Chromosomal Radio
Irradiated by LabRat
Note: This is one of those posts where I’m as much speculating out loud as anything, so.
One of the things I’ve noticed in the background when reading and participating in various discussions about modern sexual battlegrounds is a certain form of mutual confusion that can seem less than mutual depending on the discussion. When men discuss divorce law and predatory wives that get married and then abuse the law and the court system to take a man for everything he has, emasculate him and then abscond with his children, the women in the audience have an almost palpable thought bubble over their heads reading “….So why don’t you guys just not sign legally bonding contracts with predatory controlling bitches? Women don’t just turn into that by magic.” Likewise, I’ve had at least one experience discussing sexual harassment and women’s dilemma in distinguishing a man who is merely slightly too pushy and maybe socially awkward from one who is predatory and testing the boundaries with a man that cleared up as though by magic once the guy realized “oh, creeps. An element of “why rape-avoidance tips are often more harmful than helpful” discussions seems to be men with that same kind of intangible thought bubble hanging over their heads along the lines of “….So why don’t you women just not hang out with predatory creeps? It’s not like all or even a majority of men are this kind of scum.”
It seems that most men and most women can fairly easily recognize someone of dubious character within their own gender; maybe not spot someone and go “Yep, there’s a rapist/thief/murderer”, but readily spot someone pushy, manipulative, status-seeking, and generally self-centered enough to abuse other people for their own ends. Moreover, we seem to have distinct trouble with it when it comes to recognizing the same underlying predatory character in the opposite sex; most guys, whether genuinely nice guys or “nice guys” seem to have a story about a female friend who’s as sweet as can be but seems to have a tendency to get involved with real assholes, and most women know similar men who just seem to be put on earth to be hapless victims for the sort of woman who is looking for one.
To go into storyland, when I was in college, there was one young woman on our floor that every single other person on the floor with two X chromosomes knew was trouble within an hour of meeting her. It wasn’t that we hated her and certainly not that we were jealous of her, though that is the usual motive ascribed in cases like this, but we knew her for what she was on a nearly instinctive level. I wouldn’t say that she wasn’t even necessarily *disliked*, but we watched her mow through every male on our floor and eventually on campus, use them in outrageous ways, and leave a trail of broken hearts, maxed credit cards, and academic malfeasance in her wake with utter lack of surprise. What DID surprise and confuse us was that it seemed like NONE of the men she abused, even if they had no reason not to know her history, seemed to see her for what she was even a little bit; to a man, they all readily volunteered for it. It wasn’t even about sex; she was fairly chaste so far as we knew (and in a dorm it’s hard to NOT know someone’s general behavior), it was just that all she had to do was flutter her eyelashes and they stepped up for the pain. It was utterly baffling- none of them were stupid. They were, so far as we could tell, simply very, very blind.
A working idea I’d already had is that by whatever result of biology, culture, and social forces, men and women tend to develop distinct and mostly non-overlapping intra-gender forms of communication. I’d long since noticed that my male friends in general and Stingray in particular will sometimes come to radically different conclusions about interactions among men that I experienced as neutral, and also completely miss what I’d experienced as elaborate communications among women. This experience of completely differing observations happened often enough between Stingray and I that we gave it one of those little couples’ terms, “XY/XX Radio”. Someone missed something because they weren’t tuned into the right gender’s radio band. I know what life is like on the XX side of the band (not even misanthropic tomboys get to opt out), and I can catch a few stray signals from XY from time to time if I’m paying close attention, but that’s about it.
The idea that’s taking shape now is that XX and XY radio aren’t just a source of sitcom misunderstandings and each gender’s perception that the other is cryptic and unfathomable*, it’s also the source of the “why don’t you just…” confusion. To me and most likely most other women, a gold-digger, nymph, or other Chick To Avoid is rather trivial to see coming; a short period of interaction is all we really need. Likewise, the distinction between a shy and awkward guy who’s maybe trying some sort of assertiveness on for size, or an oblivious guy who really has issues with identifying boundaries, and a guy with bad intent trying to test our boundaries to see if he can override them really do look and feel almost exactly alike from a woman’s perspective, especially if she’s never been victimized before and doesn’t know specific signs to look for. When we hear any variant on, “just don’t hang out with creeps or just shoot the creep”, we want to snap back with “as soon as they start wearing nametags we will”. By the time we can readily tell, as with the dazed fellow wondering what direction the crazy bitch came from, it’s generally too late.
*Yes, men, women really do find you difficult to understand. That’s why they analyze dates and relationships with their girlfriends in levels of detail that the Pentagon would do well to emulate and why there are best-selling books with mind-boggling titles like “He’s Just Not That Into You” and a market for magazines like Cosmopolitan. We HAVE collectively figured out that sex is a motivation for y’all, but that didn’t really require NSA-level intelligence work to ferret out.
June 25th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
a market for magazines like Cosmopolitan.
is that really more help than harm, though?
June 25th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
I think you really hit on something here. I have an example as well. When I was a new teacher at a local high school *cough* years ago, there was another teacher, a man, whose wife, as far as we could distinguish (among the women in the department) was an utter flake!
If I remember correctly, she had a fairly well paying job, far better pay than that of a High School teacher, that she left to ‘find herself’. All of the women in the department just looked at each other and shook our collective heads.
“She’s using you.” We told him to a person. “She just wants you to look after the kids while she goes and has a life.” But he just couldn’t see it.
Did I mention that they had small children? 3 boys.
The last I heard of him was that SHE had decided that Virginia was THE place to live. So, he quit his job and moved with her and the kids.
*sigh* It’s a shame really. He was quite intelligent.
June 25th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Farm Mom and i have noticed the same thing , and have learned its wise to do a lot of ” comparing notes ” after interacting with new folks we meet.
June 25th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
There is a societal component, too. Friends in college that were from overseas wound up dating really odd people. The Americans could see the oddness right away, but the foreigners could not.
For a while, I found myself dating people with Axis II disorders, particularly ones from the cluster B category. I’m getting better at recognizing them, but these folks tend to engage in the behaviour known as “splitting” either idealizing or demonizing others. When you’re being idealized, it’s flattering. It’s bloody GREAT! Those efforts and behaviours are designed to work on the opposite gender, and yes, they piss off the same-gender folks-they’re easy to see through when you’re not the target.
I wonder how it plays out for the gays.
June 26th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Labrat, the XY/XX radio example is perfect. It’s something that both sides of the gender war can understand. It was my experience bartending that lead me to check with the gals I worked with if I felt sure I missed the signal.
June 27th, 2010 at 8:34 am
I second William’s note about people from a given culture having problems reading ‘signals’ in a different culture. I came to the USA from South Africa, so I have a mixed cultural ‘bag’, part conditioned by tribal Africa, part by the racial tensions of apartheid South Africa and the struggle to bring democracy (of which I was part), and part British colonial influence (my parents were from England). Put that mix into a southern Redneck Cajun environment, and all sorts of misunderstandings can ensue . . .
Seriously, though, I know I don’t read signals from American women very well. Their life experience is so radically different to mine, from school through work through society, that I often fail to understand their signals. This can baffle and annoy them - but, on the other hand, it can also intrigue them. Ask my wife!
June 28th, 2010 at 6:41 am
Excellent analysis! Here’s another data point: Former female co-worker met up with a guy there who every guy there knew was (to use the name he was later dubbed with) a toilet-head. She fell for him, HARD, left her husband, took her (IIRC) about one-year-old daughter,and shacked up with TH. Various issues ensued, she finally got away from him, but the damage was done. Every male co-worker was amazed that she couldn’t see the neon sign reading “JERK” that was on his forehead.
I have to comment on your asterisk-note though. The reason why women find men “difficult to understand” is that we really are much simpler than you give us credit for. He REALLY didn’t mean anything when he ordered the baked potato soup, that’s just what he was hungry for. Analyzing our soup choice with your girlfriends is sure to lead to you the wrong place, you started with an invalid assumption, i.e. that he was trying to communicate something to you by ordering baked potato soup.
June 28th, 2010 at 10:03 am
Mark: It’s not that they really think he’s sending messages, it’s just what people do when they’re trying to figure something out that they don’t understand at all; they cast around trying to make sense of it. Men make decisions/act in ways that aren’t intuitive or predictable to women, therefore they’re not “simple”, therefore try to understand- which doesn’t at all mean that it will work or that it won’t be silly at times.
June 28th, 2010 at 11:33 am
My wife and I went through a marriage study called “Love & Respect” (http://www.amazon.com/Love-Respect-Live-Marriage-Conference/dp/B00030DD1K) that has a similar premise. In this case, the author/speaker an image of men as “wearing blue headphones and speaking through a blue megaphone” and women “wearing pink headphones and speaking through a pink megaphone”, but it’s the same principle. When pink speaks to pink, they interpret the message as intended. When blue speaks to blue, they interpret the message as intended. But when blue speaks to pink, or pink speaks to blue, the messages can get muddled.
The conference and study then spend hours (for the conference) or weeks (for the home study) trying to teach how to understand/interpret what you partner is saying, and how to learn to phrase your own speech to your partner in a way that is more harmonious with the color headphones he or she wears.
I’ll also note that it’s very much from a modern evangelical Christian perspective, so there’s definitely some elements that the Nerds would disagree with, but the foundational principal is exactly what LabRat was talking about.
June 28th, 2010 at 11:47 am
It IS a part of biological nature I think. Even in a long happy communicative “Best Friend” marriage like mine and Libby’s, once in a while (mostly late, and mostly- oddly?- in “intellectual” rather than emotional arguments/ discussions), we will catch ourselves saying the same things over and over and over, louder and louder, unable to “hear”…
Luckily we are old and affectionate enough that at that point we usually start laughing.
June 28th, 2010 at 11:52 am
Not least of which is that designating respect a “male” need and love a “female” need strikes me as completely and utterly silly- so far as I’m concerned both components are entirely necessary for all parties to make any healthy relationship work- but that doesn’t mean we can’t agree on some points of principle…
June 28th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
It doesn’t help that, at least at some basic, instinctual level, a lot of the behaviors that would leave people of the same gender cold are the same ones that actually raise attraction in opposite genders. It’s easy for guys to know that another guy is a jerk and a cad by talking to him for about 15 seconds; unfortunately, caddish behavior looks like “assertive, confident and interesting” to a woman, at least at first. Similarly, women can sniff out a vapid attention whore in seconds; unfortunately, attention whore looks an awful lot like “assertive, sexually confident, and interesting” to a guy that only talks with her for about five minutes.
Experience and patience helps, but you have to have the experience necessary to know that it’s okay to be patient and be willing to step away from an initial infatuation while you regain your bearings.
June 28th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
LabRat, I’d argue that the love vs respect differentiation isn’t as silly as it seems. As presented by the author, at least, it’s not so much one or the other as it is more of the XY/XX or Blue/Pink communication differences.
For a trivial example, some mornings my wife fixes me a cup of coffee before I leave for work. If you ask her why, she’d probably answer something like “Because I love my husband, and my having his coffee ready is a small thing that shows him that I love him.”
If you ask me my she does it, I’d say “Because she wants to show that she loves me” but the way that reads to me is “She respects my morning time and that I need to get to work quickly and is doing something that shows that respect.” I feel loved emotionally because I feel respected. That’s XX talking to XY in XY’s language.
On the other hand, if I come home late to a messy kitchen and decide to take time out of my busy late-night schedule of watching anime and playing WoW I’m going to load the dishwasher and handwash whatever needs it, if you ask her the next morning why I did it, she’ll say “Because he knows I like it when he does that and it’s a way he shows love.”
My explanation would be “It’s a way to show her that I love her” but the mental process again is more of a “I respect her time and the effort she’s put in today, and I know she reads my volunteering to do this as love, so I’m going to do this.”
You can certainly argue that some of these Love/Respect definitions are learned, either from parents or the primary culture my wife and I both grew up in, but the fact remains that for a lot of couples that we know, it’s a very distinct pattern that generated an “Ah-ha!” moment when we started figuring out “you mean she really wants me to do/say it like that?” and “you mean he really thinks I’m saying this when I use this terminology?”
June 28th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Fair enough. I suppose my own perspective is equally colored by having been raised Unitarian within a worldview that was much less gendered than it seems to be for many.
For reference, if asked about any of the similar things I do for my own husband, I would have used neither love nor respect but an answer along the lines of “because it’s the right thing to do”… which probably says a great deal about my own worldview right there. I don’t think of the things I do to or for my partner as expressions of love or respect so much as I think of them as the proper way to treat someone I love and respect… hm.
Steve: Hah, we know that pattern. It rather famously once ended in someone stomping off to sleep on the couch after an argument that initially began over a dispute regarding the odds to whether the universe should exist.
June 28th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
I’ll offer an example from my own pre-marital counselling (which sounds similar to Shdwcaster’s):
Man and woman are having a “discussion”, woman says “You ALWAYS (fill in behavior that upset her)”. Man then responds that he DOESN’T always do that, then proceeds to prove his point by listing all the times he didn’t do that, or he lists all the times when he did in fact do that and it didn’t upset her (or it didn’t seem to at the time). “Discussion” degenerates until woman accuses man of thinking she’s fat and man wonders who this psychotic is who’s taken over his lady-love’s body.
Man failed to understand that, when woman said “You always (fill in the blank)” she is really saying “You (fill in the blank)ed and it upset me, and it’s not the first time you’ve (fill in the blank)ed”. Man thinks she’s upset because he (literally) always (fill in the blank)s and sets out to prove his innocence. They talk past each other, in more and more widening circles, until they may as well be speaking Martian and Venusian. Woman wonders why man is arguing an unimportant point, man wonders why he’s still in trouble after proving his innocence, and both become millionaires when they sell the script of their argument to a sit-com. Or something like that.
Wife and I, especially early in our marriage, often reminded each other that we don’t read minds. As we approach our 11th anniversary we seem to get better at it though. You know how they say communication is important in a marriage? True dat. If you’re upset, tell me WHY you’re upset, tell me what’s bothering you, tell me what I’ve done that upset you. Don’t expect me to just know.
Oh, from my standpoint, if I’m in a bad mood, you ask me what you’ve done, and I tell you that you didn’t do anything to upset me, I mean it. I may be upset about work, or the car, or about the Jets having another losing season.
June 28th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Sounds familiar enough too. The gender roles aren’t always so clear-cut- I know my father and my stepmother could easily have been reversed in your above scenario, she having ruled the family through a sort of tyrrany of specificity- but I suspect they broadly hold.
It’s one of those things that is rarely explicitly taught though evidently you sought it out, which is that arguing with your partner fairly and productively is actually a learned skill. It’s not enough not to take out your anger on your partner, which is obviously bad, you also have to let them know you’re not actually upset about them or anything they did when you’re in a VERY uncommunicative mood to start with. Communicating badly is a distressing thing in and of itself, and sometimes something to add to a list of needed apologies to make the other person unbristle enough to resume listening to you. Etc.
June 28th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
“It rather famously once ended in someone stomping off to sleep on the couch after an argument that initially began over a dispute regarding the odds to whether the universe should exist.”
EXACTLY.
June 29th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
LabRat —
Interestingly enough, this ties right back to your recent post about a certain article.
While the article in question was ludicrously simplistic, it was an example of what people are reporting here — there ARE gender-associated differences in communications, whether verbal or behavioral. Whether people think they are primarily cultural or biological in origin, the communications difficulties DO exist, and ARE real, even if you yourself are not particularly susceptible to them.
For example — “love” versus “respect”. I’ve noted time and time again that “respect” is MORE of a driver for MORE men than it tends to be with women, and vice versa.
A tangential behavior is how one interacts with people at work. Time and time again, I’ve seen female dominated offices where the primary concern of female employees was whether or not people LIKE each other, get along, and are mutually supportive friends. The functionality of one’s co-workers is less important than the personal connections. I’ve noticed in almost every single female-dominated office I’ve worked in where one or more workers is propped up WELL beyond what they would have gotten as a guy in a male-dominated office, all because it’s the “nice” thing to do. Drunks, fools, the lazy, the mentally unbalanced – no one (not just the boss) wanted to hurt her feelings. . .
Contrast my experience in male-dominated workplaces; yes, “buddies” are important, but most men I’ve worked with don’t NEED to “like” their co-workers, so long as they respect them as fellow workers. Perfectly fine with working next to a guy you despise, so long as he pulls his weight and doesn’t cause shit in the office. Oh, if he’s a “good guy”, people may pull slack for him out of loyalty when he temporarily falls short – but loyalty will only prop him up so long. (Of course, if he is asshole buddies with someone who CAN cover up his failings, he is likely to be kept around well beyond normal group loyalty – but in general, the collective hive workers are ready to dump “Good Ol’ Charlie” if they had a chance to fire his drunk ass. It’s only his college buddy in the big office who keeps him around.)
Or, the ever-popular observation (again, a generalization, but one that seems to hold true enough that most people recognize it even while realizing there are females who process things in an “XY” fashion, as well as males who process things in an “XX” fashion) that when a female starts talking about a problem, her mate often gets into trouble because he jumps in with (what seems to him to be) a logical solution, and then feels the conversation has reached a natural conclusion. Wrong — she wasn’t looking for a SOLUTION, she was looking for SYMPATHY. Whereas most males, most of the time, are looking for a solution, and sympathy (while often appreciated) is not solving the problem. We can “sympathize” by talking about sports, sex, and guns over a beer AFTER I get this friggin’ thing fixed. . .
Differences in non-verbal communications (including expectations of how another party will react to a verbal communication, and how one non-verbally interprets what their verbal response actually is) are just as serious as people using words in different ways to each other, with neither realizing that the other party DOES NOT understand the word to mean the same thing.
SUPER-simplistic example — as a gunny, if I ask someone to pass me a “clip”, a fellow gunny will hand me a stripper or charger, but my little sister would hand me a box magazine. If I say “assault rifle”, I’m referring to a medium power selective fire rifle; to my mother it means “anything scary looking”.
My current work environment requires me to be fluent in several (supposedly American English culture) dialects, not just switching language tracks for myself, but often acting as an interpreter between mutually unintelligible dialects of:
1. Engineering geek (usually with a touch of Asperger’s).
2. Navy
3. Coast Guard (Yup, they DO NOT use words the same way as the Navy even when discussing the same topic. . . as I found out in a meeting. “Disabling fire” to the Coast Guard means, “stop that boat so we can arrest those guys, but we want them alive for trial” — to the Navy, a smoldering puddle of diesel and debris is an acceptable outcome of “disabling fire”; while taking the prisoners intact would have been great, the important thing is the target is no longer able to run or fight. This has PROFOUND affects when planning and integrating weapons coverage, especially in required precision and upper limits of firepower. . .)
3. Local yokel
4. And the various “normal” flavors of human communication. . .
Which is why articles (insipid as most are) such as, “Guys, Why Your Woman has Cut You Off” sell magazines.
Because there is a large enough segment of the public for which these articles connect with the readers’ own life experiences. Yes, most of those examples in that article are silly — to YOU. By definition, half the reading (and therefore purchasing) public is “below average”, whilst you rate somewhat above that.
What I don’t get is how you can so utterly see the issue HERE, and deride it as nonsensical THERE. . . Just because YOU don’t have a problem interpreting what are (to you) fairly straightforward things, doesn’t mean that large chunks of the population don’t.
June 29th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Geo: My problem with that article specifically and with that genre in particular isn’t so much that I deny there are significant cultural and perhaps biological differences between the genders, as that they encourage people to start thinking of their partners in relationships as alien creatures with a defined list of ways that species operates rather than as another, different, person whose wants and needs are comprehensible in person-terms rather than their-species terms. I find this especially dehumanizing and infuriating when the subject is sex, which is about as intimate between two people as it gets. Then give it a framing that boils down to “Guys, here how you get the sex machine to start working again when it breaks” and you get a motivation for a fisking and a complete loss of sympathy both for the author and its genre. Not only do I view it as morally wrong, it’s poison for relationships.
I brought up Cosmo in this post in a semi-sympathetic light- the motivation both for it and for the other article, as you say, boils down to confusion and lack of understanding- but honestly their advice is just as bad and silly and often very dehumanizing of men and women alike. I just don’t rip apart Cosmo because that’s Holly’s schtick.
If I am somehow more evolved than most, it’s because everything I’ve ever learned about men I gained from, y’know, talking to them and interacting with them rather than asking anybody to explain “men” for me. I do have my own list of mental gender stereotypes and overall “men tend to work this way and women tend to work this way” prejudices, I just try not to assume they are Gospel Truth and drape that frame over interactions. I will admit to having at least somewhat of a stereotypical XY bent to my makeup, though, at least judging by the infuriating number of times people on the internet that will refer to me as male when they can’t see my face, even once or twice when they could hear my voice. And learning the distinction between people asking for sympathy and people asking for help solving a problem was something it took adulthood and observation for me… and I still suck at pure sympathy.
Somewhere in my parts bin of “stuff I’d like to post but can’t for varying reasons” is something of a Frankenstein’s monster on the societal histories that shed light on some of the stereotypical ways in which men and women behave- it is, for example, understandable for women to focus on social ties among each other if, for centuries within a culture, that kind of social power was the only path to ANY kind of power for aggressive, capable women and the forms of accomplishment that focused more on meritocracies among people that may not know each other well were open almost exclusively to men. In the meantime, if I were to focus on the biological background to the whole thing, unrelated male primates in most species spend time forming and shattering alliances as group politics pervail, but a female primate that gets herself truly on the outs with the others will be driven out or killed…
Frankenstein’s monster is still on the table because it has way too many parts and not nearly enough stitches, alas.
June 29th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
You have to make some allowance for age and experience with your “chromosomal radio.”
When I was 16, the Miss Scarlet of your dorm would have mowed me down too. But when I was 26, I would have looked at her like a black diamond ski run: “This could be exciting, but I could also end up in a world of pain.”
Aren’t you supposed to learn from experience?
June 30th, 2010 at 9:43 am
I luv you guys sooo much.
June 30th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Not to be too simplisme, but this is why girls need proper dads and brothers. Because, as incomprehensible as they may start out and morph into over time, at least some experience of men while hormones and personal loyalties are not critically on the line helps one to develop defenses to the majority of human ass-hattishness. Dad models male behaviour toward women, brothers demonstrate that boys can be douche-y without even meaning to do so.
Conversely, it’s also why boys need a mom who can model proper feminine behaviour, and enforce discipline on how ladies should expect respect. They need sisters to demonstrate how devious and manipulative chicks can be.
There are single moms and dads out there who do a good job of raising their kids alone, but it’s MUCH harder for all involved, and often falls short. It’s much easier to learn from example and familiarity than abstractly.
Kids are animals. They have to be taught how to be human adults. Without the proper mature influence of both genders, kids grow up a little twisted. People who don’t have experience of close relationships with the opposite sex are often just awkward and weird.
June 30th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Tam: True story, too.
Bastidge: It works both ways, though. Toxic parents or siblings can create some VERY twisted perceptions of what the opposite sex is supposed to act like and how they’re supposed to treat men and women. I know lots of great men who had great moms- and also an unfortunate number that see all women as parasitic and manipulative like mom, or seek out one to run their entire lives like mom, and so on. Likewise women who seek out men to treat them like crap like dad did- or to spoil them rotten like dad did.
Single parenting, or for that matter same-sex parenting, has its definite challenges and this is a valid one, but the role model can be every bit as bad for the kid as they can be good, and are all too often better off absent than filled with someone toxic. I know I would NOT have been better off if my parents had stayed together- not because either one of them was even bad themselves, but because the relationship they were modeling for me was a deeply unhealthy one.
Short version: Christ, raising a little sponge of a miniature human into a reasonable adult is hard.
July 1st, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Labrat,
Can’t disagree with that. It’s important to acknowledge that it’s not usually a choice between two Platonic Ideals, but between two very imperfect compromises.
But I did put in my weasel words there: proper role models. It actually takes a lot to screw a kid up beyond all repair. There’s lots of room for variance. People start out as animals, but we have predispositions towards becoming humans. We’re social animals that respond to social cues and incentives.
A dog couldn’t live so well with humans if it didn’t have some predispositions in common with us; witness how few people actually keep lizards for pets. It’s a stretch to find kinship with such animals, and they’re typically more of a posession. Relaively more people will sell you their “pet snake” or “pet lizard” while most dog lovers will run into a burning house for theirs once they have bonded (and vice versa). (Yes Lil, I know you have affection for your scaly critters!)
I think people raising their children well both deserves praise AND an acknowledgment that most of what you can do consciously and deliberately to your children is either harmful or neutral. It’s how you live YOUR life that matters to your kids’ outcomes, not how you (try to) steer theirs.
July 2nd, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Did the original article you fisked paint with a broad brush? Was the original article shallow?
Yup. And?
It was intended to be, not a sociopolitical dissertation worthy of scientific publication. . . it was a puff piece intended for an casual audience that wasn’t intending (nor intended) to unlock the Secrets of the Universe(tm) in a brief article.
As such, it was no more “wrong” than an article that stated “Dogs are good for kids.”
Let’s look at that analogy for a second. . .
No, not all dogs are good for kids.
No, not all dogs that are good for kids are good for ALL kids.
No, there are some kids for whom NO dog is “good”.
But if you charted it out as a Venn diagram, you would find that there is a very large overlap between “kids” and “dogs”, where a significant population of both are represented.
If the article is aimed at another audience segment where the applicable portion of the “kids” and “dogs” populations (one that disproportionately included kids who dogs would be good with - such as “kids in stable middle class suburban homes who live in fenced yards”, disporportionately excluded kids who dogs would not be good for — such as “homeless kids who live in hand-to-mouth poverty without access to adequate food for themselves much less pets”, and disporportionately excluded dogs who would not be good with kids — such as “feral urban dogs” and “badly socialized aggressive fighting dogs”) tends to inflate the relative importance of the “dogs that are good with kids” and “kids for whom dogs would be good” slice, you would have a relaitionship that accurately (if not 100%) represents reality. You could achieve that by placing the article in a general interest magazine aimed at white suburbanites.
Likewise, the original article.
There ARE a significant percentage of males (especially young guys) who are absolutely clueless about reading other people’s nonverbal communications if those people do not use exactly the same methods. We’ll call them “Shallow and Insensitive Young Guys” for lack of a better term. (This set of behaviors isn’t likely a genetic-based trait — it is almost certainly cultural, exacerbated by immaturity and a lack of experiene with mature women.)
There ARE a significant percentage of females who tend to use nonverbal communications that they EXPECT the men in their life to magically understand (even if they have never witnessed said male use those particular methods ONCE, and even if he seems to ALWAYS miss the “obvious” signs she’s sending), and who ALSO are inclined to play silly little power games, often focussed around sex, using the Magic Vagina as a Scooby Snack. We’ll call them “Shallow and Insecure Young Girls” for lack of a better term. (Likewise, not likely a genetic trait — almost certainly cultural and inflated by insecurity and immaturity.)
The overlap between the two is significant. If you are a Shallow and Insensitive Young Guy, you are probably going to end up hooked up with at least one Shallow and Insecure Young Girl at some point, and have no friggin’ clue what she means in the nonverbal arena. More mature women tend to avoid these guys, because they are immature and do stupid, insensitive things, which grownups find silly or infuriating (depending on circumstances).
(These Shallow and Insensitive Young Guys are also likely to disporportionately display (in early 21st Century North America) other common behaviors amongst themselves — wearing baseball hats sideways or backwards, tuning their car stereo to “All Bass”, putting $2K worth of flashy crap that inhibits actual performance on a car worth $500, get insipid tatoos they don’t understand by picking them out of a catalog so they can display their “individuality” by looking like everyone else they know, binge drinking bad beer until nausea and unconsciousness as a recreation, as well as other juvenile and immature behaviors. None of the causes of those choices are likely genetic or biological in nature, either. . . )
Shallow and Insecure Young Girls tend to end up hooked up to Shallow and Insensitive Young Guys a lot, primarily because more mature men (often former Shallow and Insensitive Young Guy themselves who got tired of the BS games and wised up) tend to run like Hell when they see one of these moving in.
To the world where the Shallow and Insensitive Young Guy lives in, the Shallow and Insecure Young Girl is DISPROPORTIONATELY represented, and thus learning how to interpret her tribal communications is relevant, even if presented in a very shallow fashion that ignores the fact that Grown Up Women (which isn’t an “age”, it’s a mindset — I’ve met 17 year olds who were decades more mature than the head cases I let sink their fangs into me as a Shallow and Insensitive Young Guy) do not act that way.
In short, the kind of guys who are likely to go to Ask Men.com articles for realtionship advice are disproportionately likely to be regularly involved with the kind of women who DO exhibit the behaviors and motivations in the article.
And an Ask Men.com article that tried to teach Shallow and Insensitive Young Guys how to NOT be a Shallow and Insensitive Young Guy, it wouldn’t get read. For one, it’s a complete change in lifestyle and phlosophy, so it won’t fit in a short online article. For another, the attention span of the average Shallow and Insensitive Young Guy wouldn’t hold him through it, even if you liberally sprinkled pictures of attractive and scntily clad females throughout. (Although, I assure you, he WILL look at all the pictures in that case. . . {grin})
“Subtractive enrichment” — when your behavior and lifestyle has already excluded the majority of the mature, sane potential mates, you’re left with the immature, crazy ones as the overwhelming remainder. Even if they represent a minority of the entire poulation, they represent the majority of the population YOU are dealing with.
You fall into a subtractive enrichment field yourself — you wouldn’t even consider a Shallow and Insensitive Young Guy as a potential mate, so they are disproportionately excluded from your field of observation.
July 2nd, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Which is a good explanation for why the audience exists, just as one does for Cosmopolitan, but does not make the advice good or the article good.
To use the dog analogy, even a shallow article whose premise is “dogs are good for kids” whose framing and execution rests on treating dogs as fur-bearing lifestyle accessories instead of domestic carnivores is inherently a bad article no matter who it was intended for, as it is likely to lead to an unsatisfying outcome at best and a tragic one at worst. Aimed at shallow and insensitive young guys or not- and Cosmo is aimed at his female counterpart- it still rests on treating one’s partner as a malfunctioning object that requires you to say and or do the proper rituals to fix.
Again: just because an market exists does not make a product good. To use a wildly disproportionate analogy, meth exists to service a market of people who want to stop thinking well for awhile and do not care what the cost is. Because the market exists does not justify the product, only tells you something about people.
July 6th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
It makes the advice good for the people who comprise the target audience.
Telling dysfunctional people how to intrepret the dysfunctions of the type of people they generally attract provides a service to those who make up the audience. One which, apparantly, they are willing to pay oodles of cash (collectively) for.
Whether that advice is of any value to someone who DOES NOT share that dysfunction is irrelevant.
Giveing me advice on how to best cope with the cultural differences of an “other” partner (non-Western, Scientologist, high functioning autistic; it’s irrelevant what the major difference is — pick your own category of “people with customs and behavior so unlike mine, it’s like we don’t speak the same language) is useless to me if I do am not partnered with whatever the “other” that particular advice is about.
If I AM, however, it can be very valuable to helping me understand how to avoid unnecessary conflict and rectify misunderstandings that lead (or have already led) to conflict.
Just becuae it’s useless to YOU doesn’t make it useless. There really are people like that, and tehy really have people who are utterly clueless as to the unspoken subtext that is comprising too much of the bandwidth.
Just telling stupid, shallow people to “Buck up, suck it up, and deal with it like grownups,” is about as useful as telling your parakeet the same.