If I read this correctly, it seems an oddly positive spin on what should actually be referred to as the "Men are awful" effect.
> The authors supposed that the positive general evaluation of women might derive from the association between women and nurturing characteristics. This bias has been cited as an example of benevolent sexism.
Seems an unusually baseless conclusion when in the actual research:
> a task was done to discover whether people associate pleasant words (good, happy, and sunshine) with women, and unpleasant words (bad, trouble, and pain) with men
(conclusions from the study seem to focus on the former positive indicators and ignore the latter negative indicators?)
> men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic preference for their own gender
I wonder why that might be?
> Other experiments in this study found people [...] associated the male gender with violence or aggression
> Rudman and Goodwin's suggested that [...] male intimidation influences gender attitudes.
I've clipped the positive attitude findings in the above quotes which seems like cherry picking but I'm not trying to negate the findings of positive attitudes toward women. Just pointing out that the clear findings around negative attitudes seem omitted from the conclusion.
The following quote is the clearest example:
> mediation comes not from differences in attitudes towards women, but in attitudes towards men. In more egalitarian societies, people have more positive attitudes towards men than in less egalitarian societies
Yes, the association of men with intelligence more often than women would be benevolent sexism. I don't understand the issue you have with the terminology. Benevolent doesn't mean morally good here, it just means the person exhibiting the bias is assigning a positive attribute rather than negative. On the other hand, "women are dumber than men" would be hostile sexism. Yes, they are just different ways of saying the same thing, but they are framed differently.
> Benevolent doesn't mean morally good here, it just means the person exhibiting the bias is assigning a positive attribute rather than negative.
It's just like the concept of positive punishment. You can have positive punishment by adding a consequence (ie. an electric shock) and negative punishment by removing but it's still punishment despite being labelled "positive".
What’s the actual difference between believing women are more X vs men are more !X? Presumably someone would believe one believes the other, and one of those is going to be a positive trait if the other is negative.
As I said in my comment, they are more or less equivalent as statements of fact, but different in how the fact is framed. Framing, or the context in which you state a fact, matters.
Framing a belief can matter when it is first presented to a person. For example think about the phrases "reproductive rights" vs. "baby killing" or "estate tax" vs. "death tax". If you are first being introduced to these concepts, it matters how it is framed to you when you first start forming your opinions or beliefs about the idea.
I suspect that is because you already have a belief about them and can use that belief to make an informed interrogation of the ideas at hand.
If, on the other hand, as I argued above you did not have a belief yet about an idea, that would not be the case and how it is framed to you would matter. I will give two contrived examples to show my point.
A 7-8 year old little girl is told by her (progressive) mother that "reproductive rights" are important to her and that abortion is part of that and they should fight for it to protect those rights related to her body.
vs.
A 7-8 year old little girl is told by her (conservative) mother that abortion is literally people "killing babies" and they should fight against it to protect the innocent babies.
The way those were framed (even though, I agree with you they are talking about the same concept at the end of the day) would obviously make a big difference to the little girl first hearing about this.
Indoctrination isn’t people independently coming to their own options so the names are irrelevant. A 7-8 year old girl can feel equally strongly about red vs blue being a boys/girls color.
Culture is extremely adaptable with little boys being put into dresses less than a hundred years ago for practical reasons and pink being a manly color as a less overt reference to blood. That swap didn’t depend on some new name for dress and colors.
> I don't understand the issue you have with the terminology. Benevolent doesn't mean morally good here
That's certainly not immediately clear. "Benevolent" is not a synonym of "positive", it's a synonym of "good". The former would apply in your definition but the latter very clearly doesn't.
----
Edit: I see from sibling commenters that this seems to be a compound term that makes up part of an established theoretical framework. That makes sense but I wouldn't assume everyone is automatically aware of that:
> Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive (subjective to the person who is evaluating), but are actually damaging to people and gender equality more broadly
It also doesn't redefine the word "benevolent" completely - in this context it just means "the misleading appearance of benevolence".
You're missing the point, where benevolent doesn't equal good, but either way, yes, "good" or "evil" is relative.
Robin hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor - that's going to be seen one way or the other from the rich person being stolen from vs the poor person being given to.
To have a moral system where defining something as unassailably good is also prone to manipulation - once you decide something is truly good you're more than willing to go to any end to defend or enact that good, including committing atrocities.
Some actions are harder to see as being subjective, sure, but there's always going to be gradients and perspectives.
Calling it "benevolent sexism" is using a technical term you seem to be unfamiliar with. Benevolent sexism towards women is considered harmful to women and equality. Likewise attributing something overly positive to men would be considered harmful to men.
> By that same logic the bias that "men are smarter than women" is benevolent sexism.
Yes. Exactly. That's not the gotcha you think it is.
Indeed, use of the phrase "benevolent sexism" for this is in fact an example of "benevolent sexism" (because nobody would use that phrase to refer to sexism in favor of men).
As has been pointed out elsewhere, benevolent sexism is a technical term in the field, and is just as applicable to situations where positive traits are assigned to men as it is when positive traits are assigned to women. It has nothing to do with judging about the moral status of the sexism.
This issue with "men are smarter than women" as a form of benevolent prejudice stems from the fact that there are largely only two bio-sexes (vs. genders). That, plus the explicit relative value judgment, makes it clear who the "loser" of the statement is.
This is different from the phrase "Armenians are good at Chess." Many peoples exist worldwide, so there is no de-facto loser or relative judgment.
Those confounding issues don't somehow make the statement less of a form of benevolent prejudice toward men. It is just that the statement is also clearly prejudicial toward women. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Yep. And calling it "benevolent sexism" is absurd. By that same logic the bias that "men are smarter than women" is benevolent sexism.
I don't see the logic there.
The "benevolent sexism" is in regards to equating women with "nurturing" characteristics (in this specific case, that's not the only example). My poor understanding of the subject is that the problem is that you are then saying that woman need to be nurturing or they are failing somehow or not meeting expectations, whereas you might not place the same expectation on a man. And that this expectation should guide the roles and opportunities women receive. But it isn't used as a put down against men, just that people don't have the same expectation that men need to be nurturing.
The stance "men are smarter than women" is just plain old sexism since the statement can easily be written as "women are dumber than men".
GP's point was that both "Everyone Prefers Women" and "Men Are Smarter" are equally "benevolent" and "malevolent" (depending on POV) and thus the adjective is "absurd" (meaningless).
Would you interpret "men are smarter than women" as a stereotype harmful to men because it sets them higher standards?
> The stance "men are smarter than women" is just plain old sexism since the statement can easily be written as "women are dumber than men".
Let me rewrite 'equating women with "nurturing" characteristics' into "women are more caring than men". Or alternatively "men are less caring than women". Do you see the problem now?
Let me rewrite 'equating women with "nurturing" characteristics' into "women are more caring than men". Or alternatively "men are less caring than women". Do you see the problem now?
I would say you are adding information that wasn't stated, and you are also missing the important part of the issue. Which is types of issues that result from stances like "women are nurturing".
Such as removing woman from consideration from management positions because you feel that their "nurturing" nature would make them unable to make decisions like firing people or taking a stance that is unpopular with their subordinates.
And honestly, I'm going to be blunt here. I feel like people are reacting defensively to the surface level words rather than what the words actually mean.
'The authors supposed that the positive general evaluation of women might derive from the association between women and nurturing characteristics. This bias has been cited as an example of benevolent sexism.'
How is that any less "problematic" than inverting the above to say that
' men are uncaring or mean'?
Casting all men as uncaring can't possibly be viewed as a good thing.
A study finds that women are viewed more positively than men, then researchers coin phrases like "women-are-wonderful" (equally "men are bad") and "benevolent sexism" (no, it's just sexism).
Hmm, almost like it's ironic. or something. So blatantly obviously ironic, in fact, that I begin to wonder whether they were aware of their own joke. Any by joke, I don't mean social science in general or anything.
Why, because sexes are not different from each other?
What's immoral is to state things that exist differently than what they really are, as if you know.
The real problem is most people don't have the understanding (or, otherwise, safe conditions) to accurately state the differences, but they clearly exist. Otherwise none of us would be here.
The problem lies in the ambiguity between prescriptive and descriptive statements.
If you describe the average woman whom you have interacted with as being more kind and nurturing, that's totally reasonable. You're just being descriptive.
If you prophesy that the average woman that exists will be more kind and nurturing, then you are making an assertion without enough data. There are plenty of women who don't fit that generalization.
If you proport that women in general are inherently better equipped to be in a nurturing role, then you are being prescriptive. That implies that women should be more nurturing, and that those who are more nurturing should be more feminine. That's sexism framed as benevolence.
Maybe unvolontary sexism ? There s a difference between the base macho sexism, embracing the gender divide, degrading women as sexual consumption near-objects, and the simp putting women on a pedestal so high he d even rather they don't speak so they dont break his illusion.
It's sexism in both ways, but there's an interesting difference in how to tackle them I think.
Raising a daughter myself, I'm sometimes lost: should I tell her so often she's cute, should I instead vindicate her physical strength, should she do karate or dancing or both ? It's hard to navigate when you know there's a problem, that you're probably part of it and you have a responsibility to try to fix it for your daughter.
I would somewhat agree with you, but the definition of sexism, like many things, do not depend whatsoever on the solution for it.
For example, if I robbed a bank or stole money from my parents, the solution for those are very different, however they are still both theft.
A bit tangential, but I always dislike this new trendy phenomenon of assigning whether forms of discrimination are "voluntary" or not. I find that it misses the point, and is mostly irrelevant to the conversation. "Oh my manager is totally sexist but nobody else sees it because everyone's been conditioned by society". Just like that, I find that it's a slippery slope into explaining why one is always right or wrong.
It’s a positive stereotype but still negative. I’ve had a few E Asian buddies who were about as successful as me in that life stage with similar interests (some not wholesome) and their home/social lives seemed so stressful.
They’re ‘failures’ or ‘disappointments’ in their circles despite just being a normal Canadian guy studying what they want, and having some beers and smokes. Meanwhile I’m cool, easygoing and edgy because as long as you aren’t fucking up your life completely, poor white people think you’re doing great.
From experience, "Asians are good at math" is often related to the wider (and very wrong, from my own experience) stereotype of "Asians are awkward" or "Asians are shallow" or "Asians are only good for math/work". And even then, "are good at math", by definition of the word "good", means that others are worse (otherwise "good" wouldn't mean anything).
> No, read the wiki again.
My point is that, still, they coined (therefore popularising) only one side (women good), and not the other (men bad).
It’s definitely in the same orbit, but I would connect it more closely to the high risk, high variance strategies taken by males, which drive mentioned traits such as aggression, disagreeableness, & danger.
Women create society, women ARE society. A few chosen men (rich, powerful, handsome) hold key positions in this society, meanwhile most men are just outside, looking for a way in. You can buy your way in by being productive and hard-working. Or by dying for the society. Note that in times of war, women were handing out white roses, not putting on their combat boots. The rich and powerful were likewise found nowhere near a battlefield.
We try to get past our wild roots, the fact that we don't have harems in most of the world is how we became civilized.
Forced monogamy is what gave most men “skin in the game” (a chance at having a family), and as such, encouraged them to go above and beyond in making society better and safer. So yes, a lack of harems is what makes society progressive, safe, and stable.
Having large masses of men who will never have an opportunity for a wife and family is massively unstable for any society, because these men will either sod off and do their own thing (why should I contribute to society/civilization if it does nothing for me?), or they will forment unrest in an attempt to acquire wives of their own by any means possible.
More precisely, societies that enforced monogamy out competed and eliminated those that didn't.
I think it is possible to have a self stable society without enforced monogamy, so long as you have a mechanism to eliminate the hoards of unnecessary males before they rise up in revolution, but it's not stable in a world where there are some societies that do enforce monogamy and therefore have more males with a stake to fight for.
Where are the sources for this? What stopped many men from marrying in the far past wasn't that women were all in harems, it's that many men were poor laborers.
>Note that in times of war, women were handing out white roses, not putting on their combat boots.
True.
>The rich and powerful were likewise found nowhere near a battlefield.
False; see the traditional sorting of European aristocrats' sons (oldest is heir, second joins military, third joins clergy). To a first approximation, every single member family in Britain's landed gentry and peerage lost someone in WW1.
Every child also needs a father. Not just his semen or his money.
To believe that you are expendable is just your mind providing a token explanation for deflecting intimacy. That’s the believe that others can only need, but never love you. Such thinking is a symptom for an avoidant attachment style. Those “explanations” tell you nothing about the world. Though they do tell you something about yourself.
The definition of benevolent sexism makes no sense. If "women are cooler than men" is benevolent sexism, then either you admit sexism is defined subjectively from the female POV, or you have to admit that "men are better at math" is also "benevolent sexism".
That's probably because you haven't spent enough time trying to understand the intent of the expression.
Benevolent here refers to the intent, not the outcome.
If I say "women are so caring" and then use that as a justification for why I shouldn't hire them, the result is a sexist policy with a benevolent origin.
You see this all the time with stereotypes - queer men are so good at fashion, Asians are so good at math, Black folks are such good athletes, etc. We might think these are compliments, but when they are used to deny opportunities they can be as harmful as any other stereotype.
If we are talking about a highly competitive situation, like hiring, then going by this line of thinking there can be no "benevolent sexism".
Any sexist or racist prejudice will either be against one group (women are so weak), leading to a disadvantage for them; or benefit one group (Asians are so good at math), leading to a disadvantage for everyone else. Both are leading to discrimination based on gender or race. Calling one of the two benevolent is just a bad name.
You are misinterpreting the expression. It's about disambiguation in the source of the sexism, not the outcome.
The whole point is that the outcome is not benevolent.
But it's useful to have a nominative difference between sexism that has roots in hate ("women are hysterical") and sexism that has roots in a "positive" stereotype ("women are nurturing").
Those are two different types of sexism with two different root causes and need to different solutions.
> then either you admit sexism is defined subjectively
That is indeed right in the definition, which you should read:
Hostile sexism reflects overtly negative evaluations and stereotypes about a gender (e.g., the ideas that women are incompetent and inferior to men). Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive (subjective to the person who is evaluating) but are actually damaging to people and gender equality more broadly
I don't like when people muddy the water here. *ism is judging people based on their inherent features they cannot change, be that ableism, sexism, or racism. I hold everyone, no matter their sex, color, or ability to the same standard of decency, and if I failed to do otherwise, I'd consider that, itself a form of *ism.
> I quite like the idea that prejudice becomes race/sex/whateverism when used to cause harm.
That's bit icky, because "causes harm" is extremely relative. Any negative attitude (or the shadow of a positive one) causes harm to some degree. Wasn't "microagression" a buzzword not long ago?
Everyone has some degree of power, and ignoring that feels like just another kind of marginalization.
What's so wrong with leaving those words with their current meaning, and if you mean X + power, just say the extra word. Otherwise we wind up with heated arguments over nothing more than the sounds our throats make.
> That's bit icky, because "causes harm" is extremely relative. Any negative attitude (or the shadow of a positive one) causes harm to some degree. Wasn't "microagression" a buzzword not long ago?
Just want to chime in on this bit here, since it's a bone I have to pick with society on some level, and your comment is providing a good way to maybe hopefully explain it. (I agree with you btw, just to be clear) Though to start off first, I want to make clear that I don't intend harm or any sort of 'flamewar' with this comment, though I can see how some people might take it out of hand.
Sure, there may be degrees to which harm is caused depending on the situation and context at hand, but we (logically, as I see it) should not be concerning ourselves with the lesser degrees overly much; as it creates a societal numbness to the more important things when rallied against too fiercely.
It's like the old "Boy who cried wolf" story. Sure, there WAS a wolf eventually, and so the villagers should have just listened to the boy anyways perhaps, but because the boy fooled them so many times at lesser levels of potential harm, they failed to believe him at higher levels of potential harm.
And yes, I realize that old story is about lying, but sometimes there are similar parallels in life that fit the stories narrative to some degree. Claiming that something is harming you, when there is no immediately understandable effect beyond getting emotional about whatever that thing is, is basically in and of itself, a lie.
Example: If you insult me, have you harmed me in any way beyond possibly injuring my ego?
My answer is no, because the ego is a personal psychological construct. It sucks, sure, but it's not hurting you in any way unless you are already in a mental state where such things become magnified. (I.E. some type of psychosis for example.)
Anyways. The reason why I bring this up, is because I've seen similar arguments about harm being used in the past to try to degrade and reduce the liberty of others, all because someone feels they have right to be more 'equal' than those others all due to the supposed harm being caused. I don't agree with the notion that one should be able to constitute small infractions against another as 'harm'.
I think this is why some people here are quibbling over the differences between 'benevolant sexism' and what they see as 'real sexism'. It's all ultimately some sort of ism, but some have different connotations depending on how they are applied. Ultimately, it's all stereotyping of some degree or another.
I agree with most of your points in principle, with a caveat. Harming another's feelings does constitute harm, but there is the confounding matter of how much responsibility we place on the individual to avoid such harms. Somewhere between spending our whole lives walking on eggshells and sociopathy is a healthy balance, both for each of us as individuals, and the sum of us as a society. It's fine to disagree where on that spectrum we believe things should be.
In any case, I doubt this was a helpful expansion, just felt important to say.
I think we overall agree then, it's just that society has become the 'walking on eggshells' part of your comment, in an attempt to not be sociopathic, which is part of the problem I am describing; just in different words.
In my opinion as someone who was constantly bullied in school and have had to deal with people through my life who (in a just world) would have been committed to a psych ward to figure out their issues in why they insist on psychologically harming others... I think we as a society are going too far now with being worried about hurting some random persons feelings over things they technically have no right to be offended over. Which is a tricky thing to discuss, because 'right to be offended' is a hard thing for some people to wrap their heads around when all they ever are is offended at everything.
Which is why I bring up the boy who cried wolf story. I think it suits the situation, since these people are essentially crying wolf at what the rest of society sees as 'nothing'.
Anyways, don't worry about whether or not something is a helpful expansion when discussing these things with me. Sometimes what ends up being the case is we actually agree on many points; but our lexicon differs. That's helpful because others will too, which means now both parties are giving a description that different people will now understand (hopefully) more accurately.
Oh believe me, I know. I don't know about you, but I've been having to deal with these people for over 2 decades now, with only a few moments of respite.
I can't begin to tell you how much I have to say on this subject. I've already written and deleted multiple paragraphs due to the potential of my words being against this sites rules.
No it's a well known phenomenon. It's like opening the door only to women to simplify, but it will impact for instance a vote decision: "women are too precious to be dragged into political fights".
Another analogy I've seen used is that in countries where men violently force wifes, daughters and sisters to veil their entire body, they are all very surprised to be accused of misogyny: they love and admire women like we do dogs, and only aim at protecting them from dirty cavemen as much as possible. But, just like them, you wont ask you dog to vote and you ll give it a slap if it disobeys. Women in turn can then accept this fact of life and embrace their newfound respect for a masculine God protecting them from base men and would show proud humility and obedience, while men burn cars and foreign effigies at the first sign of minuscule disrespect.
>Another analogy I've seen used is that in countries where men violently force wifes, daughters and sisters to veil their entire body, they are all very surprised to be accused of misogyny: they love and admire women like we do dogs, and only aim at protecting them from dirty cavemen as much as possible.
This is just a thinly veiled criticism of Iran(?) that has almost nothing to do with the parent comment.
Considering the term "privilege" (in that sense) was coined specifically in regard to male (and white) privilege, it is definitionally not "female privilege", though clearly that on its own isn't a very convincing argument.
The phrase "benevolent sexism" is not an oxymoron though. "Women should stay at home with the kids because they're so nurturing" is a belief that leads to reduced opportunities for women, despite ostensibly being praise of their inherent characteristics. At its simplest definition, "privilege" just means that a particular trait won't be the cause of things being harder for you, and by the example of women being nurturing, that's clearly not an example of privilege.
> Considering the term "privilege" (in that sense) was coined specifically in regard to male (and white) privilege, it is definitionally not "female privilege", though clearly that on its own isn't a very convincing argument.
That is indeed not a very convincing argument. A derogatory word invented by a political advocacy group is rarely useful. In this context however it was not coined specifically in regard to male (and white) privilege. It was coined in the social class struggle in regard to the privilege held by the nobles vs the common folks. The meaning was people with legal immunity or exemption from the law that the rest of the people had to follow.
That definition of the word hasn't change much since the 15th century. It is also from this period that the negative connotation occurred with the word pravilege, "an evil law or privilege".
Leaving aside the discussion about privilege, if you go back far enough, any commonly used term/idea will be entirely unused. For any term, there's someone who used it first, and for some of those terms we can identify who that person was, and some of those people are responsible for popularizing the term in question.
It's one thing to say that we don't know who coined the term "privilege" in the context being discussed, but to dismiss the possibility of knowing who coined any common term is just clearly false.
It looks like the term "privilege" was used in the 1200s, and even earlier in Latin, so restricting its use to male white privilege in the 2000s seems silly to me.
So its a bad argument you disagree with but don't present an alternative?
And doesn't women being viewed as more nurturing doesn't deny opportunities to nurturing men or men who would like to stay at home and raise their kids?
Did you miss the second paragraph where I make an argument aside from the one I said was unconvincing on its own? Also, I didn't say it was bad or that I disagreed, just that it was unconvincing on its own, and that's exactly why my comment didn't end there.
But I was just talking about "benevolent sexism". The fact that I didn't address a different topic (reverse sexism) isn't a rebuttal, it's just whataboutism. You made some arguments, there are other arguments for and against the idea, none of those relate to my point, which was solely that benevolent sexism alone isn't an oxymoron.
> participants had a much less positive response to articles favouring men over women than those that favoured women over men – and, again, this effect was stronger in women, as well as in left-leaning participants
> They also felt more strongly that male-favouring findings should be kept away from girls and not mentioned by teachers and the media.
I think Carl Jung did a great job of describing the origin of this effect with the concept of the underdeveloped anima - which is an especially common condition among modern men(technically it's common among all men before they reach emotional maturity, but this specific type of maturation is often stunted nowadays).
At different levels of underdevelopment, it can cause women to be perceived negatively; evil, duplicitous, manipulative, etc. At other levels it causes a person to put women on a pedestal, thinking they can do no wrong, viewing them as these perfect, almost numinous beings who are a source of comfort and love.
The common symptom is not viewing women as PEOPLE, as instead of seeing women as they are, all women are viewed through the projection of the persons own "anima"(think of it as an internal construct that represents a persons mother, or more generally, as the archetypal "woman"), and whatever unrecognized complexes or ideas are tied up with that image are projected into the real world. These complexes are developed naturally during early stages of life when a persons mother is perceived as some all-powerful and all-loving source of life, and as a person matures they are supposed to adapt a more and more realistic view of their mother figure and of women in general, but there is a tendency nowadays, especially for men, to not want to give up the comfort and support of their mother(literally or psychologically), and this can cause the immature mother image to persist throughout their life, which then gets projected onto women as a whole
>Ambivalent sexism is a theoretical framework which posits that sexism has two sub-components: "hostile sexism" (HS)[1] and "benevolent sexism" (BS). Hostile sexism reflects overtly negative evaluations and stereotypes about a gender (e.g., the ideas that women are incompetent and inferior to men). Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive (subjective to the person who is evaluating), but are actually damaging to people and gender equality more broadly (e.g., the ideas that women need to be protected by men).
To me 'benevolent sexism' seems just a misleading name. Something like 'positive eugenics'. According to its definition it makes sense to call it that, but you need some context to properly understand what the name actually means.
The problem isn't that the name is misleading, the problem is that every instance of hostile sexism is also benevolent sexism and vice versa according to that definition. For example:
HS: women are incompetent and inferior to men
BS: men are competent and superior to women
Both of these statements are equivalent. The only thing that changes is POV. So if you insist benevolent sexism and hostile sexism are different - you have to assume a POV (for example call the sexism that prefers women benevolent). Which to me seems obviously the wrong thing to do.
> the problem is that every instance of hostile sexism is also benevolent sexism
It's not a problem. It's an essential part of the definition:
"Hostile sexism reflects overtly negative evaluations and stereotypes about a gender (e.g., the ideas that women are incompetent and inferior to men). Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive (subjective to the person who is evaluating), but are actually damaging to people and gender equality more broadly"
Labeling all sexism using the benevolent form and voila ! the problem of sexism us conveniently solved. Let's move on to solve all sorts of other issues like racism next.
It depends. There's a practical and mechanical difference between one group being more liked than average, and one group being more disliked than average. Even though the situations can be equivalent in a purely logical sense, the nature of the difference changes
If there are two groups (and in addition they are roughly equal size) those are entirely interchangeable as there is no logical "standard" to compare to except eachother
(Speaking only to the "liked more than average" and "disliked more than average", not the general opposition of preferred vs dis-preferred.)
Imagine if there are 200 people, 100 of category A and 100 of category B. It's possible for members of category A to be simultaneously "liked more than average" and "disliked more than average". If 20 A's are liked and 20 A's are disliked, while only 10 B's are liked and 10 B's are disliked, then A's are liked 33% more than average and disliked 33% more than average.
Yes, but that will either cancel out to the average in group B matching the total average, or it won't, meaning the average of B is significantly different from the total average.
The question is "what does liked more than average mean?"
I think it's more naturally interpreted as a frequency question ('given a random A, how likely is it that I would say "I like this person"?') rather than an average/sum question ('what is the total likability of all members of A minus the total dislikability of all members of A?')
Consider the following thought experiment: a world with similar sexual dynamics as ours, but where women and men have equal physical strength and capacity for violence. In this case, although the traits would be defined as relative between the each of the two groups, the lack of a specific asymmetry in this case changes the dynamic completely. Whereas in our world, the difference of capacity introduces an asymmetric dimension that influences the relative mix of reactions each gender has towards the other.
The fact that men are specifically feared for some imbalance, whereas women are specifically valued for others, makes it not exactly interchangeable even if the standards only exist in a relative sense. In the hypothetical world, men (and perhaps women) would place extra value on women due to the way sexual desire and attraction works, but men would be seen more neutrally (or with disinterest rather than fear) than in our situation.
In our world women and men has equal capacity for violence. Time and time again we see researchers come to this conclusion. How we view violence is colored by our culture and views about gender roles, and thus gender and violence get mixed up. The same problem occurs with race. White and black people obviously have equal capacity for violence, but black men (and women) are more feared by white people. In the past people would use genetics and race theory to explain this, but today we know to avoid those traps in our thinking.
I understand the argument you are going for, and agree that we must obviously consider the role of culture, but it's not plausible to claim that the capacity for violence is equal. The comparison with ethnicity is flawed because in the case of gender you have clear physical differences, the most notable of which being that the majority of women would have much difficulty physically overcoming the majority of men in life or death situations, barring superior tactics or weaponry. If, say, the propensity of each gender towards violence was identical, this mere fact would already provide a culturally significant imbalance.
I'm not sure what research you are pointing towards, but I sincerely doubt that the propensity for violence is identical, either. Consider the following scenario: a person points a gun to your head and tells you to pick a person at random either amongst all of the women or amongst all of the men (let's sidestep the question of gender neutrality for the sake of the argument) If the person you pick has an aggressive and violent psychological profile, you are shot. Which gender would you pick in this situation to maximize your survival? Would you sincerely rely on your intuition about equal capacity for violence in this case?
Equal capacity for violence? Yes.
Equal capacity for violence in a specific cultural context? No.
Let say you wrote a AI that detected if a person talks negative about a other person in order to make themselves look (or feel) better. We run this AI over a messenger network with true identities. Will men or women be tagged proportional more often?
An other example, let count the number of bullying victim in schools and number of people who are guilty of committing bullying. Will it be boys or girls that are found guilty more often?
A person who wields a gun is more like male because people who own and wield guns in this culture is male. If the person were a poisoner, statistics will say it is a woman. Why? Culture.
What research on violence say is that violence is defined by culture, and if the violence we highlight is those typical of male culture then that is the kind of violence we see. For a very long time researcher did not even consider that female-female competition existed among animals because the only form of competition researcher know of was defined in term of male-male competition. It was only in recent decades that they realized that, in contrast to previous theories, females do compete with each other that mirror the violence seen in males. It just happens to be very different form of violence, although the consequences were often just as deadly as male-male competition.
I would consider that verbal bullying, school bullying perhaps even poisoning are not as violent as brutally killing or maiming people on the spot, sexual assault, and so on, which are more male oriented in general.
Let's say we take the cultural argument at face value. If the capacity for violence is identical, why did we come to have a culture that fears men more or highlights male violence? Why were researchers blind to female-female competition in the first place? The explanation is that the violence in question has a dimension of brutality and assertiveness towards challenges that goes beyond just classifying it as male or female and leaving it at that in a cultural relativist sense. If it were completely equal, it would have been very unlikely that we would have assigned such lopsided values to these types of violence since no tradition or cultural expectation is completely divorced from material reality.
Question like those is why researchers goes to animal observations. Easier to make conclusions without introducing too much cultural assumptions.
In the jungle people find a dead young female baboon. She is apparently dead from starvation, so we hastily conclude it was natural causes. The researcher however who observed the flock gives a different explanation. The young female was healthy just a few weeks ago, but after joining the flock she got continuously bitten and scratched by other females whenever she went to eat or tried to sleep. After weeks of constant stress, lack of sleep and food she died.
In contrast we might find a dead young male baboon clearly beaten to death. They joined the same flock recently and after a large fight over dominance the young male acquired injuries and died. Which of the two cases displayed more capacity for violence, brutality or aggressiveness? Is a brawl better or worse than cold calculated murder?
> why did we come to have a culture that fears men
Very good question. One likely answer is that we have a culture that reward men who commit violence in the right context. Why do men get rewarded for violence? There are many contradicting theories and books on that subject. Are humans inherently violent or peaceful? Is society holding back the savage beast or is cooperation the human default behavior? A lot of questions, a lot of research, a lot of theories.
If you want to dig down into those question there are good books and other sources on it. The stanford Human Behavioral Biology lecture serie on youtube is a good start (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...). The same researcher has also a book called Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, which focus a fair bit on aggression and violence. There is War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, which also has a counter-argument book which name is currently evading me.
I must confess, I don't have a definite answer to your questions. Thank you for the recommendations, I enjoy this topic very much and have heard good things about this researcher so I will check those out.
Disagree. Biologically, men are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive.
This is also true for basically all large social mammals (cats, dogs, deer, ...), and seems to be a consequence of the fact that female parental investment is greater than male parental investment. In situations like seahorses where the male paternal investment is greater than the female, it is the females that are bigger, stronger and more aggressive.
Size, strength and aggression are directly related to capacity for violence. Men are bigger, stronger and more aggressive, and therefore have a higher capacity for violence. This is why we separate men and women for e.g. boxing or MMA.
You mention dogs. Which one is more likely to fights among themselves, owning two females or two males?
An other easy question. Let have two human households, one where two men live together and one where two women live together. Which one is more likely to have domestic violence?
Based on biologically, those two should have a very clear and simple answer. The actually answer is that two female dogs are more likely to fight than two male dogs, and in human households, both of them has statistically identical rates of domestic violence.
There are studies showing bias against women, there are studies showing bias against men. This should remind us not to take any one reported bias and conclude that it represents the overall relationship between the sexes, even if politically convenient to do so.
Note though that even though this sounds like a positive and "well-meaning" bias, it can be dysfunctional too. Holding someone to a higher standard also has a "reverse" psychological effect that when they deviate or stray away from the expected standards, people are harsher on them than they usually would be. This is why, when coupled with regressive societal norms, "honour killing" of women happen (the extreme worst-case example).
> Holding someone to a higher standard also has a "reverse" psychological effect that when they deviate or stray away from the expected standards, people are harsher on them than they usually would be.
That sounds strange. Women are held to a higher standard, yet when they commit crimes, we punish them less severely than men. How would that fit into your narrative?
One rational for this could be that we shouldn't see this in isolation and should also consider other societal aspects too, mainly - (1) women are perceived as the weaker sex (2) women who commit crimes are actually much lower than male criminals and (3) male pride (men too are held to some unreasonably high standards in society, one of popular ones being that men need to protect women and always be chivalrous towards them). So a male dominated society, while holding a "fallen" woman in contempt, might still irrationally blame themselves for "failing to protect" a woman from going waylaid and thus award her a less harsher punishment to assuage their guilt and as an act to "protect" her from further harm. (This is perhaps why many are now advocating for gender neutral laws because some laws do prescribe different treatment based on the gender of the person involved).
Note though that while a judicial punishment might be less severe, the societal contempt that such women face lasts much longer than with a man in a similar situation. Indeed, while, despite the contempt they feel, the judicial system can show restraint due to their legal training to disregard emotions, others in society don't often hold back in showing their disgust and contempt towards a "fallen" women, depending on what gender specific societal standard she has violated. In my own society (in India), I have seen woman who have committed adultery (no longer a crime) being treated more harshly by society than men who have also committed a similar act. From the point of view of our discussion, this could be because the standard ("that woman should display higher level of control over their sexual desire and be more empathetic") is gender specific, and doesn't equally apply to the men for whom the societal standard is different ("men too are expected to control their sexual urges but they can be forgiven as they cannot indulge in it unless a woman consents").
any sexism inherently has a counter-effect on the opposite sex. e.g women being viewed as homemakers and not being taken seriously in professional environments has the counter-effect that men are hoisted with the responsibility of making a living and creating a successful career and are judged more harshly for failing to do that.
men and women both have issues caused by sexism and it's okay to acknowledge both. I only think it's taken too far sometimes when either sex acts like they are the only ones with problems. Also, lets just be honest here, women have it worse as the ROOT of all these dual-edged sexist beliefs stems from a tendency to not view women as REAL people. Some cultures are worse than others with this but I'd argue that pretty much EVERY culture still has certain views on women that, consciously or not, restrict their personal freedom. There are certain benefits to this(e.g being judged less harshly in court, people being more likely to treat you nicely, do favors, etc) but all of those "benefits" are the result of others not viewing the woman in question as a full, independent person who is capable of making their own decisions and forming their own thoughts/beliefs outside the context of being a woman
They say that female call-centre responders are preferred to male ones.
I'm less likely to kick-off at a female call-centre responder if the service is awful, than to a male responder. But the responders I'm happiest with are usually male responders (preferably with a lowlands scottish accent).
I thought the phenomena was called the "Althouse Rule," from the below blog post observation.
November 8, 2005
Scientists: remember to portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior.
I've said it before, and I must repeat, the rule is: If you do scientific research into the differences between men and women, you must portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior. And when you read reports about scientific research into the differences between men and women, use the hypothesis that the scientists are following that rule. It makes reading the reports quite humorous.
Yesterday it was the old OKCupid blogs today it's WAW. I spent some time a few years ago exploring the incel wiki after one of the mass shootings that happened and saw these concepts popping up again and again. I feel like maybe these ideas are reaching a critical mass of young men lately and it will be interesting to see what the ramification of that are....
Looking at how men are doing in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment, career prospects, etc... does make it obvious something has gone very wrong for them as a group but I think there's a real lack of any sort of positive vision going forward. Mostly I see lamentations of how much better women seem to have it or angry calls for a return to the status quo ante.
Is there someone with a positive vision for men? Jordan Peterson spews a bunch of nonsense about fighting dragons and embracing suffering but that's not going to get men into universities or opening up emotionally with one another so that they stop drowning in lonely misery.
The one positive proposal I've seen lately was the suggestion that boys should start school at 6 instead of 5 since girls mature a bit more quickly which gives them a leg up in terms of academic achievement.
I think encouraging healthy emotional relationships among men is probably a better idea for society than the "the world is harsh and unpleasant so you must be strong" sort of rhetoric that I hear men tell each other on this website a lot.
What if that's the truth? It's useful to know what to expect and what not to, even if you'd be much happier if you only expect good things ... at least until your expectations don't match reality and you're swept off your feet because you never knew that might happen.
I don't understand how men operate among themselves to be honest but I do know that my ability to share my feelings and struggles with my friends and family has helped me grow and survive a lot of hardships in my life. My husband has me for that now, but he only has me for that and didn't have that with anyone in the past and I think it hurt him and he is still recovering. I go out of my way to talk to his family when he is hurting about something for instance because he is too proud to do it himself, and we all don't tell him that we've been worried about him and instead just try to lift him up. It works, but only because he has a woman in his life. When he was single he says he would just sink into depression and engross himself in work and hobbies alone all day. That's so unhealthy to be that lonely and disconnected from others. I think my husband is a pretty typical guy and I wonder what he would be like now 7 years since we met if he had remained single. What kind of dark place would he have found himself in? It makes me worried for a lot of young guys. It's like they live in a self enforced solitary confinement.... Solitary confinement drives people nuts.
Should male culture become a copy of female culture? That wouldn't work I don't think because I think men have different personality types and tastes on average but it doesn't mean that they can't learn to express their emotions and build friendships with people where they feel comfortable confiding their hurts and fears to each other. Just a basic support network really....
And speaking of friendship, that's another area where me and my girlfriends have noticed that pretty much every man in our lives struggles. It seems like once a guy leaves college his ability to make close friends drops to almost zero. Meanwhile I've made some of my best friendships in my 30s at women's meetups.
I believe your husband is lucky and it's certainly a good approach that you're using, but for many/most men, that's not the experience they are having, whether they're married or not. They'll hunger for attention and won't find it, they'll need help but will not get any. What else could you say to them but some version of "winter is coming, be prepared"?
The best you can do for the vast majority is handing out winter coats and hope they'll find ways to deal with what life offers them besides drugs and suicide. It is what it is, their suffering usually is damaging only to themselves and thus society at large has no interest in changing it.
My wife was the first person I shared my feelings with. Since then I have learned and grown to share those feelings with my family and friends as well.
I honestly don’t know why I didn’t grow up sharing my feelings, but I believe it has something to do with culture as well as the way paternal figures in my life behaved.
Really, at its very core it drives home ideas of male expendability. You will be loved if you can provide, so 'clean up your room', start providing and if still no women want to be with you, then we can talk about it.
I don't see why you'd call it a "bunch of nonsense" when his messages are merely digestible morsels of the most prevalent traditional thought. The metaphors are obvious enough really.
It is adult versions of Aesop's fables & Panchatantra. It is the exact opposite of 'a bunch of nonsense'. They are the most well understood civilizational cliches of humanity.
> Really, at its very core it drives home ideas of male expendability.
Do you think it's healthy for boys to be taught that they are expendable and that their lives only have conditional value that can go away at any time if they are unable to work?
Or do you just think "that's the way things have always been so we should embrace it?"
I think probably most manosphere guys think the former which is why I say that there's no positive vision of a future for men. Just this very dreary outlook that life is some sort of hopeless struggle. No wonder so many men are violent and angry if that's the message they get their whole lives. :(
I actually love the men in my life and I want better for them and this slaying dragons stuff doesn't help them as far as I can see. They need to feel like they are valued and loved so that they can open themselves up to more possibilities beyond trying to act tough by building walls around them.
> Do you think it's healthy for boys to be taught that they are expendable and that their lives only have conditional value that can go away at any time if they are unable to work?
I do see your point, however this is an issue with all self-help advice. As a person who looks for such advice, you're looking for something you can fix about yourself. Whether it is a good thing on a society level is not the question.
Yes. It is essential & useful for struggling boys to internalize the values of male expendability. If anything, Peterson's "go on a hero's journey & prioritize self-improvement" way of phrasing it is fairly optimistic and hopeful.
The question isn't "how should men with already healthy co-ed social circles structure their lives?". Those men don't need Peterson. They already have a functioning model of the world. The question is "how do chronically unsuccessful men with zero potential partners avoid spiralling into a cycle of depression, nihilism & misogyny?".
Peterson's "Women behave in ways that perfectly align with their constraints and incentives." message implies that "There is a light at the end of the tunnel if you can grow in ways that align with women, they may reward you with attention and intimacy." Now this might not be a correct view of the world, but it is a useful model for pulling people out of a bad spot into something productive. The more nuanced views of the world will come later, but at least these people are out of their rut for now. It also humanizes women in that "Just like men, women are greedily looking for interactions that enrich their lives". It preemptively dismantles the 'nice guy attack pattern' which places blame on women.
I am not entirely sure women fully realize the extent to which the societal behaviors of single-straight men revolve around finding a romantic partner. The degree of desired promiscuity varies, but it is foundational to male-female interactions for men in their 20s. This is especially true the more starved the men are. "Starved" is the perfect word for it too, because just like food, those living in abundance of it can forget just how desperate a famine can feel.
> men are violent and angry
I'd say it is the opposite. The inability to make peace with male expendability is exactly what leads to the male entitlement, which in turn leads to violence and anger. The old 'patriarchal' image of man was progressively mocked and dismantled, but it was replaced with nothing. Certain toxic parts of the manosphere prey on these empty men, but the real question is why that emptiness has suddenly arisen in the 21st century.
> beyond trying to act tough by building walls around them.
It makes me wonder if you've only ever experienced the meme version of Peterson. He is among the most emotionally intune and vulnerable men I've seen. I mean, just read the the 12 rules he has come up with in his proverbial bible.
"Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street."
"Make friends with people who want the best for you."
"Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today."
"Pursue what is meaningful"
It is literally timeless ideas rephrased for a modern person. There is nothing offensive about them. If anything, the one valid criticism I can think of is "duh, aren't these super obvious"? To which I'd say, not for the target audience.
> I actually love the men in my life and I want better for them
Advice for 'Persons' and advice for 'People' are different things. These books are written for 'People'. You are talking about 'Persons' in your life. Advice for People must by definition be generic. Advice for Persons can often contrast 'generic People advice' because you know specifics about what works for them and their circumstances. Then, it is okay for them to be in conflict. It does not invalidate either.
> They need to feel like they are valued and loved so that they can open themselves up to more possibilities
I would genuinely appreciate if you could elaborate on what you mean here. Vague platitudes are one thing. But, universal specific advice is incredibly hard to phrase. If you could phrase a new positive counter-model for these 'disenfranchised men' to follow, then I am all ears.
>> They need to feel like they are valued and loved so that they can open themselves up to more possibilities
> I would genuinely appreciate if you could elaborate on what you mean here. Vague platitudes are one thing. But, universal specific advice is incredibly hard to phrase. If you could phrase a new positive counter-model for these 'disenfranchised men' to follow, then I am all ears.
I was just thinking about my own life and the people in it and about how socially cloistered and risk averse some of the less [socially] successful men, and women, I've known have been and how that closed off stance toward the world preceded their lack of success. Feeling like you have intrinsic value gives a person a foundation to stand on so that they can branch out socially. Does that make sense?
It's like how coming from a wealthy family allows you to take more career risks like accepting unpaid internships. Showing your personality to strangers and acquaintances is like taking an unpaid internship. You're putting yourself out there with no immediate reward and no guarantee that it will work out. You could get rejected, but you could also make a genuine connection.... If you're "poor" you might decide that the risk is too much.
Somebody here said something like: "men make society and women are society. Men have to buy their way in to society or die protecting it." I think that message is toxic because while a few guys might hear it and feel gassed up about their "heroes journey" toward "buying" their way into being seen as an actual member of society [human], many others will probably find it paralyzing and be pushed into choosing life strategies which are overly conservative as a result.
Part of having a conservative life strategy would be to close yourself off emotionally right? Showing vulnerability is risky because it can open you up to criticism or lower your perceived value; but at the same time people who are vulnerable tend to build stronger relationships and those relationships have a compounding effect on their well being as having more friends and friends of friends etc.... exponentially increases your chances of finding romantic partners, job opportunities and many other of the things that make for what most people would call a successful life.
Another sad thing about it is that the idea of needing to "buy your way in" to society is that it pits men in a competition against one another for value. Seems worth investigating if this has something to do with the way that men don't support each other the way that women often do. Instead men seem to pile onto other men who show signs of weakness and try to totally destroy them as if life were a last-man-standing video game where taking out the competition leaves more loot for you.
Like, have you read much about female autism? One reason girls are better at "masking" their autism is that neurotypical girls will help autistic girls to fit in. They nurture them essentially. Isn't that interesting? How do neurotypical boys treat autistic boys by contrast?
I'm sort of rambling here, but hopefully this makes sense.
Males can't grow babies inside their bodies. Fish can't run marathons. Whatever. Being able to grow a baby inside you is really cool and important but we don't live in a hunter gatherer tribe that is in danger of going extinct due to lack of babies. Feels like we ought to send boys the message that they are intrinsically valuable and lovable too so that they can feel safe to express themselves and build social networks without worrying constantly about falling out the bottom of society.
I suspect that if physics and/or CS students were required to take part in at least one study per class per semester (like psychology students - this may have changed since I last took a psych course), then I suspect that the results of university psychology studies would have greater representation.
Technically, people participating in those studies are supposed to be volunteers. Although if part of your "class participation" grade is a result of "doing" a study, then it might not be totally voluntary. And if those studies are unpleasant enough, then you really don't want to be a senior or graduate psych student actually trying to run those experiments.
We may never know, but I would think the results wouldn't be the same.
Mostly because there still is inherent bias against certain genders regarding a degree or a profession, e.g. men as nurses, women as programmers, and those would be way more pronounced back in the 90s.
So many of the comments in this thread are misinterpreting the phrase, "benevolent sexism".
"Benevolent" is describing the context of the sexism, not judging that the sexism itself is morally good.
The context of the term still heavily implies that "benevolent sexism" is a moral/social failure.
To call out an idea as "benevolent sexism" is just shorthand to say, "despite this idea being framed as a positive affirmation, it reinforces the structure of traditional gender roles and sexism."
The most interesting part of this -besides the obvious absurdity of "benevolent sexism"- is this line:
"In more egalitarian societies, people have more positive attitudes towards men than in less egalitarian societies."
This makes sense to me- the person you're going to fear the most is someone who has power over you. In the absence of toxic power dynamics, there would probably be a lot more social and sexual openness between the sexes. Probably a big part of what's going on here is that men are seen as threatening in a way that women aren't. And I don't think there's any biological reason that men should be seen as threatening. Cultural reasons, maybe, but those can be fixed.
By the way- please read what I actually wrote, not what you assume I meant, before downvoting. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, in fact I specifically said that men are not bad or any worse than women. If you didn't catch that, read it again. Thank you.
All this research appears to be from the 80s and 90s. When women were still largely confined to being homemakers and soft jobs.
Since then research has shown that people tend to have far more negative views of women in power than equivalent men.
I suspect this derives more from the fact that women were simply not allowed positions of power and so if you guessed a woman was a homemaker and/or in a caretaking job like a nurse or teacher you would almost certainly be right.
I'm trying to remember someone's words that if <politician(s)> were a woman, there wouldn't have been <bad things>. As if...
Google has so far suggested to me Boris Johnson's "if Putin were a woman...", Kaja Kallas' (Estonian PM) "If women were in charge...", and Sheryl Sandberg's "If women were in charge"; but I am sure I heard this sentiment before 2022.
you can look at matriarchal societies, queens, famous women politician (tatcher, merkel - now that the aftermath unplayed I suppose she will have less fans- albright) to see that we at the end are all same. men and women. both awful when in power
We already know, it's not like if female rulers were an unknown quantity. And empirical examples (Thatcher, Catherine the Great, Maria-Theresa, Elisabeth I, ...) shows that it would basically be the same.
There's a reasonable argument that you'd need to exclude women from dynastic monarchies, and women who fought through a male-candidate-dominated democratic process for their prominence. The selection process weeds out the archetypical woman (or neurotypical, or stereotypically feminine in thought, or whatever you want to call it. The Iron Lady was not your Mum).
Hilary Clinton is another example. Wellesley to warmonger? Something happened there, and my suspicion is that it has to do with "competing" in a male-dominated arena.
And what makes you think that competing in a female-dominated arena would make for nicer people?
If the women-dominated workplaces I worked in are any indicator, it wouldn't change much at all.
> The Iron Lady was not your Mum
Yeah, and Gengis Khan is not my granddad. What's your point? People cunning, ambitious, and ruthless enough to reach the highest offices will not be representative of the average human, independently of their sex.
The argument is that our selection process for leaders is basically broken, and the winners are less "men and women" than "aggressive egotists with varying genitalia".
Males are more often in the extreme edges of the personality curves. It seems likely to be the case with aggression and egotism also. Women who compete with them are less common (in the field, but also in the female population), but often similarly extreme.
Not on average, but I believe men do have a flatter Gaussian curve. We have more mass murderers but also more notable leaders, scientists, etc.
At any rate, this is interesting in the large but useless at the individual level. We should not allow fuzzy impressions over the entire human race change our impressions of an individual person.
When the book "The Bell Curve" came out it caused an uproar for this reason. We cannot discriminate against anyone on the basis of their broad studies of race, as the authors themselves noted.
And the flatter curve exists because males are essentially the experimental units of a species.
Because eggs are scarce but sperm is abundant, males are largely disposable in the context of a species' or society's collective survival. Therefore, it is advantageous for males to engage in high risk, high reward behavior to keep prodding the environment they live in for changes that might require an adaptation from the group. The result is a flatter curve with more extreme failures and more extreme successes.
My ex-wife used to physically abuse me (hitting, throwing things). An attorney friend told me to leave the house whenever that happened, because if anyone called the cops (including me), the police would arrest me instead of her. It's called the "Duluth Model" of domestic violence enforcement.
Here where I live, police are instructed to use a gendered lens in their responses, specifically to treat everything as though women are the victims, always, and never the aggressors.
Heh, another example of the bias in action. I'm sure people tend to more easily forget instances where a woman was not well-behaved. Take a look at /r/PublicFreakout. Also note the Karen meme is not about a man.
Also, similar to bullying in childhood, women's bad behavior often doesn't manifest in physical displays of aggression, but psychologically manipulative and emotional ones. Obviously men can be psychologically manipulative too, yada yada... I'm not a woman hater.
Discrimination means treating things differently because they're different. You seem to be assuming that all discrimination is bad; but the "bad discrimination" is discriminating based on irrelevant differences.
> Stereotypes reinforce themselves through the ways we treat people.
Whatever; I don't understand the sentence. Perhaps I should have studied sociology! But a "stereotype" is like a cardboard cutout; it's a super-simplified (ands therefore false) representation of a difference. I don't know what stereotypes have to do with discrimination, unless somehow we're suddenly talking about racial discrimination, or gender discrimination, or some other unjustified discrimination.
People are individuals, not averages of everyone. To assume someone is a statistical extrapolation of other people is stereotyping, regardless of how frequently it is correct.
There's no data to back up the assertion though. At least not in this article - all it says is that we attribute more positive attributes to women, not that women exhibit those attributes more often than men.
Depends on your average. If you take mean then male averages are always skewed by outliers. The mean number of people murdered is going to be higher for men than for women. But the median and mode for both will be 0. Also note that such statistics have a lower limit (0) but no upper limit. It might be that there are men who are overwhelmingly "good" and prevent many murders, but this won't count as a negative contribution to male murder statistics.
I suspect it's accurate but tells us less than one might think. In that sense it may be a "bad thing" if the conclusions are taken at face value and applied out of context without being interrogated.
i.e.: saying "this shows people are predisposed to favour women, ergo the narrative of gender discrimination against women is disproven."
In actuality, this shows favourable sentiment toward women in quite narrow, specific ways: words quoted from the article are "good, happy, and sunshine" & not things like "competent, reliable, trustworthy, and cool". There's a hint of infantilisation within the words used. Yes they're positive, but it's worth looking at how those specific sentiments might exhibit in real world situations.
While I was hesitant to comment on the topic at all, it's worth it for men to have words for the bias, because the entire moral code of a lot of men who tend toward agreeability is based on not-upsetting the women in their lives, or anywhere for that matter, and the effect is pernicious.
There is a maturation stage for men that traditionally happened in late adolescence that doesn't seem as common these days. Now these men relate to women as though they expect women to supervise them, and expect other men to "behave," in a way that is acceptable to their percieved feminine supervisors, or they have some kind of hyper-conscientious responsibility to blunt themselves around women so as to seem "unthreatening" to them, because they are still fundamentally actuated by shame, even though it is just a harness our species uses to manage children.
The anxiety originates from this unmatured Women are Wonderful bias, which boys are taught as children so they can be managed, but with the expectation that they grow out of it or leave it behind during a rite of passage. The result of not breaking men of this childhood harness is they grow up to be "nice guys" who are really just full of anxiety and resentment from navigating the absurd bind of believing their goodness and identity as a protagonist comes from being validated by the women they have placed in their supervisory pedastal roles, and because by treating women as better, they have implicitly made the women in their lives responsible for their feelings instead of taking complete ownership of their own emotions and lives. I meet these "happy wife happy life" guys all the time, and not only do they compete to debase themselves and accumulate sacrifices nobody asked for, but they take it out as resentment of other men whose freedom from that bias casts a light on that undocked lever of shame they wear around like a collar - and then ultimately the women in their lives.
Women are people, and for any quality in a population, people tend to be on pretty long tailed distributions. When you refuse to see the worst examples because of some well meaning bias, it leaves the great ones unappreciated, which I think is the most harmful bias of all. Men and women can be wonderful, but nobody gets there without a lot of practice, imo.
The question isn't whether women are wonderful or not, as that's a dumb dichotomy - it's whether guys have matured into men by ceasing to be controlled by this internalized language of shame that was only necessary to keep them physically safe as children. Part of that is recognizing women aren't symbols, but other people, who like men are responsible for their own actions and feelings, and above all, not a single one is responsible for yours either.
I mean, when attending a birthday or christmas party, who buys the presents?
Bias means that judgment about a topic doesn't match reality. But is it really bias (or even more loadedly "sexism") to think that stereotypical women do more likable things if we were to assume that was perhaps actually true?
Imagine, for example, saying that it's "benevonent species-ism" to think that animals are on average more likely to be quadrupedal than humans. That'd be a silly assertion, because we know for a fact that this is true, and because the idea of more legs being better is weird for human standards. This thought exercise then begs the question: if we do think that thinking "women are nicer" is a form of bias, then what is the reality? Is the implication that they are not? That niceness should account for things other than nurturing attributes? According to who?
IMHO, the more interesting aspect of the observation of this effect is what it says about the people talking about it.
> I mean, when attending a birthday or christmas party, who buys the presents?
This one confuses me, are you saying that it's a given that women are the one buying presents and men aren't? I've not seen that, nor heard that be the stereotype.
this is just catering to the predominantly male audience of early tech adopters. I remember hearing that the landing assistant in soviet fighter jets has a female voice, because it has a soothing effect on the male pilots.
My personal opinion is the "Bitching Betty" voice with its crisp instructions and authoritative tone makes us subliminally think of our mother giving us guidance or reprimand at an early age. It is a great design; it has saved a TON of pilot lives who otherwise would have accidentally perished.
Out of curiosity I googled "percentage of US prison population that's female" and it's ~10%. So is this partly why we have the "women are wonderful" bias (because women are apparently much less likely to commit violent crime)? Or is it that because of this bias fewer women end up in prison?
A quote I saw somewhere, and backed up with links to research that I (unfortunately) did not save, went something like this:
“For the exact same crime with the exact same damages, the gender sentencing gap is three times larger than the wealth sentencing gap, and seven times larger than the racial sentencing gap. Having been born female is the single largest get-out-of-jail-free card you could possibly possess.”
This hesitancy by police, prosecutors, judges, and juries to properly charge, prosecute, and sentence women to the same degree as men are treated, is certainly sounding a lot like the “women are wonderful, they couldn’t possibly be responsible or capable of this” effect in action.
> Or is it that because of this bias fewer women end up in prison?
That's well documented [0]. Money quote: "In the United States men are most adversely affected by sentencing disparity being twice as likely to be sentenced to jail after conviction than women and receiving on average 63% longer jail sentences."
An interesting side-note: the effect shrinks when the judge is a woman.
I never said it would, but it does explain part of it, and especially the length, which acts as a multiplier. Hard to say what the "true" frequencies are. I'm pretty sure you'd still have more men committing crimes, but probably not as many if they'd get similar treatments. And you'd probably see shorter sentences, and fewer jail sentences, if there was no sentencing gap. I have no idea what the "true" numbers would be though.
When women are statistically fewer of the high achieving people in society we say it must be because of socialization, because women and men are equal. How is it that this is because men are simply violent? So are men just women with an added propensity for violence?
I see you have no actual interest in the discussion and just want confirmation of your beliefs. I'm sure you'll find plenty in the depth of the internet. Good luck, and have a great day!
Folks are rushing to criticize the term "benevolent sexism" without knowing what the technical term means. It's not the gotcha you think it is.
tl;dr Benevolent sexism towards women is damaging to women. Likewise for benevolent sexism towards men. And yes, it is subjective. That's in the definition.
"Ambivalent sexism is a theoretical framework which posits that sexism has two sub-components: "hostile sexism" (HS)and "benevolent sexism" (BS). Hostile sexism reflects overtly negative evaluations and stereotypes about a gender (e.g., the ideas that women are incompetent and inferior to men). Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive (subjective to the person who is evaluating), but are actually damaging to people and gender equality more broadly"
This is just sexism and if you swapped "man" with "women" you would be rightfully cancelled. Your age is not a justification for suggesting such absurdities. As an example, the majority of teachers are female and so many of them are useless slobs who should have never been allowed near a school.
> The authors supposed that the positive general evaluation of women might derive from the association between women and nurturing characteristics. This bias has been cited as an example of benevolent sexism.
Seems an unusually baseless conclusion when in the actual research:
> a task was done to discover whether people associate pleasant words (good, happy, and sunshine) with women, and unpleasant words (bad, trouble, and pain) with men
(conclusions from the study seem to focus on the former positive indicators and ignore the latter negative indicators?)
> men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic preference for their own gender
I wonder why that might be?
> Other experiments in this study found people [...] associated the male gender with violence or aggression
> Rudman and Goodwin's suggested that [...] male intimidation influences gender attitudes.
I've clipped the positive attitude findings in the above quotes which seems like cherry picking but I'm not trying to negate the findings of positive attitudes toward women. Just pointing out that the clear findings around negative attitudes seem omitted from the conclusion.
The following quote is the clearest example:
> mediation comes not from differences in attitudes towards women, but in attitudes towards men. In more egalitarian societies, people have more positive attitudes towards men than in less egalitarian societies