I want to return to a previous post where I linked to and commented on a YouTube video of an 8th grader mercilessly documenting her best friend's libidinous ways, all while the friend begs her to stop and chases after her when that doesn't work. This is the familiar pattern of girls sabotaging their so-called sisters to get ahead.
Yet several commenters argued that the teaser was only acting under the influence of the patriarchal norms that she'd internalized -- if they were reared under a matriarchy, teenage girls would not act so savagely toward one another.
But let's get real.
This girl just so happens to police the sexuality of other females exactly at the time when she herself has a selfish motive to do so -- to keep them from competing with her for boys, from dragging down standards, and so on.
Think it through: if females policed others due to social brainwashing, it would show up in their behavior early on. Even by the end of elementary school, kids have absorbed most parts of culture that are not innate -- the ambient language, looking both ways before crossing the street, saying please and thank you, etc.
And yet elementary school girls don't harangue females of any age about their sexuality -- at all. They only start doing this after puberty.
Under the "social brainwashing" hypothesis, the perfect coincidence between policing and puberty is completely unaccounted for. Under the "advancing her own interests" hypothesis, it makes perfect sense. We conclude that girls tearing into other girls for acting slutty, once puberty begins, is as genetically pre-programmed as boys acting violently toward each other to attain top dog status.
File another Women's Studies theory under "so wrong a high schooler could figure it out."
I have no theory or no proof for my agreement to your words.
ReplyDeleteAnd before I continue, I have seen cases where men policy female sexuality, and this mostly has been in small communities, or small distant towns.
My agreement to your post comes from a simple logical induction:
-Not all women are promiscuous.
-But all women assume the "cant get laid" is an insult to a man's being.
-Thus I assume that for all women, their sexuality is kind of a trophy.
-From this I get that women see a man getting laid with a woman not too low from his level as a success.(note 1)
-Also from the "trophy" conclusion, it makes sense that a trophy has value, whose value has to be kept high.
-the higher the perceived value of the trophy, the more women will get out of "granting the trophy"
-The value is raised by raising demand, and artificially lowering supply
-A woman giving a trophy to many men will lower the asking price for the other women. (note 2)
-Promiscuity during non-committed period is regulated by women to prevent the perceived value of female sexuality from dropping.
I come to this conclusion by a simple logical pathway.
Now to the notes,
Note 1: I said:
From this I get that women see a man getting laid with a woman not too low from his level as a success.
I have seen this mentality in promiscuous women, as well as non-promiscuous ones.
The funny part for me is this attitude in the promiscuous women.
They fail to see the irony in: Deeming a man successful if he gets laid vs finding more men worthy of success (by sleeping with them) compared to their non-promiscuous peers.
A promiscuous woman insulting a man by "he cant get laid", is immediately insulting herself by declaring that she has found many men worthy of her sexuality, i.e. slut.
And for me, this insult, "he cant get laid", is the biggest building block of my peace with the slut vs stud standard.
Note 2.
A woman giving a trophy to many men will lower the asking price for the other women.
Actually, in an environment where women bang around, the few women will have a much higher asking price for commitment, due to men's inclination toward chaste (or almost chaste) women for long term commitment.
The reason that this is not taken into account by women is that in an unregulated environment, most women will slut it around, including the regulators, and leave the attractive&chaste (the same woman) ones in the minority, and minority never has interested women.
So you have to keep the majority chaste to make this law worth the effort.
One thing regulation does is to keep the value of casual sex higher.
What sexuality is there to police when a girl is in elementary school. Most 5th graders are not putting out, or even making out. Those very few that are, and if widely known, are surely mercilessly mocked by their peers as their older cohorts.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly enough, teen guys don't like it either. They may like the girl doing whatever to them, that night, but after the sun rises, will make fun of her as much as any of her other teenaged girlfriends. Which should be almost directly against his own interest, yet he still does it.
This very argument is made forcefully by Baumeister and Twenge in their paper "Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality".
ReplyDeleteWhat sexuality is there to police when a girl is in elementary school.
ReplyDeleteThere's the sexuality of all post-pubescent females. Like how if an elementary school girl saw a teenager or adult robbing, murdering, or doing something wrong, she'd recognize it and perhaps tell someone.
If patriarchy recruits females to police other females, they shouldn't police only those in their narrow age group -- that's a mystery in the patriarchy hypothesis, but perfectly explainable under the self-interested hypothesis.
This very argument is made forcefully by Baumeister and Twenge in their paper "Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality".
I think I linked to it in the previous thread, but yes, that lays out a lot of the detail here.
If patriarchy recruits females to police other females, they shouldn't police only those in their narrow age group -- that's a mystery in the patriarchy hypothesis, but perfectly explainable under the self-interested hypothesis.
ReplyDeleteWhat sexuality do elementary school-aged girls see to police. Their peers aren't behaving in a sexual manner. Those older than them may be sexually active in some way, but they normally aren't privy to such information. When they are, as in the case of an older, post-pubescent sister, they do tattle on them on a regular basis. But nascent displays of sexuality, like kissing boys and such, are routinely met with exclamations of "Gross!", or "slut!" amongst the elementary school crowd, so I don't think many here have observed young girls very much.
There's not just actual behavior, but also the way girls dress -- why don't elementary school girls give teenage girls with low-rise jeans that "omigod, who does she think she is?" sneer?
ReplyDeleteAgain, it's mostly girls in their own age group who give them a nasty look for wearing revealing clothing, lots of make-up, etc.
Agnostic,
ReplyDeleteYou recently made a comment on Ziel's "Lying Eyes" blog about NYT Blogger Judith Warner claiming men "hated" educated women was simply *really* about men not finding her (and her man-face) attractive.
So true! I didn't even think about that, but it should have been so obvious. Thats probably the primal motivating reason for half that chick's output.
Interesting that this post is about girls competing among one another. Goes seamlessly with another astute observation mined from a gnxp comment thread:
ReplyDelete"Goddamnit, teenage boys are not supposed to be able to relate to girls in a healthy way or any other way. We're programmed to compete against other males, and every once in awhile have a quick shag or accept marriage offers, again mostly ignoring whatever the wife does in the household while we go about our daily guyish business."
It is not, and never was, boys against the girls.
Feminist theories are nonsense.
This the article might be of interest:
ReplyDelete“Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality” by Baumeister & Twenge.
“Four theories about cultural suppression of female sexuality are evaluated. Data are reviewed on cross-cultural differences in power and sex ratios, reactions to the sexual revolution, direct restraining influences on adolescent and adult female sexuality, double standard patterns of sexual morality, female genital surgery, legal and religious restrictions on sex, prostitution and pornography, and sexual deception. The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.”
http://www.femininebeauty.info/suppression.pdf
Baumeister has many interesting articles published, worth a look.