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.
-
Show this thread
-
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.
5 replies 12 retweets 84 likesShow this thread -
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)...
1 reply 8 retweets 63 likesShow this thread -
...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.
1 reply 9 retweets 72 likesShow this thread -
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.
3 replies 6 retweets 56 likesShow this thread -
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
2 replies 9 retweets 51 likesShow this thread -
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.
3 replies 6 retweets 49 likesShow this thread -
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)
1 reply 6 retweets 64 likesShow this thread -
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)
1 reply 5 retweets 46 likesShow this thread -
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.
2 replies 6 retweets 53 likesShow this thread
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.
-
-
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.
7 replies 9 retweets 71 likesShow this threadThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.