An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.
I find it also annoying when people cannot turn off their sexual behavior and focus on the topic, and instead disrupt the debate for everyone else. Both genders have their version.
The male version is what you described: focusing on status competition at all costs.
The female version is… essentially: “everyone, pay attention to me! I am a young fertile woman! look here! look here!”… giggling in a high-pitched voice at every opportunity, frequently inserting little “jokes” which other women often find annoying, turning attention to their body by exaggerated movements, etc. (Not sure if I described it well; I hope you know what I mean).
Not sure what to do with this. Seems like a multi-player Prisonner’s Dilemma. People who are doing this (if they are well-calibrated) receive some personal benefits at the expense of the group, so it would be hard to convince them to stop. Most likely, they would deny doing this.
But seems like men have an advantage here, because fighting for status in order to seem more attractive is trying to kill two birds with one stone. Even if it doesn’t make the man any more attractive to anyone, he still gets some status (unless he is doing it really wrong). On the other hand, when the woman fails to seem attractive, her behavior will only seem stupid.
giggling in a high-pitched voice at every opportunity, frequently inserting little “jokes” which other women often find annoying, turning attention to their body by exaggerated movements, etc. (Not sure if I described it well; I hope you know what I mean).
To me, that behavior connotes a combination of wanting to project femininity (not so much sexual behavior or attractiveness) and having lower-than-average self esteem (i.e. perceived status). It is mostly the latter that can be slightly annoying in the workplace, since such people are often unwittingly excluded from discussion (wobster109 also raises this point).
The root problem here is not so much the behavior itself, but lack of perceived status that then leads to that behavior as a kind of overcompensation. ISTM that high self esteem often boosts both social attractiveness and effectiveness in the workplace (as long as it doesn’t come with ‘Type-A’ overt aggressiveness, and even then sometimes), and that this broadly applies to both males and females.
Low self-esteem hypothesis is difficult to falsify, because whatever social role given person plays and however they behave, one could still say “but maybe deep inside they feel insecure”. Having said that… yes, this may be an instinctive reaction of a nervous woman, but I believe I have also seen high-status women doing that strategically.
Imagine a club that has informal lectures at its meetings (not LessWrong, but similar), and a 30-something woman, a long-term relatively high-status member of the club, interrupting the lectures every few minutes with some “witty” remark. That was the most annoying example I remember. It seemed to me like she was trying to immitate a behavior of a young girl, in my opinion not very successfully, exactly because some element of shyness was missing; it was only rude. Possibly she was projecting her authority against other present women. I just shrugged this behavior off as rude and forgot it afterwards, but my girlfriend later told me she wanted to kill that person. (Which I take as an evidence that the behavior was a way of intra-gender status fight.)
a 30-something woman, a long-term relatively high-status member of the club, interrupting the lectures every few minutes with some “witty” remark.
Not sure what you mean by “witty remark”, but wit and humor often connote fairly high status, as opposed to, e. g. just giggling at something or other things you mentioned. Could it be that your girlfriend was just annoyed at the sheer amount of interruptions? And yes, there may have been some intra-gender status competition involved, but males often compete in much the same way (Protip: don’t invite sealion specimens at clubs or conferences).
Reminds me of this Aldous Huxley quote:
I find it also annoying when people cannot turn off their sexual behavior and focus on the topic, and instead disrupt the debate for everyone else. Both genders have their version.
The male version is what you described: focusing on status competition at all costs.
The female version is… essentially: “everyone, pay attention to me! I am a young fertile woman! look here! look here!”… giggling in a high-pitched voice at every opportunity, frequently inserting little “jokes” which other women often find annoying, turning attention to their body by exaggerated movements, etc. (Not sure if I described it well; I hope you know what I mean).
Not sure what to do with this. Seems like a multi-player Prisonner’s Dilemma. People who are doing this (if they are well-calibrated) receive some personal benefits at the expense of the group, so it would be hard to convince them to stop. Most likely, they would deny doing this.
But seems like men have an advantage here, because fighting for status in order to seem more attractive is trying to kill two birds with one stone. Even if it doesn’t make the man any more attractive to anyone, he still gets some status (unless he is doing it really wrong). On the other hand, when the woman fails to seem attractive, her behavior will only seem stupid.
To me, that behavior connotes a combination of wanting to project femininity (not so much sexual behavior or attractiveness) and having lower-than-average self esteem (i.e. perceived status). It is mostly the latter that can be slightly annoying in the workplace, since such people are often unwittingly excluded from discussion (wobster109 also raises this point).
The root problem here is not so much the behavior itself, but lack of perceived status that then leads to that behavior as a kind of overcompensation. ISTM that high self esteem often boosts both social attractiveness and effectiveness in the workplace (as long as it doesn’t come with ‘Type-A’ overt aggressiveness, and even then sometimes), and that this broadly applies to both males and females.
Low self-esteem hypothesis is difficult to falsify, because whatever social role given person plays and however they behave, one could still say “but maybe deep inside they feel insecure”. Having said that… yes, this may be an instinctive reaction of a nervous woman, but I believe I have also seen high-status women doing that strategically.
Imagine a club that has informal lectures at its meetings (not LessWrong, but similar), and a 30-something woman, a long-term relatively high-status member of the club, interrupting the lectures every few minutes with some “witty” remark. That was the most annoying example I remember. It seemed to me like she was trying to immitate a behavior of a young girl, in my opinion not very successfully, exactly because some element of shyness was missing; it was only rude. Possibly she was projecting her authority against other present women. I just shrugged this behavior off as rude and forgot it afterwards, but my girlfriend later told me she wanted to kill that person. (Which I take as an evidence that the behavior was a way of intra-gender status fight.)
Not sure what you mean by “witty remark”, but wit and humor often connote fairly high status, as opposed to, e. g. just giggling at something or other things you mentioned. Could it be that your girlfriend was just annoyed at the sheer amount of interruptions? And yes, there may have been some intra-gender status competition involved, but males often compete in much the same way (Protip: don’t invite sealion specimens at clubs or conferences).