Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Mean girls, how do they work?
@RobHenderson tweeted this:
Which I think is a common and accurate statement.
But how exactly do mean girls arrive at consensus? Is it through one queen bee like Regina George? And, if so, how is that queen bee chosen?
To me, as a man, it is mystifying. Men tend to automatically arrange themselves in hierarchies, with "rule by the best" being the standard organizing principle. By default, best equals size and strength. But, depending on the activity, the hierarchy might be based on charisma, intelligence, wealth, musical ability, etc...
With women, this doesn't seem to happen. In fact, in female social hierarchies, the tall poppies are often ostracized leading to women constantly downplaying their abilities. Women who draw credit to themselves get shot down. So who, then rules, the roost? Is it a person who is uniquely able to play the false modesty game? Or is consensus arrived at organically, with a hive mind deciding who is "in" and who is "out".
Let me say that I'm glad to not have to play these games.
In my analysis, the core of the difference between male and female social status arrangement is the locus of the evaluation rubric.
For men, it's an external, verifiable, and discrete measurement - performance. Who scored the most points? Who brought in the most dollars? Who got everyone to show up for the party/vote/heist? While there is certainly haggling over who should get what percentage of "credit" for a particular success, there is still a "thing" that happened and that everyone can point.
For women, it's the constantly in flux consensus mechanism for status. You're "cool" because enough other people decided you were. Why or how did they decide that? Irrelevant they just did, and at a critical mass that those who disagree with the coolness assessment are necessary in the minority (perhaps not in number, but in social capital within the group). I think you see this in a lot of female coded activities - fashion, art, food, entertainment. Anything that is governed chiefly by the hard to define concept of "taste." There's no discrete external rubric for what makes this year's pants/tops/shoes "in" yet, somehow, everyone seems to know (or is forced to accept) what is "in." Interestingly, this creates a constantly updating mechanism wherein whatever is current in terms of taste sets up its own demise by creating the opportunity for an opposition to develop. You can't get whatever is "in" right just once, you have to update lest you fall "out."
This, to me, is why you have the infamous gender specific difference in neuroticism. Why
bitches be so crazy?do women, as a group in general, exhibit higher neuroticism? It's because their constant task is to covertly poll their social groups for the days' social standings which are, in turn, based on subtle expressions of taste (fashion, style, memetic currency etc.) without explicit voicing of opinions by the group members. Male or female, if this was your life, you'd be a little stressed, no?I'd implore anyone reading this to avoid plunging into normie-feminist rage responses. I tried to describe what I see as differences while doing my best to avoid any implicit value judgements. The female means of determining social status is critically and necessarily important to human families, communities, and societies. A world without women? The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison. I'll take a daily "mean girls status market" over a daily "avoid random lethal violence" roulette wheel. Furthermore, I do believe women have outsized importance in building and maintaining culture. Politics flows from that, and laws from politics. Many societies have tried to sequester women away from culture and politics - universally, I would say, to their existential risk and eventual death.
But the problem of our time, I'd argue, is that the west has, for 30+ years now, actively fostered cultural developments that try to maximize female styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. In the past 10+ years, it has risen to the level of doing so in explicit opposition to all male styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. But, wait, please don't think I'm saying "What about men?!". Far from it. The insidious and tragic result of the rise of extremist feminism has been it's disastrous effects on social order as a whole and women specifically. We eat our own with the best and most earnest of intentions.
I don't disagree with the embedded implications of that concerning masculinity, but I find that example somewhat dishonest since prison 1) is not a voluntary or free environment and 2) is filled with people by and large not representative of the average male member of society. You could also have named the military, industrial seafaring, boy scouts or oil rigs, which all paint a much more nuanced view while still containing the same male traits of socialisation that impact prison life.
See my response later in this thread
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wheredoyouthinkweare.jpg
Not so much recently, but maybe the army?
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Social interaction in groups of women can involve feelings of like and dislike, love and hate at the same time and often towards the same person. Friendship between men and friendship between women isn’t and can probably never be the same. That isn’t because male friendship is particularly deeper; women and men can both have lifelong friends and casual acquaintances and everything in between. But the nature of close female friendship is different.
This is true even within families. For example, sisters who are close to each other will often argue viciously, be nasty and vindictive, but also be very close to each other, speak all the time, be very supportive, be best friends. Brothers are usually very close or very distant. There is either bad blood, good blood, or not much of a real relationship at all.
It is true that men are quicker to forgive their friends than women. But that is in large part because the boundary between friend and foe is more strictly delineated for men than for women. The concept of male camaraderie doesn’t really have an equivalent for women. Women have community, a form of female identity and collectiveness that is no less powerful, that extends in many cases to risking time, effort, disgust to care for another girl throwing up in a bathroom at a party who you’ve never met before out of a shared womanhood, but then also bitching to all your close friends about each other (and the drunk girl at the party) in a way that men, or at least most men, don’t really do.
On one point I disagree. Men join groups and then subordinate themselves to an oft unspoken and yet entirely real hierarchy. So do women. The grounds are no less material though; on both counts usually beauty. That both sexes have in common.
Some men laugh at women online in memes that amount to ‘how can you claim to be a ‘girl’s girl’ if you constantly gossip about each other behind your backs’. True, and indeed intolerable in a male friendship group, presumably. But women can both love and hate their friends, bicker about them in front of some mutual acquaintances and stand up for them in front of others.
One thing that make male hierarchies different than female ones is instability when exposed to the other sex.
Let's say there is a group of boys. One boy is the leader. He's best at sports, and he has natural charisma. When the boys meet the other sex, the girls will be attracted to the male leader. The hierarchy is stable.
Now let's take a group of girls. One girl is the leader. She's charismatic and smart. But when the girls meet a group of boys, the boys all ignore her and pay attention to the dumb blonde instead. The hierarchy is unstable.
This is obviously an oversimplification, but women generally respect male hierarchies more than the opposite.
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I appreciate the well thought through feedback. I think it adds a lot to the discussion of the topic.
May I request you go into more detail here? A lot of men would see this kind of behavior, in a male group, as sowing dissent and/or destabilizing the group. This could prove fatal in a situation in which group cohesion is necessary (i.e. some sort of intergroup violence). Thus, "talking shit" in male groups is dealt with severely.
Why is this not the same in female groups? Genuine question, not trying to lead anywhere.
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I appreciate your attempts to be fair and not just turn this into a rant about women. But this strikes me as off the mark. Perhaps prison is the closest approximation we have, perhaps not - but it's not very close if so. The people who get sent to prison are (by and large) bad people. They act in horrifying ways because they acted that way on the outside too. It's kind of like pointing to the most manipulative, sociopathic of women and going "see, this is what women are like without men to moderate them".
A better (though still not perfect) model of a man's world might be fraternities. They do act very badly indeed sometimes, but not on the level of prisons. The main flaw with using them as a model is that they're still very immature young men, so again they aren't necessarily representative of what a true world without women would look like (because that world would have mature as well as immature men and the former would moderate the behavior of the latter). Another model might be young businesses where they only have men on the payroll. These don't tend to be hellscapes of bad behavior as far as I'm aware. They seem to be just focused on getting shit done. This too is probably an imperfect model, albeit the flaws don't stand out to me. But regardless, I think prison is a pretty flawed model and we have better available to us.
I think the male culture within seafaring could be a more accurate example - it's in large part a totally confined social space that developed over the course of millennia with next to zero female influence. We find strict hierarchies - but camaraderie is a given and mutiny an ever-present possibility should the captain fail his crew. It's also a very fratty environment in the sense that hazing is commonplace and there's usually a whole array of crew-specific rituals an shibboleths meant to confer a strong sense of shared identity.
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I'll admit imprecision here was a mistake.
I should've said that the group organization mechanisms present in prison are what "pure" or perhaps "raw" male organizational systems look like. You are correct that the general character flaws of most prisoners are not representative of society at large.
Widening the aperture to the military, we see the patterns continue; explicit hierarchies with unambiguous leadership. Strict behavioral codes that, when transgressed, are met with physical violence or, at least, extremely high tension verbal intimidation. College fraternities reduce the propensity for physical violence (mildly) because they still exist in the context of civil society - if you beat up your Frat Bro, you're still probably getting arrested.
The point is this is how men organize themselves when female organizing principles are absent or extremely muted. I'm not an expert on how, say, the eastern Saudi tribal folks organize their extremely patriarchal societies, but I'd be willing to guess we can see some continue through lines there as well.
It's interesting to note that patriarchy is usually conceived of all wrong by westerners for whom patriarchy was not even in living memory when their grandparents were born- it's patriarchy, not andrarchy. Rule by the fathers, who often harshly suppress younger men as much as women. Patriarchal societies are of necessity clannish because ruling over adult sons is the sine qua non. These societies have age gated authority rather than gender gated; yes, men rule over women at the same level, but that's as close to a universal rule as even exists. Intensely clannish societies give older women quite a bit of power and influence because they do the social work to maintain this intense clannishness; the networks of controlling arranged marriages and intense reciprocity structures which maintain the clan as a social unit are done by women even if men theoretically have the final say.
I remember speaking to a woman who fled a particularly strict family in Saudi Arabia in adulthood- she was married off at fifteen but her husband wasn't permitted to see or speak to her beforehand. Instead his mother picked which of the sisters in her family he was to marry. She doesn't know how 'this guy marries a woman from family X' was arrived at. This example is a bit trite, but it illustrates key facts about ultra-patriarchal social structures- unmarried men are tightly policed to bind them into the clan structure, no less than women(albeit in different ways), and authority is exercised by elders over the young. Our resident Indians can probably confirm that their arranged marriages are made by women as well.
This is, despite the name, not a particularly male-oriented macho man environment like, say, VDV barracks or a frat. In fact intensely patriarchal societies mostly lack these kinds of institutions because they separate young men from the controlling power of clan elders.
A deep, yet topical pull.
I appreciate the important addition of age as more than an additional variable, but a whole new (and indispensable) axis in the very rough model my first post attempted to sketch out.
It leads, I think, to some uncomfortable confrontations with reality in today's world. We just had an election where the sitting president knocked himself out of it by being himself at the first debate. One of the internet's most famous Guys Who Says Stuff asserts "many of the problems of Western society are caused by ... privileging the old over the young.".
The classic RETVRN concept of a patriarchy fails to reconcile the fact that, for most of human society, men reached their wise and philosophic years starting at 40 or so. Then, they were expected to move their talents to the afterlife in their 60s - and this for the luckiest!
Most of us reading this forum will probably live to see extreme scale issues of care for elderly folks in their 80s and 90s with tragic yet real cognitive decline. Obviously, we should not be deferring to their collective "wisdom" in any domain.
I don't have good answers. As much as I have emotional sympathies and inclinations towards a kind of traditionalist social redoubt, the world only moves forward and you have to live in it (but not of it) the way it is.
In practice, the Saudi royal family(which runs on this kind of patriarchy) does a better job of avoiding 'all power to the senile' than the US gerontocracy. I'll wager it'll do a better job than the British monarchy does, as well. We really don't know much about the influence of aged, high status female Sauds(and Saudi Arabia is a personal possession of the Saud clan), but it's a good bet that it exists, given how clan dynamics work. The Saud clan also has super-opaque internal dynamics we only get glimpses of when people are purged, exiled, or murdered, which seems more like a female dynamic to western sensibilities.
I'd point to the privileging of the old over the young which afflicts the west- as in the specific gerontocratic model we see in the anglosphere- as the sort of explicit thing that can only happen when patriarchy is broken; the patriarchal answer to social security is for children to have legal obligations to take care of their aged parents, China had this sort of patriarchal society before Mao and is experiencing issues of relations between the generations running on dynamics which seem inscrutable to westerners. A patriarchal society prefers to keep major social functions within the clan so they can remain under the control of elders rather than the state. This of course means that when natural faculties start to fade the next generation(still quite old, of course) rises in influence because there's no one to stop them.
De Maistre wrote about this- 'the counter revolution is not the revolution opposite, but the opposite of the revolution'. In the modern west we see some parallel society movement among social conservatives who nevertheless participate in society- think the Knights of Columbus benefits for their members, or the LDS... everything, or generically Christian health sharing initiatives, or the homeschooling movement. These things are exactly what he's talking about; the establishment of folkways/institutions which accomplish the things needed by a healthy society in a time of chaos is the traditionalist social redoubt, in a form which grows because it is healthy, crowding out the dysfunctional revolutionary folkways until it reaches a position of dominance at which it can calcify into tradition. And the decline in Christianity has halted, per the latest pew poll. Parallel institutions steadily grow. It's the opposite of the revolution, it proceeds agonizingly slowly but steadily, almost unnoticed until the tortoise overtakes the hare's fits and starts and from the perspective of the normie becomes just the way it is.
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Surely men are constantly cut down for being tall poppies, it just depends on what dimensions you focus on. Threats can come in many forms – small but too smart would be an example of someone who might get ostracised. Certain social skills just happen to be more weighted dimensions for women than men. That's more complicated as harder to measure, but in large groups where higher status is not dependent on size and strength, equally complex games are going on with men (e.g. in politics).
This hasn't been my experience.
Men genuinely admire their betters. That guy can jump really high. He can play the guitar well. He is smart. He is tall. These are all good qualities that I admire him for and wish I had.
Conflict among men comes when there are status uncertainties. I think I'm better than him, he thinks he's better than me. Now we have to fight about it.
There's also the case where natural hierarchies are upset by outside forces. I'm better than him, but he got promoted because his dad's the boss/he's black/he kisses ass/etc... Now I hate him for his unearned status and he hates me for my superiority.
This is an example of status uncertainty, not tall poppy syndrome. The bully's logic is "I'm big and strong. That means I'm better than this weakling. But he won an award from teacher. Why should this inferior specimen be above me?".
This status confusion is imparted by a third party, the teacher who rewards boys based on an alien value system. None of the boys actually think the "small but smart" kid is a tall poppy. Quite the opposite. He belongs at the bottom of the hierarchy.
On the other hand, in a clique of boys who are on the math team, then the "small but smart" kid might actually be a tall poppy. He is the best at what they do, and he will be admired by the other boys for his skill.
What is happening if a woman is an excellent singer? A perfect mother? A physics professor? Isn't it the same thing, they are claiming status on some dimension but other hypothetical women want status to be primarily based on another axis. Status uncertainty.
If we stick to a situation where a group all share the same preference for what dimension should count most, like I dunno a hockey team. I think everyone respects the best player regardless of gender?
Not exactly sure how to isolate the difference you are talking about here. Perhaps you could give a clear example of a tall poppy situation with women where it is not a case of status uncertainty?
Yeah, thinking about it more, I think it's status uncertainty for both genders. It's just that female status is complicated.
Women are attracted to the top men in male status hierarchies.
Men are attracted to beautiful women, largely ignoring female status hierarchies.
So women have more opportunities for conflict based on status uncertainty. "I'm the best opera singer, but all the boys want to date her instead. It's not fair! Girls, let's sit somewhere else for lunch today".
Women have twin status hierarchies, one based on physical beauty and one based on merit. Men just have one.
Well, there's something in that especially in a school type scenario where attractiveness and status are perhaps most correlated, but I dunno if status is ever really simple. Venkatesh Rao has great material on this and the idea of keeping status deliberately illegible among a group:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/14/the-gervais-principle-iv-wonderful-human-beings/
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There are cultures famed for “tall poppy syndrome” like Japan and Scandinavia that were run mostly by men until very recently.
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Women take social cues from the women around them. When they perceive a thing to be common in their little sub-society they start doing it. Status comes from a lot of things(including being in a good situation by whatever metric- economically, relationship-wise, etc), but correctly predicting what will become common is a big source(yes, this is a self fulfilling prophecy).
So yes there's a hivemind, and wokeness is good at gaming the hivemind. Think about the woke articles along the lines of so-and-so did X and people on twitter are saying Y. It's stupid but it's creating the illusion of commonality for these beliefs. Or the woke ostracism and cancellation campaigns- when you can signal boost early adopters hard enough you can get people to think they're late adopters and they'll jump on the bandwagon hard.
You just described the entire nation of Japan.
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