{In my limited experiences as a hetero male} Women identify their breasts as important or not important less by the size of their breasts than by their bodyweight. In this model, women prefer to be skinny, but if they can't reasonably say they are skinny it is better to be "curvy" with big tits than be a pudgeball. So a woman with small tits will still identify herself as curvy (emphasize her breasts) if she's fat, but a woman with large tits will identify as skinny even if she has large breasts. A woman with medium-sized breasts will emphasize or de-emphasize how nice they are based on her body weight, a mostly-unrelated variable.
Guys to the upper left, more athletic than smart, identify as jocks; guys to the lower right of the line, smarter than they are athletic, identify as nerds. But the result is that many guys who identify as nerds aren't actually as smart as guys who identify as jocks. And many guys who identify as nerds are actually a lot stronger than guys who identify as jocks. Which attribute you identify with has less to do with what you have than with what you lack, it's the balance between the two that makes the difference.
So I think, to cite SA on themotte, the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic." So maybe it's like skinny vs curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic."
I think that's the default anti-woke explanation for this kind of behaviour, or as I said in the post itself: "The default explanation among the woke-sceptical is that such people are 'snowflakes': they want to be seen as special and unique, but are hampered in this goal by the critical defect of not actually possessing any special or unique traits. Hence, they dress up their perfectly ordinary traits using language which implies that they are far more unusual than they really are."
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
So maybe it's like skinny vs. curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
There's been some recent discussion on this forum about how, prior to coming out, trans women tend not to be exemplars of "peak masculinity" (and vice versa for trans men), so identifying as trans could be thought of as a sort of "you can't fire me, I quit!" response when a person realises that they're losing a game which they were entered into against their will.
I don't dispute this hypothesis, and it certainly jibes with my experience of trans people I know personally. But I don't think this is necessarily true of non-binary people. As I said in the post, if you've been raised in an environment in which even banal and unremarkable instances of gender non-conformity are interpreted as red flags for gender dysphoria, you could be forgiven for believing that only "peak masculine" men are actually men (and vice versa). Whereas twenty years ago we would've said "Alice doesn't wear makeup and likes playing rugby, but she's still a woman - she's not a man, or something other than man or woman."
Or if you've consumed a great deal of porn (which almost exclusively depicts fictional characters with hypersexual/nymphomaniac sex drives), you might come away with the inaccurate impression that the average person is always rearing to go, and hence that your (perfectly normal) level of sex drive is below average - something intermediate between sexual and asexual, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. Hence "grey-asexual". It's the social-justice equivalent of men feeling inferior about the size of their perfectly average dicks because porn has given them a skewed impression of what the average dick looks like.
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
Sure, and I think that's a good point, some people will always take the rhetoric too seriously and break the kayfabe. But it's still downstream of feeling that X is something that needs to be labeled about oneself, or that Y is a valid axis on which to build one's identity. There's a lot of groundwork that goes into those assumptions.
It's sort of the Nietzsche-an idea of Achilles acting without thinking to satisfy his desires and labeling that the good, versus the slave morality of overthinking and labeling everything.
I think what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Gray-Asexuals aren't acting in bad faith when they do so, they legitimately think that label describes them. What I'm saying is that their need to label it is downstream of their attributes or lacks. I don't think there's anything consciously false about their cope, but it's still a cope. The need for an explanation for their own misery is at the root of their need to explain themselves and identify themselves.
I'm stepping into a tangent off the 2nd shitty sketch, but do you agree with the "middle school bullied kid = loser" paradigm ?
I'm sure plenty of Motte-folks got bullied through school. So did I. I have my reasonable theories on why it happened to me. But, I don't agree with the "loser" paradigm. In my school, losers were ignored, quickly formed their own group and then stopped interacting with the rest of the class.
What was your 'bullying' journey like and what do you think put you in the cross hairs?
I'm stepping into a tangent off the 2nd shitty sketch, but do you agree with the "middle school bullied kid = loser" paradigm ?
I disagree Middle School Bullied kid is automatically a Loser under the definition I gave of a loser (low IQ, low athleticism). But sometimes he is, and sometimes he isn't; more often than not kids in the Loser quadrant but north of the 45* are bullies to kids I put in the True Nerd quadrant. And hell, from what I've seen bullying can equally be targeted at a star athlete for racial reasons or a valedictorian for jealousy reasons or anybody at all for no reason at all. Being bullied doesn't really tell you much about someone, especially absent the context of their school.
I offered that example for someone with neither athleticism nor intelligence because it's hard to think of a famous one off hand other than boo-light culture war examples; even Leo Bloom doesn't really fit, but the best I could think of in a minute. One of the problems of thinking about people at a population level is that that quadrant becomes practically invisible to us, we don't even think about them. The primary point of the loser quadrant is to demonstrate the idea that people might identify as nerds or jocks, while not actually being very athletic or very smart, it's just the best they've got to go with. A lot of kids with average-to-below-average intelligence latch onto the "bullied misunderstood brilliant nerd" narrative to salve their wounds, when in reality some of their bullies are smarter than they are. It's a sad, blackpilled fact of life.
What was your 'bullying' journey like and what do you think put you in the cross hairs?
I wouldn't say I was particularly bullied in middle/high school, I was more in the category of "ignored." I was known for being hyper bookish overly political and anti-war, I wore an m65 surplus army jacket to school every day and had long hair; the stereotypical middle school bullies mockingly nicknamed me "Weed Man," ironically I wouldn't touch the stuff until after I was married, but "Weed Man" beat the other nerds on the bus they nicknamed things like "Fucking Faggot" and "Shitbreath" right? Most of my isolation was, in retrospect, self-inflicted; I latched on to identities and narratives that required me to play the loner bookish nerd, if I were min-maxing another playthrough I would have skipped out on playing WoW or MTG or going to death metal concerts at dive bars in middle/high school and joined the football team instead when they didn't cut anyone, but at the time I sort-of thought joining the football team required you to be an asshole moron which I didn't want to be. I would figure it out at 18 or so, and from there my life has been much better. I was flat out bad at being a teenager.
I apologize if the use of the term "Loser" had negative or traumatic associations for your past. What term would you use to refer to people who really have nothing going for them?
Just like introversion-extroversion or sex drive, gender is a spectral trait which follows a Gaussian distribution: occupying the extremes is rare, most people fall somewhere in the middle.
I could not disagree with this more. Gender absolutely does not follow a Gaussian distribution. By this claim, you would have a hard time determining what gender most people are. And yet I can assure you, that barring cherry-picked exceptional cases, the median human will have an exceptionally easy time sorting photographs of people into "male" and "female". What gender is, is a bimodal distribution.
Incidentally, the same criticism applies to your forced normalization of all of the other labels you are criticizing - for people's usages of terms like 'ambivert' to to make sense, it is sufficient that they believe its a bimodal distribution, not a discrete one. (And this goes doubly for sexual attraction, where 'bisexual' is definitely not the majority category)
Finally, knowing that somebody is average in a trait is useful information, because it collapses your uncertainty about that person. It's not the same thing as describing an elephant as gray.
the median human will have an exceptionally easy time sorting photographs of people into "male" and "female"
I agree, but that's sexual dimorphism, whereas I'm talking about adherence to gender roles. It's a bit confusing because He-Man both looks like a man and fully conforms to a classical archetype of how a man is supposed to behave (vice versa for Barbie), but I'm only really talking about the extent to which people adhere to gender roles, not what they look like. I was trying to make this distinction clear in a footnote but maybe it was too ambiguous.
This obviously varies from culture to culture, but I think it's fair to say that in much of the West, few people fully conform to classical archetypes of how members of their gender are "supposed" to behave. Even leaving aside overt gender non-conformance like men wearing dresses and makeup: very few men engage in hard physical labour as their primary source of income, no one bats an eyelid at a woman drinking beer or wearing jeans, women pursuing careers in STEM are generally encouraged to do so by their peers and mentors, it's not seen as embarrassing if a man knows how to bake (or a woman doesn't).
And this goes doubly for sexual attraction, where 'bisexual' is definitely not the majority category
very few men engage in hard physical labour as their primary source of income, no one bats an eyelid at a woman drinking beer or wearing jeans, women pursuing careers in STEM are generally encouraged to do so by their peers and mentors, it's not seen as embarrassing if a man knows how to bake (or a woman doesn't).
But these are all examples of historical gender norms (though I doubt there was ever a physical labour-income norm for men) not contemporary norms.
Well yeah, that was precisely the contrast I was striking in the article, or as I said in the comment above, 'few people fully conform to classical archetypes of how members of their gender are "supposed" to behave'.
If you're arguing that "contemporary" gender norms are far more open to the point that androgyny (or something approximating it) is the rule rather than the exception, then that's literally the exact point I was arguing in the article.
though I doubt there was ever a physical labour-income norm for men
Huh? Surely you accept that, for most of human history, the overwhelming majority of men earned their income through physical labour (e.g. coal mining, carpentry, assorted agricultural activities, tree felling etc.).
If you're arguing that "contemporary" gender norms are far more open to the point that androgyny (or something approximating it) is the rule rather than the exception, then that's literally the exact point I was arguing in the article.
No, the evidence you cite is just as consistent with a change in gender norms. That doesn't mean that gender norms aren't still present and clear to people.
Huh? Surely you accept that, for most of human history, the overwhelming majority of men earned their income through physical labour (e.g. coal mining, carpentry, assorted agricultural activities, tree felling etc.).
Right, but was it a norm, let alone a gendered norm? If you look at great admired male figures in most of human history, like Achilles, Jesus, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Heracles, Caesar, King Arthur, Alexander, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates... They are distinguished mainly by just about everything except earning an income through physical labour. Fighting? Yes. Doing something physical in an adventure? Yes. Working down a mine or fixing a wheel? Hardly something for great men to do.
Among intellectuals Aristotle thought that men doing physical labour belonged with women and children in the political hirearchy: not fit for citizenship. The normative life for Aristotle was that of a leisured aristocrat, not some proletarian or peasant. Physical labour could be used to keep oneself fit and virile, or monastic labour to get closer to God, or to get out of some sticky situation (see Heracles) but it wasn't something that you were supposed to do to earn a living of all things!
Among intellectuals Aristotle thought that men doing physical labour belonged with women and children in the political hirearchy: not fit for citizenship. The normative life for Aristotle was that of a leisured aristocrat, not some proletarian or peasant. Physical labour could be used to keep oneself fit and virile, or monastic labour to get closer to God, or to get out of some sticky situation (see Heracles) but it wasn't something that you were supposed to do to earn a living of all things!
This is misunderstanding of classical antiquity attitude. It was not about "labor".
In ancient mindset, only free man, man worthy of being a citizen, was an independent man.
Who was an independent man?
Slaves were obviously dependent, had to obey their masters or else.
Wage laborers were also considered slaves who had to sell themselves every day in order to survive.
City dwelling artisans were dependent on their customers - if no one wants to buy the shoes you make, you are hosed.
The same about merchants.
In ancient mind, the only independent people were farmers living on their land - both small farmers working their land themselves and large landowners sitting in atrium and watching the slaves.
large landowners sitting in atrium and watching the slaves.
is sufficient for my purpose: there was not a general norm that hard physical labour should be one's primary source of income, which was the original claim under contestation.
No, the evidence you cite is just as consistent with a change in gender norms. That doesn't mean that gender norms aren't still present and clear to people.
Gender norms can still exist and be present at clear, and yet vary in degree of strictness. I never claimed that gender norms no longer exist, but I believe that, in the West, they are far less restrictive than in other cultures or historically.
If you look at great admired male figures in most of human history
I wasn't talking about "great admired male figures". I was talking about the overwhelming majority of men in human history, most of whom were neither great nor admired.
Fighting? Yes. Doing something physical in an adventure? Yes.
I think both of these things fall under the definition of "physical labour".
Among intellectuals Aristotle thought that men doing physical labour belonged with women and children in the political hirearchy: not fit for citizenship. The normative life for Aristotle was that of a leisured aristocrat, not some proletarian or peasant.
I don't doubt that Aristotle thought this, but that doesn't imply that the belief was universal or even widespread for most of human history: this belief could well be a luxury belief held only by intellectuals.
So, we agree that, for most of human history, most men had to earn a living through physical labour (even if certain intellectuals thought such behaviour was unbecoming). We also agree that many historical male figures considered "great" or "admirable" (such as Odysseus, Alexander, Heracles, Caesar, King Arthur) also earned a living or became famous as a result of physical labour, albeit physical labour of a different type (namely fighting, conquest, exploration etc.). I still don't feel like you've really contradicted my argument.
Lumping together fighting with handling dung is a low-resolution picture that is inadequate for understanding past norms about masculinity.
The example of great admired men was just some of the evidence that earning a living from physical labour was not, historically, seen as a norm for men. Another would be that idle landowners and royalty didn't generally use their spare time to do physical labour, although some did.
Of course, there are exceptional individuals and periods. For example, the social status of male physical labour seems to have risen in the Victorian period. I recommend reading the works of Samuel Smiles, e.g. Self-Help and Life and Labour. Part of the novelty of his books was that he was esteeming proletarian labour - not just proletarian inventors and savants, but also men at all levels who worked hard and honestly. To this day, I think there's a degree of social esteem in men earning a living from physical labour, but it is important to note that this is a recent phenomenon.
I still don't know exactly what you're getting at when you say a "norm". I appreciate that physical labour was seen by the aristocracy as something undesirable and laborious that only plebs engage in. But that's just it - it was seen as such by the aristocracy, who almost by definition are small in number relative to the human population as a whole.
It can be true that the aristocrats believe that physical labour is ignoble drudgery, and also true that the commoners believe that toiling in the fields is "real work" that requires you to get your hands dirty, unlike "women's work" that involves sitting at a desk all day. Both of these things can be true simultaneously, but because commoners are far greater in number than the aristocracy, the latter belief will be held by a far greater share of the human populace than the former.
You seem to be saying "the elites don't believe in X, therefore X isn't part of human culture and never was". But a recurrent theme of discussions in this space is that what the elites believe (or profess to believe) is often radically skew of what ordinary people believe. Modern Western elites are disproportionately likely to believe that a) male and female brains are biologically indistinguishable and any observed differences between them are solely attributable to socialisation; b) the police are unnecessary or actively detrimental to society, and hence ought to be defunded or outright abolished; c) God doesn't exist; d) homosexuality is natural and harmless.
By using your logic, I could point out that elites currently believe these things and conclude that all of humanity believes that men and women are the same, police are unnecessary, God isn't real and homosexuality should be tolerated. But doing so would give me a very skewed impression of what beliefs or norms are held by the human race as a whole, currently or historically.
I didn't claim that the attitudes of elites (and scribes, poets etc.) proved that they thought that earning a living through physical labour was considered undesirable by everyone. It does provide some evidence.
Now, what's the evidence that earning a living through physical labour was seen as a general gender norm for men in the past?
It can be true that the aristocrats believe that physical labour is ignoble drudgery, and also true that the commoners believe that toiling in the fields is "real work" that requires you to get your hands dirty, unlike "women's work" that involves sitting at a desk all day. Both of these things can be true simultaneously, but because commoners are far greater in number than the aristocracy, the latter belief will be held by a far greater share of the human populace than the former.
Where to start...
No, this has nothing in common with "traditional society". No, America seen in 1950's sitcoms was not "traditional society".
Toiling in the fields was, in traditional societies, fate of 90+% men and 90+% women (may differ due to urbanization rate). Labor of peasant woman was lighter than one of peasant men, but still hard enough it would crush any modern man, no matter how tough he imagines himself to be.
Sitting at a desk - work of scribe - was extremely prestigious and desirable work, and it was for (elite) men only.
It seems crude to map all of human expression onto a spectrum with with which to make a distribution. A major problem with gender being different to sex is that one needs to decide between meaninglessly vague definitions of genders or crudely specific ones where we tabulate out that someone is 62% masculine and thus a demi boi based on seemingly random traits. The popular hack out of this seems to be "self id" which shunts this issue onto distributed sets of individuals so that there is no central entity to criticize for how absurd the decision process is. Instead of one central entity saying "you like dolls more than you like sports cars, you're a girl" that we could all call arbitrary and idiotic it's seven billion people weighing their relative like of dolls and sports cars, or something even more absurd, but in a not very easy to criticize way.
All valid points. Probably there are a great many human traits which actually don't fit into a bell curve, and once you bring sex into it you begin seeing bimodal distributions everywhere. The article was intended to present a crude model of certain aspects of the human experience in order to illustrate how ambiguity in discussions of same can lead to confusion (and hence entirely new identity categories).
For the people that might get duped like me: no, this article isn't about figuring out the true statistically rigourous answer for what a medium-sized breast looks like.
orthoxerox
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2yr ago
I think the whole "ambivert" thing makes sense for those who claim this trait.
Alice, when invited to a party, immediately claims she has to rearrange her sock drawer
Bob, when invited to a party, gladly goes unless he has an interesting book to read
Carol, upon finding a new book, will eagerly read it unless she has a cool party to attend
Dave will rather go to the park to hang around with retirees than read the new bestseller alone
Bob and Carol have much more in common with each other than they have with Alice or Dave. If Alice and Bob are matched with each other on some simplified MBTI or HEXACO or Big Five matchmaking app, they will find out they are not really compatible: Bob actually wants to have guests around, while Alice complains she just wants to sit next to him in peace and quiet. It's easier if Bob and Carol can indicate they are neither introverts nor extraverts and get preferentially matched with each other. Complaining that it's a new identity is like complaining "cis-het" is an identity to me. It's not really an identity people claim, there's an empty spot on a map and it needs a name because other spots around it do. If you have a B-cup that's just what you have, it's not what defines you, but when shopping for bras it's easier to say you're a B than explain you're not well-endowed but not flat-chested either.
My experience of dating apps in the past few years would beg to differ.
I don't know, it just seems so laborious to have a specific label for nigh-every point on the spectrum of this trait. And why don't we do this with any other psychological trait (e.g. "ambi-trusting", "ambi-agreeable" etc.)?
Neuroticism has been in the common parlance for at least as long as I've been alive. I remember seeing sitcoms in the 90s that used the term casually and without explaining what it meant.
In this category I think you could also include things like narcissism or megalomania. Moving from psychological traits to the realm of mental illness, people have been using "OCD" as a sort of intensified form of "extremely neat" for at least a decade and a half. And of course "autism", which is used casually and pejoratively on the internet all the time. And in a non-pejorative context it's not uncommon to hear people say that such and such a person has "aspie" tendencies.
But masculinity and femininity aren't one bell curve. They are two separate bell curves. I would still agree that the idea of non-binary people (besides, maybe, some rare intersex cases) is flawed, because the curves don't really overlap when you look at all psychometric traits at once for reasons similar to Lewontin's fallacy. Sure on any given trait like height, agreeableness, aggression, etc. the curves overlap. But, when all are taken together and looked at in a higher dimensional space that includes all of them, two almost completely nonoverlapping clusters emerge.
I agree that this is a bit of a fudge, but I was trying to keep the article simple and accessible by not introducing bimodal distributions. We can imagine "gender" as a bipolar trait, where "male" is north and "female" is south, even if the reality is quite different. It's a toy model designed to illustrate how the concept of "non-binary" may have arisen from confused thinking about the gender concept.
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Notes -
More graphs and ways to think about identity vs distribution of attributes
I'm thinking about breasts, and I think you're missing a more important question than the gaussian distribution.
Shitty sketch graph
{In my limited experiences as a hetero male} Women identify their breasts as important or not important less by the size of their breasts than by their bodyweight. In this model, women prefer to be skinny, but if they can't reasonably say they are skinny it is better to be "curvy" with big tits than be a pudgeball. So a woman with small tits will still identify herself as curvy (emphasize her breasts) if she's fat, but a woman with large tits will identify as skinny even if she has large breasts. A woman with medium-sized breasts will emphasize or de-emphasize how nice they are based on her body weight, a mostly-unrelated variable.
Or consider, guys identifying as Jocks or as Nerds. Second shitty sketch graph
Guys to the upper left, more athletic than smart, identify as jocks; guys to the lower right of the line, smarter than they are athletic, identify as nerds. But the result is that many guys who identify as nerds aren't actually as smart as guys who identify as jocks. And many guys who identify as nerds are actually a lot stronger than guys who identify as jocks. Which attribute you identify with has less to do with what you have than with what you lack, it's the balance between the two that makes the difference.
So I think, to cite SA on themotte, the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic." So maybe it's like skinny vs curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
*The Jalen Hurts joke It's gonna get memed so bad when he starts losing games.
I think that's the default anti-woke explanation for this kind of behaviour, or as I said in the post itself: "The default explanation among the woke-sceptical is that such people are 'snowflakes': they want to be seen as special and unique, but are hampered in this goal by the critical defect of not actually possessing any special or unique traits. Hence, they dress up their perfectly ordinary traits using language which implies that they are far more unusual than they really are."
What I'm trying to get it with my post is that maybe people aren't just describing themselves as "ambivert", "non-binary" or "grey-asexual" because they don't want to be seen as "basic": perhaps some of the people describing themselves as such are legitimately (and understandably) confused about what the terms in question refer to.
There's been some recent discussion on this forum about how, prior to coming out, trans women tend not to be exemplars of "peak masculinity" (and vice versa for trans men), so identifying as trans could be thought of as a sort of "you can't fire me, I quit!" response when a person realises that they're losing a game which they were entered into against their will.
I don't dispute this hypothesis, and it certainly jibes with my experience of trans people I know personally. But I don't think this is necessarily true of non-binary people. As I said in the post, if you've been raised in an environment in which even banal and unremarkable instances of gender non-conformity are interpreted as red flags for gender dysphoria, you could be forgiven for believing that only "peak masculine" men are actually men (and vice versa). Whereas twenty years ago we would've said "Alice doesn't wear makeup and likes playing rugby, but she's still a woman - she's not a man, or something other than man or woman."
Or if you've consumed a great deal of porn (which almost exclusively depicts fictional characters with hypersexual/nymphomaniac sex drives), you might come away with the inaccurate impression that the average person is always rearing to go, and hence that your (perfectly normal) level of sex drive is below average - something intermediate between sexual and asexual, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. Hence "grey-asexual". It's the social-justice equivalent of men feeling inferior about the size of their perfectly average dicks because porn has given them a skewed impression of what the average dick looks like.
Sure, and I think that's a good point, some people will always take the rhetoric too seriously and break the kayfabe. But it's still downstream of feeling that X is something that needs to be labeled about oneself, or that Y is a valid axis on which to build one's identity. There's a lot of groundwork that goes into those assumptions.
It's sort of the Nietzsche-an idea of Achilles acting without thinking to satisfy his desires and labeling that the good, versus the slave morality of overthinking and labeling everything.
I think what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Gray-Asexuals aren't acting in bad faith when they do so, they legitimately think that label describes them. What I'm saying is that their need to label it is downstream of their attributes or lacks. I don't think there's anything consciously false about their cope, but it's still a cope. The need for an explanation for their own misery is at the root of their need to explain themselves and identify themselves.
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"Women so ugly I don't notice or know them"
Dangerously based
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I'm stepping into a tangent off the 2nd shitty sketch, but do you agree with the "middle school bullied kid = loser" paradigm ?
I'm sure plenty of Motte-folks got bullied through school. So did I. I have my reasonable theories on why it happened to me. But, I don't agree with the "loser" paradigm. In my school, losers were ignored, quickly formed their own group and then stopped interacting with the rest of the class.
What was your 'bullying' journey like and what do you think put you in the cross hairs?
I disagree Middle School Bullied kid is automatically a Loser under the definition I gave of a loser (low IQ, low athleticism). But sometimes he is, and sometimes he isn't; more often than not kids in the Loser quadrant but north of the 45* are bullies to kids I put in the True Nerd quadrant. And hell, from what I've seen bullying can equally be targeted at a star athlete for racial reasons or a valedictorian for jealousy reasons or anybody at all for no reason at all. Being bullied doesn't really tell you much about someone, especially absent the context of their school.
I offered that example for someone with neither athleticism nor intelligence because it's hard to think of a famous one off hand other than boo-light culture war examples; even Leo Bloom doesn't really fit, but the best I could think of in a minute. One of the problems of thinking about people at a population level is that that quadrant becomes practically invisible to us, we don't even think about them. The primary point of the loser quadrant is to demonstrate the idea that people might identify as nerds or jocks, while not actually being very athletic or very smart, it's just the best they've got to go with. A lot of kids with average-to-below-average intelligence latch onto the "bullied misunderstood brilliant nerd" narrative to salve their wounds, when in reality some of their bullies are smarter than they are. It's a sad, blackpilled fact of life.
I wouldn't say I was particularly bullied in middle/high school, I was more in the category of "ignored." I was known for being hyper bookish overly political and anti-war, I wore an m65 surplus army jacket to school every day and had long hair; the stereotypical middle school bullies mockingly nicknamed me "Weed Man," ironically I wouldn't touch the stuff until after I was married, but "Weed Man" beat the other nerds on the bus they nicknamed things like "Fucking Faggot" and "Shitbreath" right? Most of my isolation was, in retrospect, self-inflicted; I latched on to identities and narratives that required me to play the loner bookish nerd, if I were min-maxing another playthrough I would have skipped out on playing WoW or MTG or going to death metal concerts at dive bars in middle/high school and joined the football team instead when they didn't cut anyone, but at the time I sort-of thought joining the football team required you to be an asshole moron which I didn't want to be. I would figure it out at 18 or so, and from there my life has been much better. I was flat out bad at being a teenager.
I apologize if the use of the term "Loser" had negative or traumatic associations for your past. What term would you use to refer to people who really have nothing going for them?
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I could not disagree with this more. Gender absolutely does not follow a Gaussian distribution. By this claim, you would have a hard time determining what gender most people are. And yet I can assure you, that barring cherry-picked exceptional cases, the median human will have an exceptionally easy time sorting photographs of people into "male" and "female". What gender is, is a bimodal distribution.
Incidentally, the same criticism applies to your forced normalization of all of the other labels you are criticizing - for people's usages of terms like 'ambivert' to to make sense, it is sufficient that they believe its a bimodal distribution, not a discrete one. (And this goes doubly for sexual attraction, where 'bisexual' is definitely not the majority category)
Finally, knowing that somebody is average in a trait is useful information, because it collapses your uncertainty about that person. It's not the same thing as describing an elephant as gray.
I agree, but that's sexual dimorphism, whereas I'm talking about adherence to gender roles. It's a bit confusing because He-Man both looks like a man and fully conforms to a classical archetype of how a man is supposed to behave (vice versa for Barbie), but I'm only really talking about the extent to which people adhere to gender roles, not what they look like. I was trying to make this distinction clear in a footnote but maybe it was too ambiguous.
This obviously varies from culture to culture, but I think it's fair to say that in much of the West, few people fully conform to classical archetypes of how members of their gender are "supposed" to behave. Even leaving aside overt gender non-conformance like men wearing dresses and makeup: very few men engage in hard physical labour as their primary source of income, no one bats an eyelid at a woman drinking beer or wearing jeans, women pursuing careers in STEM are generally encouraged to do so by their peers and mentors, it's not seen as embarrassing if a man knows how to bake (or a woman doesn't).
Completely agree.
But these are all examples of historical gender norms (though I doubt there was ever a physical labour-income norm for men) not contemporary norms.
Well yeah, that was precisely the contrast I was striking in the article, or as I said in the comment above, 'few people fully conform to classical archetypes of how members of their gender are "supposed" to behave'.
If you're arguing that "contemporary" gender norms are far more open to the point that androgyny (or something approximating it) is the rule rather than the exception, then that's literally the exact point I was arguing in the article.
Huh? Surely you accept that, for most of human history, the overwhelming majority of men earned their income through physical labour (e.g. coal mining, carpentry, assorted agricultural activities, tree felling etc.).
No, the evidence you cite is just as consistent with a change in gender norms. That doesn't mean that gender norms aren't still present and clear to people.
Right, but was it a norm, let alone a gendered norm? If you look at great admired male figures in most of human history, like Achilles, Jesus, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Heracles, Caesar, King Arthur, Alexander, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates... They are distinguished mainly by just about everything except earning an income through physical labour. Fighting? Yes. Doing something physical in an adventure? Yes. Working down a mine or fixing a wheel? Hardly something for great men to do.
Among intellectuals Aristotle thought that men doing physical labour belonged with women and children in the political hirearchy: not fit for citizenship. The normative life for Aristotle was that of a leisured aristocrat, not some proletarian or peasant. Physical labour could be used to keep oneself fit and virile, or monastic labour to get closer to God, or to get out of some sticky situation (see Heracles) but it wasn't something that you were supposed to do to earn a living of all things!
This is misunderstanding of classical antiquity attitude. It was not about "labor".
In ancient mindset, only free man, man worthy of being a citizen, was an independent man.
Who was an independent man?
Slaves were obviously dependent, had to obey their masters or else.
Wage laborers were also considered slaves who had to sell themselves every day in order to survive.
City dwelling artisans were dependent on their customers - if no one wants to buy the shoes you make, you are hosed.
The same about merchants.
In ancient mind, the only independent people were farmers living on their land - both small farmers working their land themselves and large landowners sitting in atrium and watching the slaves.
Fair points, but:
is sufficient for my purpose: there was not a general norm that hard physical labour should be one's primary source of income, which was the original claim under contestation.
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Gender norms can still exist and be present at clear, and yet vary in degree of strictness. I never claimed that gender norms no longer exist, but I believe that, in the West, they are far less restrictive than in other cultures or historically.
I wasn't talking about "great admired male figures". I was talking about the overwhelming majority of men in human history, most of whom were neither great nor admired.
I think both of these things fall under the definition of "physical labour".
I don't doubt that Aristotle thought this, but that doesn't imply that the belief was universal or even widespread for most of human history: this belief could well be a luxury belief held only by intellectuals.
So, we agree that, for most of human history, most men had to earn a living through physical labour (even if certain intellectuals thought such behaviour was unbecoming). We also agree that many historical male figures considered "great" or "admirable" (such as Odysseus, Alexander, Heracles, Caesar, King Arthur) also earned a living or became famous as a result of physical labour, albeit physical labour of a different type (namely fighting, conquest, exploration etc.). I still don't feel like you've really contradicted my argument.
Lumping together fighting with handling dung is a low-resolution picture that is inadequate for understanding past norms about masculinity.
The example of great admired men was just some of the evidence that earning a living from physical labour was not, historically, seen as a norm for men. Another would be that idle landowners and royalty didn't generally use their spare time to do physical labour, although some did.
Of course, there are exceptional individuals and periods. For example, the social status of male physical labour seems to have risen in the Victorian period. I recommend reading the works of Samuel Smiles, e.g. Self-Help and Life and Labour. Part of the novelty of his books was that he was esteeming proletarian labour - not just proletarian inventors and savants, but also men at all levels who worked hard and honestly. To this day, I think there's a degree of social esteem in men earning a living from physical labour, but it is important to note that this is a recent phenomenon.
I still don't know exactly what you're getting at when you say a "norm". I appreciate that physical labour was seen by the aristocracy as something undesirable and laborious that only plebs engage in. But that's just it - it was seen as such by the aristocracy, who almost by definition are small in number relative to the human population as a whole.
It can be true that the aristocrats believe that physical labour is ignoble drudgery, and also true that the commoners believe that toiling in the fields is "real work" that requires you to get your hands dirty, unlike "women's work" that involves sitting at a desk all day. Both of these things can be true simultaneously, but because commoners are far greater in number than the aristocracy, the latter belief will be held by a far greater share of the human populace than the former.
You seem to be saying "the elites don't believe in X, therefore X isn't part of human culture and never was". But a recurrent theme of discussions in this space is that what the elites believe (or profess to believe) is often radically skew of what ordinary people believe. Modern Western elites are disproportionately likely to believe that a) male and female brains are biologically indistinguishable and any observed differences between them are solely attributable to socialisation; b) the police are unnecessary or actively detrimental to society, and hence ought to be defunded or outright abolished; c) God doesn't exist; d) homosexuality is natural and harmless.
By using your logic, I could point out that elites currently believe these things and conclude that all of humanity believes that men and women are the same, police are unnecessary, God isn't real and homosexuality should be tolerated. But doing so would give me a very skewed impression of what beliefs or norms are held by the human race as a whole, currently or historically.
I didn't claim that the attitudes of elites (and scribes, poets etc.) proved that they thought that earning a living through physical labour was considered undesirable by everyone. It does provide some evidence.
Now, what's the evidence that earning a living through physical labour was seen as a general gender norm for men in the past?
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Where to start...
No, this has nothing in common with "traditional society". No, America seen in 1950's sitcoms was not "traditional society".
Toiling in the fields was, in traditional societies, fate of 90+% men and 90+% women (may differ due to urbanization rate). Labor of peasant woman was lighter than one of peasant men, but still hard enough it would crush any modern man, no matter how tough he imagines himself to be.
Sitting at a desk - work of scribe - was extremely prestigious and desirable work, and it was for (elite) men only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satire_of_the_Trades
https://web.archive.org/web/20190308063715/http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/instructions_of_kheti.htm
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It seems crude to map all of human expression onto a spectrum with with which to make a distribution. A major problem with gender being different to sex is that one needs to decide between meaninglessly vague definitions of genders or crudely specific ones where we tabulate out that someone is 62% masculine and thus a demi boi based on seemingly random traits. The popular hack out of this seems to be "self id" which shunts this issue onto distributed sets of individuals so that there is no central entity to criticize for how absurd the decision process is. Instead of one central entity saying "you like dolls more than you like sports cars, you're a girl" that we could all call arbitrary and idiotic it's seven billion people weighing their relative like of dolls and sports cars, or something even more absurd, but in a not very easy to criticize way.
All valid points. Probably there are a great many human traits which actually don't fit into a bell curve, and once you bring sex into it you begin seeing bimodal distributions everywhere. The article was intended to present a crude model of certain aspects of the human experience in order to illustrate how ambiguity in discussions of same can lead to confusion (and hence entirely new identity categories).
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For the people that might get duped like me: no, this article isn't about figuring out the true statistically rigourous answer for what a medium-sized breast looks like.
You may have thought I was above using a clickbait-y title and attention-grabbing image to draw eyes.
I am not.
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I think the whole "ambivert" thing makes sense for those who claim this trait.
Alice, when invited to a party, immediately claims she has to rearrange her sock drawer
Bob, when invited to a party, gladly goes unless he has an interesting book to read
Carol, upon finding a new book, will eagerly read it unless she has a cool party to attend
Dave will rather go to the park to hang around with retirees than read the new bestseller alone
Bob and Carol have much more in common with each other than they have with Alice or Dave. If Alice and Bob are matched with each other on some simplified MBTI or HEXACO or Big Five matchmaking app, they will find out they are not really compatible: Bob actually wants to have guests around, while Alice complains she just wants to sit next to him in peace and quiet. It's easier if Bob and Carol can indicate they are neither introverts nor extraverts and get preferentially matched with each other. Complaining that it's a new identity is like complaining "cis-het" is an identity to me. It's not really an identity people claim, there's an empty spot on a map and it needs a name because other spots around it do. If you have a B-cup that's just what you have, it's not what defines you, but when shopping for bras it's easier to say you're a B than explain you're not well-endowed but not flat-chested either.
My experience of dating apps in the past few years would beg to differ.
I don't know, it just seems so laborious to have a specific label for nigh-every point on the spectrum of this trait. And why don't we do this with any other psychological trait (e.g. "ambi-trusting", "ambi-agreeable" etc.)?
Are other traits as well-known as intro/extraversion?
Well, looking at the Big Five personality traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Neuroticism has been in the common parlance for at least as long as I've been alive. I remember seeing sitcoms in the 90s that used the term casually and without explaining what it meant.
In this category I think you could also include things like narcissism or megalomania. Moving from psychological traits to the realm of mental illness, people have been using "OCD" as a sort of intensified form of "extremely neat" for at least a decade and a half. And of course "autism", which is used casually and pejoratively on the internet all the time. And in a non-pejorative context it's not uncommon to hear people say that such and such a person has "aspie" tendencies.
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But masculinity and femininity aren't one bell curve. They are two separate bell curves. I would still agree that the idea of non-binary people (besides, maybe, some rare intersex cases) is flawed, because the curves don't really overlap when you look at all psychometric traits at once for reasons similar to Lewontin's fallacy. Sure on any given trait like height, agreeableness, aggression, etc. the curves overlap. But, when all are taken together and looked at in a higher dimensional space that includes all of them, two almost completely nonoverlapping clusters emerge.
I agree that this is a bit of a fudge, but I was trying to keep the article simple and accessible by not introducing bimodal distributions. We can imagine "gender" as a bipolar trait, where "male" is north and "female" is south, even if the reality is quite different. It's a toy model designed to illustrate how the concept of "non-binary" may have arisen from confused thinking about the gender concept.
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