Stock Rants #5: Women and Men

[kiya]

Men are from Earth.

Women are from Earth.

Fucking deal with it, okay?


The longer version:

No, really, "the opposite sex" is not actually all that complicated to understand, or motivated by arcane and incomprehensible impulses that only other people of the same identification can relate to. If you actually crawled out of your teeny solipsistic universe and talked to one or two of them you might discover that they are secretly people and have the same sorts of thoughts and desires that you may have encountered in interactions with that subset of humanity that you have previously considered to be real people. No arcane deciphering is required except, perhaps, if you are dealing with a golem (if they never speak and are very strong and do not seem to be readily injurable, go study the kabbalah until they make sense; otherwise, you will quite likely be fine with using whatever protocols you use for ordinary mortals).

That thing you just called "such a [particular sex] thing to do" is not in fact sexed behaviour. Even the bits that conform to mainstream obligatory gender stereotypes (once described by nancylebov as breaking people in complementary ways so as to force them into couples) are not sexed behaviour. If you cannot get along with people who behave like characters in summer romantic comedies, that does not indicate that either men or women are incomprehensible aliens; it indicates that the behaviours in summer romantic comedies are kind of atrocious, and the only reason the stuff that the characters of the sex you identify with appears less atrocious to you is familiarity of role. I suggest talking to people who are not secretly members of the casts of primetime television shows. (I also suggest not secretly being a member of the cast of a primetime television show, if only because nobody is going to bail your ass out of whatever damnfoolishness you have perpetrated before the closing credits.)

The people you want to form relationships with are not video games. You cannot learn about "men" or "women" and expect to be successful at forming such relationships; you most particularly cannot pursue Cosmo or pick-up artist clubs or whatever else in search of the cheat codes and then throw a snit because up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start does not, on this particular target of your attractions, get you sex, romance, free food, or whatever you were trying to cheat-code out of them. If you want a relationship with someone, you have to learn what that specific person is interested in, and if you're not it, you're shit out of luck. Move on to someone or something else. Don't blame the erstwhile target of your affections for being defective because they don't properly appreciate the symbolism of your offering of the severed genitalia of flowering plants.

If you presume someone is up for something, interested in something, not interested in something, has a particular personality trait, or behaves in a certain way because of their sex, you are wrong. Not only are you wrong, but you are boringly wrong and should spend some time coming up with more creatively entertaining ways of being an asshat. "Women are" and "Men are" and "real women" and "real men" and "such a man" and "like a woman" are all phrases that send up bright flags marked "Fertile supply of bullshit may be found here". If you don't want to be mistaken for compost and shipped off to feed the blackberries, get some new material. Your excuses are passé.

A man once asked me--it is true that it was at the end of a very good dinner, and the compliment conveyed may have been due to that circumstance--how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends?
I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five.
'Well,' said the man, 'I shouldn't have expected a woman [meaning me] to have been able to make it so convincing.'
I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over.
One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

--Dorothy L. Sayers: from "Are Women Human?"

Comments

[rosefox]

See, I totally agree with this.

And yet tonight I had another round of a conversation I've been having a lot with female friends lately, that basically goes like this:

"Why are so many men so horrid?"
"I don't know! I want to like them! But they keep treating me so badly."

Maybe this is just an example of your bit about people being societally broken. But why do I keep meeting so many great women who've done a brilliant job of throwing off that conditioning, and so many awful men who've bought in without a second thought? My Kinsey score keeps going up in self-defense.

I still try very hard not to prejudge people on the basis of visible sex characteristics. I just can't escape the mounting statistics about the people I already know.

[brooksmoses]

An offhand late-night theory is that the patriarchy etc. means that you can ignore many of the women who are awful, but not so many of the men.

(Also, that part of being non-awful as a man is not impinging on the consciousness of the women around oneself nearly as visibly as many awful men tend to.)

[rosefox]

Can you expand on your late-night theory somewhat? I'm not sure I understand your meaning there.

As for your second sentence, it is certainly possible that my preference for loudly awesome people means that I overlook quietly awesome people as well as being fed up by loudly non-awesome people; but I would expect the category of quietly awesome people to include at least as many women as men, since women get so many more cultural lessons on hiding their awesomeness so as not to scare people away. Of course, it's just as possible that I'm overlooking all those quietly awesome women too!

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

the patriarchy also means that men don't have the same incentive to get over themselves, since they are rewarded for not doing so.

[zeborah]

I think the ways that society breaks women are more obvious to women (partly because feminism has worked hard to expose them, partly because, well, duh) than the ways that society breaks men are obvious to men. So women have plenty of motivation to throw off their conditioning, while a lot of men don't realise that it's not a zero-sum game, but that becoming less awful will actually make their own lives less awful.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

That. Also, many of the ways men are broken ('don't show emotions' 'reach for agression as a way to solve conflicts') are presented as positive traits.

[ailbhe]

Yup, all of that.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly what both of you said.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

I think I see what you're getting at here. When men expect women to conform to gender stereotypes, and the women fulfill those expectations, it creates a society where men have power over women. If women expect men to conform to gender stereotypes, and the men fulfill those expectations, it STILL creates a society where men have power over women. If women want equal power in society, they HAVE to be willing to think outside the box on all sides. The gender stereotypes promote and sustain a male-dominated society. Clinging to them is no good for women, but it's harder for men to realize that something is wrong with them, because when those stereotypes are in place, it's easier for men to get what our society tells them they should want. They don't realize that throwing them off might lead to them being able to get more real, personal satisfaction out of life.

[zeborah]

Yes, that's it exactly. And specifically/worse, with the gender stereotypes in place, men can't want the things that throwing the stereotypes away would give them, because wanting those things would make them 'unmanly' and 'effeminate' and 'sissy'. It's one thing for women to seek something that society calls 'strength', another for men to seek something that society calls 'weakness'. --And for that matter, for individual women to say that they personally want (some of) those things that society undervalues and don't want (some of) those things that society overvalues.

[(Anonymous)]

It doesn't.

Or, rather, it doesn't do so reliably. There are real costs in terms of social hierarchy position (and sometimes personal safety; any macho culture will tend to beat unprotected non-macho male members to death, frex.) to becoming less awful. It's *very* expensive.

There's a better stable system to be had -- there are a bunch of options about better stable systems to be had -- but the existing one is that way in significant part because it's tough to kill; it's stable, and acts to keep itself that way.

[zeborah]

Well, sure. But then there are costs to women in speaking/acting out against the existing system too: women have been imprisoned and killed for claiming their rights -- continue to be killed explicitly for that in many places, and I think much domestic violence is implicitly to keep individual women in their place.

So yes, changing the system is dangerous, but it's dangerous for everyone; and once the system is changed the benefits will accrue to everyone too. So I still think the fact that women have been more likely to risk that danger is because the long-term benefits to women are more obvious to women than the long-term benefits to men are obvious to men.

[(Anonymous)]

For some men, there *are* no long term benefits. They will lose status and access to choice, sometimes quite a lot of both, and will not begin to regain it due to a more egalitarian social structure. *In general*, an egalitarian social construction materially disadvantages men over a patriarchal system; that's what "loss of privilege" means.

That doesn't mean an egalitarian social structure is a bad thing -- I am very strongly of the opinion that it's a good thing -- but you can't just assert that men also benefit without showing how that works. (and it's tough to do, because a real loss of privilege is precisely that.) Even if there is an obvious potential benefit, the rules have changed, and the current generation of men are poorly suited to the new selective landscape, and undergo a high cost to switch landscapes. The next generation might benefit, but even that's unclear; not being responsible for everything is only a benefit if the other option includes significant exercise of choice, and the general cultural tendency has been to try to degender service-instead-of-person rather than to make women really people in a lot of social areas.

Even for very high status women, shifting to women-are-people is a net material gain. (Just having standing to enter into contracts on your own behalf would do that.)

So it's not a symmetric situation; treating it as a symmetric situation has odd failure modes. (Such as associating women-are-people with upper class attitudes; that doesn't really change the upper class power structure, and it makes women-are-people a thing folks-like-us don't do.)

Sexes are *defined* by differing reproductive strategies. (few expensive gametes, many cheap gametes.) We haven't collectively figured out what the social organization looks like where this is not a source of contention. (We might not be able to; that's a tough problem.)

Female choice systems in primates -- they exist in many primate species and have been studied -- generally disadvantage the bottom 90% of males, because it's easier for the females of those species to share the top 10% of males than accept an inferior male and that certainly ups female reproductive fitness. That won't map, cannot map, directly on to people, in large part because we've significantly substituted social fitness for reproductive fitness. But something like it maps; if the cost of being picky enough about reproductive partners is low enough, the result is a lot of relatively disadvantaged men compared to the way things used to be. There are ways to make that stable, but a combination of strict female choice and men-are-responsible-for-everything (which are the two dominant ideas in Anglo culture right now) is horribly unstable. So it's not enough to talk about egalitarian social change as an obvious general benefit, because it isn't.

[zeborah]

I was going to give you a proper reply (summary: feminism doesn't take away men's access to choice unless you mean men can no longer choose to enslave women; 'loss of privilege' means loss of relative privilege, not loss of absolute privilege - when women are more educated, there's more people to be friends with, more people who can treat you medically, more people who can come up with scientific solutions to benefit your life, etc; the "general cultural tendency" is so because society doesn't yet understand that women are people too; feminism is *especially* (not "even") of benefit to high-status women - gaining the right to own land and get a job is useless if you've got no money and have no education, so low-status women stay low-status; no, it's not symmetric because the struggle for feminism has involved women being *murdered* whereas men are merely mildly inconvenienced)

...but then you started on the evolutionary biology and the "a combination of strict female choice and men-are-responsible-for-everything" and I just don't have the brains to deal with the wtf fail.

[(Anonymous)]

Feminism ... is a wide country.

*OF COURSE* I mean "the right to choose to enslave women"; this thread started with a note that "why are so many men so awful?"

And the answer is (they think) they are better off by being awful. And they are quite probably right, for them, in this time, so they act to protect their right and their ability to be awful, because that is what makes them better off. And their analysis, for them, isn't wrong. It works; it gets them what they want.

The necessary thing, if you want a society that agrees with the proposition that women are people, is for being awful *not* to make those men better off. This has clearly not presently been achieved. I don't know how to do it; it's a really tough problem.

And the whole "general benefits of educated women" thing, while certainly systemically true -- there used to be serious worry about the eventual shortage of doctors -- has to balance against "it's harder to get a job" (which it is, for what used to be the unquestionably privileged group), "it's harder to get married and have kids" (which it is, just because fewer women chose to get married when they don't *have* to get married), and the whole perceived diminished economic attractiveness problem. *Of course* a huge slice of the male population is against equality for women, because it really is making them worse off in terms of the things they care most about. And this really does come out in their behavior.

I don't think they're right, I don't think the desire to maintain alpha-male primate band status type status makes sense in a global urban culture, but I also think "they're just assholes" is a bad explanation. I also think the idea that all these people will eventually be for women-are-people without a certain amount of cultural extinction having to take place is beyond optimistic.

(Legally, right now, we have strict female choice. We should have strict female choice; you get involved with who you want to get involved with. Socially, we have not left the Victorian/Edwardian men-have-all-the-responsibility, and the social cues from that period -- buy flowers, say -- still work to communicate attraction. The interaction is unstable.)

[zeborah]

Legally, right now, we have strict female choice.
Seriously, WTF? Are you talking about sex still? Because seriously, wtf? A woman can legally choose not to have sex with a man, sure. But so can a man choose not to have sex with a woman.

"Responsibility"? Do you mean about who asks who out and who pays for whose dinner? That too is becoming more and more equal.

I'm just taking a wild guess here, but -- you're a man, right?

Because you're exemplifying my entire point, which is that men find it really hard to see that feminism makes things better for them.

Economically, enabling women to work outside the home if that suits them increases productivity a heapload, which makes the country richer, which makes it more able to support people who don't for whatever reason have a job.

Recognising more widely that working in the home is equally valuable would more enable men to do that if it suits them.

When women gain benefits pertaining to parenthood, these benefits generally accrue to men too. (Not universally, but under actual feminism they do, as with parental leave in New Zealand.)

When women can choose to wait before marriages, and when both men and women have the right to divorce - and the ability to divorce without suddenly being financially impoverished - men don't get stuck in loveless marriages for the rest of their lives.

When women have rights and opportunities, men's sacred chromosomes that happen to be passed on via their daughters and sisters get as good a chance as those chromosomes that happen to be passed on via their sons and brothers.

And here's one for the evolutionary biologiests: when women are able to choose not to have sex and able to choose *to* have sex, it turns out that a lot of women rather like sex -- and this makes it *easier* for men to get sex.

As long as they're not awful, anyway.

[kiya]

I think the relevant point is that many of those are abstract improvements rather than intimate ones. "Making the country richer" is not as emotionally accessible as "Now that women have their own money my productivity does not attract them." So these things tug in different directions.

Which latter is mentally broken, but hugely common, because that's the way the societal breakdown has been set up for a long time - you read at Figleaf's, right? I thought I'd seen you comment there, this is "two laws of attraction" again - and it's the individual level, not the abstract level, that tends to most strongly influence gut responses.

[zeborah]

The abstract ends up effecting concrete changes, but yes, it's those extra steps that make it not so obvious.

And it's so easy to get hung up on "My productivity does not attract them" that one just doesn't see "so I don't have to stress so much about productivity for the sake of productivity" or even "so my rival's productivity doesn't attract them either, so they can focus on my awesome personality."

Yeah, I definitely read at Figleaf's, which has no doubt gone a large way to influencing me on this side of the matter.

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Selection pressure.

Humans are (contrary a whole bunch of dogmatic statements all over sf and popular literature about human evolution stopping) undergoing accelerated natural selection. Part of that is rapid change of environment -- agriculture is just as much an environment as "semi-arid savanna"; so are cities -- but another part of that is culture. The environment people live in is made up of their interactions with other people.

Culture is, from this angle, a massive fight over whose needs have structural biases in favour of them (which produce structural biases against everybody else's needs as side effects); it's constructed, sure, but so are (in a certain sense) termite mounds, coral reefs, and climax rain forests.

Patriarchy/presumption that women are services, rather than people/men-being-horrid can be thought of as a combination of structural-biases-in-favour and a determination to keep them from going away, because while there certainly are many other possible cultures, in those cultures, if you're horrid, your relative fitness just dropped like a rock, sometimes to zero. (Sometimes below zero.)

Of course, if you have to interact with a patriarchal social context[1], and you're male, and you're *not* horrid, your relative fitness is pretty darn low, too. Like many evolutionary outcomes, just because it's stable doesn't mean it's good.

If you're operating mostly in another culture already, and have to keep dealing with another one with different biases, well, "culture clash" is real; just because they're from the same ostensible material culture doesn't mean you can't have one with them.

[1]Neglecting, so well as I am able, the whole aspie-spectrum conviction that the entire world has been carefully organized so that everything with actual importance (that is, human social hierarchy construction, because that *is* the environment people live in, no matter what) is something I can't do.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

WORD. I love this rant and would like to print it out and stick it on my wall or something.

[miz-evolution.livejournal.com]

Standing Ovation.

I get so sick of the "men are like/supposed to be like" "women are like/supposed to be like" memes!

People are different, and what's between their legs is not the sum all beat all code for who they are, how they act, or what they are supposed to be. Nothing gets me riled up faster than people talking about how Man X is "girlie" or Woman X is "dude-like" because, well, they do their own thing and follow their own interests instead of what they are supposedly supposed to be like!
Gah!

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Why are your stock rants always so awesome? *wild applause*

The one small disagreement I have with this is that I think it's generally impossible for cis-gendered men to understand how awful periods are for many women, because they do not experience them themselves. A very sensitive man with a female partner who really suffers will have a great deal of intellectual understanding (and will do things like spontaneously bring home chocolate at certain times of the month, because he knows it is necessary), but he won't ever know what it's like to experience the female biology from the inside.

But then this is true of everything that involves the actual biological differences. Cis-gendered women don't know what it feels like to be hit in the balls (although I'm guessing that being hit in the boobs when they are all swollen up and sore from hormones might be similar), nor can we really understand how men feel about male pattern baldness.

However, these are genuine biological differences rather than social gender role differences. So your rant stands.