I just read a paper on 'gender-fluid geek girls' which claimed men in tech make less eye contact with attractive, feminine women & this is sexism. ' No data on this but even if true, could shyness/awkwardness be a thing?https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/981190080814551040 …
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The assumption that bad motivations on the part of men must underlies everything is what is so poisonous. If someone is having difficulty looking at you or chatting with you, I'd be inclined to first, try putting them at their ease and second, leaving them alone.
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It's a weird thing that people who talk so much about systems of power which manifest socially also seem to assume that women have no power to influence a social environment when, in fact, we almost certainly have more on average.
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Because we are, on average, more attuned to social nuance and more concerned about how it should be. I am not terribly good at social nuance and find I am much more likely to offend women with failings of this than men. There are more rules in female company.
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This can be difficult to navigate but it also has its advantages. Because I am overwhelmingly interested in social & cultural issues, I often enjoy conversations with women more because they're more likely to go into them in fine detail & in an exploratory way.
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I find a lot of the stereotypes of women & men & the complaints the sexes make about each other come down, at root, to 'reading too much into things' & 'not reading enough into things.' We know that stereotypes have a high degree of accuracy because we are pattern-seeing animals.
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When men accuse women of being too complicated & taking offence at things that weren't meant & not saying directly what they mean & being generally a mystery & women accuse men of being insensitive & not taking hints or being thoughtful (intuitive) enough & mansplaining (ugh)...
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...we are observing these differences on average. The problem is when we moralise these differences and read them as a flaw of one sex and making one sex inferior to the other either naturally or due to socialisation.
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I have always wanted to go back into late medieval Christian perceptions of male & female failings & show how they correlate to gender politics today but with a very different interpretation & bias and then show how it all is consistent with evolutionary psychology.
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eg, Analysis of the Sin of Eve in medieval culture focuses a lot on weakness of women in being moved to sympathy with plausible strangers & weakness of men in being moved to sympathy with women. Horribly moralised into women lacking moral integrity & men needing to take charge
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We see echoes of this in members of the alt-right who tell us that women are going to bring about the destruction of western civilisation because of sympathy with refugees & today's men are all cucks who go along with this & the solution is a literal, legal patriarchy.
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We see a complete renuancing of this within feminism which holds that women's greater empathy (yes, I know that's complicated) &social skills & provision of 'emotional labor' is how everyone should be & men fail. (They leave out the bit where men tend to prioritise women's wants)
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We see a weird version of this in Lacanian psychoanalysis where women work on social connections and men are linear and goal-orientated, women emote & men systemise, women are open & men closed, women feel & men reason. (semiotic & symbolic)
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I'd really like to take all this stuff and remove the contradictory ideological moralising & pull out gender observations which have been being made consistently in various forms for hundreds & even thousands of years & show what evolutionary psychology has to say about them.
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This is not moral, no matter how much opponents say it is because it reinforces stereotypes. We're not going to lose stereotypes because they relate to an objective reality which humans won't stop noticing. We will just moralise about them in radically different ways forever.
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Unless we actually work on understanding human psychology & nature from a biological & evolutionary point of view. This is actually the best countermeasure to the negative aspect of stereotypes which is moralistic generalisation. The facts don't allow for generalisations.
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End of conversation
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