Monday, January 15, 2018

Why Do Most Women Prefer Male Bosses?

I don't know why I thought this might be an honest, objective discussion of the phenomenon. I guess Lucy can yank the football at the last minute a very large number of times before I learn my lesson.
   The answer given is: it's not the phenomenon that requires explanation...it's the feeling. Because, you see, you are always to "believe women"...unless they think things that feminism says they shouldn't think. Then their experience is not to be so much explained as explained away.
   And the explanation of the feeling that they'd rather have male bosses is, very roughly: because patriarchy. I mean, we don't have actual bosses in my world. But we have Chairs and administrators and shit. My favorite Chair ever was a woman. (No offense to my current Chair...) And I've had extensive dealings with both good and bad administrators--a fair number really good, and a fair number really bad. (And sometimes the same person was in both categories.) I'd have a hard time generalizing about sex in this matter. I don't see any correlation. Even administrators are often individual people with personalities and stuff. My currently-most irrational and autocratic administrator is a woman. But in the past it was a man. And a man before that. So.
   But, anyway, it's women themselves who clued me into the cattiness and backstabbery of some women--basically the "mean girls" phenomenon. My hypothesis is that men are the biggest shits in relatively unconstrained environments. In contexts when you might just get physically attacked, it's men you have to be worried about. (And you see how it's not sexist to recognize that?) In relatively more constrained environments, that problem is mostly nonexistent. In such environments, things like backstabbing and hostile-coalition-forming become more salient threats. Also, there's significant evidence that stereotypes of this general kind are pretty accurate--more accurate than most psychological studies. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise, since stereotypes are the conclusions of untold numbers of observations by people who have an actual stake in knowing the facts. (Though, of course, there could still be social explanations.)
   At any rate, I'm not so concerned about the specifics here as I am about the general leftish inconsistency about such stuff, and the tendency to explain away unwelcome conclusions. I'm in no way suggesting that the right doesn't do likewise. That'd be absurd. But the general template really ought to be met with derision: believe all women...except when you don't like what they think...then explain away the collective wisdom of humankind by gesturing at some social science studies that you like better.
   And, for the love of God, don't forget one of the most important points of the rational, liberal feminism of yore: we're only talking about generalizations in such cases. We're in no way saying anything specific about each specific individual.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home