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I've been asked by a mod to repost this here, so here goes!
What Is The Problem With Women?
We've often discussed, and it seems we will continue to discuss, what is going on in the Battle of the Sexes. I have to hold my hands up and admit that very often in such dispatches, I am the one defending women and criticising the behaviour and the attitudes of men.
But it is also undeniable that some women are fudging stupid. Or at the very least, so it appears. We've argued over "women prefer the Bad Boys to the Nice Guys" but there comes a point where it seems to be sheer self-destruction at work, because how could anyone stick with a guy like the one in this story?
So, to do justice to the gentlemen here with whom I have argued, here is the sorry story of a woman who apparently had not a brain in her head. Her family warned her off, her friends warned her off, even on a first date she knew this was a bad idea - and she still ended up marrying him and having two children with him while he was irresponsible, controlling, and abusive.
Why? I can't explain it to you in any way that makes sense. Even she doesn't know why, looking back. There are some hints that, in line with theories of such behaviour, she was drawn (for whatever reason) to abusive men, like a typical victim who keeps going back to the same kind of relationship after getting out of the last one. But as to what was at work here, who knows? I can't imagine any evo-psych explanation for this that makes any sense at all, not even the "women evolved to tolerate rape because women who resisted rape got murdered when the barbarian horde over-ran the village and killed all the men and took all the women" kind of thing.
An Irish divorce story.
It gets worse from there, until finally she won't put up with it anymore and leaves. Why she didn't run a mile after the first date, I have no explanation. This is a stupid (and indeed, dangerous) choice she made of her own free (so it seems) will. Nobody was urging or forcing her to take up with this guy, indeed it was the opposite. She had plenty of chances, and plenty of warning signs. She got pregnant, of her own accord again, (I strongly suspect the first pregnancy was the usual hope around 'a baby will fix this' and the second time, what, she had no access to contraception? highly unlikely) and brought two kids into an unstable situation where the father had no interest in contributing to the family. It was only when things finally became intolerable that she left.
And I genuinely, honestly can't blame men or The Patriarchy or anything else for this. The guy in question was a shithead but she knew that from the immediate start. There's nothing in her story, as told, about her family pressuring her to get married or settle down with anyone, much less this guy. She did it all herself.
Will you accept an even less rigorous, non-falsifiable, ad-hoc explanation in its place? If so, here's my framework for understanding this stuff.
An instrumental goal for any evolved brain is: "Figure out what the heck is going on, figure out your place in it, figure out what you need to do."
For social animals, this gets refined into: "Figure out the Narrative, figure out your place in the story, comport to that role."
The Narrative started (probably) as a way of coordinating individual hunter-gatherers into a single super-organism. To do that, there needed to be a shared "thing that we are doing", with roles assigned within that story. Leaders who could enforce that Narrative (e.g. with violence) ended up being more successful than ones who couldn't; non-leaders who could quickly and adeptly take their role in the Narrative ended up being more successful than ones who couldn't. So I imagine humans have a really deeply ingrained goal of "figure out your role in this story and follow it".
Chuck in some standard sex-based differences around appetite for risk. If you're a middle-of-the-pack male, it might be genetically worth it to try out the high-risk Narrative "I should be king"; less so for his female equivalent, who will be genetically "safer" in following the dominant Narrative around her.
If all of this is true: then people will generally be susceptible to things that hijack the Narrative-identifying mechanism. Women will tend to be more susceptible to attacks that strongly and bluntly overpower the dominant Narrative; men will tend to be more susceptible to Lady-Macbeth-type "you should be king" attacks that provide a risky status-enhancing alternative Narrative.
Some loosely associated stuff that might support this:
Connecting this back to, y'know, your actual point: there are people, usually men, who instinctively broadcast an aura of "this is what we're doing". It's typically unselfconscious and unaware of even the possibility that this isn't actually the thing we're doing. It's just happening. When they do this, it seems to activate that ancestral Narrative-seeking DNA. People fall into their roles. It's like picking up a kitten by its nape.
(This kind of attitude is easily mistaken for confidence, and I reckon is a big part of why men are told "just be confident!" when dating.)
If I can add another layer of evopsych to my tower of unsubstantiated claims: if women are generally looking to find the dominant Narrative and comport to their role in that story, then there's a huge selection pressure for men who can trigger those dominant-Narrative identifiers. But if these identifiers are too legible, then lots of men are going to consciously cultivate them; so there's a pressure for the identifiers to become illegible (or hard to fake). So you can end up with men who aren't good, or even good-looking, or even any other legible markers of sexual success -- but they have this illegible way of making people go "yes, we're doing what this guy wants".
... so, yeah, when encountering people like this, some women are going to make superficially inexplicable decisions that probably felt completely right from the inside. A million years of evolutionary optimisation is a hell of an opponent.
I said up front that this was non-rigorous and non-falsifiable, so naturally I will not be accepting criticism at this time.
Yeah, but everyone around was telling her "he's bad news" and she knew it by demonstration when for the first date he turned up drunk, then on a later date slapped her. She kept quashing her doubts up to the point of marriage, then after marriage she still didn't or couldn't bring herself to leave. She was afraid of him, afraid that he'd kill her.
That's not "figure out your place in the narrative and fit into it", that's "this is how you end up a story on the six o'clock news", though in this case it wasn't the woman's partner who set her on fire, it was because disgruntled drug dealers were trying to get her partner. There are men who do threaten to set their ex-partners on fire.
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From your description, I'm having a hard time imagining how "this is the thing we're doing" might differ from confidence. What is confidence, if not protecting the idea that you have a specific goal in mind and you know you're able to accomplish it?
Here's a few related concepts:
All of these could reasonably be called "confidence". I'm not staking any kind of linguistic claim, where the thing I'm pointing at is definitionally some distinct thing from confidence.
The distinction I'm making is this. Informal uses of "confidence" (particularly in the context of male dating advice) are a blend of 1-4, maybe with a sprinkle of 5 and 6. It's usually an internal thing. A lot of "just be confident!" advice is about being comfortable with yourself and accepting outcomes -- it's not about controlling the Narrative.
For example: a manservant might be very confident in their role (i.e. they feel non-anxious, they're competent and know it, they're unflappable in the face of failure) -- but they wouldn't generally be someone who projects "this is the thing we're doing".
You've never met a really good manservant then!
I mean I'm not @grandburdensomecount or @2rafa I don't have a valet. But I've definitely interacted with people in service roles who gave off that "this is what we're doing" vibe. Barbers and waiters come to mind. Mechanics as well.
A really confident barber tells you what you want to do with your hair, informs you that this is how we do things in this shop. Yes you want to trim your eyebrows let me do that quick. No you can't cut your hair that way it will look gay. Now sit back while I do the massage with the vibrating glove from 1950.
There's a whole trope older than dirt of the strong willed servant who dominates his weak master, by his sheer frame.
PG Wodehouse wrote of this.
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I get it, thanks for clarifying.
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