For no reason at all
I get so tired of the sitcom view of women. Yeah sure we’re all crazy bitches who always think it’s the other person who is wrong and who demand apologies for no reason whatsoever. Haha, so funny, what’s for dinner?
Tip Jar
I get so tired of the sitcom view of women. Yeah sure we’re all crazy bitches who always think it’s the other person who is wrong and who demand apologies for no reason whatsoever. Haha, so funny, what’s for dinner?
And yet these stereotypes are recognised by so many people. After all, many people laugh at this stuff (the advertising sales department can tell you how many). There are other comedy stereotypes where women come out well at the expense of men.
This does not make stereotypes true, but it does mean that there is something authentic about the sentiments expressed.
Everyone can see at least one side of the sexism, and anyone can hold opinions on which sex is most in the wrong, but the elephant in the room is the open (and largely unasked) question of where these sentiments really come from. What are they doing there in the first place? What is their origin?
I expect that regular readers of this blog have ready political answers to this, but I think this is looking in the wrong place. With rare and honourable exceptions, our adult understanding of politics only ever channels feelings – which invariably originate in lived experience and are as individual to us as our fingerprints. The political is the personal (to invert the normal sense of the phrase).
So my question is, if men harbour so much resentment towards women so, why is that? Particularly when it is, as they say, a man’s world.
_Because_ it is a man’s world, as you put it. That’s how human minds work. If I get more than you, if I treat you badly, if bad things happen to you that don’t happen to me, I’ll convince myself that it’s your own fault. Because I’m comfortable the way things are, change would mean giving up privileges, but I still want to think I’m a good person.
“the elephant in the room is the open (and largely unasked) question of where these sentiments really come from. What are they doing there in the first place? What is their origin?”
I think this could at least partly be answered by an evolutionary account. In their book “Inside Jokes” (http://insidejokesbook.com) the authors take a shot at providing such an explanation.
Women really do act this way; I’ve seen it first hand. And the reason they act this way is precisely because they lack the power to express themselves directly. If women had more power (in society, in relationships) then they could just say I’m angry; I’m hurt; I want you to behave differently; whatever. But they don’t feel (possibly correctly) that they have the power to say those things, so they resort to these indirect guessing games as a way to regain some leverage over the situation.
It is of a piece with PMS. PMS manifests in societies that don’t permit women to express negative emotions, so instead of saying what they feel when they feel it, women reserve one week a month to be bitchy.
I’m so awestruck by your global insights, I am quite unable to express myself.
Must be the time of year? ;-)
@2 I get this as a rationale – a lot of right wing political commentary is about this IMO. But it is just a rationale. Even when it’s a true reflection of peoples’ relative positions, it’s just not visceral enough to be real motivation.
I read this as a dig at marriage/relationships rather than women (though admittedly the father/son can be )- And both my spouse and I can attest to just saying sorry so that we can move on – no one remembers how or why the argument started quite a few times.
Yeah right – that has nothing at all to do with the vastly overworked stereotype of women as petulant demanding princesses grinding men into the dirt. It’s absolutely a wise, compassionate, sensible bit of advice to apologize readily for the sake of harmony. And I’m Marie of Romania.
#6:
I’m afraid the actual reasons why people do the things they do are not always as satisfyingly visceral as in movies and novels.
yahweh – from my experience observing my parents and siblings (we don’t indulge in games like this in my marriage, thank goodness), it appears that this relates at least in part to a ubiquitous pattern of toxic masculinity – the inability of the male in a partnership to recognize that they might be in the wrong. In addition, the training of young boys to “be a guy” often includes suppression of feelings and not recognizing legitimate feelings in others – I saw this all too brutally in my childhood, when my brother was forced to apologize to me for “no reason” after slamming his fist into my back so hard I couldn’t breathe. The inability to recognize legitimate feelings in others often leads to the impression that women are mad “about nothing”.
The common mantra in my parent’s household for the boys was “never apologize; it’s a sign of weakness” (yeah, thanks, John Wayne, you asshole).
In a marriage where the partners treat each other as true equals, I don’t usually see this complaining about apologizing “for no reason”, because the partners recognize each other as legitimate human beings, the feelings can be discussed, and apologies can be dished out as appropriate. Yes, there will still be “gotcha” moments, bad blood, and grudges, but they will at least be the anger you get at a peer, not the powerless vs. the powerful.
In other words, I guess I’m saying, yes, it comes from somewhere, but not from where you think.
I’ve had to deal with a lot of these kind of guessing games in a slightly different context.
When I want something, my first recourse is to get it myself; if for some reason I need it from someone else, I go to that person and say, “I want”. When I started dating in my 20s, I found that my girlfriends behaved very differently. When they want something, their first recourse is to ask me if I want it.
Food is specially fraught. When my girlfriend asks if I want to eat, what that means is that she wants to eat. Asking if I want to eat is her opening gambit. In her mind, I will say yes, and then we will get food together, and that is how she will get food.
Being your typical simple-minded male, this kind of subtlety is entirely lost on me. She asks me if I want to eat; I’m not hungry so I say no; now she’s stymied; things go downhill from there.
My gloss on this is that women don’t accept the primacy of their own wants. It isn’t enough for her to want something. Someone *else* has to want it, and then that validates her want.
Before I started dating, the only woman that I had any significant experience with was my own mother, who is a very strong, direct, and straightforward person. I had never encountered this kind of behavior from anyone before, and I was totally blindsided when I started getting it from my girlfriends.
What makes all this specially maddening for me is that if one of my girlfriends asks me for something, she probably gets it. Women who spread for me have a very significant call on my time, attention and resources. What’s more, it gratifies me to provide for my girlfriends.
But I need her to ask. That’s my chit: the acknowledgment that she asked and I did. Without that, I feel like I’m being played, the way Aladdin played the Genie: “He probably can’t even get us out of this cave.” (There is also the practical matter that if she doesn’t ask, I may well not know what she wants, or even that she wants anything.)
@Ophelia
I merely observed how I interpreted it and I got this meme a week ago – I didnt say your take was invalid.
There is a lot of truth to that; I was brought up that way. If a woman wanted something, she first found out if the man wanted it. If a woman had an idea, she made the man think it was his idea. This was made very explicit to me – my mother didn’t mince words, she just put it out there. You don’t ask for what you want.
I do have some difficulty asking for what I want; I learned with my first husband that the most certain thing to happen was if I asked for what I wanted, I would end up with the opposite (my sister’s husband comes right out and says if my sister wants something for her birthday, that is absolutely what he will not get her). So I learned to play that game. I do not play it anymore; my second husband is different, and has no problem with women having an opinion. Sometimes I find myself slipping back into that mode, usually in dealings with my boss or other figures of authority.
The worst of it is, we blame this behavior on the women. I am an intelligent, independent woman who is a highly educated professional, and I KNOW about all this – I still find myself falling into the pattern. This is something that was trained into us, not something we do on purpose. I spend a lot of my life battling against that early training that sought to groom me as some man’s “little woman” (a phrase that my mother hated, to her credit). It is very difficult to just say, “gee, that’s stupid, I won’t do that anymore” when you’ve been taught to do that since you were 2 years old!
Steven – “Women who spread for me”??? Seriously?
iknklast@13:
Wow, that is just rude. I wonder what sort of relationship power dynamic leads to this kind of interaction. What happened to doing something nice for someone whom you care about? I am 100% in favor of people in my life telling me something that they’d like for a birthday or holiday, because it means that I’m guaranteed to get at least one thing for them that I know that they will appreciate.
Ophelia, I suspect he’s talking about farmhands.
In which case his determination that it’s in his interest to give them what they ask for is laudable.
Or maybe marmalade?
There are some uninformed people speaking up this time.
Listen, guys: there’s this thing you might have heard of called “socialization”. It’s where people form opinions, values, and behaviors based on what the people who came before them and live around them think, do or say. It’s the reason why so many people have a low opinion of women. It’s not that women are, in general, so bad at life that we deserve to be mocked and scorned. It’s that when you were boys, the men around you taught you to deride women. She’s angry? Must be that time of the month; it cannot be thought that he did something genuinely wrong and is being told about a legitimate grievance. She’s asking if you want to eat? She must be a fucking passive-aggressive manipulator– it can’t be that eating is a social thing and she thinks it would be more polite of her to wait a while if you aren’t ready to eat with her now. You had an argument and she expects an apology, even though *she* apologized? It must be that she is actually crazy, not that her socialization taught her that all arguments end with both people apologizing to each other to show the relationship is more important than the topic of disagreement, so she swallowed her pride and apologized even though she was right, and now you’re just sitting there, smug, thinking you “won”, when she was just trying to show you how much she cares.
Look, men and women are socialized differently, and the way to deal with that is to open up more lines of communication and talk about why things aren’t working smoothly if both people just act the way they were taught to act.
For instance, “spread for me” is a horribly sexist sounding phrase to a woman’s ears, because it reduces your lovers to passively granting access to sex, rather than reflecting enthusiastic consent and partnership. It also sounds objectifying.
Furthermore, demanding that a woman “ask you” for things is demeaning. These are not the days where a man must provide for a woman. We can buy our own food. She doesn’t need your permission to eat. She just wants your fucking company, so don’t pretend like it’s a huge favor you’re granting. Do you want to eat or not? If she asks and you aren’t hungry, how about saying how long you think it will be before you are ready to eat? (My husband is diabetic. Sometimes we actually can’t eat at the same time, and sometimes I get low blood sugar– more likely to make me cranky than PMS ever would) because I wait too long for him… but I’ve learned to grab a snack, I just want to know what size snack to get.
[…] a comment by Samantha Vimes on For no reason at […]
Absolutely.
Humans reproduce sexually, which means it takes two to make a baby, which means that at some level sex is always going to be transactional. If we ignore this, or pretend that it isn’t true, then we won’t be able to manage it in our lives, and we risk very bad outcomes. If we acknowledge it, then we can try to deal with it and move forward in an ethical way. In my case, that means taking care of the women who take care of me (and…uhhh…our offspring).
I could have phrased it more delicately, but that invites people to ignore it. We ignore this at our own peril. Sailors pay attention to wind, and weather, and tides. We need to pay attention to this.
I think the world would be a better place if women could get more for themselves out of the sexual transaction. It is tempting to cite Lysistrata here, but that is farce. Madonna did well for herself, but I can’t figure out how to scale that. What it really needs is political change, and I don’t know how to get that. The Muslim world is a disaster; India is not much better; even my own country (USA) is moving in the wrong direction.
Any interaction between two people is transactional by definition.
If you mean “transactional” in the economic sense, as in, “sex is something that men want and women must be payed for,” that doesn’t follow from your premises. Also, bullshit.
Try thinking of it in terms of rights or empathy or affection or mutual kindness or all of those. It’s less bleak, and less crude, and – though I daresay you won’t believe this – more realistic.
Also, if women aren’t getting much for themselves out of sex with you, the problem is not that they aren’t good negotiators. It’s that they apparently haven’t yet had a partner who knows how to make their toes curl, or they have had, but what they have now is a partner they don’t trust to listen to them about how to do sex better. Learn what gets them satisfied. They should be able to expect orgasms, not dinner and babies.
“Transactional” ? WTF does that mean?
You know, Steven, plenty of people do things for other people (often those whom they care about, and often complete strangers) without expecting anything in return. I can think of at least a couple of examples of such people just among the regular commenters here at B&W, without even straining my work-addled brain too hard.
A good hint to this is that her husband never refers to her by name when he mentions her to people – she is just “my wife”. In other words, a sign of ownership. Mine. And when something belongs to you, you can do what you want with it. (Which sounds a lot like what Steven is saying, only he seems to be trying to say that you will take better care of something that belongs to you, which is not really any better).
“It’s that when you were boys, the men around you taught you to deride women”
OK, so accepting that there is a nub of truth in this sad remark, the question still remains. Where does this resentment / hatred or whatever negative feeling these boys are taught to focus on women actually come from?
Do you think it’s just there – ‘toxic masculinity’ like original sin – a fact no more in need of an explanation than the grass being green? No more in need of a cause than God?
Or maybe it can be explained purely by some kind of social or biological Darwinist theory? Or maybe this training needs no pre-existing feeling to hook in to. Maybe it just generates visceral antipathy from nothing. Or maybe boys do this without the involvement of any feelings?
The problem is that all of these rationalisations deny personal involvement and the personal feelings oh both sides. And we all know how these things start up because we have all lived through similar things. Did iknklast’s horrible brother really just do that because he was trained? Of course not. Even if the boy’s uncle’s sat him in front of a blackboard and drew derisory pictures of girls for him to laugh at, that’s not a sufficient explanation.
So I think the elephant is still in the room and still being avoided. Where and how do these negative feelings towards women originate?
yahweh, these feelings have been in many cultures for thousands of years at the very least. We can speculate how they originated but what we can easily demonstrate is how they are perpetuated. Where does the evidence for the speculations come from?
I’m not sure what you’re asking here, yahweh. Are you suggesting my brother was inherently (genetically) an awful person? Maybe…there might be some genetic basis to a sociopathic personality. I’m not up on all the research on that topic. But one thing I do know – all the men around him as he was growing up treated women as second rate humans of lesser intellect and with no feelings worth considering.. He could see otherwise – he had four sisters, all of them equal to him in intelligence and capable of doing all the things he was doing except peeing standing up. He had a mother who could hold her own with most men in intellect, even if she chose not to use it most of the time because she had been trained that it would be improper for a woman. The books he read, the TV he watched, even the music he listened to, all presented women in a particular way. Yes, he was trained. It may not all have been training, but IT WAS NOT EXPERIENCE. He did not see the women around him acting like he presented women acting.
What it seems like you are saying is that, yes, women act like this because this is how women are, and that is why men perceive it that way. As Anat is saying, this has been going on for as long as we have recorded history; how can we possibly know the initial reason for the meme in our culture? But I am aware of many memes that started from a basis of untruth – either someone just made something up that becomes “common knowledge” (liberals spit on Vietnam veterans when they returned from war) or something is misunderstood and twisted and becomes “common knowledge” (Ronald Reagan cut taxes every year of his presidency). Things don’t have to come from anywhere. They can be wishful thinking. They can be lies. They can be illusions. Or they can be part of a concerted effort to establish power over another group. In other words, it had to come from somewhere, yes, but that somewhere didn’t have to be based in reality.
@yahweh, It is very doubtful whether we can ever address the elephant in the room.
Here is a hypothesis that questions the very basic assumption that we use reason for the purpose of realizing truth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html?_r=0
and here is an excerpt from it:
“Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,” said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.
@yahweh, this is a question a lot of people have considered. Books about misogyny, the evolution of sexism, and the history of Abrahamic religions will help you find some answers. Here’s an essay about how things that are clearly observationally untrue can continue to get perpetuated:
http://www.sfwa.org/2013/05/guest-post-we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative/
Madhu @29, that’s hardly new, and it’s simplistic because it’s applicable only to its social aspect.
(And that quotation is just plain silly; reasoning is the act of making inferences)
—
On the OP topic, from what I recall from my own enculturation, that mindset comes from perceived entitlement.
Those of us who can (ahem) reason eventually realise it’s a flawed mindset.
@John Morales,
The social aspect where it’s applicable is very broad. It purports to explain the behavior of individuals and groups when they are under pressure to defend their interests, views and ideas against the competition. Under those circumstances, what is the instinct that is driving the behavior of an individual/group ?
1) truth instinct: They are committed to go wherever the pursuit of truth leads them, without worrying about its consequences on their interests and views.
2) “Just play to win the game” instinct: They give primacy to defending their interests and views. They will be economical with truth and just pay enough attention to truth to pass the tests and standards set by the society and everything else is fair game.
The hypothesis is that the instinct driving an average agent is the 2nd one. This still allows the case of some people being driven by the 1st instinct some times and very few people most of the times and extremely rare individuals all the time.
This predicts that where it is possible for the society to set stringent standards and verify them, individuals will be committed to truth by default because that is simply in their interest. Examples include proposing scientific theories, academic work that is peer reviewed, courts of law (to some extent), etc.
“Reasoning” is commonly used as an umbrella term that includes many things from observations to conclusions. In addition to inferences, weighing alternatives, judgements, etc are part of this. It is generally not restricted to inferences as you claim. The quotation uses the word reasoning in this sense and you too seem to use it in this broad sense in the final sentence of your comment. After all, to realize a flawed mindset as such requires things other than inferences, like judgements.
Madhu:
Well, yes. It has multiple senses, their thesis relates to a non-primary sense (arguing), but they don’t mention that in the article. What we get is: ““Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,” said Hugo Mercier”.
Do you really think that employing reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions?
“all the men around him as he was growing up treated women as second rate humans of lesser intellect and with no feelings worth considering”
But WHY did they treat women this way? Just because? Because their fathers did before them? An infinite regress?
My question was, where did the hateful feelings come from? I’m not really asking you to expose more of your history to the Internet, and I’m certainly not trying to imply that these personal questions are easy to answer.
I’m just saying that there seems to be a universal desire to believe that no feelings are involved (Mr Spock is emotionless rather than angry, boys really don’t have feelings, …) and that the explanation must sought by speculation in social, economic or scientific theory when actually, we’ve all lived though this or something like it.
Basically, just what was their problem?
Madthu, perfectly reasonable to question the origin and purpose to which we put our powers of reason, but you seem to draw a rather anti-enlightenment moral from the situation.
“I do have some difficulty asking for what I want; I learned with my first husband that the most certain thing to happen was if I asked for what I wanted, I would end up with the opposite (my sister’s husband comes right out and says if my sister wants something for her birthday, that is absolutely what he will not get her)”
Apologies iknklast, I’m not really getting at you… This is a familiar parental dynamic. Zillions of us, as boys and girls, learn this pattern from both our mothers and our fathers.
I’m not minimising the impact – I think it’s quite grotesque when men treat the women in their lives this way and I completely sympathise with you – but the origin of this practice does not lie in misogyny even when the application is misogynist.
FWIW, I think that the root of the problem is that it is universally acceptable to treat children this way. This readily gets extended to other ‘weaker’ people and problems only arise because it turns out that women can make their voices heard.
Sounds to me like you’ve been reading Alice Miller. I like her, but she oversimplifies.
I weary of people speculating about the origins of such behavior based on one pet theory or another. My own pet theory: human beings are social animals, like all social animals we form heirarchies and tend to look askance at members of outgroups. And we can belong to multiple groups; an individual can be in an in-group relative to you in one relationship (eg they’re a member of your family) and out-group in another (they’re the other sex, they’re queer, they’re a child, they’re from the poor side of the family.) In any case, when people have power over others (or perceive them as “others,”) they tend to behave in broadly predictable ways.
That’s one hypothesis. But unless one’s a scientist working on the question, recognizing and opposing the behavior is probably of more worth than hypothesizing.
Please just stop, okay? It’s not because I’m sharing my history…it’s because I’ve explained to you what I think is going on, and you keep asking. Throughout history, if you read a lot of history (I do) there are stories of men attempting to keep women in the roles they have designated for them. There are stories of women who do not wish to remain in those roles. The answer was to socialize women to those roles from the moment of birth – telling women how to behave, teaching them how to be obsequious to men, etc. Over time, many generations, we have lost the beginning story, because those records no longer exist (and probably never did). Just like the domestication of wild animals to cats, dogs, etc, we have to piece together how human culture developed some of the long-lasting social habits. Some of them, if they happened recently, can be traced back to a single inciting event or a series of unfortunate events. This does not appear to be one of them, which is what I said in my earlier post.
I was raised to be “female” by a mother who was raised to be “female” by a mother who was raised to be “female”, using standards for “female” that none of us invented, and we don’t know where they came from. By the same token, my brother was raised to be “male” by a father who was raised to be “male” by a father who was raised to be “male”, using standards for “male” that none of us invented, and we don’t know where they came from. What we do know is that the women fighting back against these standards goes back a very long way. The amount of work, conscious or unconscious, that society puts into reinforcing these standards suggests to me that it is probably not “inherent” in women to be the way we are socialized. In other words, you are suggesting that men see that because it is there; I am suggesting they see it because they have been trained to see that (even when it isn’t there) and when it is there, it has often been trained into the women.
Now, please try to get what I am saying…where he gets these feelings is lost to history. In short, we don’t know. We can only see the socialization that is going on now, but we don’t know who the original “genius” was who sat down and said “Let’s train men this way and women this way, so men will be able to control women easier” – in fact, it almost certainly wasn’t a single “genius” saying that, but a process that occurred over a period of time and is now so ingrained in our socialization that many people see it and think it is an inborn difference between men and women.
My brother did not see that in the women around him. He was trained to believe he saw that in the women around him. That is all I know. Where those feelings come from? I’d have to have a crystal ball or a time machine to answer that, and since those are extraordinary claims that violate the known laws of physics, I am not going to hold my breathe waiting, and you shouldn’t either.
iknklast @38, limpidly expressed — you couldn’t be clearer, to me.
I entirely share your opinion.
#38
One small addition: it doesn’t have to be mothers teaching daughters and fathers teaching sons; both parents are reading their roles from the same script, and they each teach both children to some degree.
John Morales:
I think the thesis is saying that on the average the propensity of an individual would be to passionately defend his own views and beliefs against the competition. The innate tendencies that trigger the use of reasoning (on the average, as worked out by evolution) have the function of “convincing others”, not getting to better beliefs.
For example, when faced with a view that is diametrically opposite to his own view, one can first look for errors in his view and merits in the opposing view, then proceed to look for merits in his view and errors in the opposing view. Or one can do this in opposite order with the caveat that the passions may lead to dedicating all the time to defending one’s views and never getting to other part.
The thesis says it is the second scenario that happens by default on average. But we can cultivate habits and tendencies which work as correctives. For example, one can cultivate a habit of first looking for errors in his view and merits in the opposing view.
As you may have noticed, this is not specific to reasoning. This happens in general with any behavior that has nature and nurture components.
It is these cultivated tendencies that increase the chances of (have the function of) helping us to get better beliefs and decisions.
An obvious well known example is how Earthcentric theories have been replaced by Heliocentric theories.
A counter example is the case of some economic ideas that dominated the scene for more than 3 decades and finally led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Holms – totallly agree. I got as much socialization in “being a woman” from my father as from my mother. I was just trying to be symmetrical, that’s all ;-)
Isn’t the idea that a persons feelings originate in some past historical era getting rather metaphysical?
Patterns of interaction certainly span generations. But each generation has to experience the feelings for themselves, courtesy of the hands, words and facial expressions of our elders and betters. Socialization is not exactly a painless or undetectable process and it doesn’t take actual archaeology to know why you hit your little sister. You don’t need to know the wider cultural context to know your being cruel.
And if one cannot expect people to account for their feelings other than by this hopeless theorising, then holding them to account for their actions smacks of ‘being born ill and commanded to be well’.
Lady Mondegreen, yes I’ve read Alice Miller and think she was excellent. Likewise, her English translator, whoever that was, for such wonderful, economical prose.
But why do you think only a scientist can understand people’s behaviour? We’re quite good at understanding people, although we’re pretty good at arguing that black is white as well if it suits us, but can we really call ourselves moral or claim free will if the immediate explanation for our own actions has to be outsourced to a man or woman with a test tube and a white labcoat?
In cultures where homosexuality is considered normal, few if any people feel any revulsion at the thought of people of the same sex being in a romantic relationship with each other. But in highly homophobic cultures, that very same thought can make people recoil in disgust. The homophobes certainly experience their feelings of revulsion “for themselves”, but that doesn’t mean those feelings are innate, or have a specific practical or current reason (other than inherited bigotry) for existing. The huge cultural differences in homophobia are testament to that.
You seem to suggest that because people “experience the feelings for themselves” and don’t consider themselves misogynist, the origin of those feelings can’t be misogyny, and I’m still trying to figure out why (I actually agree that it’s probably not misogyny as defined by a hatred of women, but rather good old fashioned sexism, but that doesn’t change the gist of the argument).
The idea that feelings can originate in inherited bigotry has the cart before the horse. Homophobes may rationalise their feelings by recourse to bigoted opinion, as may racists and sexists, and they may truthfully cite their parents as the origin of those opinions, but disgust simply cannot come from theory any more than can love or hate (of women or of something else).
It seems to me that the argument that a persons feelings may arise from misogyny not only places misogyny in a similar role to Evil or The Devil (maybe it should be capitalised) but also incidentally weakens the personal responsibility of the misogynist.
No one is saying that there are no underlying psychological mechanisms at play. We just presume(d) you’re capable of filling in the gaps without having everything spelled out to you. But let me try:
First off, people have a tendency to think that their own opinions and perspectives are reasonable and that other people’s opinions and perspectives are less reasonable. There’s no great mystery in this, no deliberate motive, it’s just the way the people are. Most people have the potential to develop skills to overcome this tendency, at least occasionally, but it’s a lot like language or trying to walk. Just because the potential is there doesn’t mean it’ll happen all by itself.
And secondly, empathizing with others, seeing things from other people’s perspective, paying attention to behavior and body language to gauge people’s mood, trying to figure out why their mood is as it is and what you can do to make it better, etc. is work, which a lot of us would rather be without. Humans have a tendency to use whichever methods saves them the most energy, so if the skill/habit of considering how things appear from another perspective is not needed or enforced, they default to the most lazy position (aka. “My perspective is reasonable, because it makes sense to me. This other perspective is stupid and irrelevant, because I don’t care about it”). Again, no great mystery.
When boys are raised with the idea that girls are hysterical, irrational, incomprehensible, have mood swings for no reasons, and are fussy about completely unimportant things that no real man would ever notice or care about, it doesn’t instill a new feeling into them, it taps into an existing human tendency to believe yourself to be more reasonable than others, and to not always pay attention to how your actions affect or come across to people who’re not you.
It’s not that boys start out with the idea that girls, as a rule, have a point when they complain about something, and have to be talked into dismissing girls and women, it’s that they start with a tendency to see everything from their own perspective (“I have nothing to complain about, therefore there is no problem”), and this social laziness is not discouraged by our cultural norms. At least not when it comes to men’s treatment the women they’re romantically involved with.
In a similar way, most people have an innate wish to be accepted by their family and social circle, and they’re going to adjust their behaviors to what gives them the most favorable, or the least unfavorable, reaction. So when girls experience that their opinions are dismissed on a routine basis, they become less likely to state those opinions directly. And when they’re taught that they shouldn’t be selfish, uncooperative, bossy, abrasive, etc., they’ll start trying to get what they want in less intrusive ways, and to wait for encouragement or permission to prioritize their own needs.
It’s perfectly understandable that people who’ve been taught that certain groups of people can be safely dismissed will have a tendency to dismiss members of said groups rather than engage in unpleasant confrontations. And it’s perfectly rational that people who’ve been taught that dominant and self-serving behaviors are socially unacceptable, and who’ve been punished when engaging in said behaviors, will have a tendency to internalize those values. Because it’s usually the easiest solution.
@Yahweh, another book that will help you out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years