I would posit that the phenomena they’re describing–gossiping, passive-aggressive, back-stabbing, shaming, and appeals to 3rd parties (hey-la, hey-la, my boyfriend’s back)–represents the worst kind of feminine social striving. If an honor culture full of duels, blood-feuds, and vendettas is the ugly, barbarous version of male social interactions, this ‘cry victim and try to sick a mob on my social rivals,’ ala the UVA rape hoax, is the female equivalent. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the increasing sex ratios on college campuses, but it’d be nice if level-headed adults would recognize this behavior for what it is and avoid indulging it rather than actively egging it on, as many campus administrators seem to do.
I think that this is an under-explored topic, because people are afraid to touch it. But I do believe that the political culture changes when women can vote and that the college culture changes when women are in the majority. It would be surprising if all of the changes are for the better, just as it would be surprising if all of the changes are for the worse.
I found in business that I felt uncomfortable in meetings that were nearly all male or nearly all female. The dynamics of both types of meetings bothered me, in ways that I found difficult to articulate. I want neither Randle McMurphy nor Nurse Ratched.
I believe that men and women tend to differ on the Big 5 personality characteristic known as “agreeableness.” For (low-agreeable) men, disagreement can be exciting and competitive (“wanna bet?”). (High-agreeable) women prefer not to have disagreement. Perhaps I am uncomfortable with the meetings that are dominated by males, because they strike me as overly confident and aggressive. Yet I am uncomfortable with the meetings dominated by females, because I feel that I cannot freely express a dissident point of view.
My guess most people are uncomfortable with situations in which they are not used to. Growing up in California 1980 – 1990s, I got used to living in a very multicultural soceity so I was used to meetings that people had all kinds of backgrounds. Then I went to a small Midwest meeting in 1998 and was uncomfortable that the entire gathering was for white people.
Look at the current debates about Illegal Immigration. The loudest voices against immigration are states that have the least foreign immigration like Iowa, New Hampshire and many Southern states. It is not California here.
I’d check my premises on the Southern States being a loud voice against immigration, but having not experienced it. I don’t have any raw numbers, but do any traveling through agricultural areas of the South, and you will see plenty of presence and impact.
Also, I’ve never been to California, and I’m sure it is nice. But why is it nice? It seems like most things policy-wise and culture-wise is exactly what places like The South don’t want, and not just because of unfamiliarity. Also, get back with me when you have upwards of 40% African American and then Californians can lecture me on diversity (and being around academia, if aggregated I additionally work with more Chinese and Indians, not to mention Europeans, Russians, etc. than whites). It is always odd to me when people say “see, it’s not a disaster” when most people aren’t saying it would be a total disaster, just that they don’t want it. Being a libertarian, I wouldn’t favor mandates and restrictions to achieve my aesthetics, but Californians do.
Not sure what you’re talking about when you say “get back to me” because surely you aren’t pretending the South is more diverse than California? California is low on blacks, but only in comparison to Hispanics and Asians.
“It is not California here.”
That would be the California that tried to restrict services to illegal immigrants in the 90s, and that tried to ban gay marriage as recently as 2008?
On immigration, in any event, California is forcibly inundated with immigrants. The natives aren’t particularly friendly to the idea, as many articles demonstrate.
Yeah, that is exactKY what I’m talking about.You guys seem to think you have something to tell us,about diversity. And like I said, we have a lit of Hispanics and Asians. You just have all Hispanics and Asians.
And don’t get me started on all the women we have!
Btw, refer back to the original comment for the context. Basically that it is ironic that states unlike California are more anti-immigration. I’m just not sure that is all that ironic.
“Perhaps I am uncomfortable with the meetings that are dominated by males, because they strike me as overly confident and aggressive. Yet I am uncomfortable with the meetings dominated by females, because I feel that I cannot freely express a dissident point of view.”
Perhaps from this discomfort comes growth. At least in this century you have the chance to experience alternatives to the meetings that are 100% male. Absent such an experience this particular insight may never have occurred to you.
I think the rise of feminist culture is definitely a positive for two reasons, slightly opposite one another:
1). Typical ones which are stated elsewhere, even though I don’t mood affiliate with the women’s rights movement
2). The excesses of women’s pride will eventually lurch social norms towards more rationality about what the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two sexes actually are.
#1 has to do with the fact that we probably didn’t have enough of it for a long time. #2 has to do with the fact that viewpoints associated with the movement will get more traction than they deserve and the corresponding counter-movement will serve up more appropriate viewpoints to what it got wrong.
Of course all sea changes of opinion have excess, but they usually produce kernels of wisdom that embed themselves into daily consciousness.
The only problem is that we don’t know where we are on the sea.
I don’t think it’s because of the gender mix at all. That’s a coincidence.
Parents and teachers (and increasingly law enforcement) forbid, break up, and punish verbal and physical fights between children. What you might all “self-help dispute resolution” amongst minors is largely prohibited these days. This is as much for the benefit of the authority figures as it is for the children. We assert jurisdiction when we tell the kids, “If you’ve got a problem with him or her, you don’t scream or kick, you come to me, and I’ll settle it”
Then when they bring forward their complaints, we tell them whether the perceived slights either warrant retribution or are too de minimus to bother about – that there are some inconsequential social annoyances that are simply part of life and one must either learn to cope with them, avoid them, and/or develop enough social savvy to minimize their occurrence.
If we put something in this trivial category, and tell the kids they are still not allowed to fight or they’ll get in big trouble, then they do one of the above three things, and something in the nature of human psychology even prevents them from having an out-of-proportion emotional experience in the first place if they calculate there is no point and nothing to gain socially or otherwise from making such a display. “Sticks and stones …” and they go about their day without these hypersensitive hair-triggers.
On the other hand, when we signal that certain kinds of complaints that were once trivial and insignificant are now extremely serious, that we will give them a hearing, that we will presume all accusations are true, and that we will persecute and throw the book at these offending ‘wrongdoers’ at the lowest standard of evidence, then we are going to “define offensiveness up” and create the kinds of incentive environment which just guarantees a growing avalanche of these claims.
The reason this might seem to be a gender-related phenomenon is because of the kinds of different optimal strategies employed by both genders in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, instincts of which of course still manifest themselves in the psychological tendencies of the modern descendants of those ancient ancestors.
In the ancestral world, the huge male upper-body strength advantage and a winner-take-all lek-mating-environment meant that the optimal male strategy was usually a high-risk, high-reward one of direct confrontation. The optimal female strategy, on the other hand, was usually social-alliance with other females, and appeal to ‘authority’ and the strength of her male mates or kin as enforcers against any offenses or threats to her interests.
In the tightly-behaviorally-controlled environments of today, we make male-style direct conflict all but illegal. That means ‘female-style’ appeals to higher authority are all that is left. In the not-too-distant past, however, we were not just more tolerant of the boys taking it outside and duking it out, we only permitted such appeals to authority to be made in the most egregious circumstance. But now that everything physical or even verbal if it’s ‘threatening’ enough will get anyone charged with assault or harassment, and the scope of actionable complaints have exploded, we are seeing appeals to authority multiple like cancer cells.
If that resembles the optimal ancestral female strategy, it is only because the state and other institutions are in the position of Big Man who is so much stronger than anyone else that what he is willing to hear and enforce is able to define the nature of all social relations.
Actually it is worse. Bullying is tolerated, tuned out, denied and covered up. Defending yourself is punished.
I agree with most of this. I would just add that I think this very much does resemble optimal female social strategy and so, no surprise, many of them take to it like a duck takes to water, which is precisely why these appeals to authority multiply like cancer, as you aptly put it.
Also, as Andrew’s comment above is getting at, the problem is not simply an over-reliance on authority. The problem is a cunning person can weaponize that authority against social rivals or. completely innocent third parties when the bar for what constitutes an offense or transgression is set so low. It’s my belief that women are more likely. to do this than men, although that is just based on personal observation.
Furthermore, I would note that as complaints multiply, it becomes harder to segregate legitimate complaints from mere whining.
Ironically, this may also hamper efforts to increase diversity and social integration on college campuses, because who wants to hang around people who are likely to make you the subject of a Title IX investigation after an offhand comment about ethnicity/gender/nationality?
This is a huge, old, and well-known problem and yet I haven’t seen any proposals on how to deal with it. Maybe people are invested in insisting it’s not a problem.
So that creates big incentives for regulatory arbitrage – find structures that can avoid this but with some legal loophole exception that can avoid getting in trouble over it.
I think it probably means that when certain projects require groups of people to really mesh as a team with strong morale, cooperation, team-spirit, cohesion, mutual trust, and bonds of loyalty and camaraderie, and no worries about this sort of social drama, (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”) those projects are best accomplished in small start-ups far away from the HR-matters-dominated corporate culture of large bureaucratic organizations, that can’t get away with the sort of personnel selection necessary to optimize for this kind of social dynamic.
So it would make sense for large bureaucratic corporations to outsource these functions to small start-ups who can get that mojo going to do the initial groundwork and development, and then just buy out the finished product once its mature enough to go prime-time.
In a way, the huge prices paid for such start-up businesses may be a kind of premium on work these large businesses cannot easily do on their own because of legal concerns.
My wife works in a disproportionately female profession. She is a progressive feminist, but nonetheless she has come to believe that heavily female workplaces have communication problems in line with Arnold’s hypothesis.
I’d be curious to see some actual data.
I work in a disproportionately male profession and I have not regularly had the problem Arnold hypothesizes. However, it seems plausible.
I agree it’s an under-explored area.
I had another interaction with a woman going apeshit on me. I know this sounds sexist, but it wasn’t until I looked back on life and I surprised myself with how many times it has happened. Guys are jerks, to be sure, but women are…different. I wonder if they aren’t so much agreeable as they punish disagreeableness when they feel they can.
Two modes of discourse: debate as sport
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/12/intellectual-discourse-taking.html
I am very different on the social medias than I am here, or YouTube (oh boy!). I don’t think the solution is the group thought solution of removing anonymity. That is not an even-handed incentive. Bullies and panderers don’t give a care.
One could as well term this a transition from a culture of tolerance to a culture of respect, where contemptuous tolerance must be replaced by respect which is a problem when there is none. Then respect must be learned or dissembled under political correctness. But is it fear of freedom to express contempt or the loss of respect contempt garners that is the real complaint? There is a difference between disagreement and disagreeable.