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I am convinced that the Sex Divide is the greatest political engine of today, and that a big chunk of the culture war is based on the existance of this divide, and the inability of society to understand that political differences between males and females have an enormous biological basis.
After I finally understood this concept, I began to "notice", being always passionate about politics and speaking about it, that the discourses and the nature of the topic I discussed with people were and are heavily genderized.
Having a political or cultural discussion with a female is, in general, radically different from having one with a male, not only regarding the topics of interests per se (males more interested in economics or raw politics, female more interested in immigration, equality or similar topics), but also regarding "how" to approach a discussion.
I feel way more free talking with males, because I always had the impression, confirmed 95% of the times, that I can be more open and direct with what I felt without receiving a backslash, that can be personal (simply the person screaming at you or hating you) or social (person beginning to talk with other people in your social network) (NB: I am not American and I do not live in a very polarized society). Apart from the political extremists and activists that you can meet, the following things happened often:
Me and the other male have a disagreement, that can be harsh or about an hot topic, but that resolve itself in a shake of hand.
We disagree on a lot of topic, but also agree on other ones, making the discussion constructive in itself.
I discover that the other male have a lot of, uh, hidden opinions that he does not reveal in his network, often because of female backslash.
In general, I love to talk about politics or culture with other middle or low class males, because I always "received" something in exchange after the discussion, something that can be a new reflection on a topic, an earnest discovering of new knowledge, or simply understanding more some concepts.
Meanwhile, apart from a selected group of very close female friends and a selected other few, almost all the discussion with females ended with a disaster. In spite of me trying to move in a different manner, being more gentle and less direct, and understanding that I need to adapt to other people when I talk about something, the discussions simply does not start well and end well. What happens is:
We have a disagreement, and at this point the discussion or close itself ("It is useless to continue, why we should?") or degenerate in a very uncomfortable discussion where the woman put herself as an emotional victim of what we are talking about.
If the discussion does not degenerate but continues, it is always redirected to morality or feeling or about a generic "natural law". At this point if I try to redirect the discussion negating the opposing point (I do not agree with your morality or I do not care about this morality) it simply degenerate again in a morality context, where your worth as individual is put on a public pedestal.
The result of all of this, after years of experience... is that I do not talk about these kind of topics with women anymore, apart from a selected few. When I have this kind of conversation I always strive for earning something, that can be knowledge, human connection or shared experiences. Why doing these with women, when the things that you can earn are statistically negative?
Adding to what I said, I also need to mention that, after lowering down the kind of topics and approaches that I have with women, both my dating life and romantic life radically improved. I do not know if it is a coincidence or not.
I think part of this divide has to do with the perception of how "concrete" (as opposed to "abstract") one is thinking about the implications of their discussions. By "concrete" here I mean something like "relevant to the everyday lives and experiences of individuals." So a discussion is very concrete if it is closely about how the politics under discussion will impact the lives of people and it is very abstract if the discussion is more about the politics or principles in a purely logos kind of way, disconnected from any individuals or particularities. My impression is that my political discussions with men have been much more abstract than my political discussions with women have been. This also tracks, I think, the topics you've mentioned discussing with each group as well as explains part of the reaction. It is much easier to become emotionally invested in a discussion or make inferences about another's moral character when one is imagining the people who will be suffering due to some purported principle, or policy, or whatever.
Why is this the case? I posit it is due to a kind of group political consciousness. That is, members of certain groups have, historically, been politically disadvantaged due to their membership in that group. In the United States the 15th and 19th amendments stand as reminders that it was once common to deny people participation in the political process on the basis of race or sex. Not to mention other laws like coverture and Jim Crow that impacted these groups legal standing in other ways. I think this also leads members of these groups to increased sympathy for people who will be on the "losing" end of a policy because of the perception that they were once in a similar position (not necessarily as an individual, but as a member of a certain group).
Consider this through the lens of discussing a particular political issue: whether women ought to have the right to vote. I suspect two men discussing this issue could do so dispassionately assuming the discussion stayed sufficiently abstract. About the merits, from a utilitarian or some other perspective of such a policy. Now imagine we concretize the discussion, we make it more personal. "I think your wife/girlfriend/mother ought not have the right to vote, much harm has been done by their participation in the political process." Would the discussion stay as dispassionate or would it become more heated? More like the conversations you have with women? All the principles in the abstract discussion imply the concretized statement, of course, but plenty of people don't "feel" the implications the way they do when the implications are stated more explicitly. Or imagine one of our interlocutors is a woman. No longer is this an abstract discussion about policies, it's a discussion about whether she and people like her ought to have political equality, about whether maybe society would be better off if she (and others like her) didn't.
I think the term you're reaching for is, at least in common parlance around here, is high vs low decouplers. It's both something innate to different people and something more or less easy depending on distance from topic.
I find this overly charitable to low decouplers, who can come in all sorts. Nearly everyone has historically been oppressed in one way or another to some degree. And even among you examples it has not been my experience that black men have decoupling abilities in line with white women like your theory would predict.
I've never been a fan of the "decoupler" verbiage. I think it inappropriately conflates a thing one does with a way one is. I phrased my description of the phenomenon in terms of the debate rather than the debaters deliberately.
I mean, aren't we supposed to be charitable here? That aside I want to be clear. I intend my description above to be an account of causes rather than reasons. I think having a political identity with a particular kind of narrative history with respect to that identity can cause people with that identity to have issues "decoupling", as you put it. I do not intend to claim that the reasoning I have laid out is something explicitly happening in the minds of people with that identity who is having issues "decoupling."
Depending on your definition of "oppressed", "one way or another", and "some degree" I am probably in agreement but I think the kind and degree of the oppression are important. Perhaps more than either it needs to be perceived as having contemporary salience. When feminists connect the contemporary struggle for abortion rights back to the century long effort to improve women's legal and political rights that is an act of building the kind of political group consciousness I'm imagining. Similarly arguments that trace the modern struggle for African Americans against biased policing back to slavery.
I am not sure I take my theory to have made any predictions about relative ability to "decouple" among groups that have the kind of consciousness I describe.
Charitable in that we should engage with the strongest form of counter arguments and assume good faith. Not charitable in that we intentionally discard reasonable hypothesis because they are offensive to some group. I'm very aware that the oppression based theory of increased empathy is fundamental to the progressive worldview and I don't think it's true which is why I'm reluctant to grant it here. I'm afraid it's too much to ask me to be charitable in swallowing the pill that may be the crux in a very large disagreement I have with one of the most powerful ideologies alive today.
But the theory you're arguing against suggests that Black men would have more in common with white men on decoupling because it's presumed gender/sex is the primary difference and your theory predicts they'd have more in common with women because recent oppression status is the primary difference. So it does seem like strong evidence in favor of the gender based decoupling theory relative to the oppression status based theory.
What "reasonable hypothesis" am I advocating "discard[ing]" "because [it is] offensive to some group?" I view the point of my post as attempting to explain part of why the phenomenon of differences in discussion styles the OP observes exists.
I would be interested in hearing your characterization of "the oppression based theory of increased empathy." I consider myself pretty progressive and am not sure I agree that any such theory is "fundamental" to my world view.
Ahh I see, I think I misunderstood your sentence. Do I characterize your experience correctly that, in discussions with black men, their ability to decouple is more like white men than white women? If so then I better understand how this is contradictory to my theory. I also don't really view my project as arguing against the OP's observation, but more trying to provide (perhaps mistaken) explanations for it.
It's difficult to formalize and I'm not super happy with how I phrased it there. It's a little cleaner and recognizable as "lived experience" or "the progressive stack" but not exactly. The idea that people who have experienced hardship are more credible in discussion pertaining to those hardships. Or it's more corrupted form, people who claim to have experienced hardship are more credible in discussions pertaining to hardships in general. In my view at best the hardships experienced introduce more bias than clarity and at worst as you privilege the voices of people who claim to have gone through hardship you create a Goodhart's law situation where legacy admit female graduates from Harvard genuinely think their voices should be privileged over white male coal miners. But even that comparison is playing the game. I think arguments should survive on their own merits and upturning the table for a failure to decouple is a defect bot strategy. The idea that men should be excluded from talks of abortion is ridiculous as an example that I sometime hear.
I'm wondering what kinds of things you would classify under "hardship" for this example. Would it include, say, blindness? It seems like a pretty unintuitive conclusion to me to say that being blind introduces such bias in blind people that sighted people better understand what it is like to be blind than blind people do. Or if blindness would not be included, what facts about a kind of hardship distinguish blindness from ones you would include?
For my part I do believe something like this. Very generally, that people who have had a particular experience have insight about what it is like to have that experience which people who have not had that experience are lacking. One area where I suspect we agree is that just because they have insight into what it was like to have had that experience they do not necessarily have insight into how to improve or alleviate that experience.
I would say that blind people would have insight, in that they may be able to bring things to attention that might have been missed if they were totally ignored. But I don't think it's difficult for others to understand the perspective once it's been raised. I often see a kind of motte and bailey where the motte is "Blind people can help identify what their difficulties are" and the bailey is "sighted people cannot then understand those difficulties once raised well enough to pragmatically make decisions that impact blind people". More commonly the problem is on some culture war grounds where some special interest accuses the opposition to something they're demanding of ignorance rather than a legitimate disagreement. The whole dynamic creates a grievance arms race where rather than carefully discuss issues people race to legitimize their positions by emphasizing how much of an underdog they are in an appeal to pathos rather than logos. It results in what could have been substantive debates being reduced to mere whining.
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