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Humans and hierarchy | 132 comments (132 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 0)
Women certainly are more mean to them.
by das monde on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 06:23:03 AM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 0)
das monde:
Women certainly are more mean to them.

What's starting to come through is das monde is subtly expressing a doubt that feminism is going to last long as the inequality gap widens. More women are going to realise how the fastest way to enter the alpha circle is to project their favour onto alpha men, budding 1%ers.

This is depressing but possibly true...

I believe part of the problem is that the most successful women playing alpha in a patriarchy have to internalise the 'rules of the game' and often become more male than males in order to beat us on our own turf.

Maggie, Hillary, Carly, Angie, Theresa May and the gang are only serving feminism obliquely in the least inspiring way. They are like spiritual transvestites, dolled up as women while out-toughing men on the economic and political battlefields.

I saw an interview between Paxman and Hillary the other day that showed Hill in a better light than when she campaigned for President. Possibly she has transcended the previous phase and can model femininity and politics in a more authentic way, that would be really interesting if it survived the gruelling 2 year marathon of the campaign.

I had experience with a career lady lawyer from L.A. once and it was an eye-opener listening to her tell of how difficult it was for her to find a man who was not intimidated by her salary.

Thankfully there are (a few) women who see through the status marking games and use their access to their own wholeness (encouraged by enlightened feminism) to encourage men to transcend the pissing contest of ego territoriality and seek security in relationship between equals, where both genders share in flexible roles. This intimacy can only be enjoyed when those roles are left at the door.

Then there are women who choose weaker men to punish for the centuries of unfairness inflicted on them, but that's another story!

I wish you better luck in finding women who are looking for more than BSDs, because then you may feel differently about the destiny your words imply, ie that we will all regress once we realise our ecological limits and the middle class disappear and go back to patriarchy.

You may just have been hanging out with the wrong crowd!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 10:33:27 AM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 1)
This intimacy can only be enjoyed when those roles are left at the door.
I have to disagree here. I am pretty convinced now that hierarchy role games are an important (if not the key) part of sexual attraction. Career lady lawyers are surely sick of intimidating everyone! Feminism would need centuries to change biochemical triggers. And the favour projection towards the 1% alpha is not a logical choice for the most women, I have to suggest.

So you related this diary to me living in Greece, nice! You would expect that above average employment and prospects would be a good sell in a crisis stricken country. But no way you can rely on that! I do not remember pickier women anywhere else (or ever?). Thus I resorted to internet search soon, haha.

by das monde on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 11:10:45 AM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 1)
I have to disagree here. I am pretty convinced now that hierarchy role games are an important (if not the key) part of sexual attraction.

They certainly are for adolescents, and for many adults, see my remarks about highly gendered sexual scripting. But what Melo is suggesting (also Wife of Bath), is that to have a mature, equal relationship then you need to leave that hierarchy stuff out. All of us have played these games, many of us have left them behind.

And by the way... Don't knock internet matching. I would recommend it strongly for anyone who is having difficulty meeting a compatible partner.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II

by eurogreen on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 11:28:42 AM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 0)
Thanks! I feel so much more competent now than a year ago.
by das monde on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 11:37:34 AM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (4.00 / 2)
I always thought the hierarchy went:

Alpha Males
Alpha Females
Beta Females wanting to be alpha females
Beta Males
Gammas (who are pretty much out of the game in both sexes)

That's certainly how American jock/cheerleader culture seems to work. The cheerleaders slut-shame the female betas 'under' them while having far more random sex than they do, because that happens to be an efficient way to get an alpha husband you can divorce later, and they don't want the competition from their social inferiors.

So far as I can tell from a comfortable distance, being labelled a slut by the popular girls in high school is far more devastating to female self-esteem than anything the boys can say to them.

All the alphas are afflicted with textbook narcissism, which pretty much defines the alpha mindset. Deviations from an idealised image are not allowed.

Here's a female startup founder talking about her job interview style:

Q. What would cut an interview short for you?

A. If somebody is negative at all about anything, it's done for me. If they describe a past job as not fun, I am literally done because it's your job to make your life fun, and it's in your hands. If you didn't figure out how to make something of it, you're not going to figure out how to make something of it here.

Now, no obvious slut-shaming happening here. But woe betide you if you show honest feelings or - worse - an ability to think critically about your work environment, because that marks you out as a loser.

The unconscious irony is strong in this one:

Q. What are some things that are unusual about your culture?

A. Every month, an employee wins the gnome that we named Chomsky, and employees submit a "gnomination" for who they think deserves it most. The winner gets to have Chomsky on their desk for a month and they get $1,000. We read to the entire team why they deserve the award, which is tied into our four leadership principles.

So... alphas are alphas. Male and female alphas do alpha in somewhat different ways, but they're both primarily interested in controlling their environment to maximise their self-image.

For an alpha woman, or a wannabe alpha woman, settling for a non-alpha man would be considered a terrible narcissistic wounding.

Which is why talking about 'men do...' or 'women do...' is stupid. You need more levels to get the nuance.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 11:33:36 AM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 1)
Your comment is spot on.
by das monde on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 11:40:22 AM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 0)
ThatBritGuy:
All the alphas are afflicted with textbook narcissism, which pretty much defines the alpha mindset.

Haha, I just watched a political talk show (run by a woman, not that that matters!) where a right-wing 30 (+-) year old woman was talking about Renzi as being a narcissist and then added -completely without irony, (I know they don't do irony)- "... not that being a narcissist is a bad thing to be, actually the opposite!"

All is Vanity... ;)

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 12:07:02 PM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 1)
On the flip side, the liberuls, the modest white/blue collars, and the poor are really looked down by those people.
by das monde on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 03:39:14 PM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 0)
In Italy 'liberuls' is a term for people who want low taxes, no regulations and no moral proscriptions from the state.

Think 'bunga-bunga'.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 04:09:24 PM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (4.00 / 2)
The ones you're talking about here are called 'Grillini'. ;)

More grist for your mill:

All the Single Ladies - Kate Bolick - The Atlantic

Whether the sexual double standard is cultural or biological, it's finding traction in the increasingly lopsided sexual marketplace that is the American college campus, where women outnumber men, 57 percent to 43 percent. In 2010, The New York Times ran a much-discussed article chronicling this phenomenon. "If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us," a University of Georgia co-ed told The Times, reporting that at college parties and bars, she will often see two guys being fawned over by six provocatively dressed women. The alternative is just to give up on dating and romance because "there are no guys," as a University of North Carolina student put it.

Last year, a former management consultant named Susan Walsh tried to dig a little deeper. She applied what economists call the Pareto principle--the idea that for many events, roughly 20 percent of the causes create 80 percent of the effects--to the college dating market, and concluded that only 20 percent of the men (those considered to have the highest status) are having 80 percent of the sex, with only 20 percent of the women (those with the greatest sexual willingness); the remaining 80 percent, male and female, sit out the hookup dance altogether. (Surprisingly, a 2007 study commissioned by the Justice Department suggested that male virgins outnumber female virgins on campus.) As Walsh puts it, most of the leftover men are "have nots" in terms of access to sex, and most of the women--both those who are hooking up and those who are not--are "have nots" in terms of access to male attention that leads to commitment. (Of course, plenty of women are perfectly happy with casual, no-strings sex, but they are generally considered to be in the minority.) Yet the myth of everyone having sex all the time is so pervasive that it's assumed to be true, which distorts how young men and women relate. "I think the 80/20 principle is the key to understanding the situation we find ourselves in--one in which casual sex is the cultural norm, despite the fact that most people would actually prefer something quite different," Walsh told me.



'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 06:10:12 PM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (none / 1)
She applied... the Pareto principle... and concluded....

How much empirical work did she do? I was told the numbers are even more skewed.

by das monde on Wed Jun 18th, 2014 at 11:06:55 PM EST
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Re: Humans and hierarchy (4.00 / 2)
I'll run that one past my sister, when I next see her... she's an epidemiologist, currently studying harmful behaviour linked to alcohol consumption on US campuses ("epidemic of rape" etc)

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
by eurogreen on Thu Jun 19th, 2014 at 06:56:34 AM EST
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Humans and hierarchy | 132 comments (132 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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