Women Want Safety, Men Want Respect
22[anonymous]
10lesswronguser123
6Sean Herrington
5Gordon Seidoh Worley
2lesswronguser123
4oligo
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
6Karl Krueger
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
5ZY
3Gordon Seidoh Worley
3ZY
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
1ZY
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
9ZY
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
0ZY
1Cole Wyeth
-1ZY
4Cole Wyeth
1ZY
2Cole Wyeth
1ZY
4Cole Wyeth
1ZY
3Cole Wyeth
4Gordon Seidoh Worley
4Cole Wyeth
3AnnaJo
1Gordon Seidoh Worley
New Comment
I (and my friends) might be more of a woman as per this criterion. lol. (for reference I happen to be part of the cluster which my society recognises as with the label "young men"; I am mostly neutral on most of these, and lean womanly on others)
Another young man here largely identified as a woman by many of these criteria. I'm not sure that the author's post generalises past their own experience, although I do agree with some of the statements as correct societal commentary.
1My rough guess is that about 20% of men give up on caring about respect. My best theory is that they don't think they can get it, so they stop putting effort into it, or seek it out only in very restricted ways that make "respect" stop feeling like the right word to describe what they're doing, like getting good at a video game that no one ever sees them play or cultivating a sense that they are secretly better than everyone else in a way no one can detect.
I'd be interested in more data about non-modal men.
I kind of want to have my cake and eat it too, it depends on situation context etc. I tend to desire both safety and respect, it also depends on the mood.
For additional data point: I am a man and generally care a lot about in-person social disapproval; it's probably my main motivation when there's another person in the room. I care much less about active adulation, and basically never even think about my own physical safety. I notice I am confused about whether this would count as "respect" or "safety."
If we decompose these into (social/physical) and (upside-focused/downside-focused), I note that in your (Gordon's) gendered examples above both stereotypically masculine and feminine behaviors have instances in the (downside-focused/social) quadrant, with very little in the (upside-focused/physical) quadrant (which makes sense, since there's closer to a hard ceiling there.) So maybe the original claim is best expressed that men are disproportionately attuned to (upside and downside) social outcomes and women are disproportionately attuned to (social and physical) downside outcomes.
For additional data point: I am a man and generally care a lot about in-person social disapproval; it's probably my main motivation when there's another person in the room. I care much less about active adulation, and basically never even think about my own physical safety. I notice I am confused about whether this would count as "respect" or "safety."
I'd say this is respect. If one is disapproved of, one is not respected.
This post's list of "stylized facts about men and women" left me feeling a bit nonbinary. Then I checked more carefully and — sure enough — of the thirteen items, for five of them I see myself as leaning strongly to the side described as masculine; five feminine; and for three, neither or both seemed to fit. (Both sides of the last one hit pretty hard.)
It turns out there are psychometric tests for this sort of thing, like the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Open Sex Role Inventory. People who also find themselves not very well described by the "men" or "women" stereotypes in this post might want to look into those.
On your point about feeling non-binary, I think there's broadly three ways men and women can adopt behaviors normally associated with the other sex.
First, just random variation that doesn't mean anything. This would be a good explanation if someone is mostly gender conforming and just as a few quirks.
Second, some kind of gender dysphoria. This might be a good explanation if someone feels deeply that they are the wrong sex.
Third (and why I wanted to leave this comment), adaptive response to trauma. That is, a person's life history may include some things where they were in a painful situation, possibly repeatedly, where the standard behavior for their sex was maladaptive and they identified that behavior as the source of pain, then swapped to the other sex's behavior in that situation and it made the pain go away, so they end up looking non-conforming but would actually be more modal if they healed their trauma.
I bring this up mostly because I can think of several ways I was less male behaving in the past and am more male behaving now and mostly what happened is that I dealt with a lot of psychological stuff I was hung up on, and once the hangups were gone, my behavior flipped to be more typically male because, in mind sight, I was avoiding some male coded behaviors out of fear and thus getting pulled towards the female attractor as an alternative. This may be true of some other readers, so might be helpful to know there's multiple possible causes of the same results from something like the inventories you link.
It is still not clear to me from this post how "safety" and "respect" are contradictory (edit to clarify - have trade-offs). Additionally these seems to be biased from certain experiences from the author and most claims are still clearly stereotypical to me (sorry), from non-trivial counter examples in my experience (for each explanation in the post). I also think people’s needs for certain things are mostly reactive to their experience/environment.[1]
- ^
As opposed to something biological.
You edited your comment into something I can more clearly reply to, so I retracted my original response. Thanks!
It's not unfair to think that I'm reasoning about stereotypes here because stereotypes often reflect common behavioral patterns. I didn't give must justifications because to me these patterns seem obvious.
I don't claim that they are universal patterns, though. Like all patterns, this is rather fuzzy. I offer something more like an 80/20 explanation of differences in male/female motivation. There will of course be counter examples because humans are complex systems that are difficult to predict, so at best I can point to the category of things we call "men" and "women" and talk about the behaviors that are frequently associated with them.
I mostly offer an evolutionary explanation (which is not strictly the same thing as a biological one) because I think it's the source of the difference. The full context of how someone meets the world obviously comes in to play here, though notably it'll be influenced heavily by the biological and cultural conditions created by evolutionary processes. This helps explain why there are so many counter examples: individuals have life histories that create many opportunities to introduce variation, though I think not so much variation that the pattern disappears and the theory holds no explanatory power.
Thanks for the answer! Appreciate you recognize these as stereotypes. I also may unconsciously believed that being more general is less rude than being more specific, but it creates more confusion. I have a couple levels of comments (if I accidentally posted this before finished, it could be an error as I was in and out between meetings.)
That is, men are more willing than women to trade off safety to earn respect and women are more willing than men to trade off respect to increase safety.
First of all, what I take as "safety" and "respect" do not belong to the same dimension. Respect is something everyone want and need, and it is independent of how much "safety" a person want. Any human without respect feels not a human. From your context, I would think by "respect" you probably meant something else as "validation" or "admiration" or even "authority"/"power". The safety-respect trade-off seems to be best along the lines of "risk-averse" vs "risk-taking".
To wit, women can only reproduce if they are alive.
...it helps to understand that women don't share their same strong drive for respect.
On above first quote: they can also kill themselves/the baby if they do not want to reproduce but was forced to. On the above second quote, it is a wrong claim to me, as women share the same strong drive for "respect".
Following from the previous paragraphs, with the new definition of "risk-averse" vs "risk-taking" - are there correlations with gender? That I am also not sure about based on my experience, and need to do some additional research and experiments. But what I know as a fact, is that there is no causal relationship. Therefore, I generally have problems with claims that could imply causal relationships. This will be enhancing bias and stereotypes about not only the opposite sex but your own sex/in yourself. It is almost how people enjoy constellation reading sometimes, where the more you read something about "your group and their associated traits", the more you try to fit to that description unconsciously, and the more you feel descriptions may be accurate. The causal factor here is - how is this person raised? This could also be quite situational, as opposed to a fixed preference.
I mostly offer an evolutionary explanation (which is not strictly the same thing as a biological one) because I think it's the source of the difference.
I agree with evolutionary explanation is different with biological explanation, but the source of that evolution seems still to be biological. And I personally believe that we as humans have developed far beyond our animal instincts, so evolutionary/biological arguments might not be a good source of explanation, though could be a side one, conditional on if it is explained properly (following up with how things have changed/humans have developed).
Further, it seems you are extrapolating this to dating context, which would be good to be separated out. Dating preferences is also quite different among people, at least those who have seriously explored themselves (as opposed to following what the societies impose on them).
It's not unfair to think that I'm reasoning about stereotypes here because stereotypes often reflect common behavioral patterns. I didn't give must justifications because to me these patterns seem obvious.
Reasoning about stereotypes and believing in certain stereotypes versus another could mean it is something about the person who is exhibiting the stereotypes, not necessarily the stereotyped group themselves (opinions vs truth). Overall, this also echoes back to avoid making simple/surface level claims.
Another layer is "want" vs "being forced to". Historically for example, women were not able to participate in lots of activities, and were educated to not take risks (though times have already changed with lots of efforts and reforms, that I hope is not going to be gone in a second given recent events). These are explicit and implicit restrictions societies has put on certain types of populations.
Finally, I have a ton of anecdotes to share on all points written above that may help understanding, but still debating on if I should.
There's a lot in your reply. I'll start a thread addressing just one point for now, and can come back to more later once we finish talking about this one (depending on my time and energy for doing that).
First of all, what I take as "safety" and "respect" do not belong to the same dimension. Respect is something everyone want and need, and it is independent of how much "safety" a person want. Any human without respect feels not a human. From your context, I would think by "respect" you probably meant something else as "validation" or "admiration" or even "authority"/"power". The safety-respect trade-off seems to be best along the lines of "risk-averse" vs "risk-taking".
All goals can be traded off against each other, even if they are not directly competing goals, because each person has finite resources (time, energy, etc.) to pursue them, so the tradeoff happens at the level of "how much time, energy, etc. am I going to put in to getting more safety, respect, etc.". And my claim is that men put more effort into getting respect than women, and women put more effort into getting safety.
Now sometimes there are direct tradeoffs, like @Cole Wyeth mentioned in this comment about UFC fights. In fact, men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect. Big game hunting was perhaps the original dangerous job for humans, as was war. In modern times men do things like risk their financial safety for a shot at high variance gains.
Women of course sometimes do these things, but on the whole men engage in more risk taking behavior that will help them earn respect than women do (men also show a general willingness to take more risks, but this doesn't make sense by itself unless there is something to gain, like respect, from risk taking).
Conversely, women take fewer risks and less seek respect. For example, more women work in professions than men where outsized gains are impossible but they can also expect steady employment. They won't get lots of respect as an individual as a nurse, paralegal, etc. (though they may be respect as a member of a group because the group is respected), but they will get a lot of safety in knowing they can always do the job. We also see similar patterns in how women seek mates (they mostly prefer men who are reliable to men who are taking big risks (which means women much prefer men who have taken risks in the past and already won to men who will continue to take risks and have no yet made it)), choose friends, pick vacations, etc.
1
1Yeah I have a lot (that's why in the first place I don't really know where to start.)
Now sometimes there are direct tradeoffs, like @Cole Wyeth mentioned in this comment about UFC fights. In fact, men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect. Big game hunting was perhaps the original dangerous job for humans, as was war. In modern times men do things like risk their financial safety for a shot at high variance gains
I have replied to this from the DM with Cole, and posted below. See the comment here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jhrWnxYkoZPxMZMj/women-want-safety-men-want-respect?commentId=TvjJd2gKfewbR6v8a
men frequently take on dangerous jobs because it earns them respect
Besides the definition that I disagree on respect, I also disagree even if that word is replaced by "validation". Whether people choose to do something according to social approval or not is independent of gender. The problem is what society consider as socially approvable behavior for certain groups. If as a society people approve men to be more prudent in taking risks, are you saying men still "want" to take risks? In other words the point I am getting at is, if for women, the socially approvable behavior is to take less risks, and for men the socially approvable behavior is to take more risks, then for a women and a men who choose to conform to these expectations, they are both asking for validation.
They won't get lots of respect as an individual as a nurse, paralegal, etc
To clarify: what you mean by individually nurse and paralegal are respected? You seem to have an assumption that more risks means more "respect" which is circling back to my disagreement on the definition.
All people, if they can, want to thrive, granted if they are able to. For example, RBG need to fight for a lot of cases where schools do not admit women, or west point do not admit women. "Want" is a way too strong of a word. I would suggest something more along the lines of "historically women may be forced to pursue more risk averse options for reasons xxxx during time period A to Z, and this need to change", if "women ending up in more risk averse options" is true for some time A to Z.
(I have a bit more to say as well but will probably come back to this later).
Besides the definition that I disagree on respect, I also disagree even if that word is replaced by "validation". Whether people choose to do something according to social approval or not is independent of gender. The problem is what society consider as socially approvable behavior for certain groups. If as a society people approve men to be more prudent in taking risks, are you saying men still "want" to take risks? In other words the point I am getting at is, if for women, the socially approvable behavior is to take less risks, and for men the socially approvable behavior is to take more risks, then for a women and a men who choose to conform to these expectations, they are both asking for validation.
Yes, it seems you have some idea about what "respect" means that's the source of the disagreement. I think you are somehow failing to grasp the full nature of respect and keep looking at it in narrow ways (or that's how I would classify what's happening).
It doesn't mean the same thing as "validation" because "validation" is more generic. A woman might be validated by the acceptance of her friends. A man might be validated by the respect he receives from others.
I'm not sure how much help I can be here. Dictionaries don't do a great job of explaining all the nuance of what the word "respect" means or what it means in the context of this post. It's a word that points to a kind of status acknowledgement between people. I didn't mean any of this to be complicated. If you are missing some intuition for what I mean by "respect" that's a bit outside the scope of what I wanted to write here (I'm not saying it's wrong to not share my intuition, just that I probably don't have time or energy to teach the intuition that most readers seem to share with me.).
I unfortunately had the same feeling that you had the concept of respect wrong, and lacking of the understanding of the underlying social aspect of risk averse vs risk taking in this post, and felt didn’t have enough time yet to educate. Sorry for the bluntness.
I could only maybe say - as a woman I could try to say is we want basic respect (which any decent human should get), impact, power, authority, influence, winning, fights, adventures, becoming better versions of oneself as much as non-woman, but if you as non-women and strongly believe that’s not true I am not sure how much better I could approach the problem/dispute. (As you hinted in the post you might be overestimating how much you know about the population you are making a claim on.)
Did you read the post? Your main point is addressed directly in the post.
I don't mean to be rude but I'm not sure how to respond other than copy and pasting the text here or saying the same words another way.
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]
Yes, I read the post (I should have clarified that), but was not convinced by the detailed claims, and how they support the overall claim/was not able to find my answers.
The questions you asked show a misunderstanding of the post, for instance the OP does not claim safety and respect are always in conflict.
So, in this case it’s kind of on you to be more concrete about what in the post you disagree with, or why the counter arguments which are already in the post do not sufficiently address your criticisms.
That is, men are more willing than women to trade off safety to earn respect and women are more willing than men to trade off respect to increase safety.
This quote in the post shows the implication. There were frankly also a lot of things to point out, but I should and will post a longer reply to the OP.
No it does not. There can be tradeoffs between things that are not inherently contradictory. For instance, houses and cars are not contradictory, but some people can only afford a house or can only afford a car, and therefore must choose, while others can afford both.
In the context of limited resources, they are contradictory with that resource. Usually only with limited resource, you need a preference/prioritization, or a need to point out that preference/prioritization, and differences between prioritizations (in this case women vs men).
Yeah, and what my point is, these two are not able to be prioritized, for the reason (roughly) "they usually are not or can not be constrained by the same resources/not in the same resource pool"
I don’t agree with that at all.
There are many ways to seek respect that compromise your safety, for instance fighting in the UFC.
Here is the answer that I replied in DM since I wasn't able to post, and the full history of conversation in DM upon Cole's consent, for audience of this post and comments. @Gordon Seidoh Worley I just saw your reply too! Will reply to yours once I got a second as well; but some of the answers could also be found below. The first part is immediate response to this example Cole provided.
Seems I cannot post the reply in 20hours, but here is the reply, and I will post it to the comment in 20h.
It is fine if you disagree.
I have three criticisms to the example.
First I do not consider this as “respect” seeking, but “validation”/winning seeking. (See my long reply for the difference). I also don’t consider this as safety but that gets more involved into physical vs mental.
Second, with the definition of winning/validation, this seems to be an out of context example with this post with weak general connection to general life. The context for this is a fighting game. Participation of the game signals a prior willing to take risks.
ZY 19h
Two criticisms* (grouped one of them together)
Cole Wyeth 18h
I think you’re mainly trying to dispute the way that the word respect is used. Yes, a basic level of respect is somewhat more about boundaries, and I would even say that at this level it is pretty closely connected to safety because it implies something like moral or legal or just agreed upon basic rights. But it seems to me that there can be greater or lesser degrees of respect, and the greater degrees look a lot like admiration / reputation for competence. Also, my reading of the post is that it is this higher degree of respect which the OP intended to talk about - or rather, the entire axis, including this higher degree. I’m not very interested in further debating the word choice.
And no, I don’t think the MMA example is too special. You could also consider mountain climbing or for many people military service. Really, any profession or pursuit that puts the self at significant physical risk (or for that matter, intense mental strain) seems to be disproportionately chosen among men. The major exception is probably pregnancy / childbirth, which is interesting (maybe that’s risk enough for many women!) but obviously this is also a risk that men cannot choose to take.
ZY 18h
I don’t see mountain climbing being disproportionally “chosen” by men. Nor military service. West Point only starting to even admit women since 1970s, not bc of ability or lack of demand, but more for discrimination, either policy wise or mentally enforced. https://warontherocks.com/2020/11/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-and-the-u-s-military/
There are many cases like this.
There is also “want” that I want to dispute for definition. A lot of things people ends up, or not what they “want” generally. The environmental factor, either explicitly or even implicitly, restricts on if people can get what they want.
Cole Wyeth 18h
I’m sorry, but I frankly can’t take seriously your assertion that women would be equally keen to enroll in the military if allowed. That is very clearly untrue - which is why, as far as I’m aware, there has never been any society in history with an equal number of men and women in the military. It seems very hard to believe that every society has conspired to prevent women from entering armed service. Can you produce any examples of nations which allowed women to serve, and then actually saw women enroll at similar rates to men?
Cole Wyeth 17h
As for mountain climbing, see this list of people who have climbed Everest multiple times for a basic sanity check: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mount_Everest_summiters_by_frequency
Cole Wyeth 17h
As you can see, the vast majority are men.
ZY 17h
Society need to adopt to the restrictions that was historically put on women, both explicit laws and discrimination/stereotypes.
Additionally, your comments does not address the want vs consequence part. Similarly, there are less female CEOs, or has less pay, but not bc they do not want to.
Cole Wyeth 6h
The idea that all of these differences are because of societal restrictions is just an assertion you are making. You attribute every difference across genders to “society.” Why do these differences then persist across all societies, across all times? That seems to beg for an explanation, and without providing one, you are only speculating, and perhaps choosing the explanation that seems most ideal to you.
Concretely, it also seems very unlikely in the case of Everest. Women (from, say, America) have about the same ability to climb (or at least, to attempt) Everest as men do, but we see much lower numbers. If this isn’t convincing to you, feel free to look into the number of attempts by sex (do you want to bet which way it will come out? I think we both already have the same guess). So there is no restriction here, but women still chose the dangerous activity less often. Do you really believe that somehow, the restrictions that were once placed on women 100 years ago are still preventing them from climbing Everest because they haven’t “adapted?” This does not seem to make any sense to me; I do not believe that.
But, even if we were to accept for a moment that women take less risks because they haven’t “adapted” to restrictions being removed - fine, that means they choose to take less risks, so the OP’s point stands. You’re simply asserting a different (and in my opinion, much less plausible) explanation.
ZY 5h
You could look up history in examples countries to see why it persists at all times, and maybe some news.
There are less free will, and more influence from environment, and maybe some psychology books help. Women, and all people want power, and are risk taking if their env allow them to, and when the env does not, and are stereotype enforcing, that’s when people are frustrated, have protests, and push for legal reforms.
ZY 5h
And by power I don’t mean power an abusive way, but to win, to take risks, and to achieve more, and to influence
Cole Wyeth 2h
You're just saying things without any supporting evidence or arguments.
I'm not going to continue this conversation.
ZY 1h
It is probably a few history/sociology sciences class as evidence, and also anecdotes that I am not comfortable sharing yet (sorry; and anecdotes to me creates more empathy than statistical evidence anyways, and may be biased which started the mess in the first place, though might be good counter examples to balance things out). I welcome you to study more of these in the future.
For Everest: https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/10-facts-about-everest-success-and-death-rates-based-on-scientific-data/ here are a lot of interesting facts; and I would also encourage you to read if you are interested. "Success", "respect", and "risk-taking" are all different words, and consequence does not imply intention.
Finally, as I mentioned yesterday, I would be posting my reply in this dm to your comment yesterday - are you comfortable with me posting our entire history including your turns as well (I wrote this on my page but I reached out first in dm)? If not I will remove your turns in this DM and only post mine.
Cole Wyeth 20m
Sure, you can copy paste everything, but regardless I am not going to engage on this topic further.
ZY 1m
Yeah, I understand; this is for audience of the comments/post.
Interestingly, lw is pretty male-dominated but seems mostly concerned with safety in a literal sense (e.g. X-risk) and generally views existing social-status games as irrelevant and damaging.
generally views existing social-status games as irrelevant and damaging
This is an interesting point worth looking at closer.
Rationalist culture does often make bids to reject traditional social games. This is a feature of most cultures that seek to establish particular norms. Such cultures replace standard social status games with other social status games, and rationalists try to make these games better by groundiung them in tracking something useful to us like truth.
For example, Less Wrong karma is a rather explicit social status game, even if it isn't intended to be. Lots of people try to ignore it or are mad about it (and sometimes they are mad because they don't have a lot of karma and feel that unjustly places them low in the status game karma measures), but high karma does tend to correlate with a kind of status. If you know nothing else about two Less Wrong users and one has 5000 karma and one has 100 karma you should correctly infer that the 5000 karma user has more status among Less Wrong users than the 100 karma user.
The less explicit games are about, say, who most people trust to be right and have good judgement. Some rationalists have earned a lot of respect because they say and write things people find useful or convincing and believe are true. This is itself also a social status game, though it's grounded in proving truth and one can lose status by being wrong, which is unlike a lot of social status games that are only grounded in social reality and are mostly popularity contests.
So I think it's wrong to say social status games are irrelevant or even damaging per se because, as I see it, they are just a fact of life for humans. The interesting question is, do we create status games that benefit us all, or do we create status games that let some exploit others. I see rationalists as trying to create better status games that more benefit everyone (other than, perhaps, those who would lose status if rationalists norms became more widespread).
yeah agreed. I got into a heated discussion with a friend about whether ghosting after a date was ok and my contention was that women sometimes ghost because they don't feel safe explicitly rejecting the guy, while his take was that ghosting is disrespectful and shouldn't be done.
Curated and popular this week