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Transcript of cartoon
At the top of the strip, there’s a drawing of various unidentifiable shapes floating in a liquid in a pot. Lettering on top of the drawing, in cheerfully cartoony letters, says “Toxic Masculinity Stew.”
Panel 1
A man in a chef’s shirt talks directly to the viewer. He has a mustache, is bald, and looks to be middle-aged but vigorous. He’s holding a long spoon in one hand and making a “thumb’s up” sign at the viewers with his other hand; there are various bowls arrayed in front of him, with neon green stuff in the bowls, and a big stew pot to his right. (Throughout this strip, all colors are a bit desaturated and dull, other than the neon green.)
CHEF: Welcome! Today we’ll be making “toxic masculinity stew.” Yum!
Panel 2
The chef is stirring some neon green stuff in a pan.
CHEF: We’ll start by sautéing some feelings. We’ll bury these at the bottom of the pot, so no one will ever see them!
Panel 3
The chef hold out a neon-green egg towards the viewer. The egg is visibly cracked.
CHEF: Add a delicate sense of manhood. The slightest thing can make boys feel that this has been shattered! What fun!
Panel 4
The Chef mixes something in a bowl.
CHEF: In a separate bowl, put ht eidea that “the sex” is something held by women. Mix it with the belief that if a man can’t get “the sex” from a woman, one way or the other… Then he’s not a real man at all!
Panel 5
From above the pot, we see the chef’s hand holding a shaker (like a salt shaker) and sprinkling neon green specs into the stew.
CHEF: Now sprinkle in lots of gear of being soft or gentle or vulnerable. Nothing spoils this dish quicker than boys accepting these parts of themselves!
PANEL 6
The Chef holds out a spoon towards the viewer. The spoon is dripping with a thick, neon-green liquid.
CHEF: Simmer for 10-40 years and there you have it… a lovely toxic masculinity stew! It tastes repulsive and bitter, but don’t worry. We’ll force it down.
KICKER PANEL
A tiny panel below the bottom of the strip shows a woman yelling at the cartoonist.
WOMAN: Criticizing how society harms men means you’re anti-male!
What empirical evidence is there on the prevalence of “toxic masculinity”? Is it a substantial phenomenon or ironically just another harmful and inaccurate stereotype?
As opposed to the harmless, accurate stereotypes?
Grace
@Grace
I’m a bit confused by your comment. Do you oppose the toxic masculinity stereotype, then? Or do you think that it is not a stereotype?
PS. I believe that a good argument can be made that humans cannot function effectively without stereotypes, which is little more than abstract thinking applied to people with certain traits.
I’d be surprised if there’s enough of a consensus on what “Toxic Masculinity,” is for there to be good evidence for it’s existence. One person’s evidence for Toxic Masculinity is another person’s evidence that men on average score slightly higher on the AQ spectrum. It’s one of those subjects where those who think about it for a while are bound to become nuanced in their thinking to the point where they are practically alone in their understanding.
I’m often described as masculine. I’m big, a like playing sports, and though I’m too old for it now, I used to love contact sports. I don’t typically enjoy character driven movies or books. I’m much more interested in stories about big ideas or adventures. I’m not mean or violent, but I’m not exactly caring or feeling. I have trouble determining whether or not someone is asking me for input, or if I’m just being asked to listen (like a whole bunch of other guys). I like escaping thoughts and feelings- not because of a desire to repress them, but because I’m at my best when doing things which require focus and a clear head. Things like extreme sports (kiteboarding, skateboarding), lifting weights, welding and most recently operating a sewing machine.
I feel less than other people, I know this. I know from conversations I’ve had that some people think I’m emotionally repressed even though I’m content to be just like this. In fact, I can’t imagine how anyone would want to be less level headed and more emotional. I have a fantastic marriage in part because my nature makes me conflict averse. I simply won’t get angry enough to do or say anything that could threaten our marriage. My wife never has to guess what I’m thinking or feeling.
I should make it clear right now that I’m not diagnosed with Asperger’s or anything like that. I have a normal social life for an introvert, and no trouble making and keeping friends. I’ll be attending a happy hour tonight that I organized, something I do frequently, I’m far from asocial. I think there are a whole bunch of guys just like me.
I say all this because I think I’m healthy, even though I went through 12 years of school being told that I should be more emotional (always by teachers who were women). My writing was too impersonal. My art was too literal or “crafty.” My science fair projects lacked a human element, so I always got beat by poorly executed, but “exciting” experiments and analysis. (I’ll never forgetting losing a sizable scholarship to an experiment on the brain activity in introverts and extroverts… n=2.) I didn’t cry much when my parents took me to a park to tell me they were getting a divorce, but I did cry when the school councilor kept hounding me and reading me books about grief, ignoring my insistence that I was doing fine and able to accept my new family situation (I was doing fine). I think way too many people operate under the assumption that there is something wrong with people like me, or that we are underdeveloped. My mom would urge me to express myself, while my dad would urge me to seek out ways to shape the world and my experience of it to be happier. “life is what you make of it,” he’d say. His advice resonated more, and has been more useful for me throughout my life.
I can imagine a reply to this, something along the lines of “your ‘masculinity’ isn’t the kind we’re talking about here,” and perhaps that’s true among the smart and kind commenters who frequent this blog. Outside of here people like me are described as toxic from time to time. The concept of “toxic masculinity,” has driven a wedge between me and a small number of people, including a feminist ex who I’m pretty sure wanted to “fix” me. Think of it this way: why is it that every time “Toxic Masculinity” comes up, the remedy is to socialize men to be less like me? Why did my councilor never think to ask, “Hey, have you considered exploring the colder sides of yourself? You might be really happy there.”
Gracchi:
The word “stereotype” carries a negative connotation: “A generalization, usually exaggerated or oversimplified and often offensive, that is used to describe or distinguish a group.” Desipis, in their eagerness to make it clear that we were talking about something bad, piled on to “stereotype” with “harmful and inaccurate”, which suggested to me the idea that they were qualifying the type of stereotype they meant so as to distinguish it from the quite benevolent and wholesome type of stereotype. I found this amusing. I find the phrase “jumbo shrimp” amusing in a similar way.
I think that toxic masculinity is a concept. Also, it is a continuum, not a 2-pole switch. It is abundantly clear to me there are behaviors in our society which are coded as masculine and serve to signal in-group and out-group status, which behaviors perpetuate crappy treatment of other people. Those behaviors, and the attitudes which they arise out of and reinforce, constitute a pattern which I think of as “toxic masculinity”.
I don’t think that you can point to a single person’s expression of their own masculinity and say, “that person’s masculinity is toxic”. But you can point to behaviors and note that they are more or less toxic, and more or less coded masculine in our society.
So it amuses me when I see someone say, “MY masculinity isn’t toxic! How dare you!” It reminds me of people who said or did a single thing which was a bit racist, who, when it is pointed out, flare up with, “Are you calling me a racist?! How dare you! No one is less racist that I am!” Which, okay, whatever, but actually, no one called them “a racist”, but rather pointed out a single act.
I think I see what you’re getting at, here, and if we don’t use the word “stereotype”, but, rather, a word with a moral neutral connotative existence, I agree. Since the totality of another person can never be known (my wife of many years sometimes still surprises me), we always have to rely on a mental model, and the mental model is necessarily simpler than what it’s modeling.
That said, different people weight different variables in their models. A lot of this weighting is socialized into us and takes a lot of work to sort out, and even some of the weighting which we deplore can probably never be sorted out completely, which makes such sorting the work of generations.
Grace
Jeffrey Gandee – your experience mirrors mine to a certain extent, and I think most people start falling hard into the “typical mind fallacy” when it comes to what they see as parts of the “essential core of your being” or “soul” like emotions/feelings. People can accept that someone might be smarter/stupider or talented in different ways, or even more expressive of certain emotions, but can’t accept that different people may actually have different typical internal emotional experiences.
In my case, it’s not so much that my emotions are “weak”, but rather that my emotional state is pretty robust to external perturbations (I may be temporarily pushed to extremes, but revert to my usual baseline in a few hours to a day) and that may emotions are “simple” (my wife’s words) – I respond fairly predictably and straightforwardly to various events, without much complexity or subtlety. Nobody ever makes suggestions of AS, but practically everyone who gets to know me in depth will eventually make some sort of joke about me being more animal than human, often independently of each other (due to geographic separation).
That said, I’ve actually seen very little overlap in what’s termed “toxic masculinity” and my odd emotional life. IME, pretty much everything in “toxic masculinity” seems to originate from basic primate sexual competition, either inter- or intrasexual competition (e.g. status contests among males, differences in female preference for traits versus male status value of traits, etc.). Honestly, no psychology textbook in the world can compare to a textbook on primatology for understanding humans, and most of “toxic masculinity” is basically monkey instincts that are both amplified and made maladaptive by our unusual lifestyle. Just look at the cartoon. Reducing displays of feelings/vulnerability and emotional isolation? Dominant male primates are the groomed, not the grooming, even though mutual grooming is a bonding experience. “Fragile manhood”? Continuous jockeying for position in the dominance hierarchy, meaning any mis-step could lead to loss of status. And, of course, mating access is primarily determined by status (with a concomitant need for vigilance against “sneaker males”). Most of these were fine for a small-troop primate, but fall apart in larger societies/civilization, but such basic primate behavior is not easily overcome.
Of course, right now I’ll predict a chorus of replies calling this “evo-psych nonsense”, as if the poor methods of a handful of researchers mean that the fundamental principle (that the brain is an evolved organ which bears marks of its ancestry and not a “blank slate”) is somehow compromised. I would encourage those people to throw their laptops off the roof and see if they float, since they apparently think the nonsense of super-string theory means we can dismiss Newtonian physics as well. Like it or not, we are just smart apes.
Jeffrey Gandee:
Well, this is a thread about toxic masculinity, and so far no one has suggested that we socialize men to be less like you. Also, that implicitly labels your self-description as an expression of toxic masculinity, which no one here has said. As far as it goes, your self-description doesn’t sound like toxic masculinity, to me.
So, since you have labelled this space as a place where we might NOT respond in the way that you have experienced elsewhere, why not have a conversation which has to do with how people here actually respond?
(Also, for what it’s worth, it sounds like we have a lot in common, though as far as I know, no one describes me as masculine. I’m an introvert; I play a contact sport; I practice a martial art; I’m tall; in stressful situations I’m level-headed and undemonstrative; I have no trouble making or keeping friends; I often ask, “Are you looking for a sympathetic ear, or solutions?”; and my wife never has to guess what I’m thinking or feeling, because if she can’t tell, I respond openly to such questions as, “What are you thinking or feeling?”)
Grace
‘So it amuses me when I see someone say, “MY masculinity isn’t toxic! How dare you!”’
Grace, I wish we could switch brains for a day. If we did you might come away thinking that some people operate really well with a masculine mindset that would be disastrous for others (they may even call it toxic). Take for example, the guy who made this cartoon:
https://thenib.com/toxic-masculinity
It’s clear to me that this guy’s brain works much different than mine does. For him, being told by his father to just “toughen up,” and “be strong,” were toxic. I believe him. My dad telling him “life is what you make of it,” would have been equally tone-deaf. What wouldn’t work for this cartoonist works is great advice for me. When I’m mistreated or misfortune strikes, I know I can rely on a sort of mental toughness. I’m proud of it, and resent it being called “toxic.” For some, repressing the urge to vent is toxic, but not for me. Venting makes me feel worse every time. Instead, the first thing I’ll do is set my mind on some way to make my situation better materially. This is a shortcut into my 100% focused happy place, and often times I’m actually able to do something to improve my position. This is something I’ve done again and again throughout my life, be it overcoming injuries, a shitty diagnosis, the death of loved ones, tough break-ups, etc… and I think that overcoming life’s challenges this way year after year has changed me a bit. It builds a sense of security.
I remember reading a quote when I was little, something like “when you feel afraid, just pretend that you’re brave. No one, not even you, can tell the difference.” I really took it to heart and started doing stupid stuff like jumping off roofs even though it was scary. There’s something to this notion, at least for some of us. By repeatedly mastering fear, even if it’s just a facade, some people can become braver. I doubt every mind works that way, some people might just get some form of PTSD or something, but others learn to overcome fears and accomplish amazing feats. I think something similar is going on with the kind of masculine stoicism I’ve described above. Over time I’ve become “tougher,” and more content. It’s empowering to feel a strong sense of self-control and I resent hearing it described as toxic. If I had a kid and he/she were like me, I’d be annoyed at anyone encouraging her to “stop acting tough,” and to “open up.” Like, no. You don’t even know her!
I do think it sucks that what works for me has become associated with being a “real man.” Every boy knows what it’s like to have other boys bully them into acting in a masculine way at the risk of being less than a “real man.” At the same time, I feel bad for the women who relate to my post above, and don’t conform to the ideal of a “real woman.” My wife fits this description in some ways, and if her stories are any indication, women like her experience horrible bullying at the hands of other women. She was under intense pressure to conform. I’m not about to accuse the girls who bullied my wife of toxic femininity. Behaving in ways we may code as feminine isn’t toxic, it’s only toxic when we fail to see that other people’s brains work different than our own and instead try to force people to conform for their own good.
I should have just typed: often the problem isn’t the masculinity, but rather the forced conformity.
I think that term is too broad and too undefined to be of any practical use.
Cerastes:
Somehow I missed seeing your comment.
I too think of us as apes- apes with the absolute minimum amount of adaption necessary to build civilizations.
Before seeing your comment I was thinking to myself about gender norms, even those that are clearly social constructs, and wondering if our need to enforce them is the result of our tribal-ape-ancestor DNA, in much the same way that Ohio State students can’t handle seeing a Michigan football jersey on their classmate.
It’s why “toxic masculinity” bothers me as a phrase. I don’t think that what is being critiqued here is always masculinity (though the sex and domination stuff certainly is). I think a tribe of Amazonian warriors would bully each other over exactly this kind of bullshit, and that to do so is just part of what we are as humans.
The “women have the sex.” part of the cartoon does seem to ignore the ways sex is competitive between sexes in the animal world. It’s really no mystery why men would think that way. The “Battle of the sexes” chapter in The Selfish Gene is required reading here.
I’m curious as to why you believe that I don’t already think that.
So do I. I also believe that it would work for you, because you tell me so and I have no evidence to the contrary.
I also rely on my mental toughness. It has gotten me through some very difficult times in my life, and is arguably the reason I am alive.
Clearly, being told to be tough, by itself, is not toxic, because for some people it’s fine. It seems to me that the toxic part comes when we say “toughen up” to someone for whom that is not helpful, on the basis of a bimodal variable (apparent gender) with has, at best, a weak correlation to whether “toughen up” is going to help or hurt.
Once, in my youth,, I was at a stable when the stable master’s 2-year-old daughter fell while running and skinned her knee a little bit. She walked over to stable master, her father, who was busy with the project we were working on. She had that questioning expression which young children sometimes get, when they’re at a tipping point on whether they’re going to cry or not. He glanced, saw that it was not serious, and said, “Okay, honey, we’re playing by NFL rules, today. No blood, no foul. Go show it to Mommy.” She smiled and said, “Okay!” and ran the hundred yards or so to the house.
Because of that and other experiences, the kid grew up tough. She’s a woman, so we’re probably not going to call it masculinity, but she’s tough. And if her other experiences were like that one, she’s tough in a non-toxic way.
Now, what if her father had said, “What are you showing it to me, for? You’re not even bleeding! What’re you, weak?” That would have been a stone in the wall of toxic masculinity (or, since she’s a girl, toxic toughness). Because the message then is, “To even ask my father to look at something painful brings censure.” A well-rounded adult who’s not able to assess something needs to be able to say, “Hey, could you take a look at this? I think it might be a problem.” That’s a life skill.
(There’s a world of difference, when someone is limping and grimacing in pain, between, “No, it doesn’t hurt”, and “Yup, hurts like a sumbitch. Hand me that wrench, would you?” The former is denial; the latter is confidence.)
So, you can’t look at the transcript of what was said. It matters how it was said, and the context (the history, how often, the impact, etc).
I participate in an athletic league where I coach and train adults. It’s a contact sport, and it gets rough sometimes. They need different things. Some need encouragement and perspective. Some need a kick in the ass. Some need to be told to tone it down until they have better control. All of these messages can be put across without denigrating or belittling, and I do.
I’ve participated in other venues where it was common to deliver backhanded compliments and hazing. Those venues were contributing to the cultivation of a toxic version of toughness (and, as they were mostly-male settings, we’re probably safe to call it a toxic version of masculinity).
Yeah, no. I’m glad that you have no direct experience with PTSD, but let’s be clear: PTSD is injury. Telling someone on the cusp of PTSD to toughen up is like telling someone with a slight muscle tear to keep lifting the same weights. The result is going to be bad.
Which brings us back to the point. Equality of input is not equality of outcome when people are different. Sure, you can be pushed beyond what you thought were your limits. You can also be pushed into a traumatic experience. It’s up to the person doing the pushing to assess and push correctly. And it’s a lot more complex than, “I have two ways to go, here, so the best thing I can do is ask myself, ‘Am I talking to a man or a woman’?” But our society wants to make it that simple.
I’m perfectly happy to call the sort of femininity which is enforced with shaming toxic femininity. I’ve experienced both, and in my experience they have a lot in common.
Sure. And, in addition to that, the one-size-fits-all metric which people want to substitute for the effort of good judgement.
Grace
Jeffrey Gandee:
Eh, maybe? I mean, sure, it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s inevitable. The women’s sports league I play with, right now, is really good at building people up (I’m an instructor, but I’m not the only one or the senior one or the most experienced one, and this attitude was fostered within the league long before I arrived).
However, that’s a sports league. Probably, the closer it gets to being a matter of group survival, the more toxic it gets, because if I do some damage driving you to be tough enough to ensure group survival, that norm is perpetuated. Which is why there’s so much toxic masculinity embedded in military training, where you can make an argument that there’s more of a justification for it. And from there, it carries over back into the rest of the participants’ lives. One of the subtler bits of the collateral damage of war.
Different cultures teach masculinity differently. I don’t think it’s inherently bad to suppose that some methods work out better than others for the participants.
And I’ve spent too much time on this for today.
Grace
Grace, I think we are much alike and mostly agree on what’s going on.
I’m mostly being nitpicky over language which is often a waste of time.
Jeffrey – I would say that “masculinity” turns “toxic” to the extent it tries to limit men’s (or really boys’, since this is when it happens) emotional range or other choices to avoid anything coded as “feminine.” In other words, being naturally low-key and not very emotive because that is where you fall in the range of human personalities – that’s fine. What’s problematic is when people try to take boys with different personalities and force them to be like that because that it what boys “should” be and anything other than that is not a “real” man.
@Grace
The logical conclusion to this is then that society as a whole and women (& children) in particular also benefit from the ways in which men sacrifice in various ways for the benefit of the group (which can be society as a whole and/or the family unit). This is especially harmful to those whose natural tendencies do not fit the script.
Furthermore, a very similar situation is true for women, who are also taught to sacrifice in various ways for the benefit of society as a whole and men (& children) in particular. Of course, the script is different to that of men, so the kind of sacrifices that women make are different and the natural tendencies that don’t fit the script are different.
My objection is to the way that society as a whole and feminism in particular tends to respond to this situation nowadays. The way in which the male gender role benefits society as a whole and women (& children) in particular is taken for granted, while the downsides are decried. This leaves men in a no win situation. They are simultaneously expected to provide benefits to others that can only be achieved by following the male gender role, but also to not impose costs on others which are the consequence of that exact same gender role. This is an impossible demand that men cannot ever succeed at.
I don’t see anyone really using the term ‘toxic femininity’ in a serious way, while ‘toxic masculinity’ is, which IMO shows that the debate about gender roles is itself sexist. Either both terms should be used or we should be more nuanced about both gender roles (my preference), but not a double standard.
The double standard is very traditionalist, because the analysis tends to often be based on assumptions which fit the traditional gender roles. An example is that undesired behavior that is linked to the female gender role is generally seen as behavior that women are forced into, while undesired behavior that is linked to the male gender role is generally seen as behavior that men choose to do. This is based on the assumption of male agency and female lack of agency, which is very traditionalist.
I’m seriously wondering if you even read the cartoon. The cartoon is all about how the male gender role is forced onto boys.
I really like that this is made up of lots of “action shots”–I feel like that’s a little less typical for your cartoons since they’re usually conversations, but it works well here. I also just realized the chef is left-handed: makes sense that you’d have to keep track of that, but I’m so not artistic I hadn’t even thought of it! :)
Also, the green egg is a nice bit of “eugh.”
***
Cerastes, I wrote up a whole thing on how you’re wrong about the objections to evo psych, but it might be easier to let PZ Meyers take it.
But anyway: Some primate species have males that fight for dominance, but we still criminalize assault. Whether or not something is explicable is a completely different argument from whether or not it’s bad, and from whether or not our society currently encourages (and increases) or discourages (and decreases) it.
@Ampersand
My comment wasn’t specifically directed at your cartoon, but I don’t see it as doing anything different. The last panel seems to argue that boys voluntarily choose to accept toxic masculinity, by liking it to a repulsive and bitter stew that they nevertheless thoroughly enjoy. So I don’t see a claim here that boys are forced to eat the stew, but rather the opposite.
My reading may be a consequence of your ‘stew’ metaphor, where you intend “they’ll eat it up” to be interpreted as “to believe unquestioningly that something is true,” rather than “to thoroughly enjoy something.”
However, only the latter definition works within the metaphor. You can’t unquestioningly believe that a stew is true. Perhaps you make a mistake in your cartoon, where at the end you forgot that you were working within the restrictions of a metaphor?
“That would have been a stone in the wall of toxic masculinity (or, since she’s a girl, toxic toughness)”
Is ‘toxic toughness’ really a concept that exists? I mean in practice I don’t ever see women perpetuating this kind of thing in a gender neutral way. At worst, they just don’t challenge it amongst men.
“Whether or not something is explicable is a completely different argument from whether or not it’s bad.”
I agree strongly with this. While looking up various definitions of Toxic Masculinity, I noticed Amanda Marcotte defines it like this:
“toxic masculinity is a specific model of manhood, geared towards dominance and control. It’s a manhood that views women and LGBT people as inferior, sees sex as an act not of affection but domination, and which valorizes violence as the way to prove one’s self to the world.”
I really like this definition because it captures toxic traits held by mostly men that seem to be at least partially in our nature, and these traits really are most commonly found in men. It makes sense to make us hyper aware of these things.
hmmmm….. what are the ingredients of the “healthy masculinity” stew?
I share some other poster’s skepticism at the currency of this term “toxic masculinity”. And the absence of any parallel term for for the feminine.
And as I re-read the wonderful posts by Jeffrey, Grace, and others I notice that “toughness” has to be gender-equalized as part of making it normal/acceptable.
So: what traits associated predominantly with masculinity are inherently positive?
I’m remembering the three-year-old son of a neighbor of mine. Some of the girls in his nursery school class were taking a ballet class, and he thought that dance sounded like fun and wanted to take the class, but his father told him absolutely not — ballet is for girls, not for boys, and if a boy takes ballet, then people will make fun of him, and “You don’t want people to make fun of you, do you?” And he agreed that, no, he does not want people to make fun of him, so he guesses he doesn’t really want to dance.
A couple days later, he was visiting our house, and I was reading a newspaper. The back page of the paper, which he could see from the way I was holding it, was a full-page ad for a ballet company, with a giant photo of a male dancer. He got SO upset. “Boys CAN’T dance, because people will make fun of them, and you don’t want people to make fun of you, so that boy should NOT be dancing!” Went on like that for several minutes.
That was years ago. He’s going to graduate college soon. I kind of wonder what he’d say now if I asked him his opinion of male ballet dancers.
(His little brother was the type who’d shrug and say, “Yeah, whatever” when their dad told him that something wasn’t for boys. But this kid definitely listened to things like that.)
Self-confidence. Ability to control anger, or to redirect it into something productive. Ability to laugh off insults. Backing up the women in your life when they stand up for themselves. A sense of pride in helping others. Curiosity and willingness to learn.
The trouble with “healthy masculinity stew,” is that, when I try writing it down, I realize “healthy masculinity” is mostly just being a good person and has little to do with being masculine- unless it does, at which point I worry that I’m feeding into the whole “you’re not a real man unless,” gender conformity that I’d rather avoid.
I’ll name one, just because I think it’s so important. Calculated risk Taking. My understanding is that guys do this more. It’s crucial. Every society needs at least a few people willing to put it all on the line so that we can all benefit from the businesses they build and the technologies they help develop.
Harlequin – PZ’s supposed takedown is embarrassing nonsense that shows hes never read nor thought seriously on the topic. Essentially, he comes at it backwards, interpreting everything through the lens of adaptation rather than phylogenetic signal. Frankly, I’ve never read a supposed “takedown” by anyone who even knew what that term meant.
And I’m *far* from a cheerleader for evo-psych – the entire field is rife with methodological flaws, unwarranted conclusions, and pop-sci dreck. But the fundamental concept, buried beneath that mess, is sound: the brain is an evolved system, and should show evidence of this.
I explicitly specified as much in my prior post, as well. And, as I predicted, that was ignored by those who prefer to deal in simple categories rather than more complex thought.
I very much doubt that PZ (“this is not to deny that that there are features that are clearly the product of selection,”) Harlequin, or anyone here would disagree with this broad statement. If you think this is where the debate is, then I think you’re misunderstanding some arguments.
Please try not to be insulting towards other comment-writers here, thanks.
The last panel says no such thing. It says they will eat it up, meaning that they will swallow the stew (and its ingredients), even though they don’t enjoy it (repulsive and bitter).
To my mind, at least, it’s obvious that the strip as a whole is positioning boys as the party harmed, not as the harming party. I accept that’s not what you got out of it; and of course, you’re entitled to your own interpretation. But I don’t believe that your reading is how all readers will take it (although I suspect it’ll be how anti-feminist and MRA readers mostly take it).
(I’m not assuming you’re anti-feminist or MRA.)
It sounds like “healthy mascuilinity” is just being healthy, generally.
And I really do not think that men are more likely to make calculated risks – in fact I think saying so is pretty sexist.
And I really do not think that men are more likely to make calculated risks – in fact I think saying so is pretty sexist.
Did you bother looking at existing research before telling us what you “do not think”? There are dozens of studies that come up with a basic Google search, and I have yet to find one that does not discern a gender difference in risk assessment. Except in social situations, and that only in Western cultures, males are more likely to take risks, to underestimate costs and overestimate gains. This is a fact.
As for ‘calculated’, it’s a weasel word in this context. All risk assessment involves calculation, and judging whether risk is ‘calculated’ is very hard to isolate from the subject’s ability to make good ‘calculations’. Risk takers are often useful to others even if they are dumb risk takers. Not sure whether they exhibit healthy masculinity, though.
If you did bother looking for relevant research, found a dozen studies like this one, authored by a woman, and then decided to state that “saying so is pretty sexist”, then there is little point in my talking to you.
By the way, my wife is a professor of Psychology, and her specific area of research (nowadays) is Decision Making. Men are more likely to waste resources on tasks without even the possibility of commensurate return, period. I certainly do not consider this a valuable trait. What would be valuable is to be aware of our tenancy, and try to account for it when making decisions.
Alternate last phrases to solidify boys being forced to eat –
Don’t worry. Theyll choke it down. (Less preferred)
Don’t worry. We’ll force it down. (Preferred)
I doubt any changes will thoroughly discourage motivated readings to the contrary, but one of these could clarify for people who are receptive to hearing the argument.
I wasn’t trying to use “calculated,” as a weaselly word. We’re talking about healthy masculinity and risk-taking on its own isn’t always healthy. My understanding is that men on average take more risks and that includes really stupid risks (there’s hundred of studies on that too). I’m trying to differentiate between the two.
As to whether or not it’s sexist to say men take more calculated risks- this is a problem I have with the way these conversations often go. It’s as if it’s okay to talk about traits and behaviors coded masculine so long as they are bad. But if I start talking about ways in which behaviors coded as masculine are good, I’m going to sound sexist to some people. This is useful for people who want to bash males. I still think Toxic Masculinity is a useful concept, but I worry about this kind of language being weaponized. I mean, take “Toxic whiteness.” Fortunately, I’ve never actually heard this phrase in a face to face conversation. I’m guessing it hasn’t caught on yet or people find the concept itself too toxic, but it is out there. For those who employ the term, I suppose it makes sense to talk about it for the exact same reasons we talk about toxic masculinity. But oh man do i think these concepts will bring out the worst in us. Imagine a conversation about “healthy whiteness.” Nope! I’m not touching that. It’s not that toxic and healthy whiteness is incoherent, it’s that I don’t trust people to use that language in a productive way.
FWIW, I think toxic masculinity is still worth talking about among the right people because among those traits and behaviors coded male, there’s some really nasty stuff we’re all better off talking about.
Good idea, I’ll make this change. Thanks.
Change made! Thank you Mandolin and Gracchi for helping to improve the strip.
Regarding the change you just made, Amp: for me, it actually weakens the irony that I thought made the original so powerful. After reading Gracchi’s comment, I can understand why you made the change, but the irony, which I think is communicated very well by the chef’s facial expression, gets at an aspect of traditional, patriarchal manhood and masculinity that I think this one misses, i.e. the idea that boys will/should welcome (eat up) the tests that make them men, no matter how difficult or painful those tests might be.
In other words, I read the original in this way: the chef knows how horrible tasting the stew is, but he also knows that the boys will eat it up because there is (within his world) no worst fate than being not-a-man, which is what failure to drink the stew would mean for the boys—and he takes a sadistic pleasure in knowing that the boys also know this and will therefore force themselves to eat the stew.
Richard:
That’s a good point. Hmm. I’ll think about this some more.
Ok, so here’s something else. I am procrastinating instead of finishing one of my syllabi for next semester and am probably thinking too much about this, but I am confused about what it means to simmer the stew for 10-40 years. If the stew is in the pot for that period of time, and the stew is supposed to be fed to boys, who might be 10 but are obviously not much older than that, what exactly does the time period correspond to? Why can’t it just be “simmer until ready” or some such thing?
Richard Jeffrey Newman (and Ampersand),
Perhaps I should tell you a little about my experiences to explain where I’m coming from.
I was violently bullied as a kid and when I went to authority figures, the usual response was: fight back. Unfortunately, I am extremely reticent to use violence when relatively emotionally balanced and have a very high capacity to bear abuse without becoming so enraged that I become sufficiently emotionally imbalanced to enable me to be violent. In the rare cases where the built-up frustration did enrage me and I used violence against my tormentors, I found it temporarily effective. However, this happened too rarely to keep my tormentors at bay permanently.
I noticed that violence used against girls was typically punished by authority figures and that in the adult world, men could go to the police to have them intervene, when they experienced the level of abuse that I experienced. I found it highly unjust that as a boy, similar remedy was not available to me and I was instead left to my own (lacking) devices.
Your narrative, where boys accept the negative aspects of masculinity merely because they would otherwise be shamed for being “not-a-man” sounds like relative paradise to me, compared to my lived experience. If your narrative were accurate, where boys actually have a choice, but do not exercise that due to shaming, I would have expected the authority figures to (offer to) punish my tormentors upon recognizing my difficulties at complying with their initial advice, where this would then have resulting in me being socially shamed/ostracized for being ‘girly.’ However, this never happened to me.
So in summary, my experience is that I didn’t believe and still don’t believe that I had any alternative to this expected part of the male gender role. I could either succeed and experience the upsides and downsides of this part of the gender role; or I could fail and experience the downsides of failing to comply with my gender role. There was never the option of finding remedy in a non-‘traditionally masculine’ way.
So this is why the original phrase frustrated me somewhat, because it implies that by rejecting some parts of the male gender role, the boys would be unharmed; while it is merely the voluntary acceptance of these elements that damages the boys. What makes gender roles so hard to shake is exactly that this is not the case, because society regularly merely allows people to achieve things in accordance with their gender role, with no alternative.
Gracchi:
Ironically, your story is, in virtually every detail, identical to mine. I’m sorry that happened to us.
One thing that is different: I’ve talked to multiple women who suffered horrific, ongoing bullying without the authorities intervening at all. It’s all anecdotal, of course, but maybe you think girls have it easier than they actually do.
Do you like the revised last line better?
OK, I tried. I really did. It’s been days, that it has been gnawing at me, and I was hoping that someone else would do something about it. But I cannot stand it anymore.
Please, please, please change the “licked” to “liquid”, it’s been driving me crazy.
I tend to agree with RJN@34 about the change, although for somewhat different reasons. I would agree that boys willingly “consume the stew” and that this is an important aspect of the issue. However, I would see that willingness being driven at least as much by an underlying biological instinct as it is by social shaming (which itself is driven as much by biological instincts as cultural norms).
Whoops! Thanks for pointing that out. Fixed.
1) Masculinity looks different in different cultures. This is important to remember when making biological arguments. You can still make them, but it’s probably easier if you argue that boys are biologically oriented to identify local masculinity and create identities that are unlike those of girls in order to maintain something like a binary (and girls likewise). There are still exceptions, but for the most part that’s an easier evidential load to pull than the idea that the local definitions of masculinity are biologically determined, unless you’re limiting what counts as masculinity very severely.
2) I was bullied *by* the authorities.
@Ampersand
Thank you for your sympathy and my sympathy to you (and others here who were bullied).
I believe that there are both boys and girls who had/have it worse than me, including having authority figures encourage and/or join in on the bullying. AFAIK, scientists generally find that the level of victimization is fairly similar for each gender, but that the nature of the bullying differs (male bullying is more violent and female bullying is more ‘social’). Whether one is worse than the other or the other worse than the one is presumably not objectively answerable. It’s also not that interesting a question if you want, as I do, to have society to put in more effort to reduce both, because then there is no need to justify focusing (more) on victims of one gender than the other.
Anyway, I do think that the changed line is a substantial improvement.
Gracchi— cheers and agreement.
Fortunately, I think lessening one type of bullying is likely to lower others also.
I’ve been prepping classes all day, so this is the first chance I’ve had to come to see what’s going on.
I also was bullied mercilessly when I was a kid; my experience took place in the context of some pretty profound antisemitism. So I empathize Gracchi, Amp, Mandolin and all.
I just wanted to make one clarification. When I wrote:
and
I did not mean to suggest that the boys have any real choice in the matter. I meant, rather, that it is part of the mythos of patriarchal manhood and masculinity that boys will willingly, proactively, choose to “eat the stew” no matter how bad it tastes. The irony I saw in the original got very sharply—and, for me, far more powerfully—to the point that the boys are in fact forced to eat it, whether they/we want/ed to or not. (I also saw the cartoon as being more about the bullies and how bullies are created than about the experiences of those who are bullied.)
Mandolin:
Yes, that is the argument that I would make. I would also point out that progressives tend eschew having positive male exclusive groups. Creating a positive conception of masculinity is seen as “sexist” because it’s seen as implying that women can’t be positive in that way too. This leads to the only local masculinity options being traditional masculinity or whatever masculinity boys and young men come up with on their own, both of which are likely to contain “toxic” elements. In short, boys willingly eat up the stew because there’s nothing else being put on the menu.
I’d put the last few comments in a slightly different perspective.
There are almost certainly pretty large differences between the genders (or else feeling like you’re the wrong gender wouldn’t be such a problem). Much of the modern history of studying gender has been about denying that reality until very recently (again around the time awareness of trans identities came to the fore so gaining traction only in the last ten years or so). As such, gender studies hasn’t even made the attempt to separate non toxic and toxic masculinity because until recently it effectively treated the social construction components as implying that masculinity was not real.
Just a quick response to Sebastian:
One reason I try to be conscious to group manhood and masculinity together in conversations like this—and I’m sure I don’t always succeed—is because I think talk that focuses exclusively on terms like toxic masculinity often misses the point that the toxicity comes from the way those behaviors are organized into manhood, into the need to prove manhood, to maintain it, defend it. John Stoltenberg made what, for me, has been a useful distinction between masculinity as a performance (and I don’t think it matters for my point here whether or to what degree that performance is biologically determined) and manhood as an ethic, as a value system, that organizes that performance towards a particular social/cultural/political end.
And I am talking here specifically about traditional, patriarchal, male dominant notions of manhood. I am not trying to suggest that any and all value systems to which we might attach that name would be, by definition, similarly toxic.
Sebastian – there would still be a problem with feeling like the wrong gender if the difference were how genders were *treated* rather than essential so that argument does not necessarily require biological bases. (One notes body dysphoria is a thing and also may contribute to senses of gender misfitting.)
Unless you’re not making an essentialist biological argument, in which case, well, yeah. In modern America, there are sociologically significant differences between genders.
(Honestly, I’m with the strain of sociobiologists who argued that differences in gender norms are a social reaction to the biological issue of pregnancy and nursing which means people’s needs are broadly sorted into two categories on that basis.)
“Sebastian – there would still be a problem with feeling like the wrong gender if the difference were how genders were *treated* rather than essential so that argument does not necessarily require biological bases. (One notes body dysphoria is a thing and also may contribute to senses of gender misfitting.)”
I’m not sure I understand this. If you have it without biological bases, trans-gender is just a subclass of body dysphoria *where the usual solution is to change more about the mind than the body*. We don’t counsel people with body dysphoria to spend most of their time getting the body their mind’s eye wants, we generally counsel them to work at changing their mind’s eye.
If gender is just a social reaction to the different physical needs of the sexual body, we don’t need trans people to change their sexual bodies. If that were the case we would need to spend more time teaching them to have a mind’s eye that is closer to their already existing physical body just like we do with anorexics. (Intersex people would be an edge case, but the more typical trans person would not.)
To be clear, I’m NOT arguing in favor of that view.
I’m arguing in favor of a view where gender exists on a continuum, but the continuum is largely male-female. MANY of the traits we associate with ‘male’ or ‘female’ are mere social constructions of the patriarchy to enforce a wide variety of things. But at least some important ones aren’t. And some of the time they don’t match up the way society expects which is why it is possible to have a gender identity which doesn’t match your sexual body.
So in the context of ‘toxic masculinity’ and gender, the problem in talking about it is that until very recently the main thrust of the discipline has been that the word ‘toxic’ doesn’t really modify ‘masculinity’. It is just there for emphasis. Only recently have we revisited the idea that ‘masculinity’ might be a real thing at all (and largely because trans has forced the issue).
You seem to be saying that trans doesn’t force the issue, but unless you think we should treat it the way we treat other dysphorias (and I don’t think you are saying that) I don’t see how the problem can be avoided.
As a side note, there are also people who don’t care which sex they are, and would be okay being either sex. There’s nothing wrong with that, just as there’s nothing wrong with people who have very strong feelings about being one sex or the other. It’s just another spectrum.
I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the differences between the sexes are mostly a matter of overlapping bell curves. Whether or not it’s a “large” difference depends on which end of the bell curve we focus on.
Sebastian H:
Haven’t got time to reply to the main conversation, but I was struck by the framing, here.
My problem, prior to transition, was not that I felt like I was “the wrong gender”. My problem was that the gender I was was invisible to the people around me (or actively denied by them).
Just wanted to point that out. Carry on.
Grace
But the bell curves can change cross culturally, and a lot of what’s called cross cultural research actually isn’t, but rather a slightly wider subset of Western Europe or sometimes first world countries.
Sebastian, I hear you, and am absent energy to reply. I’m just tired right now, you deserve a reply if I can manage later.
At any rate, I think the productive thing is to imagine a healthy American masculinity.
I might consider:
Protector of those who need protection
Self-confidence in ones abilities
…honestly I don’t know how to come up with a list that doesn’t apply to both genders. I guess it’s emphasis that matters.
Here’s the problem – whatever traits we describe as “healthy masculinity” would by definition be harder for feminine people to achieve.
I’m just not comfortable telling young girls “yes, you can be [X healthy trait], but it’s going to be harder for you than it is for a boy – and that difficulty isn’t something that we can change”.
Whatever positive traits are identified with “healthy masculinity”, we need to fight to open them up to girls. Not that denying them to boys is a way to open them up to girls, but claiming that there is something essentially male/masculine about them is standing in the way of that.
You can have emotionally and mentally healthy people who are masculine, of course. But their emotional and mental health will be incidental to their masculinity.
Gracchus:
I disagree. Men’s emotional and mental health will be dependant on their ability to express their masculinity. If the only ways to express their masculinity is through negative traits, then men are in a double bind. Either they suppress their masculinity or engage in “toxic” behaviour, both of which will result in harm to their emotional and mental health.
Why does one need to express their masculinity? I’m not even sure there’s a consensus on what masculinity is, which could just be me.
I’m neither male nor particularly masculine, so I’m writing this from an outsider’s perspective and it may not be useful. But in case it is–
One way I’ve tried to explain toxic masculinity to people IRL is to describe part of it as the reductio ad absurdum version of positive traits. For example, positive = self-reliant and dependable; toxic = never ask for help for anything ever because it will make you look weak (cf higher male suicide rates). Positive = treats others well and relates well to others; negative = if you can’t convince a woman to have sex with you there’s something wrong with you. Positive = works to be worthy of others’ respect; negative = demands deference and forces it when it isn’t received. That dichotomy is not a complete explanation–the second example also requires a healthy dose of misogyny, for example–but I’ve found it helpful because it seems to encode a path forward as well, by showing alternate pathways that satisfy the same social urges but aren’t as destructive.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the “positive” examples I can come up with have to do your conception of yourself and most of the “negative” examples have to do with trying to manipulate and control the way other people see and treat you.
I think I’m with Mandolin that the difference between healthy/positive masculinity and healthy/positive femininity would ideally (for me) be a difference of emphasis not a difference of kind. And like Gracchus’s most recent comment, I think, given that we live in this world and not in my ideal world, that we need to be careful in making sure those positive traits are still accessible to girls’ and women’s self-concept. (And probably also continue to fight the thing where femininity is seen as worse than masculinity regardless of which gender(s) are performing it.)
Side note–we’ve had a Gracchus and a Gracchi on this thread. Is this the same person (or…people) in the singular and the plural?
“Why does one need to express their masculinity?”.
Why does anyone need to express their gender identity?
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you’re asking incredulously about why cis males need to express their gender identity. But if they don’t need to, why do trans people need to? I feel like I must be misunderstanding you because the seem to literally be the same question.
I think, in this context, “masculinity” and “gender identity” are not the same thing.
For a trans man to express his gender identity means, I think, merely presenting as male. (Note that he IS male, regardless of if he presents as male.) This could be done with dress, with attitude, with appearance, with voice, and many other things, often in combination. It might be as simple as saying “I prefer he or him.”
But nothing about this requires him to be masculine, in the sense of “he is a masculine man.” There’s no reason a trans guy can’t be an effeminate man. Trans men, like the rest of us men, are found at every point on the femme-butch continuum.
Actually, thinking about trans may be a red herring. Whether we’re talking about cis or trans men, “gender identity” and “masculinity” are not the same thing.
But another way, my gender identity is male. It will remain male even if I’m a totally effeminate man; even if I entirely reject the idea that I have to express my “masculine side.” The two are separate traits.
I’m not convinced that they are particularly separate. Why is ‘gender’ (as divorced from sex) so much more privileged a category than ‘masculinity’? At the very least they are correlated closely. We can observe people wanting to be identified as masculine or feminine at least as often as people who identify with a gender that doesn’t match their sex.
But even if they if they are separate, is masculinity/femininity less defensible than ‘gender’? I.e. should we tell the masculine lesbian that she ought to femme it up because masculinity is toxic? Should we tell the fey boy to butch it up because femininity is socially constructed? On some level I don’t understand the difference between “I am a man” and “I want to be identified in the masculine” they are closely equivalent statements.
I know three trans men who are super obsessed about chest hair because they think it makes them more masculine. Is that something you want to be discouraging?
Ampersand@59/60, I disagree. “Male identity” and “masculinity” (at least its behavioural component) might have a difference of degree, but not of kind. Telling a cis man that he’s “not a real man” due to his behaviour causes the same kind of harm as telling a trans man the same thing, even if the degree of harm is more in the later case.
A “totally effeminate man” isn’t going to have zero masculinity, even if most of his masculinity comes from physical attributes. Simply calling oneself a “man” is an act of masculinity by asserting membership of the male group, even though it might not be a particularly strong act. For some men, this may be sufficient to satisfy their need to express their masculinity, but others may have a need for something more significant.
I think that a big problem with discussions about things like ‘toxic masculinity’ is that behaviors/tendencies are often assumed to be either good or bad, while in reality they are nearly always both. Men are more prone to violence in some ways (although less than commonly assumed) and also better at it, in part due to biology. This has obvious downsides, in that men are more likely to harm innocents or harm in excess of what is reasonable.
On the other hand, we also see that this causes men to make sacrifices for society as a whole and women/children in particular. For example, in several of the terrorist attacks in Europe over the past few years, it was civilian men who tried (and sometimes succeeded) to stop the terrorist. Similarly, police and infantry are overwhelmingly men. At a more personal level, being insufficiently violent can open one up to be abused/bullied by others.
A good argument can be made that modern society has less need of certain behaviors/tendencies, but this is merely an argument for weaker gender roles, not for their elimination. Even then we have to actually show that this is true. I often see fairly extreme assumptions being made about certain behaviors no longer being useful, seemingly based more on wishful thinking and blinding oneself to inconvenient facts, than based on a strong analysis.
Another common argument is that it’s more healthy to have moderate behaviors/tendencies and that we should thus push all men and women into the same moderate behaviors/tendencies. However, this is actually an anti-diversity argument based around the idea that it is best if everyone is close to identical. It seems very doubtful that this is correct. From the view of society, we probably need some people to have very unbalanced behaviors/tendencies to do important jobs that a much more balanced person can’t do or is much worse at.
From the view of the individual, quite a few people presumably have natural behaviors/tendencies that are not moderate and getting them to act moderate may require strong pressure or may be impossible. The former has similar oppressive elements to gender roles in the first place. Given that there are biological differences between the genders (only the extent is really in doubt, but differences like only female bodies being able to gestate and nurse babies clearly exist), we can also expect that ‘gender neutral’ socialization doesn’t actually result in equal outcomes.
Currently, many people judge unfairness by the lack of equal outcomes and jump to conclusions about the causes, despite a lack of scientific evidence or even having the scientific evidence show something different. This predictably results in interventions that fail, because they don’t actually address the true causes; or worse, in discrimination because people forcibly want to equalize the inequalities that they notice (which usually is actually merely a subset of all inequalities). I don’t think that this can work.
Instead of starting with a grand narrative and grand design of equality, I am more in favor of starting small. First work to understand how we actually treat people differently in specific ways, testing our theories with science (and with a willingness to be proven wrong) and then making gradual interventions to improve society. It’s usually better to make small moves in the right direction, than to make great leaps in often the wrong direction. The former seems to often feel ineffective in the eyes of many, while the latter feels like one is making large advances, but I think that this is a perceptual fallacy.
The end result should not be defined by a grand ideal, but by what makes people actually happy. Reducing gender roles should be a means to this end, but historically, a lot of harm was done when the means became the end.
PS. I am a different person than Gracchus. I took the name as a reference to the Gracchi brothers, who both served as tribune for the plebeians and tried to institute anti-aristocratic reforms, but who were both killed for it. Presumably because their lack of social skills made them unaware of how far they could go, so their criticisms and demands exceeded what was acceptable to those in power. Somehow this resonates with me. Presumable the other commenter called Gracchus has a similar appreciation of Roman history.
In a world where gender roles exist, a person who violates them is going to face repercussions from others. This can mean being treated unfairly, but also losing out on opportunities, because the person doesn’t match the needs of (most) others*. For instance, one can be less attractive as a partner when one is less masculine or feminine.
Of course, the complement of this situation is that a more masculine man and more feminine woman is generally going to be treated more fairly (what is considered fair for their gender, that is) and is going to have more opportunities.
Most people seem to identify with and be proud of the traits that get them treated better and/or gives them more opportunities than those who lack these traits, regardless of whether they actually worked for the traits or whether they were lucky enough to be born with them. One can argue that this is irrational and/or oppressive to others, but the actual extent to which a trait is luck or choice is probably unknowable, especially at the individual level. Humans may be better off overestimating their agency, rather than see the world as a maelstrom of caprice.
Anyway, I think that this means that gender identity is going to be linked to masculinity or femininity for most people unless we get rid of gender roles entirely, which may be impossible (see my earlier comment). One can try to counter this by vilifying masculinity or femininity, but if society still actually rewards masculinity or femininity in many ways, it may simply lead people to feel like failures no matter how masculine (for men) or feminine (for women) they are.
If relationships/sexuality requires a difference between partners, for people to see relationships as an enrichment in their lives, it is perhaps also very hard to prevent this from aligning by gender, given that most people are heterosexual. Currently, a major reason for gender identity seems to be that people feel that success in relationships requires adhering to the gender role and they justify adhering to the gender role by making it a part of their perceived identity, rather than face the truth.
* A less masculine man or less feminine woman can make some choices to reduce this, like surrounding themselves with more open-minded people, but this only works to some extent.
“I disagree. Men’s emotional and mental health will be dependant on their ability to express their masculinity.”
Speaking as a man I disagree. I can’t remember the last time I “expressed my masculinity”. Maybe I’m doing it subconsciously, but IDK. And I hope you’ll accept my word that I’m reasonably emotionally and mentally healthy (and I’ve never seen expressing my masculinity as a solution to any of the emotional or mental issues I’ve encountered in my life).
“On the other hand, we also see that this causes men to make sacrifices for society as a whole and women/children in particular.”
See, this is where you lost me. I do not believe that women are any less likely to make sacrifices to protect others than men are. And I think it’s wrong to promote a narrative that says they are.
(And yes, we’re different people. Sorry I jumped in late, didn’t realise there was sb with a similar name in the thread)
I agree with Ortvin – I can’t figure out when the last time I “expressed my masculinity” was. I mean, I am bald and I have a beard, so I guess I express my masculinity with my looks, but by actions or words? I have no idea.
Gracchus wrote:
This is true—and, to be clear, I am describing here, not endorsing or suggesting that things can’t or shouldn’t be different—but the nature of the sacrifices that are expected and the relationship of those sacrifices to prescribed gender roles are very different. Women, for example, have historically not been expected to go to war to protect society; men have been and so a willingness to become a soldier and potentially “make the ultimate sacrifice” is held up to men (by both men and women) a prime example of what it means to express/achieve/embody manhood.
You are, indeed, misunderstanding me. Part of the problem may be that “masculinity” has not been clearly defined – either in this thread or globally. I mean, if you consider having an obviously male body as the definition of masculinity, you may have a point. I don’t think that either of us believes that is either the definition of masculinity or what we mean when we talk about expressing masculinity.
When you hear the phrase “expressing your masculinity” what actions do you think of?
@Richard: Yes, but now we’re no longer describing some theoretical “healthy mascuilinity” that we would want to promote among men, but we’re describing the healthier (or less unhealthy, anyway) aspects of masculinity as it currently exists. And one of the problems of the currently existing concept of masculinity is that it takes certain positive concepts and moves them less available to women.
I’ll say it again – we cannot in a clear conscience promote a “healthy masculinity” because then we are saying there are healthy things that are innately or at least more closely masculine, and that has negative effects on women who aspire to those qualities.
You can be healthy while being masculine, but you cannot be “healthily masculine”.
“only female bodies being able to gestate and nurse babies clearly exist”
I know quite a few transmen who would strongly disagree.
@Gracchus
I didn’t say that women were less likely to protect or help in general. I was talking specifically about a certain kind of violent behavior to help others. I also noted that despite the positive connotation of ‘protecting,’ it isn’t actually always positive in it’s effects.
Also see Newman’s comment.
As I’ve said before, the idea that there are exclusively positive or negative concepts that are part of either gender role is IMO the result of a simplistic analysis/frame. Any concept that you can name has positive and negative sides to it.
The way that people typically frame concepts that they like is by pointing to the situations in which the concept is helpful and even then they typically have to ignore the downsides that do exist even in the optimal scenario. The way that people typically frame concepts that they dislike is by pointing to the situations in which the concept is unhelpful and/or by merely pointing to those people who go way too far in applying it. Both approaches are cherry picking to support a narrative.
The basic gist of it is that the gender roles make ‘feminine’ behaviors less available to men and ‘masculine’ behaviors less available to women, but also forces men into certain ‘masculine’ and women into certain ‘feminine’ behaviors. So coercion is not just in not or not as easily being able to act in ways that are in accordance with the other gender role, but also in being forced into behavior for the ‘matching’ gender role. These are two separate kinds of coercion that are often not properly distinguished.
You are assuming that there are no innate differences, which is simply not the case. For example, healthy masculinity can at the very least consist of trying to take responsibility for helping to raise a kid after impregnating a woman (and healthy femininity can be to try to give a man who impregnated her a role in raising the kid).
Secondly, you seem to assume that masculinity has to be exclusive to men. If we make masculinity and femininity less exclusive & allow men to (also) be (and be proud of and respected for being) feminine & allow women to (also) be (and be proud of and respected for being) masculine, then people of both genders can identify with a healthy form of masculinity and/or femininity.
I really think that you can merely see one particular solution. I’m not saying that you should necessarily give that up, but I would suggest trying to understand how other people can have other solutions that do not force people into a gendered role.
That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.
“, healthy masculinity can at the very least consist of trying to take responsibility for helping to raise a kid after impregnating a woman (and healthy femininity can be to try to give a man who impregnated her a role in raising the kid).”
But if the healthy thing to do – involving your child’s parent in their upbringing – is effectively the same regardless of masculinity or femininity, isn’t it simply more productive to talk about healthy behaviour, and leave masculinity or femininity out of it?
Or to put it another way, isn’t it sufficient to tell the masculine person to be a good person, rather than to be a good -man-? And isn’t there something kind of wrong with someone who will only respond to an appeal to their manhood, and not to their humanity?
(And, as an aside, there are quite a few women for whom the choice to exclude their child’s biological father from the child’s life is quite a healthy one, for both the woman and the child)
Jake Squid:
That would be almost entirely dependant on your personal context, social groups, local culture, etc. The simplest way to identify such behaviours would be to look at when you engage in male centric socialisation. But it could be something as simple as fashion, or something as nuanced as language choices. It’s probably easier to identify if you consider adolescence, a time which masculine behaviour would be most strongly emphasised.
So we all say, “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it?”
If that’s the case, how does one (knowingly) express their masculinity?
Until we can agree on a definition of masculinity, or at least things that belong to or comprise it, I don’t see how one can express their masculinity or be prevented from expressing their masculinity.
“”When you hear the phrase “expressing your masculinity” what actions do you think of?”
It is an outward expression of behavior springing from gender coding. By gender coding I mean both the things that are intrinsically/naturally tied to gender (whatever they are) and the traits that society has (rightly or wrongly) linked to a specific gender. I’m not even sure that masculinity and gender are properly understood as different things. I guess gender is an identity, and masculinity is the common expression of the male gender.
The thing I don’t understand is that there seems to be some sort of hint that gender identity is super important, but the simultaneous and contradictory belief that gender identity is an empty thing which has no specific expression. But it can’t be. If male and female are just the same thing, it makes no sense whatsoever to bother spending so much time and energy on gender identity, and especially being identified as ‘the wrong’ gender can’t mean anything useful. So the trans experience strongly suggests that there really an essential difference between the gender ‘male’ and the gender ‘female’. I’m not sure it is well understood exactly what the differences are. But gender identity doesn’t make sense if there is no reflection into the outside world. I would call ‘masculinity’ the way that male gender identities express themselves differently from female gender identities.
Now there are millions of things in your identity that aren’t deeply tied to gender expression, so they aren’t masculine or feminine, they are “non-gendered” parts of your identity. I strongly suspect that many of the things that our society codes as expressions of gender identity aren’t in fact gender different. But a male gender identity doesn’t make sense as a category if there is literally no difference between it and a female gender identity. The identity is internal, masculinity/femininity is external expression of the identity.
Well, if we define masculinity and femininity as wholly separate from man and woman then we theoretically reach a point where we can say traits belong to masculinity or femininity without linking them to man or woman, then we can define masculinity and femininity as schemas and not limit who can access them.
I don’t know how possible that is in the culture at large, or if it is desirable, but it’s how my husband and I tend to discuss our relationship and the kinds of labor we do for each other and for others.
Femininity can include emotional labor in lots of forms, maintaining social connections, organizing and conducting daily domestic business.
Masculinity can include an emphasis on physical labor, providing physical shelter and safety, and favoring action over rumination.
Those are just … you know, random things. But when Mike does the yard work, or I do everything to keep us in touch with family, we figure we’re doing work that accords with the masculine and feminine gender roles respectively. There are other ways in which we do not do that, for instance he is better at taking care of children, and I am more comfortable with argument and debate than he is.
I think a healthy masculinity or femininity has to have room in it for the person to express both kinds of behaviors, if they want to.
Sure, I think the overlapping bell curves idea is an excellent explanation of the concept. What I don’t understand is the idea that gender identity is super important AND that it is essentially an empty set.
I guess it can be squared by saying that it is essentially empty but we have to pay attention to it because society does (which is what I would say about ‘race’), but that leaves trans people out in the cold.
I can’t speak for what makes trans people trans, but I think I can sort of speak for what makes cis people cis.
From what I’ve observed of cis people (they/we’re convenient because there are so many of them/us): Some cis people are deeply attached to their gendered bodies, they may not like the social implications of being a man or a woman, but their gendered body feels like who they are. Some cis people align well in core personality with what is expected of their gender, when as little kids they were taught that they were a boy or girl and that boys or girls like this and that and do this and that, they said “Yes, that’s me!” Some cis people were told that they were a boy or a girl and that boys or girls do this and that and feel this and that, and they said “I can do that,” and took satisfaction in striving to be who they were told to be. Most cis people are probably driven by all those things to some extent or another. Some cis people aren’t any of those things or are some of those things to some extent, and they said, “Well, I guess so?” and did their best (“cis by default”). And most cis people are both masculine and feminine, but most cis women are a little more feminine than masculine and most cis men are a little more masculine than feminine and most cis people emphasize their gender appropriate traits more when they are adolescents and trying to figure out how to fit in and what this all means (as someone pointed out up thread).
Is there some root thing in gender identity that is not just the things that were put into gender identity? Who knows. It seems likely that that sense of fitting in ones body is probably a root thing, as well as a core thing to some extent.
As to why gender dysphoria should be treated differently than the dysphoria of anorexia, no matter whether “gender is just a social reaction to the different physical needs of the sexual body” or not? If people with gender dysphoria change their gender, their gender dysphoria is generally resolved and they become happier, healthier people. If people with anorexia try to resolve their dysphoria by freely chasing their image of who they should be, they die. Just like we don’t need to prove that sexual orientation is not physically innate to support marriage equality, we don’t need to know whether gender identity is innate to support the right of people to live as their gender. It is sufficient to ask “Does it harm people to prevent them from doing this? Does it harm people to allow people to do this?” when the answer to the first is “yes” and the second is “no,” then we should support people who want or need to do this.
I favor (thanks to Sandra Bem) the view that masculinity and femininity are more accurately viewed as separate sets of traits, so someone can be very masculine and very feminine, or not masculine and not feminine, or predominantly masculine, or predominantly feminine. Men tend to be more masculine and less feminine and women tend to be more feminine and less masculine, but it isn’t a continuum, it is two sets of positive traits, most of which are not in opposition to each other.
Sandra Bem’s Sex Role Inventory is arguably a little outdated (sex roles aren’t the same now as they were in the 1970s) but is still probably a reasonable approximation of a list of masculine traits and feminine traits for the mainstream of modern US culture.
I don’t think it follows from the fact that men tend to have more masculine traits and women tend to have more feminine traits that it is by definition harder for men to have feminine traits and harder for women to have masculine traits. I think we can work to correct the way that our culture does make it harder for women to have masculine traits (I think we’ve done good work on this front in the past century) and for men to have feminine traits (I think we still have a long way to go on this front) without simply insisting that there are no such categories as masculinity and femininity. Nor do I think that it is helpful to look at “nurturing masculinity” (Grace had a great comment delineating a model of positive masculinity a while back that I can’t find) and say, “Well, women also do all of those things, so clearly that can’t be masculinity.” Masculinity is something that man and women can both do, just as femininity is something that both men and women can do. That doesn’t make it not masculinity.
If we eventually reach a point where there are very few barriers and negative repercussions for men being feminine and women being masculine, then it will be a really different culture and who knows what all of this will look like. I think attacking those barriers and repercussions is a great thing to be doing. I think that trying to emphasize positive masculinity and positive femininity is also a good thing to be doing. I think we can do both at once.
@Mandolin
Indeed, although the science strongly suggests that some group level gender differences are biological (but as Sebastian says: there is substantial overlap in the bell curves). If this is indeed the case, one can expect a permanent skew (in other words, men on average preferring a more ‘masculine’ role and women on average preferring a more ‘feminine’ role), even if we give people maximum freedom to choose. I don’t think that you can get people to not notice this, nor do we probably want people to ignore reality.
However, we can get people to recognize that you can have group-level differences, without the average group-level behavior being the right thing for the individual man or woman, because the individual-level differences are far larger than the group-level differences. If people understand the concept of overlapping bell curves, they will then presumably usually end up supporting individual-level freedom. In other words: that we shouldn’t seek to force individual men and women into what is good for the average man or the average woman, because the individuals often deviate greatly from the average.
Unfortunately, it seems that there is a fairly poor understanding of the differences between group-level and individual-level statistics in society, even among the well-educated. For example, a very common response to a certain memo by a certain ex-Googler was to misread his claims about overlapping bell curves as a claim that every woman has certain traits more than every man (and vice versa).
Arguably, traditional gender roles are/were at least in part an attempt to make society work for the average man and women, sacrificing personal freedom for simplistic heuristics that can be applied relatively easily. Moving to allowing far more individual-level freedom, while still recognizing that freedoms also bring responsibilities with them, presumably requires that people start employing more complex heuristics, which also have to make sense collectively.
Mandolin:
This makes absolutely no sense. Why would we use the words “masculinity” and “femininity” to describe collections of traits if those collections have nothing to do with men and women respectively? To do so seems like a way to use word games to try to preemptively define the connection between biology and behaviour out of existence. The whole purpose of the words “masculinity” and “femininity” existing is to have a label to apply to traits that correlate with being male and female respectively.
Charles:
I think this oversimplifies things a bit too much. A important part of the process is that boys observe the behaviour of other people regardless of what they’re told. They will identify people’s genders based on physical attributes, observe the behaviours (including patterns of socialisation) of men and other boys, and associate those behaviours with being male. They will, to some degree, instinctively seek to replicate those behaviours, and barriers to them doing so will feel like an attack on their gender identity. This will happen independently of any cultural drivers such as being explicitly told “Boys/men do this” (and would have a similar process for girls/women).
Obviously, biological variation can impact the significance (or direction) of any of these steps and hence how much this process impacts on actual behaviours for individuals. I would see part of trans gender identity as getting the gender’s behaviour they instinctively replicate as being the opposite of most people with their other biological traits. Also, the specific traits an individual associates with their gender would be dependant on the patterns they observe as they grow up and live their lives.
Gracchi – again, the science is rarely cross culturally supported, which is literally the only thing that would make it clear whether traits were biological or not.
FWIW, If there are biologically mandated group level differences, then there are, that’s fine. But the standard of proof had to be higher than “we tested this in America, Europe, and maybe a couple parts of Asia, all in one historical time period.”
Frex, there are common claims about how there’s a human universal preference for a certain women’s waist to hip ratio.
We know of at least one culture that deliberately causes a very different ratio in a pretty extreme way in order for one to be considered marriageable. So it’s not universal. But the researchers didn’t worry about looking for data from other sources, like historical records or anthropology studies. They did some tests in several different locations, and declared their findings biological truths. (Or possibly we’re misreported as claiming that, but it’s caught on.)
That doesn’t stop people – including academics – from citing this study.
That’s not even getting into claims of universality from psychological studies done in only one culture and place, which also happens.
Possible bio truth from the knowledge set when I was in school—
Differences in spatial intuition between men and women show up a lot, with men being better on it. (Spatial intelligence is a skill, not just a trait, so this isn’t easily provable as inevitable without taking training into account, but it shows up.)
Example of not-a-bio-truth—
That men speak directly and forthrightly and that this is preferred communication, while women soften language and speak indirectly. You get places that flip this, where the expectation is that men will soften and speak slantwise, a style that locally is considered evidence of intelligence and erudition, while women are expected to be direct because simplicity is the resort of the less intelligent.
All of this—
Is extreme hard to prove, and extremely hard to research. The researchers cultural biases are always present and incredibly hard or impossible to divest even with the best intentions. Anthropologists have a record of seeing things and misinterpreting them because of their basic assumptions about, e.g., what women are and do. This can happen in support of any agenda, the classic examples are minimizing women’s public roles, but there’s also Margaret Meads entirely bizarre, wishful thinking that there is no rape in Samoa.
Basically—
It is quite definitely possible there are group differences that are innate between men and women, but we are a fairly long distance from being in a political place where that matters. Solve inequalities first, try different possible solutions, let what happens happen.
Trans ness and dysmorphia –
Anorexia is a type of dysmorphia that is not resolvable through physical changes. Becoming thin enough does not resolve anorexia. This leads to escalating dangerous and unstoppable behavior.
I have a type of body dysmorphia related to anorexia, but its cultural perception is such that I am regularly offered potentially deadly treatments in order to resolve it. The culturally proposed solution for this dysmorphia is to alter the body, even though the rate of this treatment working is very low.
These are body dysmorphias that don’t entirely relate to the actual state of the body.
There are, however, bodily dysmorphia s that appear to have to do with differences in brain mapping. This is a biological rather than psychological basis. The brain expects one thing, encounters another, gets upset. These are resolvable by altering the body. Where the mismatched map is “I’m supposed to have a hand but mine got cut off” we call that phantom reactions. When the map is “I have an arm and I’m not supposed to” we haven’t figured out what to do, frankly, although iirc just cutting off the arm actually reduces distress no matter how awful it sounds. When the map is “my body displays the wrong features of gender” this has much more major social consequences than “I have two arms” which affect the whole creation of identity and relationships. The extreme distress of this means withholding workable treatment is a terrible thing to do. It often leads to suicide.
Not all trans people have a perception that their physical bodies are “wrong.” Not all trans people have or want gender reaffirmation surgery. Others may prefer surgery or hormonal treatment not because of an innate unsettlemrnt with their own bodies, but because they knoe it affects how people perceive and respond to them.
Transness is probably “caused” by different things in different people.
(Reduced— anorexia is an unappeasable response to trauma. Need for gender reaffirmation is resolvable and appears not to be primarily a trauma response, though even if it were, trauma victims also deserve medical treatment.)
desipis,
Yes, I’m vastly oversimplifying the process by which people are told which gender they are and learn what that gender does. I agree that a large part of that process of being told is actually active observation of what people around them do, divided by gender. But there is also an early layer of being told what they are based on what gender they are assumed to be. Told that they are strong or pretty, praised for being daring or for being shy, punished for being shy or daring, etc.
Mandolin @85,86 & 88,
Yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at.
Given that there is no solid evidence at this point, I have to go with my lived experience. And my lived experience is that there are no behavioral or psychological differences between men and women. We’re all basically the same and diverge based on some unknowable combination of nature/nurture. Would I be the same person if I had grown up with different parents? How about if I grew up in a different location with different peers? Probably in some ways and not in others, but we can’t predict what those similarities and differences would be.
Lacking definitive – or even strongly suggestive – evidence, I’m going to go with what I know based on my experience. Experience which tells me that the differences I see are performative. I realize that I’m in a minority (of, possibly, near one) on this, but what are you gonna do?
@Mandolin
I think that your demands for the quality of evidence are so high that pretty much all of social science doesn’t qualify. Furthermore, it privileges the nurture assumption, which is what I see a lot. I think that the more sensible approach is to favor the explanation with the strongest evidence, rather than demand more evidence in favor of a competing explanation than the ideologically preferred one.
I’ll discuss some suggested gender differences (based on the typical case where sex & gender are the same as this discussion is about average group-level differences, so overlap in the bell curves are not relevant in this context) and the level of evidence for or against:
Clear physical differences in the presence/absence of body parts that enables/disallows a person to do certain things. One obvious example being the presence/absence of a uterus or the presence/absence of functional milk glands. The evidence for this is rock solid, as you can just open up a human body and see the differences. By itself this invalidates the 100% nurture position.
Relative physical differences in the development of the human body, like strength differences. The evidence for this is very strong, for example, we see consistently that in sports with a major strength component and where people’s performance can be measured objectively, that women perform at a far lower level. This can partially be explained by social conditions, but the effect is so strong, that it is very unlikely for there not to be a very large nature component. You’d expect some people to be willing to flaunt the gender norms, as we see with many other gendered differences, but we don’t see a few rare women who are able to compete with men, what you would expect if there was no major biological component.
Difference in interests based on having more thing- vs a more people-orientated interests (for men and women, respectively). Evidence for this is very strong. Not only do studies find very large gender differences, but studies already find differences in interests in babies and apes (although whether the method uses actually measures more thing- vs a more people-orientated interests is debatable, but differences in interests are definitely found). Furthermore, we see that in the most egalitarian societies, like Sweden, men and women make far more gender-typical job choices than in far more traditionalist societies. This makes absolutely no sense if men and women had the same interests, but were forced into traditional jobs, unless one would argue that societies like Iran are less patriarchal than Sweden, which seems absurd. So, quite strong evidence for this one.
Big Five personality traits. Women consistently report higher ‘neuroticism’ (scientific term for the tendency to experience negative emotions, so the opposite of stoicism), agreeableness, warmth and openness to feelings, and men often report higher assertiveness and openness to ideas. However, many of these differences are quite small. It’s mainly neuroticism/stoicism where the larger differences are found, including in a multi-country study over 55 countries. Again we see the peculiar effect that the sex differences in Big Five personality traits are larger in the more egalitarian societies, although only because men differ between these nations. This is again not what you’d expect if the difference was due to being nurtured into traditional gender roles. However, the differences found in studies are much smaller than for difference in interests, so there is only weak evidence for this difference being biological.
Differences in IQ. Studies find no significant differences between the average IQ of men and women, although there is some evidence that men are more often very dumb or very smart (aka higher variance), which can actually have a major effect when you look at situations where exceptional (capable and incapable) people tend to end up.
Average differences in ability. There is very little evidence of this. We have some weak evidence that teenage women are a bit more verbal or that men have a bit more ‘spatial intelligence’, but it’s all quite weak and thus may very well be purely nurture or minor biological variation that doesn’t really matter much in what people can and/or want to do.
Level of aggression. Despite the stereotypes and theories about testosterone being an aggression hormone, there is decent evidence that men and women have fairly similar levels of natural aggression, where social factors determine very much whether and how this is expressed.
Sexual desire. Studies consistently find that men have higher sex drives, based on various metrics and never the opposite. It is possible that this is a cultural response to female vulnerabilities, as is sometimes claimed as an explanation, but those vulnerabilities are in part differences for which there is very strong evidence that they are biological (like a strength difference). So there is fairly strong evidence that this difference exists and has a biological origin.
Anyway, I could go on, but I hope that my point is clear. I think that a completely disbelief in ‘nature’ is absurd, given the hard evidence to the contrary, but the more extreme beliefs about strong biological gender differences in things like ability have much more evidence against them than in their favor.
Ultimately, I think that the current evidence supports a gradual effort to weaken gender norms, but that 100% equality of outcome can most likely only be achieved by forcing/oppressing people, instead of allowing them freedom to do what they want.
The belief that inequality of outcome is entirely due inequality of opportunity and that we need to force equality of outcome is a position that doesn’t merely require a belief that there is no hard evidence that nature plays a role, but one that requires hard evidence that nature does not play a role. I rarely actually see the proponents of that position try to prove that with any scientific rigor, but they generally merely seem to take it on faith. Not respecting people’s wishes and/or using discrimination to force an outcome, based on faith that this is actually what people would want if they were free from cultural influences, is a very dangerous belief system. Some extremely bad interventions happened in history using the same kind of approach.
If I am wrong, then a gradual evolution, where we encourage people to not feel bound by gender roles and in general eliminate barriers, ought to end up with equality of outcome anyway. However, that humble approach allows for actually maximizing human happiness even if that is not the case, by stopping the effort to reach equality of outcome when we see that pushing people more towards that, makes them less happy, rather than more so.
Ultimately, the well-being of people is what is important. If reality does not allow for perfect outcomes, we must maximize human happiness within that reality, not pretend that reality does not limit us.
I think a more sensible approach would also include agnosticism as an acceptable outcome. Sometimes the evidence simply isn’t strong enough for conclusions to be justified.
A note regarding tone: I apprecaite your participation here, but I think a remark like this:
Seems to be more about making a personal attack on the person you’re disagreeing with, than about adding anything useful to the discussion.
Actually, people often have different opinions of what the evidence shows without being any more ideological than you are. But also, why speculate on this at all? If you genuinely believe that evidence and logic agree with you about a purely factual matter, then you shouldn’t find these personal attacks on the motives of people who disagree with you necessary.
Is anyone here taking such an extreme nurture position that they have argued that who gets pregnant is purely a matter of nurture, with no biological component? So that without cultural influences, cis men would be just as likely as cis women to be pregnant? Is there anyone anywhere making that argument, for that matter? If so, could you quote them? If not, then this is a strawman.
In general, a lot of your response seems to be you arguing against what people elsewhere have allegedly said (but not linking or quoting what they’ve said), rather than being responsive to what people here have written. For example, who here has argued for “not respecting people’s wishes and/or using discrimination to force an outcome, based on faith that this actually what people would want if they were free from cultural influences?”
Yeah, I specifically said I think physical differences are a huge basis for gender differentiation upthread. So I’m not super keen on being lectured on that. Which, I’m afraid, means I’m also not super keen on responding since I’m not really up for being belittled.
I will note here that the presence of a black swan invalidates the claim that “all swans are white.” People making claims that swans are white might want to look around and see if there are any black ones. Or, perhaps, just listen when someone else says “hey, this is a black swan over here that I found.”
Ampersand,
Mandolin and Gracchus both seemed unwilling to state that there are any innate group-level differences between men and women, which I read as an unwillingness to state that who gets pregnant is an innate group-level gender difference. Mandolin now disagrees with my interpretation of her comments, which I will address in a separate comment.
Anyway, I see an unwillingness to state that there are any innate gendered group-level differences as an extremist nurture position, in the same way that being ‘agnostic’ on climate change is not a moderate position, given the actual evidence we have. I should not have used the phrase ‘100% nurture’ though.
I see the belief that the existence of innate group-level differences between men and women is entirely unknown or unknowable as a rejection of extremely strong scientific evidence, on par with being agnostic about the claim that ‘humans have hearts’.
Also, what do you mean by acceptable? I don’t accept that agnosticism on this issue is reasonable given the current scientific evidence, in the same way that I don’t consider agnosticism on climate change to be reasonable. I do accept that other people have beliefs that I consider unreasonable and that this doesn’t mean that they are bad people.
Sure, plenty of people have argued for much stronger conclusions than the evidence justifies. However, many people have also argued for much weaker conclusions than the evidence justifies.
I have made a claim that IMO is fully justified by the evidence. If people disagree, I would like them to point out why.
Any debate is an implicit personal attack, because by favoring their own beliefs and by assuming that a debate can convince another person by using logical reasoning, the participants implicitly claim that the other participant made a mistake in their reasoning.
I don’t see where I claimed anything much more significant than that other people make mistakes, for the most benign of reasons. I believe that pretty much anyone has bias. Do you disagree with me and feel that having bias is exceptional and that therefor it is an unacceptable personal attack to imply that bias may play a role in how people arrive at their positions? Or do you believe that we should ignore the possibility that bias plays a role in how people come to their conclusions? Or something else that I haven’t considered?
Some of it was, but much of it was just clarification of what evidence I think exists for various differences. I noticed that several people, included the person I responded to, addressed fairly weak claims about gender differences, without really addressing the stronger claims head on. I hoped to provide an opening to do the latter.
As for your claim that arguing against people elsewhere is wrong, that is what you commonly do in your cartoons. Are you arguing that doing the same in comments on this blog is undesirable in general?
My argument was that an unwillingness or inability to recognize the true extent of group-level gender differences can lead to interventions that are unjust and that harm human happiness.
My impression is that some of the people here are way more wary of erring in one direction than in the other direction. I was arguing that erring in either direction can be quite bad, so that erring in both directions needs to be taken quite seriously.
Note that this is not intended as an accusation or demand, but as something that people can consider and then for themselves decide whether they ought to update their beliefs. This isn’t necessarily limited to people who themselves believe in more radical solutions, but also to people who are in a position to influence the radical solutions. A person who underestimates the dangers of certain actions may be willing to allow them, even if they don’t personally favor those solutions, but not be willing to do so if they properly understand the dangers. As such, my argument may be useful to those with more moderate beliefs.
Mandolin,
I have re-read all your comments in this thread and don’t see where you said that. I would appreciate you quoting the specific statement(s) that you are referring to, so I can respond meaningfully to your claim.
What I do see is you making a statement where you merely state a belief in the possibility that there are innate group-level differences (“It is quite definitely possible there are group differences that are innate between men and women […].”), which is not the same as stating that such differences do exist. You now say that you actually have the latter opinion.
Perhaps you meant the statement that I quoted in a more limited context, like it only applying to differences in the brain, but in that case you failed to make that explicit.
I like debate, including the kind where people make it very clear what they believe and where people criticize each other’s positions. None of my statements were intended to belittle you, but if you consider my debating style unpleasant then you are of course free to disengage.
However, I do want to point out that my previous comment seems to have been successful in making clear that your interpretation of what you communicated and my interpretation of what you communicated, are not the same. This realization allows for clarification, so we can hopefully communicate better, rather than talk past one another.
My second-to-last comment was almost entirely about group-level differences. If you have one black swan and one albino crow, then this in no way negates the fact that on the group-level, swans are on average white and crows on average black.
The only exception is that I believe that all cis women, with no medical condition, have certain physical traits, like having a uterus; while no cis men, with no medical condition, have those same physical traits. You can prove me wrong on this by giving a single counter-example.
Gracchi,
Given that you have so far not, as far as I can tell, provided a single link to the evidence you find so persuasive, it’s a little hard to take you seriously when you say you are interested in a substantive debate on the issues. I can, for example, respond to your claim that there is substantial evidence supporting your claims by saying that I have read very persuasive studies, which I have, demonstrating that, when those studies claim they have found significant innate biological differences between men and women that correspond more or less to traditional gender roles, what they’re really measuring is the degree to which social and cultural norms have magnified those differences in the creation of gender roles—that the differences themselves are, actually, statistically irrelevant.
Now, I don’t have the time right now to dig those studies up, and you might not have the time to dig up your studies either, which is entirely understandable. If that’s why you haven’t been providing links, though, it seems to me the responsible thing to do is to say that. You’ve expressed your opinion; others have disagreed; and none of us have the time to do much more than that.
There is a difference between believing that there are innate group-level differences between men and women, and believing we know which differences are biological and which are socially modulated. I would against the latter for all but the most obvious gross physical traits, but I’m in favor of the former. (I also find the distinction kind of pointless in terms of addressing behavior norms like toxic masculinity, but whatever…)
Are women with a medical condition not cis women, then? Those medical conditions are biological, too, so presumably they should be included in our understanding of the natural variation of cis people.
As I said, you’re fighting strawmen. You “read” their position as a ridiculous, over-the-top position that virtually no one holds. That’s dishonest. You present yourself as interested in discussion and debate, but actual discussion and debate means trying to understand the other person’s view honestly and (if you disagree) rebutting it honestly. Attacking obvious strawmen positions is posturing, not debate.
My cartoons are my job (albeit a job I love). They’re not drawn exclusively for “Alas.” Generally, my cartoons are intended to editorialize about social issues, not to be a response to any particular person or argument.
The comments section of this blog, on the other hand, is intended for respectful discussion with other people in the comments, including but not limited to debate. And generally, the comments people post here are presumed to have been written for this discussion we are having.
So yes, they are two entirely different things.
Look at it this way; If I’m having a direct discussion with George Will, it’s reasonable for me to expect what he says to be responsive to what I’ve said. That’s what makes it a discussion. But it would be unreasonable for me to expect that an op-ed he publishes will be responsive to a specific thing I’ve said. Op-eds are not discussions. And my cartoons are akin to op-eds.
If you want to argue against something someone who isn’t here on “Alas” has said, in the Alas comments, that can be fine. You could, for instance, take it to an open thread – it’s all good there. Or, if it’s on-topic for a thread, then please make it clear that you’re not arguing with the person that you’re addressing or responding to – especially when what you’re saying can easily be read as accusing the other people of holding views that are horrible and/or implausibly stupid. It’s also good, for the sake of intellectual honesty, to link to what you’re talking about when possible. Say “I’m not saying you hold this view, but some people do – for example, [link]” or something along those lines.
Thanks for cooperating – I appreciate it!