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Notes -
Some rambling on modern attitudes found generally leftward which I strongly dislike. First, an anecdote:
There was recently a shooting at a gay bar. I share an online space with some friends and some acquaintances for general purpose discussion - no specific focus other than a general lean toward our mutual shared interests, which are unrelated to the shooting or what follows.
One person posted an article about the shooting and then something roughly equivalent to "thoughts and prayers" for the victims, and a follow up note that Bigotry Is Bad. No problem, I'm on board. A second person posted that, as a sexual minority, they are now afraid to go out. They have updated based on this attack to think the world is not safe enough to enjoy. I interjected with something along the lines of "hold on, attacks like this are less likely to get you than car accidents or [insert whatever mundane thing] - yes they're flashy and scary, but you really shouldn't update based on them - they're statistically insignificant AND if you want to view them as terrorism then you living in fear is letting them win - you shouldn't do that"
The response I got was a gentle dogpile (they did start with "I know you're just trying to help, but..." and such), saying that I shouldn't be trying to tell marginalized people how to feel about things and I should let them have space to process their trauma and etc etc, much insistence on "letting the victims speak" (by which they mean indirect victims - people that share a class with the victims, not the firsthand victims) and being a good ally by listening. I pushed back for a bit saying that I'm not making any claims about the general safety of LGBTetc folks (though they are still safe enough to not feel so afraid of the world around them if they live somewhere like the US, this was left unsaid) and that I'm only saying if you previously had the courage to face the world, the shooting shouldn't have changed that and we explicitly had a person saying exactly that they were now afraid based on this event...
But eventually I got the sense they just didn't want to hear me. I gave an apology in the vein of "when people are afraid is exactly the BEST time to reassure them, but clearly I am failing to do that, so I'll back off" and they spent a few seconds talking about how important and good it is to let LGBT voices speak first (of which there were several available in the space, many of which were in the dopile). After those seconds, we have had 24+ hours of silence. Not a word on the topic from any involved or even any spectators, though they all continued talking about unrelated things in other channels of the space.
So. What happened here? I feel like insistence on sitting down and letting marginalized voices be heard is frequently insincere, as it happens even when nobody marginalized (or indeed, anybody at all) has anything to say. It is a "shut up" button, to be deployed whenever somebody says something you don't like that's adjacent to [minority issue]. Even if that isn't how they feel about it, that is functionally what is going on.
Superweapons are bad.
Within the context of the discussion group, the person stating that they now felt less safe was essentially reinforcing the point that Bigotry Is Bad: "this bad thing is so bad that I feel less safe, which shows just how bad the bad thing is!". Your perfectly reasonable and true objection against their unwarranted update is then seen as an enemy argument. In an indirect way, you're arguing that the mass shooting wasn't literally the worst thing in the world, which is perceived as an attack on the in-group. There's also the female vs male styles of communication here, the person who wrote that they felt less safe was really communicating an emotion, whether or not their statement was actually true was much less important than what emotions it communicated, and the name of the game in emotional discussion is validation, you need to either make them feel heard, or respond at a similar emotional level. When your girlfriend says that she feels fat, you don't pull out data from your bluetooth scale that shows that she didn't actually get fat, you go kiss her and tell her that she's never been more attractive to you and that, in fact, you can barely restrain yourself from just taking her right now. Your fundamental faux-pas was that you responded factually to an emotional statement.
This more “female” style of communication is strongly associated with progressivism and has become increasingly dominant in a lot of online spaces and workplaces. I also find it typically eye-roll inducing and unproductive for any purposes beyond mutual emotional masturbation.
I, by contrast, often find that men who sneer at "I feel..." statements and "So what I hear you saying..." acknowledgements are often the first to appreciate genuine listening to their actual feelings, and validation of their emotions as socially understandable. Respecting other people's feelings is an important bit of social glue.
Indeed, in contexts like The Motte, thinking about people's underlying emotions rather than taking their statements solely at face value is a valuable part of my skill set. Often, acknowledging people's feelings can actually be a really useful aid to getting them to step away from their statements and examine them factually without feeling like those underlying emotions themselves are about to be crushed underfoot.
I do not doubt that emotionally respectful conversation can be done badly. I do not doubt that it can be enforced in unproductive ways. But if you think that enforcement of detached manly emotionlessness is the solution then you are very wrong.
The problem to me is that, as much as it claims the opposite, the feminine style of communication seems to be just as often about weaponizing emotions as is it about validly acknowledging them (which I don't think men actually have that much of a problem with).
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Yeah, the point is well taken. I agree that there are clear contexts in which focalising empathetic norms in communication is helpful and serves as a social glue, as you say. The cases where that’s clearest to me, though, are ones involving genuinely close and mutually supportive relationships. What I do think is a bit pathological is when these same norms — helpful in intimate contexts — are translated to domains like Twitter or other kinds of social media where most people only have parasocial or pseudo-social relationships with each other. I largely approve of (literal or figurative) hugs, but dislike hugboxes.
Partly that’s because the forms of reassurance you get in online hugboxes are pretty unhelpful psychologically, insofar as they don’t come from someone who actually knows you and cares about you and is in a position to meaningfully validate you, but simply someone with your same political or identity-group values who’s been socialised to praise expressions of pain or victimhood or oppression that are framed in the right political vocabulary. These spaces typically strongly limit actual debate, and what debate actually does occur is often a form of “gotcha” based around identifying when someone is showing insufficient demonstration of compassion (e.g., “doesn’t your analysis marginalise the experiences of group X?”).
I genuinely think this kind of norm is corroding public online debate, but more to the point, I find it often intellectually insipid and emotionally ersatz. But that’s just online with relative strangers — in the real world (or in online communication with close friends or family) there’s obviously a space for primarily therapeutic rather than investigative or forensic communication.
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do you have any evidence for these assertions or are you using the female style of communication right now?
Touché! I don’t have useful evidence at hand — it was a grumpy sideswipe, on anecdotal and observational grounds. If I were to make more a extended argument, I’d start by operationalising the specific communication style I have in mind, probably in terms of Trait Agreeableness (Compassion), which is robustly higher in women and higher in progressives, and then look for (or run) a sentiment analysis on left wing vs right wing social media spaces.
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