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

[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.