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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2083 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 30, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I’m not suggesting that this is a conscious thought process; I’m suggesting that this is all going on at the level of the visceral and subconscious. Those people looking askance at you for playing flute were doing so because it is weird to see a big deep-voiced man with his lips pursed blowing into a little flute and making a girly pretty noise. And it’s equally weird seeing a quiet and feminine girl blasting out noise from an extravagant tenor-voiced trumpet.

I’m not saying that these are rationally correct value judgments. And certainly I’m both glad that you found joy in playing woodwind instruments and confident that you’re very skilled at them! I’m just saying that the “socialization” you’re talking about is not the cause of the gender imbalances we observe, but rather the result of more hardwired bio-social dynamics farther upstream. If half the girls in your music class had eagerly picked up trumpets, and half the boys had eagerly picked up flutes, I don’t think the music teacher would have forced everyone against their will to trade instruments until the gender assignments were “correct”.

Do you disagree? Do you think that all of those male trumpet players were secretly pining to play flute, but felt like they were forced against their will to play loud tenor instruments by the oppressive shackles of socialization and imposed culture?

I think it's pretty possible there's a feedback loop, or several, going on here. First, it does feel more masculine to be making loud, blasting, boisterous noises and more feminine to be making small, high-pitched, well-controlled ones.1 As such, more men choose brass and drums and more women choose flutes and harps. Then that becomes a stereotype - 'only girls play flutes, loser!' - that reinforces itself in a feedback loop of its own.

  1. Going one step deeper, what feels masculine or feminine does indeed change culturally a bit, but some basic outlines seem to hold pretty constant.

Interesting implication being that when men made up the whole orchestra, from flute to timpani, a wider range of masculine expression was allowed. Flute was a purely male instrument in the best Vienna orchestras until the early 21st century!

It's only the introduction of women into the orchestra that marks one instrument as masc and another as femme. Until then all orchestral performance was masculine, and the variety you chose could implicate the kind of man you were but not your masculinity itself.

I think this is what's missing from the modern gender debate with the supposedly traditionalist right wing view (that I am sympathetic to). Traditionally if there was a profession, men were almost exclusively doing it, and so we can realistically expect men to have a pretty broad palette of expressiveness.

I basically see it as male security -> women enter workforce -> male anxiety -> men undermining and sniping at each other, enforcing too restrictive gender roles. The result is broader male expression gets twisted into shame-coated "queer" outlets rather than being healthily expressed, and traditionalists are confused into not realizing the anxiety itself (part of) the problem.

You’re missing one key factor, which is that woodwinds objectively suck.

“Yes I would like to go eeeeeeee in the background, how did you know?”

Haha, I mean. I did choose to play the clarinet in Mid/High School, just to be different, and it was a great choice. There were 12 male trumpets, 11 female flutes, and like 6 other players, so it was a bit unbalanced.

My male friend did flute to be different too, but man did it not work. Skinny tall dude fluttering away in the front row, firmly embedded in a sea of girls tinier and cuter than him. I got to slack off in the middle row with 3 girls, 2 of them among the cutest in the class, and didn't even have to practice hardly at all bc who cares what the clarinets are doing so long as it's in the right key. Too bad I was socially incapable of acting on IOI's; our teacher was often trying to motivate me to practice by telling me how talented I was at pitch and breath control, which works great to impress 14yo band girls I guess.

Of course the real masterclass was the other, naturally social, friend who chose to be the saxophone player. the bastard

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