I do have the impression that men who have the fundamentals right aren’t good with the female hindbrain, for the most part (there are exceptions, and there are compromises.)
My own perspective: I’ve had experience with guys who don’t have the fundamentals, and that’s horrible. Someone without human decency is the worst, but someone who isn’t too bright also doesn’t make for a great relationship. So that sort of thing is primary. Mandatory. I don’t appreciate people who argue that women are somehow not serious when they say that they care about intellectual or moral values. I’m entirely serious.
But, on a totally different metric and with a totally different mechanism, masculinity also matters a lot. (I think this is true of most women, but I might be an outlier in just how much it’s true for me.) Masculinity will make a bad match look tempting; the lack of it will make a good match look unappealing. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that my hindbrain works like this—on the off chance that I have “chemistry” with a guy who’s also a good match, I’ll enjoy the relationship much more than if I were Ms. Spock. It adds another dimension. The downside is that there’s a chance I’ll be attracted to assholes and idiots—but I believe (somewhat hopefully) that being self-aware will prevent me from making those kinds of mistakes in practice. [Note that I am saying something different from “Women just want sex with assholes.”]
I think you’re probably also right about behavioral selectivity. Looks matter, but in a pretty coarse-grained way; there’s “unappealing,” a broad swath of “meh,” and a tiny minority of “incredibly good-looking.” Everything else is what you do.
I don’t appreciate people who argue that women are somehow not serious when they say that they care about intellectual or moral values. I’m entirely serious.
What do you think causes the common perception that women are not serious about caring about intellectual or moral values? Are you saying that it’s extremely rare for women to say this unseriously, or that you just don’t like being judged as non-serious on such a claim merely because a non-trivial percentage of women may make it incorrectly? What level of variation do you think occurs in the female population in this area.
Us guys, we see women saying that they want guys with intellectual and moral values, but then we often seeing women going for men who seem unlikely to exhibit those traits, and we get… confused. Since this kind of subject isn’t politically correct to talk about, when a guy sees something like this happening, it will dominate his thinking and lead to hasty generalizations about what all women want (like your example of “women just want sex with assholes”).
What do you think about women who are into Rhett Butler, and other “dark heroes” from romance novels? If that example is too fictional, how about, say, rappers?
His popularity with girls sends a dangerous message to boys and men.
Boys and young men have long expressed frustration with the fact that girls and young women say they’re attracted to nice guys, but that the most popular girls often end up with the disdainful tough guys who treat them like dirt. We all know that heterosexual young guys are forever struggling to figure out what girls want. What are they supposed to conclude when 53% of the 8 Mile audience on opening weekend was female?
What are men to make of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd when she writes, uncritically, that a “gaggle” of her female Baby Boomer friends are “surreptitiously smitten” with a 30-year-old rapper whose lyrics literally drip with contempt for women? (If you’re in denial or simply refuse to believe that his lyrics are degrading to women, do your homework – download his lyrics.) That girls want to be treated with dignity and respect? Or that the quickest route to popularity with them is to be verbally and emotionally cruel, that “bad boy” posturing is a winning strategy to impress naïve (and self-loathing) girls? Surely most of Eminem’s female fans would not want to be sending that message to their male peers – but they are.
Boys who have listened carefully to Eminem’s actual lyrics—not just the hit songs or the sanitized movie soundtrack—know that most self-respecting girls who are conscious about the depths of our culture’s sexism are repulsed by Eminem’s misogyny and depressed by his popularity. Sadly, many of these girls have been silent, fearing they’ll be branded as “uncool” because they “don’t get” the artist who is supposedly the voice of their generation.
There are women who like Eminem because (they say) he’s complex and not easily knowable; they would argue that it is reductionist to characterize his art as sexist. But the burden is on them to demonstrate how—in a culture where so many men sexually harass, rape, and batter women—it is possible to reconcile a concern for women’s physical, sexual, and emotional well-being with admiration for a male artist whose lyrics consistently portray women in a contemptuous and sexually degrading manner.
Girls and women, even those who have been coopted into Eminem-worship, want to be treated with respect. They certainly don’t want to be physically or sexually assaulted by men. They don’t want to be sexually degraded by dismissive and arrogant men. But they can’t have it both ways. They can’t proclaim their attraction to a man who’s gotten rich verbally trashing and metaphorically raping women and yet expect that young men will treat them with dignity.
Moving on...
But, on a totally different metric and with a totally different mechanism, masculinity also matters a lot. (I think this is true of most women, but I might be an outlier in just how much it’s true for me.)
I think your preferences for are pretty typical for women with high intelligence: intelligent masculine guys who aren’t douchebags.
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that my hindbrain works like this—on the off chance that I have “chemistry” with a guy who’s also a good match, I’ll enjoy the relationship much more than if I were Ms. Spock. It adds another dimension.
I used to hate the idea of gender dynamics in dating. But then I gave them a try, and found that some of them are actually pretty fun. A lot of it is simply aesthetics on both visual and behavioral levels.
The downside is that there’s a chance I’ll be attracted to assholes and idiots—but I believe (somewhat hopefully) that being self-aware will prevent me from making those kinds of mistakes in practice.
Imagine how self-aware you would be with about 30 less IQ points, and how well you’d make decisions about avoiding attractive assholish guys. That’s what most women are probably like.
I think women want guys with values, in principle, and are tempted by guys without values, in practice, because they like “masculine” or “alpha” behavior. It doesn’t mean that the desire to date a good person isn’t a real desire. If someone desires to get work done, but also procrastinates, would you say she doesn’t “really” want to get work done?
I think women would prefer a good person who hits the right masculinity/dominance buttons than a bad person. (Read or watch Gone With The Wind again—Rhett is actually the male character with the most integrity and smarts.)
I think you’re entirely right that men who are pretty awful people can be very attractive to women. But I think that’s because they have certain social skills that they’ve developed and relied on. And anyone can learn social skills. There’s not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women—you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer. Rappers swagger, make it obvious that women can’t resist them, and they’re typically in great shape. They’re popular for completely predictable reasons.
You’re probably right that some women gravitate to assholish men because they’re just not thinking (just like some men gravitate to women who have nothing going for them but their beauty.) But it’s unfair for a man to assume that every woman is going to do that, and I’d find it sad if a man compromised his more serious principles just to pick up the less self-aware women. You can make yourself more attractive without becoming a person you’d hate.
I think women want guys with values, in principle, and are tempted by guys without values, in practice, because they like “masculine” or “alpha” behavior. It doesn’t mean that the desire to date a good person isn’t a real desire.
I think this hypothesis makes a lot of sense: masculinity is the main cause of attraction, and bad values just tag on along for the ride. This hypothesis is entirely plausible to me, but I have to wonder whether it’s the whole story. For some the nastier forms, I’m not sure that masculinity and bad values are always separable; they are intertwined.
There could be several different paths by which different types of women are attracted to assholes; you’ve certainly named one of them.
If someone desires to get work done, but also procrastinates, would you say she doesn’t “really” want to get work done?
Not necessarily, but it could be the case.
(Read or watch Gone With The Wind again—Rhett is actually the male character with the most integrity and smarts.)
It’s one specific scene that I’m thinking of: the quasi-rape scene.
There’s not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women—you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer.
You might be surprised! Famous serial killers are very popular with women and have groupies. Female serial killers don’t have male groupies. Now, women with these preferences are probably pretty rare; women attracted to shy nerds are probably more common (2% of women are into shyness), but there are a lot more shy nerds than women into them, whereas serial killers are a scarce resource for women who are into them.
More hilariously, I have an article on my hard drive about Western women attracted to Osama bin Laden written after 9/11 (I’ll write it up sometime, but it’s behind a paywall.)
This behavior might initially seem like some sort of weird fluke, but looking at female attraction to Eminem, who raps about doing some of the things that serial killers are in for, these preferences could be conceptualized along the same continuum: serial killers are hypermasculine ultra-assholes.
See also the Draco In Leather Pants (TVTropes) phenomenon, where fangirls turn villains into objects of desire (there are some hilarious example pages at the bottom).
Fantasy is different from reality, of course. These women may have different desires in real life. Even if they have similar desires, they know better than to try to act them out, consistent with your model. The point is that such psychology seems like a watered-down, fantasy-only version of the psychology of serial killer groupies, who act out these same sorts of desires in reality.
Although there are categorical distinctions between women who lust after Eminem or dress Draco Malfoy up in leather pants, and women who go for serial killers, all these women may be the same continuum on other variables. Serial killer groupies are just at the far right of the bell curve of women attracted to assholes.
Rappers swagger, make it obvious that women can’t resist them, and they’re typically in great shape.
They swagger, but I’m not sure their swagger is always distinguishable from their misogyny. I hypothesize that being misogynistic in the context of swagger reads as attractive masculinity to some women in some subcultures. I guess the question is what sorts of female fans these rappers would gain or lose if they weren’t so misogynistic. I do think your hypothesis explains many or even most cases of female attraction to these guys; I just don’t think it’s the whole story. There are swaggering masculine guys who aren’t misogynistic; why no go for them instead?
But it’s unfair for a man to assume that every woman is going to do that, and I’d find it sad if a man compromised his more serious principles just to pick up the less self-aware women.
Agreed.
You can make yourself more attractive without becoming a person you’d hate.
That’s the conclusion of my experience. Though part of the way that I do this is by trying to have the same mystique or bad boys and aesthetic appeal, just without actually being an asshole. For instance, the way I dress is partly inspired by villains in movies… though I’ve stopped short of wearing leather pants.
Masculinity + authority + sarcasm + disagreeableness is an attractive combination for a reasonable subset of women. Alan Rickman’s looks and voice may help.
See also House, M.D. for another attractive character close by in the same region of guyspace.
Harry treated him as though he was a major villain though. He and Ron spend pretty much the whole series blaming him every time anything goes wrong. I’m guessing that simultaneously raised his villain-status and his misunderstood-guy-in-need-of-love status.
The thing is, he’s a medium-status villain. He’s a teacher and not in charge of more than his classroom. He’s not good-looking or well-dressed.
He is a lot higher status in the movies, purely due to the way he is acted. He exuded power.
I’ll also note that Snape is in charge of a house and could reasonably be considered the third most powerful in Hogwarts. Given the role Hogwarts has in Magical Britain his status would seem to be rather high.
Also, the theory of female attraction to status is not so much about global status, but about local status in interactional contexts. That’s part of why members of small-time crappy bands can do so well with women (that, plus good genes from being a musician). Global status in men is great, but local status is good enough, and it’s more attainable.
Oddly, after reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time, long before any of the movies came out, I too found Snape to be oddly charismatic… sure, he seemed to hate Harry for no apparent reason and go out of his way to be mean to him, but he seemed interesting in a way that many of the other characters weren’t. A hero who is consistently heroic is often a Flat Character and therefore boring.
Your perspective is that of an adult, of course; but the Harry Potter books are children’s literature, and thus (I presume) take a child’s point of view on the world. Children often perceive adult authority figures as “mean” even when they are well within the bounds of what (adult) society considers to be acceptable behavior. Such “meanness”, while unpleasant, is not something children are necessarily shocked by; they expect it in more or less the same way that adults expect “outrageous” actions from the government .
He mentally beats them—between the implied Legilimency and verbal humiliation, I think a lot of his students would have preferred the occasional physical slap or kick.
Is your point that Harry isn’t shocked by Snape’s behavior, so that a good many readers aren’t, either? I don’t remember if Harry had a general opinion about Snape’s viciousness.
The women who find Snape attractive aren’t children themselves—I don’t know what the typical lower age limit for liking Snape is.
IIRC, Rowling hated the way Snape taught. She could have presented his nastiness as part of a useful toughening process, but she didn’t.
Of course, as the books went on, not only did he eventually redeem himself, but (earlier) Umbridge made him look like a relatively less awful teacher.
Jeffrey Dahmer might have been a bit too creepy even for the serial killer groupie population, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he got an occasional love letter too.
But it’s unfair for a man to assume that every woman is going to do that, and I’d find it sad if a man compromised his more serious principles just to pick up the less self-aware women.
A lot of parents find it sad when their kids find out that santa claus isn’t real.
I think there’s a bit more to it than just women overlooking a lack of values because of other attractive factors like confidence. There’s some evidence that men with the ‘dark triad’ personality traits are more successful with women.
There’s not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women—you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer.
I had to google him, I also googled his name and sexy and found this. :(
He gets 28,800 hits for jeffrey dahmer sexy. Out of 275000 hits. So a sexy ratio of 0.1. I’m not sure if this is high or low for a public male figure, a lot of it will be incidental mentions.
Steve Buscemi gets a ratio of 0.03, brad pitt get 0.13. Harold shipman (another serial killer but not so handsome or gruesome) gets 0.06.
I’m not sure of my methodology, I suspect that I might do better looking for the phrase in quotes.
Ah thanks. Quotes it is, although it will under report.
“Dead elephant is sexy” gets none, as does Harrold Shipman.
Steve buscemi does better this time. 60⁄935000 = 6*10^-4
Jeffrey Dahmer gets 4/264000 = 1.5*10^-4
Jay Leno gets 112⁄4.7million = 2*10^-4
Brad pitt gets 14700⁄17.1 million = 8 * 10^-3
While not falling foul to the dead elephant problem, I’m still not happy with it methodologically. This is probably the best information we can get without searching for all the variants of “X is hot”.
Hmm, this might make a good small web app, a more advanced version of google fight that looked for relative popularity of adjectives.
Not quite the same, but Googlism is sort of a simple version of that. Also, I suspect a trolling element in the Jeffrey Dahmer page you linked, although that could be optimism at work.
Us guys, we see women saying that they want guys with intellectual and moral values, but then we often seeing women going for men who seem unlikely to exhibit those traits, and we get… confused.
This confuses me, because it seems to imply that men need to believe that a simple personality heuristic can be applied to all or almost all women. Why is it an unacceptable answer that some women like one thing, and some like another? Or did you mean the same group of women in both cases?
I used to hate the idea of gender dynamics in dating. But then I gave them a try, and found that some of them are actually pretty fun.
By “gender dynamics” in this case do you mean doing the things that you’re expected to do because of your gender? If so, yeah, some of them are pretty fun. And some of it is stuff we’re hardwired to like; I won’t argue with that. The trouble is just when we limit ourselves to broad heuristics about the whole population which gloss over the degree of individual variety, and then try to apply those on the individual scale.
This confuses me, because it seems to imply that men need to believe that a simple personality heuristic can be applied to all or almost all women. Why is it an unacceptable answer that some women like one thing, and some like another? Or did you mean the same group of women in both cases?
In other cases, it could be that the most common things women in your culture say they want, and the guys who are getting the most attention, don’t seem to match. Of course, there’s no necessary contradiction, like you say.
In other cases, it’s the same women saying one thing, and (seemingly) doing another.
There is a social desirability bias that will encourage women to signal preferences for positive traits like intelligence and values. In contrast, if you’re a woman who likes meatheads, you’ve less likely to talk about it. Furthermore, when people misstate their preferences, it’s more likely to be in the direction of positive traits than of negative traits.
For many white middle-class men, it’s drummed into their heads from an early age that women universally prefer intelligent men with values such as “respectfulness.” So when a guy sees evidence to the contrary, it makes him question anything he is told about what women want, even by women. Since it’s not politically correct for either women or men to talk about women going for anything other than intelligence and values in men, when he sees women going for men without those traits, he may freak out and start making hasty generalizations.
That’s not the most rational attitude, but it is understandable. The presence of some women misstating their preferences (or dating guys other than what they prefer) lowers the priors for men believing what other women say about their preferences. This is sad, but true.
And yes, it probably sucks for you when you are interacting with a guy, and his priors for how to interact with you are all screwed up by the ways that other women have trained him.
By “gender dynamics” in this case do you mean doing the things that you’re expected to do because of your gender? If so, yeah, some of them are pretty fun. And some of it is stuff we’re hardwired to like; I won’t argue with that.
Basically yeah.
The trouble is just when we limit ourselves to broad heuristics about the whole population which gloss over the degree of individual variety, and then try to apply those on the individual scale.
Sometimes, broad heuristics are all you have, at least to start with. “Women are misstating their preferences until proven otherwise” probably would be too broad and extreme. But a moderate degree of skepticism until proven otherwise might make sense.
Getting better reference classes can improve the heuristics used. For instance, you might know that some groups of women state their preferences more accurately than others. I propose that nerdy women are both more aware of their preferences, actually date guys who fulfill their preferences, and less likely to incorrectly state socially desirable preferences for signaling reasons. These women are also more likely to be into intelligent men with values, so on the question of those preferences, nerdy women’s claims about their preferences are more trustworthy.
Gangestad et al. found that 90-95% of women fit into a gender-typical taxon based on their interests and traits, while 5-10% of women are a gender-atypical taxon (which also contains most of the queer women). 90-95% of women are wired one way; 5-10% are wired another way. As a result, there actually probably are many examples where it’s reasonable to approach women with one set of heuristics by default unless you have special evidence that they are gender-atypical, which allows you to pull out some different heuristics.
It may be the case that the 5-10% of gender atypical women contain most of the nerdy women, and disproportionately state their preferences accurately.
This confuses me, because it seems to imply that men need to believe that a simple personality heuristic can be applied to all or almost all women. Why is it an unacceptable answer that some women like one thing, and some like another?
The prevalence of different personality types in the population is very relevant here and you seem to be glossing over it. If the number of women attracted to your personality type is relatively low (and especially if it is low relative to the number of other men similar to you) it will still be an obstacle you need to overcome in finding a partner even if you believe that there are women out there who would be attracted to you. Internet dating has probably helped with this a bit by making it easier to find potential matches but it can’t overcome seriously unfavourable relative numbers.
I’d compare this with employment. Every now and then, you see a media story about some company with a highly unusual internal culture that uses all sorts of unconventional practices in hiring, organization, and management. Yet unless you luckily stumble onto some such employer and happen to be an exceptionally good candidate by their standards, you would be well-advised to stick to the standard conventional advice on how to look and behave in job interviews and, subsequently, in the workplace. In fact, doing anything else would mean sabotaging your employment and career prospects, and expecting that your unconventional behavior will surely be rewarded with a dream job with an unconventional employer is a delusional pipe-dream.
The main flaw of this analogy, of course, is that the conventional wisdom on seeking and maintaining employment is largely correct, whereas the conventional wisdom on dating has fatal points of disconnect from reality. Also, while conforming to optimal workplace behavior is truly painful for many people, fixing the problems in one’s approach to dating and relationships typically doesn’t require any such painful and loathsome adjustment. (Even though people often rationalize their unwillingness to do it by convincing themselves in the opposite.)
You’re probably right but ironically I’ve ignored much of the standard advice on employment and it’s worked out just fine for me so this example doesn’t resonate very well for me. I’ve never worn a suit to a job interview for example.
Certainly! If he’d said “women who might like me tend to also like …” I’d have understood. My confusion was because there was no such qualification, or anything else limiting the population under discussion beyond “women,” but the commenter seemed to expect consistency within that population.
The prevalence of different personality types in the population is very relevant here and you seem to be glossing over it.
I assumed he was saying something like “the majority of women prefer a man more ‘masculine’ than the median man”. By analogy, if it is true that “the majority of men prefer a woman who is slimmer than the median woman” it should be obvious that being overweight will make it harder for a woman to find a match even if there are men who prefer less slim women. Saying “men prefer slim women” is a slightly sloppy generalization but not an unreasonable one in this example.
We might be looking at different parts of the comment under discussion, because I’ve completely lost the correlation between what we’re talking about and what I actually read. At this point I’d rather just drop it.
What do you think about women who are into Rhett Butler, and other “dark heroes” from romance novels?
Dark heroes in romance novels generally aren’t disrespectful or aggressive towards the heroine, and if they are domineering or deceptive towards the heroine, it’s generally motivated by something that the hero at least believes is for the heroine’s good, and often at the expense of the hero’s own interests.
For example, if a fantasy-romance novel heroine gets put under a curse that makes her terribly lustful under the full moon, the heroine might lock her up to protect her… even if she secretly wants to have sex with him anyway, and he wants her as well. Or in an adventure-romance where the heroine is a trained assassin with genetic superpowers, the hero might trick her into getting left behind when he goes to kill the bad guy, to protect her… even if his powers aren’t as powerful as hers, or he has no powers at all besides his secret agent training.
Even if the hero is a bad guy with a past, his actions toward the heroine never turn out to be actually evil or unprincipled, though they may be mistaken and tragic for one or both of them.
(To be fair, romance has a lot of subgenres, and my knowledge is limited to skimming the books my wife has left in the bathroom over the last 20 years or so, and a handful of conversations with her about the emotional and sexual significance of the various tropes in the genres she reads. It’s possible that things are different in subgenres she doesn’t read, like “contemporary”; she almost entirely prefers ones with fantasy, SF, adventure, and other “non-realistic” themes, since this lets her get two categories worth of entertainment at once. ;-) But I’d be a bit surprised if it’s dramatically different.)
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of romance fiction is powered by the idea of a frightening man, even if, as you say, he has a good reason. I admit that this conclusion is the result of realizing that I don’t like the genre, and I think that’s the reason.
The thing I don’t understand in all these discussion is I know a fair number of men in long term—and sometimes happy—relationships. They aren’t high-display of masculinity guys, and yet, somehow they’ve hooked up with someone. How did they manage it?
Gone with the Wind is a hard thing to argue from. It’s an extraordinary book—very popular, but never duplicated. One of the things that drives it is that Scarlett is much more motivated by survival and status than the average female lead.
I just realized—it’s actually an example of a relatively rare sort of women’s fiction. Perfect guy shows up, but the woman is too busy to notice for most of the novel. The other examples I’ve got (Murder with Peacocks and Good in Bed), she’s distracted by a bunch of things going on in her life, but not by being in love with the wrong guy. In a normal novel, she’d realize she’s in love with him while he was still in love with her.
Also, it’s interesting that I’ve never heard anyone say that it was implausible for Scarlett to be fixated on Ashley.
Part of what makes these discussions messy is that the fantasies that hook the hindbrain aren’t necessarily what people want to live. There are a lot more men who like action movies than who’d like to be in violent fights.
The thing I don’t understand in all these discussion is I know a fair number of men in long term—and sometimes happy—relationships. They aren’t high-display of masculinity guys, and yet, somehow they’ve hooked up with someone. How did they manage it?
How old are they? Most people get married eventually. Furthermore, the older people get, the more they switch over to long-term mating strategies.
If you’re an average guy, eventually you’re going to “get lucky” and run into a woman who is into you. As people get older, more and more women get tired of bad boys and switch over to their long-term mating strategies (and in some cases, are looking for men to support them).
So our average guy will find a mate. The question is, how many years go by while he is only dating sporadically, while women (on average) are off having fun with the more masculine and exciting guys? When he finally does find someone, how much choice does he actually have? What is her level of attractiveness (in various areas) compared to his? Is she the “one” who is “right” for him, or is she simply the one woman who has shown interest in him in the past few years?
It seems that during youth, most people do some combination of short-term mating and attempted-but-aborted serial long-term relationships, until eventually they find a good match. People test-drive each other. According to the model I’m outlining, women concentrate their test driving towards men at the top, while men’s test driving
of women is more evenly distributed (though of course, still skewed).
As a result, men who aren’t flashy rides get disproportionately overlooked or cut out of the developmental test-driving stage, until with time women’s average preferences shift and they want something more dependable. I’ve heard men express frustration with this situation and ask, “if the kitten didn’t want me, do I want the cat?”
Sex differences in attraction is also important. For men, looks are relatively more important in attraction, while for women, behavior/personality is relatively more important. If you are a guy dating people you find attractive, they can still turn out to be good long-term mates for you. But for women, the guys you find most attractive during youth may have personality traits that exclude them from making good long-term mates. Of course, there is variation in women on this trait: for some, their ideal short-term mate and ideal long-term mate are the same guy. On average, the people who young women are sexually excited about are less likely to make good long-term mates than the people young men are excited about.
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of romance fiction is powered by the idea of a frightening man, even if, as you say, he has a good reason. I admit that this conclusion is the result of realizing that I don’t like the genre, and I think that’s the reason.
Given that there are so many subgenres of romance, I suspect we are talking about different ones. In the small sample of my wife’s books that I’ve read, the hero is never described as frightening to the heroine. Typically, he takes the form of an annoying rival who the heroine believes is overconfident or arrogant, someone whose goals are (superficially and initially) at odds with those of the heroine. (It then usually turns out that one or both characters have been operating on the basis of a mistaken impression about the other’s goals or character.)
But I have never seen fear described as a heroine’s reaction to anything except the villain, or her feelings for the hero. (Or more precisely, her anticipation of the problematic consequences of allowing her feelings for him to develop and be acted upon.)
Fear of the hero himself, or his actions, though? To my recollection, never happens in these genres.
Thanks for the information. I may have been over-influenced by the blurbs on paranormal romances.
And my take on “frightening” was that these are guys who any reasonable person with ordinary human abilities would find frightening, whether the heroine does or not.
The thing I don’t understand in all these discussion is I know a fair number of men in long term—and sometimes happy—relationships. They aren’t high-display of masculinity guys, and yet, somehow they’ve hooked up with someone. How did they manage it?
From the “Perception Lab” at St Andrews:
Women’s preferences for men’s facial masculinity are especially interesting, as there is great variation in preferences across individuals. These preferences have been demonstrated to vary with age, womens’ own self-rated attractiveness, and across different phases of their menstrual cycle.
Older women tend to prefer more feminine faces. Women in the infertile part of their fertility cycle tend to prefer more feminine faces. Women rating themselves as less attractive tend to prefer more feminine faces.
By the way, I don’t mean to imply that your guy friends in particular are in stable relationships because of these tendencies—I can think of many other reasons beyond the differing attractiveness of their faces, or their demeanour.
Part of what makes these discussions messy is that the fantasies that hook the hindbrain aren’t necessarily what people want to live. There are a lot more men who like action movies than who’d like to be in violent fights.
This deserves emphasis. Our instincts are not interested in our happiness. There is no reason to presume that those we are most attracted to will be the same as those who will be the most satisfying either in the long or short term. (Although it is certainly strong evidence to be considered as well as a direct contributor to that satisfaction.)
The thing I don’t understand in all these discussion is I know a fair number of men in long term—and sometimes happy—relationships. They aren’t high-display of masculinity guys, and yet,
Are these mostly older guys or more precisely guys in LTRs with older women?
The increase over the last 4 decades in female personal income has made the “beta good provider” male strategy less successful.
Also, some (e.g., the Man Who Is Thursday) say that the increase in female promiscuity has had a similar effect because (the thinking goes) once a woman has had sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men, she is less likely to settle for a LTR with a much less exciting one (and as long as she does not demand any sort of commitment from them, a woman using a “modern” sexual strategy will probably have sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men).
Although I have a relatively small circle of friends, even I have a friend of a friend, now in her 60s, who only ever had sex with one man (the father of her kids to which she is still married) and she was quite beautiful, grew up in the proverbial big city (Manhattan) and has and had no notable social handicaps.
Also, some (e.g., the Man Who Is Thursday) say that the increase in female promiscuity has had a similar effect because (the thinking goes) once a woman has had sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men, she is less likely to settle for a LTR with a much less exciting one (and as long as she does not demand any sort of commitment from them, a woman using a “modern” sexual strategy will probably have sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men).
If she doesn’t demand any sort of commitment from them, she can have sex with many more extremely exciting men than that, if she’s at all attractive. Even less attractive women can similarly easily have lots of sex and non-serious relationships with men who are far above what they can realistically expect to get for serious commitment, even if they won’t be extremely exciting by absolute standards, so the same principle applies.
There was a discussion of this issue on LW recently. If anyone’s interested, these are my thoughts on the subject, and here I comment on some relevant research.
I’m not sure what the typical age for starting the relationships was.
OK but note that my point is not that women get less choosy as they get older (though that is almost certainly true) but rather that it was easier for a man of average attractiveness to win the hand of a 30-year-old woman 30 or 40 years ago than it is today.
IIRC, a study a couple of years back that said that the male hero raped the female heroine in about half of a large sample of romance novels they looked at. Can’t remember how they chose their sample.
Dark heroes in romance novels generally aren’t disrespectful or aggressive towards the heroine, and if they are domineering or deceptive towards the heroine, it’s generally motivated by something that the hero at least believes is for the heroine’s good, and often at the expense of the hero’s own interests.
That is disrespectful. It’s asserting that the hero knows better than the heroine what’s good for her, and is entitled to act on her behalf. In my mind that’s a much, much more dangerous meme than outright acting maliciously.
That is disrespectful. It’s asserting that the hero knows better than the heroine what’s good for her, and is entitled to act on her behalf. In my mind that’s a much, much more dangerous meme than outright acting maliciously.
The phrase ‘dangerous meme’ jumped out at me. I agree that it is disrespectful and I personally make an effort to prevent people that try from having any part of my life. I actually have to bite my tongue at times so that I don’t point out to young adults “You don’t have to take that. You can choose your own boundaries, with consideration of your options and likely outcomes.” (That put me in a particularly interesting situation when I was a teacher!)
But going from ‘undesirable behavior’ to ‘dangerous meme’, well, strikes me as dangerous. It seems like a move from discussing behavioral preferences to considering the very fact that the behavioural pattern appeals to some people or plays a role in their literature of choice is wrong.
I find the kinds of romance novels in question decidedly unappealing. Not just because they are aimed at women but because they are aimed at a different subset of women than those with whom I most empathise with. But I do know that there people who actually appreciate or are attracted to these same behaviours that I find obnoxious. Judging the very meme just because I personally don’t prefer the behaviour would seem presumptive.
I don’t think I intended the phrase as strongly as you interpreted it. However, “undesireable behavior” is too weak. As noted in another fork of this thread, I think that kind of paternalism is totally out of place between any two capable adults, but invididual cases are not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the notion that “members of group X know better than/are entitled to look after members of group Y.” The particular example given happens to be sexist, but it would be offensive for any two groups of normal grown-ups. Perpetuating that idea in popular culture, e.g. via popular fiction, has negative effects on members of both groups, even if they’re not directly exposed to the fiction itself.
I’m talking about the notion that “members of group X know better than/are entitled to look after members of group Y.”
That’s not a notion that was actually present in the context and nor is it one that you introduced yourself (until now). I say this not to be pedantic or to accuse you of any form of inconsistency but rather because there is an implicit assumption that I don’t share. The one that allows a leap from a fictional stories where a female protagonist interacts with an objectionably dominant hero to the general claim “members of group X know better than/are entitled to look after members of group Y”.
The particular example given happens to be sexist, but it would be offensive for any two groups of normal grown-ups.
The particular example given happens to be of heroes who are sexist (or just excessively dominant) and female heroines with arguably terrible taste. If someone is offended that the heroine is attracted to the domineering hero or offended that a woman likes to read such books or empathises with the character then that is the problem of the person taking offence. Not the problem of the author, not the problem of the fictional protagonist and not the problem of literary porn fan.
While my position on what it makes sense to declare offensive may well be irreconcilably opposed to your own it may be interesting to note that my objection here is actually similar to the objection that we both would share to the heroine being overridden. It is not OK to prevent (or shame or otherwise apply moral sanction against) people having, reading or writing stories that appeal to their own emotions. It is not OK to condemn literature because the character doesn’t fit an ideal.
I don’t think “members of group know better than/are entitled to look after members of group ”. Actually, you probably do ‘know better than’ but it is the ‘are entitled to look after’ that is in play when we consider declaring things offensive.
Yes, this particular example is of individuals in just a few works of fiction. But the pattern does happen to exist in many more. And it does happen to be a pretty common idea in our culture. I’m not deriving that from the few examples given; I’m deriving that from living in the culture. I’m not looking out for readers-of-that-fiction, I’m looking out for me, who has to live with them, and with the people who learn values from them.
I’m also withdrawing from this conversation, because the amount of mental effort it’s taking to participate is exceeding the payoff significantly.
I’m also withdrawing from this conversation, because the amount of mental effort it’s taking to participate is exceeding the payoff significantly.
In all sincerity the my goal in this conversation was not primarily to maximise the immediate enjoyment of the participants, for all that I do not like draining the mental energies of either others or myself. The role of morality has been discussed elsewhere recently and within that role declarations of things that things should be considered offensive or shamed serves as a powerful power play. It even more powerful when the assumption that something is sexist, prejudiced or otherwise normatively wrong is passed off implicitly without question. It takes very little for such beliefs or injunctions to become unquestionable and once in place can be a significant inhibitor of personal freedom.
The task of minimising personal offence while at the same time acting to make a social move too expensive for it to be worth their while to try frequently is one that is quite difficult.
That is disrespectful. It’s asserting that the hero knows better than the heroine what’s good for her, and is entitled to act on her behalf.
You’re leaving out the part where I said that the hero’s actions could be mistaken and/or tragic: i.e., in actual romance novels it’s quite often the case that the hero only thinks he knows better than the heroine, that she fights his actions every step of the way, and/or the actions lead to bad results.
I’m also a bit confused as to how you can say that either of the specific examples I gave qualify as “disrespectful”. If somebody throws themselves in front of a bullet for you, is that being disrespectful because they think they know what’s better for you?
might lock her up to protect her… might trick her into getting left behind when he goes to kill the bad guy, to protect her
I don’t see either of these as analogous to throwing himself in front of a bullet. In both cases he’s making a choice for her which she is capable of making herself—he’s taking care of her instead of letting her take care of herself. Even in the first case, there’s precedent in werewolf fiction for the lycanthrope to be voluntarily restrained to minimize damage. In the second case he’s also mislelading her so as to actually prevent her from making the choice to, say, protect him with her superior abilities.
It would be equally messed up if you switched the gender roles—saying “I’m going to do what I’ve decided is good for you instead of letting you make your own choices” always is, between two capable grownups. This just happens to be the direction which conforms to the popular trope about who is supposed to take care of whom.
It would be equally messed up if you switched the gender roles—saying “I’m going to do what I’ve decided is good for you instead of letting you make your own choices” always is, between two capable grownups. This just happens to be the direction which conforms to the popular trope about who is supposed to take care of whom.
This particular aspect may be unique to the romance genres my wife reads, but ISTM that the female leads in these novels are just as likely to make the same sort of imposingly-yet-self-sacrificing decisions for the male leads—i.e., both parties doing it in the same novel, prior to reaching a saner equilibrium. The contextual implication I draw from the few ones that I read myself, is that:
1) The signal “I will do what it takes to protect you, even if you disagree” is covertly found attractive by the heroine, even when her rational/overt reaction is that it’s stupid, unnecessary, condescending, chauvinistic etc. (This distinction is usually reflected in the heroine’s inner and outer dialogs),
2) While the signal is valued, the actual behavior and effects are not—by the time they reach “happily ever after”, the hero grudgingly agrees to limit his heroic impulses to merely vigorously arguing and protesting against courses of action he deems too dangerous, rather than outright sabotage or quasi-suicidal pre-emptions.
Hypothesis: once the hero has established the credibility of his signaled concern by actually putting himself at risk, the heroine can simply enjoy the now-credible verbal signals, without having the ongoing cost of excessive risk to him, or the annoyance of being treated somewhat condescendingly.
I do have the impression that men who have the fundamentals right aren’t good with the female hindbrain, for the most part (there are exceptions, and there are compromises.)
I wonder how much this is due to the American Jock vs Geek mentality. Geeks see masculine behaviour as out group so eschew it? The conflict isn’t so bad in Europe (it doesn’t carry on into University in the same way). That is not to say that European geeks are naturally intensely masculine, simply that it might be easier for them to adopt masculine behaviours, because they aren’t having to act like the enemy.
This dichotomy doesn’t seem prevalent in all American culture, entrepreneurs seem quite happy with to straddle the line. How much of your experience is with people inside academia?
My experience is either inside academia or way the hell outside (people who didn’t go to college.) I never met an entrepreneur.
My experience with meeting Europeans is that smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I’ve known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars) but that just about everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US. So I think your point is probably more relevant on the female end—European female geeks are more conventionally feminine because they don’t see a dichotomy. (I’ve also noticed that about Asian female geeks—that is, raised in Asian countries, not Asian-American.)
just about everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US.
That’s a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire continent that contains countries as different as, say, Sweden and Albania, or Moldova and Switzerland. Also, I’m certain that the sample of Europeans you’ve seen is unrepresentative in all sorts of relevant ways even of their own countries, let alone the entire continent.
Of course, if by this you mean the specific patterns of behavior characteristic of
certain sorts of American men, then the claim is trivially true.
[In Europe] smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I’ve known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars)
That is true, for the most part. Where I come from, the electrical engineering students’ club at the local university is a popular location for nightlife and rock concerts that attracts masses of people as a party hangout. Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America, but it’s not at all unusual in Europe.
Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America
That’s a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire contient that contains countries as different as, say, Canada and Nicaragua, or Alabama and San Francisco.
OK, that was an imprecise statement—by “North America,” I meant the U.S. and Canada, not the standard usage of the term.
When it comes to the U.S. and Canada, however, I stand behind my assertion. There are indeed significant cultural differences between, say, Alabama and Northern California, but not when it comes to this question.
I’ve also heard that in China, self-effacing and conscientious students can be the most popular. For the US, that’s unimaginable.
These pieces of data suggest that the polarization of men towards “geek / nice guy” and “masculine bad boy” in the US is at least partly cultural, and it could be fought by other cultural forces.
That is the argument that David Anderegg makes in Nerds. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger’s Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity.
Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between “men of action” and “men of reflection” in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the “man of reflection” was the “effete intellectual” or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He argues that our modern concept of “nerd” is the descendant of the “man of reflection” and “effete intellectual” stereotypes. Read that entire chapter I linked to. Here are some of Anderegg’s examples:
Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s story was a classic example of “nerd vs jock,” where the nerd is portrayed in many negative and stereotypical ways
Superman becoming incognito and undatable to Lois merely by being mild-mannered and wearing glasses
He argues that ancient Greeks didn’t have such a dichotomy between brain vs. brawn/looks: heroes were typically intelligent, good-looking, and capable, while villains tended to be both ugly and stupid.
Emerson’s speech is fascinating and complex, but it definitely sets up the dichotomy between men of action and men of reflection. Here are some troubling excerpts (emphases mine):
There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical men’ sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, — who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day, — are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.
[...]
Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
[...]
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,
“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim.
[...]
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.
Emerson makes a lot of good points, such as about avoiding past orthodoxies. But as Anderegg points out, his attitude is very close to “throw away books from the past, and write your own,” which is anti-intellectual and fails to reflect how thinkers can stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no dichotomy between studying works of the past, and original thinking.
He displays a great ambivalence towards scholars of his time. He romanticizes “Man Thinking,” but links scholars to Europe, femininity, homosexuality (via the word “mincing”), religion, unoriginality, laziness, timidity, and disease (e.g. “infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness”). No doubt there were and are many scholars who deserve those labels, but his dichotomy is much too stark:
Non-scholars are much more lacking in original thought than scholars
Non-scholars are plenty lazy, too
What about men of action who are temperamentally timid?
He speaks disdainfully of scholars having “second thoughts,” but wasn’t he criticizing them earlier for being too credulous? Can’t men of action who are engaging their subject matter hands-on have second thoughts?
Why can’t you both read books, and carve out your heroic path in your field?
In domains with low-hanging empirical fruit, I’ll buy his argument that scholars should get more hands-on. In other domains, it’s best to read the book, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Why are the intellectual errors Emerson criticizes associated with women or homosexuality? Why can’t we have feminine or homosexual men of action? Would Alan Turing fit into Emerson’s notion of the “American scholar”?
That’s a very interesting reference, I’ll try to check it out when I find some time. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with Emerson’s work, so I can’t tell if Anderegg is representing his views fairly. But in any case, I’ve always found the American phenomenon of equating intellectual interests with “nerdiness” alien and weird, and its exact historical origins are still a mystery to me, so I’ll be interested in checking out the book and seeing if it sheds some light on it.
Another funny example of the nerd stereotype: Georges St. Pierre (aka GSP), the current UFC Welterweight Champion and one of the greatest mixed martial artists in the world, thinks of himself as a nerd because he is into paleontology.
“I don’t like to tell people that very much, but I am. I don’t really watch sports. I watch the Canadian version of the Discovery Channel. Ask me a question about the Jurassic period or the Cretaceous period and I probably could answer it… Seriously, I’m into paleontology. That’s the study of prehistoric life. I’m into philosophy. And psychology too. You know that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was found with feathers? Yes, feathers!”
“When I train, I love to take time off and fly to the Natural History Museum or an exhibition. I just love that. When you know your past, it will help you with your future… That’s why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That’s why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with. I’m married to my work right now. But you never know. One day I could wake up and just do something different. Life is so unpredictable.”
I also recall Michelle Bachmann describing herself as a “nerd” because she watches science programs on TV. Look—occasionally going to museums or reading books or watching educational TV shows should be normal. It’s not a distinguishing characteristic.
I don’t describe myself as a “nerd” on OkCupid because it just seems like a meaningless term by now. If you’re looking for someone who’s interested in ideas, well, I’m in academia, so that should tell you all you need to know. If you’re looking for someone a little shy and silly, that’ll come across too.
It is not normal for humans to occasionally go to musea or watch education TV shows, so it is indeed non-trivially informative to learn this about a human. It also clusters with other dispositional characteristics and therefore is useful for low-cost classifiers.
Because humans don’t know much about the natural sciences, and certainly not in terms of predictive models, I have difficulty communicating with most of them about paperclip engineering topics. For example, when I start talking about endurance limits, I lose over 99% of the audience. It would be understandable if they could grasp the concept but weren’t familiar with that particular term (it just means the stress—load per unit area—that a mechanical component could endure in tension for an arbitrary long period when applied cyclically i.e. on/off).
But that’s not the situtation here. Their only knowledge of metallurgy and materials science is brief regurgitation of text that doesn’t even map to a prediction as far as they’re aware. So stuff is made out of atoms? Great, what predictions can you make with that? (That’s on the better end of the human clippiness spectrum!!!)
Yes, it still means that people with intellectual interests aren’t quite socially acceptable.
Admittedly, there’s a paradox—he’s saying something that he “doesn’t tell people very much” in an ESPN interview—we’ve not talking about a gigantic stigma. Still, I don’t think he’d talk about a fondness for NASCAR racing in the same way.
The funny thing is that car racing is also a technical subject. As Anderegg points out in the “Nerds” book, it’s strange that some intellectual and technical pursuits get a “pass” on being “nerdy” because they are associated with masculinity, such as playing fantasy football or being a car mechanic.
If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person’s interests. The other meaning concerns a person’s social skills. GSP calls himself a nerd because of his interests. After calling himself a nerd, he makes a half-baked attempt at presenting himself as socially inept (“I have a hard time finding a girlfriend”), but we don’t have to believe him.
As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word “nerd” to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word “nerd” have in fact started to separate in English.
If “nerd” once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either “socially inept person” or “person with a keen interest in an unusual topic”, without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here’s proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).
If all this is correct, then the word “nerd” is in fact evolving away from the concept that rolled the two ideas into one, i.e., the idea of keen interest in an unusual topic and the idea of social ineptness.
If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person’s interests. The other meaning concerns a person’s social skills.
The real puzzle is not about the current meaning of the term, but why the former is normally taken to imply the latter. The existence of a widely used term that covers both meanings is just evidence that this connection is widely made, not an explanation of why it exists.
[Edit: the rest of this comment is based on an incorrect reading. See the replies below.]
As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word “nerd” to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word “nerd” have in fact started to separate in English.
If “nerd” once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either “socially inept person” or “person with a keen interest in an unusual topic”, without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here’s proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).
I think your analysis is wrong. GSP (or at least the public persona he’s presenting) is clearly an example that defies the stereotype. Yet because he fulfills one element of the stereotype, GSP seems unable to conceive of the possibility that he might be an exception to the other ones (or, alternatively, believes that claiming to be such would be absurd), and feels obliged to present himself as someone who indeed conforms to it wholly.
This is evidence of the tremendous strength of the stereotype: since GSP displays “nerdy” intellectual interests, then despite the extreme appearance to the contrary, somehow he still must have a nerdy essence that makes him unattractive to women and ostracized by the cool and popular social circles.
(I should add that the word “stereotype” is nowadays often used with strong moralistic meaning, but I’m using it as a neutral technical term for heuristics for categorizing people based on statistical discrimination.)
That’s why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That’s why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with.
Actually, he doesn’t believe that being a nerd means his social skills are so poor he can’t attract a woman. He believes (perhaps accurately) that he’s only interested in the relatively rare women who share his nerd interests.
What’s interesting is that he associates being a nerd with having difficulty finding partners, even though the connection isn’t by way of poor social skills.
Interesting. So it looks more like it’s a new meaning all the way down the line, as he uses the term. He has even supplied a new explanation (pickiness) for the old phenomenon (having a limited set of friends), which was previously explained by ineptness. It was easy to be confused because he is describing the familiar outward pattern of the nerd, even though he has a new explanation for it. Genuine linguistic evolution here?
The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.
People have limited self knowledge and are constantly rationalizing what they just did or just said. Their self explanations are not definitive.
I believe your argument requires that he has in fact mislabeled himself on the basis of an imperfect match between himself and the word. “nerd”, and that he followed up by confabulating to make himself a better fit for the definition.
In contrast, I argue that the word is in flux (as is the related stereotype), that he is correctly applying a new meaning, but that he misunderstands his own statement. I think self-misunderstanding is commonplace, so I find thus to be a natural, unforced possibility, rather than a contrivance. I think that the meaning of the word “nerd” has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.
Added: I propose ostensive definition as the key mechanism of change.
Step 1: “a nerd is a socially inept person with special interests...”.
Step 2: …”like Bill Gates.”
Step 3: “a nerd is a person like Bill Gates...”
Step 4: ”...who is famous for becoming fantastically wealthy through his special interests.”
From Step 1 to step 2, examples are generated. From step 3 to step 4, the examples yield a changed definition because what was most conspicuous about the examples has changed.
The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.
I agree that my comment was incorrect, and based on an inaccurate reading of what GSP said. Taking that into account, you’re probably right that he is applying only the “obscure interests” meaning to himself.
That said, I don’t think the general use of the word has lost much, if any of its negative connotations, nor that the underlying stereotypes are becoming any weaker. You say:
I think that the meaning of the word “nerd” has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.
But notice that the public perception of Bill Gates is still in accordance with the full “nerd” stereotype. Watch the joke video that he made when he retired. What it clearly shows is that within the ranks of the rich, powerful, and famous, his position is very much like the position of a nerd kid among his more popular school peers: he is proud just because they’re giving him some attention, and views this as a boost to his status. (Consider how unimaginable the opposite would be!) Certainly, despite all the money, power, and fame, nobody ever considered Gates as someone to admire and emulate in terms of style or social behavior, and not to even mention his complete lack of sex-symbol status.
Moreover, even if the nerd stereotype acquired some positive connotations in terms of good career prospects during the eighties and nineties, this trend could only have been downward for the last decade or so, considering that both the economic and general social status of tech professions has been going down ever since the dot-com crash. The ongoing deindustrialization is increasingly catching up even with white-collar technical work.
I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.
The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson’s own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka “Wasp”, the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she’s obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it’s a very different kind of disconnect from the “nerd” disconnect.
What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu’s Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she’s no goth, doesn’t go around in black leather, but she’s still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it’s Sandra Bullock.
What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There’s Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there’s the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd—and he was the one picked for the hacker role.
I’m out. Can’t think of anything else at the moment.
Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I’m starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.
I’ve only seen a couple of the HP movies—is Hermione’s character presented much differently there than in the books? In the books, she’s presented sympathetically, but she also has to navigate being disliked for knowing so much.
Also in the movies, it seemed to me that she was very pretty, while in the books, she seems to have average looks.
Being disliked for knowing so much is not the same thing as being socially inept. But my recollection is that she was attacked primarily for being muggle-born, and more by Draco Malfoy than by anybody else. It’s been a while.
In the first movie Emma Watson was very much like the drawn character, becoming markedly less so in the later movies, maybe in part because the movies were made every two years or so, which meant that the actors quickly outgrew their characters. But the movies have been, I think, very faithful to the books as far as story and character go, within the necessary constraints.
Three nerds on one of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (early 2000s) were socially inept (e.g. completely defenseless against bullying by Spike) and evil though less so than most of the bad guys.
Yes, those were definitely nerds in the bad old dual studious/inept sense. However, Willow Rosenberg was much more central to the series. Wikipedia actually says, “Willow is a shy and nerdy girl with little confidence,” and, “Willow is presented as a bookish nerd with considerable computer skills, dowdily dressed and easily intimidated by more popular girls in school.”
buffy.wikia.com says, “Willow started out as a meek and largely unassertive computer nerd, but eventually grew to be a powerful and authoritative individual,” and, “In her early years at high school, Willow is a shy, naïve nerd with a light, risqué sense of humor. A member of the Math, Science, and Computer clubs, she is the person to go to for tutoring help. Willow is ridiculed by her more popular classmates, including cheerleaders Cordelia Chase and Harmony Kendall.” It includes the corporate explanation of the shift in Willow:
Joss Whedon explained, “The incredibly nerdy clothes that she’s wearing, you’ll see her wearing for exactly one episode, because [the network] kept sending us memos ‘You must make her more hip. You must make her more cool. You must make her more… like Buffy’ which confused me because, you know, I wanted to do an ensemble show and ensemble means that people are different. Besides, I think that outfit’s really cute.”
Which suggests that Whedon wanted to sustain Willow as more of a nerd in all respects, but the suits said no, and so this is why Willow became more of a Hermione and less of a female Anthony Michael Hall. Harry Potter came out in 1997 and Buffy (TV series) came out in the same year. Even though both the HP books and Buffy continued for many years, the characters were sufficiently established early on that my guess is that there was minimal influence.
Thinking of female nerds, The Mummy’s librarian pops into my head. Played by Rachel Weisz. Some degree of social awkwardness, but not really all that much. Definitely studious—knows enough to wake the antagonist.
In light of Whedon’s remark, it looks like you can thank corporate headquarters for the memorable succession of dresses. But Hannigan was smoking hot whatever she wore.
As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.
I’m not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a “computer genius” character having just about every stereotypical “nerdy” characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his “nerdy” computer knowledge (he’s depicted as living in his parents’ basement in his thirties).
While that computer hacker lived in his mom’s basement, he was not the only computer hacker in the movie. In fact there was another one, and a much more important one.
For a movie to strongly depict a correlation between X and Y, the movie needs to show X and Y occurring together and not occurring separately. But Live Free or Die Hard does not do this. There is one computer hacker who lives in his mom’s basement, but there is another one who does not and who is going to win the cop’s daughter in the end. Contrast with Breakfast Club or Revenge of the Nerds, where the X and Y occur together and not apart. There are no good students/chess club members in the Breakfast Club aside from the nerd.
It’s easy to charge that I’ve been cherry-picking, and very hard to defend against that charge, so it would be tremendously costly for me to respond in this vein. Listing examples as I did requires a cooperative audience; if the audience turns on you it might be either because the audience is cherry-picking, or because you are cherry-picking, but either way, there is just no inexpensive way to pursue that line of argument at that point.
I am not entirely without defense, because by luck one of the articles recently cited agrees with me about the shift over time in the frequency of what it calls Type 1 nerds. It says:
Type 1: Pasty, weak, Geek Physiques, probably with Nerd Glasses, bullied by the jocks, Can Not Spit It Out if a girl is anywhere within range, working on odd projects in their basements and garages. These are the nerd stereotypes that were most prevalent in the 70s and 80s, the ones that feature in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, the sort that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs looked like back in the day.
Based on the examples I came up with, I gave 1984/1985 as the high point of the depiction of that sort of nerd, which is consistent with “most prevalent in the 70s and 80s”. Furthermore, American Heritage Dictionary’s history of the word “nerd” appears to give 1970 as a lower limit on when the word “nerd” accrued the intellectual element to its earlier “dud” meaning—and this is consistent with, and so supports, the article’s claim that the nerd stereotype was most prevalent in the 70s and 80s. In fact it appears to have come into existence in the 70s, reached a high point in the mid eighties, and largely flamed out, at least in its more virulent manifestation.
But rather than pursue this further, instead, consider my latest comment here, which deals more directly with the meaning of the word.
You’re right, I forgot about that other hacker character. In any case, I will defer to your superior knowledge of the modern pop culture, which I already confessed being largely ignorant of.
On further reflection, you have convinced me that the pop culture stereotypes of technically savvy characters have changed. One possible reason for this is that among the present younger generations, computers are used by nearly everyone for fun in various ways, whereas 20 years ago and earlier, this was much more unusual and mostly restricted to “nerdy” kids. An interesting test of this theory would be to see how portrayals of computer-savvy characters have changed relative to those with other technical and scientific interests which have remained unusual and unpopular among the majority of kids.
This theory seems to me more plausible than the explanation based on the economic success of tech entrepreneurs, both because the public image of tech magnates is still largely “nerdy” and because the status and economic prospects of tech professions have in fact been going down since the early 2000s.
Interesting examples. I gotta cite the TVTropes article on Hollywood Nerds:
Type 1: Pasty, weak, Geek Physiques, probably with Nerd Glasses, bullied by the jocks, Can Not Spit It Out if a girl is anywhere within range, working on odd projects in their basements and garages. These are the nerd stereotypes that were most prevalent in the 70s and 80s, the ones that feature in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, the sort that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs looked like back in the day. …Ok, Gates still looks kinda like that, but he’s a billionaire now, wanna make something of it? You would think the nerds ruling the world nowadays would make this a Discredited Trope, but there’s enough Truth In Television to Geek Physiques to keep this one running.
Type 2: Take your average attractive actor or actress and stick on Nerd Glasses, a lab coat and some mussed hair and clothes to make them Hollywood Homely. They are probably also Hollywood Dateless, and the social ineptitude may only be an Informed Flaw. They may even shoot straight into Hot Scientist or Hot Librarian territory without help from their smarts to pull it off. May be involved in an Ugly Duckling Beautiful All Along story if they do get paired off with someone.
I think some of your examples are Type 2 Hollywood nerds: hot people with glasses stuck on. That type does defy the general nerd stereotype, but it doesn’t do so in a believable way, so I’m not sure how much these portrayals actually dent the “nerd” stereotype.
The “hacker” archetype is a bit different. “Hacker” incorporates rebelliousness and creativity which is attractive and high-status, in addition to being emotionally relatable.
Goth and punk aesthetics also relate nerds to rebelliousness and Romanticism.
Justin Long is an interesting character. Why did he become the hacker for Die Hard, other than having good looks? There actually are a bunch of qualities that both Justin Long’s Mac character have, and Hollywood hackers have. Justin Long’s character also exemplifies creativity (Macs are associated with media, and his clothes and hairstyle look artsy) and rebelliousness (against the authority of the PC in the workplace).
The end result is that I only find Long semi-believable as a hacker. It’s much easier to imagine him working in Final Cut Pro than doing scripting. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up an interview of Long and found he does not have a technical mind: he says that he isn’t good at math and his mind “doesn’t work that way.” Justin Long’s Mac character is a textbook “Hollywood Nerd.”
Technical interests are cool to have as long as you mask them in rebelliousness or artsiness.
To avoid getting far off track, citing these fictions was in order to make a point about the changing meaning of “nerd”. With that in mind, look at what the article you linked to says about real nerds:
In Real Life, nerds can run the entire spectrum of “beauty” and social prowess, from unattractive and socially inept to drop dead gorgeous and a social butterfly. Like most people, most nerds are simply of average looks and social skills. The only thing that really differentiates nerds from anyone else is their intense interest in niche topics.
That’s agreeing with my thesis about what the concept of “nerd” has come to mean recently. The article writer thinks that it is distinguishing real nerds (who are distinguished only by intense interest in niche topics) from Hollywood Nerds (who are type 1 or type 2). But if you simply look at a dictionary (none of them have been updated to reflect the new meaning—the latest shift is too recent), the word “nerd” did not just mean someone with an interest in niche topics. By (earlier) definition, a nerd was not “of average looks and social skills”. The word has been gutted of its earlier meaning and emotional impact, making it no longer, or at least less, painful for someone to call themselves a nerd.
The American Heritage Dictionary traces the meaning of “nerd” through time. In 1957, meant “square”, which, looking it up, meant conventional or old-fashioned or opposed to current trends. Nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. Then in 1970, an uninteresting person, a “dud”. Again, nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. At some point, the concept of “nerd” gained the element of keen and single-minded interest in niche and especially technical topics. while retaining the “dud” element. But now we see, in the article you link to, that “nerd” has, at least for some, dropped the “dud” element and retained only the (relatively new) element of interest in niche topics.
Yup. And there are other examples. Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, another current comedy. But Big Bang Theory is much more hard core. However Big Bang Theory is, I think, not the cultural benchmark that The Breakfast Club was.
Edit: just thinking further, it occurs to me that Albert Einstein, with his dress and his hair, must have greatly informed the cultural stereotype of the badly dressed genius. Doctor Who is I think a sometimes “cool” version of Einstein. I think there’s some overlap between the absentminded professor (as in flubber), the nutty professor (as in Jerry Lewis), Dick Van Dyke of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the nerd. We have the high intelligence, the being lost in one’s interests, the social awkwardness and obliviousness, and so on. Shared among the absentminded professor types (informed, whether justly or unjustly I don’t know, by the common idea of Einstein) and also the nerds.
I’ll take your word for the cultural benchmark, it didn’t make as much impact on the rest of the world as it did the states (I hadn’t heard of it until 1997)
Speaking of 1985, and crazy scientists you get Doc Brown. Now he was a cool version of Einstein, hair and all. Well actually Einstein is probably considered fairly cool for a scientist, the crazy tongue photo gives the impression he didn’t take himself too seriously.
In the meantime, I read the chapters of Anderegg’s book you cited above. I find his thesis very interesting, but as always in the history of ideas, it’s hard to estimate the relative significance of particular cultural tropes, especially since I know little about all the other factors that could have influenced the development of this characteristic modern American stereotype. I’ve put his book on my reading list, so I’ll probably have more comments when I get to reading it.
This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate may actually be culturally localized.
So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?
This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate is actually culturally localized.
I don’t see why these specific patterns of behavior would seem “absolutely innate” even looking only at the U.S. There are lots of non-nerdy people with high intelligence, and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t excel in “nerdy” professions if they chose to enter them in large numbers. In my opinion, the main reason why non-nerdy smart people go mainly into non-technical professions is that in the American society, technical professions, on the whole, offer relatively low status considering the demands they impose.
So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?
Where I lived in Europe (various places in ex-Yugoslavia), we’ve never really had anything comparable to the American notion of “geeks” and “nerds.” It’s hard to find even an approximate translation for these words which would have all the connotations of high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things.
We do have words that denote these qualities separately, or for people who put excessive effort into success in school while lacking real-life skills and smarts, or who achieve high grades thanks to cramming rather than smarts and talent, etc., etc., and various terms of this sort are used to translate “nerd/geek” in different contexts. But there is no accurate translation, simply because there is no striking correlation between all these attributes. (That said, in recent years some of the American “geek” culture has been making inroads, but even what exists of it is still not comparable, since there is both less social nerdiness involved and much less correlation with interest, let alone high achievement, in science and engineering.)
Partly this is because technical professions have higher relative status, so they attract plenty of intelligent people who are not at all deficient in social skills. The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people’s innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in “geeky” social circles and activities, since they can’t find them anywhere else.
All that said, this situation still does not mean that success in courting women is more evenly distributed among men. On the contrary: the attention of attractive women, and the overwhelming part of casual sex that takes place, is still restricted to the minority of men who are attractive by pretty much the same criteria as anywhere else. It’s just that you’ll find many more such men (as well as less attractive, but still far from nerdy men) among people doing technical professions and having various intellectual interests that are stereotyped as “geeky” in the U.S.
Vladimir M asserts that in Europe, “technical professions have higher relative status”.
That agrees with my experience. My mom used to say that my engineer father would have higher status if he lived in the old country. Also, when letters from Europe arrived for my dad, his name was sometimes prefaced with the honorific “Ing.” which is short for “Ingenieur”, which means “Engineer”.
The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people’s innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in “geeky” social circles and activities, since they can’t find them anywhere else.
How is the educational system different?
As you may know, there’s been a lot of interest lately in the US about how to lessen or eliminate bullying in schools—there’ve been a number of suicides lately resulting from years of severe bullying.
The only structural cause I’ve seen suggested (as distinct from recommendations of active anti-bullying programs) is the high emphasis on competitive athletics, and in particular, athletic competitions between schools.
The other question is whether there’s a process of bullying/ostracism in European schools which is aimed at other sorts of people.
I don’t have anything resembling a complete theory of these differences. It’s certainly not about some clearly identifiable and straightforward organizational aspects that could be reformed in a planned way, and there are definitely deep cultural differences involved.
One organizational difference that seems significant, though, is that I went through a system that had tracking done in such a way that smart kids of all sorts ended up separated from the not so bright ones, but largely mixed together, without being allowed to segregate by electing different coursework. (You had a choice of high schools with different curriculums, but everyone within the same high school had to learn the same, usually eclectic mix of things.) This did seem to create an optimal environment for introverted smart kids to grow up without being exposed to bullying (which was unheard of in the high school I went to), and giving them less inclination and opportunity to self-segregate into “nerdy” cliques.
There is bullying/ostracism however it isn’t as formalised.
I would be tempted to blame the sports. Simply it creates an in group of people that are considered higher status. There are pep rallies to them, with beautiful girls cheering them on, that has to create an inflated sense of worth/superiority/difference.
So they persecute the out group, the geeks, to signal their in-group ness and preserve their sense of superiority. I suppose it is similar to the stanford prison experiment. Raise one group above another and that group seems to persecute the other.
I would be tempted to blame the sports. Simply it creates an in group of people that are considered higher status. There are pep rallies to them, with beautiful girls cheering them on, that has to create an inflated sense of worth/superiority/difference.
It’s definitely not the sports that do it. You may be right about all the rest of the stuff that is associated with sport over there. Cheerleaders? That’s not just in the teen movies right, you actually have them?
Does being a nerd and a good athlete seem out of place in that culture? Come to think of it there is a separate group for ‘band nerds’ too if my consumption of low grade entertainment is anything to go by. I wouldn’t know where to put myself!
Yeah by sports I meant the importance given to it. In comparison we don’t have such things as sports scholarships (irrespective of academic talent, which I think is called an entrance scholarship) for prestigious universities. Does Australia?
I’m a Pom, so my exposure to American culture is mainly fictional in nature as well. I’ve seen a number of documentaries as well though. The BBC loves analysing the US.
Yeah by sports I meant the importance given to it. In comparison we don’t have such things as sports scholarships (irrespective of academic talent, which I think is called an entrance scholarship) for prestigious universities. Does Australia?
Heck no. University sports here are relatively obscure. They are there for students who enjoy them but they are approximately status neutral.
Athletes don’t do all the bullying—not even most of it, I think.
That’s not a necessary implication of whpearson’s theory. Once the athleete/nerd stratification has been established, it may create bullying incentives for those who are physically stronger than the nerds, but not part of the elite athlete circle. Such individuals will want to assert superiority to the nerds to at least confirm their middle-rank status if they can’t achieve the top one, and bullying seems like a straightforward strategy.
I didn’t go myself through the American school system, though, so I have no idea how well this hypothesis holds water.
Once the athleete/nerd stratification has been established, it may create bullying incentives for those who are physically stronger than the nerds, but not part of the elite athlete circle. Such individuals will want to assert superiority to the nerds to at least confirm their middle-rank status if they can’t achieve the top one, and bullying seems like a straightforward strategy.
I didn’t go through the American school system either but your theory seems to match with general observable tendencies. Bullying and crude social aggression isn’t an indicator of high status so much as an indicator of ‘medium high status that requires effort to maintain’. This is why I make sure I never work for an insecure boss.
If you mean people that don’t like to party, then from my experience they are doing science and engineering and probably some humanities as well. They also generally co-exist quite happily with the party-ers, at least at University level.
I’ve just realised how much we have a cultural one way mirror. I’ve seen fictional depictions of fraternities, keg standing, hazing etc, however you probably haven’t seen what a European rock concert is like. Which is generally non-violent, unless you get in the mosh pit.
I say European, but in some ways I have less idea of what mainland European social life is like than American.
Vladimir_M’s “high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things” is good enough except that I’d add lack of femininity to the list.
One horrifying feature of American culture in the 50s was that intelligence was considered not masculine and not feminine, and since everyone was supposed to be one or the other, being visibly intelligent had a social cost. In my opinion, a major (but incomplete) change in this happened when it was clear that people could make money in IT. I’m inclined to think the Flynn effect is also taking hold.
From a science fiction convention: A women mentions that sometimes she feels she’s just got to do something different with her hair, and fannish women are apt to look at her as though she’s crazy.
Historical note: I think that identifying interest in dressing up with being effeminate is a modern weirdness. The only culture I can think of where men and women who could afford to didn’t get about equally elaborate and showy was colonial America, and in that case, the men were dressier.
Afaik, American rock concerts are mostly non-violent, but this is very much second hand. Anyone have more information?
Every mainstream rock concert I’ve ever been to in the US has been entirely non-violent, modulo the occasional and mostly unrelated edge cases that arise when you get a thousand drunk people together. Even metal and punk concerts aren’t violent outside of the mosh pit, and I’m not sure that properly counts as violence, being consensual and generally not aimed at causing injury.
Sounds a lot like the European case, in other words.
everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US
This is true. Gorilla-type masculinity is not what I had in mind when talking about masculinity (being European and all). I was thinking about being into sports/cars/heavy metal (going back to your nice/anti-nice dichotomy) or just generally being confident and self-assured.
If that is what you want, then I can see why it conflicts with some of the fundamentals (kindness, competence). Gorilla masculinity seems to be about getting what you want through physical intimidation. If that is the hammer that you have used the most through your life, then everything will look like a nail.
If you typically try to convince people with competent argument or being kind, then you are less likely to reach for the physical intimidation toolkit of gorilla masculinity.
ETA: I wonder why there is a difference in masculinity in Europe. I’d make up some just-so-story about the more physically aggressive men having been killed in the two world wars, unless it is purely memetic.
If you typically try to convince people with competent argument or being kind, then you are less likely to reach for the physical intimidation toolkit of gorilla masculinity.
I consider competent argument to be far more representative of gorilla masculinity than whatever the other category is. Viewing conversations in certain communities (for example, MENSA mailing lists) I’ve seen patterns that look remarkably like what I would expect from gorrilas—guys trying to dominate each other with verbal sparring while girls are competing via asserting moral control and creating social alliances with other women and undermining the status of targets. Depending on your physical self confidence the physical forms of intimidation can seem gentle and benign in comparison.
I consider competent argument to be far more representative of gorilla masculinity than whatever the other category is.
I think there is more than two categories here. Gorilla’s don’t talk much in general...
I’ve seen patterns that look remarkably like what I would expect from gorrilas—guys trying to dominate each other with verbal sparring while girls are competing via asserting moral control and creating social alliances with other women
There is plenty of that in Europe.… so I’m not sure if it contributes to what activates SarahC’s hindbrain. As gorilla masculinity’s top hit in google is SarahC’s comment, it is up to her to say what it means. To me it had hints of a pure physicality (rather than verbal) to it which she may not have meant to impart.
As gorilla masculinity’s top hit in google is SarahC’s comment, it is up to her to say what it means.
I cannot think of a useful reply. I operate as if the words and phrases refer to common English definitions and refer to actual properties of the universe. You appear to be operating at a level of conversation that does not interest me.
I cannot think of a useful reply. I operate as if the words and phrases refer to common English definitions and refer to actual properties of the universe. You appear to be operating at a level of conversation that does not interest me.
Gorilla-type masculinity doesn’t have any common english definition. It can have multiple possible readings. I read it as non-verbal, large physical presence, chest thumping, wooping.… things to intimidate foes. Because that is what I think of as male gorillas. To speak geek for a moment, Worf is an example of gorrilla-type masculinity and Picard is an example of a non-gorilla type to me. Both examples of masculinity, just different flavours.
Your reading expanded it to verbal domination, or any sort of domination. Which lost the distinction in my mind.
SarahC introduced it to differentiate between what she finds attractive in American men and lacking in European culture, so she had one of the two meanings in mind. Or a different meaning altogether.
It is what she meant that is important! She had something that she wants men to become more of, and the ability to win arguments on Mensa is not what she was thinking of, I think. Assuming her preference is shared by some other women, then it is important for people interested in dating to know exactly what she meant.
That is why I chose her as the arbiter, lacking a common meaning.
I think you’ve basically got it right.
I do have the impression that men who have the fundamentals right aren’t good with the female hindbrain, for the most part (there are exceptions, and there are compromises.)
My own perspective: I’ve had experience with guys who don’t have the fundamentals, and that’s horrible. Someone without human decency is the worst, but someone who isn’t too bright also doesn’t make for a great relationship. So that sort of thing is primary. Mandatory. I don’t appreciate people who argue that women are somehow not serious when they say that they care about intellectual or moral values. I’m entirely serious.
But, on a totally different metric and with a totally different mechanism, masculinity also matters a lot. (I think this is true of most women, but I might be an outlier in just how much it’s true for me.) Masculinity will make a bad match look tempting; the lack of it will make a good match look unappealing. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that my hindbrain works like this—on the off chance that I have “chemistry” with a guy who’s also a good match, I’ll enjoy the relationship much more than if I were Ms. Spock. It adds another dimension. The downside is that there’s a chance I’ll be attracted to assholes and idiots—but I believe (somewhat hopefully) that being self-aware will prevent me from making those kinds of mistakes in practice. [Note that I am saying something different from “Women just want sex with assholes.”]
I think you’re probably also right about behavioral selectivity. Looks matter, but in a pretty coarse-grained way; there’s “unappealing,” a broad swath of “meh,” and a tiny minority of “incredibly good-looking.” Everything else is what you do.
SarahC said:
What do you think causes the common perception that women are not serious about caring about intellectual or moral values? Are you saying that it’s extremely rare for women to say this unseriously, or that you just don’t like being judged as non-serious on such a claim merely because a non-trivial percentage of women may make it incorrectly? What level of variation do you think occurs in the female population in this area.
Us guys, we see women saying that they want guys with intellectual and moral values, but then we often seeing women going for men who seem unlikely to exhibit those traits, and we get… confused. Since this kind of subject isn’t politically correct to talk about, when a guy sees something like this happening, it will dominate his thinking and lead to hasty generalizations about what all women want (like your example of “women just want sex with assholes”).
What do you think about women who are into Rhett Butler, and other “dark heroes” from romance novels? If that example is too fictional, how about, say, rappers?
Here’s an interesting passage from feminist author Jackson Katz about the popularity of Eminem with women, and the message it sends to guys:
Moving on...
I think your preferences for are pretty typical for women with high intelligence: intelligent masculine guys who aren’t douchebags.
I used to hate the idea of gender dynamics in dating. But then I gave them a try, and found that some of them are actually pretty fun. A lot of it is simply aesthetics on both visual and behavioral levels.
Imagine how self-aware you would be with about 30 less IQ points, and how well you’d make decisions about avoiding attractive assholish guys. That’s what most women are probably like.
I think women want guys with values, in principle, and are tempted by guys without values, in practice, because they like “masculine” or “alpha” behavior. It doesn’t mean that the desire to date a good person isn’t a real desire. If someone desires to get work done, but also procrastinates, would you say she doesn’t “really” want to get work done?
I think women would prefer a good person who hits the right masculinity/dominance buttons than a bad person. (Read or watch Gone With The Wind again—Rhett is actually the male character with the most integrity and smarts.)
I think you’re entirely right that men who are pretty awful people can be very attractive to women. But I think that’s because they have certain social skills that they’ve developed and relied on. And anyone can learn social skills. There’s not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women—you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer. Rappers swagger, make it obvious that women can’t resist them, and they’re typically in great shape. They’re popular for completely predictable reasons.
You’re probably right that some women gravitate to assholish men because they’re just not thinking (just like some men gravitate to women who have nothing going for them but their beauty.) But it’s unfair for a man to assume that every woman is going to do that, and I’d find it sad if a man compromised his more serious principles just to pick up the less self-aware women. You can make yourself more attractive without becoming a person you’d hate.
I think this hypothesis makes a lot of sense: masculinity is the main cause of attraction, and bad values just tag on along for the ride. This hypothesis is entirely plausible to me, but I have to wonder whether it’s the whole story. For some the nastier forms, I’m not sure that masculinity and bad values are always separable; they are intertwined.
There could be several different paths by which different types of women are attracted to assholes; you’ve certainly named one of them.
Not necessarily, but it could be the case.
It’s one specific scene that I’m thinking of: the quasi-rape scene.
You might be surprised! Famous serial killers are very popular with women and have groupies. Female serial killers don’t have male groupies. Now, women with these preferences are probably pretty rare; women attracted to shy nerds are probably more common (2% of women are into shyness), but there are a lot more shy nerds than women into them, whereas serial killers are a scarce resource for women who are into them.
More hilariously, I have an article on my hard drive about Western women attracted to Osama bin Laden written after 9/11 (I’ll write it up sometime, but it’s behind a paywall.)
This behavior might initially seem like some sort of weird fluke, but looking at female attraction to Eminem, who raps about doing some of the things that serial killers are in for, these preferences could be conceptualized along the same continuum: serial killers are hypermasculine ultra-assholes.
See also the Draco In Leather Pants (TVTropes) phenomenon, where fangirls turn villains into objects of desire (there are some hilarious example pages at the bottom).
Fantasy is different from reality, of course. These women may have different desires in real life. Even if they have similar desires, they know better than to try to act them out, consistent with your model. The point is that such psychology seems like a watered-down, fantasy-only version of the psychology of serial killer groupies, who act out these same sorts of desires in reality.
Although there are categorical distinctions between women who lust after Eminem or dress Draco Malfoy up in leather pants, and women who go for serial killers, all these women may be the same continuum on other variables. Serial killer groupies are just at the far right of the bell curve of women attracted to assholes.
They swagger, but I’m not sure their swagger is always distinguishable from their misogyny. I hypothesize that being misogynistic in the context of swagger reads as attractive masculinity to some women in some subcultures. I guess the question is what sorts of female fans these rappers would gain or lose if they weren’t so misogynistic. I do think your hypothesis explains many or even most cases of female attraction to these guys; I just don’t think it’s the whole story. There are swaggering masculine guys who aren’t misogynistic; why no go for them instead?
Agreed.
That’s the conclusion of my experience. Though part of the way that I do this is by trying to have the same mystique or bad boys and aesthetic appeal, just without actually being an asshole. For instance, the way I dress is partly inspired by villains in movies… though I’ve stopped short of wearing leather pants.
I’ve had some success while dressed as Darth Sideous… but I’ve got my suspicions that was despite not because. ;)
Can you give some examples of the sort of villains you are considering here?
It’s very odd that a lot of women find Snape attractive. Where does he fit into the theory?
Masculinity + authority + sarcasm + disagreeableness is an attractive combination for a reasonable subset of women. Alan Rickman’s looks and voice may help.
See also House, M.D. for another attractive character close by in the same region of guyspace.
I would go with villain-type + played by Alan Rickman in the movies
The thing is, he’s a medium-status villain. He’s a teacher and not in charge of more than his classroom. He’s not good-looking or well-dressed.
I believe he was the subject of a lot of fan fiction before the movies came out.
Harry treated him as though he was a major villain though. He and Ron spend pretty much the whole series blaming him every time anything goes wrong. I’m guessing that simultaneously raised his villain-status and his misunderstood-guy-in-need-of-love status.
He is a lot higher status in the movies, purely due to the way he is acted. He exuded power.
I’ll also note that Snape is in charge of a house and could reasonably be considered the third most powerful in Hogwarts. Given the role Hogwarts has in Magical Britain his status would seem to be rather high.
And he looks and talks like Alan Rickman!
Also, the theory of female attraction to status is not so much about global status, but about local status in interactional contexts. That’s part of why members of small-time crappy bands can do so well with women (that, plus good genes from being a musician). Global status in men is great, but local status is good enough, and it’s more attainable.
I’ll agree here. I didn’t like him at all in the books, but after the movies…
Oddly, after reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time, long before any of the movies came out, I too found Snape to be oddly charismatic… sure, he seemed to hate Harry for no apparent reason and go out of his way to be mean to him, but he seemed interesting in a way that many of the other characters weren’t. A hero who is consistently heroic is often a Flat Character and therefore boring.
For me, bullies children = utterly revolting.
I’m surprised this isn’t widely shared, but I seem to be an odd person in many respects.
Your perspective is that of an adult, of course; but the Harry Potter books are children’s literature, and thus (I presume) take a child’s point of view on the world. Children often perceive adult authority figures as “mean” even when they are well within the bounds of what (adult) society considers to be acceptable behavior. Such “meanness”, while unpleasant, is not something children are necessarily shocked by; they expect it in more or less the same way that adults expect “outrageous” actions from the government .
Snape doesn’t even beat the children does he? That puts him ahead of what has often been considered acceptable behaviour to direct towards children.
He mentally beats them—between the implied Legilimency and verbal humiliation, I think a lot of his students would have preferred the occasional physical slap or kick.
Is your point that Harry isn’t shocked by Snape’s behavior, so that a good many readers aren’t, either? I don’t remember if Harry had a general opinion about Snape’s viciousness.
The women who find Snape attractive aren’t children themselves—I don’t know what the typical lower age limit for liking Snape is.
IIRC, Rowling hated the way Snape taught. She could have presented his nastiness as part of a useful toughening process, but she didn’t.
Of course, as the books went on, not only did he eventually redeem himself, but (earlier) Umbridge made him look like a relatively less awful teacher.
I agree; Snape ought to have been revolting. I don’t know why he wasn’t.
SarahC:
Not a one-to-one relationship, to be sure, but stories like this strongly suggest some positive statistical relation: “No shortage of women who dream of snaring a husband on Death Row: experts ponder why deadliest criminals get so many proposals.” The article references an academic book that dedicates a chapter to the phenomenon.
Jeffrey Dahmer might have been a bit too creepy even for the serial killer groupie population, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he got an occasional love letter too.
Dammit, V_M, you ninja’d me by posting that article before I could post my analysis.
A lot of parents find it sad when their kids find out that santa claus isn’t real.
I think there’s a bit more to it than just women overlooking a lack of values because of other attractive factors like confidence. There’s some evidence that men with the ‘dark triad’ personality traits are more successful with women.
mattnewport:
Here’s the research paper on which the article you link was based:
http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/normanli/JonasonLiWebsterSchmitt2009.pdf
I had to google him, I also googled his name and sexy and found this. :(
He gets 28,800 hits for jeffrey dahmer sexy. Out of 275000 hits. So a sexy ratio of 0.1. I’m not sure if this is high or low for a public male figure, a lot of it will be incidental mentions.
Steve Buscemi gets a ratio of 0.03, brad pitt get 0.13. Harold shipman (another serial killer but not so handsome or gruesome) gets 0.06.
I’m not sure of my methodology, I suspect that I might do better looking for the phrase in quotes.
Dead elephant gets a ratio of 0.59.
Ah thanks. Quotes it is, although it will under report.
“Dead elephant is sexy” gets none, as does Harrold Shipman.
Steve buscemi does better this time. 60⁄935000 = 6*10^-4
Jeffrey Dahmer gets 4/264000 = 1.5*10^-4
Jay Leno gets 112⁄4.7million = 2*10^-4
Brad pitt gets 14700⁄17.1 million = 8 * 10^-3
While not falling foul to the dead elephant problem, I’m still not happy with it methodologically. This is probably the best information we can get without searching for all the variants of “X is hot”.
Hmm, this might make a good small web app, a more advanced version of google fight that looked for relative popularity of adjectives.
Not quite the same, but Googlism is sort of a simple version of that. Also, I suspect a trolling element in the Jeffrey Dahmer page you linked, although that could be optimism at work.
This confuses me, because it seems to imply that men need to believe that a simple personality heuristic can be applied to all or almost all women. Why is it an unacceptable answer that some women like one thing, and some like another? Or did you mean the same group of women in both cases?
By “gender dynamics” in this case do you mean doing the things that you’re expected to do because of your gender? If so, yeah, some of them are pretty fun. And some of it is stuff we’re hardwired to like; I won’t argue with that. The trouble is just when we limit ourselves to broad heuristics about the whole population which gloss over the degree of individual variety, and then try to apply those on the individual scale.
In other cases, it could be that the most common things women in your culture say they want, and the guys who are getting the most attention, don’t seem to match. Of course, there’s no necessary contradiction, like you say.
In other cases, it’s the same women saying one thing, and (seemingly) doing another.
There is a social desirability bias that will encourage women to signal preferences for positive traits like intelligence and values. In contrast, if you’re a woman who likes meatheads, you’ve less likely to talk about it. Furthermore, when people misstate their preferences, it’s more likely to be in the direction of positive traits than of negative traits.
For many white middle-class men, it’s drummed into their heads from an early age that women universally prefer intelligent men with values such as “respectfulness.” So when a guy sees evidence to the contrary, it makes him question anything he is told about what women want, even by women. Since it’s not politically correct for either women or men to talk about women going for anything other than intelligence and values in men, when he sees women going for men without those traits, he may freak out and start making hasty generalizations.
That’s not the most rational attitude, but it is understandable. The presence of some women misstating their preferences (or dating guys other than what they prefer) lowers the priors for men believing what other women say about their preferences. This is sad, but true.
And yes, it probably sucks for you when you are interacting with a guy, and his priors for how to interact with you are all screwed up by the ways that other women have trained him.
Basically yeah.
Sometimes, broad heuristics are all you have, at least to start with. “Women are misstating their preferences until proven otherwise” probably would be too broad and extreme. But a moderate degree of skepticism until proven otherwise might make sense.
Getting better reference classes can improve the heuristics used. For instance, you might know that some groups of women state their preferences more accurately than others. I propose that nerdy women are both more aware of their preferences, actually date guys who fulfill their preferences, and less likely to incorrectly state socially desirable preferences for signaling reasons. These women are also more likely to be into intelligent men with values, so on the question of those preferences, nerdy women’s claims about their preferences are more trustworthy.
Gangestad et al. found that 90-95% of women fit into a gender-typical taxon based on their interests and traits, while 5-10% of women are a gender-atypical taxon (which also contains most of the queer women). 90-95% of women are wired one way; 5-10% are wired another way. As a result, there actually probably are many examples where it’s reasonable to approach women with one set of heuristics by default unless you have special evidence that they are gender-atypical, which allows you to pull out some different heuristics.
It may be the case that the 5-10% of gender atypical women contain most of the nerdy women, and disproportionately state their preferences accurately.
The prevalence of different personality types in the population is very relevant here and you seem to be glossing over it. If the number of women attracted to your personality type is relatively low (and especially if it is low relative to the number of other men similar to you) it will still be an obstacle you need to overcome in finding a partner even if you believe that there are women out there who would be attracted to you. Internet dating has probably helped with this a bit by making it easier to find potential matches but it can’t overcome seriously unfavourable relative numbers.
I’d compare this with employment. Every now and then, you see a media story about some company with a highly unusual internal culture that uses all sorts of unconventional practices in hiring, organization, and management. Yet unless you luckily stumble onto some such employer and happen to be an exceptionally good candidate by their standards, you would be well-advised to stick to the standard conventional advice on how to look and behave in job interviews and, subsequently, in the workplace. In fact, doing anything else would mean sabotaging your employment and career prospects, and expecting that your unconventional behavior will surely be rewarded with a dream job with an unconventional employer is a delusional pipe-dream.
The main flaw of this analogy, of course, is that the conventional wisdom on seeking and maintaining employment is largely correct, whereas the conventional wisdom on dating has fatal points of disconnect from reality. Also, while conforming to optimal workplace behavior is truly painful for many people, fixing the problems in one’s approach to dating and relationships typically doesn’t require any such painful and loathsome adjustment. (Even though people often rationalize their unwillingness to do it by convincing themselves in the opposite.)
You’re probably right but ironically I’ve ignored much of the standard advice on employment and it’s worked out just fine for me so this example doesn’t resonate very well for me. I’ve never worn a suit to a job interview for example.
Certainly! If he’d said “women who might like me tend to also like …” I’d have understood. My confusion was because there was no such qualification, or anything else limiting the population under discussion beyond “women,” but the commenter seemed to expect consistency within that population.
This is what I thought I was saying. :)
I assumed he was saying something like “the majority of women prefer a man more ‘masculine’ than the median man”. By analogy, if it is true that “the majority of men prefer a woman who is slimmer than the median woman” it should be obvious that being overweight will make it harder for a woman to find a match even if there are men who prefer less slim women. Saying “men prefer slim women” is a slightly sloppy generalization but not an unreasonable one in this example.
We might be looking at different parts of the comment under discussion, because I’ve completely lost the correlation between what we’re talking about and what I actually read. At this point I’d rather just drop it.
Dark heroes in romance novels generally aren’t disrespectful or aggressive towards the heroine, and if they are domineering or deceptive towards the heroine, it’s generally motivated by something that the hero at least believes is for the heroine’s good, and often at the expense of the hero’s own interests.
For example, if a fantasy-romance novel heroine gets put under a curse that makes her terribly lustful under the full moon, the heroine might lock her up to protect her… even if she secretly wants to have sex with him anyway, and he wants her as well. Or in an adventure-romance where the heroine is a trained assassin with genetic superpowers, the hero might trick her into getting left behind when he goes to kill the bad guy, to protect her… even if his powers aren’t as powerful as hers, or he has no powers at all besides his secret agent training.
Even if the hero is a bad guy with a past, his actions toward the heroine never turn out to be actually evil or unprincipled, though they may be mistaken and tragic for one or both of them.
(To be fair, romance has a lot of subgenres, and my knowledge is limited to skimming the books my wife has left in the bathroom over the last 20 years or so, and a handful of conversations with her about the emotional and sexual significance of the various tropes in the genres she reads. It’s possible that things are different in subgenres she doesn’t read, like “contemporary”; she almost entirely prefers ones with fantasy, SF, adventure, and other “non-realistic” themes, since this lets her get two categories worth of entertainment at once. ;-) But I’d be a bit surprised if it’s dramatically different.)
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of romance fiction is powered by the idea of a frightening man, even if, as you say, he has a good reason. I admit that this conclusion is the result of realizing that I don’t like the genre, and I think that’s the reason.
The thing I don’t understand in all these discussion is I know a fair number of men in long term—and sometimes happy—relationships. They aren’t high-display of masculinity guys, and yet, somehow they’ve hooked up with someone. How did they manage it?
Gone with the Wind is a hard thing to argue from. It’s an extraordinary book—very popular, but never duplicated. One of the things that drives it is that Scarlett is much more motivated by survival and status than the average female lead.
I just realized—it’s actually an example of a relatively rare sort of women’s fiction. Perfect guy shows up, but the woman is too busy to notice for most of the novel. The other examples I’ve got (Murder with Peacocks and Good in Bed), she’s distracted by a bunch of things going on in her life, but not by being in love with the wrong guy. In a normal novel, she’d realize she’s in love with him while he was still in love with her.
Also, it’s interesting that I’ve never heard anyone say that it was implausible for Scarlett to be fixated on Ashley.
Part of what makes these discussions messy is that the fantasies that hook the hindbrain aren’t necessarily what people want to live. There are a lot more men who like action movies than who’d like to be in violent fights.
How old are they? Most people get married eventually. Furthermore, the older people get, the more they switch over to long-term mating strategies.
If you’re an average guy, eventually you’re going to “get lucky” and run into a woman who is into you. As people get older, more and more women get tired of bad boys and switch over to their long-term mating strategies (and in some cases, are looking for men to support them).
So our average guy will find a mate. The question is, how many years go by while he is only dating sporadically, while women (on average) are off having fun with the more masculine and exciting guys? When he finally does find someone, how much choice does he actually have? What is her level of attractiveness (in various areas) compared to his? Is she the “one” who is “right” for him, or is she simply the one woman who has shown interest in him in the past few years?
It seems that during youth, most people do some combination of short-term mating and attempted-but-aborted serial long-term relationships, until eventually they find a good match. People test-drive each other. According to the model I’m outlining, women concentrate their test driving towards men at the top, while men’s test driving of women is more evenly distributed (though of course, still skewed).
As a result, men who aren’t flashy rides get disproportionately overlooked or cut out of the developmental test-driving stage, until with time women’s average preferences shift and they want something more dependable. I’ve heard men express frustration with this situation and ask, “if the kitten didn’t want me, do I want the cat?”
Sex differences in attraction is also important. For men, looks are relatively more important in attraction, while for women, behavior/personality is relatively more important. If you are a guy dating people you find attractive, they can still turn out to be good long-term mates for you. But for women, the guys you find most attractive during youth may have personality traits that exclude them from making good long-term mates. Of course, there is variation in women on this trait: for some, their ideal short-term mate and ideal long-term mate are the same guy. On average, the people who young women are sexually excited about are less likely to make good long-term mates than the people young men are excited about.
Given that there are so many subgenres of romance, I suspect we are talking about different ones. In the small sample of my wife’s books that I’ve read, the hero is never described as frightening to the heroine. Typically, he takes the form of an annoying rival who the heroine believes is overconfident or arrogant, someone whose goals are (superficially and initially) at odds with those of the heroine. (It then usually turns out that one or both characters have been operating on the basis of a mistaken impression about the other’s goals or character.)
But I have never seen fear described as a heroine’s reaction to anything except the villain, or her feelings for the hero. (Or more precisely, her anticipation of the problematic consequences of allowing her feelings for him to develop and be acted upon.)
Fear of the hero himself, or his actions, though? To my recollection, never happens in these genres.
Thanks for the information. I may have been over-influenced by the blurbs on paranormal romances.
And my take on “frightening” was that these are guys who any reasonable person with ordinary human abilities would find frightening, whether the heroine does or not.
From the “Perception Lab” at St Andrews:
Older women tend to prefer more feminine faces. Women in the infertile part of their fertility cycle tend to prefer more feminine faces. Women rating themselves as less attractive tend to prefer more feminine faces.
By the way, I don’t mean to imply that your guy friends in particular are in stable relationships because of these tendencies—I can think of many other reasons beyond the differing attractiveness of their faces, or their demeanour.
This deserves emphasis. Our instincts are not interested in our happiness. There is no reason to presume that those we are most attracted to will be the same as those who will be the most satisfying either in the long or short term. (Although it is certainly strong evidence to be considered as well as a direct contributor to that satisfaction.)
Are these mostly older guys or more precisely guys in LTRs with older women?
The increase over the last 4 decades in female personal income has made the “beta good provider” male strategy less successful.
Also, some (e.g., the Man Who Is Thursday) say that the increase in female promiscuity has had a similar effect because (the thinking goes) once a woman has had sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men, she is less likely to settle for a LTR with a much less exciting one (and as long as she does not demand any sort of commitment from them, a woman using a “modern” sexual strategy will probably have sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men).
Although I have a relatively small circle of friends, even I have a friend of a friend, now in her 60s, who only ever had sex with one man (the father of her kids to which she is still married) and she was quite beautiful, grew up in the proverbial big city (Manhattan) and has and had no notable social handicaps.
rhollerith_dot_com:
If she doesn’t demand any sort of commitment from them, she can have sex with many more extremely exciting men than that, if she’s at all attractive. Even less attractive women can similarly easily have lots of sex and non-serious relationships with men who are far above what they can realistically expect to get for serious commitment, even if they won’t be extremely exciting by absolute standards, so the same principle applies.
There was a discussion of this issue on LW recently. If anyone’s interested, these are my thoughts on the subject, and here I comment on some relevant research.
Most of my friends are around my own age, so both the men and the women are older than young.
I’m not sure what the typical age for starting the relationships was.
OK but note that my point is not that women get less choosy as they get older (though that is almost certainly true) but rather that it was easier for a man of average attractiveness to win the hand of a 30-year-old woman 30 or 40 years ago than it is today.
IIRC, a study a couple of years back that said that the male hero raped the female heroine in about half of a large sample of romance novels they looked at. Can’t remember how they chose their sample.
That is disrespectful. It’s asserting that the hero knows better than the heroine what’s good for her, and is entitled to act on her behalf. In my mind that’s a much, much more dangerous meme than outright acting maliciously.
The phrase ‘dangerous meme’ jumped out at me. I agree that it is disrespectful and I personally make an effort to prevent people that try from having any part of my life. I actually have to bite my tongue at times so that I don’t point out to young adults “You don’t have to take that. You can choose your own boundaries, with consideration of your options and likely outcomes.” (That put me in a particularly interesting situation when I was a teacher!)
But going from ‘undesirable behavior’ to ‘dangerous meme’, well, strikes me as dangerous. It seems like a move from discussing behavioral preferences to considering the very fact that the behavioural pattern appeals to some people or plays a role in their literature of choice is wrong.
I find the kinds of romance novels in question decidedly unappealing. Not just because they are aimed at women but because they are aimed at a different subset of women than those with whom I most empathise with. But I do know that there people who actually appreciate or are attracted to these same behaviours that I find obnoxious. Judging the very meme just because I personally don’t prefer the behaviour would seem presumptive.
I don’t think I intended the phrase as strongly as you interpreted it. However, “undesireable behavior” is too weak. As noted in another fork of this thread, I think that kind of paternalism is totally out of place between any two capable adults, but invididual cases are not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the notion that “members of group X know better than/are entitled to look after members of group Y.” The particular example given happens to be sexist, but it would be offensive for any two groups of normal grown-ups. Perpetuating that idea in popular culture, e.g. via popular fiction, has negative effects on members of both groups, even if they’re not directly exposed to the fiction itself.
That’s not a notion that was actually present in the context and nor is it one that you introduced yourself (until now). I say this not to be pedantic or to accuse you of any form of inconsistency but rather because there is an implicit assumption that I don’t share. The one that allows a leap from a fictional stories where a female protagonist interacts with an objectionably dominant hero to the general claim “members of group X know better than/are entitled to look after members of group Y”.
The particular example given happens to be of heroes who are sexist (or just excessively dominant) and female heroines with arguably terrible taste. If someone is offended that the heroine is attracted to the domineering hero or offended that a woman likes to read such books or empathises with the character then that is the problem of the person taking offence. Not the problem of the author, not the problem of the fictional protagonist and not the problem of literary porn fan.
While my position on what it makes sense to declare offensive may well be irreconcilably opposed to your own it may be interesting to note that my objection here is actually similar to the objection that we both would share to the heroine being overridden. It is not OK to prevent (or shame or otherwise apply moral sanction against) people having, reading or writing stories that appeal to their own emotions. It is not OK to condemn literature because the character doesn’t fit an ideal.
I don’t think “members of group know better than/are entitled to look after members of group ”. Actually, you probably do ‘know better than’ but it is the ‘are entitled to look after’ that is in play when we consider declaring things offensive.
Yes, this particular example is of individuals in just a few works of fiction. But the pattern does happen to exist in many more. And it does happen to be a pretty common idea in our culture. I’m not deriving that from the few examples given; I’m deriving that from living in the culture. I’m not looking out for readers-of-that-fiction, I’m looking out for me, who has to live with them, and with the people who learn values from them.
I’m also withdrawing from this conversation, because the amount of mental effort it’s taking to participate is exceeding the payoff significantly.
In all sincerity the my goal in this conversation was not primarily to maximise the immediate enjoyment of the participants, for all that I do not like draining the mental energies of either others or myself. The role of morality has been discussed elsewhere recently and within that role declarations of things that things should be considered offensive or shamed serves as a powerful power play. It even more powerful when the assumption that something is sexist, prejudiced or otherwise normatively wrong is passed off implicitly without question. It takes very little for such beliefs or injunctions to become unquestionable and once in place can be a significant inhibitor of personal freedom.
The task of minimising personal offence while at the same time acting to make a social move too expensive for it to be worth their while to try frequently is one that is quite difficult.
You’re leaving out the part where I said that the hero’s actions could be mistaken and/or tragic: i.e., in actual romance novels it’s quite often the case that the hero only thinks he knows better than the heroine, that she fights his actions every step of the way, and/or the actions lead to bad results.
I’m also a bit confused as to how you can say that either of the specific examples I gave qualify as “disrespectful”. If somebody throws themselves in front of a bullet for you, is that being disrespectful because they think they know what’s better for you?
I don’t see either of these as analogous to throwing himself in front of a bullet. In both cases he’s making a choice for her which she is capable of making herself—he’s taking care of her instead of letting her take care of herself. Even in the first case, there’s precedent in werewolf fiction for the lycanthrope to be voluntarily restrained to minimize damage. In the second case he’s also mislelading her so as to actually prevent her from making the choice to, say, protect him with her superior abilities.
It would be equally messed up if you switched the gender roles—saying “I’m going to do what I’ve decided is good for you instead of letting you make your own choices” always is, between two capable grownups. This just happens to be the direction which conforms to the popular trope about who is supposed to take care of whom.
This particular aspect may be unique to the romance genres my wife reads, but ISTM that the female leads in these novels are just as likely to make the same sort of imposingly-yet-self-sacrificing decisions for the male leads—i.e., both parties doing it in the same novel, prior to reaching a saner equilibrium. The contextual implication I draw from the few ones that I read myself, is that:
1) The signal “I will do what it takes to protect you, even if you disagree” is covertly found attractive by the heroine, even when her rational/overt reaction is that it’s stupid, unnecessary, condescending, chauvinistic etc. (This distinction is usually reflected in the heroine’s inner and outer dialogs),
2) While the signal is valued, the actual behavior and effects are not—by the time they reach “happily ever after”, the hero grudgingly agrees to limit his heroic impulses to merely vigorously arguing and protesting against courses of action he deems too dangerous, rather than outright sabotage or quasi-suicidal pre-emptions.
Hypothesis: once the hero has established the credibility of his signaled concern by actually putting himself at risk, the heroine can simply enjoy the now-credible verbal signals, without having the ongoing cost of excessive risk to him, or the annoyance of being treated somewhat condescendingly.
I wonder how much this is due to the American Jock vs Geek mentality. Geeks see masculine behaviour as out group so eschew it? The conflict isn’t so bad in Europe (it doesn’t carry on into University in the same way). That is not to say that European geeks are naturally intensely masculine, simply that it might be easier for them to adopt masculine behaviours, because they aren’t having to act like the enemy.
This dichotomy doesn’t seem prevalent in all American culture, entrepreneurs seem quite happy with to straddle the line. How much of your experience is with people inside academia?
My experience is either inside academia or way the hell outside (people who didn’t go to college.) I never met an entrepreneur.
My experience with meeting Europeans is that smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I’ve known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars) but that just about everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US. So I think your point is probably more relevant on the female end—European female geeks are more conventionally feminine because they don’t see a dichotomy. (I’ve also noticed that about Asian female geeks—that is, raised in Asian countries, not Asian-American.)
SarahC:
That’s a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire continent that contains countries as different as, say, Sweden and Albania, or Moldova and Switzerland. Also, I’m certain that the sample of Europeans you’ve seen is unrepresentative in all sorts of relevant ways even of their own countries, let alone the entire continent.
Of course, if by this you mean the specific patterns of behavior characteristic of certain sorts of American men, then the claim is trivially true.
SarahC:
That is true, for the most part. Where I come from, the electrical engineering students’ club at the local university is a popular location for nightlife and rock concerts that attracts masses of people as a party hangout. Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America, but it’s not at all unusual in Europe.
That’s a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire contient that contains countries as different as, say, Canada and Nicaragua, or Alabama and San Francisco.
OK, that was an imprecise statement—by “North America,” I meant the U.S. and Canada, not the standard usage of the term.
When it comes to the U.S. and Canada, however, I stand behind my assertion. There are indeed significant cultural differences between, say, Alabama and Northern California, but not when it comes to this question.
Whoa.
I’ve also heard that in China, self-effacing and conscientious students can be the most popular. For the US, that’s unimaginable.
These pieces of data suggest that the polarization of men towards “geek / nice guy” and “masculine bad boy” in the US is at least partly cultural, and it could be fought by other cultural forces.
That is the argument that David Anderegg makes in Nerds. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger’s Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity.
Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between “men of action” and “men of reflection” in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the “man of reflection” was the “effete intellectual” or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He argues that our modern concept of “nerd” is the descendant of the “man of reflection” and “effete intellectual” stereotypes. Read that entire chapter I linked to. Here are some of Anderegg’s examples:
Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s story was a classic example of “nerd vs jock,” where the nerd is portrayed in many negative and stereotypical ways
Superman becoming incognito and undatable to Lois merely by being mild-mannered and wearing glasses
He argues that ancient Greeks didn’t have such a dichotomy between brain vs. brawn/looks: heroes were typically intelligent, good-looking, and capable, while villains tended to be both ugly and stupid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of the American scholar
Emerson’s speech is fascinating and complex, but it definitely sets up the dichotomy between men of action and men of reflection. Here are some troubling excerpts (emphases mine):
[...]
[...]
[...]
Emerson makes a lot of good points, such as about avoiding past orthodoxies. But as Anderegg points out, his attitude is very close to “throw away books from the past, and write your own,” which is anti-intellectual and fails to reflect how thinkers can stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no dichotomy between studying works of the past, and original thinking.
He displays a great ambivalence towards scholars of his time. He romanticizes “Man Thinking,” but links scholars to Europe, femininity, homosexuality (via the word “mincing”), religion, unoriginality, laziness, timidity, and disease (e.g. “infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness”). No doubt there were and are many scholars who deserve those labels, but his dichotomy is much too stark:
Non-scholars are much more lacking in original thought than scholars
Non-scholars are plenty lazy, too
What about men of action who are temperamentally timid?
He speaks disdainfully of scholars having “second thoughts,” but wasn’t he criticizing them earlier for being too credulous? Can’t men of action who are engaging their subject matter hands-on have second thoughts?
Why can’t you both read books, and carve out your heroic path in your field?
In domains with low-hanging empirical fruit, I’ll buy his argument that scholars should get more hands-on. In other domains, it’s best to read the book, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Why are the intellectual errors Emerson criticizes associated with women or homosexuality? Why can’t we have feminine or homosexual men of action? Would Alan Turing fit into Emerson’s notion of the “American scholar”?
That’s a very interesting reference, I’ll try to check it out when I find some time. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with Emerson’s work, so I can’t tell if Anderegg is representing his views fairly. But in any case, I’ve always found the American phenomenon of equating intellectual interests with “nerdiness” alien and weird, and its exact historical origins are still a mystery to me, so I’ll be interested in checking out the book and seeing if it sheds some light on it.
Another funny example of the nerd stereotype: Georges St. Pierre (aka GSP), the current UFC Welterweight Champion and one of the greatest mixed martial artists in the world, thinks of himself as a nerd because he is into paleontology.
If GSP is a nerd, does the term make any sense?
“I’m a nerd” is a pet peeve of mine.
I also recall Michelle Bachmann describing herself as a “nerd” because she watches science programs on TV. Look—occasionally going to museums or reading books or watching educational TV shows should be normal. It’s not a distinguishing characteristic.
I don’t describe myself as a “nerd” on OkCupid because it just seems like a meaningless term by now. If you’re looking for someone who’s interested in ideas, well, I’m in academia, so that should tell you all you need to know. If you’re looking for someone a little shy and silly, that’ll come across too.
It is not normal for humans to occasionally go to musea or watch education TV shows, so it is indeed non-trivially informative to learn this about a human. It also clusters with other dispositional characteristics and therefore is useful for low-cost classifiers.
Because humans don’t know much about the natural sciences, and certainly not in terms of predictive models, I have difficulty communicating with most of them about paperclip engineering topics. For example, when I start talking about endurance limits, I lose over 99% of the audience. It would be understandable if they could grasp the concept but weren’t familiar with that particular term (it just means the stress—load per unit area—that a mechanical component could endure in tension for an arbitrary long period when applied cyclically i.e. on/off).
But that’s not the situtation here. Their only knowledge of metallurgy and materials science is brief regurgitation of text that doesn’t even map to a prediction as far as they’re aware. So stuff is made out of atoms? Great, what predictions can you make with that? (That’s on the better end of the human clippiness spectrum!!!)
Yes, it still means that people with intellectual interests aren’t quite socially acceptable.
Admittedly, there’s a paradox—he’s saying something that he “doesn’t tell people very much” in an ESPN interview—we’ve not talking about a gigantic stigma. Still, I don’t think he’d talk about a fondness for NASCAR racing in the same way.
The funny thing is that car racing is also a technical subject. As Anderegg points out in the “Nerds” book, it’s strange that some intellectual and technical pursuits get a “pass” on being “nerdy” because they are associated with masculinity, such as playing fantasy football or being a car mechanic.
I wonder how much anti-intellectualism is separate motivation, and how much it’s an effort to enforce gender roles.
If we simply recognize that it has two meanings which are often assumed to overlap but in fact do not always overlap, the puzzle is resolved. One meaning concerns a person’s interests. The other meaning concerns a person’s social skills. GSP calls himself a nerd because of his interests. After calling himself a nerd, he makes a half-baked attempt at presenting himself as socially inept (“I have a hard time finding a girlfriend”), but we don’t have to believe him.
As you imply by your rhetorical question, GSP in fact is not socially inept. And he applied the word “nerd” to himself. What this means, assuming he was speaking current American English and assuming he is not deluded, is that the two meanings of the word “nerd” have in fact started to separate in English.
If “nerd” once meant something like: a socially inept person with a keen interest in an unusual topic, now it evidently can mean either “socially inept person” or “person with a keen interest in an unusual topic”, without necessarily meaning both. Want proof? Here’s proof: GSP is a nerd. He is keenly interested in an unusual topic, and he is not socially inept. QED (at least for one half of the claim).
If all this is correct, then the word “nerd” is in fact evolving away from the concept that rolled the two ideas into one, i.e., the idea of keen interest in an unusual topic and the idea of social ineptness.
Constant:
The real puzzle is not about the current meaning of the term, but why the former is normally taken to imply the latter. The existence of a widely used term that covers both meanings is just evidence that this connection is widely made, not an explanation of why it exists.
[Edit: the rest of this comment is based on an incorrect reading. See the replies below.]
I think your analysis is wrong. GSP (or at least the public persona he’s presenting) is clearly an example that defies the stereotype. Yet because he fulfills one element of the stereotype, GSP seems unable to conceive of the possibility that he might be an exception to the other ones (or, alternatively, believes that claiming to be such would be absurd), and feels obliged to present himself as someone who indeed conforms to it wholly.
This is evidence of the tremendous strength of the stereotype: since GSP displays “nerdy” intellectual interests, then despite the extreme appearance to the contrary, somehow he still must have a nerdy essence that makes him unattractive to women and ostracized by the cool and popular social circles.
(I should add that the word “stereotype” is nowadays often used with strong moralistic meaning, but I’m using it as a neutral technical term for heuristics for categorizing people based on statistical discrimination.)
Actually, he doesn’t believe that being a nerd means his social skills are so poor he can’t attract a woman. He believes (perhaps accurately) that he’s only interested in the relatively rare women who share his nerd interests.
What’s interesting is that he associates being a nerd with having difficulty finding partners, even though the connection isn’t by way of poor social skills.
Interesting. So it looks more like it’s a new meaning all the way down the line, as he uses the term. He has even supplied a new explanation (pickiness) for the old phenomenon (having a limited set of friends), which was previously explained by ineptness. It was easy to be confused because he is describing the familiar outward pattern of the nerd, even though he has a new explanation for it. Genuine linguistic evolution here?
You’re right. On a more careful reading, my interpretation was incorrect.
You may be right but let me add to my argument.
The evidence I see is of two competing meanings, an old one and a new one. The new one (obscure interest only) motivated the initial labeling, and the old one (obscure interest plus social ineptitude) motivated the subsequent rationalization.
People have limited self knowledge and are constantly rationalizing what they just did or just said. Their self explanations are not definitive.
I believe your argument requires that he has in fact mislabeled himself on the basis of an imperfect match between himself and the word. “nerd”, and that he followed up by confabulating to make himself a better fit for the definition.
In contrast, I argue that the word is in flux (as is the related stereotype), that he is correctly applying a new meaning, but that he misunderstands his own statement. I think self-misunderstanding is commonplace, so I find thus to be a natural, unforced possibility, rather than a contrivance. I think that the meaning of the word “nerd” has in fact changed due to the mind-boggling success of the likes of Bill Gates among others.
Added: I propose ostensive definition as the key mechanism of change.
Step 1: “a nerd is a socially inept person with special interests...”.
Step 2: …”like Bill Gates.”
Step 3: “a nerd is a person like Bill Gates...”
Step 4: ”...who is famous for becoming fantastically wealthy through his special interests.”
From Step 1 to step 2, examples are generated. From step 3 to step 4, the examples yield a changed definition because what was most conspicuous about the examples has changed.
Constant:
I agree that my comment was incorrect, and based on an inaccurate reading of what GSP said. Taking that into account, you’re probably right that he is applying only the “obscure interests” meaning to himself.
That said, I don’t think the general use of the word has lost much, if any of its negative connotations, nor that the underlying stereotypes are becoming any weaker. You say:
But notice that the public perception of Bill Gates is still in accordance with the full “nerd” stereotype. Watch the joke video that he made when he retired. What it clearly shows is that within the ranks of the rich, powerful, and famous, his position is very much like the position of a nerd kid among his more popular school peers: he is proud just because they’re giving him some attention, and views this as a boost to his status. (Consider how unimaginable the opposite would be!) Certainly, despite all the money, power, and fame, nobody ever considered Gates as someone to admire and emulate in terms of style or social behavior, and not to even mention his complete lack of sex-symbol status.
Moreover, even if the nerd stereotype acquired some positive connotations in terms of good career prospects during the eighties and nineties, this trend could only have been downward for the last decade or so, considering that both the economic and general social status of tech professions has been going down ever since the dot-com crash. The ongoing deindustrialization is increasingly catching up even with white-collar technical work.
I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.
The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson’s own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka “Wasp”, the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she’s obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it’s a very different kind of disconnect from the “nerd” disconnect.
What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu’s Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she’s no goth, doesn’t go around in black leather, but she’s still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it’s Sandra Bullock.
What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There’s Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there’s the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd—and he was the one picked for the hacker role.
I’m out. Can’t think of anything else at the moment.
Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I’m starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.
I’ve only seen a couple of the HP movies—is Hermione’s character presented much differently there than in the books? In the books, she’s presented sympathetically, but she also has to navigate being disliked for knowing so much.
Also in the movies, it seemed to me that she was very pretty, while in the books, she seems to have average looks.
Being disliked for knowing so much is not the same thing as being socially inept. But my recollection is that she was attacked primarily for being muggle-born, and more by Draco Malfoy than by anybody else. It’s been a while.
In the first movie Emma Watson was very much like the drawn character, becoming markedly less so in the later movies, maybe in part because the movies were made every two years or so, which meant that the actors quickly outgrew their characters. But the movies have been, I think, very faithful to the books as far as story and character go, within the necessary constraints.
Three nerds on one of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (early 2000s) were socially inept (e.g. completely defenseless against bullying by Spike) and evil though less so than most of the bad guys.
Yes, those were definitely nerds in the bad old dual studious/inept sense. However, Willow Rosenberg was much more central to the series. Wikipedia actually says, “Willow is a shy and nerdy girl with little confidence,” and, “Willow is presented as a bookish nerd with considerable computer skills, dowdily dressed and easily intimidated by more popular girls in school.”
buffy.wikia.com says, “Willow started out as a meek and largely unassertive computer nerd, but eventually grew to be a powerful and authoritative individual,” and, “In her early years at high school, Willow is a shy, naïve nerd with a light, risqué sense of humor. A member of the Math, Science, and Computer clubs, she is the person to go to for tutoring help. Willow is ridiculed by her more popular classmates, including cheerleaders Cordelia Chase and Harmony Kendall.” It includes the corporate explanation of the shift in Willow:
Which suggests that Whedon wanted to sustain Willow as more of a nerd in all respects, but the suits said no, and so this is why Willow became more of a Hermione and less of a female Anthony Michael Hall. Harry Potter came out in 1997 and Buffy (TV series) came out in the same year. Even though both the HP books and Buffy continued for many years, the characters were sufficiently established early on that my guess is that there was minimal influence.
Thinking of female nerds, The Mummy’s librarian pops into my head. Played by Rachel Weisz. Some degree of social awkwardness, but not really all that much. Definitely studious—knows enough to wake the antagonist.
“Dowdily dressed”? Not consistently.
After 10 years, I still remember the impression a succession of dresses in season 3 made on me.
In light of Whedon’s remark, it looks like you can thank corporate headquarters for the memorable succession of dresses. But Hannigan was smoking hot whatever she wore.
As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.
I’m not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a “computer genius” character having just about every stereotypical “nerdy” characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his “nerdy” computer knowledge (he’s depicted as living in his parents’ basement in his thirties).
While that computer hacker lived in his mom’s basement, he was not the only computer hacker in the movie. In fact there was another one, and a much more important one.
For a movie to strongly depict a correlation between X and Y, the movie needs to show X and Y occurring together and not occurring separately. But Live Free or Die Hard does not do this. There is one computer hacker who lives in his mom’s basement, but there is another one who does not and who is going to win the cop’s daughter in the end. Contrast with Breakfast Club or Revenge of the Nerds, where the X and Y occur together and not apart. There are no good students/chess club members in the Breakfast Club aside from the nerd.
It’s easy to charge that I’ve been cherry-picking, and very hard to defend against that charge, so it would be tremendously costly for me to respond in this vein. Listing examples as I did requires a cooperative audience; if the audience turns on you it might be either because the audience is cherry-picking, or because you are cherry-picking, but either way, there is just no inexpensive way to pursue that line of argument at that point.
I am not entirely without defense, because by luck one of the articles recently cited agrees with me about the shift over time in the frequency of what it calls Type 1 nerds. It says:
Based on the examples I came up with, I gave 1984/1985 as the high point of the depiction of that sort of nerd, which is consistent with “most prevalent in the 70s and 80s”. Furthermore, American Heritage Dictionary’s history of the word “nerd” appears to give 1970 as a lower limit on when the word “nerd” accrued the intellectual element to its earlier “dud” meaning—and this is consistent with, and so supports, the article’s claim that the nerd stereotype was most prevalent in the 70s and 80s. In fact it appears to have come into existence in the 70s, reached a high point in the mid eighties, and largely flamed out, at least in its more virulent manifestation.
But rather than pursue this further, instead, consider my latest comment here, which deals more directly with the meaning of the word.
You’re right, I forgot about that other hacker character. In any case, I will defer to your superior knowledge of the modern pop culture, which I already confessed being largely ignorant of.
On further reflection, you have convinced me that the pop culture stereotypes of technically savvy characters have changed. One possible reason for this is that among the present younger generations, computers are used by nearly everyone for fun in various ways, whereas 20 years ago and earlier, this was much more unusual and mostly restricted to “nerdy” kids. An interesting test of this theory would be to see how portrayals of computer-savvy characters have changed relative to those with other technical and scientific interests which have remained unusual and unpopular among the majority of kids.
This theory seems to me more plausible than the explanation based on the economic success of tech entrepreneurs, both because the public image of tech magnates is still largely “nerdy” and because the status and economic prospects of tech professions have in fact been going down since the early 2000s.
The explanation from the rising popularity of tech does seem highly plausible.
Interesting examples. I gotta cite the TVTropes article on Hollywood Nerds:
I think some of your examples are Type 2 Hollywood nerds: hot people with glasses stuck on. That type does defy the general nerd stereotype, but it doesn’t do so in a believable way, so I’m not sure how much these portrayals actually dent the “nerd” stereotype.
The “hacker” archetype is a bit different. “Hacker” incorporates rebelliousness and creativity which is attractive and high-status, in addition to being emotionally relatable.
Goth and punk aesthetics also relate nerds to rebelliousness and Romanticism.
Justin Long is an interesting character. Why did he become the hacker for Die Hard, other than having good looks? There actually are a bunch of qualities that both Justin Long’s Mac character have, and Hollywood hackers have. Justin Long’s character also exemplifies creativity (Macs are associated with media, and his clothes and hairstyle look artsy) and rebelliousness (against the authority of the PC in the workplace).
The end result is that I only find Long semi-believable as a hacker. It’s much easier to imagine him working in Final Cut Pro than doing scripting. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up an interview of Long and found he does not have a technical mind: he says that he isn’t good at math and his mind “doesn’t work that way.” Justin Long’s Mac character is a textbook “Hollywood Nerd.”
Technical interests are cool to have as long as you mask them in rebelliousness or artsiness.
To avoid getting far off track, citing these fictions was in order to make a point about the changing meaning of “nerd”. With that in mind, look at what the article you linked to says about real nerds:
That’s agreeing with my thesis about what the concept of “nerd” has come to mean recently. The article writer thinks that it is distinguishing real nerds (who are distinguished only by intense interest in niche topics) from Hollywood Nerds (who are type 1 or type 2). But if you simply look at a dictionary (none of them have been updated to reflect the new meaning—the latest shift is too recent), the word “nerd” did not just mean someone with an interest in niche topics. By (earlier) definition, a nerd was not “of average looks and social skills”. The word has been gutted of its earlier meaning and emotional impact, making it no longer, or at least less, painful for someone to call themselves a nerd.
The American Heritage Dictionary traces the meaning of “nerd” through time. In 1957, meant “square”, which, looking it up, meant conventional or old-fashioned or opposed to current trends. Nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. Then in 1970, an uninteresting person, a “dud”. Again, nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. At some point, the concept of “nerd” gained the element of keen and single-minded interest in niche and especially technical topics. while retaining the “dud” element. But now we see, in the article you link to, that “nerd” has, at least for some, dropped the “dud” element and retained only the (relatively new) element of interest in niche topics.
I agree with you that the concept of “nerd” has been slowly changing, but I think it’s still pretty bad.
The nerd stereotype is alive and thriving in the big bang theory.
Yup. And there are other examples. Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, another current comedy. But Big Bang Theory is much more hard core. However Big Bang Theory is, I think, not the cultural benchmark that The Breakfast Club was.
Edit: just thinking further, it occurs to me that Albert Einstein, with his dress and his hair, must have greatly informed the cultural stereotype of the badly dressed genius. Doctor Who is I think a sometimes “cool” version of Einstein. I think there’s some overlap between the absentminded professor (as in flubber), the nutty professor (as in Jerry Lewis), Dick Van Dyke of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the nerd. We have the high intelligence, the being lost in one’s interests, the social awkwardness and obliviousness, and so on. Shared among the absentminded professor types (informed, whether justly or unjustly I don’t know, by the common idea of Einstein) and also the nerds.
I’ll take your word for the cultural benchmark, it didn’t make as much impact on the rest of the world as it did the states (I hadn’t heard of it until 1997)
Speaking of 1985, and crazy scientists you get Doc Brown. Now he was a cool version of Einstein, hair and all. Well actually Einstein is probably considered fairly cool for a scientist, the crazy tongue photo gives the impression he didn’t take himself too seriously.
Darwin vs Einstein, who is cooler?
Yes, it’s things like these that I find bizarre.
In the meantime, I read the chapters of Anderegg’s book you cited above. I find his thesis very interesting, but as always in the history of ideas, it’s hard to estimate the relative significance of particular cultural tropes, especially since I know little about all the other factors that could have influenced the development of this characteristic modern American stereotype. I’ve put his book on my reading list, so I’ll probably have more comments when I get to reading it.
The link to Emerson’s speech is in my post.
You can read the relevant chapter in Google Books. The link I gave should take you to the history chapter starting with Ichabod Crane.
In general it’s a good book, but it has some wrong assumptions and moralizing.
This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate may actually be culturally localized.
So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?
NancyLebovitz:
I don’t see why these specific patterns of behavior would seem “absolutely innate” even looking only at the U.S. There are lots of non-nerdy people with high intelligence, and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t excel in “nerdy” professions if they chose to enter them in large numbers. In my opinion, the main reason why non-nerdy smart people go mainly into non-technical professions is that in the American society, technical professions, on the whole, offer relatively low status considering the demands they impose.
Where I lived in Europe (various places in ex-Yugoslavia), we’ve never really had anything comparable to the American notion of “geeks” and “nerds.” It’s hard to find even an approximate translation for these words which would have all the connotations of high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things.
We do have words that denote these qualities separately, or for people who put excessive effort into success in school while lacking real-life skills and smarts, or who achieve high grades thanks to cramming rather than smarts and talent, etc., etc., and various terms of this sort are used to translate “nerd/geek” in different contexts. But there is no accurate translation, simply because there is no striking correlation between all these attributes. (That said, in recent years some of the American “geek” culture has been making inroads, but even what exists of it is still not comparable, since there is both less social nerdiness involved and much less correlation with interest, let alone high achievement, in science and engineering.)
Partly this is because technical professions have higher relative status, so they attract plenty of intelligent people who are not at all deficient in social skills. The other reason is a very different youth culture and education system. As far as I see, these different circumstances usually tend to attenuate people’s innate lack of sociability, rather than, as happens in the U.S., exacerbate it and force intelligent introverts to seek company and respect in “geeky” social circles and activities, since they can’t find them anywhere else.
All that said, this situation still does not mean that success in courting women is more evenly distributed among men. On the contrary: the attention of attractive women, and the overwhelming part of casual sex that takes place, is still restricted to the minority of men who are attractive by pretty much the same criteria as anywhere else. It’s just that you’ll find many more such men (as well as less attractive, but still far from nerdy men) among people doing technical professions and having various intellectual interests that are stereotyped as “geeky” in the U.S.
Vladimir M asserts that in Europe, “technical professions have higher relative status”.
That agrees with my experience. My mom used to say that my engineer father would have higher status if he lived in the old country. Also, when letters from Europe arrived for my dad, his name was sometimes prefaced with the honorific “Ing.” which is short for “Ingenieur”, which means “Engineer”.
How is the educational system different?
As you may know, there’s been a lot of interest lately in the US about how to lessen or eliminate bullying in schools—there’ve been a number of suicides lately resulting from years of severe bullying.
The only structural cause I’ve seen suggested (as distinct from recommendations of active anti-bullying programs) is the high emphasis on competitive athletics, and in particular, athletic competitions between schools.
The other question is whether there’s a process of bullying/ostracism in European schools which is aimed at other sorts of people.
NancyLebovitz:
I don’t have anything resembling a complete theory of these differences. It’s certainly not about some clearly identifiable and straightforward organizational aspects that could be reformed in a planned way, and there are definitely deep cultural differences involved.
One organizational difference that seems significant, though, is that I went through a system that had tracking done in such a way that smart kids of all sorts ended up separated from the not so bright ones, but largely mixed together, without being allowed to segregate by electing different coursework. (You had a choice of high schools with different curriculums, but everyone within the same high school had to learn the same, usually eclectic mix of things.) This did seem to create an optimal environment for introverted smart kids to grow up without being exposed to bullying (which was unheard of in the high school I went to), and giving them less inclination and opportunity to self-segregate into “nerdy” cliques.
There is bullying/ostracism however it isn’t as formalised.
I would be tempted to blame the sports. Simply it creates an in group of people that are considered higher status. There are pep rallies to them, with beautiful girls cheering them on, that has to create an inflated sense of worth/superiority/difference.
So they persecute the out group, the geeks, to signal their in-group ness and preserve their sense of superiority. I suppose it is similar to the stanford prison experiment. Raise one group above another and that group seems to persecute the other.
It’s definitely not the sports that do it. You may be right about all the rest of the stuff that is associated with sport over there. Cheerleaders? That’s not just in the teen movies right, you actually have them?
Does being a nerd and a good athlete seem out of place in that culture? Come to think of it there is a separate group for ‘band nerds’ too if my consumption of low grade entertainment is anything to go by. I wouldn’t know where to put myself!
Yeah by sports I meant the importance given to it. In comparison we don’t have such things as sports scholarships (irrespective of academic talent, which I think is called an entrance scholarship) for prestigious universities. Does Australia?
I’m a Pom, so my exposure to American culture is mainly fictional in nature as well. I’ve seen a number of documentaries as well though. The BBC loves analysing the US.
Heck no. University sports here are relatively obscure. They are there for students who enjoy them but they are approximately status neutral.
High school cheerleaders at a game.
This was actually a little harder to find than cheerleading competitions. It’s morphed into its own sport.
Athletes don’t do all the bullying—not even most of it, I think.
It’s possible that the high emphasis on sports poisons the whole atmosphere.
NancyLebovitz:
That’s not a necessary implication of whpearson’s theory. Once the athleete/nerd stratification has been established, it may create bullying incentives for those who are physically stronger than the nerds, but not part of the elite athlete circle. Such individuals will want to assert superiority to the nerds to at least confirm their middle-rank status if they can’t achieve the top one, and bullying seems like a straightforward strategy.
I didn’t go myself through the American school system, though, so I have no idea how well this hypothesis holds water.
I didn’t go through the American school system either but your theory seems to match with general observable tendencies. Bullying and crude social aggression isn’t an indicator of high status so much as an indicator of ‘medium high status that requires effort to maintain’. This is why I make sure I never work for an insecure boss.
Define what you mean by geeky...
If you mean people that don’t like to party, then from my experience they are doing science and engineering and probably some humanities as well. They also generally co-exist quite happily with the party-ers, at least at University level.
I’ve just realised how much we have a cultural one way mirror. I’ve seen fictional depictions of fraternities, keg standing, hazing etc, however you probably haven’t seen what a European rock concert is like. Which is generally non-violent, unless you get in the mosh pit.
I say European, but in some ways I have less idea of what mainland European social life is like than American.
Vladimir_M’s “high intelligence combined with social ineptness, lack of masculinity, and obsessive interest in obscure and unpopular things” is good enough except that I’d add lack of femininity to the list.
One horrifying feature of American culture in the 50s was that intelligence was considered not masculine and not feminine, and since everyone was supposed to be one or the other, being visibly intelligent had a social cost. In my opinion, a major (but incomplete) change in this happened when it was clear that people could make money in IT. I’m inclined to think the Flynn effect is also taking hold.
From a science fiction convention: A women mentions that sometimes she feels she’s just got to do something different with her hair, and fannish women are apt to look at her as though she’s crazy.
Historical note: I think that identifying interest in dressing up with being effeminate is a modern weirdness. The only culture I can think of where men and women who could afford to didn’t get about equally elaborate and showy was colonial America, and in that case, the men were dressier.
Afaik, American rock concerts are mostly non-violent, but this is very much second hand. Anyone have more information?
Every mainstream rock concert I’ve ever been to in the US has been entirely non-violent, modulo the occasional and mostly unrelated edge cases that arise when you get a thousand drunk people together. Even metal and punk concerts aren’t violent outside of the mosh pit, and I’m not sure that properly counts as violence, being consensual and generally not aimed at causing injury.
Sounds a lot like the European case, in other words.
This is true. Gorilla-type masculinity is not what I had in mind when talking about masculinity (being European and all). I was thinking about being into sports/cars/heavy metal (going back to your nice/anti-nice dichotomy) or just generally being confident and self-assured.
If that is what you want, then I can see why it conflicts with some of the fundamentals (kindness, competence). Gorilla masculinity seems to be about getting what you want through physical intimidation. If that is the hammer that you have used the most through your life, then everything will look like a nail.
If you typically try to convince people with competent argument or being kind, then you are less likely to reach for the physical intimidation toolkit of gorilla masculinity.
ETA: I wonder why there is a difference in masculinity in Europe. I’d make up some just-so-story about the more physically aggressive men having been killed in the two world wars, unless it is purely memetic.
I consider competent argument to be far more representative of gorilla masculinity than whatever the other category is. Viewing conversations in certain communities (for example, MENSA mailing lists) I’ve seen patterns that look remarkably like what I would expect from gorrilas—guys trying to dominate each other with verbal sparring while girls are competing via asserting moral control and creating social alliances with other women and undermining the status of targets. Depending on your physical self confidence the physical forms of intimidation can seem gentle and benign in comparison.
I think there is more than two categories here. Gorilla’s don’t talk much in general...
There is plenty of that in Europe.… so I’m not sure if it contributes to what activates SarahC’s hindbrain. As gorilla masculinity’s top hit in google is SarahC’s comment, it is up to her to say what it means. To me it had hints of a pure physicality (rather than verbal) to it which she may not have meant to impart.
I cannot think of a useful reply. I operate as if the words and phrases refer to common English definitions and refer to actual properties of the universe. You appear to be operating at a level of conversation that does not interest me.
Gorilla-type masculinity doesn’t have any common english definition. It can have multiple possible readings. I read it as non-verbal, large physical presence, chest thumping, wooping.… things to intimidate foes. Because that is what I think of as male gorillas. To speak geek for a moment, Worf is an example of gorrilla-type masculinity and Picard is an example of a non-gorilla type to me. Both examples of masculinity, just different flavours.
Your reading expanded it to verbal domination, or any sort of domination. Which lost the distinction in my mind.
SarahC introduced it to differentiate between what she finds attractive in American men and lacking in European culture, so she had one of the two meanings in mind. Or a different meaning altogether.
It is what she meant that is important! She had something that she wants men to become more of, and the ability to win arguments on Mensa is not what she was thinking of, I think. Assuming her preference is shared by some other women, then it is important for people interested in dating to know exactly what she meant.
That is why I chose her as the arbiter, lacking a common meaning.
Right, there’s something to that.
And I don’t like people who intimidate people by force. If there’s a direct conflict, I’m going to go with the person who’s kind and competent.
(Also, I’m starting to hate my “nice/anti-nice” dichotomy—in retrospect that post made no sense.)
I love this phrase. It reminds me of this exchange, which happened out loud:
“You drive like a guerilla.” ”… what?” “Not the ape. The kind with a beret.”