The Great Feminization
compactmag.com
compactmag.com
Even if we assume that there are “standard men” and “standard women”, there's another problem: office politics occurring in country M in century N is most certainly the product of specific culture, and not some cavemen rituals. Problems of Patrick or Patricia Bateman are probably quite alien to a lot of people in the world.
The irony is that the image of “good old days” is itself based on modern day stereotypes. So-called progressive propaganda was quite focused on the caricature of concentrated Bad Masculine Man, and now, freshly painted, it is presented as a positive example (because public is familiar with it, and making public think is too hard).
If male and female abilities differ, it should follow that our social expectations differ.
If you are using "female" as a noun in a sentence to refer to human women, it is a good idea to also refer to human men as "male". It is more consistent and doesn't end up dehumanizing one side.
People seeing this inconsistency may jump to conclusions about your thoughts on men and women.
Are you saying he is actually a woman?
For the sake of argument, let's say I had mentioned logic and emotions and you were right about Trump. He would just be an example of an outlier (which by the way he obviously is, although not in the way you imply), not an argument against my point which is that male and female distributions are quite distinct for some traits, with little overlap.
As if brain configuation, that staemming from genetics and hormone levels, had no influence in how the sexes perceive world and social clues and behave according to those perceptions. Not mentioning the inherent physical differences which also influence how they differently percieve the world and behave.
Being a proud servant of the status quo is neither fresh, nor smart, nor scientific. Illiterate savages worshipped their idols in the exact same fashion.
I do also love how she glossed over her example of how men were better at reconciliation and less likely to cancel culture because men were conditioned for war in which “ The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday.” Like completely glossing over the fact that first they felt they had to kill thousands of people? And do you think it was the people who fundamentally differed in ideology that reconciled with?
Then like: “Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade”
Almost every leader eventually learns that leading through influence is much more powerful than leading through authority, gender be damned.
But it’s also just got more holes than Swiss cheese. Sure I love classical liberalism and the ideas of rationality, but per some of her own arguments, this isn’t the natural state of things. Most men in most cultures just wanted to club people over the head to win arguments, not engage in rationality. Most kings just wanted their way, not to deal with an objective legal system. And per her own arguments, are men Socrates or Bluto?
No, they are not. And when we take into account that they are not, the whole argument breaks down.
By one side of equation I meant all those arguments about “men” and “women” altogether. You are absolutely free to state that men are X, and women are Y, and attribute it to Nature as a whole, or scientific data sliced off of it. There is nothing wrong with that by itself. However, the whole other “stable” side which you try to “fix” by this process is no less of an invention.
Say, we're having an argument whether cucumbers are fruits or vegetables. In that case, we can even reach an “official” answer. But it's more important to realise that the whole stage on which we're playing is constructed. “Fruits” and “vegetables” are convenient man-made classifications. Cucumber does not come with a label “I'm a cucumber, as stated in encyclopaedias, etc.” Nor its atoms come with a label “We're parts of that cucumber thing”, nor anything else (note for our young vulgar materialists).
In my opinion, feminist thought taking that step (which — for multiple possible reasons — was not taken even by greatest thinkers) is the most important achievement. Which “wave” is right, or how to “correctly” display your alignment with “correct” movement according to latest fashions are ancillary questions.
Just because some people -want- men and women to be interchangeable in all respects does not mean that they are, or can be.
Women bring a critical set of biases and skills to the human condition, as do men. There is technologically no escape from sex determined role differentiation at a statistically significant scale without dooming humanity to population decline and rapid extinction.
Even if it were possible, is it wise to ignore the wisdom of millions of years of evolution, hard won by countless suffering and deaths? Should we blindly lunge toward an ill tested notion of “equality”, ignoring the sociopolitical and cultural risks we now are bearing witness to, undercutting the very ideals of self determination and individual freedom and allowing an easy entry point for totalitarian aspirations?
The simple, inescapable truth is that statistically, men hold the monopoly of coercive force on the planet, and all rights that women enjoy are therefore in effect granted by men. We don’t have to look far to see what happens in societies where this kind of affordance is considered unwise.
Whether one wishes it were so or not, the overstepping of women towards the erosion of reason in deference to compassion, while admirable in some measures, is propelling us towards a reaction by men and women alike that erodes the plausibility of the hypothesis that women should be trusted with power in hierarchical society.
I’d like to add that I am not making a personal value judgment here. I am a man, but life has shown me the great value that women can bring to nearly every endeavor both directly and indirectly.
I do not suppose that the role of men is somehow more important or significant in creating a just and prosperous society, but that rather the roles of women and men are of equal importance and value, specifically because those roles tend to be distinct and irreplaceable.
That's a generalisation that loses all sense.
For example, you're building giant pyramids out of human corpses. Based on experiments and precise calculations, you know that you need x.y% more female corpses than male corpses, and get really angry when suppliers try to argue that men and women are equal in all respects.
Obviously, this is not the important question. We should ask questions about your activity as a whole instead.
(It might seem that my example is a bit over the top, but people around us do things that are just as bad, and with real enthusiasm.)
Gender issues are not just abstract, they are tied to problems people see in the society. It is not fashionable today to just state that someone is a swine to behave in some manner (and the answer would usually be that you are not allowed to limit anyone's freedoms), so dumb pathetic fences of bureaucratic states are used, and the talk about progress, benefits, equality, shared future, etc. floods the stage. However, you personally still either think that something is right, or that it's wrong.
During “millions of years of evolution”, in many places any woman walking alone without male relative or servant could be treated as a potential free sex toy. It was simply “evident” that anyone could try to rape her, and “everyone” knew that — men, women, kids. It was “natural”, and even the commandment about neighbour's wife could easily be seen as excluding “no one's” or “everyone's” wives, so it was even sanctioned from above. Obviously, it all stemmed from the heads of certain people, and changes introducing consequences mutated that “natural order”.
By the way, the figure of noble male saving damsel from the jerks is considered noble because... he could've joined the party, but choose not to. What a hero! Simple-minded people continue to see things the old way to this day when they expect heroines saved by the hero to have sex with him immediately. Because what are other options, really?
I am a supporter of legal equality for women, of course, and of women having the social agency and opportunities to choose the path of their life on an individual basis.
That has nothing to do with the abandonment of reason for empathy, which I see as threatening and highly dangerous to the cause of female empowerment. You don’t have to use your imagination to see how that works out.
Straightforward male and female traits/roles pervade the animal kingdom, including the other great apes.
Honestly, even entertaining this idea is female-coded. In a male space, the denial of so obvious a reality would be dismissed out of hand as obviously retarded.
No. My claim is that male and female traits/roles generally differ. That can't be read as a claim that there is no overlap between their roles/tasks.
Are those social constructs?
From the relevant Wikis:
Chimps:
At the core of social structures are males, which patrol the territory, protect group members, and search for food. Males remain in their natal communities, while females generally emigrate at adolescence. Males in a community are more likely to be related to one another than females are to each other. Among males, there is generally a dominance hierarchy, and males are dominant over females.
Orangutans:
One to several resident female home ranges are encompassed within the home range of a resident male, who is their main mating partner.[50][51] Interactions between adult females range from friendly to avoidance to antagonistic.[52] Flanged males are often hostile to both other flanged males and unflanged males, while unflanged males are more peaceful towards each other.[53]
Orangutans disperse and establish their home ranges by age 11. Females tend to live near their birth range, while males disperse farther but may still visit their birth range within their larger home range.[51][54] They enter a transient phase, which lasts until a male can challenge and displace a dominant, resident male from his home range.
Gorillas:
Gorillas live in groups called troops. Troops tend to be made of one adult male or silverback, with a harem of multiple adult females and their offspring.[58][59][60] However, multiple-male troops also exist.[59] A silverback is typically more than 12 years of age, and is named for the distinctive patch of silver hair on his back, which comes with maturity. Silverbacks have large canine teeth that also come with maturity. Both males and females tend to emigrate from their natal groups. For mountain gorillas, females disperse from their natal troops more than males.[58][61] Mountain gorillas and western lowland gorillas also commonly transfer to second new groups.[58]
Mature males also tend to leave their groups and establish their own troops by attracting emigrating females. However, male mountain gorillas sometimes stay in their natal troops and become subordinate to the silverback.
Your citations don't really support your claim well, since the sections you quoted don't mention traits or roles much at all.
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Also, why mention Orangutans and Gorillas, but leave out Bonobos?
According to https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/natured-nurture/2022..., "Evolutionarily, humans are equally related to patriarchal chimpanzees and matriarchal bonobos".
I almost thought to argue that this means that humanity could basically pick its traits, except... the traits mentioned for two species seem fairly gendered themselves: "Chimpanzees are male-dominated, competitive, territorial, and sometimes violent. Bonobos are female-dominated, peaceful, and highly sexual."
This reminds me of the ""Nordic gender equality paradox", where "in Sweden and Norway, gender strongly influences job choice despite high levels of gender equality".
Ultimately, I think the argument that everyone should be having is not whether gendered traits exist, but whether this fact is something that should be enforced or resisted.
I personally think it should be resisted as resisting our basic impulses is generally considered more enlightened or noble and the world already has enough idiots who will try to put others in a box and claim some sort of evolutionary justification.
The sections do mention roles very clearly. If you're not capable of making these basic connections, it's no wonder that you're confused.
For chimps:
> At the core of social structures are males, which patrol the territory, protect group members, and search for food
Male roles: Patroller of territory, protector of group members.
For Orangutans:
> One to several resident female home ranges are encompassed within the home range of a resident male, who is their main mating partner.
Female roles: harem member. Male Roles: Alpha, Harem haver
For Gorillas:
> Troops tend to be made of one adult male or silverback, with a harem of multiple adult females and their offspring.
Female roles: harem member. Male Roles: Alpha, Harem haver
If roles weren't based on sex, a female Chimp would be just as likely to patrol territory, and a female gorilla would be just as likely to be an alpha with her own harem. The fact that these roles are only filled by males indicates that they are sex-based roles.
> Evolutionarily, humans are equally related to patriarchal chimpanzees and matriarchal bonobos
You've lost the plot. For bonobos to be matriarchal implies male and female traits/roles, which obviously supports my argument.
> I personally think it should be resisted as resisting our basic impulses is generally considered more enlightened or noble and the world already has enough idiots who will try to put others in a box and claim some sort of evolutionary justification.
Telling the truth is a good thing, actually. Encouraging people to understand their nature is good. Lying to people about their nature is bad. Encouraging people to misunderstand their nature, which will inevitably lead to them making life decisions based on lies, is bad. Borderline evil.
And I don't think the fact that we have baser impulses is justification enough to tell people that they should live a certain way.
I just read a book about civic action, where a comment was made that suggested not thinking about left and right, but of top and bottom... but even that is dualistic.
More than dualistic when so much of the time it is constructs of other peoples' minds on top of that.
Other than that, one need to look no further than the guys in the White House/ICE for examples of highly emotionally based men.
One example of many I remember was a social/music class where the prof asked the lecture if there are any innate, non-culture-specific features that make music enjoyable. I raised my hand to say I think so, because octave equivalence seems pretty universal, but the right answer was no. Suggesting that there's anything innate about music means you can't chalk everything up to cultural difference, leading to the possibility that some cultures have better music than others, which needless to say would be very offensive. So I learned something valuable.
If you want to ascribe their reasoning to "proof by emotion" then you're welcome to make that logical leap, but instantially your teacher was asking you to think outside the anglobox here. You made an unlucky guess, but props to you for trying.
I'm also still not sure about the answer. A lot of unrelated cultures developed music independently and ended up with some kind of rhythm beaten from something. I didn't say they had tuning forks or scales, and ofc 12 tones or 8 notes per scale isn't universal, but there's still the thing about octave equivalence. I did some searching back then and found some scientific papers on this that didn't show a definite conclusion.
Gamelan music might be a good example of one where microtonal dissonance is expected basically continuously through a piece.
There is also music that is completely without traditional pitch information (all sorts of percussion traditions).
You said this:
> One example of many I remember was a social/music class where the prof asked the lecture if there are any innate, non-culture-specific features that make music enjoyable. I raised my hand to say I think so, because octave equivalence seems pretty universal, but the right answer was no.
Does the octave interval make music enjoyable in some non culturally contingent way? I don't think that the evidence for this is super strong. There's music from around the world that would consider harmonic motion from consonance to dissonance to consonance to be wrong. There's music from around the world that would consider metered rhythm to be wrong.
Also, idk who finds consistent rhythm completely wrong. Some music breaks it more than others. Is there some culture that will hear Mozart and think "what, this isn't even music"?
Women emphasize "empathy over rationality" ... what a strange dichotomy. As if empathy could not be rational, or rational thought automatically leads to dis-empathy.
She asserts that feminine culture emphasizes cohesion, but then brings up a biracial (what's the point of this note?) reporter at the NYT not having coffee with Bari Weiss and says that this snub is "feminine". What? Are woman about cohesion or not? The previous graph would assert that colleagues would have coffee to not hurt each others' feelings, but then she claims the backhanded animosity ALSO as feminine.
Make up your mind, woman.
Like the ICE raids clearly not are not an appeal to rationality, they’re an appeal to fear, and that fear is created by a real or imagined sense of scarcity.
Everything in society is colored by this, good or bad. Everything. Even politics, even dynamics in families, even your work place, even your school.
Not every individual is 100% male behavior or 100% female behavior (something the alt-right podcasters keep bringing up to drive a wedge between their victims and society at large), but generally your average male is going to, on average, have male behavior and it will come naturally to them; vice versa, average female is going to, on average, have female behavior, and it will come natural to them. Conflict resolution is one of those things that differ between the two.
This article would probably benefit greatly from citing works on psychology and neurobiology, because it has been noted by science over the decades that testosterone and estrogen levels mediate many things in human behavior, including which conflict resolution camp you belong to. The article paints this entirely too black and white, because nobody is firmly in either camp.
The article also fails to actually state the correct solution: you're gonna be who you are, and you shouldn't be shamed for it, but you're gonna have to learn how to deal with both kinds of conflicts, and realize when a conflict doesn't actually exist and its just a mismatch between the two camps. Sometimes you need to negotiate the "conflict resolution even if it compromises the truth/logic" side, sometimes you need to negotiate the "logic even if it steps on people's feelings" side, and sometimes the logic side does actually need to win out and you have to pay the toll on that, and sometimes the feelings side needs to win out because it isn't worth the cost.
Also, a woman wrote that article, and I think the people here on HN missed that.
Based on what evidence? It was clear to me.
A majority women group may be more rational, competitive, or risk-seeking (all values she attributes as more likely to appear in groups of men), but it depends on the women in the group. She already admits that individual characteristics are variable across sexes or genders.
There’s also an implicit assumption that masculine traits are de facto optimal for making an organization fit or successful. They can be, but so are the feminine traits which she would like to see less of. Feminine traits evolved in the first place to provide a necessary counterbalance to problem-solving without a myopic and invariable approach. If a team member is sick, you take care of them so they can contribute again (their domain knowledge and inherent capabilities are their main contributions), instead of chucking them over the side of a hill.
Successful populations in nature have thrived because of adaption, flexibility, and variability. It doesn’t make sense to say that any aspect of society achieved the success that it did because of the presence of masculine traits alone. I think masculine traits are important, but a monoculture approach has almost always lead to the downfall of an empire. Great ideas have come from all sorts of people (and cultures), and we do humanity a disservice by reducing ourselves down to what may essentially be skin deep (literally). The goal should be to enable individuals to reach whatever level of excellence that they’re capable of achieving, regardless of sex or gender. That’s feminism as I remember it, that’s the core of egalitarianism.
There are a lot of factors which are polarizing American society, and other places, but it’s more geopolitical than sociocultural, due to the connected nature of the world now. I could be wrong, but the main thrust of wokeness is restorative justice, and it’s not centered around feminization, necessarily. I think people who advocate for restorative justice need to exercise some caution because I don’t think they fully appreciate the constancy of human nature across different dimensions of being human. If you change the positions of a mean rich person and meek poor person, don’t expect that only the rich/poor parts of those labels will change. People will make the same terrible decisions that you hate the current dominant groups for, that’s just who we are. It’s better to create systems which enable egalitarian self-actualization of individuals than ones which optimize for tribal success.
Last point on the counterbalance of feminine and masculine traits—I like this metaphor from a Samurai film (I forget which): a sword dulls faster if it is never sheathed. Taking Joan of Arc as an example, her literal sword was sheathed by her faith, in many ways.
https://ameblo.jp/fighting-toma/entry-12251883996.html
Eg: "masculine" (relentlessly) open debate+unfettered pursuit of truth as advocated in TFA <-?-> never sheathing the sword
"the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female". are you kidding me?
Did she intend to make that veiled dig suggesting the “feminization” of MAGA with the recent highly emotional calls for cancellation lead by the (feminine??) Trump, Vance, Carr?
For the rest of it, randomly spouting off things she heard random others tell her were true -- makes it true I guess?