a class called “Feminism and Science.” I would be very surprised if there were classes in feminist science studies at your school, but they have a perspective on rationality and science studies that is unique and valuable.
I believe they do. I would not recommend anyone attend them unless they are already well versed in sociology and evolutionary psychology. That allows them to put what is really going on into the right perspective.
This post seems hostile toward the subject of feminist studies. In general, I shared this perspective (which I interpret as: skeptical of feminism, thinking of it as identity politics) before: (a) meeting feminist studies majors and (b) taking feminist studies classes.
While feminist rhetoric can seem anti-scientific, or be used in anti-scientific ways, I have found that feminist theory is more often in league with applied rationality. I am currently composing a post on the subject.
In general, I shared this perspective (which I interpret as: skeptical of feminism, thinking of it as identity politics) before: (a) meeting feminist studies majors and (b) taking feminist studies classes.
I share wedrifid’s opinion on feminism and feminist studies. Yet I have also taken feminist studies classes, and my experiences also overlap with yours, though I had significant experience with feminism prior to taking those classes which undoubtedly colored my judgment. I will briefly outline the development of my views around gender politics:
As a teenager, I started out with feminist intuitions, believing that feminism could do no wrong.
I got into pickup, and I read Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell. My experience as a shy, romantically-challenged, gender non-conforming young man, combined with Farrell’s book and the arguments of the pickup and seduction community, led to a perspective on gender politics that became increasingly different from feminism. Feminists emphasized the oppression of women and “male privilege.” I could see these phenomena, but I also say phenomena that looked pretty clearly like male oppression and “female privilege,” which feminists didn’t seem to talk about.
I read more books, such as Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson and Young, and Heterophobia by Daphne Patai. I started discussing feminism on the internet, yet my interactions with feminists on blogs taught me very fast that many feminists have trouble defending certain ideas in feminism, and have a low tolerance for criticism of their ideas. My agreement with a larger segment of feminist positions didn’t matter; unless I accepted certain concepts (e.g. “male privilege”) and embedded assumptions, I was treated like an outgroup member, regardless of how civil or reasonable I tried to be.
I came to believe that ideological and biased thinking was highly prevalent in feminism. Yet I found that many critiques of feminism, were also biased and wrong. For example, the Men’s Rights Movement criticizes feminism in many areas, yet it also sometime replicates some of the errors of feminism, such as playing fast and loose with the facts to support ideological positions. I started a blog on feminism with a couple other people to have a critical, but fair evaluation of the movement: FeministCritics.org.
In college, I took several feminist studies courses. Although I had a lot of negative experiences with feminism prior to these courses, I tried to counteract my biases. I tried really hard to like feminism.
My experience with feminism in real life was much more positive than my experience with feminists on the internet. I had a lot of fun, and made several new friends. I got one B+, and several As, in these courses (these grades serve as evidence that I understand a lot of the basics of feminist theory). I voiced a lot of agreement with certain feminist positions, and I also managed to raise a few objections to feminist ideas in classes and in papers. Most of these objections were heard and treated respectfully, though I did not try to insist on them in a way that would take up lots of class time. I did get one D on a paper in one class, where the professor didn’t seem to understand my objection to some ideas in the reading, and said that I had “failed to engage with the reading” (I toed the party-line better in subsequent assignments, and got an A in the class). Other papers I wrote were on the similarities between misogyny and misandry, and the seduction community. I recently posted one of my old feminist studies papers that I got on A on to my blog.
Feminists I encountered in real life seemed a lot more open to new ideas. Perhaps real life led to less polarized communication than the internet. Also, feminists who are motivated to talk about it on the internet may be more convinced by it and treat it more as an ideology. “Real life” feminists seemed a lot more open to considering notions-that-should-be-compatible-with-feminist-theory-but-are-treated-as-politically-incorrect, like the oppression of men, sexism towards men, and female privilege; they haven’t yet learned that these things aren’t supposed to exist, according to academic feminism. (Though I did have a brief disagreement with another student during a feminist studies class who claimed that women are oppressed, but that bad stuff that happens to men does not qualify as “oppression.”) I also found that some feminist students were open to hearing about men’s experiences and perspectives, and consider them evidence of problems in society, just as feminism treats women’s experiences as evidence of problems in society.
Even though I had a better experience with “real life feminists” in women’s studies than with “internet feminists,” my conceptual criticisms of feminism weren’t alleviated by experiences in feminist studies, and some were intensified. I’ve read several books which criticize women’s studies and academic feminism, such as Professing Feminism by Daphe Patai, the aforementioned Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson and Young, Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Bricmont (an excellent rationality text), and Higher Superstition by Gross and Levitt. My experiences with feminist studies weren’t quite as bad as what they describe, but there was definitely overlap. Here are a couple examples that stand out in my memory:
On the first day of Feminist Studies 101, the professor handed out the syllabus, and said that this class would proceed from the assumption that (1) women are oppressed in society, and (2) this oppression is unjust and should be remedied. Here’s how the syllabus put it:
This course embarks from a few key feminist assumptions: women’s and men’s lives are thoroughly gendered, gendered dynamics of power and inequality are reproduced in and through other forms of difference (class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, religion, disability and so on), and such social inequality is unjust.
Whenever I debated feminists online, couldn’t defend their foundational terms and assumptions, and would resort to saying “go take Feminism 101.” So I did… yet, the premises of feminist thought were really explained and justified there either, but rather assumed.
I saw denials of biology several times. In a couple classes, I heard the claim that not just gender, but sex (i.e. division into male and female) and sexual orientation were socially constructed. The notion that sex is a social construction can only be created by a lot of sleight of hand that I won’t get into right now (but see this critique of Anne Fausto-Sterling).
As for sexual orientation being socially constructed, I have a funny story. The queer professor in my masculinity and feminist theory class claimed that sexual orientation is “socially constructed.” A student objected, saying something like “well, I’m queer, and I’ve heard a lot of queer people say that they feel like they are born that way… isn’t biology a factor?” The professor brushed off this objection and maintained that homosexuality is socially-constructed, marginalizing the experience of this student, many queer people, not to mention a lot of scientific research and queer history. During the break in the class period, the student thanked the professor and walked out of the class never to return, but not before I befriended her at the water fountain and told her she was my hero.
Some of the biggest problems with feminist studies from an epistemological standpoint were not things that feminists said, but what they didn’t say. Feminist professors and writing just start throwing around all these terms like “patriarchy,” “male privilege”, “oppression”, “power”, “dominance”, and “sexism.” Yet the conceptualization of these terms was never explained or defended. I view them as a castle built on sand.
Since the concept of privilege inherent in the term “male privilege” expresses a hierarchy (ie. an in-group/out-group dynamic), the placement of men in the in-group (because of the power that their class holds) necessitates placing women and other non-men in an out-group (because of the lack of power). Thus, “female privilege” doesn’t work as a counterpart to “male privilege” because it doesn’t fit into that dynamic.
This argument assumes that there is a linear hierarchy of men over women. This is a persistent claim of feminism. While it is plausible that the people at the top of the hierarchy of a certain type of status are disproportionately male, this doesn’t mean that males in general are ranked higher than females in general; there could be more men at the bottom, also: a greater variance of advantage in men.
This argument assumes a metric by which we can discover a hierarchy of men over women, but the metric is unspecified. Another assumption is that hierarchy is unidimensional. To me, it seems plausible that males are advantaged over females on some dimensions of power, while females are advantaged over males on other dimensions of power; who is on top of this hierarchy depends on what dimension we are looking at, or on some way of aggregating measurements on different dimensions. A multi-dimensional model of power is unexplored by feminists, who simply assume that the dimensions of power and status that women rank lower on are the only dimensions that exist or matter. From this biased assumption, feminists declared a hierarchy of men “as a class” (whatever that means) over women “as a class,” self-servingly defined “institutional privilege” as only held by the class at the top of the hierarchy, and denied that women have gender privilege.
As far as I can tell, most of feminist theory isn’t about rational arguments, it is a morass of biased and self-serving reasoning. Feminist theory is highly foundationalist with its dependence on ubiquitous terms like “male privilege” and “patriarchy” that are loaded with unexplained and unexamined assumptions. If you believe in gender equality, but you don’t believe in the concept of patriarchy, and you think female privilege and male oppression exist, then you can still be a feminist, right? Not in the feminist blogosphere or academia you can’t, at least not if you argue for these opinions at length. Ironically, many “real life” feminists who haven’t been inducted into the higher forms of feminist dogma on the internet and in academia probably believe at least the last two things, because they have not yet been taught to subordinate their sense of fairness and empathy (being open to the idea that the other gender has disadvantages, too, not just advantages) to the convoluted sorts of reasoning that I criticize above.
There are forms of feminist thought that are better than others. Some feminist philosophers, such as Helen Longino, do have insightful ideas and seem epistemically responsible (even though I don’t always agree with them). Many feminists are empathetic and interested in learning about men’s experiences with gender in ways the broader culture is not, which I view as the human capacity for empathy rising above the limiting conceptual framework of ideological feminist thought (the typical response of blogosphere feminists to male experiences of oppression is “patriarchy hurts men, too” used as a dismissal). For an example of what feminist theory could be (but unfortunately isn’t most of the time), see this discussion of a feminist paper that I like.
So magfrump, I do agree that there is potential for learning stuff about applied rationality from feminism. It’s kind of a needle in a haystack, but if you’ve found the needle, I would love to see it, and I look forward to your post on the subject. As I’ve written, I like a look of the analytical tools developed by feminists, and I wish feminists would use them more often, and in an unbiased and consistent way.
Don’t take my word for any of this. Read Finally Feminism 101. Read feminist blogs. Participate on feminist blogs, call out ideas that seem fishy to you (general you), and see what kind of response you get. Read The Gender Knot. Take some feminist studies courses. Then get back to me.
A couple of things stand out that I would like to reply to. For the most part, you seem vastly better-informed than I feel, and I have a lot of reading to do, so I will save a longer-form reply for the post itself.
Things that stood out:
Saying that something is socially constructed, to me, is about the map/territory distinction. Thus in the case of queerness, I would say that things such as “gay” and “straight” are socially constructed, and our concepts of sexual orientation are socially constructed, which does not at all contradict that they may be biologically based. For example, I would also say that a table is socially constructed (why is it a table vs a bed vs a chair?). The set of people that you may or may not be attracted to is not socially constructed, but the labels you apply to communicate that information are.
In regards to the response to Fausto-Sterling; I don’t agree that (as they claim) her claims about a continuum rely on her claims of abundance. I also noticed that when discussing vaginal agenesis they did not discuss consent or comfort, although the comparison to a cleft palate makes that implicit. Finally, they conclude by defending pathology only with an example, and by saying that her theories are “not helpful to clinicians,” whereas I feel that her intended audience was not so limited. I also feel very strongly that on page five about “these...individuals deserve the same care...” is pure window dressing, for reasons that I will mention but not in detail.
On the other hand, purely in terms of statistics, I feel somewhat betrayed by my Professor who is, for the most part as far as I can tell, of a feather with Longino (we had assigned reading from Longino, for example).
I agree with you that feminism includes specific political ideals at its roots, including fairness and inclusivity, and while I don’t mean to say that this means everyone should “tow the party line” I do think that effort put into, for example, reasserting the sexual dimorphism or discussing female privilege could be better used in other ways and lead to self-images which create artificial conflict. Of course this somewhat assumes epistemological hygiene on the part of feminists which may not exist...
I’m cutting myself off because this is at least five times the length I intended and I need to go to a barbecue.
my Professor who is, for the most part as far as I can tell, of a feather with Longino (we had assigned reading from Longino, for example).
I don’t deny that your prof holds similar views, but in general this isn’t an accurate indicator. Some things are just stuff everybody has to assign or they’re accused of not covering the material, and I’ve also had teachers assign things specifically to complain about how awful they were in the next class.
I’m pretty sure that our professor said we should read the Longino assignment twice, because we probably wouldn’t get it and it was very important. But that is of course extra information that convinced me that I didn’t provide, and I do see your point.
I have a notion that oppression is done by the most dominant/aggressive people in each group. Sometimes groups have historical advantages over other groups, but you really have to keep an eye on what individuals are doing.
Looking forward to your post, magfrump! As a person who doubts that most social scientists have the inclination and ability to practice their craft from an ideologically-neutral vantage point, I am always interested in projects that attempt to correct the biases of scientists. Feminist theory sometimes holds itself out as such a project, but, as you point out, some feminist rhetoric simply comes off as anti-science, and not as “anti-scientism.” Thus, I eagerly await your identification of some parts of feminist theory that do not share this flaw.
I should add that I would never recommend anyone attend feminism classes until they have developed the psychological maturity required to resist threat of shaming as a dominant factor in forming their beliefs about reality.
Expanding on my earlier suggestion that it is best to form an understanding of evolutionary psychology before immersing oneself in to feminist studies, I suggest that the critical indicator of whether you are ready to extract the most insight from the “Feminism and Science” subject is when you are able to explain the evolutionary psychological reasons why there is no male counterpart for the ‘feminist’ movement. If you will, why there is a “her” but neither a “him” nor an “er”.
I mentioned that I have done previous studies in education. As one would expect in a postgraduate teaching degree there was a disproportionate number of Arts graduates among my peers, including not a few feminism majors. (What else does an Arts degree with one of the non practical majors qualify you for?) In my experience I was able to get along well with that subset who a) had left behind the raw idealism of a first year student and b) appreciated the fact that I had the same pride in my own masculine identity that they had in their femininity. In such cases I was able to have sometimes heated but always respectful and informative conversations on their course related ideas.
I suggest that the critical indicator of whether you are ready to extract the most insight from the “Feminism and Science” subject is when you are able to explain the evolutionary psychological reasons why there is no male counterpart for the ‘feminist’ movement.
To me, it seems obvious that there hasn’t previously been a male counterpart to the feminism movement because men haven’t been institutionally lower-status the way that women have been. And now that the situation is in some respects reversing, we are seeing the beginnings of an equivalent movement for men, although it isn’t anywhere near as organized yet. Also, because some strands of feminism do work to improve mens’ rights as well as womens’ rights, there’s been less of a need for a separate movement for men.
Bringing evpsych to this seems superfluous to me. What am I missing?
To me, it seems obvious that there hasn’t previously been a male counterpart to the feminism movement because men haven’t been institutionally lower-status the way that women have been.
What does it mean to say that women are “institutionally lower-status” than men, and what is the metric for institutional status? This notion is counter-intuitive to me, because I think there are multiple institutions and multiple dimensions of status. Although I think it’s plausible that men were indeed institutionally higher-status in many cultures throughout history, specifying why is actually a nontrivial philosophical problem that I don’t feel feminists have thoroughly confronted.
For example, in Colombia, institutions may grant males more prestige, yet grant women more protection. Which gender has more “status” depends on whether your metric of status is something like “who is more likely to be in charge of the household,” or “who is more likely to die horrible deaths to chainsaws or machetes.” I’m not sure how we we can aggregate these metrics, considering how dramatically different the units are; it’s kind of like adding up feet and pounds. Do dead men have status?
My preferred definition for status is “the ability to control (or influence) the group”, which as a special case includes the ability to control yourself. Children are in general far more protected than adults, but a lot of that protection comes at the cost of having harsh restrictions on your freedom, so under this definition children would be considered to be low-status. (You could also word this as “status is the amount of optimization power you are allowed to exert”. Hmm. I wonder this would be worth a top-level post.)
Women have historically had a number of restrictions on their ability to control themselves and the broader group. They didn’t always have the right to vote or to spend money without their husband’s permission, and to some degree they persist in having less sexual freedom, a smaller pay than males, be less likely to be found in positions of authority or to be taken seriously when in authoritative positions, be less likely to be found in prestigious occupations, and so on.
My preferred definition for status is “the ability to control (or influence) the group”
Rather, it’s godshatter counterpart of that. You can have status without ability to influence the group, or ability to influence the group without status. The pattern is explanatory, but doesn’t quite work as definition.
Ah, I think you’ve stated what I was trying to more clearly than I did. Its godshatteriness/proxiness is why we need a characterization rather than a definition.
My preferred definition for status is “the ability to control (or influence) the group”,
That is a great measure of status but at as a definition it is just wrong. While strongly correlated these two concepts are not the same. I can think of ways to influence a group while still having low status. And I can think of situations in which it is better to stay low status even though group influence is still desirable.
Examples that are not necessarily practical but which unambiguously demonstrate that the two concepts are different:
Sabotage media sources (which can be either in group or out of group) that do not support whatever policy you prefer.
Poison people.
Plant bombs.
Essentially anything that can kill or influence the behavior of other people without being traceable to you.
Advanced techniques of influence that maximise the desirable alteration of the brain state of others without raising your state. (Optimal use of priming and suggestion, etc.)
Be the example. If five people are littering that encourages other people to do it. If one person is littering and getting visibly punished socially for it that is an extremely strong way to discourage other people from littering. (Has been studied. Reference probably in Cialdini.)
Pay prostitutes. (In general, pay people to do stuff when to do so lowers status.)
Make (apparent) attempts to influence the group. If you do so when you have low status then other people (typically those from the middle of the pack) will take the excuse to crush you and in so doing demonstrate their dominance. This can be used to exploit the influence of others but actually lowers your status.
There are examples that are much less extreme than the above (which means less useful as definitive demonstration). I will say that I routinely sacrifice dominance in order to win. Most people focus more on dominance than winning. This can be exploited. This winning is obviously integrally tied up with influence.
Conclusion: Make a post on the ability to influence the group and perhaps show how it relates (both ways) to status. But definitely do not waste the insights you would be expressing in the post by premising them on a false definition.
It’s also common, if low status people attempt to influence a group, for their ideas to not be heard until the idea is picked up by a higher status person. The low status person never gets credit, but has influenced the group.
I was in a pagan group for a while which met at somewhat irregular times and places. A high status person in the group would call people to tell them about when and where.
I later found out that one of the reasons the group eventually dissolved was that the low status person who’d been reminding the high status person to do the phone calls had moved out of the area.
I don’t know how common that sort of thing is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an important but almost invisible feature of how things work.
I don’t know how common that sort of thing is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an important but almost invisible feature of how things work.
I suspect extremely high. Social dominance independent of domain knowledge and competence is common and in a subset of such cases the group still functions.
On reflection, I think your original insight is basically correct, but acquires explanatory capacity only when supplemented with what I’m going to call a theory of conversions.
I’ve actually been aware of “power conversions” for several years (the topic is discussed in Jerry Weinberg’s Becoming a Technical Leader), but I only thought to apply that to that frustratingly elusive “status” notion tonight as I was turning in. (And had to get up to take some notes; so much for a good night’s sleep.) Something went click; the two seem to be a very nice fit, and to make sense of a whole bunch of things that were previously perplexing to me. It has interesting implications, for instance it suggests that “raising your status” is meaningless. It neatly incorporates Vladimir’s observations of “godshatteriness”. I could go on.
Would you be interested in collaborating on a top-level post on this idea? My plan would be to send you a draft of the core ideas and some implications, have you turn a critical eye on it, and if it still stands after that, incorporate your own take on it.
It’s also common, if low status people attempt to influence a group, for their ideas to not be heard until the idea is picked up by a higher status person. The low status person never gets credit, but has influenced the group.
I was in a pagan group for a while which met at somewhat irregular times and places. A high status person in the group would call people to tell them about when and where.
I later found out that one of the reasons the group eventually dissolved was that the low status person who’d been reminding the high status person to do the phone calls had moved out of the area.
I don’t know how common that sort of thing is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an important but almost invisible feature of how things work.
Is a definition really the appropriate way to handle the concept? I was under the impression that the word “status” refers to some collection of internal variables in the human brain, where by “internal” I mean intermediate, not necessarily corresponding to individual features of the outside world; what might be a called a hanging node if not for the fact our actions depend on it and other people care about it. In such a case, attempting to define it makes no sense, only to describe how it interacts with the rest of the system, as it’s not even meaningful on its own.
A definition for “status” is simply an answer to the question “what do you mean by status”. If we frequently use the word, then we should have some relatively agreed-upon definition for it, or at least give our own definition whenever someone asks. If we everyone means something else when they say “status”, then we’ll never succeed in communicating to others the things we want to communicate to them.
If you say the term “status” refers to some collection of internal variables in the human brain, and then describe how those variables interact with other things, then that’s a definition of status as well.
I would also like to see the top-level post, but there are a couple problems with this definition. First of all, if we’re talking about how much influence people have, it would be clearer to use a word like, say, “influence”. Second, status usually suggests some element of what people think of you, which is related to though not the same as influence. One can be highly influential but poorly-regarded, and vice versa. Note that in this sense status can be multi-dimensional: for instance, people can regard you as a good person to spend time with, but think poorly of your intelligence.
This is a good point, thank you. I have an intuition that while status is the ability to control the group, you can have influence without having status, although you cannot have status without having influence. That points to an flaw in my definition, one which I should resolve somehow before making that post.
I should probably note that I think that there are actually two different terms to which we refer when we say “status”. Status1 (or “influence”) is the ability to control the group, so it’s the one I was talking about above. Status2 is stuff like official titles or other considerations that cause a situation where it’s expected that people grant you Status1. I believe that people liking you would fall under Status2.
Is that true? A few counterexamples come to mind, such as figurehead monarchs and Paris Hilton. Or is the assumption that their status is such that they could ‘control the group’ to some degree if they so chose, even without any formally recognized authority?
I think they do. People often seem to care a lot about how they die. Often they will much prefer the ‘honour’ of beheading by a sword rather than the gallows like a common thief. Even ‘sword’ vs ‘axe’ matters rather a lot. Ordering someone to commit ritual suicide is in some cases a kinder act than having them killed.
The desire for men to keep their status when they die is also rational, not just an outcome of having status seeking mechanisms that aren’t calibrated to care that you’re about to die anyway. The status of a parent, grandparent or in some cases even more distant ancestor significantly influence reproductive potential.
I would buy “there hasn’t previously been a male counterpart to the feminism movement because males as a social class have (almost) never been disenfranchised” as an argument. (Not necessarily a correct one, but a testable one. My possibly flawed assumption, prior to any fact-checking, is that the feminist movement has its roots in the women’s suffrage movement.)
Once more, “status” here seems to only muddy the waters, and invite a definitional argument starting here which goes nowhere close to answering the original query.
If men work very hard to keep women out of male roles (which seems to be the case), and women don’t work especially hard to keep men out of female roles (which also seems to be the case), what do you think is going on?
For many people, their gender is an incredibly important aspect of their identity. One can think of a given subculture as having an ideal performance of masculinity. Men and women both respect that ideal. Certain occupations have been traditionally seen as very good ways of achieving that ideal. If women enter into such an occupation, the occupation is no longer seen as validating mens’ manly virtues.
I oppose sex-discrimination in hiring, but there is no denying that this is a very serious loss for some men. Eventually, norms and ideals evolve in a way which allows men to continue to have their masculinity validated, and/or de-emphasizes gender as a component of one’s identity, but this is a slow process. Moreover, with any change in values, there will always be winners and losers.
I think that’s part of what’s going on, but (if it matters), do you think people just happen to have gender performance as a major part of their identity, or are they trained into it?
Both, I’d guess. While there is a lot of socialization around gender performance, there also seem to be biological factors the predispose people towards gender performance. To the extent that biological factors influence gender expression, I’m not even sure it is correct to say that gender is “socially constructed,” at least not entirely.
For one example, look at the experience of some trans people as experiencing a strong gender identity as long as they remember (just one at odds with their socially assigned gender). I doubt that all of those feelings can be explained by social factors.
I don’t think we should push too hard on the dichotomy of boy vs. man. I would emphasize that there is individual variation in how well men they can perform/achieve masculinity in their sub-culture. Women face the issue as well.
On a related note some psychological theorists suggest that not having a ritual process (with a significant element of ‘trial by ordeal’) to mark the transition from boyhood to manhood fundamentally impairs the psychological maturity of many males in western civilisation. Such ceremonies are nearly ubiquitous across tribal cultures.
I’ve heard it. However, how common are such ceremonies in non-tribal cultures?
Alternate hypothesis: having responsibility delayed for years beyond what’s normal causes lack of psychological maturity. Or, maybe there isn’t less maturity, maybe there’s just more complaining about the lack of it.
Also, I was hoping to hear from from some of the men here about whether they personally feel this need to be definitively accepted as men.
A hypothesis: Men are more aggressive than women, and more apt to defend territory. This doesn’t prove anything about which territory is more valuable.
If men work very hard to keep women out of male roles (which seems to be the case)
Whaaaa? I don’t remember ever doing such a thing. It seems your standards for accepting blanket statements as truth are pretty relaxed. Maybe even to the point where you should readily agree with statements like “Jews control banks and mass media”.
I was thinking specifically about the efforts to keep women out of the military, and complaints from women that other women give too much credit to men for doing child care.
I was thinking specifically about the efforts to keep women out of the military
That one I can see. Bizarre too… as far as I can see every woman who is out getting shot puts me one dead body further away from being conscripted. (Mind you I feel instinctively uncomfortable writing that statement. In many circumstances I would censor myself because I estimate it would lower my sexual attractiveness in the eyes of females.)
nd complaints from women that other women give too much credit to men for doing child care.
Really? There are men that get too much credit for doing child care? What I would expect is women getting criticism from other women for being with a man who is low status (perhaps not in so many words). It is the kind of role that men are encouraged to take on but in most cases penalised socially for submitting to that pressure.
Really? There are men that get too much credit for doing child care? What I would expect is women getting criticism from other women for being with a man who is low status (perhaps not in so many words). It is the kind of role that men are encouraged to take on but in most cases penalised socially for submitting to that pressure.
I’ve seen the complaints.
Men also lose status for being stay-at-home dads, so it’s complicated.
I perhaps have a more cynical outlook on human nature than you. I don’t think low status helps a movement become popular ever. There is always something deeper at play. I recall reading relevant posts on overcomingbias on the topic. Along the lines of “anti-discrimination is never about equality”. But I cannot find a reference. Can anyone help me out?
I can’t find it, but Steve Barnes has said that no political movement is ever for equality, which I take to mean both that political movements aim for an advantage rather than equality and that the leaders of a political movement aren’t looking to be equal with their followers. Neither of these imply that political movements are never trying to address actual injustices.
I don’t think low status helps a movement become popular ever.
Low status might not help, but that’s a different claim from saying that a movement for improving the rights of a lower-status group can’t become popular for other reasons. We’re not talking about a small low-status minority, or even a low-status phase that’s generally thought to be transitory the way childhood or having no sexual experience is. Nor is it something that can be thought of being the person’s own fault, like some people view poverty or alcoholism. We’re talking about group that consists of 50% of the population and needs to implement society-wide changes if they want to improve their position. Feminism has certainly been unpopular among many men, but there were also enough women to make it succeed regardless.
I think the problem is not with feminism, but with noisy feminists: the ones that you hear about the most are often highly irrational. My source of info in this is largely Blank Slate by Pinker.
It’s a type of availability bias where the biased person is largely not at fault. Pinker did point to quite a few feminists of very apparently sound mind.
I believe they do. I would not recommend anyone attend them unless they are already well versed in sociology and evolutionary psychology. That allows them to put what is really going on into the right perspective.
This post seems hostile toward the subject of feminist studies. In general, I shared this perspective (which I interpret as: skeptical of feminism, thinking of it as identity politics) before: (a) meeting feminist studies majors and (b) taking feminist studies classes.
While feminist rhetoric can seem anti-scientific, or be used in anti-scientific ways, I have found that feminist theory is more often in league with applied rationality. I am currently composing a post on the subject.
magfrump said:
I share wedrifid’s opinion on feminism and feminist studies. Yet I have also taken feminist studies classes, and my experiences also overlap with yours, though I had significant experience with feminism prior to taking those classes which undoubtedly colored my judgment. I will briefly outline the development of my views around gender politics:
As a teenager, I started out with feminist intuitions, believing that feminism could do no wrong.
I got into pickup, and I read Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell. My experience as a shy, romantically-challenged, gender non-conforming young man, combined with Farrell’s book and the arguments of the pickup and seduction community, led to a perspective on gender politics that became increasingly different from feminism. Feminists emphasized the oppression of women and “male privilege.” I could see these phenomena, but I also say phenomena that looked pretty clearly like male oppression and “female privilege,” which feminists didn’t seem to talk about.
I read more books, such as Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson and Young, and Heterophobia by Daphne Patai. I started discussing feminism on the internet, yet my interactions with feminists on blogs taught me very fast that many feminists have trouble defending certain ideas in feminism, and have a low tolerance for criticism of their ideas. My agreement with a larger segment of feminist positions didn’t matter; unless I accepted certain concepts (e.g. “male privilege”) and embedded assumptions, I was treated like an outgroup member, regardless of how civil or reasonable I tried to be.
I came to believe that ideological and biased thinking was highly prevalent in feminism. Yet I found that many critiques of feminism, were also biased and wrong. For example, the Men’s Rights Movement criticizes feminism in many areas, yet it also sometime replicates some of the errors of feminism, such as playing fast and loose with the facts to support ideological positions. I started a blog on feminism with a couple other people to have a critical, but fair evaluation of the movement: FeministCritics.org.
In college, I took several feminist studies courses. Although I had a lot of negative experiences with feminism prior to these courses, I tried to counteract my biases. I tried really hard to like feminism.
My experience with feminism in real life was much more positive than my experience with feminists on the internet. I had a lot of fun, and made several new friends. I got one B+, and several As, in these courses (these grades serve as evidence that I understand a lot of the basics of feminist theory). I voiced a lot of agreement with certain feminist positions, and I also managed to raise a few objections to feminist ideas in classes and in papers. Most of these objections were heard and treated respectfully, though I did not try to insist on them in a way that would take up lots of class time. I did get one D on a paper in one class, where the professor didn’t seem to understand my objection to some ideas in the reading, and said that I had “failed to engage with the reading” (I toed the party-line better in subsequent assignments, and got an A in the class). Other papers I wrote were on the similarities between misogyny and misandry, and the seduction community. I recently posted one of my old feminist studies papers that I got on A on to my blog.
Feminists I encountered in real life seemed a lot more open to new ideas. Perhaps real life led to less polarized communication than the internet. Also, feminists who are motivated to talk about it on the internet may be more convinced by it and treat it more as an ideology. “Real life” feminists seemed a lot more open to considering notions-that-should-be-compatible-with-feminist-theory-but-are-treated-as-politically-incorrect, like the oppression of men, sexism towards men, and female privilege; they haven’t yet learned that these things aren’t supposed to exist, according to academic feminism. (Though I did have a brief disagreement with another student during a feminist studies class who claimed that women are oppressed, but that bad stuff that happens to men does not qualify as “oppression.”) I also found that some feminist students were open to hearing about men’s experiences and perspectives, and consider them evidence of problems in society, just as feminism treats women’s experiences as evidence of problems in society.
Even though I had a better experience with “real life feminists” in women’s studies than with “internet feminists,” my conceptual criticisms of feminism weren’t alleviated by experiences in feminist studies, and some were intensified. I’ve read several books which criticize women’s studies and academic feminism, such as Professing Feminism by Daphe Patai, the aforementioned Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson and Young, Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Bricmont (an excellent rationality text), and Higher Superstition by Gross and Levitt. My experiences with feminist studies weren’t quite as bad as what they describe, but there was definitely overlap. Here are a couple examples that stand out in my memory:
On the first day of Feminist Studies 101, the professor handed out the syllabus, and said that this class would proceed from the assumption that (1) women are oppressed in society, and (2) this oppression is unjust and should be remedied. Here’s how the syllabus put it:
Whenever I debated feminists online, couldn’t defend their foundational terms and assumptions, and would resort to saying “go take Feminism 101.” So I did… yet, the premises of feminist thought were really explained and justified there either, but rather assumed.
I saw denials of biology several times. In a couple classes, I heard the claim that not just gender, but sex (i.e. division into male and female) and sexual orientation were socially constructed. The notion that sex is a social construction can only be created by a lot of sleight of hand that I won’t get into right now (but see this critique of Anne Fausto-Sterling).
As for sexual orientation being socially constructed, I have a funny story. The queer professor in my masculinity and feminist theory class claimed that sexual orientation is “socially constructed.” A student objected, saying something like “well, I’m queer, and I’ve heard a lot of queer people say that they feel like they are born that way… isn’t biology a factor?” The professor brushed off this objection and maintained that homosexuality is socially-constructed, marginalizing the experience of this student, many queer people, not to mention a lot of scientific research and queer history. During the break in the class period, the student thanked the professor and walked out of the class never to return, but not before I befriended her at the water fountain and told her she was my hero.
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Some of the biggest problems with feminist studies from an epistemological standpoint were not things that feminists said, but what they didn’t say. Feminist professors and writing just start throwing around all these terms like “patriarchy,” “male privilege”, “oppression”, “power”, “dominance”, and “sexism.” Yet the conceptualization of these terms was never explained or defended. I view them as a castle built on sand.
Nowadays, you can find some 101 explanations of feminism, such as Finally Feminism 101, but I wonder if anyone else finds the quality of reasoning to be pretty bad. For example, try to figure out why there is no such thing as “female privilege”:
This argument assumes that there is a linear hierarchy of men over women. This is a persistent claim of feminism. While it is plausible that the people at the top of the hierarchy of a certain type of status are disproportionately male, this doesn’t mean that males in general are ranked higher than females in general; there could be more men at the bottom, also: a greater variance of advantage in men.
This argument assumes a metric by which we can discover a hierarchy of men over women, but the metric is unspecified. Another assumption is that hierarchy is unidimensional. To me, it seems plausible that males are advantaged over females on some dimensions of power, while females are advantaged over males on other dimensions of power; who is on top of this hierarchy depends on what dimension we are looking at, or on some way of aggregating measurements on different dimensions. A multi-dimensional model of power is unexplored by feminists, who simply assume that the dimensions of power and status that women rank lower on are the only dimensions that exist or matter. From this biased assumption, feminists declared a hierarchy of men “as a class” (whatever that means) over women “as a class,” self-servingly defined “institutional privilege” as only held by the class at the top of the hierarchy, and denied that women have gender privilege.
As far as I can tell, most of feminist theory isn’t about rational arguments, it is a morass of biased and self-serving reasoning. Feminist theory is highly foundationalist with its dependence on ubiquitous terms like “male privilege” and “patriarchy” that are loaded with unexplained and unexamined assumptions. If you believe in gender equality, but you don’t believe in the concept of patriarchy, and you think female privilege and male oppression exist, then you can still be a feminist, right? Not in the feminist blogosphere or academia you can’t, at least not if you argue for these opinions at length. Ironically, many “real life” feminists who haven’t been inducted into the higher forms of feminist dogma on the internet and in academia probably believe at least the last two things, because they have not yet been taught to subordinate their sense of fairness and empathy (being open to the idea that the other gender has disadvantages, too, not just advantages) to the convoluted sorts of reasoning that I criticize above.
There are forms of feminist thought that are better than others. Some feminist philosophers, such as Helen Longino, do have insightful ideas and seem epistemically responsible (even though I don’t always agree with them). Many feminists are empathetic and interested in learning about men’s experiences with gender in ways the broader culture is not, which I view as the human capacity for empathy rising above the limiting conceptual framework of ideological feminist thought (the typical response of blogosphere feminists to male experiences of oppression is “patriarchy hurts men, too” used as a dismissal). For an example of what feminist theory could be (but unfortunately isn’t most of the time), see this discussion of a feminist paper that I like.
So magfrump, I do agree that there is potential for learning stuff about applied rationality from feminism. It’s kind of a needle in a haystack, but if you’ve found the needle, I would love to see it, and I look forward to your post on the subject. As I’ve written, I like a look of the analytical tools developed by feminists, and I wish feminists would use them more often, and in an unbiased and consistent way.
Don’t take my word for any of this. Read Finally Feminism 101. Read feminist blogs. Participate on feminist blogs, call out ideas that seem fishy to you (general you), and see what kind of response you get. Read The Gender Knot. Take some feminist studies courses. Then get back to me.
A couple of things stand out that I would like to reply to. For the most part, you seem vastly better-informed than I feel, and I have a lot of reading to do, so I will save a longer-form reply for the post itself.
Things that stood out:
Saying that something is socially constructed, to me, is about the map/territory distinction. Thus in the case of queerness, I would say that things such as “gay” and “straight” are socially constructed, and our concepts of sexual orientation are socially constructed, which does not at all contradict that they may be biologically based. For example, I would also say that a table is socially constructed (why is it a table vs a bed vs a chair?). The set of people that you may or may not be attracted to is not socially constructed, but the labels you apply to communicate that information are.
In regards to the response to Fausto-Sterling; I don’t agree that (as they claim) her claims about a continuum rely on her claims of abundance. I also noticed that when discussing vaginal agenesis they did not discuss consent or comfort, although the comparison to a cleft palate makes that implicit. Finally, they conclude by defending pathology only with an example, and by saying that her theories are “not helpful to clinicians,” whereas I feel that her intended audience was not so limited. I also feel very strongly that on page five about “these...individuals deserve the same care...” is pure window dressing, for reasons that I will mention but not in detail. On the other hand, purely in terms of statistics, I feel somewhat betrayed by my Professor who is, for the most part as far as I can tell, of a feather with Longino (we had assigned reading from Longino, for example).
I agree with you that feminism includes specific political ideals at its roots, including fairness and inclusivity, and while I don’t mean to say that this means everyone should “tow the party line” I do think that effort put into, for example, reasserting the sexual dimorphism or discussing female privilege could be better used in other ways and lead to self-images which create artificial conflict. Of course this somewhat assumes epistemological hygiene on the part of feminists which may not exist...
I’m cutting myself off because this is at least five times the length I intended and I need to go to a barbecue.
I don’t deny that your prof holds similar views, but in general this isn’t an accurate indicator. Some things are just stuff everybody has to assign or they’re accused of not covering the material, and I’ve also had teachers assign things specifically to complain about how awful they were in the next class.
I’m pretty sure that our professor said we should read the Longino assignment twice, because we probably wouldn’t get it and it was very important. But that is of course extra information that convinced me that I didn’t provide, and I do see your point.
I have a notion that oppression is done by the most dominant/aggressive people in each group. Sometimes groups have historical advantages over other groups, but you really have to keep an eye on what individuals are doing.
Looking forward to your post, magfrump! As a person who doubts that most social scientists have the inclination and ability to practice their craft from an ideologically-neutral vantage point, I am always interested in projects that attempt to correct the biases of scientists. Feminist theory sometimes holds itself out as such a project, but, as you point out, some feminist rhetoric simply comes off as anti-science, and not as “anti-scientism.” Thus, I eagerly await your identification of some parts of feminist theory that do not share this flaw.
I should add that I would never recommend anyone attend feminism classes until they have developed the psychological maturity required to resist threat of shaming as a dominant factor in forming their beliefs about reality.
Expanding on my earlier suggestion that it is best to form an understanding of evolutionary psychology before immersing oneself in to feminist studies, I suggest that the critical indicator of whether you are ready to extract the most insight from the “Feminism and Science” subject is when you are able to explain the evolutionary psychological reasons why there is no male counterpart for the ‘feminist’ movement. If you will, why there is a “her” but neither a “him” nor an “er”.
I mentioned that I have done previous studies in education. As one would expect in a postgraduate teaching degree there was a disproportionate number of Arts graduates among my peers, including not a few feminism majors. (What else does an Arts degree with one of the non practical majors qualify you for?) In my experience I was able to get along well with that subset who a) had left behind the raw idealism of a first year student and b) appreciated the fact that I had the same pride in my own masculine identity that they had in their femininity. In such cases I was able to have sometimes heated but always respectful and informative conversations on their course related ideas.
To me, it seems obvious that there hasn’t previously been a male counterpart to the feminism movement because men haven’t been institutionally lower-status the way that women have been. And now that the situation is in some respects reversing, we are seeing the beginnings of an equivalent movement for men, although it isn’t anywhere near as organized yet. Also, because some strands of feminism do work to improve mens’ rights as well as womens’ rights, there’s been less of a need for a separate movement for men.
Bringing evpsych to this seems superfluous to me. What am I missing?
What does it mean to say that women are “institutionally lower-status” than men, and what is the metric for institutional status? This notion is counter-intuitive to me, because I think there are multiple institutions and multiple dimensions of status. Although I think it’s plausible that men were indeed institutionally higher-status in many cultures throughout history, specifying why is actually a nontrivial philosophical problem that I don’t feel feminists have thoroughly confronted.
For example, in Colombia, institutions may grant males more prestige, yet grant women more protection. Which gender has more “status” depends on whether your metric of status is something like “who is more likely to be in charge of the household,” or “who is more likely to die horrible deaths to chainsaws or machetes.” I’m not sure how we we can aggregate these metrics, considering how dramatically different the units are; it’s kind of like adding up feet and pounds. Do dead men have status?
My preferred definition for status is “the ability to control (or influence) the group”, which as a special case includes the ability to control yourself. Children are in general far more protected than adults, but a lot of that protection comes at the cost of having harsh restrictions on your freedom, so under this definition children would be considered to be low-status. (You could also word this as “status is the amount of optimization power you are allowed to exert”. Hmm. I wonder this would be worth a top-level post.)
Women have historically had a number of restrictions on their ability to control themselves and the broader group. They didn’t always have the right to vote or to spend money without their husband’s permission, and to some degree they persist in having less sexual freedom, a smaller pay than males, be less likely to be found in positions of authority or to be taken seriously when in authoritative positions, be less likely to be found in prestigious occupations, and so on.
Rather, it’s godshatter counterpart of that. You can have status without ability to influence the group, or ability to influence the group without status. The pattern is explanatory, but doesn’t quite work as definition.
Ah, I think you’ve stated what I was trying to more clearly than I did. Its godshatteriness/proxiness is why we need a characterization rather than a definition.
Edit: Made less ambiguous.
That is a great measure of status but at as a definition it is just wrong. While strongly correlated these two concepts are not the same. I can think of ways to influence a group while still having low status. And I can think of situations in which it is better to stay low status even though group influence is still desirable.
Examples that are not necessarily practical but which unambiguously demonstrate that the two concepts are different:
Sabotage media sources (which can be either in group or out of group) that do not support whatever policy you prefer.
Poison people.
Plant bombs.
Essentially anything that can kill or influence the behavior of other people without being traceable to you.
Advanced techniques of influence that maximise the desirable alteration of the brain state of others without raising your state. (Optimal use of priming and suggestion, etc.)
Be the example. If five people are littering that encourages other people to do it. If one person is littering and getting visibly punished socially for it that is an extremely strong way to discourage other people from littering. (Has been studied. Reference probably in Cialdini.)
Pay prostitutes. (In general, pay people to do stuff when to do so lowers status.)
Make (apparent) attempts to influence the group. If you do so when you have low status then other people (typically those from the middle of the pack) will take the excuse to crush you and in so doing demonstrate their dominance. This can be used to exploit the influence of others but actually lowers your status.
There are examples that are much less extreme than the above (which means less useful as definitive demonstration). I will say that I routinely sacrifice dominance in order to win. Most people focus more on dominance than winning. This can be exploited. This winning is obviously integrally tied up with influence.
Conclusion: Make a post on the ability to influence the group and perhaps show how it relates (both ways) to status. But definitely do not waste the insights you would be expressing in the post by premising them on a false definition.
It’s also common, if low status people attempt to influence a group, for their ideas to not be heard until the idea is picked up by a higher status person. The low status person never gets credit, but has influenced the group.
I was in a pagan group for a while which met at somewhat irregular times and places. A high status person in the group would call people to tell them about when and where.
I later found out that one of the reasons the group eventually dissolved was that the low status person who’d been reminding the high status person to do the phone calls had moved out of the area.
I don’t know how common that sort of thing is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an important but almost invisible feature of how things work.
I suspect extremely high. Social dominance independent of domain knowledge and competence is common and in a subset of such cases the group still functions.
Thank you; these are good examples. You and the other commenters are right, my definition was inadequate. I need to think about it some more.
On reflection, I think your original insight is basically correct, but acquires explanatory capacity only when supplemented with what I’m going to call a theory of conversions.
I’ve actually been aware of “power conversions” for several years (the topic is discussed in Jerry Weinberg’s Becoming a Technical Leader), but I only thought to apply that to that frustratingly elusive “status” notion tonight as I was turning in. (And had to get up to take some notes; so much for a good night’s sleep.) Something went click; the two seem to be a very nice fit, and to make sense of a whole bunch of things that were previously perplexing to me. It has interesting implications, for instance it suggests that “raising your status” is meaningless. It neatly incorporates Vladimir’s observations of “godshatteriness”. I could go on.
Would you be interested in collaborating on a top-level post on this idea? My plan would be to send you a draft of the core ideas and some implications, have you turn a critical eye on it, and if it still stands after that, incorporate your own take on it.
I’d love to. :)
It’s also common, if low status people attempt to influence a group, for their ideas to not be heard until the idea is picked up by a higher status person. The low status person never gets credit, but has influenced the group.
I was in a pagan group for a while which met at somewhat irregular times and places. A high status person in the group would call people to tell them about when and where.
I later found out that one of the reasons the group eventually dissolved was that the low status person who’d been reminding the high status person to do the phone calls had moved out of the area.
I don’t know how common that sort of thing is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an important but almost invisible feature of how things work.
Did Hitler have high status in the concentration camps?
Warmer
Are you serious? So Robinson Crusoe can actually be high or low status, even without Friday?
I think you’re defining something like “power”, not status.
I’d like to see that top-level post. Your definition of status is the only one I’ve seen on LW that is clear and testable.
Is a definition really the appropriate way to handle the concept? I was under the impression that the word “status” refers to some collection of internal variables in the human brain, where by “internal” I mean intermediate, not necessarily corresponding to individual features of the outside world; what might be a called a hanging node if not for the fact our actions depend on it and other people care about it. In such a case, attempting to define it makes no sense, only to describe how it interacts with the rest of the system, as it’s not even meaningful on its own.
I’m not sure if I understand what you mean.
A definition for “status” is simply an answer to the question “what do you mean by status”. If we frequently use the word, then we should have some relatively agreed-upon definition for it, or at least give our own definition whenever someone asks. If we everyone means something else when they say “status”, then we’ll never succeed in communicating to others the things we want to communicate to them.
If you say the term “status” refers to some collection of internal variables in the human brain, and then describe how those variables interact with other things, then that’s a definition of status as well.
Ah, you are using the word “definition” in a more inclusive way than I am. I would call that a characterization, not a definition.
I would also like to see the top-level post, but there are a couple problems with this definition. First of all, if we’re talking about how much influence people have, it would be clearer to use a word like, say, “influence”. Second, status usually suggests some element of what people think of you, which is related to though not the same as influence. One can be highly influential but poorly-regarded, and vice versa. Note that in this sense status can be multi-dimensional: for instance, people can regard you as a good person to spend time with, but think poorly of your intelligence.
This is a good point, thank you. I have an intuition that while status is the ability to control the group, you can have influence without having status, although you cannot have status without having influence. That points to an flaw in my definition, one which I should resolve somehow before making that post.
I should probably note that I think that there are actually two different terms to which we refer when we say “status”. Status1 (or “influence”) is the ability to control the group, so it’s the one I was talking about above. Status2 is stuff like official titles or other considerations that cause a situation where it’s expected that people grant you Status1. I believe that people liking you would fall under Status2.
See here for a recent mention of an example.
That’s a good example, especially since it’s different from the one I was thinking about. Thanks.
Is that true? A few counterexamples come to mind, such as figurehead monarchs and Paris Hilton. Or is the assumption that their status is such that they could ‘control the group’ to some degree if they so chose, even without any formally recognized authority?
Good point, let me reword: you cannot have status1 without having influence.
(I need to find better names for these. Status1 could be I-Status, for “Influence”. Status2… P-Status for “Position”, maybe.)
I think they do. People often seem to care a lot about how they die. Often they will much prefer the ‘honour’ of beheading by a sword rather than the gallows like a common thief. Even ‘sword’ vs ‘axe’ matters rather a lot. Ordering someone to commit ritual suicide is in some cases a kinder act than having them killed.
The desire for men to keep their status when they die is also rational, not just an outcome of having status seeking mechanisms that aren’t calibrated to care that you’re about to die anyway. The status of a parent, grandparent or in some cases even more distant ancestor significantly influence reproductive potential.
GIWIST. (*)
I would buy “there hasn’t previously been a male counterpart to the feminism movement because males as a social class have (almost) never been disenfranchised” as an argument. (Not necessarily a correct one, but a testable one. My possibly flawed assumption, prior to any fact-checking, is that the feminist movement has its roots in the women’s suffrage movement.)
Once more, “status” here seems to only muddy the waters, and invite a definitional argument starting here which goes nowhere close to answering the original query.
(*) Explanatory link for the acronym-impaired
If men work very hard to keep women out of male roles (which seems to be the case), and women don’t work especially hard to keep men out of female roles (which also seems to be the case), what do you think is going on?
For many people, their gender is an incredibly important aspect of their identity. One can think of a given subculture as having an ideal performance of masculinity. Men and women both respect that ideal. Certain occupations have been traditionally seen as very good ways of achieving that ideal. If women enter into such an occupation, the occupation is no longer seen as validating mens’ manly virtues.
I oppose sex-discrimination in hiring, but there is no denying that this is a very serious loss for some men. Eventually, norms and ideals evolve in a way which allows men to continue to have their masculinity validated, and/or de-emphasizes gender as a component of one’s identity, but this is a slow process. Moreover, with any change in values, there will always be winners and losers.
I think that’s part of what’s going on, but (if it matters), do you think people just happen to have gender performance as a major part of their identity, or are they trained into it?
Both, I’d guess. While there is a lot of socialization around gender performance, there also seem to be biological factors the predispose people towards gender performance. To the extent that biological factors influence gender expression, I’m not even sure it is correct to say that gender is “socially constructed,” at least not entirely.
For one example, look at the experience of some trans people as experiencing a strong gender identity as long as they remember (just one at odds with their socially assigned gender). I doubt that all of those feelings can be explained by social factors.
It seems to be common for boys to feel that they have to earn the right to consider themselves men, but I don’t know how universal it is.
I don’t think we should push too hard on the dichotomy of boy vs. man. I would emphasize that there is individual variation in how well men they can perform/achieve masculinity in their sub-culture. Women face the issue as well.
On a related note some psychological theorists suggest that not having a ritual process (with a significant element of ‘trial by ordeal’) to mark the transition from boyhood to manhood fundamentally impairs the psychological maturity of many males in western civilisation. Such ceremonies are nearly ubiquitous across tribal cultures.
I’ve heard it. However, how common are such ceremonies in non-tribal cultures?
Alternate hypothesis: having responsibility delayed for years beyond what’s normal causes lack of psychological maturity. Or, maybe there isn’t less maturity, maybe there’s just more complaining about the lack of it.
Also, I was hoping to hear from from some of the men here about whether they personally feel this need to be definitively accepted as men.
A hypothesis: Men are more aggressive than women, and more apt to defend territory. This doesn’t prove anything about which territory is more valuable.
Whaaaa? I don’t remember ever doing such a thing. It seems your standards for accepting blanket statements as truth are pretty relaxed. Maybe even to the point where you should readily agree with statements like “Jews control banks and mass media”.
Your observations about reality differ to mine. In fact, in some cases the reverse seems to be the case.
I was thinking specifically about the efforts to keep women out of the military, and complaints from women that other women give too much credit to men for doing child care.
What have you got in mind?
That one I can see. Bizarre too… as far as I can see every woman who is out getting shot puts me one dead body further away from being conscripted. (Mind you I feel instinctively uncomfortable writing that statement. In many circumstances I would censor myself because I estimate it would lower my sexual attractiveness in the eyes of females.)
Really? There are men that get too much credit for doing child care? What I would expect is women getting criticism from other women for being with a man who is low status (perhaps not in so many words). It is the kind of role that men are encouraged to take on but in most cases penalised socially for submitting to that pressure.
My own occupation/training (IT).
I’ve seen the complaints.
Men also lose status for being stay-at-home dads, so it’s complicated.
I perhaps have a more cynical outlook on human nature than you. I don’t think low status helps a movement become popular ever. There is always something deeper at play. I recall reading relevant posts on overcomingbias on the topic. Along the lines of “anti-discrimination is never about equality”. But I cannot find a reference. Can anyone help me out?
I can’t find it, but Steve Barnes has said that no political movement is ever for equality, which I take to mean both that political movements aim for an advantage rather than equality and that the leaders of a political movement aren’t looking to be equal with their followers. Neither of these imply that political movements are never trying to address actual injustices.
Were you thinking of “Affirmative Action Isn’t About Uplift”?
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/affirmative-action-wasnt-about-uplift.html
Thanks mindviews. That is one of them.
Low status might not help, but that’s a different claim from saying that a movement for improving the rights of a lower-status group can’t become popular for other reasons. We’re not talking about a small low-status minority, or even a low-status phase that’s generally thought to be transitory the way childhood or having no sexual experience is. Nor is it something that can be thought of being the person’s own fault, like some people view poverty or alcoholism. We’re talking about group that consists of 50% of the population and needs to implement society-wide changes if they want to improve their position. Feminism has certainly been unpopular among many men, but there were also enough women to make it succeed regardless.
If I promise not to take more classes on feminism and science, will you PM me the answer? [grin]
I think the problem is not with feminism, but with noisy feminists: the ones that you hear about the most are often highly irrational. My source of info in this is largely Blank Slate by Pinker.
It’s a type of availability bias where the biased person is largely not at fault. Pinker did point to quite a few feminists of very apparently sound mind.