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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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I've seen versions of this argument before, and there is one point that I always get caught up on, voiced here as

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

...which sounds plausible, but then I remember that this has a great deal of overlap with complaints I have read in many forms from Westerners finding themselves in a Japanese workplace. Japan is not exactly known as a den of feminism, so could the author be wrongfully universalising a Western perspective? (The hypothetical tail of the argument is also: if Japan is in fact feminised, which I guess would mesh well with old "effeminate Asians" stereotypes, then why does it work so well in ways that the Aesthetic Right tends to appreciate in particular? Why does it not import refugees or create HR departments, and why is it happy to glass-ceiling women at lower management level and outright push them to get married and retire in their 30s once you look at more traditional corporations?)

FWIW in Japanese there is a suffix, -ne which basically means, 'isn't it so?', 'right?', this agreement seeking suffix is associated with feminine speech.

Everyone can use that suffix, and it is not exclusively agreement-seeking (a simple そうだね。 has all the vibes of an English "Right."~"I see.", and the Facebook "like" button is translated as いいね).

Correct but it’s not really feminine, men use it all the time. Maybe women use it a bit more.

The -wa suffix, which is feminine, seems to be becoming more common amongst young men at least in fiction. I think this is just because young men watch a lot of anime babes and then subconsciously repeat what they hear.

わisn't feminine in Kansai, though tone and various other things will affect this (as they will with ね.)

I have been never to Japan, but I thought their thing was more about deference to seniority and authority, rather than true consensus.

Where's @George_E_Hale when you need him?

The eternal question. I think there's a lot going on here, and a bit of simplification of a grand clockwork that isn't simple. Unfortunately I am in transit with no time to bless everyone with my important thoughts.

See this paper (randomly lifted from Google) and everything that it cites. I haven't personally experienced the Japanese workplace, but I have worked with and socialised with many Japanese people (and do not have a language barrier), and the core thesis essentially rings true. The role of the senior is fundamentally ceremonial, and any significant decisions affecting the group are always based on meticulous vibe-checking. A senior or authority who fails to vibe-check and just steamrolls their personal preference will find themselves sidelined in the most Mean Girls way imaginable, unless it's literally a doddering old (wo)man with a long social track record in which case they will be superficially humoured while the actual decisions are carefully made behind their back.

I have been never to Japan, but I thought their thing was more about deference to seniority and authority, rather than true consensus.

So is the mean girl style. Well, less seniority, and the authority is even less legible, but it's definitely not true consensus.

I wonder how much of this is just age. Old people don't like to buck the trend, strike out on their own, take risks. And notably, western societies have been getting older while japan has been older.

With Japan, it’s essentially an American/South-American problem where tact is perceived as dishonesty or time-wasting. The Japanese are no more effeminate than the Victorian British.

It’s hard to describe exactly, but there’s a difference between presenting criticism in a way that allows people to save face, and the kind of knives-covered-in-sugar behaviour where the critic tries to pretend that no criticism is actually occurring.

Ideally the former is clearly understood but not rubbed in, so as to spare the recipient’s blushes; the latter can easily become an exercise in allowing the critic to emotionally detach from the situation.

I’m not saying that Japan is all one way or that women are all the other way, but there’s the shadow of an important distinction to be made IMO.

I've spent years working at several different Japanese companies, and this is a pretty spot-on analysis.

It’s hard to describe exactly, but there’s a difference between presenting criticism in a way that allows people to save face, and the kind of knives-covered-in-sugar behaviour where the critic tries to pretend that no criticism is actually occurring.

Which setting, do you figure, does which?

A missing piece of the puzzle may be that (as far as I can tell) well-adjusted women in "feminised" social groups in the West also in fact do get the substance of socially-diffused deniable criticism clearly, even when it is never explicitly stated to them. Failures occur when men and incorrectly socialised (or neurodivergent) women enter those circles.

I've even seen a pattern along the lines of the following: Chinese girl to American CS student guy friend: "I feel like those people hate me and don't actually want me to join their homework group" - guy friend: "Did they actually say something to the effect? No? I'm sure they are just busy, don't worry about it too much" - [girl gets bullied out of the girls' group and winds up with only male friends, who also all want to get with her]. In this case, the girl should have followed her initial instincts; in fact probing about it more positively would have revealed that she had a pretty accurately understanding of why the others were cross with her. The system worked fine, up until the point that it had to contend with people that expected it to be something that it actually isn't.

In this case, the girl should have followed her initial instincts; in fact probing about it more positively would have revealed that she had a pretty accurately understanding of why the others were cross with her.

Now I'm curious. Why were the others cross with her?

In that particular case, I never found out. It was an undergrad that I only intersected with as we both TAed the same course, and my curiosity about undergrad drama was no longer high enough to seek out information that was not volunteered.

On another occasion, there was a mixed undergrad/grad bouldering group I was in for a while, and one of the undergrad girls (who seemed to be socially fairly central to the group before) suddenly stopped coming. I asked why I hadn't seen her around and the only response I got was "X? Oh, X is cancelled." Some of the other undergrads present just turned around and did some sort of "oh yeah, there was that" raised-eyebrows nod. - me: "Huh? What happened?" - interlocutor, repeating: "She's cancelled." I didn't pry further. Figures what they have going on.

Most of her female friends would tell her the same thing, only because it breaks omerta to explain what's going on rather than out of genuine misunderstanding.

But she understood that intuitively, which is why she didn't ask her female friends. If she did ask, the reply, however superficially encouraging, probably would have carried an undertone of "really? you are asking about that?" that she would also have caught on to. The point is that female (and oldschool Japanese) norms are not actually reducible to "Male Westerner culture, with a layer of obscuring passive-aggressive misdirection applied on top"; communication really is supposed to bottom out in getting a hint, and making sure that others get the hints that you want to drop, with no truthful explanation in words being accessible as a last resort, and yet it works if everyone cooperates on it. (Whether it is a global or merely a local optimum is another question.)

If she understood that, she already knew what was going on and was asking her male friend in order to get precisely the wrong answer she wanted. But, yes, mean girl communication norms do work. They're just even more viciously status-dependent than male communication norms.

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