I'm almost seventy, and my whole life has been one of embracing roles and then abandoning them for others that became a better fit. I thank my Lord that I was born before surgical and hormonal interventions existed to make the embracing of roles permanent, or at least not completely reversible. The human body is somewhat plastic and the human mind seems infinitely so. Locking oneself into ANY role seems to be tragic at worst, and a waste of time that could be better used elsewise at best.
I agree totally. And your comment reminds me of another arena--far more trivial--where I have had thoughts like this. Tattoos. I have always found it strange that you would imagine at 16 or 20 or 24 that you are certain enough of your future aesthetics and life interests to permanently ink your body, especially if you do so in a way that isn't easily obscured by clothing. I've known people with beautiful tattoos, people who did not regret those tattoos, tattoos that I found compelling and fascinating. But I still think that getting tattooed young both misunderstands how we change our minds as we age and we grow, and also unnecessarily narrows the range of options available to us. Maybe a topic for a post here sometime...
My late father was a seaman in WWII and had tattoos that fascinated me as a kid. When I suggested that I was interested in body art for myself, he remarked that "Not many tattoos that you could want will still be desirable after 20+ years of seeing them everyday" Every time I see a person my age with ink I think about how smart he was.
It's interesting to wonder how much of this relies on pop science and the simplification of evolution. I've made several comments in your comment section showing my disdain for pop science before.
It reminds me of such ideas as "women be shopping" because of genetics, as women were the gatherers in nomadic tribes, so of course women would like to gather materialistic items as it was instilled within them via evolution! It seems so simplistic and really seems like a non sequitur in my opinion.
The same seems to happen here with the idea of alpha male, or heck even with people like Liver King and his central tenets, but that all works out if you obfuscate the fact that our ancestors didn't have access to pharmaceutical-grade anabolic steroids (at least as far as I am aware. I'll be on the lookout for cave paintings depicting bodybuilder competitions and anthropologists discovering tanning oil).
It's very easy to take bits of science and either co-opt it or bastardize it to make it palatable for the lay person, and there's a ton of damage in doing that, as can be seen with the gender ideology stuff.
I do find it rather interesting that gender ideology has itself regressed, once arguing that gender was not inherent to one's behavior or hobbies. But apparently now one's gender is justified by those same mechanisms.
But as cultures change so too do the lifestyles and behaviors of those in it, such as the man/woman paradigm, and I think part of the gender ideology survives on the fact that gender is now argued to be a "social construct" because that makes gender ephemeral, and thus the ideology can now sustain itself because of its ever changing definitions.
I think that's part of what James Lindsay's intent was in the Oxford Union debate, taking the side that "woke has not gone far enough" in order to make the argument that within wokeness is imbedded the belief that wokeness can never go far enough, and thus becomes a self-sustaining ideology:
I had not heard "women be shopping" and now I can never forget. Thanks a lot.
Seriously--I agree with you. Like eugenics before it, so much of pop psychology depends on a naive and generally wrong understanding of evolution, but it has this patina of science, so people think it's legitimate.
And yes--much of what people are claiming now conveniently forgets that we are living in a hyper-novel world with access to so many things that nobody had even dreamed of, much less had 24-7 access to, not very many years ago.
Do you (or other readers here) have an explanation for this collective forgetting, this misunderstanding of science we once knew? I struggle to understand how Westerners have lost so much knowledge about human beings and human behavior and motivation at the very moment we claim to be the most advanced iteration of human civilization ever. It defies logic...as so much of postmodernism does. So maybe that's the answer? We embraced post-modernism with its nonsensical perspectives and impulses that upend all norms... Oy.
I believe most of it is owed to hyper novelty and the need for quick bits of information rather than spending time dwelling on ideas and learning.
As to hyper novelty, consider the idiom "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and contrast that with our constant need to have things updated or improved. It's an inherent heuristic which assumes that because things are newer they have to be better, otherwise why come out with something new?
Consider that within the context of the vaccines. As a new pharmaceutical with unknown safety and efficacies how do you sell it to the public? Argue that it's newer, and therefore there's something about them that just makes them so much better than old vaccine technologies. This doesn't always work as the vaccines were met with a ton of hesitancy at first, but then you pair that with a public health emergency and you can coerce people.
One aspect of Fahrenheit 451 that tends to get overlooked is that the censorship and book burning came far downstream of other events. As one character explains (I believe the main character's lieutenant, can't recall names of characters) they took textbooks and made them more accessible to the public by essentially making brochures and "X for dummies" type of books so that more people can learn, even though all of the nuance ends up being lost. Keep boiling the information down until it becomes wholly simplistic, and then it was only after that where books were eventually removed for censorship.
People want to be informed, but they don't want to think critically, and so constant bombardment of information with quick turnover makes the public feel informed and complacent.
Anyways, I may have mentioned it before but I had a biology professor who made the comment that pop psychology was sort of a" fairytale field". I think she was inferring that much of pop psychology focuses on explaining the here and now by looking retroactively and seeing any possible explanation i.e. it's somehow related to evolution or genetics.
It's sort of like how those who did not know where thunder came from may create deities, only now we justify modern proclivities with tenuous use of science. Again, I wish people were a bit more discerning in their examination of science. I find that people still put scientists on a pedestal when COVID should have alerted us that scientists are no more intelligent or critical thinkers than the average person.
Heather, I completely agree with you and admire your courage to write and speak about this whole gender craziness we live in. I am wondering what you think about the choices made by a good friend of mine who chose to transition to male in her 50s? I find the choices people make fascinating and try not to judge how they meander through the journey of life. But I feel for her body that now is dependent on hormones and who knows what else. But this person knew what they were getting into. At what age does personal choice become a valid consideration?
This is much more difficult territory, I agree. Adults have agency, and an ability to understand the trade-offs involved in our decisions (or at least we should).
However, hormonal and surgical transition are a) novel (and therefore may well have effects we haven't yet understood), and b) inherently put the recipient permanently in the hands of the medical establishment (a position that I, at least, would never want to be in--even long before Covid). There are some procedures that medicine currently won't do for people, I think (I hope): doctors will not remove healthy limbs to bring a person into agreement with their sense (their delusion) that in fact they are already missing a limb. That we have the technological capacity for something does not mean that we should allow it. But there is, obviously, a tension between "what society allows" and "individual freedom." When the thing in question is a new technology about which many people are concerned, I tend to side with disallowing, but this is clearly tricky territory.
Another consideration is the age at which your friend made this choice. Perhaps it is because I have not known well any people who transitioned so late (I have met and talked with a few, but do not know them well), but it feels more strange to me than the idea that someone's "sense" of their own sex might really be inconsistent, internally, due to oddities in development that pushed the brain and body, for instance, in somewhat different directions. I have known well people who transitioned young. I do not think it should be an option below the age of 18. But I do know people who seem to have been helped by being able to live "as" the opposite sex, once they were able to make the choice. Choosing to transition once you are well into adulthood feels fundamentally different, but this may be ignorance on my part.
There is so much to be said here...there is also the question of which direction the transition is happening in. The people I know and know of who have transitioned late are all (natal) males who wish to present as female, and I admit that I have concerns about what all is driving that choice. In contrast, a natal female who wishes to present as male is, at the very least, not likely to be a threat to others.
I like the distinction, which I take from Joseph Henrich, between dominance hierarchies and prestige hierarchies. Rather than calling the best fire starter dominant in starting fires, we could say that the best fire starter is prestigious. We respond to dominance with fear, compliance, and resentment. We react to prestige with admiration and gratitude (and also sometimes jealousy).
In my experience, and from my frame of reference, men are usually extraordinarily happy to have their daughters alongside building, playing, shooting and doing man things. We never thought that made them less feminine and we are so much more likely to show additional patience and empathy with them.
As always I truly enjoy your writing, but this topic really hit home. I feel our society is so anti-male it is hard to see past it most of the time. Watching my boys grow up in a world full of "girl power" while they are told to sit still and act like girls, not horse around and use their amazing energy as they should. Thank you for sharing so beautifully and well.
You always make me think about a lot of things, usually to many and to far away to mention. But here I want to say that you make me think about consent.
You dedicate a paragraph to your childhood experience of a kind of freedom to define yourself, to do the things that would make you into the person, the woman, that you are today. To me that paragraph is about consent.
Interesting. I can see various ways in, but do you want to say more? Who is consenting, or who is granting consent, or maybe those are entirely the wrong questions?
It's literally just your recognition of self authorship. We are all like self pruning bonsai trees, we make our choices and our choices make us.
Somehow it's just striking to see a woman of approximately my own age who acknowledges her own hand in her development as a person. Most people, women and men it seems to me, they claim that life just happened to them.
My hypothesis is that, like other primates with similar sexual dimorphism, that human evolved in a polygynous / multi-male environment. That is a far more complex social context than a linear hierarchy with an alpha male at the top. Males would need to collaborate effectively with other males to be part of the 'alpha group' and not be driven out of the larger band. Females would need to know how the group dynamic is shifting to make smart mating decisions.
That feels like an evolutionary environment that might develop the human brain.
A true alpha male (akin to what you see in primates with more sexual dimorphism, like gorillas) would be problem. They would try to dominate and not collaborate. The ones that couldn't adapt would be driven out.
Again, that feels like the basics of a human moral system: don't kill, rape, steal, etc.
You do realize that "bogeymen" is sexist? Almost stopped reading right there...(though maybe the context allows it ;-). Bogey on, Heather. Always interesting.
Let me know if it works. The one I linked works for me, but that's tech for you, isn't it: bespoke experiences that keep us from knowing what others can see.
Actually, not behind a paywall. Went back and saw I had the option to request the full text from you as author (I guess you'll be getting an email about that?) and then let me join ResearchGate for free.
I'm almost seventy, and my whole life has been one of embracing roles and then abandoning them for others that became a better fit. I thank my Lord that I was born before surgical and hormonal interventions existed to make the embracing of roles permanent, or at least not completely reversible. The human body is somewhat plastic and the human mind seems infinitely so. Locking oneself into ANY role seems to be tragic at worst, and a waste of time that could be better used elsewise at best.
I agree totally. And your comment reminds me of another arena--far more trivial--where I have had thoughts like this. Tattoos. I have always found it strange that you would imagine at 16 or 20 or 24 that you are certain enough of your future aesthetics and life interests to permanently ink your body, especially if you do so in a way that isn't easily obscured by clothing. I've known people with beautiful tattoos, people who did not regret those tattoos, tattoos that I found compelling and fascinating. But I still think that getting tattooed young both misunderstands how we change our minds as we age and we grow, and also unnecessarily narrows the range of options available to us. Maybe a topic for a post here sometime...
My late father was a seaman in WWII and had tattoos that fascinated me as a kid. When I suggested that I was interested in body art for myself, he remarked that "Not many tattoos that you could want will still be desirable after 20+ years of seeing them everyday" Every time I see a person my age with ink I think about how smart he was.
It's interesting to wonder how much of this relies on pop science and the simplification of evolution. I've made several comments in your comment section showing my disdain for pop science before.
It reminds me of such ideas as "women be shopping" because of genetics, as women were the gatherers in nomadic tribes, so of course women would like to gather materialistic items as it was instilled within them via evolution! It seems so simplistic and really seems like a non sequitur in my opinion.
The same seems to happen here with the idea of alpha male, or heck even with people like Liver King and his central tenets, but that all works out if you obfuscate the fact that our ancestors didn't have access to pharmaceutical-grade anabolic steroids (at least as far as I am aware. I'll be on the lookout for cave paintings depicting bodybuilder competitions and anthropologists discovering tanning oil).
It's very easy to take bits of science and either co-opt it or bastardize it to make it palatable for the lay person, and there's a ton of damage in doing that, as can be seen with the gender ideology stuff.
I do find it rather interesting that gender ideology has itself regressed, once arguing that gender was not inherent to one's behavior or hobbies. But apparently now one's gender is justified by those same mechanisms.
But as cultures change so too do the lifestyles and behaviors of those in it, such as the man/woman paradigm, and I think part of the gender ideology survives on the fact that gender is now argued to be a "social construct" because that makes gender ephemeral, and thus the ideology can now sustain itself because of its ever changing definitions.
I think that's part of what James Lindsay's intent was in the Oxford Union debate, taking the side that "woke has not gone far enough" in order to make the argument that within wokeness is imbedded the belief that wokeness can never go far enough, and thus becomes a self-sustaining ideology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zut8akB4h8
I had not heard "women be shopping" and now I can never forget. Thanks a lot.
Seriously--I agree with you. Like eugenics before it, so much of pop psychology depends on a naive and generally wrong understanding of evolution, but it has this patina of science, so people think it's legitimate.
And yes--much of what people are claiming now conveniently forgets that we are living in a hyper-novel world with access to so many things that nobody had even dreamed of, much less had 24-7 access to, not very many years ago.
Do you (or other readers here) have an explanation for this collective forgetting, this misunderstanding of science we once knew? I struggle to understand how Westerners have lost so much knowledge about human beings and human behavior and motivation at the very moment we claim to be the most advanced iteration of human civilization ever. It defies logic...as so much of postmodernism does. So maybe that's the answer? We embraced post-modernism with its nonsensical perspectives and impulses that upend all norms... Oy.
I believe most of it is owed to hyper novelty and the need for quick bits of information rather than spending time dwelling on ideas and learning.
As to hyper novelty, consider the idiom "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and contrast that with our constant need to have things updated or improved. It's an inherent heuristic which assumes that because things are newer they have to be better, otherwise why come out with something new?
Consider that within the context of the vaccines. As a new pharmaceutical with unknown safety and efficacies how do you sell it to the public? Argue that it's newer, and therefore there's something about them that just makes them so much better than old vaccine technologies. This doesn't always work as the vaccines were met with a ton of hesitancy at first, but then you pair that with a public health emergency and you can coerce people.
One aspect of Fahrenheit 451 that tends to get overlooked is that the censorship and book burning came far downstream of other events. As one character explains (I believe the main character's lieutenant, can't recall names of characters) they took textbooks and made them more accessible to the public by essentially making brochures and "X for dummies" type of books so that more people can learn, even though all of the nuance ends up being lost. Keep boiling the information down until it becomes wholly simplistic, and then it was only after that where books were eventually removed for censorship.
People want to be informed, but they don't want to think critically, and so constant bombardment of information with quick turnover makes the public feel informed and complacent.
Well, apologies for that! Even as a millennial I can't keep up with these memes. It's just something I heard recently to be quite honest.
Apparently it came from The Nutty Professor when he sees a comedy skit with Dave Chappelle playing the comedian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOmxEBAFHwI
Anyways, I may have mentioned it before but I had a biology professor who made the comment that pop psychology was sort of a" fairytale field". I think she was inferring that much of pop psychology focuses on explaining the here and now by looking retroactively and seeing any possible explanation i.e. it's somehow related to evolution or genetics.
It's sort of like how those who did not know where thunder came from may create deities, only now we justify modern proclivities with tenuous use of science. Again, I wish people were a bit more discerning in their examination of science. I find that people still put scientists on a pedestal when COVID should have alerted us that scientists are no more intelligent or critical thinkers than the average person.
"Self-sustaining ideology" I'm stealing that.
Hey, you can't steal that! The person I stole it from will become very angry!
Thank goodness they will come after you than me 😂
Heather, I completely agree with you and admire your courage to write and speak about this whole gender craziness we live in. I am wondering what you think about the choices made by a good friend of mine who chose to transition to male in her 50s? I find the choices people make fascinating and try not to judge how they meander through the journey of life. But I feel for her body that now is dependent on hormones and who knows what else. But this person knew what they were getting into. At what age does personal choice become a valid consideration?
This is much more difficult territory, I agree. Adults have agency, and an ability to understand the trade-offs involved in our decisions (or at least we should).
However, hormonal and surgical transition are a) novel (and therefore may well have effects we haven't yet understood), and b) inherently put the recipient permanently in the hands of the medical establishment (a position that I, at least, would never want to be in--even long before Covid). There are some procedures that medicine currently won't do for people, I think (I hope): doctors will not remove healthy limbs to bring a person into agreement with their sense (their delusion) that in fact they are already missing a limb. That we have the technological capacity for something does not mean that we should allow it. But there is, obviously, a tension between "what society allows" and "individual freedom." When the thing in question is a new technology about which many people are concerned, I tend to side with disallowing, but this is clearly tricky territory.
Another consideration is the age at which your friend made this choice. Perhaps it is because I have not known well any people who transitioned so late (I have met and talked with a few, but do not know them well), but it feels more strange to me than the idea that someone's "sense" of their own sex might really be inconsistent, internally, due to oddities in development that pushed the brain and body, for instance, in somewhat different directions. I have known well people who transitioned young. I do not think it should be an option below the age of 18. But I do know people who seem to have been helped by being able to live "as" the opposite sex, once they were able to make the choice. Choosing to transition once you are well into adulthood feels fundamentally different, but this may be ignorance on my part.
There is so much to be said here...there is also the question of which direction the transition is happening in. The people I know and know of who have transitioned late are all (natal) males who wish to present as female, and I admit that I have concerns about what all is driving that choice. In contrast, a natal female who wishes to present as male is, at the very least, not likely to be a threat to others.
I like the distinction, which I take from Joseph Henrich, between dominance hierarchies and prestige hierarchies. Rather than calling the best fire starter dominant in starting fires, we could say that the best fire starter is prestigious. We respond to dominance with fear, compliance, and resentment. We react to prestige with admiration and gratitude (and also sometimes jealousy).
In my experience, and from my frame of reference, men are usually extraordinarily happy to have their daughters alongside building, playing, shooting and doing man things. We never thought that made them less feminine and we are so much more likely to show additional patience and empathy with them.
'Cuz they're our girls!
As always I truly enjoy your writing, but this topic really hit home. I feel our society is so anti-male it is hard to see past it most of the time. Watching my boys grow up in a world full of "girl power" while they are told to sit still and act like girls, not horse around and use their amazing energy as they should. Thank you for sharing so beautifully and well.
You always make me think about a lot of things, usually to many and to far away to mention. But here I want to say that you make me think about consent.
You dedicate a paragraph to your childhood experience of a kind of freedom to define yourself, to do the things that would make you into the person, the woman, that you are today. To me that paragraph is about consent.
Interesting. I can see various ways in, but do you want to say more? Who is consenting, or who is granting consent, or maybe those are entirely the wrong questions?
It's literally just your recognition of self authorship. We are all like self pruning bonsai trees, we make our choices and our choices make us.
Somehow it's just striking to see a woman of approximately my own age who acknowledges her own hand in her development as a person. Most people, women and men it seems to me, they claim that life just happened to them.
My hypothesis is that, like other primates with similar sexual dimorphism, that human evolved in a polygynous / multi-male environment. That is a far more complex social context than a linear hierarchy with an alpha male at the top. Males would need to collaborate effectively with other males to be part of the 'alpha group' and not be driven out of the larger band. Females would need to know how the group dynamic is shifting to make smart mating decisions.
That feels like an evolutionary environment that might develop the human brain.
A true alpha male (akin to what you see in primates with more sexual dimorphism, like gorillas) would be problem. They would try to dominate and not collaborate. The ones that couldn't adapt would be driven out.
Again, that feels like the basics of a human moral system: don't kill, rape, steal, etc.
🥰
You do realize that "bogeymen" is sexist? Almost stopped reading right there...(though maybe the context allows it ;-). Bogey on, Heather. Always interesting.
I couldn't open the link to your journal article. Got this:
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access denied</Message>
</Error>
Is there a different link you can share?
Try this one: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357664075_Covert_vs_Overt_Toward_a_More_Nuanced_Understanding_of_Sex_Differences_in_Competition
Let me know if it works. The one I linked works for me, but that's tech for you, isn't it: bespoke experiences that keep us from knowing what others can see.
Actually, not behind a paywall. Went back and saw I had the option to request the full text from you as author (I guess you'll be getting an email about that?) and then let me join ResearchGate for free.
Thanks. That gives me at least a chunk of preview. Looks like the full article is behind a paywall.
Off topic, but do you still record these for audio? The last one I can find is from October. Thanks!
I will resume, but haven't in a while. I get tired of hearing my own voice.
I don't. :-)
I am still unused to how my recorded voice sounds after all these years