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army1987 comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn't one of those.
Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I'm not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I'm not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.²
To be fair, this scenario probably should bother you, because it amounts to hacking a critically important social system through the use of the Dark Arts. The gender of the participants is, IMO, less important than the realization of how easily our social infrastructure can be exploited.
It does bother me in Real Life, what I'm not sure of is whether it should bother me in fiction.
I don't actually watch How I Met Your Mother, but I've been assuming that the fictional situation you described was plausible enough to have a good chance of occurring in real life -- though it's possible I was wrong.
People getting their way to the unfair detriment of others through arse-licking does happen a lot where I am, and not always in sexualized ways. (And it's not the “sexualized ways” part that bothers me,¹ it's the “unfair detriment of others” part.)
Picture that situation gender-swapped.
Hmm... Yeah; my intuition says the people involved would be frowned upon a lot more in that case. But then again, before the first time I did something like that, my intuition had said I would be frowned upon a lot more than actually happened; so I don't trust it so much anymore, IOW I'm not sure I should have updated my intuition about the male stripper case but not also that about the female stripper case in the same direction. (When someone does something that makes me update my model of humans, it usually doesn't occur to me to only update my model of their gender and not that of the other gender -- but in situations like this one there are potential confounders aplenty.)
... in a world where men get pregnant?
Really, I'm impressed it took this long for someone to point out one of the fundamental problems of the gender-swap test.
Yep — human reproduction is not an equal deal for the participants. In the most basic sense possible, it is not fair. Nobody promised humanity that our alien-god-given bodies would perfectly implement the rules of morality that we might later derive — such as reciprocity; or for that matter not using another person merely as a means to your ends.
This bug has been acknowledged many times before, and various technical and social workarounds have been proposed and deployed. The underlying bug still needs work, though it may not be fully fixed before humans are ported to a new platform.
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
People get envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier that they ((possibly incorrectly) think they) are? I had thought of that... as a joke, but it hadn't occurred to me to take that seriously. (Wait, why does my brain think that what's funny cannot be plausible? It must be that, since if an idea is neither funny nor plausible I forget it shortly after hearing/thinking it, within the pool of ideas I do remember, being funny does negatively correlate with being plausible due to Berkson's paradox. Or something like that.) I'm thinking of how to test for this. (If this were right, women who think are ugly would object to such pictures more often than those who don't; also, objecting to such pictures wouldn't correlate much with religiosity, unless for some reason religious people are more likely to think they're ugly. Neither of these seems to be the case IME, but the sample size is small, I cannot always be sure whether someone thinks they're ugly, etc.) I do have a feeling that if I thought I was much uglier than I actually think I am, seeing pictures of half-naked sexy men would bother me much more, but I'm very bad at guessing what my feelings would be in counterfactual situations. (Hey, I do know a version of me with something like body dysmorphia -- that's myself from two years ago! Unfortunately, I can't remember any specific instance of seeing such a picture back then, and also I have changed in lots of other ways too so even if I could there would still be huge confounders.)
Another hypothesis is that one version is more offensive than the gender-reversed version because it's more common. Maybe I'm not bothered by pictures of sexy men because I don't see them that often, but I would get fed of them if I saw them several times a day; and maybe certain women are annoyed by pictures of sexy women because they see them all the time, but they wouldn't be if they only saw them a couple times a month.
Edit: OTOH, “just because you are right doesn't mean I am wrong”, i.e. it could still be that each of several causes plays a substantial role. What I've observed so far seems compatible with a model where that indignation is caused by:
Speaking only for myself, I've had a bit of a fight to calm down about my appearance-- I'm 59 and apparently more or less look it. It's been work (pretty successful recently) to not feel like a failure because I don't look like I'm 30. From what I can gather, this isn't uncommon among women, and frequently in stronger form.
Your frequency argument is relevant, but needs a bit more causality added-- the reason the pictures are so common is presumably because they're what's preferred.
See also my edit to the parent, if you haven't.
I don't get it... Preferred by whom? Of course straight males would prefer to look at females and vice versa...
“A generation” might be an overestimation. A few hours ago, a Facebook page in Italian about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth” published a status “let's tell our gym-going friends that it's cold on Facebook too”, it's been liked by 81 people so far a sizeable fraction of whom are male, someone (using a gender-neutral pseudonym, but with a male cartoon character as profile picture) commented complaining about an “exponential” increase of pictures and videos of people in underwear, and that comment has been liked by 6 people so far of whom 4 males.
EDIT: <troll>I commented “Envy?”, and my profile picture is bare-chested. Let's see how many flames I'll get.</troll> (For all I'm concerned, if you're the kind of person who resents cynicism, you do not subscribe a page about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth”.)
To play Feminist's Advocate for a moment:
Some feminists argue that gender reversal is not a valid technique, since there is a huge power differential between men and women. Thus, when a man says "all women are X", he is implicitly wielding his power in order to dehumanize women even further and reinforce his privilege -- which is what makes the action sexist, and therefore exceptionally offensive. When a woman says "all men are X", her statement may be technically wrong, but it is not sexist, because the woman does not wield any power, due to being a woman. Thus, her statement is only mildly offensive at worst.
I would argue that most proponents of this argument do not grok much of mathematics, or at least are inappropriately compartmentalizing.
Sum total differences as single absolute numbers over wide populations are poorly suited to context-sensitive power valuations (judged in terms of available game-theoretic actions and the expected utility results) in individual situations like those statements or the examples in the grandparent.
They may have a point in that when there exists and expected power differential the (A set / B set) reversal technique is not valid, but their actual arguments usually break down when there are four armed women and two hungry men on an otherwise-deserted island with only one line of communication with the outside world (controlled by the women) given a typical patriarchal society in the outside world. Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
Agreed; I'm not a terribly good Feminist's Advocate. That said, I believe they'd disagree with this statement:
I've seen feminists argue that situations where women unequivocally hold power over men are much more rare than men think. Some of the reasons given for this proposition are that:
a). Women are socially conditioned to defer to men, and do so subconsciously all the time, even when these women are nominally in charge, and
b). Men are used to their privilege and see it as the normal state of affairs; and therefore, men tend to severely underestimate its magnitude, and thus overestimate the amount of power any given woman might hold.
I might agree, provided they're talking about group averages rather than about all women and all men -- this guy doesn't sound “used to his privilege” to me.
And if they're talking about group averages, I can't see their relevance to interactions between individuals. Suppose that blue-eyed people are taller in average than brown-eyed people, and everyone knows this. Suppose there are two people in a room, one with blue eyes and one with brown eyes. They need to take something off a shelf, and the taller one was the easier it would be to do that. It would be preposterous to say “the blue-eyed person should do that, and if she lets the brown-eyed person do that she's an asshole, as she could much more easily do that herself, given that brown-eyed people are shorter”, if the blue-eyed person happens to be 1.51 m (5') and the brown-eyed person happens to be 1.87 m (6'2'').
Yes, indeed. That's the whole source of the disagreement once all the confusions and bad arguments are shaved off.
However, IME they (nearly always, only exception I've ever seen was on LW) make the opposite claim on the basis of their own experiences, perceptions of power balance, limited (often cherry-picked) data, and/or personal moral intuitions.
From what little (read: I suspect much more than a typical student who has taken a college course in Feminism or Cultural Studies and goes on to join the feminist movement in some way) social science and serious-psychology I've read and understood, it seems that most multiviewpoint analyses and calculations (I've seen the term 'intersectional analysis' thrown around, but AFAICT it's basically just computing multiple subjective judgments of power in a combined utilitarian fashion) end up with much higher variation and fluctuation in both nominal agent power and psychologically perceived power balance than the above feminists would even consider plausible.
What I've read also seemed to indicate a very important (though not incredibly strong, but enough to be a turning point) correlation between the "normalcy" of an individual and how much those feminist claims will apply to them - IIRC, an IQ more than a standard deviation above the norm is enough to bring the "subconscious advantage" and "landed privileges" difference to statistically insignificant levels of correlation with gender. Other forms of abnormality presumably have similar effects (LBGT, for instance), though I only have anecdotal data there.
Admittedly, I don't have much more to show either in terms of hard evidence and clear numbers, but I'd largely attribute this to my poor memory. The difference is that I've argued for many positions and many claims, a good portion of which were similar to those feminist arguments given in support of the claim that the subconscious domination and privilege conditioning is almost always applicable... and I've changed my mind upon realizing that I was wrong many times. When I talk to these feminists, I often quickly realize that they have never changed their mind on this subject.
Given that I've read more balanced samples of evidence than it seems most of them have, and that I've noticed I was wrong and changed my mind much more than them, I'm very strongly inclined to believe that my beliefs are... well, Less Wrong.
Also, you're a pretty good Feminist's Advocate as far as people not devoting their entire life to the cause usually go, IME. And now I'm exhausted for doing so much beisu-ryuu belief-questioning. Whew. Not as productive in terms of belief updating and propagation as I'd hoped, but at least it was good mental exercise.
Yes, just because I can play Feminist's Advocate, doesn't mean I actually agree with them :-) That said, I've never taken a feminism course, nor am I a sociologist, so my opinion probably doesn't carry much weight. These kinds of debates can't be conclusively resolved with words alone; it's a job not for words, but for numbers.
I haven't studied those issues, but what you say is more or less what I have inferred from my experience in meatspace.
Sometimes, when mentally gender-reversing a situation in my mind, some part of my brain pops up and says, “But... $stereotype_about_men, whereas $stereotype_about_women!”. I try to ignore it because the stereotypes are often wrong. (E.g. the slut-shaming one: IIRC, a survey --with WEIRD sample, but people I interact with are also usually WEIRD anyway-- found that
comprise more or less 10%, 10%, 40% and 40% of the population respectively, and IME that's not obviously wrong.)
Really? IME that finding does seem wrong. I've seen females slut shamed way more than males. People often disapprove of both, but when it is a female they seem to disapprove more and are more compelled to speak up about it.
If a male sleeps around, he might be seen as a jerk who uses women, or as undesirable for a partner...but he wouldn't be considered weak, dirty, or lacking in self respect.
Caveat - IME it's mostly women doing the shaming, so if your friends are mostly male you might not see this trend.
When someone fills out their opinions explicitly in a survey, the double standard is thrown into their face. Only 10% of people would admit to having a double standard.
Imagine that survey was about racism. I bet only about 5% of people would admit to having racist sentiments on a survey, but experiments which did not involve explicit stating of values (like resume studies) find that people often hold prejudices that they claim not to hold.
I can't recall the topic ever coming up with my friends (more or less equal number of males and females) in the last couple years, so I don't know for sure about them. (From what little I can infer indirectly, the difference between the average male and the average female is less than differences within each gender, or between the average practising Catholic and the average atheist/agnostic/etc.) The friends I usually hang around with in high school (almost exclusively female, and almost exclusively non-religious) did seem to laugh at the promiscuous guy we knew slightly more good-heartedly than they did at the promiscuous girl we knew (though neither was anywhere near outright ostracised), but there were other differences between the two confusing the issue.
What experiments? (Googling "resume studies" doesn't seem to turn up anything relevant -- "resume" is used as a verb in most of those results.) Anyway, I'm not sure we should care about prejudices people don't want to have (and sometimes aren't even fully aware of having), as per Yvain's "Real Preferences" post. (They might be consciously lying, but who does that on anonymous surveys?)
Resume studies:
Some researcher sent identical resumes with different names to apply for similar positions. Some resumes had names that code as white in the US, while other resumes had names that coded as black. The rate of interviews scheduled was substantially different based on the apparent ethnicity of the applicant. Summary.
Okay. That also answers the "I'm not sure we should care about prejudices people don't want to have" thing -- such a discrimination is Bad whether or not the interviewers are consciously aware of it, and whether or not they endorse it.
Totally off topic, sorry. How did you do footnotes? I'm so jealous.
I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it's AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (
1.,2.etc.).