Perhaps an instance of Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate; people who agree, do not respond… as for me, I find myself with two kinds of responses to these anecdotes. For some, I think “Wow, what an unfortunate example of systemic sexism etc.; how informative, and how useful that this is here.” Other people have already commented to that effect. I’m not sure what I might say in terms of engaging with such content, but perhaps something will come to me, in which case I’ll say something.
For others… well, here’s an example:
It’s lunchtime in fourth grade. I am explaining to Leslie, who has no friends but me, why we should stick together. “We’re both rejects,” I tell her. She draws back, affronted. “We’re not rejects!” she says. I’m puzzled. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wanted to be normal.
My response is a mental shrug. I am male. I can relate to this anecdote completely. I, too, have never much understood the desire to be “normal”, and I find that as I’ve gotten older, I disdain it more and more.
But what has this to do with minimizing the inferential distance between men and women...?
Here’s another:
It’s Bridget’s thirteenth birthday, and four of us are spending the night at her house. While her parents sleep, we are roleplaying that we have been captured by Imperials and are escaping a detention cell. This is not papers-and-dice roleplaying, but advanced make-believe with lots of pretend blaster battles and dodging behind furniture.
Christine and Cass, aspiring writers, use roleplaying as a way to test out plots in which they make daring raids and die nobly. Bridget, a future lawyer, and I, a future social worker, use it as a way to test out moral principles. Bridget has been trying to persuade us that the Empire is a legitimate government and we shouldn’t be trying to overthrow it at all. I’ve been trying to persuade Amy that shooting stormtroopers is wrong. They are having none of it.
We all like daring escapes, though, so we do plenty of that.
The gist of this anecdote seems to be “girls like Star Wars too”. Duly noted. As an anecdote in isolation I can’t say it surprises me. (At least two of my female friends are huge Dr. Who geeks. In general I would be surprised if anyone here found “geek girls exist” to be a novel and unexpected claim.) It’s not necessarily clear what more general conclusion I ought to draw from this, or what conclusion (if any) is implied by the OP, and so the extent of my potential engagement is limited.
I think the point of the Star Wars anecdote is:
Woman do engage in roleplaying but when they do they don’t focus on papers-and-dice fighting and instead have a discussion about moral issues.
The woman who wrote the example with the evil elves probably wanted to show that she didn’t cared primarily about battling the evil elves but that she rather wanted to help the farmers directly.
Well… if that’s the intended point, then I just don’t think it’s well-supported by the anecdote.
I tell the story here of a D&D gaming group I ran which was over half female. I play D&D with several more women on a semi-regular basis. There are some differences in play style between some of the guys I play with and some of the girls I play with, but there’s no monolithic bloc such that I can even begin to generalize, even ignoring the small sample size and selection effects.
To put it another way, the anecdote in question justifies an existentially quantified claim, but in no way does it justify a universally quantified claim. And anything in-between requires that stuff that you famously don’t get by pluralizing “anecdote”.
I think the point of the Star Wars anecdote is: Woman do engage in roleplaying but when they do they don’t focus on papers-and-dice fighting and instead have a discussion about moral issues.
Is that actually true, though ? This seems to fit the pattern of “men are combative, women are nurturing”, which is often denounced as a stereotype; at the very least, there is a lot of debate on whether or not this principle is generally applicable.
I’m not saying that the statement is wrong, necessarily; only that I require more evidence to be convinced.
This seems to fit the pattern of “men are combative, women are nurturing”,
I would read it more as “men like to model situations, women like to model people.” This may be a stereotype, but I’ve noticed it to be anecdotally true. Men, when spending time together socially, tend to talk more about sports and politics than women do; women spend more time talking about other people (i.e. gossip) and analyzing their motivations. Fighting elves is a situation; you don’t have to try to understand the elves’ motivations and ‘drama’ in order to fight them.
“This may be a stereotype, but I’ve noticed it to be anecdotally true.”
“but”
What do you think sterotypes are? Generally they tend to be statements that are true 30-90% of the time, which should provide plenty of room for confirming annecdotes.
Perhaps an instance of Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate; people who agree, do not respond… as for me, I find myself with two kinds of responses to these anecdotes. For some, I think “Wow, what an unfortunate example of systemic sexism etc.; how informative, and how useful that this is here.” Other people have already commented to that effect. I’m not sure what I might say in terms of engaging with such content, but perhaps something will come to me, in which case I’ll say something.
For others… well, here’s an example:
My response is a mental shrug. I am male. I can relate to this anecdote completely. I, too, have never much understood the desire to be “normal”, and I find that as I’ve gotten older, I disdain it more and more.
But what has this to do with minimizing the inferential distance between men and women...?
Here’s another:
The gist of this anecdote seems to be “girls like Star Wars too”. Duly noted. As an anecdote in isolation I can’t say it surprises me. (At least two of my female friends are huge Dr. Who geeks. In general I would be surprised if anyone here found “geek girls exist” to be a novel and unexpected claim.) It’s not necessarily clear what more general conclusion I ought to draw from this, or what conclusion (if any) is implied by the OP, and so the extent of my potential engagement is limited.
I think the point of the Star Wars anecdote is: Woman do engage in roleplaying but when they do they don’t focus on papers-and-dice fighting and instead have a discussion about moral issues.
The woman who wrote the example with the evil elves probably wanted to show that she didn’t cared primarily about battling the evil elves but that she rather wanted to help the farmers directly.
Well… if that’s the intended point, then I just don’t think it’s well-supported by the anecdote.
I tell the story here of a D&D gaming group I ran which was over half female. I play D&D with several more women on a semi-regular basis. There are some differences in play style between some of the guys I play with and some of the girls I play with, but there’s no monolithic bloc such that I can even begin to generalize, even ignoring the small sample size and selection effects.
To put it another way, the anecdote in question justifies an existentially quantified claim, but in no way does it justify a universally quantified claim. And anything in-between requires that stuff that you famously don’t get by pluralizing “anecdote”.
Is that actually true, though ? This seems to fit the pattern of “men are combative, women are nurturing”, which is often denounced as a stereotype; at the very least, there is a lot of debate on whether or not this principle is generally applicable.
I’m not saying that the statement is wrong, necessarily; only that I require more evidence to be convinced.
I would read it more as “men like to model situations, women like to model people.” This may be a stereotype, but I’ve noticed it to be anecdotally true. Men, when spending time together socially, tend to talk more about sports and politics than women do; women spend more time talking about other people (i.e. gossip) and analyzing their motivations. Fighting elves is a situation; you don’t have to try to understand the elves’ motivations and ‘drama’ in order to fight them.
“This may be a stereotype, but I’ve noticed it to be anecdotally true.” “but” What do you think sterotypes are? Generally they tend to be statements that are true 30-90% of the time, which should provide plenty of room for confirming annecdotes.