Terracotta
2mo ago
I think I specified male engineers. (And in all fairness, many of the older ones I interact with IRL are great people; it's mostly the remarks one sees from nerd-id'd young and middle-aged men on sites like this that have recently made me feel very sorry for the young women trying to work in those spaces.)
However, we weren't discussing whether current male engineers should feel bad about their character, their social skills or their workplace culture. I was questioning your reasoning above that because somewhat fewer women than men currently choose to enter engineering as a profession (an observation consistent with a wide variety of underlying causes, including that talented women have more options or that the current cohort of men in the field is unpleasant to interact with), therefore we can conclude (a) engineering is inherently, as you term it, a "men's role", (b) that biological females can't do engineering, and an all-female society would have inadequate personnel to complete its necessary engineering tasks. (That's setting aside the broader claim you were trying to support, which was, if I read it correctly, that since engineers are also so incredibly valuable, the current gender balance of engineering partly justifies the existence of patriarchal social norms.) Could you say more about the reasoning that you feel justifies (a) and (b), if I'm getting those correct?
Terracotta
2mo ago
If "Amazons" is just ordinary women who don't need no man, it seems very unlikely they could do these roles... because if they could they would in greater quantities than they are.
This is very weird logic. To take a parallel case: 75% of pediatricians and 90% of speech-language pathologists are female, give or take. Therefore on a male-only island children would die in droves, and stammerers wither into mutism, because obviously men can't perform these roles, or else they would do so in greater numbers?
I'd predict far greater numbers of women entering engineering in an Amazon society, because you're removing the substantial downside that is having to work with male engineers.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I think people are pretty good at giving credit for real, visible contributions, where the reality is clear and concrete (as opposed to a statistical construct, a historical artifact, or an abstract case that somebody could maybe make if they wanted to).
In the subsistence-agriculture conditions that birthed The Patriarchy, and in a world where physical strength is a valuable resource overall, it seems extremely clear why an able-bodied adult man wrangling a yoke of oxen, carrying stones for a wall or fighting with hand weapons is both taking on extra personal risk and rendering irreplaceable value for his family, and why the usefulness of having him in that role might justify investing it with extra privilege versus the females and immature males of his household.
Fast-forward to modern industrial/financial democracy, and sure, construction workers and other male-dominated industrial roles are great and necessary, but:
(a) superior brute strength is no longer the money-maker, thus no longer the source of high status, that it once was;
(b) availability of mechanical aids and automated tools means there's at most a small disparity between male and female capacity to perform those roles (realistically, a country of Amazons could do all their plumbing and engineering just fine)
(c) ergonomics and safety tech improvements mean that these roles are much less dramatically taxing/ uncomfortable, and that men performing them no longer take on substantial daily risk of bodily injury and death, vs. in a preindustrial context
(d) society is much less casually violent, so the utility of physical strength is restricted to a very limited number of workplaces, not experienced daily in street life; and finally
(e) even women married to physical laborers experience concrete benefit from the labor only in the form of a paycheck, which could just as easily be derived from white-collar work; hence there's no particular reason to regard the man as rendering irreplaceable value to the family through his biological form.
Ultimately, I think humans reason about respect in extremely concrete, embodied ways, and with open self-interest. Making some abstract argument that engineers are broadly good to have around, and that like 80% of engineers are men therefore all men deserve some credit for the existence of engineers (?!), is simply not the viscerally compelling case for male privilege that "need this tree chopped down and carried over there? great, I'll get on it" seems to have been.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I don't know about that. Ever since we bet on interchangeability of men and women, we can't seem to reproduce ourselves and have to make up for the shortfall by importing people from more fertile parts of the world, hoping that interchangeability works out this time.
Industrial processes work best with other industrial processes, so I guess it's a race to industrialize that biology as we have various other forms of organic production. I'm not saying I'm a fan, but it's weird for a community as virtualized, urban and seemingly techno-optimist as the Motte to come down so hard in favor of artisanal methods in this single area.
The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did. Watch some living-history documentaries about preindustrial farm life, or read about crime in early cities and roads, and it becomes extremely obvious why it would be helpful to have someone around who's taller with a lot of upper-body strength and greater potential for physical aggression, and why a smaller-bodied person might willingly relinquish a certain amount of autonomy to retain that alliance. Once men deliberately technologize themselves out of the hard-labor-and-physical-defense game, to which their biology is naturally suited, it becomes much easier for women to look at their desk-jockey vidya-playing husbands and brothers and ask why they get to demand so much and give so little in return.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Ironically it turned out that it was far less fallacious than the genderist argument. For all the attempts at "gender neutral upbringing" girls still tend to zero-in on girlie princess stuff, and boys on trucks and whatnot. Despite "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob" being cancellable and outright illegal, women still earn less money than men, etc.
I mean, I'm aware of many of the checkmate-libtard! style memes on these topics, but a couple weirdos failing at their halfhearted attempts to raise ungendered children in a very gendered social world, or some women continuing to lose out in pay negotiations despite their bosses' professions of fair treatment, says virtually nothing one way or another about the optimum extent to which a well-run society should embrace, enforce or renounce differential treatment of individuals by sex. I don't really know what the "genderist argument" is, since that's not how anybody seems to label themselves in these conversation.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Simply having the sex-vs-gender distinction implies nothing about the relationship between the two, just that they're different things worth analyzing separately, like genotype vs phenotype or wealth vs. income.
I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman. Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses). Similarly, there's an extremely good case for a presumption of blank-slatism as the best working approach to prevent grave injustice on an individual level.
Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens; and runaway gender-performance competition (like the kind the US saw in the 50s, or arguably is seeing today) is a costly Moloch-style trap that is hard to escape without externally-enforced change. So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."
That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy, which runs: sexual dimorphism is natural, therefore (a) all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change; and (b) a society's sex-specific stereotypes are "natural" and nature is good, so women should try to perform their society's conventional stereotypes of womanhood (and men: manhood), and those who less closely match those stereotypes are unnatural and bad.
Basically, trying to circumvent the fallacies in "But you have to dress your XX baby in pink because pink is naturally for girls!"/ "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob because he supports a family, that's just the nature of things."
Unfortunately, I think this usage ran afoul of the trans folks' desire to deliberately re-conflate the natural and the social in order to argue that their social performance of gender stereotypes was, indeed, "natural," therefore biological, unchangeable and good. So whether there's a definition distinct from "sex" on that side of the aisle, I couldn't say.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1.
This seems like an oddly idealistic narrative of the origins of female franchise. I'd understood that early votes-for-women initiatives in the US were aimed at preserving the political power of the (gender-balanced) elite classes in the face of growing (mostly male) immigrant populations? I'm less familiar with the history of the vote in the UK, but given that many landholding women had local suffrage long before, which was removed with the expansion of male suffrage at the start of the 19th century, I presume most of those developments were similarly driven by cynical power-consolidation politics rather than by honest persuasion changing hearts.
Power is power. There is no interesting scenario "oooh what if Group A was more violent but Group B had more members, and they realized their interests were opposed, who would win" because both numbers and capacity for effective violence are just forms of power, and by definition the most powerful group has already won-- is, in fact, the group orchestrating the conflict, defining the teams and making it permissible to think about the opposition of interests in the first place.
As regards the gender gap in political affiliation, the actual power-holders are clearly not the anxious Millennial women who dutifully parrot the ACAB memes that turn up on their Instagram feeds; they're the mixed-gender, likely majority-male Instagram board and leadership, plus all the others of their class, who decided for obscure reasons of their own that those memes were fine and dandy to boost in feeds in the first place, then to bake into the rest of our tech-driven reality. Those are the folks to watch, and if 4chan ever does go to real-life war against the Emilies, it'll be when those people decide it would be a convenient development, not a moment before. But I tend to agree with the person upthread who said that this line of thinking is mostly an excuse to fantasize impotently about punishing the people who won't sleep with them.
Terracotta
2mo ago
In a state of nature, sure. But in a society, everybody is expected to muster the self-control to behave sociably to others in public spaces like the workplace, as long as others are behaving conventionally in return (and all the clothing mentioned in this thread has been extremely middle-class conventional; nobody's asking people to roll with assless chaps or nudism).
I think the problem is in assuming that because certain fear and arousal instincts have a biological basis, they're therefore radically "unavoidable," indeed unalterable, and justify making outsize demands for accommodation from others. It didn't make sense back when anxious students were demanding full veto power over triggering college syllabus material, and it doesn't make a lot of sense in this context, either.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Affirmative! Sorry, was writing in haste above.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I believe OP mentioned braless women on the commute, not at work; the work attire I've seen criticized here was tight AKA "skinny" pants and tops with cleavage. But if you're asking if all these garments can be worn strictly with a view to looking presentable according to current fashion standards, then the answer is emphatically yes. Check out reddit femalefashionadvice and various women's clothing blogs, and you'll hear women trying to use clothes to communicate things like effortless, comfy cool (the braless or bralette tank, loose crocheted cardigan, 90s jeans look) and tailored polish (the skinny office pants look, which you'll be pleased to note has been replaced with swingy trousers). Sometimes women think about sexual display for date-night outfits, but in my decades of fashion discussions I have literally never heard or read a natal female remarking excitedly that an everyday outfit displays her nipples or shows how her breasts move, and will thus doubtless inspire random men to imagine emotionlessly fucking her as they pass by on the train.
On the bra thing specifically, visible bra straps (unavoidable under some tops) have at various points been considered un-presentable, and I've heard women express relief that the braless option solves that fashion problem.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I think I was responding to this bit:
But when you see a woman wearing a super cut low tank top with a pushup bra and high-heeled pumps, and the absolute tightest pants she could possibly wriggle into... cmon. That's sexy. [...] It's more like a mild discomfort. It's just a feeling that never, ever goes away when you're surrounded by women like that at work and in daily life, constantly,
I'm not seeing the concern in the passage above that one's strictly chaste, "accidental" and "innocuous" glances toward women might be misinterpreted as sexual; it seems more about someone who is annoyed that they get a constant arousal response, to an "uncomfortable" extent, from any visuals that show the shape of a woman's body? Thus, the opening of this conversation was about whether it's fair to complain about constantly getting aroused around boobs, while also deliberately entraining that exact response pattern, and keeping oneself in a state of artificial sexual hyper-sensitivity, through regular masturbation to porn.
If it's pivoting instead to a conversation about how women overestimate the perviness of the male gaze, then I don't see how clothing is relevant one way or the other. Men can look at women lustfully no matter what they're wearing, so presumably a woman could also level a wrongful accusation of ogling regardless of her dress.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Again, I'm not saying that there isn't a hardwired component to sexual arousal. But organisms are very good at using environmental information to upregulate and downregulate behavioral programs depending on what's most reward-rich at the moment. The dynamics of this are pretty consistent; remove a reward and there's an extinction burst of increased drive to regain it, then after a while that program gets turned down as temporarily no longer profitable.
So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them, BUT also a primary leisure activity is protracted rubbing of their genitals while they look at a bunch of images of random women in postures that suggest sexual opportunity, then I feel like they clearly aren't doing all they could to persuade their bodies to turn down the constant sex-seeking.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I'm just saying that women's bodies have greater and more pronounced visibly sexual qualities than men's,
I agree with fribble that this is a statement about the viewer's sexuality, not about women's bodies. Women are not pleasing, others are pleased to imagine the things they could do to them. Women are not sexual, they are sexualized. (We also need more gay dudes in the conversation, I guess.)
Re: social consequences, here's a weak parallel case. One reasonably common hardwired female response to a man's body is fear. Men are on some level intimidating to be around, with their height, thick muscles and wide shoulders. To a much smaller person, male bodies telegraph, accurately, the potential to inflict violent physical harm and domination, regardless of how nice the guy actually is. This is why many little kids are instinctively afraid of strange men, before they're socialized to suppress that feeling. Some women find it attractive, particularly in a context where it could be aligned with their own interests. But the physicality of an unaligned male is generally at least a little viscerally scary.
Male fashion is also designed to emphasize and aestheticize those same traits of physical dominance. It accentuates shoulders, chest and neck, making the body look squarer and more muscular. Much male fashion even mimics the working clothes of violent occupations, like military uniforms and gangster clothing! If you're a guy and have an outfit that you think looks really sharp, odds are good that some part of the design, deliberately or not, is making you look more intimidating.
Now, suppose you're wearing your favorite perfectly normal mall-purchased outfit to work, and a woman in the office objects. It's anxiety-causing for her, your big scary body in these strength-emphasizing clothing makes her feel on edge all the time and limits her ability to act freely around you. Why should you be allowed to dress to frighten other people? If you were really considerate, you'd wear something softer, frillier, maybe with a cute animal print or something to signal your harmlessness.
That woman's biological fear response to your body is just as real and unpleasant as your biological arousal response to a sexy coworker. But you didn't dress to be "scary" to her! Probably you didn't think of her reaction at all. You just wanted to look presentable within the normal idiom that gendered fashion currently provides for you.
Does it seem more reasonable that you should go home and put on something frillier? Or that she should get therapy to gain more control over these maladaptive biological responses?
Are you under the impression that historical modesty and sexiness exists on a simple linear scale from burqas to tank tops? Probably there's a universal thrill with full view of certain parts of the anatomy, but past that, modesty norms and male perceptions of "sexiness" are very much in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of extremely "conservative, old-fashioned societies" in equatorial regions have far less covered-up norms of dress than we do. Public breastfeeding used to be far more common in the West, while there's a huge amount of historical hand-wringing about the immodesty of women showing their sexy, sexy free-flowing hair, which today men view in their co-workers without experiencing unmanageable erections.
My point is that there is underlying instinct, but then there's a huge amount of situational conditioning on top of that. If a man complains that he feels uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated by the tops of a woman's breasts at work, then goes home every night and deliberately stimulates himself while looking at images of the tops of women's breasts, then all I'm saying is that he's clearly the dog AND Pavlov in that situation.
Terracotta
2mo ago
If you accept that fashion is signaling, then the overall move might be less toward "informality" than toward subtler and harder-to-fake signals of wealth and status.
Formal clothing controls and covers your body, allowing most people to look presentable if they can buy approximately correct garments and keep them in good repair. By contrast, sweatpants look good almost exclusively on women who can afford to spend a lot of time at the gym and yoga studio (or later, the plastic surgeon's), and who know how to do understated high-quality makeup with expensively well-maintained skin and hair; everybody else just looks schlubby and run-down, like the poors they are.
I've heard a similar argument made about the transition from corsets to the "freedom" of bras and elastic waistbands: every body fits neatly into an hourglass-figure dress when wearing a corset, but now we have to stress and starve ourselves to manufacture de facto corsets out of our own abdominal muscles, yay. And I suspect stockings, bras and other undergarments probably work the same way. Lissome twenty-somethings, and the class of older ladies who drop $$$ on sclerotherapy and implants, look fine in bare legs and bralettes; not so much the rest of us.
Terracotta
2mo ago
A Bacon allusion in a bra debate is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to the Motte. Well played.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I hadn't considered the role of anxiety before, but there is a match with the kind of edgy, restless, compulsive feeling that comes after eating a bunch of shitty nutrition-free junk-food.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Serious question: I know nothing about you and the guy posting above you, but if y'all are (like seemingly every other male around here) going home and jacking off to images of breasts for hours every night, aren't you somewhat responsible for greatly strengthening the existing circuitry that links that visual cue to a state of arousal and sexual reward?
Sure, it's natural for men to find bodies sexy, just as it's natural for that lady to find chocolate delicious. But if I knew that your coworker went home every night and deliberately spent hours burning chocolate-scented candles while watching candy-tasting shows, baking brownies and licking them then throwing them away while fantasizing resentfully about what it'd be like to eat them... I'd have a lot less sympathy with her complaints that thoughts of forbidden chocolate were ruining her focus at work the next day.
Terracotta
2mo ago
and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women.
This is not your main point, but it's always seemed like a particularly BS part of the whole redpill evopsych narrative to me. Men may have evolved instincts to take advantage of conditions where promiscuity is possible, sure. But that's not the same as them "doing better" under those conditions.
I recall a discussion here pointing out that the modal historical outcome for superfluous weak males is not frustrated inceldom, but early violent death. Given that a monogamous pairbonding system vs. a lothario/harem system necessarily offer identical expected value in terms of offspring, and that the harem almost certainly offers lower expected value in terms of personal pleasure owing to the lothario's diminishing marginal returns from screwing multiple partners, I don't understand how men in these spaces seem to regard promiscuity as some kind of inherently manly value that's unfairly gatekept in our women's world.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I think I was arguing that rapists and predators are by definition Bad. Also that even rich elite clans usually have a couple of members and hangers-on whose individual genetics would not be a valuable addition to anyone's family tree.
I'm not aware of any helpful published surveys supporting this, but to my mind the counter-narrative where Southern patriarchs eagerly guard the honor of their random enslaved field hands is making the more extraordinary claim. Who would even dare to come forward with a rape accusation in that context? Given the overall attitude to women of that class, why would they be believed and avenged rather than punished for causing trouble and/or assumed to have themselves been the seducers?
I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres, and that there were overall more situations of modest households owning 1-2 slaves than of big aristocratic plantations? In any case, whatever their strengths in bravado or disease resistance or whatever it took to succeed economically in the Old South, by definition the failsons who will rape the most servant girls are not the ones carrying the best genes for impulse control and orderly prosociality.
It also seems plausible that even the enslaved women on big estates would be highly vulnerable to opportunistic sexual assault from random employees and other poor whites in the vicinity.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Through generations of sexual assault and limited-opportunity marriage, that sub-population was also forced to incorporate substantial genetic contributions from the most brutal and impulse-driven individuals among the white Borderers in their vicinity, a group that had overall been actively pre-selected for violence and low conscientiousness. Given the way white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore, I haven't heard anyone rule out the possibility that the whole thing is just those Borderer genes, full stop.
Terracotta
3mo ago
Actual woman here (although not the woman in question), and my read is that although you had the best of intentions, this one was kinda on you. Why did you kiss her the second time in the same evening without any positive feedback from her, and the third time after substantial negative feedback from her (saying she'd like to call an Uber, mentioning too many people buying her drinks, telegraphing tiredness)?
First kiss definitively declared your sexual interest and established you as a confident guy who's comfortable taking the initiative. At that point, initiating more kissing, unless she's first initiated some reciprocal physical move toward you entirely of her own accord, adds no new information and risks tilting it over to "dude is overly aggressive and may or may not think he's bought himself a BJ with some figurines." You seem to be interpreting her passive compliance with handholding/ getting in the car/ being kissed/ etc. as encouragement, but plenty of women and especially preacher's-daughters-turned-leftist-activists were intensively socialized to be polite and go along when people demand interaction in social situations, particularly after somebody gave them a present. Then, at least in the normal social argot of the girls I know, "God I'm tired/ I've had too many drinks" is an expression of vulnerability, cue to visibly set aside your own goals and switch into gallant caretaking mode, "Cool, and you have a busy day tomorrow, so let's get you home safe, can I call an Uber? Is your friend around?" and then chastely load her in the cab with a squeeze of the hand and text the next day to say you enjoyed the evening, like Tom Hanks would do in a 90s romcom.
Note, this is a perfectly honest misunderstanding and I'm not trying to be harsh, more to address your fatalistic "why am I not allowed to do things regular people do??" This doesn't seem like anything wrong with you or her, just colliding sets of instincts, like you might see any day with a toddler feeding squirrels.
The problem is the odd presumption that the only possible reasons for not performing an activity must be (a) artificial bar, or (b) innate incapacity. But again, a glance at virtually any other big group difference highlights how silly that is.
For instance, you haven't responded to the point about >3:1 F:M ratios in pediatrics or SLP; can I take it that you agree men are inherently incapable of delivering language therapy?
The US produces only 1/10 the steel that China does; presumably that's because metallurgy is a strongly Asian pursuit, and without their help we would have to build most of our skyscrapers out of mud?
Only 15% of bartenders are people with a college degree. So it seems, given that no law prohibits B.A.s from taking bartending positions, that something about college must erode one's ability to create mixed drinks? Populate a luxury space station with a bunch of Ivy League grads, and they'll all be flailing around smashing the vodka bottles and trying to drink from the soda sprayer.
Re: engineers, like I said, I know some lovely older engineers, so I don't want to rag on the profession too much. I can speculate that low-EQ professions would be canaries in the coalmine for for any kind of emerging populationwide issues with male socialization, though, much more than e.g. medicine or law, where men go through more of a filter for social competence; and some of the truly hair-raising comments by self-professed engineers on themotte and elsewhere make me worry that this is happening. But the gender disparity could equally well be explainable by engineering being a profession with only middling salary and declining prestige, limited flexibility and autonomy, and low levels of evident connection to the values that women are currently socialized to care about (like "contributing to the community" and "helping the less fortunate").
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