A friend brought this tweet to my attention and part of what’s interesting about it is the large split in reactions to the video it contains between males and females:

Something about this just pisses me off pic.twitter.com/53JMiaBIXN

— Grit on Farcaster. (@GRITCULT) August 9, 2023

(Since links break on the internet, it’s a video of a woman showing off her standing desk which has a large number of color-coordinates things on it, including jars of keycaps, miscellaneous cute charging gizmos, etc.)

A friend said it reminded him of how I’ve advanced the theory that women are more given to the direct ordering of the material world while men tend more toward helping women in this role; left to their own men tend to be interested more in the abstract such as tools and how things work while women, left to their own, get a lot of satisfaction out of imposing rational order upon spaces. (note: this is not the same thing as liking cleaning; very few people like cleaning, it’s more about how much stress one feels at things not being clean.)

This video—or, more specifically, the reactions to it—are really more about the practice of ornamenting spaces, though. Though a lot of people are inclined to interpret ornamentation (or decoration) as a purely aesthetic subject, like painting or sculpting, it actually serves a practical purpose. Ornamentation exists to indicate that a space has been rationally ordered according to a function.

For example, in a kitchen, neatly folded towels with decorations on them and a row of decorated jars for flower, sugar, etc. are indications that the kitchen is clean (oriented toward food safety) and organized (oriented toward efficiently making food). Similar things apply to a bathroom, where organized flat surfaces allow one to rapidly inspect for unhygienic contamination. Decorations such as a soap shepherdess or a porcelain figure of a child in a bath serve to exclude using these flat surfaces for things that would more readily hide unhygienic contamination. (If you haven’t lived with young children, you have little concept of all of the strange places that can become contaminated and require cleaning to ensure hygiene.) Small towels with pictures of waterfowl embroidered on them laid on top of the towels which can actually dry hands off will get disturbed with use and hence act a bit like the seal on a pill bottle to assure the user that the thing to be used is fresh and clean.

In healthy femininity, the ornamentation is subordinate to the function of the space whose ordering it signifies. In toxic femininity, the function of the space becomes subordinated to the ornamentation. In extreme examples of this kind of disorder, spaces can become effectively forbidden from use lest the ornamentation be disturbed.

In the context of the desk in the video I linked above, much of what people are objecting to is (I suspect) the ornamentation. The ornamentation is there to signal that the desk has been rationally ordered to its function of getting work done. The ornamentation is not, however, part of that function. Thus people can easily perceive the ornamentation as getting in the way of the function (and thus being toxic femininity).

This is going to especially be the case for people who do not understand ornamentation, which population will tend to skew heavily (but not exclusively) male. Not having an instinct toward ornamentation of spaces (as distinct from the ornamentation of tools), they will tend to assume that there must be some practical function to the ornamentation, which they don’t understand, and thus must either figure out or reject as a mistake. This confusion costs mental effort to resolve (whichever way it is resolved), and hence is perceived as getting in the way of the function of the space.

This is a specific case of the more general principle that people find anything that they wouldn’t do mentally taxing because they do not effortlessly understand why it was done.

This is why there is the commonality (with many exceptions) of males finding a mess harmless while women find it stressful. The males will simply memorize where all of the useful things are and ignore the rest, so long as it doesn’t require moving out of the way to get at the useful parts of the space. This memorization of where the useful things are means that the mess becomes almost literally invisible to the person who knows where all things are. The females, by contrast, will not see a rational ordering, nor will they see the markers of an ordering that they don’t (yet) understand, and so will be stressed by how the space is meant to be lived in but is not optimized for its function.

When you put these two things together, they are a big part of why most of humanity throughout time and space has found it expedient to have separate male-controlled and female-controlled spaces, and for each sex to stay out of the other space or else when entering it to treat it as a foreign country and to just observe the mysterious customs of these foreigners so as not to give offense. Hence, for example, the stereotype that the same woman whose scolding of how the kitchen was left when a male made a sandwich for itself is taken meekly will be chased out of the male’s tool shed when she has the temerity to say something about its organization. (This, by the way, also tends towards a division of labor, as it’s just easier for everyone if the person who understands the organization of the space is the one who uses it, as they will both be most efficient and also least disturb this organization and thus create the least amount of work for the person who imposes that organization.)

This separation of domains is a thing, by the way, that young couples often have to learn. Each assumes that the other has no organization and does things at random, and they gradually learn that they’re wrong as they see the other reliably accomplish things. It also takes a while for the male to learn that he can’t make the female not stress over mess, while it takes the female a while to learn that she can’t make the male appreciate the function of ornamentation.

Eventually they come to learn to compromise. Eventually the female will recognize that the space is rationally ordered if everyone knows where the important stuff is and the mess is confined to only some mostly harmless places and is periodically dealt with so that there becomes an equilibrium where it does not grow like a cancer to take over the space. Eventually the male learns to tolerate ornamentation as something which makes the female happy for some reason, and that’s good in itself because one of the many purposes of his life is to help her to be happy, and that it is not too much of a waste of time to beat back the mess even when not absolutely necessary.

Obviously I’m painting with a several-foot-wide brush, here, but for all that it is a very common human pattern. Young couples fight because they are different but don’t realize it; older couples (who are wise) get along because they are different and do realize it—and make allowances for it. But you can’t make allowances for things you don’t know exist.

Of course in practice no one gets this perfectly right and it is usually done to excess (on both sides). There are also plenty of exceptions to the generalizations above, with fastidious men and slovenly women. As always, treat each person as themselves and not merely a particular local instance of a generalization. Etc.

But, even with all of the necessary caveats, this is a common pattern of you know how to look for it.