Tag: women

Feminism is a Mostly Useless Word

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Rhetoric, Uncategorized1 Comment

Most words have multiple meanings, but there are problems when you can’t tell the meanings apart by context. The word “feminism” has exactly this problem because it has been used to refer to people doing superficially similar things in the same contexts which are actually quite different. There have been many feminisms, some of which have been absolutely terrible (especially Marxist feminism). A full taxonomy of them would take more than a little time and probably not actually be very interesting, but there are two types that I would like to distinguish in order to illustrate this point: the feminism of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (in 1848) and 2000s era internet feminism.

The 1848 version of feminism was about the context in which there existed places in America where women could not own property in their own name (the legal context of mid-nineteenth century America was far more heterogenous than modern America) and in some places could not be legally held accountable for their own crimes. In fact, one of the articles in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was that it was not just that, in some places, a father or husband would be held legally liable for a woman’s crimes and not she herself. That is, they asked for a reform to the laws that would involve holding women criminally liable for their own crimes. (Please note: I am not, thereby, saying that this was all that was in the declarations of sentiments or that it was a perfect or an unalloyed good; I’m not interested in discussing that one way or another. My only point is that one of its major concerns was both legal rights and responsibilities, many of which amounted to bringing American law in line with European and especially British legal traditions, rather than innovating.)

By contrast, 2000s era internet feminism was largely selfish people telling obvious lies to justify why they shouldn’t have to treat people decently or even take the trouble of developing basic social skills. You can see this today in the wretches who complain about “emotional labor” and when you look into what they mean, it turns out that they’re talking about the work of living in a society and having to treat other people better than as chattel slaves.

Of course, I’m not saying to never use the word “Feminism.” My point is, rather, that one should rarely, if ever, use it in an unqualified way. When talking about some feminism, it would be much better to say things like “equal property rights feminism,” “suffragette feminism,” “Marxist feminism,” “sexual liberation feminism,” “2000s era internet feminism,” etc. It is more cumbersome, of course, but it drastically improves the likelihood of actually being understood; all the more so as many people are only familiar with some of these and if they’re not familiar with the one you’re talking about they’re going to assume it’s one of the ones they do know about. By adding the qualifiers, this will be especially helpful in this case as their reaction will be “what are you talking about?” rather than “you idiot.” “What are you talking about?” can be an excellent starting point to mutual understanding. “You idiot,” pretty much never is.

Clearing Plates at Family Gatherings

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

In America, Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to be occasions for family gatherings with a large meal. People often talk while they eat, and when people are done eating and only talking, it is extremely common to see the women of the family get up and start clearing the plates away while the males continue to talk. Around this time, a few unpleasant women who don’t understand human beings very well will write articles complaining about this. So for the sake of young people who might be taken in by one of those articles, I will explain what’s going on.

Unless you’re really into cooking, making thanksgiving dinner isn’t actually a lot of work. It takes perhaps fifteen minutes to put the turkey on a tray, season the skin, and put it in the oven at 325F for 3-5 hours (depending on size). Mashed potatoes or if you have better taste mashed sweet potatoes are another fifteen minutes of work. Bread, you can easily just buy at the store. If you’re not making it from scratch, add another fifteen minutes for the stuffing. Putting that all together, it’s an hour of work for a single person. That’s not trivial, but it’s not that much work. I’ve done significantly more work than that for minor dinner parties, and it’s not more work than one might do barbecuing food at a cookout. Cleaning up a dozen plates from a table is, if you’re doing it yourself, perhaps five minutes. If you have a dishwasher (as everyone who writes articles complaining that men talk instead of helping does), add another five minutes for scraping food off of plates and loading them into the dishwasher. If this is a major amount of work for you which might break you unless you get help, as the kids would say, you’re NGMI (not gonna make it).

Of course, that’s not what’s going on. Except for the occasional host with significant health problems—and the family member with significant health problems almost never hosts family gatherings—the host of family gatherings is not overwhelmed by the work involved and doesn’t need help. The reason why all the women help is because this is an expression of female social bonding. Identifying ways to help each other and helping unasked is a way that women reinforce their social bonds. When there’s nothing to do, asking, “what can I do to help” is a next best thing, which is why you will see it asked even when there’s obviously nothing to do to help. The point isn’t the actual work, but the affirmation of the social bond in the offer. This is also why the typical response is, “there’s nothing right now,” followed by a list of what’s going on. The point of this is not the actual inventory, but the affirmation of the bond by sharing concerns and implicitly inviting the other woman to help monitor them. (There’s actually a bit of an art to this because a woman can give offense by usurping some decision-making in her effort to help; young women generally watch their elders navigate this and learn the art by the time they’re old enough to take part as adults.) This is why when one woman gets up and starts to collect plates, the rest of the women jump up and start collecting plates too—they are affirming their social bonds by all working together.

This type of social bonding is markedly different from male social bonding, which can be readily observed at a cookout, where it’s traditionally the males who do most of the work. Males can, without giving offense, make a perfunctory offer of assistance to the male host, but mostly they don’t because assuming that another man can handle everything is a sign of respect. Further letting the male host do whatever grilling and other work is involved in hosting without interference is also an implicit sign of respect. Males will, however, make a point of hanging out with and talking to the host, because conversation about interesting subjects is a primary way adult males affirm social bonds.

So at the big family meal, when the women clean the plates together and the males keep talking, both are engaging in their sex’s typical form of social bonding. The two groups bond with each other by the men showing appreciation for the (in truth, quite small) labor of the women, and the women bond with the males by enabling the conversation which is maintained. The males can be rude by taking the generosity of the women for granted, the women can be rude by interrupting the conversation with work that can easily be left for after people are done talking.

The unpleasant women who write articles complaining about this dynamic at social gatherings are people with poorly developed social skills that don’t know how male social dynamics work and who assume that female social dynamics are the only social dynamics and so regard males as dysfunctional women. So they’re trying to guilt them into being functional women. (They’re also trying to parasocially bond with other women with poor social skills who don’t understand the full range of social dynamics by communal complaining.)

Socially Awkward Women Have a Really Hard Time

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

I came across the subject of how women interact with each other socially when studying female bullying, originally with the books Queen Bees and Wannabes and Odd Girl Out. (They’re both very interesting books and I recommend them.) I’ve studied more about it since then and one of the conclusions I’ve come to is that socially awkward women have an incredibly hard time. (This probably includes, but certainly is not limited to, women on the autism spectrum.)

The background you need to know (and will probably know better than I am if you are female, in which case please bear with me) is that women tend to prefer, within social interactions, subtle interactions to explicit ones. You can tell Just So evopsych stories about women being more vulnerable and needing to not offend people to explain it if you like, but the preference for more subtle nudging than direct confrontation means that women are (as a rule) highly attuned to subtle signals. (None of this comes with any value judgement attached; like all natural substrates it is the canvas upon which moral virtues are painted—in other words, it can be used well or badly.) In general this works out, in much the same way that if you have a quiet speaker and a sensitive microphone, you get a recording at a normal volume. Or to vary the metaphor, if you have a dim light and a wide-open pupil, your eye sees clearly.

By contrast—and of course I’m painting with a broad brush—men tend to dislike subtlety in social interactions. We value openness and directness. It does need to be said that that’s not the same thing as being a bull in a china shop. You can be direct, quiet, and precise—hence Teddy Roosevelt’s famous advice to speak softly and carry a big stick.

Now, it’s fairly obvious that these two strategies don’t mesh perfectly; when the male is trying to communicate to the female this can be like shouting into a sensitive microphone, and when the female is trying to communicate to the male this can be like whispering into a mic with the gain turned really low. This often causes problems to males and females who are just starting to communicate with each other (i.e. teenagers) but women pretty quickly learn to stop looking for subtle queues from men, often with the explanation that “men are simple” or “men are dumb.” A similar phenomenon happens when a woman is first married—she’ll often be trying to figure out what’s wrong all the time until she figures out that if something’s wrong the man will say, and most of the time she can’t figure out what’s going on with him, it’s not that he’s being too subtle or she not sensitive enough, it’s that nothing (relevant) is going on. This is the classic case of the woman wondering why the man is staring off into space and trying to guess why he’s angry at her while he’s just trying to figure out whether he thinks it’s actually plausible that batman could be superman in a fight. I mean, superman has super-speed, so even if batman has cryptonite…

And, again, after a while most young wives figure out that a husband staring off into space probably doesn’t mean anything, and “men are just weird/simple/stupid/big children/different”.

All well and good for women interacting with males.

But for the most part, it seems that women can’t learn to make these allowances for other women.

And this causes enormous problems for women who need them.

I’m speaking, of course, of socially awkward women. They don’t give off appropriate subtle queues, especially the positive ones, which often causes other women to take offense. This probably needs some explanation.

Often, the way women communicate that they have been offended is to somewhat reduce the amount of positive signals they’re giving, or to still give them but to make them less enthusiastic. Since the other woman is hyper-vigilant and analyzes her behavior in great detail to see where she might have given offense, she’ll probably figure this out and take action to repair the relationship. If the woman does not do this analysis and take that action, this communicates her disinclination to a close relationship, i.e. is an insult. Hence the offense.

A socially awkward woman may or may not notice the subtle variations in the other woman’s positive signals, but if she does she’ll have no idea how to respond and so the other woman is highly likely to take offense when she gets it wrong.

There’s also a pretty good chance that the socially awkward woman will have no idea how to respond properly to when her female friends try to do collaborative emotional processing with her, making the experience unsatisfying for them if they don’t interpret her actions as being judgmental or all negative and taking offense when this doesn’t seem right.

All of this will cause female friendships to be very stressful for the socially awkward woman, and in all likelihood, short-lived.

None of these problems apply to friendships with males, though, so there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll find socially awkward women having mostly male friends. This has its own pitfalls, of course, because a woman who shares a man’s interests and likes talking to him about them is extraordinarily attractive to males who are looking for a wife. There’s the further issue that women of marriageable age usually won’t talk (extensively) to males of marriageable age unless they’re open to romantic interest because they’re very sensitive to whether there’s interest and careful to not encourage it. Again, I’m painting with a very broad brush and there are tons of exceptions to that—especially in contexts which are not purely social, such as workplaces. But the point is, there’s a real danger in her friendships with males that the male will develop romantic interest in the socially awkward woman and if she’s not interested that will kill the friendship.

So we come back to the title of this post. Life is really hard for socially awkward women, and I think they deserve more sympathy than they often get.