Elizabeth Duffy: "How to Like Women."
Megan McArdle: "Why Does Everyone Hate Women?"
It strikes me is that what people hate isn't the women, but the power structures that women often set up.
I understand disliking a specific woman who is vicious. I also understand women like Ms. Duffy, who found the power structures that seem natural to girls horrible to live under as a girl, and who therefore wanted no part of them as an adult woman. Some men, I suppose, are unable to win free of such things, and find themselves driven like cattle from one thing to another. These women and these men have a natural antipathy to a form of control they do not know how to resist, and which is punishing and hateful to them.
Still, I've always liked women, and part of it is that I've always found myself entirely outside of these sorts of power plays. The kinds of power that move me are different kinds, and these sorts of things have passed over me like shadows, without the power to bind.
Nevertheless, I can see how they bind others. The question of how you treat those over whom you exercise power is deeply relevant to whether or not you earn my respect. The women who have -- and there are many -- share a virtue in this regard.
6 comments:
I read the first article a few days ago and thought it was just plain bizarre.
I'm surprised you could read the second article and proceed to talk about "power structures that seem natural to girls".
Is what Ms. McArdle describes a "power structure that seems natural to men"?
Boys do exactly the same stuff all the time. I raised two from infants to adulthood and watched exactly the same dynamic unfold.
What I got out of the first article is the picture of a mother who hasn't done a terribly good job of teaching her daughter values. Years ago I read a book called, "Guyland" that describes exactly the same kind of power structures involving men and boys. I never wrote about the book because it seemed that the author was tarring men with the same broad brush and attributing things that are human nature (bullying, viciousness, etc) to boys particularly.
This author has made the same mistake, confusing the gender-influenced expression of a universal human trait with the trait itself.
I did like this part from Duffy's article: "[W]hile I love spending quality time with my daughter letting her know that she’s unconditionally loved, I don’t want to labor under any illusions: there will be a time when I’m not there to provide her with my affirmation, and before that, I foresee a time when she will cease to be satisfied with it." Otherwise, I agree with Cass. Does Duffy really have boys who never form cliques or gang up on anyone? Lucky mother.
As for McArdle's piece, it's been obvious to me for decades that people can love or hate a male politician without commenting on his attractiveness or lack thereof, but prominent women generally are either too ugly or too pretty to be taken seriously, and are rarely discussed without some attempt to determine which category they fit into.
Lots of people have been linking a Scientific American article lately about the difference approach of men and women to male-female friendships. The upshot was that men rarely lose sight of the possibility of the friendship becoming sexual, while women rarely see the friendship in those terms at all. In my experience, men find it more difficult to see women as people than vice versa.
I found McArdle's piece to be the stranger of the two. She's describing hostility to women like Michelle Malkin as if it were hostility towards Michelle Malkin, the individual, rather than hostility toward a form of power that Malkin has chosen to employ. People -- as McArdle notes, both men and women -- often react badly to that approach.
To address your point: If you were to ask what unifies McArdle's examples -- Amanda Marcotte, Stephanie Cutter, and Michelle Malkin -- you probably wouldn't have answered, "They're women." That's right, and I agree with you. The thing that unifies them (and which explains the highly hostile reactions they get from their opponents) is not their womanhood.
On the other hand, while it is possible to abstract out to universal human qualities, there is a very real difference in the expression of those qualities among boys and girls. My sister suffered from this particular mode of expression horribly growing up. It tends to be something that authority figures don't have a good answer to, because it is nonviolent and social. The first article has the teacher limited to describing the issue, and suggesting to the parent that they maybe talk about it and perhaps go to church and pray about it.
That's great advice, but if you're the person trapped in that structure, it means nobody's going to help you. If a boy bully is bad enough, you can go to the authorities and have him arrested or confined, because the bullying is physical and the expressions are antisocial. This form is harder, and so it tends to survive to torment people for as long as they remain trapped in the environment. While I insist on showing respect to all women regardless, I can understand those like my sister who react badly to it forever after.
Tex:
I saw that article too. It's always interesting to me that we experience the world in such radically different ways. It's so hard to understand how the other side experiences it at all, so I find studies like that to be very valuable insights.
In terms of 'seeing women as people,' I agree although I would rephrase it. I don't think men see men as "people" either. They see them as other men. The category of "people" is useful in certain formal ways, such as law-writing, but in terms of encounters with other human beings it isn't very useful. We don't meet people, we meet men and women, who eventually become known to us as (say) Bob and Grace. The starting point isn't 'personhood,' but whether they are a man or a woman, with that influenced heavily by age. We will react to an elderly man different from an elderly woman, but they are both in a category of a sort; and we react to a boy differently than a girl, although they are also together in a category of a sort. It's hard to see any of them as "people" in a plain sense, except when we are speaking formally or legally of the rights that pertain to 'all people.'
While not having read the article T99 refers to, I think Grim has the sense of it--I can't see that anyone doesn't immediately categorize 'the other' based on appearance, at least initially.
As for the articles, Duffy's struck me as quite odd, as Cass noted. McArdle's didn't, if nothing else for the fact that I've seen behavior myself--young black men wearing t-shirts printed with the slogan "Bro's before Ho's" in 2008, and a bunch of college age white kids (both male and female) wearing t-shirts printed with "Sarah Palin is a C***"
Something is going on there. And it isn't nice.
"As for McArdle's piece, it's been obvious to me for decades that people can love or hate a male politician without commenting on his attractiveness or lack thereof, but prominent women generally are either too ugly or too pretty to be taken seriously, and are rarely discussed without some attempt to determine which category they fit into."
I don't know, I think it's a bit of quibbling over the specifics, where I think a man being called a liar or a cheat (or whatever we can call a male politician if he angers us) is much akin to mocking a woman's looks. Both describe an ugliness.
" The upshot was that men rarely lose sight of the possibility of the friendship becoming sexual, while women rarely see the friendship in those terms at all. In my experience, men find it more difficult to see women as people than vice versa."
Hmm, I'm not sure how seeing someone as a potential sexual partner dehumanizes them, unless you've got an unhealthy view of sex. This reminds me of the argument oft made that men separate sex from love (because they can't like a woman and not think of it) and sex means more to women because they don't think about it with someone they're not interested in, but it's always seemed to me a weak argument. Here's a counter argument that to me could be considered equally strong: Sex means more to men as they cannot detach even the consideration of it from a relationship, but to women, it's an adjunct thing- a tool, or even simply a drive, useful to cement the deal, as it were, and to begin building the future of the relationship. Now, that said, I think both are wrong- there may be some bits of truth, but I think we all know people of either gender who act counter to the model, whichever you choose, and people don't even fit neatly into a spot on the spectrum, they fall into a range, sometimes a large one on that spectrum.
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