By David Futrelle
Just a reminder that Jordan “Slappy” Peterson’s fanboys are totally not cult members in a cult or anything, why would you even think that?
Ok, ok, he doesn’t mean a LITERAL voice in his head telling him what to do and not to do., that would be weird, just that “‘the little voice’ telling [me] not to do stuff often takes on Peterson’s tone and speech pattern.” Which is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I mean, seriously, who doesn’t have some strange Canadian dude in their head — FIGURATIVELY — telling them what to do? In my case, it’s the late Doug Henning, the fuzzy-mustached magician dude who was born in Winnipeg.
In case you’d like to know what it would be like if Jordan B. Peterson were a voice in your head, this brief video should help.
The Muppets has gotten weird pic.twitter.com/fFLTQxD0ei
— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) March 30, 2018
I just saw it on an episode of Deadly Women. Not the world’s greatest information source! I can’t remember her name.
Solely cis women? I don’t know. Solely women – yes. USAF did one in the late 80’s. RAF’s most recent is from 2007. Don’t know if either is available for general review though – the USAF one should be.
(Air force has been keen because on the whole women make better pilots. That’s been shown in practice over and over again. I’d love to claim noble motives, but they want to know if they can teach men whatever women have. Flyboys make fratbros look like the writers room at Ms. )
I only specified cis because I was thinking one could keep track of participant’s behavior throughout the menstrual cycle and see at which points they tended to behave more aggressively.
Like WWTH said, cis men are generally bigger than women and do not have to deal with the dehabilitating effects of pregnancy and childbirth. They also tend to have more upper body strength. These are traits that would likely be useful when bringing violence to bear.
None of this has anything which suggests that men would be naturally more aggressive than women, just that men were historically and on average given an advantage when it comes to acting on that aggression. If we consider the null hypothesis that all other traits are more or less equal (i.e. aggression, leadership capabilities, etc.), you’d still expect the results to be skewed in favor of patriarchal societies, especially those societies which were founded on violence.
Fair enough. Was mildly curious as to why you’d specify, but I do know you well enough to know you always have a reason.
Can give you some anecdata on it (and please note, it’s solely my observations and observations shared with me by others. It’s no study!):
I’ve worked with women soldiers in the field fairly extensively especially in the past 5 years (maybe 500 or so? Can’t be more specific). Keeping track of periods is actually part of the paperwork. The army has zero shame and zero sense of privacy.
I’ve not noticed a difference that one could call a trend. Individual differences – hell yes, of course there are! But trends, apart from one not related to aggression, no.
The unrelated trend – female soldiers, while on their period, tend to try harder at tasks. We do confidence courses as a matter of course if there isn’t something infinitely more pressing to do (like patrols, cleaning, localisation work), and we certainly noticed that most of the women’s personal bests were achieved during their periods. Remember that because to a none period haver it seems pretty counterintuitive.
Edit for one point of clarity:
Cleaning is a euphemism we use. It doesn’t mean dusting and sweeping.
@Catalpa:
Part of the problem is that Lesley hasn’t told us whether this aggressiveness has to be carried out directly by the women in question or not. For instance, Mary I of England, in attempting to assert her authority and restore the Catholic church, had numerous people burned at the stake. There’s even a fair bit of evidence that her husband, Philip of Spain, who enjoyed a good auto-da-fe, suggested that she tone it down. (To be fair, in his own country all he had to do was try to stop heresy growing, not overturn a generation of Protestantism, so he may not quite have grasped the seriousness of the situation.) Her successor, Elizabeth, might have your hand chopped off for writing against her choice of suitor, or handged, drawn, and quartered for bein an active Catholic and thus challenging her position. Now, the person who burned the heretics for Mary was the executioner, not her; and it was the courts who condemned them, not her. Likewise the man who chopped off the hands for Elizabeth; the Catholics were most often trapped by Walsingham, condemned by the courts, and executed without her direct say-so. In some cases, she just wasn’t involved, in others, she could have stopped things but didn’t, but the whole state machinery was devoted to keeping her in place, by violence.
So in a case like this, where aggressive violence is carried out for a woman, but by men, is this at all suggesting that women are less aggressive, or just that societal standards mean it’s less evident when they are?
I’m not sure I’m being entirely clear how this example works, but it’s late here. And of course it’s complicated by the fact that in her last two years, after the Essex rebellion, Elizabeth made a habit of carrying a sword and occasionally randomly stabbing the tapestries in case anyone was hiding behind them, and the fact that she was pretty sexist and only made exceptions for herself. And the fact she was in a stereotypically male role, so maybe all of her aggressivity would be coded male as well. But I do think she stands as a decent example of how things are a bit more complicated than they can seem.
@Rabid Rabbit
Elizabeth I gets all the good copy – she’s one of the greats, for sure.
But, why not try our (probably) wisest monarch, Victoria, and see how she fits the hypothesis? She were certainly ruthless enough on a personal level, not exactly shy on spilling blood either.
Lesley
you say you lurked for many years – then you should know the comments policy. ☺
Well, of course it’s the one who actually carried out the aggression who counts!
But also the fact that patriarchal societies are more common means that men are just naturally more aggressive, even though the male leaders of those societies were mostly the ones giving orders to attack others, not the ones doing the attacking. /sarcasm
Well, actually, I’m pretty sure that aggressive women in history would just be written off as ‘outliers’ for the purposes of an evo-psych argument.
Against my better judgement, I’ll respond to a few of these again.
For the purpose of simplicity and clarity, we can limit violence to direct physical interpersonal violence orchestrated by one human on another. Direct “I punch you” and “you stabbed me” violence. If you want we can even narrow it further to include nothing but violence that is intended to inflict harm to weed out say athletes.
Inasmuch as models of kingship very frequently legitimate themselves directly from battle or at least from imagery or pageantry which implies the monarch is good at battle, I think it’s very easy to scale this up to the level of monarch though. It gets muddier frequently because of dynastic successional problems in which no male heir is available. This is how female monarchs typically came to power and they legitamate themselves in the same way as male monarchs by war or by pageantry or imagery depicting war and battle. To be clear that’s not the only way that monarchs legitimate themselves. They also legitimate themselves in various spiritual ways showing that they have the blessing of the gods or spirits or whatever. And they use pageantry and art patronage to dazzle with splendor and wealth and beauty as well.
All that really seems deducible from that is that war or images of violence are used as one way to legitimate kingship. It doesn’t really tell you much about the intrinsic characteristics of violence, if violence has any. But if violence does have an intrinsic nature, it seems probable it would scale.
I started reading Delusions of Gender last night as well so we’ll see where that goes. Nothing earth-shattering so far but I’m only about 20 pages in.
The goalposts keep shifting. First it was “aggressive” than it was “orchestrating violence” and now it’s literal physical violence. I don’t even know what Lesley is trying to say anymore.
How is me refining my definition because you keep insisting my first definition wasn’t refined enough “shifting the goalposts?”
Isn’t that just how meaningful conversations happen by making sure that the participants are both talking about the same thing and understand what it is they’re talking about?
I’m perfectly willing to talk about aggression at a higher level but people keep insisting that it’s borderline meaningless to do that because aggression can have such a nebulous meaning. So I assented to discussing it at a refined specific level because a specific example will probably work just as well with less confusion.
Why would you assume that aggression as a trait can be accurately gauged by how much each gender uses individual interpersonal violence? That is only one of the ways in which aggression can manifest itself, and you have provided no support for why it should be considered the defining one.
Yep. What Catalpa said. There’s a difference between refining a position and changing what words mean. Aggression and violence are two different things. Orchestrating and committing are two different things. And state violence or the threat of it has never meant the head of the state will be assumed to be the one committing violence.
Anyway, when I said “define aggression” I meant what is the scale? How do you quantify it. I didn’t mean keep refining what you personally think aggression is. Social science doesn’t work that way.
Here’s a commonly used scale called the Buss Perry questionnaire.
https://psychology-tools.com/buss-perry-aggression-questionnaire/
Now this particular one couldn’t be used on historical leaders because it’s self reporting. It probably couldn’t be used on current ones either because it would be hard to get them all to agree to take it and answer honestly. But it could be used as inspiration to make a scale based on academic writings and news sources describing various world leaders past and present. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Lesley, please drop it. You’re failing to convince anyone, you’re obviously not learning from anyone, and you’re not exactly exhibiting the timeless Christian values which your hero Dr Peterson urges you to hold. Please consider what else you could be doing with your time.
A few days ago, I learned what a motte and bailey defence was. This is a fantastic example of one: as you’ve come under pressure, your position has shifted from “pretty much undisputed conclusions of science” to “one narrow observation which is chosen because there’s no metric to measure it by and no controlled data set to study.” You’ve conceded almost everything that you originally advanced, and it might be a good idea to acknowledge that.
Ironically, despite your stated hypothesis that women are less aggressive than men, a group of women are probably feeling quite aggressive as a result of the way you’ve behaved. I (a man) by contrast had checked out the moment it became evident that you were just wasting everyone’s time, and so am not feeling very aggressive.
This may be a historic moment in the annals of science: we’ve finally found a hypothesis which creates its own counterexample when it is stated.
@EJ
Actually if you want to get really technical, the original thing I was putting forward was that the behavior called cult-like in this post doesn’t qualify as cult-like behavior.
I mentioned what I think about Peterson (which by the way is limited only to thinking that he isn’t virulently toxic on all issues and inherently dangerous because of that. I am not his disciple. The only reason I even became aware of him and looked into what he thinks at all was because of this article I saw in the Atlantic: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/550859/ which is hardly some kind of Breitbart alt right rag) because obviously when you are talking about authority, leadership, role models, and so on, it’s relevant if the leader or authority in question has good or bad information, or good or bad intent.
I was admitting where I stood on him outright to avoid accusations that I was trying to hide it. It immediately empowered a fraught digression because that admission is regarded here to use the term applied to it as “a shibboleth” which people apparently consider to be a prescriptive and accurate measure of precisely what a person’s intentions are and exactly what they think.
And I don’t really care if anybody feels like what I’m saying is producing any kind of valuable food for thought for them, but your assertions that I’m learning nothing by the exchange is entertaining an illusion of presience about me and my intentions that you don’t have.
Facepalm.
I’m getting mrex flashbacks yet again.
@PeeVee
YUP
@Catalpa
“Why would you assume that aggression as a trait can be accurately gauged by how much each gender uses individual interpersonal violence? That is only one of the ways in which aggression can manifest itself, and you have provided no support for why it should be considered the defining one.”
Can it not be pursued of itself because it is one of the most divergent behavior sets we have available to look at for whatever reason, and therefore *if* there is such a thing as any behavior with a biological sex skew, this is probably one of the ones most likely to demonstrate it? It’s probably more likely to demonstrate it than some behavior that demonstrates little or no skew. Likewise, if that association is demonstrated as mostly sociological here it’s particularly strong evidence.
It’s also useful because it’s definable. “Did subject A punch subject B in the gut” is a much more objective metric than “did subject A negotiate a raise with subject B aggressively?” In fact, those kinds of measures have been demonstrated to be filled with all kinds of biases in that when a woman negotiates *at all* and doesn’t quietly acquiesce she is frequently regarded as being more aggressive than she is really being.
However, there’s no particular reason you *have* to focus on this particular example. Any definable, heavily skewed behavior would probably work.
My point with violence scaling is that if there’s a significant gendered violence skew at the interpersonal level, especially one observed in a person’s closest circle of relationships (which from what I’ve read hangs somewhere around 30-200ish), and that can be demonstrated again and again in populations as disparate as tribal people in Africa, urban dwellers in modern China, or rural people in Iowa, it would suggest that *something* is driving people to create that dichotomy and whatever that something is, why would it not scale up to the level of abstracted relationships found in people conceiving of themselves as all collectively belonging to the same nation or ethnicity or religion or whatever. So *if* the skew exists and *if* it is in any way biologically influenced, I would expect it to scale to the level of abstracted relationships.
The use of violence is though of itself a really dubious measure. I won’t ramble on here about what is a huge subject; but you need to consider things like the inhibition on the use of inter personal violence, the need for (psychological) ‘distance’ as a facilitator of violence (eg, press this button and someone on a video screen gets a hellfire missile, versus stab this person in front of you), and the goal of the violence itself.
This is an area where social factors play a huge role. For example, most male on male violence is highly performative. It’s sometimes referred to in the literature as ‘the monkey dance’. That is to say it’s highly ritualistic. It’s a status display and is as much about ‘posture and submission’ as trying to inflict actual damage.
So to tie things in with current events, both Trump and Theresa May have just ordered the use of missile strikes. Does that tell is anything about innate gender differences; or might it just be about politics and optics?
Or to bring it onto the personal level you suggest, Trump has often bragged about shooting people on Fifth Avenue, or single handedly stopping a school shooter. Now is that evidence of innate ‘maleness’ or is he just a braggart and arsehole? I mean, can you really imagine him actually standing up to someone in a fist fight?
Unless you look at the reasons for throwing a punch, I don’t think that’s as objective an indicator as you might imagine.
ETA: Well that promise not to ramble turned out to be a bit optimistic.
Plus, as has been stated over and over again, just because a behavior is skewed towards one gender, doesn’t mean the cause is biological. Correlation is not causation. That is still true even if the correlation is large.
Given that babies are treated differently beginning the second they are born based on the genitals they popped out of the womb with, it’s just not possible to as Scild said, celebrate biology and culture. Maybe someday we’ll have the brain and how to image it figured out enough to do so. But that’s not happening anytime soon.