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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   27421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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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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