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
Er. Sexism and patriarchy are ample sociological reasons to explain that. Introductory gender studies will help you out there.
What’s more, you’re doin’ it wrong. Even if there were no sociological reason that you could see, that doesn’t mean that
a) there is no sociological reason (appeal from ignorance), or that
b) the reason therefore must be biological (false dilemma),
If it were true that we could not see a sociological reason, the correct response is to say we don’t know instead of saying therefore, biological mechanisms account for this.
It’s only been around half a century since 2nd wave feminism – the wave that dealt with women having the right and the ability to be leaders, scientists, etc – really got going. That’s a pretty short timespan compared to the millenia of hardcore patriarchy we had to turn things around. It always seems ridiculous to me when people say “well, even today women are still under represented in traditionally male dominated fields, therefore it must just be down to hardwired biological differences in the male and female brains.” These biases have been baked into our culture for a long ass time. It’s not easy and simple to change them.
@weirwoodtreehugger
I intentionally avoided talking about scientists and whatnot because of that and also because our conception of professions don’t really even directly compare to those of antiquity. There were no “scientists” per se as we understand them anyway. That’s one reason I was intentionally broad when I said “aggressive authority figures.”
@ general sociology stuff
Why then do disparate human cultures, again separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, default over and over and over to patriarchy with some exceptions but not enough to upset the overall trend.
“I’m of the opinion that no good book on behavioural biology can be written about humans right now, because we don’t know enough, and what we do know is contradictory and tainted with harmful biases. I know that’s not the answer you’re looking for, but I can’t answer otherwise.”
This is more or less my opinion too though I haven’t worded it so well. This is not to say I don’t think that anything has been found out, but that anything at the moment that postulates about this will be inundated with people looking to mine it for various political agendas. This is one reason I am really cautious about as I said before leaping on either the deification or vilification bandwagon. The answer appears to be that biology and sociology both matter and it’s really hard to separate precisely what controls what.
Okay, so how are you defining leader and how are you defining aggressive? Given that there have been so many institutional barriers to women getting into leadership positions in the first place, how do you compare male and female leaders?
Are you saying women are less biologically inclined towards being a leader at all? Or are you saying women are less biologically inclined to lead in an aggressive way? Because it’s kind of hard to address your claim when it’s not too clear what your claim actually is.
If you’re saying women are less inclined to take leadership roles, you need to control for institutional barriers when you evaluate that. You can’t just count male vs female heads of state or CEOs and call it a biotruth.
If you’re saying women lead less aggressively than men, you still need to account for cultural factors. For example, if employees respond differently to an authoritative management style when the manager is female than they do if they’re male, then how do you know female managers aren’t just adjusting their behavior to fit their environment rather than acting naturally. But really, first things first, you need a scale to measure how aggressive an authority figure is. Without some way to quantify that, we can’t really discuss it very well. Just saying it seems like men are more aggressive authorities isn’t really going to cut it.
I am saying historically there are fewer women in authority positions where a major component of the authority vested in that position is directly attributable to violence, literal violence of the “clubbing someone over the head” variety.
Also, a biological answer doesn’t have to be a neurobiological answer. Perhaps patriarchy developed in the first place because men are (generally) bigger than women and used brute force to do it. Perhaps it developed because before modern medicine, pregnancy and labor were so dangerous and simply reproducing was enough. Nowadays neither size or reproduction need keep cis women from doing everything men do, but that wasn’t always necessarily the case. Cis men being larger and not having to deal with giving birth does not mean that cis men are smarter or more aggressive.
Plus the existence in the first place of non-patriarchal societies, even if they were smaller in number than patriarchal societies, actually is an argument against patriarchy being hardwired into our brains. The existence of feminism is an argument against it too. If gender roles were natural, women wouldn’t have to be encouraged, coerced and physically threatened into staying in those roles.
That didn’t answer the question. Are you saying fewer total or few proportionately? And again, how are you defining whether or not the authority placed in that position is because of violence? How are you defining aggressive?
I mean really you seem to be engaging in some circular logic here. You’re essentially saying women aren’t aggressive because women aren’t aggressive.
Sorry I edited the post as you were quoting it to try to clarify myself a bit more.
Here is what I’m saying:
Some positions of authority, or perhaps even prestige or high regard might be a better way to put it, are granted in no small part because the person in them is good at orchestrating violence, literally killing, fighting, wounding, etc.
These are overwhelmingly occupied by men in most cultures.
Is there any other “profession” if you want to call it that, which has such a radical gender dichotomy across so many cultures and times? There certainly isn’t with priests or craft people or artists and lots of others I can think of. In fact, the variance in those later professions seems perfectly attributable to patriarchy in as much as patriarchy itself values violence and thus will consider those more likelyto perpetrate violence to be superior in any number of ways.
Sorry I’m on mobile so my ability to be nuanced is limited at the moment and I’m fixing to drive home. I will try to check back in a bit but it will probably be a while.
@Lesley
Can you provide citations for all of these claims you’re making?
Again, we need a way to quantify aggressive authority/orchestrating violence/whatever you want to call it. We need a scale. Then if the hypothesis is that the cause is male and female brain differences, we need a way to control for cultural factors.
Again, you’re using circular logic.
This seems semi pertinent. I had occasion to pester my osteo-archelogist friend the other night with one of my daft queries. But then she mentioned this.
And that’s by no means the only example. It now looks like 50% of high status Viking ‘warrior’ graves might end up being reclassified as female. I’m no statistician, but that number rings a bell from somewhere.
@kupo
If you give me some time, I can give you lots of citations from historians and archaeologists about the overwhelmingly masculine association with violent professions in various cultures, yes. Or rather I can provide you and inordinately long list of civilizations that had such associations and I can provide many more examples of civilizations where non violent professions do not have as overwhelmingly a masculine association.
I am trained as an archivist so in as much as I am an expert in any particular academic field it’s history, though I’m not claiming to be a doctorate level expert. It’s just the area I have the most formal education in and that I’ve read the most in.
And now for real I’m actually going to drive home. I’m currently sitting in a parking lot doing this which doesn’t provide much evidence for my overall sanity or mental balance I suppose.
How are we defining “most cultures” here, as well? Can you even name, say, 50 different cultures?
I’m bored now.
You have advanced some hypotheses which explain the observed data. As Pirsig pointed out, it’s possible to come up with an infinite number of hypotheses that explain the observed data, for the same reason that it’s possible to draw an infinite number of lines to fit a given set of points. Coming up with hypotheses doesn’t make you knowledgeable, or clever. Children can do it.
This is science. Experimentally-tested, peer-reviewed research or STFU.
More to the point, if you cannot tell the difference between a hypothesis and an experimentally-tested theory, you have no place in a learned discussion.
It actually says a lot less than that sentence does.
I’ll be brief, my duck, I’m in a rush.
All of the biological correlations with behaviour that we know of are weak. They aren’t strictly dominated by other things, but they are far from the most important influence. So the correct answer to “Does biological gender influence behaviour?” is yes, but not as much as a lot of other things. And that makes the answer to the question of “how much” out to be we don’t know.
You’re running on this (common) idea that there was some mythic before-human time where we were driven purely by biology and then society started layering on stuff like icing on a cake. That biology operates beneath societal influences. This is wrong. We’ve been social creatures for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens, and those social structures – including learned roles, stigmas, and eu/anti-social behaviours – evolved alongside the way our hormones influence them. You can’t separate them.
That’s why it’s so hard to determine whether something is biological or environmental in nature. Because there is no clear boundary between those classes, and we can’t apply the traditional techniques of reduction and synthesis to the problem.
Also, if you’re finding it hard to quantify aggression, authority, etc, you should be happy – the only people who find that easy are those who haven’t thought very deep about it. So, have a think on why your classification system of “men have leadership roles require violence” might have some flaws in it.
Then have a think on how your historical system of gender roles might be distorted.
Then have a think about how you might be able to reduce those issues in a meaningful way.
Looking forward to hearing what you come up with.
@ lesley
I’d be genuinely interested in seeing that. You see I can think of more examples of female ‘aggresive authority figures’ than I can of any other male associated profession. That could well be selection bias; it’s an interest of mine. But there seems to be a fair few (although still under represented) number of warrior women, whereas for most other professions it’s like women are allowed one example.
So you get like Madame Curie, Hypatia, Deborah etc.
So it seems to me, and I accept this is a layperson’s perspective, that it’s not just professions where violence is a ‘genuine occupational requirement’ in which women are being held back in some way.
@Alan
Off the top of my head:
the Minoans have a kind of generalized regard for women that a lot of ancient cultures don’t that extended to giving them various positions of authority
the ancient Maya have admittedly only one known depiction of a woman engaging in “bloodletting” which was a super important ceremony for them, but the fact she is doing it (and at her husband’s coronation ceremony at that) demonstrates that women could be vested with considerable spiritual power and moreover in that particular case, she is there because she has a more prestigious bloodline than he does so he is basically making appeals to his authority *through* her which means women could be vested with authority in themselves
assorted matrileneal American Indian tribes where women had spiritual authority, authority over various kinds of regarded craftsmanship, and generally over tribal affairs (along with men) or really to be fair you could just say “various matrileneal tribes of tribal people the world over” as there are also ones in Africa and Asia
there tons of societies where women could be priests or shamans or something roughly equivalent, in fact I’d say that *most* societies seem to have some kind of female spiritual authority figure
As to the rest of all this, it’s Friday, I am getting exhausted, and it seems more productive to just reiterate what it is I am saying and what I’m not saying because there seems to be a lot of people putting words in my mouth and assuming I’m making some sweeping declaration about the way the world ought to be or about how we are on rails because biology or something, which I’ve never been claiming.
The extent of what I’m claiming: science has demonstrated that (on average) there are noteworthy differences between biologically typical men and women. *Some* of these differences, such as hormone levels, have been shown to have an impact on behavior. I have at no point tried to quantify precisely at what level because a) I’m not qualified to do that and b) as has been pointed out various times, we don’t actually know the answer to this yet, if an answer can be found. The extent of the extrapolation I’m building on that is “If we want to come up with a good/fair understanding of gendered behavior that already exists and a good/fair refinement of what gendered behavior *should* exist, those differences probably matter.”
Nebulous and sort of useless as a guideline for actually building rules of conduct for society? Yea, probably. Useful for making sure that lines of academic/policy/ethical/whatever inquiry stay sufficiently open as to not develop tunnel vision? Also yes, probably.
@Scildfreja
“You’re running on this (common) idea that there was some mythic before-human time where we were driven purely by biology and then society started layering on stuff like icing on a cake. That biology operates beneath societal influences. This is wrong. We’ve been social creatures for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens, and those social structures – including learned roles, stigmas, and eu/anti-social behaviours – evolved alongside the way our hormones influence them. You can’t separate them.”
This is the only specific criticism I felt compelled to respond to because it’s basically the complete opposite of what I’m saying. We are the way we are largely *because* we are social, which is to say that a lot of evidence suggests that sociability drives aspects of mental evolution. That is demonstrated by studies that have been done on corvids, primates, dogs, parrots, & cetaceans that show that a lot of “higher order” cognitive features that we previously assumed were purely human are also present in those species. The common element? These are all highly social species.
However, when you come at it like that, it reinforces what I am saying that when you see the same sociological phenomenon over and over and over again it is almost certainly not there for reasons that have 0 to do with evolution or biology.
I am done for now I think. I may come back later to respond to some more of these posts in debth, but for the moment I need a break.
So y’all are batting another troll around? Another dudebro-dude who thinks he’s so fucking smart because he’s discovered the wonderful world of evo-psych bullshit, where you can convince yourself of literally anything as long as you pretend you’re smarter than facts, and therefore other people should agree with you?
Well done on all of you <3 Fragile dudes flouncing and desperately trying to get the last word is the same thing as a fragile dude who knows he's been defeated.
@Ignore Sandra
I am a woman. Other than that, obvious bait is obvious.
@Scild
Even smaller than Archer et al first determined.
The army has a fairly obvious interest in aggression research, and a large pool of experimental subjects (who really can’t say no to an additional blood draw or pointless seeming physical and mental exercises 😛 ). As far as recruitment, retention and training are concerned, the difference in aggression levels between high and low testosterone levels is so insignificant as to be not worth bothering with.
In terms of men and women, to go more broadly, and purely from a practical standpoint – there is zero difference in aggressive ability. Not minimal – ZERO.
I emphasised the ability bit because ability isn’t action and there are significant socially imposed barriers to aggressive action in both biological sexes. Those barriers have to be considered in any training, and they do differ significantly between soldiers raised as men and those raised as women. It turns out to be rather difficult to get either sex to deliberately kill, fortunately for society as a whole.
Oddly, one of the biggest considerations in training women soldiers is they do tend to have a period of enhanced aggression, usually but not always 2/3 of the way through training. We call it the revenge period. It passes.
Has there ever been a testosterone and aggression study done with cis women? People do tend to forget that women have testosterone. It goes up and down throughout the menstrual cycle. People tend to associate PMS with aggression and anger in women but PMS is not the point in the cycle in which testosterone is at the highest levels. Iirc, testosterone peaks around week two and then starts dipping after ovulation.
I’ve heard of a murder case in which a teenage girl murderer had a condition in which she had really high testosterone for a girl and that was part of the defense. But that really doesn’t mean anything.
@WWTH:
That’s absolutely fascinating (particularly the PMS/testosterone detail). This is the sort of thing I don’t know much about – does men’s testosterone also fluctuate?
And I’d love to know more about that case, if you remember the details.