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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   30701 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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As far as I can say she does, in fact, get to say this. Literally what is standing in her way?

People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations. For most people, a pet cat that decided it loved playing catch-the-Frisbee would just be a fucked-up and confusing pet, even if it was really good at Frisbee. Because Frisbee time is what you want from your dog, not from your cat.

What people want from the office hot girl is cute mannerisms, new outfits, and opportunities to flatter her (and smugly affirm your own superiority) by overpraising her work. Nobody expects actual valid professional ideas from the office hot girl, and if she volunteered any, she almost certainly wouldn't get genuine interest or constructive critique. Similarly, what pro-DEI people want from their diverse colleague is fierceness and funkiness, unusual hair and activist politics, and the opportunity to appear younger and more hip by ostentatiously approving of her. Nobody expects or wants actual good work ideas from that person, either, and they would almost certainly be confused and annoyed if they bothered to listen in the first place.

Solid professional ideas are what you expect from Bob down the hall who is neither a hot dateable woman engineer nor a brave diverse woman engineer, but just an engineer. So everyone listens seriously to Bob's engineering ideas, hopes they will be good, and is pleased with Bob when he meets those expectations.

(When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest. Same with the strong diverse woman engineer if a more fashionable political category turns up. This is why women like the one who wrote the OP's article seek permission to be Bob instead.)

When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest

I realise I'm replying quite late (got here for the Quality Contributions thread) but I don't think this is the case. There are plenty of studies that show that gendered opionions (both positive and negative) neutralise with age. Older women are treated like men. Not worse than men, the same as men.

Shakeri and North found that, in general, women were viewed more positively than men, and younger and middle-aged adults were viewed more positively than older adults. However, when looking specifically at intersections of age and gender, the results revealed a more nuanced picture. Younger and middle-aged women were both rated more favorably than their male counterparts. But when it came to older adults, perceptions of women and men were virtually identical, suggesting that gender differences in attitudes tend to level out in later life. This pattern provides empirical support for what the authors call the “gender convergence effect,” where distinctions in attitudes based on gender diminish with age.

TLDR: Women are wonderful, until they get old, at which point they lose the benefits of their femininity and get treated like men. At no point are they treated worse than men.

People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations.

I don't know what to tell you except for: not they don't. Like, where did you get this idea? The world you describe is completely alien to me anecdotally, and if you push me I could probably even justify it academically. As far as I can tell people like to engage in some of the old Noticing, but the moment your break a pattern in a visible way, they reassess you individually. I'd sooner believe in actual misogyny-driven patriarchy, than I would in a bespoke expectations-driven "implicit bias" system.

Even what you say about the cat sounds deranged to me. I aged out of caring about it, but a pet like this would be... well, I think the kids these days would call it "a cure for the male loneliness epidemic".

This strikes me as a just so story and maybe a bit limited to engineering. I don't think marketing or law departments work like that. In many marketing departments these days it's a majority hot women at least on the less senior levels.

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