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.
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.