(original thread, Mar2023) Sometimes guys say “idk how to talk to girls” and the ladies respond (understandably, but unhelpfully) “you know girls are people, right…?” – this is an eg of cultural confusion. Because what the guy is conveying is “my model of people is overtrained on male-male interactions”
there are charitable and uncharitable ways to interpret each part of this; and for the whole thing to go well, every part needs to be interpreted by every agent at least semi-charitably. once someone thinks someone else is acting in bad-faith, it takes extra savvy to manage
uncharitable read of man: “I don’t think of women as people”
uncharitable read of woman: “your lack of training data & experience is a personal moral failure on your part”
I’d say ~95% of the time neither person means this, but low-trust environments makes people suspect it of others.
discourse around this stuff is tremendously focused disproportionately on the bad examples. someone might express a little frustration at the passing thought or felt sense of awkwardness in the negotiation, and then people who are Down Bad jump aboard and it gets sooo messy
sometimes it can be fun to substitute other examples, just to see how it feels and plays out. eg suppose a Singaporean says, “I don’t know how to talk to talk to Americans”. This feels unlikely in the general sense, because we are all trained on American media…
but I feel around for it and I’m like, oh, I don’t really know the norms around tipping. we don’t have that in our culture. does saying that I’m nervous about tipping suggest to anyone that I’m a bad/selfish person? to most sensible people, no, because obviously I’m an outsider…
there are some interesting practices in women/girl culture that some women might not realize is unique to women. A fun one I like to observe is the “sry I look like shit / no you look great!” ritual. There are dozens of little things like this that lots of people take for granted
bro equivalent is somewhat inverted, guy gets a black eye, his bros say “somehow this improved the countenance of your goofy McDonald’s lookin bugs bunny ass face” (idk I’m just riffing lol every friend group has a different vocabulary)
anyway my rec to men who don’t know how to talk to women is, as always, a cultural immersion in women’s media. Crazy Ex Girlfriend is a nice place to start, but obviously no one piece of media is ever definitive of 4 billion people, just as no movie or tv show explains all guys
and my rec to women who want to help dudes is to be gently curious. “What do you worry about getting wrong? What do you find confusing?” Etc. Some people call this emotional labor, which… I mean, sure- if u don’t wanna do it, u don’t have to. Nobody is obliged to help anybody
tangentially: there’s a useful concept called the Curse of Knowledge where some experts make for worse teachers than intermediates. because the experts have forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner, so they give really vague and confusing instructions, which can even be damaging
sometimes people do like to lord their knowledge over others like “wtf how do you not even know this basic thing”, which is… not great for a healthy public commons, which in turn is not great if we want more human flourishing
and yes, occasionally there is a malicious bad actor who’s down bad horrifically and is manipulatively “Just Asking Questions” with the intent of getting other people to perform for them
that’s sad but what’s sadder is when the mere presence of bad actors cause decent actors to be unfortunately-yet-understandably suspicious of each other.
✱
(og thread, may2020)
There are lots of guys who spend their formative social experiences in male-only or male-dominant spaces. This leads to a confusion where “being myself in public” gets conflated with “being myself around other dudes”, and it leads to misunderstanding and conflict. I’ll give an eg
I saw a nerdy infographic in a group chat recently, and my first impulse was to type “bro, nerdy infographics like this make my dick rock hard”. (I didn’t post it.) I’ve been thinking about that impulse. I think it’s a sort of bawdy male cameraderie move, like a sports ass slap
The sports ass slap actually is probably a useful analogy all the way through. Imagine a guy who only ever socializes by playing sports with other dudes, who all slap each other’s asses cheerfully and laugh. And the first time he interacts with a woman, he slaps her ass
There are lots of other versions of this sort of phenomena. Consider the social rules around swearing. When is it appropriate to swear? When is it not? There’s no centralised rulebook, but we all navigate it nevertheless, and mostly well most of the time
✱
✱
tbc. further reading: women’s perspectives are criminally underrepresented