garote | A train of thought about gender politics (Reply)

I have heard it said that a woman's brain is roasted in parental hormones for a while after birth, cementing a deep instinctive bond with her offspring. That sounds plausible to me. It also sounds like it would have a profound effect on the behavior of anyone who becomes a mother, to the point where the course they chart in life would be clearly altered, and one could even see large-scale trends emerge to back this.

Yet after all these years I have not seen a simple piece of reference material that would answer a crucial question for me: How many women in the world, who are only partially in the workforce or not in the workforce at all, if you sat down and asked them honestly and confidentially, would tell you that finding a way to spend most of their time running their household and raising their family was a priority for them, chosen freely, even over other options? That is, how many "domestic" women actually sought their situation, and are willing to say so, confidently?

There seems to be a strain of feminism in this modern world that is built around a core assumption that has not actually been verified: The assumption that all women - as a collective representing approximately half of all living humans for all time - have been consistently coerced with psychological and physical violence to stay out of the workforce and become unwillingly subservient to their children and the men around them.

This assumption seems ridiculous to me. Let's back away from it. A more reasonable follow-on assumption is that most women, like a flock of sheep, tend to steer towards the middle of the flock, where conventional womanhood resides, but there are outliers - women who prefer to run at the edge of the herd or even leave it behind entirely - who are policed back into the flock on threat of violence and/or disenfranchisement whenever they try to stray towards things that aren't properly sheep-like (read: womanly). This frames feminism as supportive of choice, and supportive of accepting that there is variety in skills and temperament and preference that is wider than the collective difference between the male and female flocks can describe.

I can dig that definition. It makes more sense to me. But it doesn't say anything about why the flocks are shaped the way they are. It makes it acceptable to stray outside them - even celebrates the outliers - but does not explain their overall shape.

With that question still on the table, let me back up another step to view an even bigger picture. Now the view is of the entire landscape, with two flocks of people loosely gathered around these landmarks of masculine and feminine interest, and power, and experience. Perhaps from this altitude we can see subgroups and eddies and realize that even a basic gender binary is an oversimplification, and more diverse concepts are required. Much has been written and much has been illuminated about this landscape, but the detail that I want to focus on right now is specific:

A political writer waving the banner of feminism can publish a book arguing that men are collectively oppressing women through their aggressive overconfidence and assertiveness in conversations, e.g. "mansplaining", and therefore men need to un-learn this tactic because they are using it unfairly against women.

And another political writer can publish a book arguing that the constant portrayal of women as victims of male action, who need protection and defending from this treatment, possibly from other more sympathetic men, actually robs women of their agency and their ability to be respected and to wield power effectively.

Which side should I root for? The side that wants to call out men as "mansplainers", or the side that wants to portray women as capable of fielding just as much shit as men - including their blinkered bravado - and therefore just as qualified to run meetings and drop bombs? If I root for both sides, I am rooting for two arguments that cancel each other out, and I am effectively rooting for nothing.

Let me state this dilemma in more general terms:

Is there an inverse relationship between the level of protection we all insist that women need, and the amount of power and independence we expect them to competently wield? If so, do women need to be protected more, or do they need to be respected more?

I've concluded, regretfully, that the choice is a matter of fashion. It ebbs and flows, and is disturbingly arbitrary, based on the context or the target. Often it seems more a matter of signaling virtue to other observers for the sake of social or sexual competition, than a matter of grand philosophy or real empowerment. To give a blunt example: How many male college freshmen loudly declare themselves feminists because they know that's what women want to hear, then spend years psychologically manipulating women to gain and keep sexual access to them? Years later, how many of them become parents, and are deeply suspicious of all the men that express interest in their college-age daughters, no matter how politically correct they appear in conversation? On a case-by-case basis, one person will argue that you need more protection, and another will argue that you need more agency. I find it hilarious that those arguments often break down along lines of which man wants to merge his genes with yours, and which man's genes you already carry.

Maybe this effort is supposed to be zero-sum, and the result may actually be to prevent the conflict from ever ending, i.e. to prevent one sex from winning, because then we'd live in a sick dystopia and both sexes would lose. But I keep thinking about those vague flocks of sheep, and how they don't quite merge into one.

Here are some things I think we can all take as gospel:

The sexes are more alike than different.
There is more variation within the sexes than between them.
Men's interest in passing on their genes makes life more complicated and dangerous for us all. (But all the men who showed less interest have consistently been bred out of the population; duh.)
Anyone who says women are full of "sugar and spice and everything nice" is lying to get in your pants.
Anyone who loudly declares the previous statement may also be trying to get in your pants.

There is a minimum distance between the two major flocks of sheep - the general trends expressed by all our life choices, split across sex lines - enforced by hormones and hardware. Some political fashions move to push that distance wider. Some press against that distance, insisting that the natural state of society is for women and men to be collectively identical. I think the wisest move is to embrace the fashions that preserve and respect individual choice. If a woman wants nothing more than to be barefoot in her own sunny kitchen, that's great. If a man wants nothing more than to do the same, that's great too. Same with running a company, being a cop, serving in public office, and so on. That seems clear enough, but the real problem is in managing our own internal expectations so we treat all these outcomes fairly.

And if that's not a matter of grand philosophy, but instead a matter of virtue signaling, competition, and context, then no wonder it's so complicated and hard to do right, right? Accepting that others are free to choose is relatively easy. Accounting for our own subconscious bias, moving against the tide of fashion, victimhood, or self-interest -- that's hard.