, domestic violence, and femicide. In other words, minimum sentences should apply primarily to crimes that disproportionately affect women and children, but not to those that disproportionately affect men. If the LFE is correct, a correction in this direction is therefore to be expected.

Such a correction is in fact already underway in Canada. In 2022, Bill C-5 abolished mandatory minimum sentences, notably for drug- and firearm-related offences. A few years later, as expected, Canada adopted legislation moving in the opposite direction through the Protecting Victims Act, or Bill C-16. The long title of the legislation is already enough to grasp its scope: “child protection, gender-based violence, court delays and other measures.” Bill C-16 thus reintroduces mandatory minimum sentences where the LFE predicts them, that is, for crimes targeting women and children. Canada is therefore undergoing a genuine reversal, in apparent contradiction with the grand principles in which leftism ordinarily takes pride.

How do left-wing movements justify this reversal? In addition to protecting children, by claiming that they seek to combat reoffending. Yet the statistics are clear: almost everywhere, perpetrators of sexual offences return less often before the courts than perpetrators of ordinary violence, theft, or property offences.

In Canada, in particular, five years after their release, 25.4% of sexual offenders and 23.6% of homicide offenders had been convicted of a new offence, compared with 54.2% of assault offenders and 63.6% of property offenders. Yet it is sex offenders, or anyone who targets women and children, that leftism treats as guilty for life: no individualized treatment is therefore owed to them. Not even once they have served their sentences, moreover, as illustrated by the sex offender registries found in various Western countries. Measures which, incidentally, have no equivalent for non-sexual violence primarily affecting other men.

Rather than proving the inconsistent nature of leftism, might these laws not simply be seeking to protect the most vulnerable? That is difficult to believe in light of the following fact. In Canada, femicide is now classified as first-degree murder and, as such, carries a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty-five years in prison. By contrast, infanticide committed by a mother who kills her newborn child immediately after giving birth carries no mandatory minimum term of imprisonment. Worse still, this crime is punishable by a maximum sentence of five years, five times less than the mandatory minimum sentence imposed for femicide.

This curious asymmetry can also be found in Sweden, where femicide carries a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years in prison, compared with a maximum sentence of six years for maternal infanticide. Even Italy is gradually falling into line with this logic, now punishing femicide by at least twenty-four years in prison, but maternal infanticide by no more than twelve. According to leftism, then, the murder of a newborn child by its mother would be far less serious than the murder of a woman by her partner. The monopoly of pregnancy thus prevails even over the mandatory minimum sentences imposed for crimes against children.

What should be concluded from these examples? Quite simply that, by disregarding context, the rational application of a grand principle ultimately comes into conflict with female preferences that are just as important. Even when that grand principle was itself deduced from the LFE. The categorical rejection of mandatory minimum sentences, for example, ceases to be leftist as soon as it results in exempting criminals who have assaulted women or children. Except, of course, when the criminal is a mother who has committed infanticide against her newborn child.

To remain aligned with female preferences, leftism is therefore forced to amend its own prescriptions at a level of detail bordering on the absurd. Every female preference neglected thus far calls for a new exception, leading to an accumulation of increasingly meticulous and asymmetric legislation. Ideal leftism thus resembles less a coherent ideology, developed deductively and uniformly, than a disjoint aggregate of ad hoc decisions: a kind of fractal whose level of detail continues to increase as leftization progresses.

Consequently, as the world becomes more leftist, regulations proliferate excessively while growing ever more contradictory. This is the price to be paid for representing female preferences as faithfully as possible. In our modern societies, this normative inflation manifests itself notably in the disproportionate growth of bureaucracy, the multiplication of regulatory bodies, and the continuous increase in the complexity of legal texts. In France alone, the Penal Code grew from 78,946 words in 2003 to 141,264 words in 2025, while the Civil Code expanded from 145,454 to 192,277 words over the same period. Moreover, it is the most leftist codes that have undergone this normative inflation most severely.

More abstractly, the level of leftism of a political expression is not stable under particularization: adding an apparently innocuous detail is sometimes enough to reverse entirely the political orientation of an initially leftist decision. What, then, determines this political orientation? Whether or not it aligns with female preferences. In other words, leftism may be inconsistent at the level of its justifications, but it remains remarkably consistent at the level of the preferences it embodies. The example of butterflies is particularly amusing as an illustration of this instability under particularization.

As a reminder, the rational application of biodiversity conservation would force leftism to defend all insects, including spiders and cockroaches. Yet, for obvious reasons, insects are not generically leftist. Honey bees, ladybirds, and butterflies, however, are particularly prized by women: they are therefore leftist. Indeed, it is for butterflies that the difference in appreciation between men and women is the greatest, both among children and among adults. If leftism is as context-sensitive and dependent upon female preferences as the LFE claims, this female attraction to butterflies should be reflected in conservation policies.

A large-scale European study confirms this. By comparing the butterfly species actually protected by law with those whose protection would be justified on ecological grounds, the researchers identified a striking bias: legislators primarily protect the most beautiful butterflies. Thus, one quarter of the twenty butterfly species judged the most “charismatic” enjoy institutional protection, compared with none of those selected according to strictly scientific criteria. The European Union, for example, generously funds the conservation of the marsh fritillary, a pretty butterfly with mottled wings, even though the species is classified only as “least concern” by the IUCN. Across the Atlantic, it is the highly photogenic monarch that has been elevated into an icon of conservation.

When it comes to protecting moths, by contrast, leftism becomes much more discreet. Yet moths belong to the same biological order as butterflies, are up to nine times more numerous, and perform ecological functions that are just as important. What is their crime? Being brown, hairy, and fluttering around lamps. In short, looking like insects and, consequently, being less appreciated by women.

Such an analysis could, moreover, be pursued indefinitely, precisely because adding an apparently innocuous detail is sometimes enough to reverse a female preference. The level of leftism itself therefore reverses along with it. Species prized by women and perceived as “glamorous,” such as the luna moth or the Spanish moon moth, will thus continue to receive subsidies. As for the others, such as the clothes moth, they should soon find themselves consigned to the dustbin of biodiversity.

In summary, leftist choices are not determined by grand abstract principles, but by a much more down-to-earth criterion: their alignment with female preferences. Yet female preferences cannot be deduced from a system of axioms. They compete with one another, shift in priority depending on the circumstances, and sometimes hinge on seemingly innocuous details. In other words, they are contextual rather than deductive. Yet male preferences are contextual too. Should rightisms not, in turn, be inconsistent as well?

Except that the two sexes do not handle their preferences in the same way. Who, for example, feels the greater need to formalize their tastes into grand principles: men or women? To systematize the world? To turn an intuition into a general rule, then demand that this rule be applied all the way to its most extreme logical consequences? Statistically, men do. None of this, of course, says anything about the respective cognitive abilities of the two sexes. It merely underscores that men and women use reason differently.

Several studies in differential psychology confirm this difference. In particular, men score higher than women in systemizing, that is, the propensity to analyze or construct systems governed by strict rules. Women, by contrast, score higher on empathy, understood as the ability to identify the mental states of others and respond to them appropriately. This contrast extends even to occupational choices: men gravitate more toward careers centered on things, whereas women gravitate more toward people. Female preferences are thus less amenable to rationalization into abstract systems and depend more heavily on the context in which they are expressed.

Under the LFE, this lower female propensity for systemizing translates directly to the societal level: leftism is not a coherent ideology and was never meant to be one in the first place. Believing that merely exposing its contradictions would be enough to discredit it, as though they amounted to a gotcha, is therefore a mistake. Female preferences determine leftist choices, not the grand principles invoked after the fact to justify them. Leftism therefore cannot rationalize itself without betraying itself.

This incoherent nature of leftism gives rise to the concept of synthetic leftism. A political expression is said to be synthetic when it rationalizes a natural female preference or pushes it beyond its natural bounds. Like fully leftist expressions, synthetic expressions can take shape in law, cultural norms, or the marketplace. But because they reflect less faithfully the female preference from which they derive, they do not necessarily maximize the level of leftism. The most leftist political expression is therefore not always the most radical or the most restrictive.

The leftist conception of breastfeeding provides a good example. The most leftist position is not to impose breastfeeding on all mothers, but to promote it both culturally and materially. Requiring a woman to breastfeed her newborn would indeed amount to interfering in her reproductive choices and, consequently, calling her monopoly of pregnancy into question. Such an obligation would push the preference for breastfeeding to excess, to the point of turning it against other, equally important female preferences. It would therefore constitute a synthetic expression, less leftist than merely encouraging breastfeeding.

Nothing, however, prevents leftism from imposing constraints relating to breastfeeding, provided that they do not bear directly on female choice. Leftism thus requires companies to provide dedicated facilities for breastfeeding. European law goes so far as to require manufacturers of infant formula to include on their packaging a statement concerning the superiority of breastfeeding. The constraint therefore does not disappear: it is shifted onto third parties tasked with facilitating female choice.

As a final example, the Right to Roam of the Nordic and Baltic countries likewise illustrates the synthetic nature of rationalized political expressions. This common right of access grants everyone the freedom to enjoy forests, lakes, rivers, and other natural riches, including when they are located on private property. Without completely abolishing private property, the Right to Roam thus considers that nature belongs to no particular individual, but rather to the community as a whole. It is indeed a leftist measure, since it answers two complementary female interests: an attraction to communal sharing and a taste for naturalness. Incidentally, the Right to Roam also allows itself to trespass upon the private property of a typically male place that nevertheless has nothing natural about it: golf courses.

Leftism nevertheless ensures that the communal sharing permitted by the Right to Roam stops exactly where women wish to draw the line: at the intimacy of the private sphere. This common right of access therefore does not include gardens and vegetable gardens adjoining homes, nor the terraces, swimming pools, or children’s play areas of private residential developments. For such an extension, rather than merely making nature accessible to everyone, would allow strangers to intrude into the spaces where women live, rest, or let their children play. Extending the Right to Roam to these spaces would therefore push one female preference to the extreme at the expense of all the others. It would consequently constitute synthetic leftism, that is, a less leftist measure. Better still: a communist measure in a generalized sense.

What should we retain from this? First, as the example of the butterflies showed, that the degree of leftism of a political expression is not stable under particularization. In other words, the addition of an apparently innocuous detail can radically alter its degree of leftism. Second, that the degree of leftism of a political expression does not depend on its radicality, but on the fidelity with which it satisfies a female preference. Radicalizing a measure therefore does not necessarily make it more leftist. By rationalizing a female preference, that is, by requiring it to be applied consistently to every particular case falling under the same general principle, synthetism precisely denies this instability under particularization. In doing so, it opposes one of the fundamental properties of leftism: its incoherence. Leftism is not a coherent ideology and was never meant to be one.

One should therefore expect synthetic expressions to disappear as leftization progresses. The further leftism advances, the less weight its grand principles should carry in practice. Describing leftism as incoherent is therefore not false; it merely fails to understand that its contradictions do not refute it. Quite the opposite: they indicate that it is, before anything else, the political expression of natural female interests and behaviours.

Yet the government itself acknowledges that no study has so far established a causal link between energy-drink consumption and declining academic performance. Why, then, is leftism still so eager to legislate? According to the LFE, the reason is simple: energy drinks represent a predominantly male preference, one that women largely do not share.

To see why, one need only note that energy drinks are marketed as performance-enhancing products. It is hardly surprising, then, that their advertising primarily targets fans of extreme sports, motorsports, competitive video games and bodybuilding. In short, young men intent on pushing their limits. The statistics readily confirm this: in England, one survey found that 29.3% of boys had consumed at least one can during the previous week, compared with only 18.1% of girls. The same asymmetry appears in France, in the United States and even in Finland. Energy drinks, in other words, clearly belong to a far more masculine than feminine world.

Can we find a female counterpart that leftism would favour? We need not look far: Starbucks lattes, Frappuccinos, ultra-sugary iced coffees and bubble teas all fill that role. According to a study of Quebec adolescents, these fancy coffee drinks are in fact the leading source of caffeine among teenage girls, far ahead of energy drinks.

Under the LFE, these differences in preference translate directly to the societal level: energy drinks are thus rightist, whereas fancy coffee drinks are plainly leftist. A public-health policy dictated by leftism should therefore target the former while showing greater leniency towards the latter. Yet caffeine does not change its chemical nature depending on whether it comes with taurine or pumpkin-spice syrup. From a public-health standpoint, only the dose of caffeine consumed should therefore matter. A consistent application of the precautionary principle would therefore impose the same restrictions on Monster cans and Starbucks cups. Yet here again, it is female preference that seems to dictate the direction taken by modern societies.

More specifically, the proposed British legislation would ban the sale to under-sixteens of any drink containing more than 150 milligrams of caffeine per litre. With two exceptions, of course: tea and coffee. Once one examines the caffeine concentrations involved, however, these exemptions seem to have no basis at all. A can of Red Bull, for example, contains 80 mg of caffeine per 250 ml, or 320 mg/L. How much caffeine, by comparison, do the drinks favoured by women contain?

A standard Starbucks Tall Caffè Latte contains 89.1 mg of caffeine per roughly 355 ml, or 251 mg/L. A single serving of such a coffee therefore already delivers more caffeine than an entire can of Red Bull. Better still, in the Reserve range, the caffeine content of the same Tall Latte rises to 115.6 mg per serving, bringing its concentration to nearly 326 mg/L. Its concentration is therefore virtually identical to that of Red Bull, but its total dose is considerably higher. Even the Tall Matcha Green Tea Cream Frappuccinos, with a caffeine concentration of 151 mg/L, already exceed the threshold set by the proposed British legislation. As for bubble teas, they contain an average of 130 mg of caffeine per serving, or 320 mg/L: exactly the same concentration as a Red Bull, for a total dose more than 60% higher. Yet leftism still has no intention of banning these highly caffeinated drinks: doing so would mean taking aim at a female preference that has become ubiquitous in popular culture.

This is hardly leftism’s first offence. For more than a decade now, under the guise of fighting obesity and diabetes, Western societies have been taxing sodas and drinks containing added sugars. More than sugar itself, what leftism penalizes here is precisely its added character, that is, its artificiality. The idea, of course, being to satisfy the female preference for naturalness.

So-called “naturally sweetened” fruit juices are thus conveniently exempt from sugar taxes. Even when their sugar content exceeds that of a Coca-Cola. Apple juice, grape juice and cranberry juice are all cases in point. In the United Kingdom, Frappuccinos and bubble teas have likewise long enjoyed this preferential treatment, leftism oblige. France’s tax code, meanwhile, reads like something out of a meme: it explicitly exempts soups, puréed soups, broths... and soy-based drinks from its sugar tax. In short, the very drinks women tend to prefer.

What are we to conclude? That public health and the protection of children do not explain the decisions of liberal societies nearly as well as the LFE does. Even if science and public-health concerns matter, leftist choices appear to be governed above all by the need to accommodate female preferences. Monster and Coke will therefore have to keep footing the bill for the lattes and bubble teas.

At first glance, these questions seem absurd. Vegetables do not vote, any more than pets or forms of exercise do. Yet, without even needing to define precisely what leftism is, a reader familiar with Western culture wars will intuitively answer: the avocado, the cat, and yoga (perhaps even running). Not boxing, nor the dog, and least of all the potato. But why? Are these merely baseless clichés, or is there a deeper political meaning behind these examples?

The same intuition also appears in more serious fields, such as taxation, environmental policy, public health, or reproductive rights. Western societies, for example, are more willing to tax beer than wine. When it comes to drugs, cannabis and natural psychedelics benefit from growing leniency, while cocaine and anabolic steroids remain criminalized. Similarly, modern societies relentlessly target supercars and private aviation, while sparing fast fashion and the cosmetics industry, even though these too are extremely polluting. Could everyday objects, then, possess a political orientation capable of influencing regulation in modern societies?

At the very least, it is remarkable that Western societies tend to concern themselves with the same questions and to provide relatively similar answers to them. Yet, in theory, the diversity of possible political movements is almost infinite. It is therefore as though rich, free, and safe societies were gradually converging toward the same ideal form of social organization. Moreover, this ideal, difficult to define though immediately recognizable, does not really correspond to movements usually described as far-left. Rather, it resembles the natural extension of contemporary social-liberal societies. In practice, it is this extension that corresponds to the intuitive idea of leftism.

With this intuitive notion of leftism in mind, the answers to the three initial questions already seem less far-fetched. First, the avocado, the cat, and yoga all three correspond to female preferences. More feminine, at any rate, than boxing, the dog, or the potato. Second, if these answers do indeed possess a political meaning, that meaning cannot remain confined to the individual level. It must also be embodied at the societal level, that is, in cultural norms, consumption patterns, regulations, or their convenient absence. In other words, it is not so much the objects themselves that are leftist as the political and cultural expressions associated with them.

The Left-Female Equivalence (LFE):

- Leftism is the political expression of natural female interests and behaviors.

- Natural female interests and behaviors are the individual expression of leftism.

The LFE means neither that all women are leftists nor that feminism is identical to leftism. Nor does it imply that leftism always serves women’s interests, or even that it is necessarily favorable to them. After all, a natural behavior can very well harm the person who expresses it. What the LFE asserts is the existence of a correspondence between two levels of expression: on the one hand, female preferences at the individual level, which manifest themselves through behaviors, tastes, sensitivities, forms of sociability, or consumption habits; on the other, leftism at the societal level, which expresses itself through laws, institutions, cultural norms, markets, and political trade-offs. Femininity thus expresses locally what leftism expresses globally, and vice versa.

Moreover, the notion of leftism defined by the LFE acts as the limit toward which social-liberal societies converge. It is this convergence, whose mechanism is justified below, that makes the notion of leftism legitimate.

The term “natural” nevertheless requires an important clarification. Here, it refers to behaviors and preferences that reveal themselves in minimally constrained environments. In poor, violent, or authoritarian societies, individual choices are indeed largely masked by the imperatives of survival. Conversely, in rich, free, and safe societies, these constraints disappear: everyone becomes free to express what suits them best, rather than conforming to what the environment imposes on them. This is also the mechanism that explains the famous gender-equality paradox: the freer and more egalitarian societies become, the more pronounced the differences between men and women become.

In practice, how is the LFE to be used? By matching female preferences, whether revealed by surveys, market research, scientific studies, or simply by intuition, with cultural norms, markets, and regulations characteristic of social-liberal societies. More precisely, according to the LFE, the ordering of female preferences at the individual level is perfectly transposed to the political level, and vice versa. Thus, if women do indeed prefer cats to dogs, and if this preference genuinely reflects a natural sensitivity, then social-liberal societies should treat cats more favorably than dogs. In particular, this should manifest itself through lighter regulation and a reluctance to regard cats as an ecological problem.

Self-report surveys confirm the intuition that cats are a female interest. In France, for example, in a YouGov/Ma Reduc survey reported by SantéVet, 43% of women report owning at least one cat, compared with 32% who report owning at least one dog. Among men, 36% report owning a cat, compared with 33% a dog, a markedly smaller gap. Keeping a cat as a pet therefore qualifies more readily as a female preference than keeping a dog. By virtue of the LFE, leftism, that is, social-liberal societies, should consequently favor cats rather than dogs at the political level.

Yet many studies show that free-roaming cats kill a considerable number of small birds and mammals each year. At the same time, social-liberal societies present themselves as deeply committed to environmentalism and the protection of biodiversity. If these principles were applied consistently, cats should then be regarded as an invasive species. This would imply, for example, restricting their access to the outdoors, sterilizing them, or even, in certain extreme cases, controlling their populations. Such measures are, moreover, already applied to other invasive species. The United Kingdom, in particular, organizes and funds the culling of gray squirrels to protect the red squirrel. In France, similar policies are pursued against coypu and muskrats, and no one, incidentally, seems to find anything objectionable about them.

When it comes to cats, however, social-liberal societies prove far more reluctant to apply these environmentalist principles. Australia, which does not hesitate to exterminate cane toads, has admittedly established a program dedicated to controlling populations of feral cats. Yet, besides the fact that the people tasked with carrying out this control regularly receive death threats, domestic cats are still neither banned nor subject to mandatory sterilization at the national level. Even in Germany, cats continue to receive more favorable treatment than dogs. The city of Berlin, for example, imposes an annual tax on dog owners, but no equivalent tax on cat owners. In France, the situation is funnier still: in 2020, the country finally decided to protect birds by banning... birdlime hunting. This predominantly male practice consists in coating tree branches with glue in order to capture birds. Yet the birds caught are generally all released at the end of the season. Birdlime hunting therefore does not, in principle, result in the birds’ deaths, unlike domestic cats, which kill millions of them every year. Despite this, no comparable restrictive measure has been taken against cats.

Once again, then, it is the female preference that receives more lenient treatment than its male counterpart. The Left-Female Equivalence asserts that this phenomenon is not accidental but, on the contrary, a universal and defining property of leftism properly understood.

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A more interesting example is that of alcohol taxation. Across social-liberal societies, consumption patterns are remarkably similar: women prefer wine to beer, while men prefer the reverse. As for spirits, with the exception of gin, they remain to this day predominantly masculine rather than feminine products. According to the LFE, wine should therefore be relatively more leftist than beer, which should itself be more leftist than spirits.

Moreover, the World Health Organization reminds us that the risks associated with alcohol begin with the very first drop and depend above all on the quantity of alcohol consumed. Not on the type of beverage. A coherent public health policy should therefore tax beverages according to their alcohol content, that is, spirits more heavily than wine, and wine more heavily than beer. What do social-liberal societies do in practice?

They tax spirits more heavily than wine and beer, as expected. Beer, however, ends up being taxed more heavily than wine, even though it contains half as much alcohol per liter. Better still, within the European Union, wine is completely exempt from excise duty in around ten countries; beer is exempt in none. Even Canada and Australia conform to these European norms, despite neither being historically a wine-producing country. As for the French tax on premixed beverages, officially introduced to combat alcohol consumption among young people, it sounds invented, so absurd does it seem: for an equivalent quantity of alcohol, grapefruit rosé, strawberry red wine, peach white wine, and other feminine premixes are taxed at one-third the rate of masculine premixes such as whisky and Coke.

These amusing examples are not merely anecdotal. Even when the principles to which leftism appeals play a genuine role in political decisions, female preferences remain the final arbiter of their concrete application. If the LFE proves correct, identifying these preferences would make it possible to detect hitherto unknown asymmetries in the norms, markets, and laws of social-liberal societies; but also, and above all, to explain them. Conversely, leftist decisions that contradict the official principles of social liberalism should be explainable by underlying female preferences. In the final analysis, it is therefore not abstract principles that decide the matter, but female preferences translated into political language.

The example of true crime is particularly illuminating in this respect. Nothing in the conventional image of femininity suggested that women would consume narratives of murder, rape, or abduction on a massive scale. Yet the statistics do not lie: crime novels, podcasts, and crime documentaries are predominantly consumed by women. In social-liberal societies, such entertainment is also perceived as educational rather than violent content. By contrast, the fictional violence of action or shooter video games, a more masculine form of entertainment, is much more readily suspected of encouraging very real violence.

At the political level, this asymmetry is reflected, among other things, in age-rating systems. GTA V, for example, is rated PEGI 18, meaning that it is restricted to adults. Even Fortnite, despite its childlike aesthetic and absence of blood, is still rated ESRB Teen, meaning that it is prohibited for children under 13. At the same time, programs such as Faites entrer l’accusé, which unabashedly show bloody crime scenes, are generally deemed unsuitable only for children under 10. The World Health Organization, in its ICD-11 classification, also recognizes intensive video gaming as an addictive disorder. It must be said that this pastime is not especially appreciated by gamers’ female partners or by mothers. But when it comes to describing endless reading sessions, Netflix binges, or the compulsive consumption of crime documentaries as addictive, the WHO is nowhere to be found.

It is this correspondence between women’s attraction to true crime, on the one hand, and the political expressions that favor this form of entertainment, on the other, that makes it possible to conclude: true crime is indeed leftist, and therefore a natural female preference. At least, if the LFE is correct.

Of course, social-liberal societies still remain far from ideal leftism. Yet this distance does not render the LFE useless. If these societies do indeed converge toward this ideal, then the LFE makes it possible to formulate testable predictions. Understanding natural female preferences should therefore make it possible to predict the norms that social-liberal societies will adopt in the future. Returning to violent content, the LFE predicts, for example, that video games will continue to be regulated far more heavily than crime documentaries, notably through strict age-verification systems that will conveniently spare forms of entertainment favored by women. There is no need to wait: an asymmetry of this kind already exists in fiction.

In literature, for example, while true crime is certainly popular among women, romance stands out as their favorite literary genre. Whether in its sanitized young adult version or its more mature new adult variant, these works very often include erotic scenes. Some of these scenes would even be enough to make softcore pornography blush, despite the latter being restricted to those aged sixteen and over. Yet, in Western countries, the distribution of romance novels is subject to no age-rating system comparable to those applied to films or video games. These eroticized texts therefore remain freely accessible to everyone, without any particular restriction, including young teenage girls. The bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, is not even subject to a 13+ age restriction. Nor, for that matter, is the film adaptation, which France saw fit to restrict only to viewers aged twelve and over.

So far, the examples presented have mostly concerned micro-politics: pets, alcoholic beverages, entertainment... hence the temptation to regard them as secondary phenomena, almost unworthy of a general theory of leftism. That would nevertheless be a mistake. Modern societies undergo leftization precisely through the accumulation of minute trade-offs: a tax here, a subsidy there; the strict application of a principle in one case, followed by a reluctance to accept all of its consequences in another. Real-world leftism advances less through grand upheavals than through an infinity of administrative, economic, and cultural micro-adjustments.

Thus, by once again allowing plastic straws and high-flow showerheads, Donald Trump slows leftization more effectively than any ideologue. More importantly, no principle such as equality, environmentalism, public health, or safety can simultaneously explain all of the preceding trade-offs. To account for each case, a new principle would have to be introduced each time, followed by an ad hoc trade-off, before yet another exception came along to contradict the principle that had just been introduced. Leftism would then appear as a stack of thousands of partial and mutually inconsistent justifications. The LFE, by contrast, proposes a single and therefore parsimonious rule. If the LFE is correct, leftism must therefore genuinely be understood as the political expression of natural female interests and behaviors.

To be a complete theory of leftism, however, the LFE cannot limit itself to these everyday objects. It must also be capable of explaining the broad features of social-liberal movements. Support for environmentalism, for example, can be understood as the political expression of an obvious female interest in fauna, flora, and animal welfare. The OECD thus notes that women are more sensitive than men to environmental concerns, both in their consumption choices and in their willingness to recycle. Research in consumer psychology even shows that environmentally friendly behaviors are spontaneously associated with femininity, that is, with leftism. So much so that some men refuse to adopt environmentally friendly behaviors in order to preserve their masculine image.

If the social-liberal conception of environmentalism corresponds to its leftist form, modern societies should then prove more lenient toward pollution generated by female preferences than toward pollution generated by male preferences. The example of fast fashion is paradigmatic in this respect. Of course, an interest in fashion is not exclusive to women. Yet surveys and consumer studies show that women buy clothing more frequently than men, in greater quantities, and even regard shopping as a leisure activity. The women’s press goes so far as to speak of “retail therapy”, which says it all. Moreover, the CO2 emissions of the fashion industry, driven predominantly by fast fashion, are thought to be comparable to those of aviation and maritime transport combined. Thus, even leaving aside chemical pollution and water waste, the constant turnover of collections and the destruction of unsold goods make fast fashion particularly polluting.

What are modern societies doing to combat this pollution? So far, not much. In 2019, the British Parliament considered imposing an additional one-penny tax on every new garment sold: the recommendation was, of course, rejected by the government. In Sweden, a tax on chemical substances found in clothing and footwear was due to enter into force in 2022. It too was abandoned before being implemented. France, for its part, appeared to have adopted a firmer policy in 2024. A so-called anti-fast fashion bill did indeed provide for additional levies on companies in the sector, together with an advertising ban. The Senate, however, considerably weakened the text: it now primarily targets Shein and Temu, but not European retailers. Even the advertising ban was ultimately restricted to influencers alone. Is it really the environment that this ban seeks to protect, or rather the wallets of impressionable young women?

At the same time, Western societies have no difficulty heavily taxing large cars or private business jets. In other words, they have no difficulty making preferences that are more masculine than feminine bear the cost of environmental policies. By contrast, mass tourism enjoys much greater leniency, even though low-cost flights are themselves highly polluting. It must be said that travel now occupies an important place in the female imaginary: girls’ city breaks in Paris or Lisbon, yoga retreats in Bali, weekends in the Nordic countries... popular culture readily regards such trips as an almost obligatory step in the construction of the self. Conversely, more masculine destinations such as Las Vegas, Dubai, Singapore, or Shanghai are much more readily perceived as vulgar. The feminine is refined where the masculine is crude.

Limiting air travel to four flights over a lifetime, as Jean-Marc Jancovici proposes, is therefore nothing particularly leftist. It would amount to applying an environmental principle too consistently and therefore too indifferently to context. Yet female preferences are contextual by nature. As soon as a rule is applied uniformly, it inevitably ends up conflicting with other female preferences, at least as important as the one that inspired it. It is precisely at that point that the measure ceases to be fully leftist.

Radical environmentalism must therefore not be confused with leftism. A perfectly consistent environmentalism would go after not only supercars and private jets, but also fast fashion, mass tourism, cosmetics, hair dyes, pets, cut flowers, hot baths, takeaway lattes, sushi, a large share of home decoration, and even printed books. Such environmentalism might be right according to its own principles, but that would not make it any more leftist. If modern societies are indeed converging toward leftism, their political choices must instead be understood as trade-offs between different female preferences. Not as the ever more rigorous application of the grand principles to which they appeal, including when those grand principles have themselves been derived from the LFE.

This point bears repeating: the consistent and uniform application of a leftist principle is not leftist. Since female preferences are contradictory, leftism is equally so. Environmentalism provided a first example; the precautionary principle provides another. The latter directly echoes a female behavior well documented in psychology: risk aversion. Several meta-analyses indeed show that men engage, on average, in riskier behaviors than women. This difference appears equally in extreme sports, driving, investment choices, drug use, and sexual behavior.

It is hardly surprising, then, that social-liberal societies have sacralized the precautionary principle. The European Union, for example, has enshrined it in its primary law, in Article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. France has even constitutionalized it through Article 5 of its Environmental Charter. It would nevertheless be naive to believe that this principle applies uniformly to the preferences of both sexes. Whenever it comes to obstructing nuclear power, GMOs, pesticides, or any other technology perceived as masculine, the precautionary principle imposes itself as dogma. When it threatens female preferences, however, that same principle becomes curiously much slower to apply, including when the health risks associated with those preferences are obvious.

Everyone knows, for example, that exposure to UV radiation increases the risk of skin cancer. Yet modern societies still hesitate to ban tanning beds. In France, as early as 2012, ANSES considered the existing regulations inadequate and recommended their gradual prohibition. Fourteen years later, nothing has changed. What, then, of the UV lamps used for manicures? Will we have to wait another twenty years and dozens of meta-analyses before their potential danger is finally recognized? Yet this is precisely the kind of case in which the precautionary principle should, in theory, prevail.

If these examples are not mere coincidences, one question remains: why would modern societies converge toward the political expression of female rather than male preferences? After all, a rich, free, and safe environment allows the natural preferences of both sexes to express themselves. Western societies should therefore become more feminine just as much as they become more masculine, perhaps eventually tending toward an equilibrium. Why is this manifestly not the case?

Quite simply because men and women are not symmetrical. More precisely, the preceding objection rests on the idea that men and women differ only in a few preferences involving consumption, taste, or lifestyle. It would then be enough to compare the individual intensity of their respective preferences in order to infer their political influence. Yet evolutionary biology and psychology suggest that male and female preferences differ far beyond their mere content. They also differ in their capacity to aggregate, in the way the group that holds them defends them, and in the solicitude they elicit from others.

A preference can thus be very pronounced at the individual level without carrying any weight at the societal level. To carry political weight, it must also exhibit a certain degree of homogeneity, be capable of aggregating with neighboring preferences, be defended by the group that holds it, and elicit the solicitude of others. Only then can it become institutionalized, either through a law or through the convenient absence of one. It is from these structural asymmetries that the leftward drift emerges.

The first asymmetry is one of homogeneity: female preferences are, overall, less dispersed than male preferences. In differential psychology, the greater male variability hypothesis indeed shows that, for many measured traits, the male distribution spreads more widely around its mean than the female distribution. This difference matters all the more because individuals never vary along a single axis, but across numerous and relatively independent dimensions. A small difference in dispersion, repeated across a large number of relatively independent dimensions, produces considerable overall disparities. It is these small differences in variability that, once compounded, give male profiles a far more heterogeneous character than female profiles.

The second asymmetry is one of solidarity: women show greater solidarity toward other women than men do toward other men. This difference is well documented in social psychology, notably through the sex-specific in-group bias. Evolutionary theories of sexual selection and parental investment provide a complementary explanation: because women bear most of the reproductive cost, beginning with pregnancy, they are more selective in their choice of partner. To be chosen, men must therefore prove their value to the opposite sex. It is this selection pressure that pushes them to compare themselves, arrange themselves into hierarchies, and seek to stand out. In other words, to adopt more competitive and more individualistic behaviors than women.

These two asymmetries, moreover, mutually reinforce one another. On the one hand, female preferences are more homogeneous and aggregate more easily than male preferences. On the other, male preferences are more heterogeneous and compete more strongly with one another. The LFE immediately transposes these differences from the individual level to the societal level, making leftism a relatively unified ideology: a kind of limit-leftism, incoherent in its content yet nevertheless all of a piece. It is this unity that makes it possible to understand the leftward drift as the convergence of modern societies toward this same limit-leftism. It follows that the differences between left-wing movements diminish as each of them advances. To the point that it is now becoming difficult to distinguish Macronian leftism from Justin Trudeau’s Canadian leftism, or from that of the Nordic countries.

Symmetrically, transposing male preferences to the societal level would require a Right-Male Equivalence, that is, a male analogue of the LFE. Yet, because of the asymmetries described above, this equivalence would not give rise to a single rightism. It would instead produce a plurality of competing rightisms. Moreover, sex differences in solidarity and competitiveness make coalitions between these rightisms far more difficult than coalitions between left-wing movements. Thus, according to the LFE, the ease with which left-wing movements form alliances, faced with rival rightisms that struggle to form a united front, follows directly from these two asymmetries. By virtue of its relative unity alone, leftism therefore enjoys a major political advantage in winning the ideological battle.

Why, however, would modern societies converge toward this limit-leftism rather than toward a coexistence between leftism and rightist movements? This is where the third and final asymmetry comes into play: the asymmetry of solicitude. Men show greater solicitude toward female preferences than women do toward male preferences. Whereas the first two asymmetries give leftism its unity, this third one provides its driving force. This asymmetry of solicitude manifests itself notably in the women-are-wonderful effect, that is, the tendency among both men and women to attribute more positive qualities to women than to men. It also appears in more concrete biases, visible even within institutions. At school, for example, girls receive higher grades than boys at comparable levels of performance. In criminal justice, women are less likely to be incarcerated and receive lighter sentences for equivalent offenses. Even in the face of suffering, female distress more readily elicits the empathy and protection of others than male distress.

Here again, evolutionary psychology explains the origin of this asymmetry fairly simply. Because they bear most of the reproductive cost (pregnancy, breastfeeding, and early maternal investment), women are, on average, more selective than men in their choice of partner. Men, if they are to be chosen as partners, do not really have the luxury of ignoring female expectations. They must understand what women desire, what reassures them, what worries them, and what repels them, then adapt their behavior accordingly. By contrast, because they possess a certain monopoly of pregnancy, women can more easily afford to ignore male expectations. The asymmetry of solicitude thus merely transposes, at the individual level, an asymmetry already present in the size, cost, and scarcity of gametes.

As with the other two asymmetries, the LFE immediately transposes this asymmetry of solicitude to the societal level: in a rich, free, and safe society, leftization remains far easier than rightization. All modern societies therefore naturally tend toward the limit-leftism described above. The left rushes toward it with such zeal that its own positions from the early 2000s now appear suspect to it, if not openly reactionary. The various rightisms, for their part, have no choice but to follow the movement with a time lag, resignedly ratifying reforms they had still been fighting only the day before.

In the late 1990s, for example, the French governing left asserted that the PACS would never pave the way for marriage or adoption for same-sex couples. Fourteen years later, François Hollande’s left enacted same-sex marriage. No right-wing movement would dare propose abolishing it today. This is how the leftward drift transforms the radical demands of yesterday’s left into the irreversible gains of today. Until the next leftist demand.

In practice, however, the leftward drift is not realized solely through the introduction of new norms. It also proceeds, and perhaps above all, through selection. Social-liberal societies inherit an immense stock of norms already in place. While some of these rules are amended, weakened, or repealed, others pass through the ages without the slightest difficulty. What do these surviving laws have in common? They align with female preferences, even if only accidentally. It follows that the political orientation of a law cannot necessarily be inferred from its historical motivations. This is also what explains why parties officially opposed to leftism so often end up adopting measures that conform to it.

The German tax on dog owners, which so conveniently spares cat owners, offers a striking illustration of this process of selection. Introduced nearly two centuries ago to replenish municipal coffers, it was obviously never intended to satisfy any particular female preference. Yet this fiscal asymmetry has survived to the present day, even though the proliferation of domestic cats and their ecological impact would provide good reasons to make it symmetrical. Better still, in some places it has even been strengthened through additional taxes on dogs deemed dangerous, but still not on cats. This tax has therefore done more than merely survive the test of time: it has evolved in the direction predicted by the LFE.

Conversely, norms incompatible with female preferences, such as the impossibility of divorce, the prohibition of abortion, or primogeniture, have been abolished almost everywhere. This relative ease of leftization can even be observed in newly adopted norms. How, for example, can a Trump administration combat cocaine trafficking through airstrikes on the one hand, while relaxing the rules surrounding cannabis or psilocybin on the other? Have Republicans suddenly discovered the virtues of psychedelics and the harms of performance-enhancing drugs? Or must we simply recognize that, by force of circumstance, it is always easier to undergo leftization than rightization?

According to the LFE, social-liberal societies should consequently continue to undergo leftization over time. This should occur even in the most trivial corners of everyday life, through the transposition to the societal scale of female preferences observed at the individual scale. Femininity thus expresses locally what leftism expresses globally, and vice versa. It is this correspondence between two levels of expression that the LFE invites us to take seriously. The three initial questions were therefore not absurd at all: while the avocado, the cat, and yoga are not leftist in themselves, the favorable treatment they receive from the cultural norms, markets, and laws of modern societies certainly is. Moreover, this correspondence should appear most clearly in those domains where the natural interests of the two sexes diverge most sharply.

Yet no domain pushes this divergence further than reproduction. It is therefore in reproductive law that the LFE’s explanations and predictions should be most evident. From conception to parentage, by way of abortion, the next article will show that social-liberal societies have in fact already encoded female preferences to a considerable extent in their law. The grand principles usually invoked, such as bodily autonomy, the non-commodification of the body, or the best interests of the child, are not the true driving forces behind these rules. What leftism actually seeks to maximize is women’s decision-making power at every stage of the reproductive process. In other words, leftism aspires to institute a genuine female monopoly of pregnancy.