The religion of women
Tommi
has an excellent new post out that reveals and explains many phenomena
that otherwise seem to be not connected to each other. I think that I
shall translate the whole post here, with one tiny change: I will
boldface the one paragraph that points out the main difference between
the blogs written by women and men. I have always known that there is
some difference on how the comment section works depending on the sex
of the blog proprietor, but I didn't know that this difference can be
put in words this succinctly. The rest of the post is also excellent as
always, but my busy readers who don't feel like going through the whole
thing can just jump to the boldfaced part.
The Religion of Women
I recently read some of the more human-centered material of the blogosphere, especially blogs about divorces and marital crises. I thought that I recognized an underlying similarity between them, a doctrine that show through under diverse manifestations. I shall present this observation here as a kind of a myth or a story, and in this post, aim for clarity and easy of understanding instead of accuracy and wide applicability.
Under these posts there seems to be a whole doctrine of ethics and ontology that I shall name "the religion of women". I noticed three components in it: ontology, devotion and heroism.
Ontology
The relevant universe consists of two things: Me and World. The World is considered to have a soul and is anthropomorphic: it has thoughts, preferences and motives behind its actions, just like humans do. (Let the World here be one thing for simplicity. It could also be understood, the way it usually is understood, as a complex that consists of many individual actors, but this has no effect on the basic idea.)
The most essential part of both Me and World is the personal experience, that is, emotions. In other words, the subjective experiences of the first person. The basic attitude towards the emotional sphere is utilitarian: negative emotions have a negative sign and the positive ones have a positive sign. The quality of your life is then measured as the sum of these emotions.
The emotions of Me and World have a mirror-image relationship. The emotions felt by Me result from the actions by the World. If my emotions are good, the World is friendly, and if they are bad, this is due to active malice of the World. The normal relationship between two people is a prototype of the relationship between Me and World. Therefore similarly from perceived malice comes a responsibility to make things better.
The success of My emotional life is the World's responsibility. If I don't have a good time, the World is evil and guilty. More precisely, it is mean i.e. hostile. Let me call this the Basic Rule of the ethics of the religion of women.
Here we can see why anthropomorphizing the World is so very important. The basic duty of the World is not to be a mindless slave of Me and do exactly as I wants. In the long run that would be boring and altogether depressing. World is not a soulless mass that, in the ideal case, you could perfectly manipulate, but an active actor whose responsibility is to guarantee the happiness of Me.
This ontology is also the most important reason why women oppose using economic thinking to examine and analyse how relationships form and function in the real world. The imaginary "cheapening" connotations that the technical terms tend to have and the threat to the sense of security that comes from the metaphor of "competition" are only secondary issues. The most important issue here is that the economic approach to examining the reality of dating and relationships by itself implies that other people also have motives and emotions, and you can't just force the others under your will without giving them something of equal value in return. Such thinking is as totally against the soliptistic Me-World-dialectic as can possibly be. For the same reason, women also oppose materialistic thinking, in which the strong subjective emotions of individuals are totally irrelevant to what reality chooses to do.
Devotional material
For most men, women's writings and discussions seem quite repetitive and tedious. Assuming the ontology of the previous section, these writings are the devotional material of the religion of women. The task of devotional literature is to assure the faithful by supporting her faith.
The most common technique of support is repetition. When you repeat something often enough and when certain assumptions are included in a large portion of the daily information that you receive, these doctrines start to seep in past your conscious mind. This is why an ordinary junior high schoolgirl can easily produce in her blog twice as many words each day than a professional writer with his decades of experience.
Stories and parables flesh out the otherwise dry doctrines and add meat to them. Expressing the same ideas in a different fashion also has intellectual significance. The faithful person feels that she gets closer to the doctrine when it is explained to her in some equivalent but previously unheard fashion. On the other hand, a surprising explanation can also strengthen the belief that behind the texts, pictures and symbols there really is an independent spiritual reality that there human works refer to.
Strengthening the faith also has a social component. Women often enthusiastically comment each others' blogs. Their comments are mostly assurances that the belong to the same side (That's right! That was well said! You wrote it just like it is!) or straightforward motivation to guide the writer into the ontology of the previous section (You are a good writer! It is not your fault! You have a right to have something better! It would be great to get to know such an interesting writer!) Possible criticism also exists in the same space, but takes a different direction. It always mocks the writer, her talent and her significance.
Heroic deeds
Heroes are an essential but often ignored factor in every religion. Heroes can be divided in three categories.
The swordsmen spread the religion, fight the opponents with either weapons or words and spread the knowledge of the true doctrine to new peoples or mow them down to make room for the faithful. You can find as many examples of these as you want in, for example, the Old Testament.
Altruistic heroes sacrifice themselves for God or other people. They serve as examples for the others and convince them of the enormous power of God and faith that you can use to easily and coolly withstand torments that are each more horrible than the previous one.
The third category of heroes consists of the chosen ones. They have special gifts from God and God speaks to people through them. Although in most religions this would seem to be only the starting point for heroes: the chosen one either uses his gift to wage war to advance the kingdom of God or becomes an even more efficient altruistic hero such as Buddha, who refused to jump out of the circle of life and returned to the world because of his compassion towards those who were not yet enlightened.
In the heroism of the religion of women, the essential part is passivity and being focused on emotions. Almost all of their heroic deeds belong to the third category. Some heroic acts are, for example, finding yourself in a violent marriage, falling seriously ill or giving birth a disabled child.
In other words, the important thing is getting a strong emotional jolt, and it is totally irrelevant whether the role was actively chosen or not. The traditional idea of courage requires that the courageous actions are voluntarily chosen and morally justified. Courage can also be considered heroism if it benefits God or other people.
In the religion of women, the only important thing is your emotional life and its dialectical relationship to the antropomorphized World. This way even their heroic epics end up supporting the solipsistic ontology that I described earlier. Heroism does not come from actions that are done to benefit others of God. The only thing that matters is your subjective emotional life.
Conclusion
Allow me to point out that this is not a scientific explanation but merely a story, but at least I believe that it explains pretty well what I have seen. The essential thing here is that this religion of women seems to lurk behind the women's texts, and the diversity of topics, attitudes and the ways of expression hides this underlying religion. On purpose, I think.
I have often stated that cultures very older and more experienced than ours have almost without exceptions banned women from any important decision making, and they may very well have done that for some very good reason other than sheer malignant will of patriarchal oppression.
If cultural evolution is really a form of evolution, what has happened to those cultures who have tried to do otherwise?
Posted by Catilina | 1:47 PM
In modern western society, everyone knows (especially feminists!) that there are certain facets of male nature that need to be restrained: certain forms of aggression, sexual predation, etc.
It used to be well understood that the same was true for women. They had to be hectored to restrain their predilections towards sentimentality and other kinds of anti-rational emotionalism.
But the modern world only recognizes the flaws in male nature. Indeed, there are many ways in which our society not only fails to restrain female impulses, but actively promotes as the highest good. Witness such in the prevalence of "therapy culture" and feelings-oriented decision-making.
Posted by Russell | 4:30 PM
Lots of women write like this, and are experienced as typically feminine. Lots of women don't, and are experienced as individual exceptions. Sometimes the latter are even read as men, if their blog handle is not obviously female. I have noticed that when I write anonymous comments I am invariably assumed to be male. Invariably. I can talk about nursing my child, and still get referred to as "he."
I think this is a really accurate description of a certain kind of human, however, and it is true that most of those humans are women. The world is so much harsher on men, very few men with this kind of worldview can manage to hold down a job, attract a mate, or parent a child. Therefore it's much harder for men with this worldview to have the kind of confidence required to blog endlessly about their lives. Women, on the other hand, can get a job, spouse, and child, almost purely on personal attraction. Since they have the job, spouse, and child, they must be important enough to merit attention! This also explains why men with this worldview are usually the children of upper class parents, whose wealth and position protect the man from the consequences of his bad reality testing.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:43 PM
What strikes me odd is how women are frequently irrational below their IQ level. That is, they will believe superstitions that are normally only seen in men a standard deviation or so below them in intelligence. Self-help con artists are great favorites with them.
Posted by Udolpho | 5:09 PM
It's like I said - the world knocks that nonsense out of men, but not out of women.
Posted by Anonymous | 6:45 PM
Thanks for the translation, the theory is pretty interesting. I posted a link on my own site, and speculate that Tommi is from Denmark, is this correct?
Posted by Anonymous | 5:14 PM