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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 think the male culture within seafaring could be a more accurate example - it's in large part a totally confined social space that developed over the course of millennia with next to zero female influence. We find strict hierarchies - but camaraderie is a given and mutiny an ever-present possibility should the captain fail his crew. It's also a very fratty environment in the sense that hazing is commonplace and there's usually a whole array of crew-specific rituals an shibboleths meant to confer a strong sense of shared identity.
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