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Comment by fallingfrog | Hacker News Reader

This is a standard part of feminist theory- basically the idea is that people with no power spend a lot of time wondering what powerful people think, so they tend to have a good understanding of what powerful people think. But people in a privileged position don't really have any need to think about what less powerful people think- so they don't do it. And that's where you get the trope of women being mysterious creatures, whereas women seem to understand men perfectly. The same logic applies to bosses and workers.

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>whereas women seem to understand men perfectly.

Ummmmm, this has not been my experience at all. Women seem as perplexed by men as the other way around. Believing you understand how someone works and thinks is not the same thing as actually understanding how someone works and thinks.

Besides being wrong (just do a google search for "how can I understand men") I find this part of feminist theory to be incredibly sexist.

EDIT: Also, if women did understand men perfectly you would think they would have absolutely no problem getting exactly what they want from men. If I understood someone perfectly, I would absolutely know the best ways to manipulate them. If your statement is true, the fact that women are still unequal in some respects (seats in the boardroom/more opportunity to improve career/etc) would probably mean that women don't want the opportunities they claim they do. After all, if they understood men as well as you claim they would have no problem extracting those opportunities.

If you can't get someone to do what you want, you definitely do not understand them perfectly by any stretch of the terms.

You might start by figuring out if this is really a part of "feminist theory" -- from the use of the word "seem", I don't think it is. If you're going to criticize someone, criticize what they actually say, rather than what they "seem" to think.

As an example: it's been frequently claimed that feminists hate men, but not because a lot of feminists say that they hate men.

I don't know why, but the comment I originally replied to really bothered me and I thought of a simpler example.

If women understood men perfectly, there wouldn't be so many examples of classic male-female miscommunication. AskReddit threads are a testament to this. Take person A who only speaks Chinese and person B who speaks English as a first language as well as perfect Chinese. For some reason they often have misunderstandings, why would this be? Probably because person B doesn't speak Chinese as well as they think.

Sorry but this still bothers me. I'm not going to wade into the gender war so let me put it this way: we are also 'different' in other ways, so misunderstanding is generally not just down to one factor. So is it right to just simplify the attribution to male-female differences? Normal vs neurotypicals. Secular vs religious. White vs non-white. East vs West. Old vs young. Urban vs country. And so on it goes, plus the greys in between, and life experiences and assumptions and beliefs. Every person has a unique combination of these factors, creating a very grey (or colourful if you like) identity.

Then combine this with the time, place and mood the misunderstanding occurred in. Then you will realise that it's too fuzzy to just put it down to a factor such as gender differences ... so what to do? Simples: try not to judge, because at best it is inaccurate and at worse it feeds into the prejudice. It would be far more helpful to take the benefit of doubt while being honest and empathic, because that's the only way the two parties can meet at the centre. If one party refuses to budge, then perhaps just give in! Victories are ultimately a bit petty.

By the way, please don't take this as a holier-than-thou speech, and I'm not condemning you for being so 'simple'. The reality is that all of us are like this, because it's so deeply ingrained and easy, a shortcut in our search for explanation. But for the sake of peace, we can definitely try to rise above it. Honesty and empathy - without the tree-hugging tone.

> if women did understand men perfectly you would think they would have absolutely no problem getting exactly what they want from men

While I agree with the gist of your comment, this is not true. I perfectly understand how roulette works - yet it doesn't help me win. (Unless you're using a very literal meaning of the word "perfectly", like in some laplacian determinism sense.) In fact, we can get all sorts of interesting (probabilistic) understanding about the world, which doesn't provide any information to help us decide.

> people with no power spend a lot of time wondering what powerful people think

While this sounds "obvious", I don't think that someone in financial or personal trouble is spending a lot of time philosophising about what rich people are thinking. They're more likely focused on their problems at hand. But even if I grant you that ...

> so they tend to have a good understanding of what powerful people think

... How does that logically follow from the first statement? Just because someone spends a lot of time thinking about something doesn't mean that they're correct in their conclusions. Conspiracy theorists spend an insane amount of time thinking about what "the powers that be" are thinking about. Does that mean they're correct in their conclusions? No, their conclusions are tainted by their own biases.

> And that's where you get the trope of women being mysterious creatures, whereas women seem to understand men perfectly.

Assuming the trope was actually accurate, how do you explain that powerful women also have the same trait? Why don't very poor men understand women perfectly? It's almost as though evolutionary psychology plays a role, rather than this less-power-makes-you-more-empathetic model.

Also, I don't understand how this isn't a sexist view, saying that "women understand men incredibly well because they spend a lot of time thinking about men, while men don't spend nearly as much time thinking about women."

> The same logic applies to bosses and workers.

Do you honestly think that workers understand bosses better than bosses understand workers? I find that generally both groups misunderstand each other in equal quantities. Also arguably bosses might understand workers better because most bosses have been workers but most workers haven't been bosses.

Well,

Unlimited power may cause some lack of capacity but it's worth keeping in mind that extreme powerlessness may also create actual neurological problems also - see the learned helplessness hypothesis [1]. Of course this doesn't take away from the point that equal relations are probably the most healthy - even on a neurological level. But it makes who really understands who a bit more complicated a question.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

> This is a standard part of feminist theory- basically the idea is that people with no power spend a lot of time wondering what powerful people think, so they tend to have a good understanding of what powerful people think.

Can you provide any sources for this in feminist theory? Because I've never previously encountered it, and I'd genuinely like to know more about how it fits with other bits of feminist theory if it really is a standard (or even common) element.

> And that's where you get the trope of women being mysterious creatures, whereas women seem to understand men perfectly.

No, that trope predates feminist theory by many millenia, it is not a product of it.

The theory explains the trope.

Patriarchy plus the romanticization of what is outside the norm explains the trope and is, in fact, the explanation I've usually seen for it from actual feminists.

“Oppression grants women deep insight” seems closer to a gender-based version of the “noble savage” concept than anything feminist I've seen.

Still waiting for actual feminist theory sources for the “theory” in question.

Calling it "logic" is a stretch.

I don't even understand fellow men. Where are these women that understand guys?

That's a really cool theory, but you're also stirring up the hornets' nest by bringing it up anywhere in tech environment, which got really feministic recently. BTW, one thing doesn't seem to stick: they don't label themselves as less powerful - in fact, their misandric agenda keeps trying to repeat the opposite.

I personally believe that the "mysterious creature" concept stems from women being more emotional and thus more difficult to analyse - we seem to have more scientific grounds for logic, whereas we still hadn't even agreed what an emotion is.

| "Women being more emotional"

You just cited the same argument to justify why the argument isn't true.

'I personally believe that the "mysterious creature" concept stems from women being more emotional'

Why do you think women (as a gender) are more emotional?

Yeah, I think that's a trope that needs unpacking to be credible.

If anything, I would say women tend to be more inclined to sharing and talking about their emotions. Men tend to try to hide them, or fight them. Which often pushes us down a progression of more extreme emotions, rather than gently easing ourselves back to center.

Fighting/denying our emotions also causes us to try to rationalize perceptions driven by our emotions, by ascribing them to the world around us. Because that's a false attribution, it makes it harder for our teams to get an accurate picture of the world outside our emotions.

He can't prove it logically, but he feels very strongly that it must be true.

I really get a cringe when people act as if their ideals are reality when they are just ideals in their heads. Good morning: a great majority of the world lives traditional lifestyles in patriarchal societies, and even in the "best" parts the gender disparity in responsibilities and rights continues, and the stereotypes are true to some extent for most of them too.

I dislike feminism per se as I see it to be just another sexism and not a step towards gender equality, as it tends to cause sexual etichette becoming more visual and everything having gender associations, and comes with detrimental practices like positive discrimination and extension of gender equality into non gender-related parts of life. And in tech these are so much amplified.

For the same reason the rest of the majority of the population believes it;

It's generally true.

I hate dealing in stereotypes, but even if we stick to stereotypes, the idea that men are "less emotional" than women is hilarious.

Two stereotypical emotional memes for men:

- men think with their libido, and will throw away their life for a shag

- men have fragile egos, and will pick up a fight over a perceived injury to their honor

The sexist stereotype "women are emotional" just doesn't work.

Two stereotypical emotional memes for men:

Everyone worth discussing with knows it is an simplification.

Same as "women and feelings".

I'd guess however that pretending there is absolutely no truth to it whatsoever might leave one with a disadvantage when trying to understand what goes on.

The lack of self-awareness in this comment is simply hilarious.

Okay let's play this game. Let's accept that women are indeed more emotional creatures.

(So tempted to get all sarky with "wide-eyed" and "fragile" but onwards.)

Now what's wrong with being emotional? Even in environments such as tech, this is a necessity. Ultimately people use tech, so damn right we need to be emotional about it.

'Emotional fits' though uncomfortable to watch don't actually occur often, but when it does, it is usually grounded in a very good reason, which may not be made clear yet.

So either way, actually, it's still way better for us to embrace differences and listen to each other for a richer working environment and output. Diversity is only a barrier when you choose to look at it that way.

Please don't take HN threads into flamewars. It harms the community and leads nowhere new.

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