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Notes -
Mean girls, how do they work?
@RobHenderson tweeted this:
Which I think is a common and accurate statement.
But how exactly do mean girls arrive at consensus? Is it through one queen bee like Regina George? And, if so, how is that queen bee chosen?
To me, as a man, it is mystifying. Men tend to automatically arrange themselves in hierarchies, with "rule by the best" being the standard organizing principle. By default, best equals size and strength. But, depending on the activity, the hierarchy might be based on charisma, intelligence, wealth, musical ability, etc...
With women, this doesn't seem to happen. In fact, in female social hierarchies, the tall poppies are often ostracized leading to women constantly downplaying their abilities. Women who draw credit to themselves get shot down. So who, then rules, the roost? Is it a person who is uniquely able to play the false modesty game? Or is consensus arrived at organically, with a hive mind deciding who is "in" and who is "out".
Let me say that I'm glad to not have to play these games.
In my analysis, the core of the difference between male and female social status arrangement is the locus of the evaluation rubric.
For men, it's an external, verifiable, and discrete measurement - performance. Who scored the most points? Who brought in the most dollars? Who got everyone to show up for the party/vote/heist? While there is certainly haggling over who should get what percentage of "credit" for a particular success, there is still a "thing" that happened and that everyone can point.
For women, it's the constantly in flux consensus mechanism for status. You're "cool" because enough other people decided you were. Why or how did they decide that? Irrelevant they just did, and at a critical mass that those who disagree with the coolness assessment are necessary in the minority (perhaps not in number, but in social capital within the group). I think you see this in a lot of female coded activities - fashion, art, food, entertainment. Anything that is governed chiefly by the hard to define concept of "taste." There's no discrete external rubric for what makes this year's pants/tops/shoes "in" yet, somehow, everyone seems to know (or is forced to accept) what is "in." Interestingly, this creates a constantly updating mechanism wherein whatever is current in terms of taste sets up its own demise by creating the opportunity for an opposition to develop. You can't get whatever is "in" right just once, you have to update lest you fall "out."
This, to me, is why you have the infamous gender specific difference in neuroticism. Why
bitches be so crazy?do women, as a group in general, exhibit higher neuroticism? It's because their constant task is to covertly poll their social groups for the days' social standings which are, in turn, based on subtle expressions of taste (fashion, style, memetic currency etc.) without explicit voicing of opinions by the group members. Male or female, if this was your life, you'd be a little stressed, no?I'd implore anyone reading this to avoid plunging into normie-feminist rage responses. I tried to describe what I see as differences while doing my best to avoid any implicit value judgements. The female means of determining social status is critically and necessarily important to human families, communities, and societies. A world without women? The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison. I'll take a daily "mean girls status market" over a daily "avoid random lethal violence" roulette wheel. Furthermore, I do believe women have outsized importance in building and maintaining culture. Politics flows from that, and laws from politics. Many societies have tried to sequester women away from culture and politics - universally, I would say, to their existential risk and eventual death.
But the problem of our time, I'd argue, is that the west has, for 30+ years now, actively fostered cultural developments that try to maximize female styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. In the past 10+ years, it has risen to the level of doing so in explicit opposition to all male styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. But, wait, please don't think I'm saying "What about men?!". Far from it. The insidious and tragic result of the rise of extremist feminism has been it's disastrous effects on social order as a whole and women specifically. We eat our own with the best and most earnest of intentions.
I appreciate your attempts to be fair and not just turn this into a rant about women. But this strikes me as off the mark. Perhaps prison is the closest approximation we have, perhaps not - but it's not very close if so. The people who get sent to prison are (by and large) bad people. They act in horrifying ways because they acted that way on the outside too. It's kind of like pointing to the most manipulative, sociopathic of women and going "see, this is what women are like without men to moderate them".
A better (though still not perfect) model of a man's world might be fraternities. They do act very badly indeed sometimes, but not on the level of prisons. The main flaw with using them as a model is that they're still very immature young men, so again they aren't necessarily representative of what a true world without women would look like (because that world would have mature as well as immature men and the former would moderate the behavior of the latter). Another model might be young businesses where they only have men on the payroll. These don't tend to be hellscapes of bad behavior as far as I'm aware. They seem to be just focused on getting shit done. This too is probably an imperfect model, albeit the flaws don't stand out to me. But regardless, I think prison is a pretty flawed model and we have better available to us.
I'll admit imprecision here was a mistake.
I should've said that the group organization mechanisms present in prison are what "pure" or perhaps "raw" male organizational systems look like. You are correct that the general character flaws of most prisoners are not representative of society at large.
Widening the aperture to the military, we see the patterns continue; explicit hierarchies with unambiguous leadership. Strict behavioral codes that, when transgressed, are met with physical violence or, at least, extremely high tension verbal intimidation. College fraternities reduce the propensity for physical violence (mildly) because they still exist in the context of civil society - if you beat up your Frat Bro, you're still probably getting arrested.
The point is this is how men organize themselves when female organizing principles are absent or extremely muted. I'm not an expert on how, say, the eastern Saudi tribal folks organize their extremely patriarchal societies, but I'd be willing to guess we can see some continue through lines there as well.
It's interesting to note that patriarchy is usually conceived of all wrong by westerners for whom patriarchy was not even in living memory when their grandparents were born- it's patriarchy, not andrarchy. Rule by the fathers, who often harshly suppress younger men as much as women. Patriarchal societies are of necessity clannish because ruling over adult sons is the sine qua non. These societies have age gated authority rather than gender gated; yes, men rule over women at the same level, but that's as close to a universal rule as even exists. Intensely clannish societies give older women quite a bit of power and influence because they do the social work to maintain this intense clannishness; the networks of controlling arranged marriages and intense reciprocity structures which maintain the clan as a social unit are done by women even if men theoretically have the final say.
I remember speaking to a woman who fled a particularly strict family in Saudi Arabia in adulthood- she was married off at fifteen but her husband wasn't permitted to see or speak to her beforehand. Instead his mother picked which of the sisters in her family he was to marry. She doesn't know how 'this guy marries a woman from family X' was arrived at. This example is a bit trite, but it illustrates key facts about ultra-patriarchal social structures- unmarried men are tightly policed to bind them into the clan structure, no less than women(albeit in different ways), and authority is exercised by elders over the young. Our resident Indians can probably confirm that their arranged marriages are made by women as well.
This is, despite the name, not a particularly male-oriented macho man environment like, say, VDV barracks or a frat. In fact intensely patriarchal societies mostly lack these kinds of institutions because they separate young men from the controlling power of clan elders.
A deep, yet topical pull.
I appreciate the important addition of age as more than an additional variable, but a whole new (and indispensable) axis in the very rough model my first post attempted to sketch out.
It leads, I think, to some uncomfortable confrontations with reality in today's world. We just had an election where the sitting president knocked himself out of it by being himself at the first debate. One of the internet's most famous Guys Who Says Stuff asserts "many of the problems of Western society are caused by ... privileging the old over the young.".
The classic RETVRN concept of a patriarchy fails to reconcile the fact that, for most of human society, men reached their wise and philosophic years starting at 40 or so. Then, they were expected to move their talents to the afterlife in their 60s - and this for the luckiest!
Most of us reading this forum will probably live to see extreme scale issues of care for elderly folks in their 80s and 90s with tragic yet real cognitive decline. Obviously, we should not be deferring to their collective "wisdom" in any domain.
I don't have good answers. As much as I have emotional sympathies and inclinations towards a kind of traditionalist social redoubt, the world only moves forward and you have to live in it (but not of it) the way it is.
In practice, the Saudi royal family(which runs on this kind of patriarchy) does a better job of avoiding 'all power to the senile' than the US gerontocracy. I'll wager it'll do a better job than the British monarchy does, as well. We really don't know much about the influence of aged, high status female Sauds(and Saudi Arabia is a personal possession of the Saud clan), but it's a good bet that it exists, given how clan dynamics work. The Saud clan also has super-opaque internal dynamics we only get glimpses of when people are purged, exiled, or murdered, which seems more like a female dynamic to western sensibilities.
I'd point to the privileging of the old over the young which afflicts the west- as in the specific gerontocratic model we see in the anglosphere- as the sort of explicit thing that can only happen when patriarchy is broken; the patriarchal answer to social security is for children to have legal obligations to take care of their aged parents, China had this sort of patriarchal society before Mao and is experiencing issues of relations between the generations running on dynamics which seem inscrutable to westerners. A patriarchal society prefers to keep major social functions within the clan so they can remain under the control of elders rather than the state. This of course means that when natural faculties start to fade the next generation(still quite old, of course) rises in influence because there's no one to stop them.
De Maistre wrote about this- 'the counter revolution is not the revolution opposite, but the opposite of the revolution'. In the modern west we see some parallel society movement among social conservatives who nevertheless participate in society- think the Knights of Columbus benefits for their members, or the LDS... everything, or generically Christian health sharing initiatives, or the homeschooling movement. These things are exactly what he's talking about; the establishment of folkways/institutions which accomplish the things needed by a healthy society in a time of chaos is the traditionalist social redoubt, in a form which grows because it is healthy, crowding out the dysfunctional revolutionary folkways until it reaches a position of dominance at which it can calcify into tradition. And the decline in Christianity has halted, per the latest pew poll. Parallel institutions steadily grow. It's the opposite of the revolution, it proceeds agonizingly slowly but steadily, almost unnoticed until the tortoise overtakes the hare's fits and starts and from the perspective of the normie becomes just the way it is.
This is really vague, but: The Saudis do a good job not being of our age, Im not so sure theyre great at being in it. Primitive peoples encountering civilisation generally fall for scams. It doesnt help all that much if its the distrustful kind of primitive - the problem is lack of understanding, not a directional error. The Saudis are definitely out of the scam phase - the next one is "failing in society", which they dont because they sit on the oil, but Im not sure they personally are really well equiped. Im not sure they really could be without assimilating more - those parallel societies in the west still move, well, in parallel to mainstream society.
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