Just one guy’s experience
There’s something hilarious (however depressing) about people announcing some stale wrong pejorative stereotype as if they’d discovered it themselves from their own personal experience and detached observation.
Aw how sweet – the old he thinks/she feels insult, offered with shy sincerity as if no one had ever said it before.
He’s the brains she’s the feefees. Never heard that before.
Ben, Ben, Ben. If a woman relies on your rationality to any degree rather than your emotional intelligence, it’s because you lack the latter and so can only offer the former. Even if only to a limited extent, as significant rational capacity would lead you to understand this balance.
I checked the replies to see if any of Boyce’s ex-girlfriends showed up to comment on the notion that they relied on his rationality. No such luck yet.
I did notice, though, a couple of people saying “what’s the big deal? He’s just talking about yin and yang!” Because, you know, if you recycle trite Eastern stereotypes it’s totes ok.
And while sometimes stereotypes really are rooted in broad statistical truths, I think the only way you get to “men are rational, women are emotional” is if you ignore certain emotions (pride, anger) entirely. If aliens observed Earth, would they really agree that women are the “irrational” ones? Which gender commits most of the crimes, especially the violent ones?
One of these days I’ve got to write that science fiction story idea I’ve got for a matriarchy that justifies itself by simply applying “logic” to the very stereotypes our society embraces. “Oh, well, of course men make excellent soldiers, what with their physical strength and aggressive tendencies and all. But you have to put women officers above them; women think more clearly in battle because they don’t get blinded by bloodlust, and they can nurture their troops’ emotional needs where a male officer would be clueless to such subleties…. and a male President? Are you kidding me? What if he started a war out of some testosterone-induced rage? Oh, you do come from a strange world, traveler, with your odd ideas about men and women.”
Given that Boyce is no fan of the “feel like a woman” argument for TWAW, I think it’s ironic that he’s buying into the Men are Martians, Women, Venusian dichotomy.
Less flippantly, this is one of the difficulties in explaining the issue to many men. Their experience conforms to the paradigm, so they think it confirms the paradigm. This, however, is the problem with verificationism: there is an infinite number of propositions that any given datum supports. And that’s before we get to stuff like the paradox of the ravens. (A nonblack nonraven is evidence for the proposition that all ravens are black. As is a black nonraven, technically, as it is consistent with the claim.)
The ‘you complete me’ compliment never sounded so patronizing.
Nullius, I think that is true, but I think there is another thing here, too. Many men perceive their experience as conforming to the paradigm, because they are seeing things the way they believe them to be. My father did not come close to having that experience with his wife or his daughters (nor his mother, for that matter), but perceived that he did…because he simply didn’t see all the rational things we did, and all the feeling ones he did. We tend to see the evidence that confirms what we believe, and miss the rest of it.
And, a lot of people will build a “theory” (actually a hypothesis, but who on this site would ever nitpick over correct word usage? ;-) ) on one experience, and somehow manage to believe in their minds that this one experience represents all their experiences. My mother, for instance, had a habit of “excepting present company” when she talked about women (she believed every stereotype) and never seemed to realize that she excepted present company on every woman she knew; her “experience” was largely built from TV and books and her expectations of how women behaved.
The people who pride themselves most on rationality and dispassion are often quite deluded.
I’m reminded of all the male skeptics who identified themselves (sometimes literally, via user names or blog titles) as rational, thinking, evidence-based, facts-over-feelings, whose reaction to being advised not to hit on women at elevators at 4 a.m. who have already expressed how much they dislike it, was to FREAK THE FUCK OUT and angrily declare that the human race was going to go extinct if they couldn’t creep on women. Followed, in some cases, by threats of violence and rape, vicious name-calling, and graphic fantasies of how they would defeat their “enemies” in glorious battle and have them dragged before them in chains.
And every one of them would still swear to you that it’s just self-evident that women are the emotional ones, and anyone who disputes it is just being perverse.
Screechy, not that different in concept to “Gate to Women’s Country”, Sherri S Tepper.
Rob, thanks, I will check that out. I knew it couldn’t be a truly original idea.
Nothing ever is. Tepper’s idea is different in many ways. Yours could still make a great story so go for it I say. I’ll proof read for sure! Iknklast can turn it into a screen play that would make you both rich as Cresous.
@2 years ago I was walking back from a meeting with a group of architects, one of whom was female. She was wearing a very trendy astronauts’ flight jacket. I casually mentioned that women make better astronauts than men–we’re generally smaller and lighter, use less oxygen, have more stamina, and react better in crises. And the men just freaked the hell out–angry, upset, bewildered. They literally couldn’t process this information.
Was just listening to a podcast about the ‘facts and reason’ subculture of young white middle-class American men (the interviewee suggests that it’s an American thing, though I know we can think of a few British examples) and how it’s tied to ‘mind-enhancing’ supplements:
https://newrepublic.podbean.com/e/why-the-new-right-loves-nootropics/
It did surprise me (though I guess it shouldn’t have) how gendered the marketing for basically caffeine pills is to this subculture: ‘take this pill and DESTROY your opponent with FACTS and LOGIC.’
It’s sort of like how “race science” advocates like to insist that they can’t be white supremacists because they give Asians credit for higher IQs than whites. Of course, once you scratch the surface, it turns out that they’re only willing to concede that Asians are good at math and are nice folks for coding your app or whatever but they have the “wrong kind” of intelligence to be CEO.
Screechy, and added to that is the casual racism of grouping “Asians” together as if they are all the same. Just like we tend to do with “Africans”. No recognition of the rich diversity of cultures and traditions from a region where the civilizations are ancient – more ancient than our prized European civilizations.