There I was happily commenting on a piece at Quillette on women and the Mourner's Veto, in other words the right for emotion and tears to overrule calm and spirited discussion. So I commented with usual wit and brio thus:
The Mourner’s Veto is a Girl Thing. No man would ever tearfully say at a microphone that he is “literally shaking.”
This all began to come together for me when I read the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote over a century ago that the public square had been created by men for men, and that as women came into the public square they would change it to “suit a more feminine sensibility.”
What did that mean, I wondered?
The answer, I realized, eventually, as the world got into full-on Snowfake and Micro-aggression territory, is that women don’t relate to the public square. Not at all, and they are presently in the process of destroying it. Women’s transactions are one-on-one where the two women present complain about other women, as in “I can’t believe she said that.” A variant is “Much as I hate to say it…”
Men have a Culture of Insult. Its civilized version is the public square.
Women have a Culture of Complaint. There is no civilized version.
But an intelligent woman, red.hybiscus, responded thusly.
I feel like I’m caught in a giant Mean Girls cafeteria, wherein a tiny group of very nasty rich girls hold everyone else in thrall and terror. If a dysfunctional male hierarchy involves physical violence and brutality, a dysfunctional female hierarchy involves vicious nasty rumor and unctuous tribal affiliation. My own hypothesis is that social media - a tool that makes social shaming, expulsion, groupthink enforcement etc vastly easier - intersects with women rising in economic and social power. So we have more powerful women conjoined with a tool that allows a handful to do their Mean Girl thing.
I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience. Men perceive it’s ‘complaint’ because they still think of women as dependent on them, so to them women’s form of power is whining and complaining to them. The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.
She's right, you know. The whole point of women's complaining to each other about a third woman not present is to establish and enforce an agreed narrative to which every woman in the community must conform, or else. Or else she is a witch.
Of course, it's not just women that do this. It's true in religion, where you'd better toe the line on the orthodoxy, or you are a heretic and they are building the auto da fé right now. It's true in politics where you better toe the conventional wisdom line or you are a traitor and a rebel, and we are getting ready to shut you up for hate speech right now. It's true in science, where you better toe the line until the old guys retire or you won't get grants, as Thomas Kuhn wrote many moons ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
But back to red.hybiscus's Culture of Conformity.
The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.
I think that the key with the women's Culture of Conformity is that resort to law-enforcement should be excluded. In other words, the whole point of the women's culture is that women sort it out among themselves. This woman is a good woman, that woman is a whore. Etc. But no whining to the police, like the two women university administrators in Britland that, doubtless, were "literally shaking" about the man that said, in a private conversation, that Jews are smart and Germans are good engineers. So they fired him.
Er, no, ladies. You get to talk to all your Mean Girls in the university administration and say to each other "I can't believe he said that," and "I'm so angry I am literally shaking." But not a firing offense. Get it?
I think in the male Culture of Insult and its civilized version, the public square, this is called "being a good sport."
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