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Well, no, that actually is a (mild) insult. It refers to a bad habit some men have of charging into a conversation about women or gender stuff and condescendingly laying down How It Is to people who a) are well aware of the status quo and b) not interested in maintaining it. Bonus points for when they indulge in evopsych or factual inaccuracies about history, biology, and sociology. Its extremely entitled and rude behaviour.
There's a fair amount of such mansplaining in this thread; its why its such a cesspool. I can't remember who the first person was to mention The Holy Testosterone back at the start of the thread, but that's where the trouble started.
I was not talking about me actually, but more in the looser sense of the public in general.
Most people I know hear Patriarch and assume you mean male run. So the patriarchy is keeping the women down comes off loaded as men are keeping women down. When it's not just men, it's the entire society and their expectations.
Read what Evander wrote, this is more what I was going after if you look at the post order.
After Charcotte died, one of his students, who completely disagreed with him, spoke out against it and other people began to speak out about how the theory was a big fat hoax because Charcotte wanted to make a buck.
However the symptoms being displayed that were given the arbitrary label and theory by Charcotte didn't immediately disappear, although they did reduce in severity and frequency once it wasn't an acceptable medical diagnosis anymore. So something was obviously going on there to cause things like hysterical blindness or epileptic style fits.
During WW1, shellshock, which is symptomatically identical to the more debilitating forms of hysteria (catalepsy, contortions and cramps, vacant stares etc) caused people to think "Hmm, men are getting this womans thing I guess this is something serious". WW1 really made psychiatrists and psychologists recognise the influences of the environment affecting cognitions and beliefs in the etiology of these kinds of symptoms, because of the trenches and the state of the survivors.
Hysteria still exists as a catch all term for unexplainable problems of a similar nature, no longer restricted to females and with non of charcotte's theory behind it.
Although interestingly nobody displays catalepsy much anymore.
Ahh. Gotcha. The whole taking charge with the authority of ignorance thing. Like a preacher talking about science.
Heh. yes, its very 'bananas fit perfectly into our hands therefore god'
I know some dudes working on the MAN CYCLE, there's definitely quite a lot of interest. It's just significantly weirder than the female one, and seems to flip out at the drop of a hat.
It's like people think of "differences" and then just start blabbing about every possible difference they've picked up from their life.
Doesn't the brain often work like that?
I'd love some actual paper references, can you give me some good search terms? I just haven't read anything much beyond the usual retarded media coverage.
Don't have journal access atm (between academic institutions), but I'll email around.
People do seem to think of all possible semantic meanings of a given word when reading a sentence but the alternatives also quickly falls away if they keep reading and the sentence leads them into a specific meaning.
Only I'm saying some people aren't reading very closely, because they're hitting differences and then stopping there and starting talking. You are supposed to keep reading and find out which differences is being talked about here fellas that's what comprehension is all about.
ie I'm being very snarky and highly mocking because the completely irrelevant stuff being talked about is quite irritating.
What's the term for when a woman pulls aside a man she's never met before, and starts trying to explai to him why his dominant behavior is unacceptable BECAUSE he is a man, that he is behaving absolutely the same in regards to his treatment of individuals of to both genders, and that if a woman were behaving in the same dominant manner that he was that it would be okay (even very positive) but because he is a man behaving dominantly he is wrong and should stop it?
Because that happened to me a couple weeks ago.
BOTH genders can be idiots when it comes to these sorts of topics.
our society is fucked up when it comes to forcing people in to gender roles
both genders are guilty of this, not all men, nor some secret cabal of men who are in charge.
I don't like the implication that women are somehow innocent (or less guilty, or whatever) of perpetuating this bullshit in society.
the idea that it's okay to use the term "mansplaining" is pretty absurd. if some one were to use a similarly misogynistic term, I would imaging that the Cat would (rightfully) call them out on it.
edit: just to be clear, I'm not accusing the Cat of any particular personal bias. my issue is with the fact that such bias has become inherent in the vocabulary being used, to the point where rational intelligent people end up saying things that present standards they would otherwise disagree with.
That's not really how power differentials work.
I think it's basically OK to lightly mock those in a position of relative power. The same kind of joke turned against the disadvantaged group, however, would really just be mean-spirited. Context matters quite a bit. This is why whenever you go off on a rant about how some woman or gay person was mean to you once and insist that you have suffered some kind of meaningful injustice you come off as naive at best and utterly self-absorbed at worst.
Do I often go off on rants about women and gay people being mean to me? What do gay people even have to do with this thread? Also, for the record, the lady in my story wasn't "mean" to me, she was just incredibly resistant to acknowledging the cultural differences between the east and west coasts (this took place at a meeting of activists in the suburbs of Baltimore, she was from a Berkley "discussion group"), and somehow this turned in to her lecturing me about the fact that I don't "recognize my male privilege" enough when I speak. I am not exaggerating when she told me that she would see zero issue in a woman behaving exactly as I had behaved (as for my behavior, all I did was interrupt some one who had interrupted me first, because, frankly, I wasn't done with the floor. I turned it back over to them afterwards. I can accept this being called poor form, but to have it pinned on my gender seems silly.)
And this is a larger discussion, but I DO think that there is something wrong with taking jabs at a group you view as being "relatively" more powerful when it is oh-so-clear that the majority of that group has no power. It's a genetic fallacy at best, and at worst it is some kid of odd revenge.
oh no. please don't tell me we're heading for another round of 'but how come black people can say the n word and I can't, its not faaaaair'
because, >_<
hach's argument looks a lot more like "black people can say shit about white people and it's not racist"
or do powerful groups happen to be men?
Whether or not the average man makes more than the average woman, you are STILL attacking people for a thing that they had no choice in the matter of.
I really can't see any justification for your argument that DOESN'T include "they did it first".
Making fun of the powerful can potentially have social value. It can draw attention to certain absurdities and injustices, and provides a beneficial psychological effect for the less powerful. The term "mansplaining" as far as I can tell appeared on feminist blogs as a way for women to vent to each other about a common behavior they commonly saw in men that they saw as an unconscious (but nevertheless annoying) assertion of superiority. It makes people feel better when they realize they are not alone in noticing a certain thing. And hey, increased awareness of a certain odious behavior might even decrease its prevalence (although I wouldn't hold my breath).
Obviously it's not always productive to bitch about men, or straights, or whites, or whatever. But I'm not prepared to say it is always a bad thing, when you weigh the pros and cons.
I don't see any similar potential value in making fun of the less powerful. It seems like that if you enjoy a position of power over somebody, making jokes at their expense is just kind of mean.
Now, to be perfectly honest, I don't have a problem with women using the term amongst themselves behind closed doors. It's just cathartic and harmless at that point. When you drag the term out in to the larger public forum, though, it IS harmful, because you are making a swipe at ALL men, not just the ones who could actually do something about it.
Lasting equality doesn't come about by dragging the people at the top down. It comes about by raising everyone (including the folks at the top) up above where the top currently is.
It's similar to blaming a person for something their ancestors did. Or blaming an american for the actions of their president.
It's very true that such things need to be brought out into the limelight, but playing the random blame game on someone it doesn't apply to are not the way that this should be done. It is not helpful and it is not going to further a persons cause. It's much more likely to undercut your position because you get resented for it.
It is totally okay as a moral ideal to expect that all people will not react emotionally to being blamed personally but will respond to an accusation of moral responsibility with a calm reaction.
It's just not, you know, very realistic, smart or likely. See because moral ideals are typically not very realistic, smart, or likely.
If you wish to foster a calm reaction, you present a calm argument. If you present otherwise, you are shooting yourself in the foot. This is basic communication 101.
And what you mean by a word does not equate to how someone else will take it.
I've learnt that lesson, some of the idiosyncratic sayings I grew up with, which are very neutral to me and my family, have been taken as incredibly hostile attacks. So I had to learn this the hard way.
Meh. Men make up the majority of the unemployed now, women make up the majority of college students and graduates, and the aging WASPS that run these fortune 500 companies haven't got long left. As long as I get to start making condescending remarks to/about women when the tide (very shortly) turns I'm cool with it.
I saw a few people already threw their hat into the ring on this one, mostly ironically, but here's what I think would generally be considered an explanation pretty well in line with actually established EPsych ideas.
Men, in the ancestral environment, would generally have between 1-3 romantic partners/spouses/significant others (whatever you want to call it) simultaneously -- that is to say (nothing shocking here), most of humanity was mildly polygynous in organization.
A consequence of this is that the vast majority of women could be guaranteed the chance to reproduce, regardless of their personal characteristics, as multiple women could share the same male partner. Compounding this is the issue of the relative scarcity of eggs to sperm, and the relative investment and effort going into pregnancy versus the reproductive investment of a man, assuming there is no long-term relationship.
So, essentially you have an ancestral world where nearly any woman is sure to reproduce (though how successfully -- measured in terms of offspring who themselves survive to reproduce -- is still very much influenced by how good of a partner she can find), and many men will never have offspring at all.
Now, feelings of depression, self-loathing, and so forth can be considered somewhat as the brain's way of steering us away from certain behaviors (assuming healthy levels of such feelings, i.e. excluding severe clinical depression, suicide, etc). Essentially, certain things cause these negative feelings (for example, losing social standing, or losing access to material/sexual resources), and those feelings act as a prompt we remember later to avoid the behaviors that led to whatever caused those negative feelings.
I think everyone in this thread can understand that feeling -- getting rejected (romantically or otherwise), maybe multiple times consecutively, and saying to yourself: "wow, I really suck. I better change who I am to be less of a loser." Your brain is trying to get you to reform your behavior, not necessarily to your personal benefit in terms of your well-being (molding yourself to meet others' demands is a questionable route to happiness) but to your reproductive benefit.
Anyway, if you put these two pieces of evolutionary psychology together, you get the picture, I think pretty clearly:
Being rejected is always bad, from a reproductive standpoint. However, for men, it was potentially far worse in the ancestral environment than for women. Consequentially, men who felt way more terrible about breakups were more likely to survive because these emotions successfully prompted them to change their behaviors in such a way that they were able to more successfully attract mates and reproduce. Thus, a world of men with glass hearts.
nyoro~~~n :3
alt post:
~FART~
hey it may be subject to hindsight fallacy but so is essentially any explanation we would ascribe to this disparity in absence of more information!
but epsych is 100% more likely to get called out on that because other assumptions are more common and socially accepted and thus less likely to get hindsight criticism because they are, even unconsciously, viewed as already true/reasonable
Some guys who feel bad, whether or not they experienced a breakup, never try again, or ever.
Off-point, subjective circumstance here, there is a woman I know who broke up with a guy simply because he didn't act manly. I don't think those were her words, but it was something synonymous with "weak" or "accessory" or something you'd expect would be a property of, let's say, a non-alpha male in a pack. I believe when I asked, she said "he didn't act like a man," and I'm only lightly paraphrasing.
If you're going to argue evolutionary psychology, you have to go the whole nine yards. Yes, feeling bad about behavior does elicit change, which could help on a next try, but actually showing it - exhibiting weakness, seeking aid - may make you less appealing to the other gender, whether or not you receive help. That would explain why stereotypical male macho behavior still exists, because it works.
So, less glass hearts, more glass cannons
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
You seem to be moving quite a bit away from the specific term "mansplain" - it isn't ascribing a power position to all men, only criticizing those who behave in a specific fashion, a fashion that is motivated by their male privilege. As the phenomenon is so closely related to male privilege, you get the "man" in "mansplain."You seem to be arguing that since many men are ignorant of feminist discourse, they will view this (and related terms) as a hostile attack on all men, and thus feminists must not use them (in public) out of deference to the larger goal of persuading all to support equality. I find this argument deeply flawed.
First, I do not accept your framing on who has "power" in our society. Maybe you could elaborate on this, because I have no idea who you imagine "could actually do something about" the oppression of women, besides large collective groups of individuals. It's true that certain terms and arguments might make particularly ignorant men defensive, but that isn't a very compelling argument to not openly discuss the patriarchy and the ways in which it oppresses women and privileges men (and also harms them, in case someone has forgotten). If mentioning male privilege makes some dude uncomfortable and hostile to equality, he was never in support of equality in the first place.
I can't imagine how you plan to dismantle male privilege by hiding its existence from people who are too weak to accept the ways in which they, personally, benefit from the societal oppression of others. It's true that this a very, very complicated and frustrating problem, one that no single individual can solve by themselves, but the key to solving it isn't in coddling the privileged and deferring the entire framing of the discourse to whatever most flatters their egos. Equality is hard work, and part of that involves a certain level of self-evaluation that I think is necessary, not harmful.
Final point: one of the reasons discussions of gender on this forum are universally terrible is this constant deference to the male point of view ("Yes, I accept that you are oppressed, but what about the men?"). This is an example of male privilege, for those playing at home. What percentage of forumers have read a major work by a single radical feminist? How many even understand what the term "radical feminist" means? And yet some people seem to expect a bunch of mostly college-aged nerd-dudes to have an enlightened and valuable contribution to the topic? This is not unrelated to the origin of the term "mansplaining."
It's pretty rare. And that may become actually evolutionarily optimal at a certain point. If you are unsuccessful in your attempts for many years, it may actually be a more sound investment to spend resources and energy you were spending on courtship instead on your family -- your nieces and nephews still share many of your genes, and thus at a certain point, if your failure rate is truly extraordinary, giving up might be the best option for your genes, reproductively.
As a side-note, one would expect that evolutionary pressures would essentially find a good Goldilocks Zone for the appropriate level of depression. Dudes who get way too torn up and try too little would get weeded out the same as guys who don't modify their behavior out of shame to get more mates.
Well, what she really means (if we're going down the epsych rabbit hole) is that she didn't like him because she perceived him as someone who would be unsuccessful in attaining high levels of status, in this case presumably because he seems like he would be unfit to succeed in dominance contests, and thus unlikely to attain higher reaches in his social hierarchy. Presumably this is because elevating oneself in the social hierarchy often depends on one's ability to win dominance contests. Remember that dominance contests as such should not be thought of purely as male brawling -- they can be subtle and extremely varied in expression, depending on culture, and exist in both genders. However this woman believes thanks to her conditioning/environment, that traditional masculine gender roles are the behavioral mode best suited to winning dominance contests in the environment she lives in. Therefore, to her, masculinity=probability of success. Therefore, she prefers "masculine" men.
My mother, an avowed feminist and liberal, is subject to the same preferences. Often much to her dismay, she finds herself unable to be attracted to unmasculine men, perhaps because her early conditioning in the 1970s Midwest taught her that masculine behavior was the proper mode of behavior for men seeking to attain high levels of status (women and men always prefer mates who have or seem capable of having high status -- what varies is how societies assign that status, so what we find desirable varies accordingly, while it remains the same fundamentally).
Women are not attracted to manly men because of evolution -- they are attracted to men they think will attain high levels of status and success because of evolution (it should be noted that men are attracted to the same thing). It's just that in our society, the extent we subscribe to traditional gender roles is still a big component of how other people judge our ability to succeed.
It's also worth noting, as in all discussion of epsych, that our desires have nothing to do with our happiness. We are not built to be happy, but to be reproductively successful. So these desire for success are not necessarily good, if we are defining "good" in terms of subjective well-being/happiness. Your friend may well be right in her unconscious belief that this man she rejected will be unlikely to attain high levels of status in his social hierarchy, but she may ultimately be less happy and have less harmonious relationships for her pursuit of "masculine" men (call it bias of the effete, but I tend to think that dudes who can talk about their emotions, like to cook and clean, are feminists, and generally more modern make better boyfriends. But then, I consider myself those things.
You're essentially right (again, with the caveat that macho behavior is important at least partially because our society has developed such that it is a prevailing mode of behavior associated with success/status), but I don't think anything I said above contradicts this.
I genuinely believe epsych is not only not bogus, but in fact on of the most philosophically important and above all necessary disciplines in the history of Western thought. Its ramifications for progressive and consequentialist thought are enormous. It should inform our thinking on many forms of policy, and in fact its least interesting application is on matters of gender.
I also believe it is largely compatible with established feminist, LGBT, and anti-racist thought. And where it is not, I tend to already think that those thoughts are stupid.
And, you know, it doesn't hurt that so few people who hate on epsych have actually read any of it (I have, in fact, met literally no one I've argued epsych with who has actually read a primary text by anyone who espouses it. They know they hate Edward O. Wilson, but they've never read him! Poor form.)
pretty much on most tech/videogame/etc forums
'cause you know
lotta dudes on the nerd interbutts
empathy is hard work, people
most people gonna defer to their own point of view, and their own concerns and experiences, for better or (mostly) worse
I just hate evolution. It's like the bad guy in any movie. It wouldn't be a good story without him, but that doesn't mean I have to like him.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Oh absolutely.
I think this is another huge flaw with most criticism of epsych.
Most sociobiologists actually for the most part tend to come down on the side that evolution/our genes work very frequently to our own harm as individuals.
In fact, I think perhaps the most important lesson epsych has to teach is that our desires are not at all related to our individual well-being.
People so often forget that evolution doesn't occur at the level of the individual, group, or species. Evolution isn't a process which optimizes individual organisms' happiness or success -- if it did, we wouldn't have sex, which necessarily cuts your genetic legacy in half with each generation, but does increase the chance that the genes that encode for sexual biology and behavior will be more likely to reproduce. Genes don't even have to be likely to ensure the success of other genes! Bunch of cutthroat bastards.
But, again, to desire. Our desires are probably largely mediated through our emotional/moral apparatus (think amygdala, hypothalamus, etc. No prefrontal cortex here), which is to say our more biologically/evolutionarily mediated (or, more commonly, "unconscious") part of the brain, as opposed to our more consciousness-mediated part of the brain (although of course epsych really calls into question consciousness and free will altogether). What that means is that our desires are not built to make us happy. Thus, doing what you want is unlikely to make you happy -- it's basically Buddhism all over again. Desire is the root of suffering.
The consequences of this in progressive thought are pretty clear, I think. Autonomy of the individual, of action, is a terrible idea. Libertarianism is awful because the individual is the entity worst suited to know what will make themselves happy. If action is mediated by desire, and desire is mediated by evolutionary biology, then the last thing we want is a free society that lets people do what they want. It tells us to look at all the policies that turn our guts but make sense on paper -- these are probably the good choices. It tells us to look away from evolutionarily ingrained concepts like justice, ownership, deserving, owing, etc.
Evolutionary psychology is a discipline that even a moderate familiarity with will lead you to understand that our own biology is our greatest obstacle to fulfillment and well-being. Thankfully, it is also the discipline that offers us an understanding of how to manipulate, mitigate, and counter-act that biology.
The problem is so many progressives are so susceptible to the naturalistic fallacy that god fucking help you if you start talking about, say, the evolutionary rationale of rape. Hoo boy, look out there.