Ideologies and slippery concepts
How do you evidence 'mansplaining'? Is it even worth asking?
This is more a confession of confusion than an argument, because I really don't know what to think about the thing we call feminism.
For a while I did reject the notion that women face significantly more of an uphill journey in reaching their potential than someone like me as basically someone with a penis and a deeper vocal timbre.
So I did the pendulum swing thing with feminism, for a while.
I went from identifying as a feminist to extreme scepticism about 'the patriarchy' as anything more than a catchy phrase with rhetorical heft, used by people who like to feel aggrieved about the way things 'naturally' are.
This volte face was due to the influence of novelty; discovering for the first time non-stupid, reasonably thoughtful, versions of culturally conservative thought.
Novelty appeals to me, for whatever reason, despite fighting a daily battle against an internal neurotic Mike of rigid habit who insists that terrible things will happen if he doesn't stick to certain ways of approaching the day.
So, whenever I first 'discover' a reasonably expressed perspective I'd never previously considered, the urge to adopt it as my new way of seeing the world lands hard. Or a genre of music I didn't previously know suddenly becomes my favourite.
This is doubtless wrapped up with being a dilettante; dipping in and out of new things all the time.
Frankly it's amazing that Rarely Certain continues to exist and that people occasionally notice that it maintains a basic thematic consistency. This is quite unusual for me.
For example, for years I made tunes (shamefully naive power pop) on guitar and bass until suddenly I wanted to be Chris Franke of Tangerine Dream and make amazing 'ratchet sequences' with a Moog. A couple of years of fun with that and I'm suddenly assembling the guitar pedal board of my dreams instead. And researching for a book about some particular people in World War 2 because that's suddenly the most interesting thing I've ever done.
This is my personal human condition.
It seems to be to do with 'freshness' versus 'staleness', which is probably why I'd currently be classed as fairly right wing in certain areas. My old lefty instincts now seem, well, old. So they're much less interesting, especially since going through a process of eschewing feelings and vibes as a basis for belief.
An interesting aspect of investigating a worldview after a lifetime of shunning it is how 'fresh' it seems, so conservatism just seems cooler now. Especially since it has been largely driven out of western institutions, as western liberal values triumph among those in charge. For all the panic over a resurgent 'far right' everywhere, what matters really is the dominant philosophy where power is concentrated. On that analysis, the right are the underdogs, which confers on them some extra appeal.
It's worth being conscious of 'over-correction' though; a sense of 'aha, this is the actually correct way of seeing things'.
Maybe this is why converts are typically the most ardent proponents of a position. Like being an ex-smoker or other substance abuser who becomes an addiction councillor. Many recent religious fanatics too, like the petty criminals who convert to Islam in prison then run around murdering people. There seems to be a kind of energy in fresh perspectives that makes them not only seductive but also important to take out into the world.
But consuming a high protein diet of theoretical right-wingness eventually felt bloating. And equally unconvincing, when it left no room for nuance or doubt - as is always the case with an ideological vibe.
I realised then that the totalising worldview inevitably entails shoehorning everything into a simple script. Having grown weary and sceptical of leftishism's tabula rasa (the 'blank slate' theory that all of our natural inclinations are actually drilled into us by 'society') I also quickly saw through the strain of conservative thought that sees everything as a conspiracy to destroy the order that we know and with which we feel comfortable, in order to have utopia thrust upon us.
A perfect example of the latter popped up recently, with an essay touted by Bari Weiss as sufficiently significant to make it freely available on her podcast as an essay reading. This was so that the biggest possible audience could learn from it. This was because, as Weiss put it, the essay was 'important'.
I'd recently unsubscribed from the Free Press, having grown bored of its status as just another right-wing thought organ pretending to stand for a principle (freedom of thought) while really just being an extremely profitable conservative blog.
Don't get me wrong. A lot of it is quite good and the piss-taking by Nellie Bowles of 'pro-Palestinian' student politics is the best I've seen anywhere.
The essay is essentially a warmed over version of the traditional conservative meta-narrative that's been told for decades. The one in which societal collapse is always just around the corner, due to tireless subversive Marxist plotting. The audio essay reading is free to listen here.
This kind of meta-narrative leaves me wanting to ask whether there aren't just more prosaic things going on, to do with social desirability bias and ordinary human desires to rectify obvious past wrongs. It all seems to me much more about personality.
's recent piece on this chimed much more for me.
But, however sceptical I am about the story told by the cultural right, I'm still unconvinced by many of the 'received wisdoms' of the cultural left. Which is why I struggle so much with feminism.
To illustrate, recently I was reflecting on the fact that the most ardent feminists I've encountered tend to be among the most successful people in my orbit.
They are angry about 'the patriarchy' but seem to have achieved significant success within this conceptually blurry construction. Often significantly more material and status success than me and most of my male compadres.
Good for them ! I'm a big fan of people doing well.
But I'm puzzled about the precise nature of the oppression that threatened their chances to get there.
I'm inclined to think that they're just particularly smart, motivated and capable. This got them to where they are and over all the hurdles. Just talent and energy. Unlike me and the guys in my orbit who haven't done as well as they have.
But let's say women really are held back or pushed down by their environment. AKA 'oppressed' at steady state. What went on for those women I know who earn big bucks and have high status? Apart from them being the cream of the crop by dint of who they just are.
Is it that awareness of oppression enables these women to overcome it?
Or have they had to work much harder than it appeared from outside?
If you look for answers to questions like this you'll find a lot more theory than actual data-based evidence.
I can't suppress a nagging sense that maybe they haven't really been held back by a societal conspiracy to oppress them, but maybe believe that they would be even wealthier and more influential without something called 'the patriarchy' in the background.
These kind of wonderings have a bad name.
They are on a spectrum; considered declassé at best - ranging all the way to nakedly misogynistic at worst.
Having formerly self-described as a 'feminist' I came to realise that all I was doing was apologise for not being a woman and conforming with a social rule that emerged around the time I was growing up.
I'm a personist before any other kind of ist. If people in general are not respected or rewarded according to their contribution, I'm against that. If they are sneered at or excluded from involvement in things, like work that they could do as well as anyone or other areas of life, just for being different from the median kind of person, I'm against that.
It feels socially naive to hold this view, in a culture which loves to theorise about the endless 'injustice' that arises because different types of person are viewed as the kind of person that they are.
To not be a feminist is like being at a fancy dress party in your normal clothes. Standing out for being terminally uncool.
Someone once said to me that she was angry that her possession of a vagina meant that men see her differently than they see men.
Apart from somehow bypassing our biology in thought as well as deed, I'm not sure what we could do about that. Let alone whether we should.
There are things we can help (which make life better for everyone) and things that just are. Seeing a woman differently belongs in the second class of things, whereas treating her differently is something learned. The two seem to get confused, when it comes to popular feminism.
It's like people with a radically different heritage-derived skin colour than my bland caucasian covering. I see them as different from me, because something about them is different.
In truth, I tend to treat different types of person differently, as well as seeing them differently.
Walking behind someone in a quiet place I'll take pains to avoid unnerving that person if they're female, much more than if it's a bruiser of a guy just ahead. I'll see a woman differently and treat her differently.
With someone sporting black skin or who's obviously muslim or similar, I'm just a bit more careful to be respectful, sometimes even deferential (reverse racism!!!). I'm mindful of the idiocy people with their characteristics have often had to endure just for who they are, rather than anything they've ever done. I see them differently and treat them differently. Call these forms of discrimination, if you must. I'm unapologetically guilty of tending to notice differences, including differences in appearance.
In a reasonable world this would be fine. But it isn't.
Being an ordinary person belonging to a biological class that some popular and influential thinkers have deemed to be dominant in some kind of wrong way opens you up to all kinds of accusations about what you're really doing.
But when you examine some of those accusations, they appear flimsy and not as well evidenced as we're instructed to believe.
Take 'mansplaining'. We've all heard this one. It's where an emotionally unintelligent, or incurious, male tells an equally smart - or more intelligent - woman about something she already understands.
This has happened to me more times than I could count. But it didn't count as mansplaining because I'm a man. Sometimes it's been women who 'splained things I already knew or understood better than them. It never occurred to me to give that a name. It's just a thing that some people do with other people when they have an unjustifiably elevated opinion of their knowledge base in contrast to someone else.
If you tried to identify what 'mansplaining' really is, you'd have to go a lot further than rely on the reports of some irritated women.
Effectively, it's just condescension. So you'd first have to figure out what lies behind that way of speaking to people.
Then you'd have to test whether everyone's experience of receiving condescension is equal.
Are women just more sensitive to condescension? Are men more likely to do the condescending?
This actually seems pretty interesting as a set of questions.
There has been research into this and when you read it the circular reasoning is glaringly obvious, as it often is in social 'science' work. For example this study reports that women are more likely to assume a gender-related dynamic when they're condescended to by a man. Whereas men are more likely to think a woman condescending to them is just a dick. This seems significant to me.
Also, haven't those women been primed already to believe that they're not only being condescended to but that this is 'mansplaining'? How do we know that women aren't just more likely to attribute something darker to a negative interaction than men typically do?
This stuff is obviously a lot more complex than we're told, in popular culture. Which is what gives a concept like 'mansplaining' such a slippery quality.
Then more unevidenced assertions roll in, like you can't know because you're a man.
Well, what if it's just that men give fewer fucks about condescension? Where would that leave the concept of 'mansplaining'?
Effectively, it seems to me, the whole shebang rests on little more than vibe.
In this news report about the study above, along with some other examples, you can easily see that the research subjects are already primed to believe in 'mansplaining' and to see it as 'problematic'. No real light is being shed on whether or not men really do go around oppressing women by telling them things they already know because they assume women are stupid.
It might well be that men are just - on average - more egotistical and prone to condescension, whoever they're addressing. I've known plenty of those men.
This reminds me of how it is considered 'unjust' that men still dominate the upper echelons of business when it seems reasonably well established that they're more aggressive than women in pursuit of money and status. There are, after all, a lot more psychopathic men than women too.
None of this would really matter were it not for the social costs of being labelled in a way that's clearly designed to intimidate and make you wary of being yourself and sharing your own thoughts in public.
The intimidation works. It's seems obvious that the concept of 'mansplaining' is rooted in emotion, rather than evidence.
There. I just had to force myself through writing that sentence, amid a cacophony of imagined voices saying aha, so you're saying that women are emotional, rather than rational, so their concerns about things can be dismissed out of hand, you sexist/misogynist/woman hater.
And me, instantly on the defensive, saying no, no, I'm saying that the argument is mostly founded on emotion - a feeling - rather than reason or evidence. Lots of arguments are like that and vibe-based arguments tend to be sex-agnostic. Arguments without merit are exclusive to no identity class. Etc.
But the moment you're defending, you're already losing, so that's it. All most people really hear is the accusation and it instantly sticks.
Obviously this is why social media was so corrosive of meaningful exchange of views; accusation ending up being reliably weaponised as cancellation. The accusation is remembered forever, even if the defence against it was successful.
Various reasons have been offered for this. It's striking how salient they seem to be to the issue at hand.
Negativity Bias. This is our tendency to weight negative experiences or information over more positive stuff. It's basically why newspaper front pages are the way they are. We're wired to see the worst in people or situations. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/)
Primacy Effect. We tend to most readily recall the first thing we heard about something. Accusation, by definition, comes before defence. It creates an initial impression which is hard to dislodge, however unrealistic or unreasonable the impression is. Or absent of evidence.
Confirmation Bias. Everyone knows this one; the tendency we have to stick with the things - or reinforce the things - we already thought. If you think that some hazy thing is real and bad, you'll tend to filter out anything that doesn't jibe with how real and bad it is.
Social Stigma. Fear of disapproval and consequent need to fit in with the times. It's hard to argue that Woody Allen isn't a repugnant child abuser mainly because of this, rather than the facts of his case. AKA 'reading the room'.
[As an aside, it used to annoy me no end on Twitter when someone would try to advance a different perspective than that of the group they found themselves tangling with and someone would inevitably resort to advising that they 'read the room'. A tacit acknowledgement that social stigma trumps facts, reason or valuing of good faith contra opinion most of the time.]
Salience. Related to Negativity Bias. The more attention-grabbing the claim, the more we take notice, in comparison with other information. Much sexier than a carefully argued defence.
Heuristics. Mental shortcuts to save us the bother of thinking too much. Ideologies rely heavily on this. A snap judgement is just less effort than parsing a nuanced argument.
News value. Whether it's legacy or social media, negative accusations typically get more attention than rebuttals, which serves to reinforce an imbalance in our perception of things in the round.
All of these phenomena make us do a rapid mental calculation when we hear one of these slippery propositions like 'mansplaining' mentioned. Mostly we figure that it isn't worth the cost of pushing back.
I'm still not sure there is quite the structural disadvantage for women in our much-improved world that many assert. But there's certainly a structural disadvantage to pushing back on some of those assertions.
If you really are interested in the experience of the high flying women in your orbit, I'd suggest asking them to tell you about it.