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?
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Notes -
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.
Maybe, but I could just as easily spin a yarn about some dominant shaved-headed roid freak being the dominant male in a social circle but losing out when it comes to female attention to the skinny pretty boy with the beautiful face and hair.
True to an extent. I think it’s overstated, though. If I think back to high school, all the most beautiful girls were popular. Even where there were one or two exceptions where people were extremely disliked due to actions they’d taken, hooking up with someone’s boyfriend, whatever, this was very much a temporary thing and they were ostracized for a few weeks before being at every party again. If we’re using crass metaphor, they were temporarily exiled from court, not relegated to the peasantry.
I think some root cause of a certain subset of male anguish is that the fantasy of the mousy but extremely hot girl who glows up just for him is just that; barring weight loss in their twenties, beautiful women know they’re beautiful and always have because they remember being 11 and being catcalled by men in the street.
If I think of most groups of women friends I’ve encountered, the hierarchy is usually looks based because social groups for women are highly assortative based on hotness, often unconsciously. It would be extraordinarily uncommon to have a group in which the nerdy fat friend was dominant, unless the whole group was comprised of nerdy fat friends.
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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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