Tags
I will be at EA Global San Francisco this month. You can catch me as one of three panelists at the Strategic Movement-Building for Wild-Animal Suffering panel, where we’ll be talking about appealing to mainstream experts, framing wild-animal suffering in a way that counters common objections, and avoiding making the entire EA movement look like a bunch of weirdos.
Also, this month I am going to be moving out of a house on Ward Street, the rationalist hub in Berkeley; contact me at ozyfrantz@gmail.com if you’re interested.
Effective Altruism
Reducing Wild Animal Suffering literature library— a fascinating collection of papers about empirical, theoretical, and moral aspects of RWAS.
Argument against prediction markets.
Triple-counting impact in EA.
Postmortem of a failed happiness app. I would like to congratulate Michael Plant on his honest and forthright admission of failure; we need more of this in EA.
Detailed criticism of the chapter on existential risk in Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. “So far as I can tell, almost every paragraph of the chapter contains at least one misleading claim, problematic quote, false assertion, or selective presentation of the evidence.” Beware the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect!
Is biodiversity as important as people claim?
Discourse Norms
A conflict about a two-person protest at the University of Nebraska goes national. A very good, in-depth case study of a single campus free speech case, going beyond the headlines.
ACE intervention report on the effects of protests, which may also be of interest to activists who aren’t involved in animal activism. Many of the points may generalize.
Linking this less for the object-level points and more for the interesting example of how different conversations can look for different people.
I’m not sure this post about the King of Cambodia is worth reading, but lèse-majesté laws are evil and I feel a duty to signal-boost posts violating it as much as possible.
Gender
I think this essay‘s claims about women in general are incorrect– people are more diverse than that– but it’s a very vivid depiction of one particular way internalized sexism affected a particular person.
Anti-heterosexual hate crimes basically don’t exist, but police inaccurately report that they do.
Just Plain Neat
DNA blunder creates serial killer.
What would you do if a bank glitch gave you one and a half million dollars?
The new cartoonist for eighty-year-old newspaper comic Nancy is actually… good?
Thing of Things 
I think I now have a crush on Dirtbag Sappho.
LikeLike
So unless I miss the point, the argument against predictive markets is that (a) assuming Tetlock’s research replicates, than a predictive market is better than normal forecasters but is not (b) as good as a team of “superforecasters?”
That’s a good point, I guess, but the article might better be titled “superforecaster teams are better than predictive markets, which are better than everything else.” 🙂
LikeLike
I think it’s interesting that I draw different conclusions from the exact same information:
The lack of anti-hetero hate crimes seems very unremarkable to me. When you have an almost empty category, the data tends to be dominated by mistakes, which allows one to see the general errors in the system, that are not as visible in the more filled categories. So I think that it is a bit weird to just frame this as an issue with wrong data about anti-hetero and/or anti-LGBT crimes, when this is probably an issue with the data that is collected for all crimes. The types of errors described in the article strongly suggests this (why would picking the wrong number from a drop-down menu or scanning the wrong number happen only to these crimes?)
As for the other gender essay, Ozy sees this as internalized sexism, when I see it as a woman who has adopted (part of) masculinity and realizes that the masculine norm is not all that pleasant. So she chooses traditional femininity instead, rationalizing clearly heavily lopsided wooing as ‘equality.’ I really think that it says a lot about the lack of sophistication of the gender debate that seemingly everything can be defined as gender equality, including traditionalism, and that everything can be defined as oppressive female gender norms, including male gender norms.
LikeLike
What struck you as specifically masculine about the gender norms in the ‘hunger’ piece? Sure, men are ‘supposed’ to be stoic, in certain gender roles, but there’s also a reason why ‘attention whore’ is pretty much a female-only slur.
The setup in that piece felt pretty spot on to me: men are supposed to be stoic but women are supposed to not bother men with anything nor expect anything from them except the thing they happen to want to give anyway.
LikeLike
[note: I will use masculine & feminine in the gender role sense]
The stereotypical female role is to expect gifts, attention and to have choices be made for her, while giving hints to her desires, rather than demand aggressively. Basically, the man has to outwardly be seen as the one making the decisions and big moves, while the woman is seen as passive (note that this doesn’t have to reflect the actual power in the relationship, the woman can make most decisions and yet make herself seem passive, while the man seems like the decision maker).
This is not what the writer was doing.
The writer herself recognizes that a-romanticism runs in the family. Her mother proposed to her father with “I told my parents we were getting married.” This is masculine behavior. If anything, it is an excess of masculinity, to the point of being boorish. The writer is acting like her mother and her grandfather, not like Elizabeth Bennet.
Her description of her own behavior is highly masculine. She wants to share a box of candy on Valentine’s Day, rather than exchange chocolates or getting chocolate & giving affection in return. She “would have been mortified by flowers or love notes or public displays of affection.” She was a “little flattered but also flustered and horrified and repulsed” when a boy wrote sonnets for her in school.
None of these descriptions are about not bothering men or expecting/demanding anything from them. They are about not appreciating being treated specially for being a woman, even when the men do this by their own choice and without hints or overt demands.
The writer seems to recognize that she diverts from the female gender role: “I was, in short, that Holy Grail of girlfriends: I was Low-Maintenance.”
She acted like a man in a woman’s body.
—
Then much of the rest of the article is her trying to reconcile what she was actually doing with feminism, where she writes a lot of nonsense. This is not uncommon, as the feminist narrative describes our society as patriarchal and argues that women’s issues come from traditionalism. Furthermore, there is a strong tendency to glorify the traditional male role, denying that it has downsides compared to the female gender role.
The logical consequence is that when feminist women adopt part of the male gender role, there is a tendency to mistake the downsides that come with that as being part of the female gender role.
So then we get the ironic ending of the story, where the writer adopts a more traditional female role & then presents this as a feminist victory.
LikeLike
My response got spam-filtered, probably because of a Pride and Prejudice reference. Perhaps Ozy can un-filter it?
LikeLiked by 1 person
The TL;DR version of my comment is:
This is traditionalist: You shouldn’t have treated me like a prince(ss), but THANKS!
This is masculine: You shouldn’t have treated me like a princess, stop it!
LikeLike
Interesting.
To me, this is traditionalist: “Oh, you really treated me like a princess, you really shouldn’t have!” for women and [a woman treated me like a prince, I will accept it but not acknowledge it in any way] for men. Whether that grunt and the “you really shouldn’t have” implies “thanks, do carry on” or “seriously, cut it out” is shrouded in layers upon layers of subtext and cultural awareness.
She does explicitly say she would never tell any man to “stop it” – “This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.”
From your writing style and user name, you seem Dutch (so am I, mid-30s). The whole piece felt like the epitome of womanly expectation to me, at least for ‘normal’ women not in the top 1% of desirability. Probably because it’s easy for women to be jealous of the male gender roles and men to be jealous of the female gender roles without really FEELING that both really constrain the acceptable range of human emotions and agency.
LikeLike
@Mircea
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that (progressive) Western women have adopted the male gender role completely and/or abandoned the female gender role. My argument is that they have adopted a mixture, BUT that there is a tendency to misidentify which is which, because of the narrative that they/we are told.
The result is that you see some women blame traditionalism for what are actually changes brought about by feminism/progressivism, go back to or stick with traditionalism and present that as a progressive choice, demand benevolent sexism and/or see the absence of it as unjust treatment of women, etc, etc.
These things corrupt the progressive project in many ways.
Yes, I am Dutch. Dutch women have probably more than women of any other country adopted the same part(s) of the male gender role that the writer of this piece adopted, while simultaneously retaining major parts of the female gender role, so it makes sense that you would see this as the epitome of womanly expectation (while Ozy the American is apparently not convinced of this).
I can’t speak for other men and certainly not for women in this regard, but I do feel that my range of human emotions and agency are substantially constrained, although part of that has become so ingrained in me that I no longer have the want or ability, although I may still have the need (if that makes sense to you).
It’s complicated, also because of my atypicalness, so my experiences are not those of the typical man. If I were an equally atypical woman, my experiences would not be those of the typical woman. So it is hard to judge the grass on the other side.
I don’t want the female gender role anyway.
LikeLike
@Aapje,
That sounds like you believe there’s one true traditional masculine and one true traditional feminine, and that societies have fallen away from that to a greater or lesser extent in response to feminism.
Personally, I think Dutch society has always been fairly straightforward/low in romantic shenanigans. Before feminism, Dutch women definitely didn’t have things like the vote or the right to study or open their own bank accounts, but I cannot believe that playing coy and batting eyelashes was ever a true part of the Dutch female role – they always seemed like ‘firm managers of their spheres of influence’ to me. (Perhaps excepting the short and highly charged, but ultimately minor, period of courtship.) I can’t imagine my great-grandmothers (or even grandmothers, they were of the generation where ‘congrats on your marriage, you’re fired’ was still the done thing) having the time or patience for elaborate subtle management of their men.
I’m not saying the author of the ‘hunger’ piece is displaying traditionally feminine BEHAVIOR, by the way, just that the pressures (of not being too much, not wanting things that the man isn’t giving already, of doing all the work of adoring and not giving in to desires to be adored in return) sound perfectly normal for women to me. (Of course, stuff like ‘doing all the work of adoring and not allowing yourself to expect anything in return’ is probably part of the experience of the male role as well, but that just proves to me that ‘hiding and repressing what you want’ is a detrimental part of BOTH roles.)
Author seems like a low-self-esteem person given to overanalysis, which makes the traditionalist female behaviors feel impossible, landing her in unproductive low-status behaviors instead – in short, she seems socially awkward.
Her behavior doesn’t strike me as masculine, though, but like failed feminine. Whatever you’d call the female equivalent of ’emasculated’. (I know there’s a strain of thought that thinks manhood is something that you can fail at but womanhood is something you just ‘have’, but I couldn’t disagree more. I think the trad masc and fem roles come with a whole bunch of sacrifices and repressions, but also with a bunch of entitlements and expectations. People like the author and many other socially awkward people seem to be tuned in to the repressions but unwilling/unable to grab the entitlements.)
Her step into unlocking her ‘hunger’, building a decent self-esteem because she found someone who is an equal giver in the relationship, then, doesn’t read to me as stepping BACK into traditional femininity but stepping FORWARD. I think it’s a matter of perspective whether you think these people now find themselves in a fulfulling traditional man/woman relationship or in a fulfilling progressive relationship of equals (albeit with different hobbies).
LikeLike
@Mircea
The male and female gender roles are/were always Utopian ideals that are unachievable in practice due to pragmatic concerns. If you look at history, I would argue that these Utopian ideals were mostly ‘owned’ by the upper and upper middle class, not in the least because the lower classes didn’t have the luxury to not be pragmatic. For example, the upper class kept their women from working, but lower class women very often did paid labor or assisted their husbands with the work (especially on farms). The upper class men gave pretty clothes and jewelry to their wives & expected them to organize parties and ensure that those were entertaining. The lower class men gave their wives money for basic clothes and food & expected meals and cleaning in return. Not very romantic indeed.
Dutch society has traditionally been fairly anti-luxury, even for the upper class, due to the very strong Protestant ethic.
I would say that the defining aspect of historical patriarchy is that the man has responsibility to provide the means for the household and the woman has the responsibility to take what is provided to keep the household functioning. However, in the dating phase, the female ability to play her role is mostly assumed, while the male ability to provide isn’t, creating an obligation on the man to demonstrate potential and/or achievement. In the relationship phase, the gender roles would theoretically result in equal support for the partner. However, I think that the male role has a greater sacrificial element, resulting in a greater denial that one’s needs exist. However, because women are more person-oriented on average, they are presumably more capable on average of recognizing unspoken needs and more interested in caring for people.
So I think that women have traditionally had a greater willingness to consciously signal their needs and a willingness to accept help or such. I also think that person-oriented people see more value in symbolic behaviors, so I think that women on average are more likely to appreciate romantic, rather than pragmatic behavior. In fact, the lack of a pragmatic reason may cause the behavior to be more appreciated as a symbol of true love. Romantic movies often show this by having the man do silly things to prove his love.
Sure, but rejecting the gender roles would mean rejecting/ignoring/fighting the repressions and deciding not to take advantage of the entitlements when one is able to take advantage and one would want to.
This is why I argued that deciding to take advantage is a return to the traditional gender role. As you argue, whether this is true depends on whether the entitlement is gendered and only offered to one gender/partner. She does claim to return the favor, although her examples make me wonder about the extent to which she is doing things she likes herself and then convincing herself she is doing it for her partner. I think that most men would not particularly value getting hand-knit scarves, finding notes with sweet words or getting crafts and I think that a large percentage of women enjoys doing those things quite a bit for their own sake. Of course, her partner may enjoy those things and she may make a decent sacrifice to do them, but the odds seem against it.
Of course, in general it is very hard to decide whether a relationship is one of equals, because there is usually a disparity in need, a disparity in how things are valued and a difference in how much things cost a person to do.
Furthermore, one can wonder whether it is progressive to want an equal sacrifices & benefits. If one partner has more ability than the other, is that person not obligated to do more, in the same way that the person who has traits that make it easy for her to get a good job, is obligated to pay for welfare for those who lack those traits? Similarly, does the person with the greater need and/or deprivation deserve more sacrifice from the other partner?
LikeLike
@Aapje
I would say those are only a few of the male/female roles out there. To me, a gender role is the thing you are raised to be as a child of the gender in question. The crux is often ‘men provide the money, women use the money to provide the means, the goal of both is supporting the family unit,’ but it’s not at all true that all women are raised to be princesses and most just happen to settle for a pragmatic life. (Even less so for boys – upper-class men are trained from birth to live a life of genteel leisure, which is diametrically opposed to the ‘provider’ role.) People are raised in the gender roles they are likely to have to embody, with the ideals that suit their station or aspirational station, not some objective ideal. If 99.9% can never be the princes and princesses, is that gender role really the salient one?
Perhaps these days, when dating takes place in a weird semi-adolescent twilight zone between useless kid-dom and ‘what’s an adult anyway’ adulthood (and for many people, all throughout adulthood). In previous generations, the work ethic and skill of both men and women was easy to observe. (And people knew each other, so it was well-known that so-and-so’s son was a layabout and so-and-so’s daughter was flighty.) My grandmother routinely cooked for her parents and 8 siblings, knew all the recipes, knew how to manage the household money and pantry, knew how to sew and tailor men’s and women’s cloting, completed her set of household linens before she even started courting, knew how to clean the house from top to bottom, do minor household repairs and how to take care of children. So did my mother, and she came of age in the late 60s. It’s not without cause that little boys traditionally have much more freedom to roam as kids – little girls are traditionally conscripted into the household management at an early age and are old hands at it by the time they’re 14.
I think the sacrifices are different. I think the traditional male sacrifices of repressing your sensitive, vulnerable sides are terrible. But women regularly disown entire swaths of emotional range as well – anger, hunger, the need for respect, ambition, assertiveness, independence. Not that great either. In regards to traditional occupations, men sacrifice more in terms of job danger and toil but that’s mostly because women would sacrifice more in terms of pregnancy and associated risks and vulnerabilities, which would make them unsuitable for some of that work.
Something that is of benefit to the men, who are less person-oriented on average and presumably less capable of recognizing unspoken needs and less interested in caring for people.
Which makes this:
a bit of a non-sequitur IMO. You still see that women get most of their support from other women (apart from the household income), while men get their support from their wives. Hence the stereotypes that widowers remarry quickly while widows tend to be poor but OK on their own, that guys suffer more after a breakup while gals are fine, that single women are much less deprived of emotional support and touch than single men.
Sure, the *blinkblink* ‘help me?’ thing is a staple in stereotypical female behavior (jar opening and such, moving heavy boxes), but the women I know don’t usually do that to get their needs met (let alone the deeper emotional needs, repressed or not). It’s more of a signaling game, with a secondary goal to make the guy feel wanted/strong/awesome/useful. The pragmatic benefits are usually slight.
I do think that both men and women assume a lot of help from their partners without even asking. (“What’s for dinner?” implies a rock-solid expectation that your wife has planned the meals, done the shopping and will be doing the cooking, while I know women in relationships who don’t even know that cars need oil checks.)
Not sure! I think men are more likely to do the grand romantic gestures (propose) while women are more likely to do hundreds of tiny everyday ‘romantic’ gestures (serve drinks, knit scarves, bake cookies, buy his favorite snacks). IME, if women stop doing those things, men do miss them and get pissed off. I am not-even-married (civil union – no grand proposal, no wedding, just pizza with friends) to a fairly unromantic dude, and when the longing for a grand romantic gesture seizes me it’s not because the grand romantic gestures are that valuable but because I feel taken for granted in everyday life. A good GF/wife is attentive to her man every day but couldn’t possibly ask for a guy to be attentive every day (too much hunger). But you can kinda get away with asking him to do something romantic once a year. Hence Valentine’s Day.
Not necessarily. Fighting the repressions, yes – for yourself and others. But there’s nothing particularly wrong with entitlements, especially if they balance out. The breadwinner/homemaker and parent equation works fairly well for loads of people, even if the breadwinner in question is still in touch with his softer feelings and the homemaker and parent in question is assertive and ambitious. Same for ‘he picks the car, she picks the furniture’, where the entitlement can be both that you GET to do it and that you can GET OUT of doing it.
Sure. And men in general tend to like show-offy things like climbing mountains to stick a ‘will you marry me’ flag on top to take a pic to send to their girlfriends quite a bit for their own sake. And that’s OK! Not everything needs to be horrible. In fact, I rather think you SHOULD show love the way you like showing it, and find someone who enjoys love being shown that way. The sacrifice bit of the traditional gender roles, to me, is mostly in terms of emotional abnegation, deadening the soul like traditional male stoicism and traditional female loss of personhood. (I’m sure those were coping skills for hard lives, but I can’t say if they are NECESSARY coping skills for hard lives. I have the idea that cultures where men and women moved in very separate spheres had much less of that, but I’m not sure. Something something military industrial complex.)
I’d definitely say it’s not. But then again I’m a Dutch leftist which is internationally nearly identical to a filthy commie, and I believe in stuff like progressive taxation. But I do think you have to measure that across many axes, and that they should balance out, making everyone happier as a result. Some people are utility monsters across several axes but also unwavering sources of support across other axes, and that’s fine. Some people are just moderate. People who are just takers tend to attract people who are just givers (of any sex), but that’s not generally good for the givers.
I do think that in relationships, there is no ‘deserve’. People deserve for their partners to spend time and energy on them, up until the partner decides not to be part of the relationship anymore. Of course, that’s true in societies where divorce is a thing. Perhaps that’s where the repressive nature of traditional gender roles come from – if you cut off half of your emotions and I the other half of mine, we will spend less energy on the tug of war of emotional intimacy if we are condemned to each other.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Mircea
No way. The upper class pretty clearly try to instill a work ethic in their young & try to push them into high positions. Trust fund babies and such seem to primarily be a consequence of the parents spoiling their children by accident. The stereotypical trust fund baby is a student who deceives his parents into thinking he is working hard in college, while he or she is merely partying.
Even the nobility, who lived primarily off their estates, had a very strong sense of responsibility to society (noblesse oblige). They very often held unpaid (political) positions that in some countries were even reserved for them (House of Lords). Of course their lives were easy, but they usually didn’t revolve around leisure.
AFAIK, it is very common for girls to go through a princess phase, even if they are not a member of the royal family. So I would argue that this is a common ideal, even if children rapidly learn that it is not realistic.
However, the current main desired profession for boys and girls seems to be pro athlete and doctor, respectively.
If we are talking traditionally traditionally, then I would argue that this is false. Most boys were expected to follow the path of their father & to work from a young age and the girls were expected to follow the path of their mother & to work from a young age. It was the agricultural and (resulting) industrial revolution that disrupted society to make this no longer viable, which led to way more schooling (and compulsory education).
The narrative that men had maximum freedom under patriarchy, but that women then then gradually won more rights, while men lost their privileges, is false. The actual reality is that men were pushed out of rural areas due to the agricultural revolution (which increased farmer productivity), which provided the workforce for factories (hence the industrial revolution), which at first was not that positive for men (because abuse of workers early in the industrial revolution was rampant). However, socialists made work conditions much better for workers and a decent amount of the wealth from the industrial revolution then went to male workers. Men then also got more and more choice of profession. This then caused discontent among an increasing number of women, as their lives didn’t improve as much. This is why feminism came up during the industrial revolution and not in any significant way before that (and also why the upper class was way more into feminism, because lower class men had shitty lives for a long time & lower class women didn’t want that live).
A bit of evidence for this is that a law was passed in The Netherlands to fire married female teachers in 1925. An attempt was made to ban work for all married women in 1937. By this time, Dutch women already had voting rights. So (successful and unsuccessful) attempts to reduce women’s rights happened after women got more rights (and way more political influence).
I’ll grant you ambition, assertiveness and anger. The others not so much. My grandmothers clearly believed that they earned respect by having a well-run household and such. Traditionally, men were not believed to be able to live independently from women. Men usually used to live with their parents until they got married (like is still common in Italy) and if they did leave before that, it was normal for them to live in a hospice, with a proprietress who made meals, cleaned, fixed clothes, etc. Also, why would women not be allowed to be hungry?
That was a valid quid-pro-quo when childbirth was still dangerous, but the risk for women is nowadays way smaller than the risk for men.
This doesn’t match my perception, based on seeing such demands placed by women on their sons, which is hopely not an attempt to create an Oedipus complex. My female family members have also shown quite a bit of happiness when getting tools that make opening jars and cans easier.
Given the quotes you use, you yourself seem to realize that those things are extremely pragmatic and I doubt whether most men see them as romantic (also, just buy the damn scarves and cookies 😛 ).
Sure, the lower the cost to make your partner happy (and vice versa), the more compatible you are. Preferably, relationships are not another job.
The weird part is that studies show that the modern Western society has more personality differences between the genders than more traditional societies. Furthermore, we have some evidence that stoicism is actually less in more traditional societies, like those of the middle ages and in Islamic countries.
Yet I don’t think that we have a particularly high level of physical hardship compared to those eras/countries. Instead, the reason for the more extreme levels of male stoicism and female loss of personhood may be individualism & meritocracy, combined with more knowledge about the most succesful people. Compared to them, nearly all of us are major failures & we are to blame for this failure, because supposedly our society gives people what they merit.
It is no surprise then that many people desperately seek ways to avoid this self-blame, like medical labels that they can use to argue that they simply can do no better or claims that people with their traits face significant discrimination.
True & that is why I think that resentment against (ex-)partners is often unfair. Each person has needs and abilities & you get to accept or reject that package deal. People don’t have a right to more than the partner can or is willing to give. You get to walk away if you dislike the deal.
LikeLike
@Aapje,
Yay, the pitfalls of discussing traditionality. Which era? Which country? Which layer of the population?
I never said upper-class men were raised not to expect responsibilities or (potentially even stifling) expectations, just that they were raised not to expect (and even to avoid) LABOR. To conceptualize the difference, just look at the high-society wives of high-powered CEOs, who work their asses off socializing and keeping up appearances and volunteering for high-profile causes and throwing meticulously orchestrated parties for the who’s who and scheming and networking and making sure that their family has an impeccable image. All, technically, leisure, though you couldn’t pay me enough to stick my nose into a snakepit like that. (They definitely have more responsibilities than I do, who can just get up and wear whatever I want and not have that ruin my husband’s chance of a promotion or my family’s honor and livelihood.) Same used to go for men, plus perhaps some war, in circles such as courtiers and high nobility.
I also never said boys had maximum freedom under patriarchy, just that packs of little boys have larger territories than packs of little girls. (This is true almost everywhere.) Traditional men’s labor tends to be on and then off, while traditional women’s labor tends to be 24/7, if not as maximally strenuous at its peak.
I don’t think you can say that what kids dream of being is the same as what kids are raised to aspire to. Nobody raises their kid to be an astronaut (teaching physics, astronomy, languages, extreme conscientiousness and high levels of physical fitness), yet all kids go through an astronaut phase as well. Heck, most kids go through a ‘cat’ phase.
True. That’s not the kind of respect a man gives a man, though, as intellectual equal.
I’ll refer you back to to the article we’re discussing. 😉
Ha, let me laugh for a bit. DEATH in childbirth is much reduced, but let me tell you as someone who gave birth late last year that pregnancy is not ‘business as usual for 9 months and then an acceptablish chance of death’. I had a fairly uneventful pregnancy but still hurt all over. My last show with my band was at 6 months and the next 2 days I felt like I had been run over by a bus. And most of my friends who’ve been pregnant will tell you that they couldn’t even tie their own shoelaces after 5 months, let alone do stuff like work in mines. (Personally, I don’t get how the shoelaces thing works but apparently I’m unusually flexible. Still wouldn’t have been able to work in a mine, unusual flexibility comes with pelvic instability.) It’s not about RISK, it’s about capacity. Maternal deaths are down, but pregnancy for many people is still a period of short-term disability.
What will make women and men more equal in terms of shouldering the burden of workplace danger is paternity leave for men AND the fact that most women in developed countries don’t actually have 10 kids anymore.
The same behaviors between parents and children and between spouses cannot be compared. When I nibble my daughter’s belly that has entirely different connotations than when I do the same to my husband. (Although, don’t get me started about the tendency of some parents to see their kids as extensions of themselves.)
Have they heard of spoons and can openers?
Sure, it’s nice for someone to help you do something, but the give-and-take of minor help between romantic partners is more symbolic than anything. (For a gender-neutral example, partners getting each other a glass of water. Barring extenuating circumstances, that only saves you 30 seconds and very minor physical exertion.) Single women do tend to eat more salads than single men, but I’ve never heard of the cause being ‘I can’t open jars so I’m stuck with fresh food.’
Nah, that’s not why I used the quotes. More that society tends to think giving flowers and chocolate is romantic but giving beautiful clothing and other kinds of sweet foods is not. Same-same to me.
Yeah, that’s what I meant.
Personally, I think that the less men and women have to do with each other, the more they can be free to express their character traits as they see fit. If you toss men and women in the same cauldron AND given that most men and women value their gender identity AND given that men and women nowadays have many of the same opportunities, I don’t think it’s strange that people start differentiating themselves through behavioral quirks – women to simper, men to frown; women to be ‘elegant’, men to be ‘tough’, things like that. And as the saying goes, your thoughts become your words become your actions become your habits become your character.
Not to say that men and women should be segregated, and also not to say that there are zero inborn differences between men and women, but I’m not sure how to create a culture where men and women move in the same spheres as people of equal value and opportunity but where (sometimes minor) statistical differences in traits are not used as grist for the mill.
That sounds like you believe ‘traditional’ roles of man=tough, strong, stoic, provider, disciplinarian and woman=caring, compassionate, soft, homemaker, nurturer are decidedly modern afflictions. Which is a very odd definition of traditional.
LikeLike
@Mircea
Sure, but the provider norm is not a labor norm. It merely happens to be the case that for most men, providing requires paid labor.
I would argue that men have/had more of a outcome-based norm, while women have/had more of a deontological norm. An advantage of an outcome-based norm is that there is more freedom to choose how to achieve the outcome. It’s also a great advantage if achieving the outcome is exceptionally easy for you (for instance, because you inherited land or such). A disadvantage is that being forced to choose your own path can be a burden. Furthermore, the condemnation for failure tends to be much more harsh. So in practice we see that men are willing to take larger risks to succeed and that men who fail at life are worse off (more often kill themselves, more often homeless, etc).
Ultimately, it seems that what people prefer depends strongly on their personality. There are men and women who like to only run a household, care for children and such (the traditional female role). There are men and women who only like to provide/work. Then you have people who like both, in various ratios.
Of course, work is not work and household is not household. Working in the mines is not the same as working at a bank. Caring for 2 children is not the same as caring for 6. The evidence strongly suggests that lower-class women were not very jealous of their men, while upper-class women were.
I don’t think that my grandfathers got a lot of respect for their intellect…
I suspect that it is true that some of the demands for help are done purely for romantic reasons, but I think that others are done out of a genuine desire to get assistance.
Yet the dominant contemporary progressive agenda is that gender equality means equality of outcome & that by mixing the genders we allow men and women to be more faithful to their true selves. However, if you are correct, then people will strongly resist equality of outcome & mixing men and women more will actually create social pressure on people to adhere to their gender role more.
If that is the case, perhaps we should stop trying to fight human nature and instead work with human nature.
A role/norm is not an affliction. It is what we tell people to do and how we judge them.
I think that patriarchy had a restrictive, but relatively achievable norm. I think that in post-patriarchy, we are less forced into a specific role, but that the bar has become very high. Furthermore, I think that many of the demands are inconsistent, both on individual genders, but also the interplay between genders.
For example, in the old situation, men were supposed to achieve more societal status than women and women were supposed to partner up with someone with equal or more societal status. The numbers can work out for this. In the new situation, men and women are supposed to achieve the same level of societal status, yet women are supposed to partner up with someone with equal or more societal status. This new norm logically creates a (far) greater mismatch between men and women.
LikeLike
🙊 *muffled laughter* something something high neglectedness
In all seriousness though, you’re awesome, don’t ever change.
LikeLike
If good people would work to ensure that bad people are treated justly, we wouldn’t need Marc Randazza. But he has a career, so we must.
LikeLike
Holy crap a real person has the “silly name” the woman made up on the spot for her fictitious lover in “To Room Nineteen”! Which I read over 20 years ago in high school and still remember for some reason! Probably that moment stuck in my mind because I could totally relate to the anxiety of having to make up a plausible sounding fake name on the spot, and was simultaneously confused about why “Michael Plant” would be considered silly. It did seem a bit odd at the time, since I had never heard of anyone with the surname Plant, but years later I learned that there was a very famous person named Robert Plant, which made it sound even less odd than I had first realized. Because like any normal adolescent I had been better acquainted with the work of Doris Lessing than Led Zeppelin.
LikeLike
The ‘effects of protest’ report is really interesting. I can’t believe nobody realized she would be recording all their meetings.
LikeLike
Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
We live in a world where this gets published in a major newspaper by a professor of sociology & director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University and editor-in-chief of the 8th most-cited Women’s Studies journal, while Ozy merely has a blog. 😦
To the writer I would say:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lady,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it.
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
LikeLike
Y’know, I composed in my head some time ago an anti-SJ screed to the effect of, “We’ve seen the Social Justice movement begin to celebrate ‘anger’ and ‘rage’, how long before they openly embrace ‘hate'”? I never posted it anywhere, as I do believe anti-SJ screeds are not a thing the world needs more of, but this one sure was vindicated.
LikeLike
Anybody want to give me a problematic check? Ozy talked about Baby It’s Cold Outside a while back, how about two other guys who won’t take the hint.
– In the movie Top Hat, Fred Astaire falls in love with Ginger Rodgers. Unlike most romantic complication movies, he simply refuses to be bothered by any romantic obstacle. At first, she tries to tell him no; later on she mistakenly thinks he’s married – he’s so in love that he just doesn’t care.
– In Moulin Rouge, while singing “Elephant Love Medley,” Ewan McGregor also absolutely will not be dissuaded, no matter how many times Nichole Kidman tells him it’s not happening.
Problematic because the guys don’t give up? OK because the women ultimately fall in love with them, or because they’re not threatening?
LikeLike
Moulin Rouge is problematic because you shouldn’t try to get free sex from sex workers who are currently on the job! Ewan McGregor is such an asshole client.
LikeLiked by 1 person
TBH, when he sings “We could be heroes,” I’d give him free anything.
LikeLike
The movie is set in 1900. Around the same time, a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan rose to fame in Paris. There is no evidence that she had a problem with men (or Ewan McGregor specifically) trying to get free sex.
The real lesson to sex workers from her life is: don’t take money from intelligence services and expect that you can get away with giving little in return. They will get you executed.
So we can conclude that the German and French intelligence agencies are worse than Ewan McGregor.
LikeLike
Trying to create romantic fiction that follows modern rules about dating is going to be a bit of a challenge.
Pursuer: Do you want to go out to the (insert date idea here) on Friday night?
Pursuee: No. I’m not really into you and want to limit my interactions with you to what I have to deal with in public because we work together.
Pursuer: Thats fine. I respect your choice.
Roll credits.
Fiction has requirements that real life doesn’t. A sort of persistent chase that could be problematic in real life might be necessary in fiction because you won’t have any movie or novel otherwise. Seeing a couple fall in love or get together seems to be more interesting to the audience than seeing them interact as a couple. TvTropes even has a Trope about this. Therefore, you sometimes need some sort of persistent chase to make the movie work.
LikeLiked by 1 person