Even if we assume that there are “standard men” and “standard women”, there's another problem: office politics occurring in country M in century N is most certainly the product of specific culture, and not some cavemen rituals. Problems of Patrick or Patricia Bateman are probably quite alien to a lot of people in the world.
The irony is that the image of “good old days” is itself based on modern day stereotypes. So-called progressive propaganda was quite focused on the caricature of concentrated Bad Masculine Man, and now, freshly painted, it is presented as a positive example (because public is familiar with it, and making public think is too hard).
If male and female abilities differ, it should follow that our social expectations differ.
If you are using "female" as a noun in a sentence to refer to human women, it is a good idea to also refer to human men as "male". It is more consistent and doesn't end up dehumanizing one side.
People seeing this inconsistency may jump to conclusions about your thoughts on men and women.
Are you saying he is actually a woman?
As if brain configuation, that staemming from genetics and hormone levels, had no influence in how the sexes perceive world and social clues and behave according to those perceptions. Not mentioning the inherent physical differences which also influence how they differently percieve the world and behave.
Being a proud servant of the status quo is neither fresh, nor smart, nor scientific. Illiterate savages worshipped their idols in the exact same fashion.
I do also love how she glossed over her example of how men were better at reconciliation and less likely to cancel culture because men were conditioned for war in which “ The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday.” Like completely glossing over the fact that first they felt they had to kill thousands of people? And do you think it was the people who fundamentally differed in ideology that reconciled with?
Then like: “Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade”
Almost every leader eventually learns that leading through influence is much more powerful than leading through authority, gender be damned.
But it’s also just got more holes than Swiss cheese. Sure I love classical liberalism and the ideas of rationality, but per some of her own arguments, this isn’t the natural state of things. Most men in most cultures just wanted to club people over the head to win arguments, not engage in rationality. Most kings just wanted their way, not to deal with an objective legal system. And per her own arguments, are men Socrates or Bluto?
No, they are not. And when we take into account that they are not, the whole argument breaks down.
By one side of equation I meant all those arguments about “men” and “women” altogether. You are absolutely free to state that men are X, and women are Y, and attribute it to Nature as a whole, or scientific data sliced off of it. There is nothing wrong with that by itself. However, the whole other “stable” side which you try to “fix” by this process is no less of an invention.
Say, we're having an argument whether cucumbers are fruits or vegetables. In that case, we can even reach an “official” answer. But it's more important to realise that the whole stage on which we're playing is constructed. “Fruits” and “vegetables” are convenient man-made classifications. Cucumber does not come with a label “I'm a cucumber, as stated in encyclopaedias, etc.” Nor its atoms come with a label “We're parts of that cucumber thing”, nor anything else (note for our young vulgar materialists).
In my opinion, feminist thought taking that step (which — for multiple possible reasons — was not taken even by greatest thinkers) is the most important achievement. Which “wave” is right, or how to “correctly” display your alignment with “correct” movement according to latest fashions are ancillary questions.
Straightforward male and female traits/roles pervade the animal kingdom, including the other great apes.
Honestly, even entertaining this idea is female-coded. In a male space, the denial of so obvious a reality would be dismissed out of hand as obviously retarded.
I just read a book about civic action, where a comment was made that suggested not thinking about left and right, but of top and bottom... but even that is dualistic.
More than dualistic when so much of the time it is constructs of other peoples' minds on top of that.
Other than that, one need to look no further than the guys in the White House/ICE for examples of highly emotionally based men.
A majority women group may be more rational, competitive, or risk-seeking (all values she attributes as more likely to appear in groups of men), but it depends on the women in the group. She already admits that individual characteristics are variable across sexes or genders.
There’s also an implicit assumption that masculine traits are de facto optimal for making an organization fit or successful. They can be, but so are the feminine traits which she would like to see less of. Feminine traits evolved in the first place to provide a necessary counterbalance to problem-solving without a myopic and invariable approach. If a team member is sick, you take care of them so they can contribute again (their domain knowledge and inherent capabilities are their main contributions), instead of chucking them over the side of a hill.
Successful populations in nature have thrived because of adaption, flexibility, and variability. It doesn’t make sense to say that any aspect of society achieved the success that it did because of the presence of masculine traits alone. I think masculine traits are important, but a monoculture approach has almost always lead to the downfall of an empire. Great ideas have come from all sorts of people (and cultures), and we do humanity a disservice by reducing ourselves down to what may essentially be skin deep (literally). The goal should be to enable individuals to reach whatever level of excellence that they’re capable of achieving, regardless of sex or gender. That’s feminism as I remember it, that’s the core of egalitarianism.
There are a lot of factors which are polarizing American society, and other places, but it’s more geopolitical than sociocultural, due to the connected nature of the world now. I could be wrong, but the main thrust of wokeness is restorative justice, and it’s not centered around feminization, necessarily. I think people who advocate for restorative justice need to exercise some caution because I don’t think they fully appreciate the constancy of human nature across different dimensions of being human. If you change the positions of a mean rich person and meek poor person, don’t expect that only the rich/poor parts of those labels will change. People will make the same terrible decisions that you hate the current dominant groups for, that’s just who we are. It’s better to create systems which enable egalitarian self-actualization of individuals than ones which optimize for tribal success.
Last point on the counterbalance of feminine and masculine traits—I like this metaphor from a Samurai film (I forget which): a sword dulls faster if it is never sheathed. Taking Joan of Arc as an example, her literal sword was sheathed by her faith, in many ways.
https://ameblo.jp/fighting-toma/entry-12251883996.html
Eg: "masculine" (relentlessly) open debate+unfettered pursuit of truth as advocated in TFA <-?-> never sheathing the sword
One example of many I remember was a social/music class where the prof asked the lecture if there are any innate, non-culture-specific features that make music enjoyable. I raised my hand to say I think so, because octave equivalence seems pretty universal, but the right answer was no. Suggesting that there's anything innate about music means you can't chalk everything up to cultural difference, leading to the possibility that some cultures have better music than others, which needless to say would be very offensive. So I learned something valuable.
If you want to ascribe their reasoning to "proof by emotion" then you're welcome to make that logical leap, but instantially your teacher was asking you to think outside the anglobox here. You made an unlucky guess, but props to you for trying.
I'm also still not sure about the answer. A lot of unrelated cultures developed music independently and ended up with some kind of rhythm beaten from something. I didn't say they had tuning forks or scales, and ofc 12 tones or 8 notes per scale isn't universal, but there's still the thing about octave equivalence. I did some searching back then and found some scientific papers on this that didn't show a definite conclusion.
Women emphasize "empathy over rationality" ... what a strange dichotomy. As if empathy could not be rational, or rational thought automatically leads to dis-empathy.
She asserts that feminine culture emphasizes cohesion, but then brings up a biracial (what's the point of this note?) reporter at the NYT not having coffee with Bari Weiss and says that this snub is "feminine". What? Are woman about cohesion or not? The previous graph would assert that colleagues would have coffee to not hurt each others' feelings, but then she claims the backhanded animosity ALSO as feminine.
Make up your mind, woman.
Like the ICE raids clearly not are not an appeal to rationality, they’re an appeal to fear, and that fear is created by a real or imagined sense of scarcity.
Everything in society is colored by this, good or bad. Everything. Even politics, even dynamics in families, even your work place, even your school.
Not every individual is 100% male behavior or 100% female behavior (something the alt-right podcasters keep bringing up to drive a wedge between their victims and society at large), but generally your average male is going to, on average, have male behavior and it will come naturally to them; vice versa, average female is going to, on average, have female behavior, and it will come natural to them. Conflict resolution is one of those things that differ between the two.
This article would probably benefit greatly from citing works on psychology and neurobiology, because it has been noted by science over the decades that testosterone and estrogen levels mediate many things in human behavior, including which conflict resolution camp you belong to. The article paints this entirely too black and white, because nobody is firmly in either camp.
The article also fails to actually state the correct solution: you're gonna be who you are, and you shouldn't be shamed for it, but you're gonna have to learn how to deal with both kinds of conflicts, and realize when a conflict doesn't actually exist and its just a mismatch between the two camps. Sometimes you need to negotiate the "conflict resolution even if it compromises the truth/logic" side, sometimes you need to negotiate the "logic even if it steps on people's feelings" side, and sometimes the logic side does actually need to win out and you have to pay the toll on that, and sometimes the feelings side needs to win out because it isn't worth the cost.
Also, a woman wrote that article, and I think the people here on HN missed that.
Based on what evidence? It was clear to me.
"the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female". are you kidding me?
Did she intend to make that veiled dig suggesting the “feminization” of MAGA with the recent highly emotional calls for cancellation lead by the (feminine??) Trump, Vance, Carr?
For the rest of it, randomly spouting off things she heard random others tell her were true -- makes it true I guess?
