tweet,
or X, or whatever they're called now, by J.K. Rowling elicited a
lengthy diatribe
over at The Critic by somebody named Victoria Smith about how women are
oppressed. Rowling tweeted (I mean X'd):
Asking a woman to refer to her male rapist or violent assaulter as 'she' in court is a form of state-sanctioned abuse. Female victims of male violence are further traumatised by being forced to speak a lie.
It seems to me she's right about that, though it would be nice just once to see somebody acknowledge that this business of playing around with pronouns and calling everything that moves a ‘she’ started with feminists and has now come back to bite them.
Both men and women are equally harmed by being forced by the state to lie. But to blame patriarchal attitudes for this, as Smith does, is not helpful. As a card-carrying member of said Patriarchy, I would never try to force anyone to use my pronouns (which are “attack helicopter”* on Mondays and Tuesdays, “His Holiness” on Wednesdays between 9 and 10, and any line from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (properly cited, of course)** the rest of the time.
Politics is the opposite of knowledge and best left to those who care more than I do about what the humans think. However, scientifically there are a few problems the author's comments regarding humor that cannot go unaddressed. Unfortunately, even basic facts are political these days. Smith writes:
The work of ‘respecting’ men's perceptions of themselves—from laughing at bad jokes to feigning ignorance in the presence of male genius—is something in which women engage on a daily basis. . . . It is not something men do for us in return. Rather than laugh at our bad jokes or praise our feeble intellects, they will simply conclude women are less funny and less intelligent than them.
Sex differences in humor
Humor serves a number of important social purposes, including bonding, testing, and adjudication of status. Since all social interactions are predicated on mating, humor is used differently between the two sexes. The question of why humor is funny is entirely different from the question of why people use it.
Between males, humor is way of testing each other. If you tell an insult-type joke and the other person becomes angry, it is solid evidence that the person has a particular set of undesirable personality traits, such as insecurity or uncontrolled aggressiveness. If the other person doesn't understand the joke, assuming an absence of cultural differences, it's evidence of mental inflexibility or low intelligence that would make friendship too challenging. These are all important things to know.
Humor is also used to adjudicate social status, which as we all know is important in mate selection.
Humor between males and females, which Smith thinks that women are so forbearing about, is quite different. Males use humor primarily to test females, and females communicate a lot of information in how they respond. For instance, sincere laughter, especially in response to a weak joke, communicates possible romantic interest. Phony laughter is a polite way of communicating disinterest. Taking offense, especially when the listener deliberately misinterprets the joke in order to become offended, is a sign that the female is a “Karen” and not worth bothering with.
In surveys, females typically rate “sense of humor,” by which they mean verbal agility, confidence, and adaptive responses to setbacks, as an important criterion for selecting a mate. In my experience it is much more common for a female to demand that we tell them a joke than for a female to offer one. Cosmo, or whatever they read nowadays, is probably brimming with witty jokes; on those rare occasions when a female tells one, it's taken as a sign that they feel well at ease.
Nonetheless, males interpret “sense of humor” as a negative demand: the female wants to ensure that the male can hold his own against verbal attacks from others that challenge his status, from which the female gains by association. But a female with a sharp sense of humor, especially a non-PC one, is regarded as being non-conformist—which, despite the stereotype of men supposedly liking dumb women, increases her desirability.
There's nothing demeaning or sexist about any of this; it is well established that these differences are biologically programmed behaviors that serve a critical purpose in human survival.
Females also sometimes find an excuse to grab a male's upper arm in order to measure the strength of his biceps, the obvious purpose being to gauge his physical strength. Woe to any man who attempts a similar measurement of a woman. We must be content with doing complex three-dimensional calculations based on visual input in our superior brains.
Likewise, most everything a female does or says is in some ways a test. A lady will show up with an “interesting puzzle” to see if we can solve it. When we do, she acts impressed, indicating that the puzzle was in fact her idea of an IQ test, though perhaps a bit obvious.
One female scientist of my acquaintance once told me about a male co-worker who, decades earlier, had made a weird joke in her presence. I knew this guy well, and he often made weird jokes. Most of us just saw it as a personality quirk, but the female nurtured a seething hatred for this guy that she maintains to this day.
This same lady once invented and patented some household gadget and asked for suggestions on what to put on the packaging. I suggested “Do not eat”, which I still think was hilarious. She, on the other hand, made no secret about being offended. It was obvious that she had zero sense of humor; yet telling her so would have elicited only indignation and rage. Given the universities' unskeptical and patronizing acceptance of any complaints from women, the prudent course for a male is to assume, as a matter of self-defense, that the female lacks a sense of humor until proven otherwise.
Emotions
Smith also asks:
Haven't we been told that being honest about sex differences is wilful cruelty?
Yes, we all have. But again, it is not men telling people this. Indeed, when female psychologists (which is to say, all of them) accuse us of being alexithymic and out of touch with our emotions, it is really just another test. Every guy knows that when a woman says she wants us to be more emotional, it is, as the Civil Defense Announcements used to say, only a test. Should a male ever shed tears or demonstrate any other sign of weakness, he will have failed and the female gets “the ick” and heads back to her usual haunt at the exit gate of the local state pen to find somebody stronger.
Males are trained (again, mainly by women) to deny it, but the sexual urge is really the urge to produce children. Not caring about children is ruthlessly enforced by women, even though it goes against every protective instinct that we have.
One time a little girl came up to me at work crying, asking for help because she was lost. I knew all that needed to happen to ruin my life was for the parent to make a false accusation, and it was clear that many women were eager to do so. But I helped the little girl anyway, telling her to follow me back into the building toward the elevators. As soon as she found the parent, I disappeared into the crowd.
In general, thanks to feminists who see rapists around every corner, helping a child in trouble has been extremely risky behavior for males for several decades. There may come a time when women bitterly regret this.
Yet any human, male or female, who voluntarily decides not to have children will eventually pay a terrible price. Nature has ways of exacting terrible revenge on those who don't do what it wants. Those women who forego childbirth for their careers will suffer as much as men do, if not more, when the only time they get to see children is for a few precious seconds each Halloween. No number of cats will save them.
Men and women should be on the same side of these issues. It does no one any good to incite hostility between the sexes. My sympathy is with those few feminists, now mostly silent, who once said things like “We're in this together” and “This male-blaming must stop” and meant it. Whatever happened to them? Did they become conformist to benefit their careers or were they forcibly silenced? I miss them.
* Credit for this one belongs to college kids.
** For instance, on Fridays between 7 and 7:30, when the phone rings and I'm not around you must say “This is equivalent to saying—the world of sense has no absolute quantity, but the empirical regress (through which alone the world of sense is presented to us on the side of its conditions) rests upon a rule, which requires it to proceed from every member of the series—as conditioned to one still more remote (whether through personal experience, or by means of history, or the chain of cause and effect), and not to cease at any point in this extension of the possible empirical employment of the understanding. [p. 294, op. cit.] is not here.”
nov 08 2023, 9:39 am
