For me, this post is not doing any favors for the “women’s experiences are fundamentally different” camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life. Of course, “Why are your characters always girls?” is probably a harder question for a boy than a girl.
I’d guess these mostly work as stories of “growing up geeky”.
The only ones that didn’t resonate were the last one about not playing M:tG anymore (probably since I’ve never stopped appearing like a geek) and the “Star wars characters are mostly male”, which does seem worth mentioning.
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing. And then notice that females can experience this when watching most things.
For those that don’t want to do a google search, MLP:FiM = My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (I had to look it up)
Is this one of those kid shows that adults watch these days? A show that a decent fraction of male LW readers know enough about to “ruminate on”?
I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I’m going to be very upset.
The show is actually fairly popular amongst the male internet nerd demographic. The original creator, Lauren Faust, was a well-liked animator beforehand, and something about it just caught the popular imagination (‘nerdy’ references, characters and animation, well-timed slanderous editorials, etc.). There’s a huge fandom that constantly produces ludicrous streams of stuff.
There’s been some discussion of it on LW, and I expect there’s a not-insignificant population of fans here. Or “bronies”, as some style themselves.
Updating usefulness of the abbreviation. My initial consideration was whether I should just abbreviate it MLP, since of course people would know I was referring to Friendship is Magic. It gets enough references around here I figured it was in the popular consciousness.
In my opinion, it’s not an exceptionally good show. Though from what I’ve read so far, Fallout:Equestria is awesome.
I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I’m going to be very upset.
I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I’m going to be very upset.
I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I’m going to be very upset.
By the way, Friendship is Science in Chapter 64 of HPMoR is a reference to Friendship is Magic.
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing.
To spell it out for those who don’t know the shows, anime series that have a mostly female cast doing more or less random stuff and have a significant male audience are a thing. There’s also the type of anime series that has a mostly male cast and is aimed at a female audience.
Not to mention Serial Experiments Lain (I am not providing a link due to spoilers).
All of these are examples of anime, though. An average person doesn’t watch anime, so maybe it would disturb him more to encounter MLP (which, after all, is heavily influenced by anime).
Never checked the numbers, but always felt that shoujo and josei manga and anime were way more widespread and likely to be successful than equivalent male-oriented counterparts (though the top ones in popularity are, of course, shounen stuff).
For me, this post is not doing any favors for the “women’s experiences are fundamentally different” camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life.
There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes.
Mmm. Part of the issue here is that the male characters tend to be aspirational stereotypes. When I’m thinking of leaving work early, or I’m bothered by something petty, I ask myself, “What would Big Mac do?” and I smile and keep working. Shining Armor and Fancy Pants are both less relevant for my life at present, but are still good examples.
Perhaps it’s significant that I’m focusing only on the stallions and not on the colts- Snips, Snails, and Pip have gotten comparable airtime and lines, and the first two are stereotypical schoolboys (named after the famous rhyme)- but the primary female characters seem to be the adults, not the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and so it seems fair to do the same for the primary male characters.
For most fictional characters that are female stereotypes, it’s not as clear that they’re aspirational. I’m not sure what “What Would Princess Leia Do?” would look like, but from my first guess it doesn’t appear to be a very useful guide to life.
Er… what if it still doesn’t seem disturbing after rumination?
Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn’t one of those.
Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I’m not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I’m not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.²
The one time I actually complained about that, though, the person who had written that status told me that I was obviously not the kind of guy she was talking about so I shouldn’t be offended. Since that time, I just entirely ignore any mysandristic or mysogynistic generalization I read.
When I post a picture of a sexy woman in underwear on my Facebook wall and a woman complains about that, I dig their Facebook wall until I find a picture of a sexy man in underwear and jokingly complain about that. She usually gives me an obviously jocular excuse for why she posted it.
But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I’m not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
People get envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier that they ((possibly incorrectly) think they) are? I had thought of that… as a joke, but it hadn’t occurred to me to take that seriously. (Wait, why does my brain think that what’s funny cannot be plausible? It must be that, since if an idea is neither funny nor plausible I forget it shortly after hearing/thinking it, within the pool of ideas I do remember, being funny does negatively correlate with being plausible due to Berkson’s paradox. Or something like that.) I’m thinking of how to test for this. (If this were right, women who think are ugly would object to such pictures more often than those who don’t; also, objecting to such pictures wouldn’t correlate much with religiosity, unless for some reason religious people are more likely to think they’re ugly. Neither of these seems to be the case IME, but the sample size is small, I cannot always be sure whether someone thinks they’re ugly, etc.) I do have a feeling that if I thought I was much uglier than I actually think I am, seeing pictures of half-naked sexy men would bother me much more, but I’m very bad at guessing what my feelings would be in counterfactual situations. (Hey, I do know a version of me with something like body dysmorphia—that’s myself from two years ago! Unfortunately, I can’t remember any specific instance of seeing such a picture back then, and also I have changed in lots of other ways too so even if I could there would still be huge confounders.)
Another hypothesis is that one version is more offensive than the gender-reversed version because it’s more common. Maybe I’m not bothered by pictures of sexy men because I don’t see them that often, but I would get fed of them if I saw them several times a day; and maybe certain women are annoyed by pictures of sexy women because they see them all the time, but they wouldn’t be if they only saw them a couple times a month.
Edit: OTOH, “just because you are right doesn’t mean I am wrong”, i.e. it could still be that each of several causes plays a substantial role. What I’ve observed so far seems compatible with a model where that indignation is caused by:
a cached thought that erotica is undignified, originating from earlier, pruder times, most prevalent among religious/traditionalist/low-Openness people because that’s the kind of people who hold onto cached thoughts from long ago; ISTM that this affects pictures of females more often than pictures of males (but I might be wrong about that). Often played for laughs;
people who think they are ugly getting envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier than they think they are. According to you it’s more common among females, which seems plausible enough to me (though it’s not like males talk to me that often about whether or not they think they’re sexy, so I dunno); and
annoyance of people seeing something they’re not interested in (e.g. sexy pictures of females, in the case of straight females or gay males) popping onto their news feed over and over again. Also happens with other stuff, e.g. football or gossip about celebrities.
Speaking only for myself, I’ve had a bit of a fight to calm down about my appearance—I’m 59 and apparently more or less look it. It’s been work (pretty successful recently) to not feel like a failure because I don’t look like I’m 30. From what I can gather, this isn’t uncommon among women, and frequently in stronger form.
Your frequency argument is relevant, but needs a bit more causality added—the reason the pictures are so common is presumably because they’re what’s preferred.
Your frequency argument is relevant, but needs a bit more causality added—the reason the pictures are so common is presumably because they’re what’s preferred.
I don’t get it… Preferred by whom? Of course straight males would prefer to look at females and vice versa...
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
“A generation” might be an overestimation. A few hours ago, a Facebook page in Italian about “destroying other people’s dreams by exposing the objective truth” published a status “let’s tell our gym-going friends that it’s cold on Facebook too”, it’s been liked by 81 people so far a sizeable fraction of whom are male, someone (using a gender-neutral pseudonym, but with a male cartoon character as profile picture) commented complaining about an “exponential” increase of pictures and videos of people in underwear, and that comment has been liked by 6 people so far of whom 4 males.
EDIT: I commented “Envy?”, and my profile picture is bare-chested. Let’s see how many flames I’ll get. (For all I’m concerned, if you’re the kind of person who resents cynicism, you do not subscribe a page about “destroying other people’s dreams by exposing the objective truth”.)
2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr...
To be fair, this scenario probably should bother you, because it amounts to hacking a critically important social system through the use of the Dark Arts. The gender of the participants is, IMO, less important than the realization of how easily our social infrastructure can be exploited.
I don’t actually watch How I Met Your Mother, but I’ve been assuming that the fictional situation you described was plausible enough to have a good chance of occurring in real life—though it’s possible I was wrong.
I’ve been assuming that the fictional situation you described was plausible enough to have a good chance of occurring in real life
People getting their way to the unfair detriment of others through arse-licking does happen a lot where I am, and not always in sexualized ways. (And it’s not the “sexualized ways” part that bothers me,¹ it’s the “unfair detriment of others” part.)
Ten hours before writing the grandparent, I was getting free beer and free cake after dancing with a group of women (none of whom I had ever met until a few hours prior) and letting them take my shirt off. And I can see no good reason to feel bad about that, at least in the situation I was in.
Ten hours before writing the grandparent, I was getting free beer and free cake after dancing with a group of women (none of whom I had ever met until a few hours prior) and letting them take my shirt off. And I can see no good reason to feel bad about that, at least in the situation I was in.
Hmm… Yeah; my intuition says the people involved would be frowned upon a lot more in that case. But then again, before the first time I did something like that, my intuition had said I would be frowned upon a lot more than actually happened; so I don’t trust it so much anymore, IOW I’m not sure I should have updated my intuition about the male stripper case but not also that about the female stripper case in the same direction. (When someone does something that makes me update my model of humans, it usually doesn’t occur to me to only update my model of their gender and not that of the other gender—but in situations like this one there are potential confounders aplenty.)
Yep — human reproduction is not an equal deal for the participants. In the most basic sense possible, it is not fair. Nobody promised humanity that our alien-god-given bodies would perfectly implement the rules of morality that we might later derive — such as reciprocity; or for that matter not using another person merely as a means to your ends.
This bug has been acknowledged many times before, and various technical and social workarounds have been proposed and deployed. The underlying bug still needs work, though it may not be fully fixed before humans are ported to a new platform.
Some feminists argue that gender reversal is not a valid technique, since there is a huge power differential between men and women. Thus, when a man says “all women are X”, he is implicitly wielding his power in order to dehumanize women even further and reinforce his privilege—which is what makes the action sexist, and therefore exceptionally offensive. When a woman says “all men are X”, her statement may be technically wrong, but it is not sexist, because the woman does not wield any power, due to being a woman. Thus, her statement is only mildly offensive at worst.
I would argue that most proponents of this argument do not grok much of mathematics, or at least are inappropriately compartmentalizing.
Sum total differences as single absolute numbers over wide populations are poorly suited to context-sensitive power valuations (judged in terms of available game-theoretic actions and the expected utility results) in individual situations like those statements or the examples in the grandparent.
They may have a point in that when there exists and expected power differential the (A set / B set) reversal technique is not valid, but their actual arguments usually break down when there are four armed women and two hungry men on an otherwise-deserted island with only one line of communication with the outside world (controlled by the women) given a typical patriarchal society in the outside world. Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
Agreed; I’m not a terribly good Feminist’s Advocate. That said, I believe they’d disagree with this statement:
Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
I’ve seen feminists argue that situations where women unequivocally hold power over men are much more rare than men think. Some of the reasons given for this proposition are that:
a). Women are socially conditioned to defer to men, and do so subconsciously all the time, even when these women are nominally in charge, and b). Men are used to their privilege and see it as the normal state of affairs; and therefore, men tend to severely underestimate its magnitude, and thus overestimate the amount of power any given woman might hold.
I’ve seen feminists argue that … Women are socially conditioned to defer to men … Men are used to their privilege …
I might agree, provided they’re talking about group averages rather than about all women and all men—this guy doesn’t sound “used to his privilege” to me.
And if they’re talking about group averages, I can’t see their relevance to interactions between individuals. Suppose that blue-eyed people are taller in average than brown-eyed people, and everyone knows this. Suppose there are two people in a room, one with blue eyes and one with brown eyes. They need to take something off a shelf, and the taller one was the easier it would be to do that. It would be preposterous to say “the blue-eyed person should do that, and if she lets the brown-eyed person do that she’s an asshole, as she could much more easily do that herself, given that brown-eyed people are shorter”, if the blue-eyed person happens to be 1.51 m (5′) and the brown-eyed person happens to be 1.87 m (6′2″).
That said, I believe they’d disagree with this statement:
Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
Yes, indeed. That’s the whole source of the disagreement once all the confusions and bad arguments are shaved off.
However, IME they (nearly always, only exception I’ve ever seen was on LW) make the opposite claim on the basis of their own experiences, perceptions of power balance, limited (often cherry-picked) data, and/or personal moral intuitions.
From what little (read: I suspect much more than a typical student who has taken a college course in Feminism or Cultural Studies and goes on to join the feminist movement in some way) social science and serious-psychology I’ve read and understood, it seems that most multiviewpoint analyses and calculations (I’ve seen the term ‘intersectional analysis’ thrown around, but AFAICT it’s basically just computing multiple subjective judgments of power in a combined utilitarian fashion) end up with much higher variation and fluctuation in both nominal agent power and psychologically perceived power balance than the above feminists would even consider plausible.
What I’ve read also seemed to indicate a very important (though not incredibly strong, but enough to be a turning point) correlation between the “normalcy” of an individual and how much those feminist claims will apply to them—IIRC, an IQ more than a standard deviation above the norm is enough to bring the “subconscious advantage” and “landed privileges” difference to statistically insignificant levels of correlation with gender. Other forms of abnormality presumably have similar effects (LBGT, for instance), though I only have anecdotal data there.
Admittedly, I don’t have much more to show either in terms of hard evidence and clear numbers, but I’d largely attribute this to my poor memory. The difference is that I’ve argued for many positions and many claims, a good portion of which were similar to those feminist arguments given in support of the claim that the subconscious domination and privilege conditioning is almost always applicable… and I’ve changed my mind upon realizing that I was wrong many times. When I talk to these feminists, I often quickly realize that they have never changed their mind on this subject.
Given that I’ve read more balanced samples of evidence than it seems most of them have, and that I’ve noticed I was wrong and changed my mind much more than them, I’m very strongly inclined to believe that my beliefs are… well, Less Wrong.
Also, you’re a pretty good Feminist’s Advocate as far as people not devoting their entire life to the cause usually go, IME. And now I’m exhausted for doing so much beisu-ryuu belief-questioning. Whew. Not as productive in terms of belief updating and propagation as I’d hoped, but at least it was good mental exercise.
Yes, just because I can play Feminist’s Advocate, doesn’t mean I actually agree with them :-) That said, I’ve never taken a feminism course, nor am I a sociologist, so my opinion probably doesn’t carry much weight. These kinds of debates can’t be conclusively resolved with words alone; it’s a job not for words, but for numbers.
Sometimes, when mentally gender-reversing a situation in my mind, some part of my brain pops up and says, “But… $stereotype_about_men, whereas $stereotype_about_women!”. I try to ignore it because the stereotypes are often wrong. (E.g. the slut-shaming one: IIRC, a survey—with WEIRD sample, but people I interact with are also usually WEIRD anyway—found that
people who frown upon sexually promiscuous women, but not upon sexually promiscuous men,
people who frown upon sexually promiscuous men, but not upon sexually promiscuous women,
people who do both, and
people who do neither
comprise more or less 10%, 10%, 40% and 40% of the population respectively, and IME that’s not obviously wrong.)
Really? IME that finding does seem wrong. I’ve seen females slut shamed way more than males. People often disapprove of both, but when it is a female they seem to disapprove more and are more compelled to speak up about it.
If a male sleeps around, he might be seen as a jerk who uses women, or as undesirable for a partner...but he wouldn’t be considered weak, dirty, or lacking in self respect.
Caveat—IME it’s mostly women doing the shaming, so if your friends are mostly male you might not see this trend.
When someone fills out their opinions explicitly in a survey, the double standard is thrown into their face.
Only 10% of people would admit to having a double standard.
Imagine that survey was about racism. I bet only about 5% of people would admit to having racist sentiments on a survey, but experiments which did not involve explicit stating of values (like resume studies) find that people often hold prejudices that they claim not to hold.
Caveat—IME it’s mostly women doing the shaming, so if your friends are mostly male you might not see this trend.
I can’t recall the topic ever coming up with my friends (more or less equal number of males and females) in the last couple years, so I don’t know for sure about them. (From what little I can infer indirectly, the difference between the average male and the average female is less than differences within each gender, or between the average practising Catholic and the average atheist/agnostic/etc.) The friends I usually hang around with in high school (almost exclusively female, and almost exclusively non-religious) did seem to laugh at the promiscuous guy we knew slightly more good-heartedly than they did at the promiscuous girl we knew (though neither was anywhere near outright ostracised), but there were other differences between the two confusing the issue.
but experiments which did not involve explicit stating of values (like resume studies) find that people often hold prejudices that they claim not to hold.
What experiments? (Googling “resume studies” doesn’t seem to turn up anything relevant—“resume” is used as a verb in most of those results.) Anyway, I’m not sure we should care about prejudices people don’t want to have (and sometimes aren’t even fully aware of having), as per Yvain’s “Real Preferences” post. (They might be consciously lying, but who does that on anonymous surveys?)
Some researcher sent identical resumes with different names to apply for similar positions. Some resumes had names that code as white in the US, while other resumes had names that coded as black. The rate of interviews scheduled was substantially different based on the apparent ethnicity of the applicant. Summary.
Okay. That also answers the “I’m not sure we should care about prejudices people don’t want to have” thing—such a discrimination is Bad whether or not the interviewers are consciously aware of it, and whether or not they endorse it.
I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it’s AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (1., 2. etc.).
If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it’s disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes.
Of course, it’s possible to miss one of those elements of the chain—not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example.
But then, it’s also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don’t feel uncomfortable themselves.
I agree with Eliezer, though. I’m a man, and I don’t find the lack of fully realized male characters in MLP particularly disturbing (*). I think it would be unreasonable to demand every work of fiction to forgo the use of stock characters. MLP is a show about female ponies and their female pony overlords (“overladies” ?), and that’s already about 7 characters right there, so it’s reasonable that the rest would end up as stock archetypes. There’s only so much attention to go around.
(*) Though I only watched the first season plus the s02 pilot, so I could be missing something.
Discord is male, more powerful than the Princesses, and evil.
To be fair, Discord probably isn’t anything. It has a male voice purely for convenience. In reality, it would probably sound like The Many (warning: link contains System Shock 2 spoilers).
Er… what if it still doesn’t seem disturbing after rumination?
THEN YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.
Seriously, though, considering the large numbers of male fans who aren’t bothered by this, character seems to be a bigger consideration than gender. Which is strange, since we all know that no woman could enjoy a show with an all-male cast …
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. [...] I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing
I’m afraid I easily skipped my chance to be disturbed by this, with any amount of rumination.
When I watched several episodes, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of characters are female, which seemed strange. Then I got interested enough to read some interviews with Lauren Faust and found how she grew up with three brothers and no sisters and had to watch boys’ shows which were mostly about boys. Then I remembered some shows which are full of boys, realized that I took that for granted and understood that making a good show for girls about girls, for a change, makes sense and it didn’t bother me anymore.
What bothers me a bit is the recognition of the fact that I couldn’t accept how some of the cast are actually female. “Wait, so Applejack is a girl? And Rainbow Dash? And Scootaloo? I can’t believe it. Does it make me a male chauvinist?” Of course, I want to count myself as a male chauvinist no more than the other guy, so my unability to accept the whole spectrum of female gender roles that Lauren Faust presents us in the show bothers me. Of course, I deeply respect her for being able to think up and defend such diverse female role models for a girls’ show that I still have trouble accepting.
Of course, I deeply respect her for being able to think up and defend such diverse female role models for a girls’ show that I still have trouble accepting.
Not sure whether we think about the same thing, but to me it seems that inventing many diverse female characters is actually very easy, under one condition… you don’t fill all the roles with male characters first.
As an example, imagine that a male author is going to write a story or a movie with the typical fantasy settings. First step, he designs a party, and his planning might go like this:
“So, we need a warrior guy, a strong one with a hammer or an axe. But we could also have one guy shooting arrows; let’s make him an elf. And of course a wizard, a guy who will shoot fireballs at enemies. That’s it, basicly. Oops… I guess I should add some women too. So, there will also be a woman. No, that’s not enough. Let’s have two women; let’s call them Woman#1 and Woman#2. Now I wish I could find some meaningful way to make them differ from each other...”
The problem is not that there is not enough place in fantasy setting to have two different female characters. The problem is that the author already assigned the male gender to all the archetypes he knew, and then there was no archetype left for women. The outcome would be completely different if the author started like this:
“So, we will have a strong warrior girl, with a hammer or an axe. Also a girl shooting arrows; let’s make her an elf. And of course also a wizard girl who will shoot fireballs at enemies.”
This is exactly the same shallow character party design algorithm as in the previous example… but suddenly, it has enough space for different female characters. (A better author would certainly invent better characters than this, but the idea is that you can think about N meaningful characters, and then it is your choice whether you make them male or female.)
A better author would certainly invent better characters than this, but the idea is that you can think about N meaningful characters, and then it is your choice whether you make them male or female.
Reframing your post: “male” is so overwhelmingly default of a choice that people have to make conscious effort to remember that there is a choice, and choose otherwise. “Unless otherwise specified, an agent is a gender-normative male” seems to be a cognitive bias, but possibly a bias that we inherit from culture instead of from biological instinct.
More socially acceptable is part of the problem—a man who says he didn’t want advances from/sex with a woman who’s at least reasonably attractive will mostly be told he doesn’t appreciate his good luck.
More socially acceptable is part of the problem—a man who says he didn’t want advances from/sex with a woman who’s at least reasonable attractive will mostly be told he doesn’t appreciate his good luck.
I don’t know quite how relevant and which way the causal arrows are pointing, but this seems to add up somehow with the fact that on average women get more dates and more mates than men, explained by the phenomenon that fewer men date and mate way more women. It also seems to clash up weird with the social notion that women should be more selective of their partners while men should go for whatever’s hottest or, failing that, available. (terminology intentionally representative of what I perceive to be social norm)
For me, this post is not doing any favors for the “women’s experiences are fundamentally different” camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life. Of course, “Why are your characters always girls?” is probably a harder question for a boy than a girl.
I’d guess these mostly work as stories of “growing up geeky”.
The only ones that didn’t resonate were the last one about not playing M:tG anymore (probably since I’ve never stopped appearing like a geek) and the “Star wars characters are mostly male”, which does seem worth mentioning.
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing. And then notice that females can experience this when watching most things.
For those that don’t want to do a google search, MLP:FiM = My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (I had to look it up)
Is this one of those kid shows that adults watch these days? A show that a decent fraction of male LW readers know enough about to “ruminate on”?
I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I’m going to be very upset.
The show is actually fairly popular amongst the male internet nerd demographic. The original creator, Lauren Faust, was a well-liked animator beforehand, and something about it just caught the popular imagination (‘nerdy’ references, characters and animation, well-timed slanderous editorials, etc.). There’s a huge fandom that constantly produces ludicrous streams of stuff.
There’s been some discussion of it on LW, and I expect there’s a not-insignificant population of fans here. Or “bronies”, as some style themselves.
Yup. Try watching a few episodes, it’s pretty good.
Start at the beginning. Don’t throw the dice with the more recent stuff.
Updating usefulness of the abbreviation. My initial consideration was whether I should just abbreviate it MLP, since of course people would know I was referring to Friendship is Magic. It gets enough references around here I figured it was in the popular consciousness.
In my opinion, it’s not an exceptionally good show. Though from what I’ve read so far, Fallout:Equestria is awesome.
Find better friends!
I have never heard of Fallout:Equestria, but I started laughing out loud as soon as I read the title. Is this the authoritative source for the story ?
War. War never changes...
Not sure about definitive, but it seems to be complete.
F:E is surprisingly, serious, gritty, and well-written. It’s also longer than War and Peace.
First, share your respective definitions of “better” with regard to friends.
Not exhaustive, but “friends for which liking awesome things is not a handicap” is a good start.
Also, look for friends who are at least happy for your sake if you’re enthusiastic about something non-harmful.
Couldn’t have said it any better.
Solution make friends read it.
By the way, Friendship is Science in Chapter 64 of HPMoR is a reference to Friendship is Magic.
I’m not entirely convinced by this argument.
To spell it out for those who don’t know the shows, anime series that have a mostly female cast doing more or less random stuff and have a significant male audience are a thing. There’s also the type of anime series that has a mostly male cast and is aimed at a female audience.
Not to mention Serial Experiments Lain (I am not providing a link due to spoilers).
All of these are examples of anime, though. An average person doesn’t watch anime, so maybe it would disturb him more to encounter MLP (which, after all, is heavily influenced by anime).
Never checked the numbers, but always felt that shoujo and josei manga and anime were way more widespread and likely to be successful than equivalent male-oriented counterparts (though the top ones in popularity are, of course, shounen stuff).
Same here.
Mmm. Part of the issue here is that the male characters tend to be aspirational stereotypes. When I’m thinking of leaving work early, or I’m bothered by something petty, I ask myself, “What would Big Mac do?” and I smile and keep working. Shining Armor and Fancy Pants are both less relevant for my life at present, but are still good examples.
Perhaps it’s significant that I’m focusing only on the stallions and not on the colts- Snips, Snails, and Pip have gotten comparable airtime and lines, and the first two are stereotypical schoolboys (named after the famous rhyme)- but the primary female characters seem to be the adults, not the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and so it seems fair to do the same for the primary male characters.
For most fictional characters that are female stereotypes, it’s not as clear that they’re aspirational. I’m not sure what “What Would Princess Leia Do?” would look like, but from my first guess it doesn’t appear to be a very useful guide to life.
Er… what if it still doesn’t seem disturbing after rumination?
Discord is male, more powerful than the Princesses, and evil.
Er, I don’t seem to be finding this very disturbing either.
(Admittedly, I haven’t actually watched the show, only read fanfiction based on it.)
Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn’t one of those.
Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I’m not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I’m not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.²
The one time I actually complained about that, though, the person who had written that status told me that I was obviously not the kind of guy she was talking about so I shouldn’t be offended. Since that time, I just entirely ignore any mysandristic or mysogynistic generalization I read.
When I post a picture of a sexy woman in underwear on my Facebook wall and a woman complains about that, I dig their Facebook wall until I find a picture of a sexy man in underwear and jokingly complain about that. She usually gives me an obviously jocular excuse for why she posted it.
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
People get envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier that they ((possibly incorrectly) think they) are? I had thought of that… as a joke, but it hadn’t occurred to me to take that seriously. (Wait, why does my brain think that what’s funny cannot be plausible? It must be that, since if an idea is neither funny nor plausible I forget it shortly after hearing/thinking it, within the pool of ideas I do remember, being funny does negatively correlate with being plausible due to Berkson’s paradox. Or something like that.) I’m thinking of how to test for this. (If this were right, women who think are ugly would object to such pictures more often than those who don’t; also, objecting to such pictures wouldn’t correlate much with religiosity, unless for some reason religious people are more likely to think they’re ugly. Neither of these seems to be the case IME, but the sample size is small, I cannot always be sure whether someone thinks they’re ugly, etc.) I do have a feeling that if I thought I was much uglier than I actually think I am, seeing pictures of half-naked sexy men would bother me much more, but I’m very bad at guessing what my feelings would be in counterfactual situations. (Hey, I do know a version of me with something like body dysmorphia—that’s myself from two years ago! Unfortunately, I can’t remember any specific instance of seeing such a picture back then, and also I have changed in lots of other ways too so even if I could there would still be huge confounders.)
Another hypothesis is that one version is more offensive than the gender-reversed version because it’s more common. Maybe I’m not bothered by pictures of sexy men because I don’t see them that often, but I would get fed of them if I saw them several times a day; and maybe certain women are annoyed by pictures of sexy women because they see them all the time, but they wouldn’t be if they only saw them a couple times a month.
Edit: OTOH, “just because you are right doesn’t mean I am wrong”, i.e. it could still be that each of several causes plays a substantial role. What I’ve observed so far seems compatible with a model where that indignation is caused by:
a cached thought that erotica is undignified, originating from earlier, pruder times, most prevalent among religious/traditionalist/low-Openness people because that’s the kind of people who hold onto cached thoughts from long ago; ISTM that this affects pictures of females more often than pictures of males (but I might be wrong about that). Often played for laughs;
people who think they are ugly getting envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier than they think they are. According to you it’s more common among females, which seems plausible enough to me (though it’s not like males talk to me that often about whether or not they think they’re sexy, so I dunno); and
annoyance of people seeing something they’re not interested in (e.g. sexy pictures of females, in the case of straight females or gay males) popping onto their news feed over and over again. Also happens with other stuff, e.g. football or gossip about celebrities.
Speaking only for myself, I’ve had a bit of a fight to calm down about my appearance—I’m 59 and apparently more or less look it. It’s been work (pretty successful recently) to not feel like a failure because I don’t look like I’m 30. From what I can gather, this isn’t uncommon among women, and frequently in stronger form.
Your frequency argument is relevant, but needs a bit more causality added—the reason the pictures are so common is presumably because they’re what’s preferred.
See also my edit to the parent, if you haven’t.
I don’t get it… Preferred by whom? Of course straight males would prefer to look at females and vice versa...
“A generation” might be an overestimation. A few hours ago, a Facebook page in Italian about “destroying other people’s dreams by exposing the objective truth” published a status “let’s tell our gym-going friends that it’s cold on Facebook too”, it’s been liked by 81 people so far a sizeable fraction of whom are male, someone (using a gender-neutral pseudonym, but with a male cartoon character as profile picture) commented complaining about an “exponential” increase of pictures and videos of people in underwear, and that comment has been liked by 6 people so far of whom 4 males.
EDIT: I commented “Envy?”, and my profile picture is bare-chested. Let’s see how many flames I’ll get. (For all I’m concerned, if you’re the kind of person who resents cynicism, you do not subscribe a page about “destroying other people’s dreams by exposing the objective truth”.)
To be fair, this scenario probably should bother you, because it amounts to hacking a critically important social system through the use of the Dark Arts. The gender of the participants is, IMO, less important than the realization of how easily our social infrastructure can be exploited.
It does bother me in Real Life, what I’m not sure of is whether it should bother me in fiction.
I don’t actually watch How I Met Your Mother, but I’ve been assuming that the fictional situation you described was plausible enough to have a good chance of occurring in real life—though it’s possible I was wrong.
People getting their way to the unfair detriment of others through arse-licking does happen a lot where I am, and not always in sexualized ways. (And it’s not the “sexualized ways” part that bothers me,¹ it’s the “unfair detriment of others” part.)
Ten hours before writing the grandparent, I was getting free beer and free cake after dancing with a group of women (none of whom I had ever met until a few hours prior) and letting them take my shirt off. And I can see no good reason to feel bad about that, at least in the situation I was in.
Picture that situation gender-swapped.
Hmm… Yeah; my intuition says the people involved would be frowned upon a lot more in that case. But then again, before the first time I did something like that, my intuition had said I would be frowned upon a lot more than actually happened; so I don’t trust it so much anymore, IOW I’m not sure I should have updated my intuition about the male stripper case but not also that about the female stripper case in the same direction. (When someone does something that makes me update my model of humans, it usually doesn’t occur to me to only update my model of their gender and not that of the other gender—but in situations like this one there are potential confounders aplenty.)
… in a world where men get pregnant?
Really, I’m impressed it took this long for someone to point out one of the fundamental problems of the gender-swap test.
Yep — human reproduction is not an equal deal for the participants. In the most basic sense possible, it is not fair. Nobody promised humanity that our alien-god-given bodies would perfectly implement the rules of morality that we might later derive — such as reciprocity; or for that matter not using another person merely as a means to your ends.
This bug has been acknowledged many times before, and various technical and social workarounds have been proposed and deployed. The underlying bug still needs work, though it may not be fully fixed before humans are ported to a new platform.
To play Feminist’s Advocate for a moment:
Some feminists argue that gender reversal is not a valid technique, since there is a huge power differential between men and women. Thus, when a man says “all women are X”, he is implicitly wielding his power in order to dehumanize women even further and reinforce his privilege—which is what makes the action sexist, and therefore exceptionally offensive. When a woman says “all men are X”, her statement may be technically wrong, but it is not sexist, because the woman does not wield any power, due to being a woman. Thus, her statement is only mildly offensive at worst.
I would argue that most proponents of this argument do not grok much of mathematics, or at least are inappropriately compartmentalizing.
Sum total differences as single absolute numbers over wide populations are poorly suited to context-sensitive power valuations (judged in terms of available game-theoretic actions and the expected utility results) in individual situations like those statements or the examples in the grandparent.
They may have a point in that when there exists and expected power differential the (A set / B set) reversal technique is not valid, but their actual arguments usually break down when there are four armed women and two hungry men on an otherwise-deserted island with only one line of communication with the outside world (controlled by the women) given a typical patriarchal society in the outside world. Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
Agreed; I’m not a terribly good Feminist’s Advocate. That said, I believe they’d disagree with this statement:
I’ve seen feminists argue that situations where women unequivocally hold power over men are much more rare than men think. Some of the reasons given for this proposition are that:
a). Women are socially conditioned to defer to men, and do so subconsciously all the time, even when these women are nominally in charge, and
b). Men are used to their privilege and see it as the normal state of affairs; and therefore, men tend to severely underestimate its magnitude, and thus overestimate the amount of power any given woman might hold.
I might agree, provided they’re talking about group averages rather than about all women and all men—this guy doesn’t sound “used to his privilege” to me.
And if they’re talking about group averages, I can’t see their relevance to interactions between individuals. Suppose that blue-eyed people are taller in average than brown-eyed people, and everyone knows this. Suppose there are two people in a room, one with blue eyes and one with brown eyes. They need to take something off a shelf, and the taller one was the easier it would be to do that. It would be preposterous to say “the blue-eyed person should do that, and if she lets the brown-eyed person do that she’s an asshole, as she could much more easily do that herself, given that brown-eyed people are shorter”, if the blue-eyed person happens to be 1.51 m (5′) and the brown-eyed person happens to be 1.87 m (6′2″).
Yes, indeed. That’s the whole source of the disagreement once all the confusions and bad arguments are shaved off.
However, IME they (nearly always, only exception I’ve ever seen was on LW) make the opposite claim on the basis of their own experiences, perceptions of power balance, limited (often cherry-picked) data, and/or personal moral intuitions.
From what little (read: I suspect much more than a typical student who has taken a college course in Feminism or Cultural Studies and goes on to join the feminist movement in some way) social science and serious-psychology I’ve read and understood, it seems that most multiviewpoint analyses and calculations (I’ve seen the term ‘intersectional analysis’ thrown around, but AFAICT it’s basically just computing multiple subjective judgments of power in a combined utilitarian fashion) end up with much higher variation and fluctuation in both nominal agent power and psychologically perceived power balance than the above feminists would even consider plausible.
What I’ve read also seemed to indicate a very important (though not incredibly strong, but enough to be a turning point) correlation between the “normalcy” of an individual and how much those feminist claims will apply to them—IIRC, an IQ more than a standard deviation above the norm is enough to bring the “subconscious advantage” and “landed privileges” difference to statistically insignificant levels of correlation with gender. Other forms of abnormality presumably have similar effects (LBGT, for instance), though I only have anecdotal data there.
Admittedly, I don’t have much more to show either in terms of hard evidence and clear numbers, but I’d largely attribute this to my poor memory. The difference is that I’ve argued for many positions and many claims, a good portion of which were similar to those feminist arguments given in support of the claim that the subconscious domination and privilege conditioning is almost always applicable… and I’ve changed my mind upon realizing that I was wrong many times. When I talk to these feminists, I often quickly realize that they have never changed their mind on this subject.
Given that I’ve read more balanced samples of evidence than it seems most of them have, and that I’ve noticed I was wrong and changed my mind much more than them, I’m very strongly inclined to believe that my beliefs are… well, Less Wrong.
Also, you’re a pretty good Feminist’s Advocate as far as people not devoting their entire life to the cause usually go, IME. And now I’m exhausted for doing so much beisu-ryuu belief-questioning. Whew. Not as productive in terms of belief updating and propagation as I’d hoped, but at least it was good mental exercise.
Yes, just because I can play Feminist’s Advocate, doesn’t mean I actually agree with them :-) That said, I’ve never taken a feminism course, nor am I a sociologist, so my opinion probably doesn’t carry much weight. These kinds of debates can’t be conclusively resolved with words alone; it’s a job not for words, but for numbers.
I haven’t studied those issues, but what you say is more or less what I have inferred from my experience in meatspace.
Sometimes, when mentally gender-reversing a situation in my mind, some part of my brain pops up and says, “But… $stereotype_about_men, whereas $stereotype_about_women!”. I try to ignore it because the stereotypes are often wrong. (E.g. the slut-shaming one: IIRC, a survey—with WEIRD sample, but people I interact with are also usually WEIRD anyway—found that
people who frown upon sexually promiscuous women, but not upon sexually promiscuous men,
people who frown upon sexually promiscuous men, but not upon sexually promiscuous women,
people who do both, and
people who do neither
comprise more or less 10%, 10%, 40% and 40% of the population respectively, and IME that’s not obviously wrong.)
Really? IME that finding does seem wrong. I’ve seen females slut shamed way more than males. People often disapprove of both, but when it is a female they seem to disapprove more and are more compelled to speak up about it.
If a male sleeps around, he might be seen as a jerk who uses women, or as undesirable for a partner...but he wouldn’t be considered weak, dirty, or lacking in self respect.
Caveat—IME it’s mostly women doing the shaming, so if your friends are mostly male you might not see this trend.
When someone fills out their opinions explicitly in a survey, the double standard is thrown into their face. Only 10% of people would admit to having a double standard.
Imagine that survey was about racism. I bet only about 5% of people would admit to having racist sentiments on a survey, but experiments which did not involve explicit stating of values (like resume studies) find that people often hold prejudices that they claim not to hold.
I can’t recall the topic ever coming up with my friends (more or less equal number of males and females) in the last couple years, so I don’t know for sure about them. (From what little I can infer indirectly, the difference between the average male and the average female is less than differences within each gender, or between the average practising Catholic and the average atheist/agnostic/etc.) The friends I usually hang around with in high school (almost exclusively female, and almost exclusively non-religious) did seem to laugh at the promiscuous guy we knew slightly more good-heartedly than they did at the promiscuous girl we knew (though neither was anywhere near outright ostracised), but there were other differences between the two confusing the issue.
What experiments? (Googling “resume studies” doesn’t seem to turn up anything relevant—“resume” is used as a verb in most of those results.) Anyway, I’m not sure we should care about prejudices people don’t want to have (and sometimes aren’t even fully aware of having), as per Yvain’s “Real Preferences” post. (They might be consciously lying, but who does that on anonymous surveys?)
Resume studies:
Some researcher sent identical resumes with different names to apply for similar positions. Some resumes had names that code as white in the US, while other resumes had names that coded as black. The rate of interviews scheduled was substantially different based on the apparent ethnicity of the applicant. Summary.
Okay. That also answers the “I’m not sure we should care about prejudices people don’t want to have” thing—such a discrimination is Bad whether or not the interviewers are consciously aware of it, and whether or not they endorse it.
Totally off topic, sorry. How did you do footnotes? I’m so jealous.
I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it’s AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (
1.,2.etc.).If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it’s disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes.
Of course, it’s possible to miss one of those elements of the chain—not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example.
But then, it’s also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don’t feel uncomfortable themselves.
I agree with Eliezer, though. I’m a man, and I don’t find the lack of fully realized male characters in MLP particularly disturbing (*). I think it would be unreasonable to demand every work of fiction to forgo the use of stock characters. MLP is a show about female ponies and their female pony overlords (“overladies” ?), and that’s already about 7 characters right there, so it’s reasonable that the rest would end up as stock archetypes. There’s only so much attention to go around.
(*) Though I only watched the first season plus the s02 pilot, so I could be missing something.
To be fair, Discord probably isn’t anything. It has a male voice purely for convenience. In reality, it would probably sound like The Many (warning: link contains System Shock 2 spoilers).
THEN YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.
Seriously, though, considering the large numbers of male fans who aren’t bothered by this, character seems to be a bigger consideration than gender. Which is strange, since we all know that no woman could enjoy a show with an all-male cast …
I’m totally lost here. There must be irony in your post, but where?
This was ironic—a lot of shows have predominantly-male casts, yet women are somehow able to enjoy mass media.
That’s not to say i doesn’t cause problems, of course, but the empathy gap is not so large as to estroy viewing pleasure.
I’m afraid I easily skipped my chance to be disturbed by this, with any amount of rumination.
When I watched several episodes, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of characters are female, which seemed strange. Then I got interested enough to read some interviews with Lauren Faust and found how she grew up with three brothers and no sisters and had to watch boys’ shows which were mostly about boys. Then I remembered some shows which are full of boys, realized that I took that for granted and understood that making a good show for girls about girls, for a change, makes sense and it didn’t bother me anymore.
What bothers me a bit is the recognition of the fact that I couldn’t accept how some of the cast are actually female. “Wait, so Applejack is a girl? And Rainbow Dash? And Scootaloo? I can’t believe it. Does it make me a male chauvinist?” Of course, I want to count myself as a male chauvinist no more than the other guy, so my unability to accept the whole spectrum of female gender roles that Lauren Faust presents us in the show bothers me. Of course, I deeply respect her for being able to think up and defend such diverse female role models for a girls’ show that I still have trouble accepting.
Not sure whether we think about the same thing, but to me it seems that inventing many diverse female characters is actually very easy, under one condition… you don’t fill all the roles with male characters first.
As an example, imagine that a male author is going to write a story or a movie with the typical fantasy settings. First step, he designs a party, and his planning might go like this:
“So, we need a warrior guy, a strong one with a hammer or an axe. But we could also have one guy shooting arrows; let’s make him an elf. And of course a wizard, a guy who will shoot fireballs at enemies. That’s it, basicly. Oops… I guess I should add some women too. So, there will also be a woman. No, that’s not enough. Let’s have two women; let’s call them Woman#1 and Woman#2. Now I wish I could find some meaningful way to make them differ from each other...”
The problem is not that there is not enough place in fantasy setting to have two different female characters. The problem is that the author already assigned the male gender to all the archetypes he knew, and then there was no archetype left for women. The outcome would be completely different if the author started like this:
“So, we will have a strong warrior girl, with a hammer or an axe. Also a girl shooting arrows; let’s make her an elf. And of course also a wizard girl who will shoot fireballs at enemies.”
This is exactly the same shallow character party design algorithm as in the previous example… but suddenly, it has enough space for different female characters. (A better author would certainly invent better characters than this, but the idea is that you can think about N meaningful characters, and then it is your choice whether you make them male or female.)
Reframing your post: “male” is so overwhelmingly default of a choice that people have to make conscious effort to remember that there is a choice, and choose otherwise. “Unless otherwise specified, an agent is a gender-normative male” seems to be a cognitive bias, but possibly a bias that we inherit from culture instead of from biological instinct.
Minus the catcalling, too, I assume?
Unwanted female attention toward men exists, but is certainly less threatening, less pervasive, and more socially acceptable.
More socially acceptable is part of the problem—a man who says he didn’t want advances from/sex with a woman who’s at least reasonably attractive will mostly be told he doesn’t appreciate his good luck.
I don’t know quite how relevant and which way the causal arrows are pointing, but this seems to add up somehow with the fact that on average women get more dates and more mates than men, explained by the phenomenon that fewer men date and mate way more women. It also seems to clash up weird with the social notion that women should be more selective of their partners while men should go for whatever’s hottest or, failing that, available. (terminology intentionally representative of what I perceive to be social norm)