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Male archetypes in fairy tales

sharonblackie.substack.com

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Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#61

Post by scotty79 »

hk__2 wrote: post #57
d-z-m wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because any woman knows how false this is. In what way is the statement you quoted false?

> In what way is the statement you quoted false? "We all mostly want the same things, feel the same things and do the same things" is contradicted by any studies on consumer behavior that takes gender into account. Of course deep inside we’re all mostly the same, but as a society we constructed a gender polarization that has very real effects on what we want, how we feel and what we do. If I tell you that my friend l…

Good marketing strategy is to associate your product with identity assumed by significant number of customers. Studies of consumer behavior show mostly this. That gender based marketing works successfully. However regardless of gender customers want some food, clothing, shelter, mobility, entertainment.

> If I tell you that my friend likes to wear high heels and a red skirt you can hardly pretend the probability they are a woman is only 50%.

If you tell me that your friend wears a pendant with Libra zodiac sign I'd estimate probability of her being a Libra higher than 50% too. It doesn't mean identifying as a Libra is something natural, innate or objectively meaningful or indicative of the qualities you value.

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#62

Post by d-z-m »

roenxi wrote: post #51
d-z-m wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I don't see why a white-only association would be unusual in the current climate. I think it would be very unusual. I'm curious to know why you think otherwise. I also think it would be career and social suicide to be associated with said organization.

Picking on Harvard because I know a few people who went there and it is a decent signpost of what direction the US political elite are going in... If I go look up Black students at Harvard, I can find a Black student association association: https://www.theharvardbsa.com/ . The photos might not be completely representative of their membership but they are quite suggestive of a certain racial trend among the associate…

> I don't see why Whites are supposed to be all that different.

I guess in theory they're not. In practice, pushback would liken a race-based group of white people to the famous negatively valence'd ones from history(KKK, Nazi, etc) and it would never be allowed to form(Especially at a place like Harvard).

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#63

Post by hn92726819 »

scotty79 wrote: post #20

Why are people so fixated on gender? We all mostly want the same things, feel the same things and do the same things, both good and bad. Individual variety overwhelms slight difference in averages between the groups. When it comes to anything except children, "I'm a man" is no more meaningful than "I'm a Libra". Objectively meaningless, subjectively can screw you up but only if you believe in zodiac.

> Objectively meaningless

I think that's your issue. In isolation, maybe you think it's objectively meaningless. But if that were true in life and society, you would not see such drastic statistical significance between men and women. For example, wouldn't you expect murders, suicides, pay, life expectancy, etc etc to be a 50/50 split if gender is objectively the same?

I don't know for sure, but I imagine your star sign or whatever is not a significant predictor of anything. But being a man or woman is a significant predictor in many things.

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#64

Post by d-z-m »

scotty79 wrote: post #54
d-z-m wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm a man" is no more meaningful than "I'm a Libra". I think you're overstating things here, by a lot. I understand not wanting to get mired in gender politics, as I find it tedious as well. But "man" and "woman" goes deeper than star signs.

I think you underestimate how strongly people who are into zodiac signs feel about it. Roughly just as strong as people who are into gender are feeling about theirs. The mechanism is the same, you blow up differences, neglect similarities. All in service of constructing your identity in opposition to others.

I'm not talking about how people feel about anything. I'm saying that in the aggregate, differences between men and women exist that are predictable and durable. People may feel this way about star signs, but that doesn't make it true(and there isn't a mountain of scientific literature to back up the latter claim, for the former there is).

I'm also not saying that we aren't more the same than different, I think that's true as well.

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#65

Post by scotty79 »

hn92726819 wrote: post #63
scotty79 wrote: post #20

Why are people so fixated on gender? We all mostly want the same things, feel the same things and do the same things, both good and bad. Individual variety overwhelms slight difference in averages between the groups. When it comes to anything except children, "I'm a man" is no more meaningful than "I'm a Libra". Objectively meaningless, subjectively can screw you up but only if you believe in zodiac.

> Objectively meaningless I think that's your issue. In isolation, maybe you think it's objectively meaningless. But if that were true in life and society, you would not see such drastic statistical significance between men and women. For example, wouldn't you expect murders, suicides, pay, life expectancy, etc etc to be a 50/50 split if gender is objectively the same? I don't know for sure, but I imagine your star s…

It's known that men have more long tailed distribution across many traits. It's not super surprising because they have just one X chromosome which means any deviation from the mean on it gets expressed and there's a lot of important stuff there.

Things like murders, suicides, excessive pay and such are mostly result of that. It's not because men are different on average. It's because they are more spread around the average. Which pretty much means that men from the end of the spectrum are less similar to other men from the opposite end than they are to all women.

Of course sex and even gender are better predictors than zodiac signs. Nearly everything is a better predictor because zodiac signs are crap. But affluence might be better predictor than gender for many things. Neuroticism might be a better predictor than gender for many things. IQ can be a good predictor for many things. In the myriad of very good predictors why fixate on the simplest and dumbest one that just divides population exactly in halves?

PS: Zodiac signs are a great predictor of what horoscope the person is going to read or what zodiac pendant or t-shirt or whatever they are going to wear or buy. All other predictiors including gender are absolutely terrible at predicting that. ;-)

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#66

Post by d-z-m »

hk__2 wrote: post #57
d-z-m wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because any woman knows how false this is. In what way is the statement you quoted false?

> In what way is the statement you quoted false? "We all mostly want the same things, feel the same things and do the same things" is contradicted by any studies on consumer behavior that takes gender into account. Of course deep inside we’re all mostly the same, but as a society we constructed a gender polarization that has very real effects on what we want, how we feel and what we do. If I tell you that my friend l…

I think all your objections are subsumed by the "mostly" qualifier in the OPs comment. I don't think OP would disagree that the percentage of people who buy high heels is highly skewed towards women. I also don't think OP was referring to consumer behavior in their comment, so your pushback on those grounds seems needlessly contrarian to me.

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#67

Post by scotty79 »

d-z-m wrote: post #64
scotty79 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate how strongly people who are into zodiac signs feel about it. Roughly just as strong as people who are into gender are feeling about theirs. The mechanism is the same, you blow up differences, neglect similarities. All in service of constructing your identity in opposition to others.

I'm not talking about how people feel about anything. I'm saying that in the aggregate, differences between men and women exist that are predictable and durable. People may feel this way about star signs, but that doesn't make it true(and there isn't a mountain of scientific literature to back up the latter claim, for the former there is). I'm also not saying that we aren't more the same than different, I think that'…

There are measurable differences, sure. There's ongoing discussion how many of them should be attributed to being a male and how many to being a man. The ones attributed to being a man are no different in nature than the ones attributed to being a Leo. They are cultural. They are stornger, but only because the human culture is (and was) much more obsessed about gender than the zodiac. Also because zodiac is completely empty but men/women piggybacks on the real male/female differences.

Male/female differences are real and objective but they manifest mostly on the long tails of normal distribution. When you exclude the outliers that male sex has way more of then differences between sexes shrink to almost nothing across nearly all qualities.

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#68

Post by d-z-m »

scotty79 wrote: post #67
d-z-m wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about how people feel about anything. I'm saying that in the aggregate, differences between men and women exist that are predictable and durable. People may feel this way about star signs, but that doesn't make it true(and there isn't a mountain of scientific literature to back up the latter claim, for the former there is). I'm also not saying that we aren't more the same than different, I think that'…

There are measurable differences, sure. There's ongoing discussion how many of them should be attributed to being a male and how many to being a man. The ones attributed to being a man are no different in nature than the ones attributed to being a Leo. They are cultural. They are stornger, but only because the human culture is (and was) much more obsessed about gender than the zodiac. Also because zodiac is completel…

> there's ongoing discussion how many of them should be attributed to being a male and how many to being a man. The ones attributed to being a man are no different in nature than the ones attributed to being a Leo. They are cultural.

I don't think you can uncouple "being male" and "being a man" so easily. For thousands of years these two have been interlinked. I would argue, one informing and influencing the other in a sort of cultural epigenetic dance.

This goes back to my original objection with your comment, I don't think that "I'm a man" is objectively meaningless, but at this point I'm arguing semantics :^).

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#69

Post by david-gpu »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58
david-gpu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some nuance here. As I understand it, intersectionality simply highlights that the experiences of a collective built from the intersection of several traits can be quite different to the experience of an adjacent collective. E.g. the queer descendants of Asian immigrants may often share experiences that are quite distinct from those of queer black folks. I have no problem with that. My point of contention is…

> the queer descendants of Asian immigrants may often share experiences that are quite distinct from those of queer black folks. OK, but keep going. The queer descendants of Asian immigrants may often have experiences that are quite different from those of other queer descendants of Asian immigrants, too. So you can make some generalizations and find some patterns, but those generalizations and patterns can turn into…

> So you can make some generalizations and find some patterns, but those generalizations and patterns can turn into stereotypes if we aren't very careful

The key is that these are self-organizing groups that look for other people who have similar experiences to them. Stereotypes are forced upon people by outsiders. It's an entirely different group dynamic.

> For anything that you think is a characteristic or a shared experience of an intersectional group, you can find members who do not share that

Obviously, which is why it is particularly important that the context is within-group. Gay black men sharing their experience among themselves are in no danger of forgetting that they are individuals with unique traits, all while they seek the camraderie of people like themselves.

Re: Male archetypes in fairy tales

#70

Post by david-gpu »

junke wrote: post #52
david-gpu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely tried to steel-man her case, but her sexism was so explicit that I could not let it pass. Having your opinion dismissed because of your gender is grating; I think we can all agree on that, at least.

again, I won't argue with a straw man version of what she wrote

I provided verbatim quotes of what she said. If you disagree with my interpretation of their meaning, you are free to provide an alternative interpretation. A blanket dismissal doesn't move the conversation forward.
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