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This is really interesting and gives me a few thoughts
1. I don’t think it is reasonable to assume that women’s approach to romantic relationships is automatically the right one and it is a deficiency for a man to not conform to that. Both sexes have equal membership in the relationship, so why should one side’s view form the basis that t…
This is really interesting and gives me a few thoughts
1. I don’t think it is reasonable to assume that women’s approach to romantic relationships is automatically the right one and it is a deficiency for a man to not conform to that. Both sexes have equal membership in the relationship, so why should one side’s view form the basis that they should both see it from?
2. Men are focused on the world and women the home. I think you’re right about this. But I also think much of what you write here is inconsistent with this premise.
“If females had any important means of hurting the prospects of husbands who didn't please them, I think males would have evolved better abilities to care about female subjective feelings. The current division of relational labor simply suggests that during history, men were more important to women than women were to men.”
I do not find this to be a fair assessment. I am certain that throughout history, as now, nothing motivated men more than impressing and getting women. Which would suggest that it is what impresses women that has structured many aspects of how we evolved. The home and children that women focus primarily on requires lots of resources, and I do not think it is a coincidence that men are almost singularly motivated by the acquisition of resources. Or, to put it in terms closer to what you’ve used, this is why men focus on the outside world and women focus on the home. One requires the other. And I think throughout history this has probably been a very equal split. A mind that is optimized for acquiring resources is fundamentally different from the mind that is optimized for managing relationships and the home. The world operates according to different rules than the home; individual feelings matter less in the world than at home.
I think these are really good ideas, but I think you sometimes view the world from a woman’s lens and wonder why the world is not organized accordingly. Perhaps men need to change. Or perhaps the way women approach and understand relationships needs to change. Perhaps it is not men who do not devote enough intellectual effort towards relationships, but women who devote too much to it. I sometimes wonder if the tsunami of reality tv and movies that are heavy on interpersonal drama, that women disproportionately consume, has distorted how women interpret relationships. Maybe I’m wrong, but it certainly can’t be helping. I have heaps of criticism for men too, but I have not found much of a deficit (of quantity, not quality) there that needs correcting.
Parallel to this, and maybe only somewhat relevant, is that in my view modern thought among western women is complicated by the desire to have the benefits of tearing down traditional gender dynamics as well as the benefits to keeping them. It often feels that women want the advantages of being a man and the advantages of being a woman but the downsides of neither. I think this has sort of thrown things off kilter.
I think we need to be more creative and open minded with how we diagnose these problems. That said, I think you are doing important work.
>>I don’t think it is reasonable to assume that women’s approach to romantic relationships is automatically the right one and it is a deficiency for a man to not conform to that.
I agree. My aim with this post was just to highlight the state if things, not to establish norms for how things ought to be. Just trying to explain.
>>Perhaps it is not men who do not devote enough intellectual effort towards relationships, but women who devote too much to it.
I wholeheartedly agree. As a woman, I have been really worried about my own prospects for thinking about anything outside the personal sphere. I recently wrote a post about it in our paid section. I only posted it to paid subscribers because I didn't feel my post was as carefully written as posts on controversial subjects should be. But I will try to write about this subject on the open part of the blog too because it is a subject that concerns me enormously. On the whole, I'm a lot more worried about women's lack of interest in the world than I'm worried about men's lack of interest in relationships.
The thing I disagree with you about is history. I do believe that women mostly evolved as subordinates to men and that it is important to recognize this in order to understand the female side of psychology:
>>throughout history, as now, nothing motivated men more than impressing and getting women.
Nothing motivated men more than getting women and impress whoever needed to be impressed to achieve that. And throughout most of history, that wasn't only, or even mainly the woman herself, but other men. I think that matters a lot for today's relationship between the sexes.
Alright. Perhaps I misunderstood certain elements of what you were saying.
A theory I have, which may bring you some solace (with respect to your second point) is that the world men are is optimized for is violent, resource scarce, and primitive. But the world is no longer like that, at least not in developed societies. We exist within complex societies where having a greater understanding of others' emotions, existing within a relatively equal collective, and understanding interpersonal dynamics is really important. So at the very least I think developed societies have become something that women can contribute to and thrive in more relative to what was historically the case. I think we have achieved a state of existence that neither men nor women are perfectly optimized for. We are sort of outpacing evolution.
All that said, I do agree that it is really important to explore whether the conditions women were optimized for by our evolution is fundamentally at odds with aspirations to be equal participants in society. So I think you are exploring a very important idea that modern feminism has, up to this point, really avoided.
That said, I have sometimes understood progressive thought in the US (with respect to the more extreme form it ended up taking) as an attempt by women to articulate a view of the world that makes sense to them. I do not think it is off the mark to characterize the excesses of progressive thought as being the result of an abundance of compassion and the associated assumption that the locus of control (main reason for why things happen) is external to the individual. I remember reading about someone who pushed a stranger in front of a subway in New York and the response among progressives was overwhelmingly that he was basically not to be blamed because he had mental health problems and it was the city's fault for not helping him with that. That strikes me as being very characteristic of how women think in that it is pursuing a compassionate interpretation to an extreme.
>> The thing I disagree with you about is history. I do believe that women mostly evolved as subordinates to men and that it is important to recognize this in order to understand the female side of psychology.
I don't think our interpretations of history are mutually exclusive. It can be simultaneously true that the division of labor was, when it was all said and done, relatively equal. But someone needs to be in charge. And in a violent, resource scarce time I think it probably makes more sense for that to be the one who is capable of responding to violence and acquiring resources. But that does not come from a place of malice in men, nor is that the form it must necessarily take. I don't think you can be as emotionally complex and aware as women and be the one primarily taking the world head on; the world shears you of that sort of sensitivity. I think at some level men want to protect their women from the world so they can maintain their sensitivity, as I think I speak for all men when I say that it is beautiful. But also it is necessary for one partner to retain that sensitivity, as I think it is required at the interpersonal level. There is order and balance to all this, I think. It is just a matter of whether we have outlived the relevance of the order we were optimized for.
>> Nothing motivated men more than getting women and impress whoever needed to be impressed to achieve that. And throughout most of history, that wasn't only, or even mainly the woman herself, but other men. I think that matters a lot for today's relationship between the sexes.
In this I think you misunderstand men. I really do think women do not understand how much men think about sex. Virtually everything we do is about women and sex; first having sex and then providing for our woman. I would say it is true that men are focused on impressing other men, but only to the extent that it can help us achieve status. And the reason we give a shit about status is that women are attracted to men who are of higher status and can provide more resources.
You will never understand men until you understand that we meaningfully give a shit about little else outside of women. Women have their plan, men have their woman. I think this is part of the gulf between us; we are in some ways far simpler than women, and women refuse to accept that. They just assume we must be like them but defective.
To an earlier point you made, I think this may create room for women to contribute in ways that men can't. A Huxley quote I have always liked is "an intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex". (and a related Nietzsche quote I have always liked is that, basically, genuis is regarded as a feminine quality. They are getting at something real). And I think Huxley was talking about men, and implicitly recognizing what I said earlier: that men are genuinely wired to care about little else than women/sex. And I don't know that women are similar to us in that way. Men do not contemplate things for the sake of contemplating them. In that way we are more constrained.
My main problem is not that women are doing badly. My main problem is that science and philosophy is doing badly without most of half the human race. Science and philosophy are valuable in themselves and in my opinion it is too bad that women's focus tends to lie elsewhere. (Not that I'm in a position to tell people what they should think about, I just have opinions.)
>>I really do think women do not understand how much men think about sex.
I'm working on understanding that. Maybe I'm halfway there. In general I think that one of the most important things women could do to improve their relationship to men is to have some respect for men's focus on sex.
You do make an interesting point on science and philosophy being important but women's focus lying elsewhere. a piece i'm working on asserts that scientific approaches have basically taken over the endeavor to understand the human condition, so our philosophy and art is garbage. It is too grounded in deductive reasoning and evidence seeking (e.g. there was no methodology and works cited section to 'Beyond Good and Evil', yet western thought suggests that any idea lacking those things is not sound).
So, interestingly, women, whose thinking is not characterized by evidence seeking and deductive reasoning (generally speaking, imo) to the same extent, may be able to add a dose of what is missing, if a mode of feminine thought could be constructed that was grounded in reason and oriented towards the world. I believe men and women in western societies, at this point in time, are equally far from sound philosophical thinking but for different reasons.
Concerning your point about women understanding men, I think just starting from the basic point that men are not just shitty women. Have to be willing to accept that you need to interpret what we do within a different framework that does not assume the same mental model. We do not seek sex for the same reason a woman does, and that statement that was lacking in empathy was not made with the same intent that a woman would have made it with.