And this is why I love Lois McMaster Bujold

[trixtah]

Apropos to a discussion on her mailing list regarding why yer typical male reader doesn't seem to enjoy "romance", Lois expounded on her Theory-in-Progress as to why that might be:

First, gender formation. Gender formation consists of a certain amount of biology overlain by a lot of culture.  In our culture, gender differentiation goes into high gear at puberty, and consists to a large extent of a process of deletion.  The individual ejects or suppresses aspects of him/her/self perceived as belonging to the other gender, and the resultant cripples are called "young men" or "young women".  Maturity, to an interesting extent, consists of people reclaiming a lot of these lost aspects to become more complete persons again.

(My itals) Isn't that bloody awesome? I'm in love (if I wasn't already).

Then there's this about status:

Status and status emergency.  Status seems to me under-examined as a biological (as contrasted with a social) motive.  It's necessarily a group thing; no one has status as a lone individual, as it is created relative to the group in which the individual is embedded.  ... Lack of status can really kill one, in any crunch situation.  (Lifeboats, starving villages, the hunt, etc. See _Lord of the Flies_)   So humans have a *biological* need for enough status to obtain whatever their personal threshold may be to feel safe.  ... When a person drops below their comfort zone of status, they are thrown into a state of status emergency or panic behavior (often bad or wildly disproportionate) sometimes having little relation to any actual physical threat (see any internet flame war.  And a lot of real wars.)

Which results in this kind of thing:

Combining these two, there are three arenas of status/gender struggle: man vs. man, woman vs. woman, man vs. woman.  All overlap and all are combined with equally urgent needs for various kinds of cooperation amongst the participants, so at this point it all sort of goes fractal.  But anyway.

In the post-puberty, not-yet-mature mode, the social model goes: girls attract guys by out-competing other women in attractiveness/status, the latter being defined as (million ways again) anything from beauty to owning more cows.

Guys attract girls by *competing with other guys* to obtain victory/wealth/status: girls then happen automatically, without the guy having to actually, like, talk to them or anything.  (See: trophy wives.)

Note that both genders are focusing on guys.

Problems happen when the girl has way more status than the guy, throwing him into possibly-unconscious status-emergency mode.  Problems also happen when the girl has *so* much less status, association with her saps the boy's status, ditto status-emergency for him.  In the puberty phase, when social enforcement of gender roles is in high gear, boys also lose status in the eyes of their very dangerous peers by association with anything "girly"; tomboys have similar troubles, if less directly lethal.  (But not always: see rl murder of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon, and about a gazillion other people who stepped outside of prescribed gender boundaries in an unsafe place.)  So guys have more directly visible status-motivation not to appear "girly" than girls do not to appear "tomboy", but the indirect pressure on the girls can be just as nasty.  (Many females do not read SF because they perceive it as a guy-genre, unwelcoming to them; many guys read it for the exact same reason.  Or rather, because the suspect sissy thing, reading a book, is redeemed by being strongly guy-associated.)

There follows more about "why guys don't read girlie romance" - and it's easy to see where Lois is heading here - but doesn't this Theory-in-Progress go way beyond that?

This kind of thing is why I regret not finishing a university degree. I wish I could think in that kind of way, and have the underpinning concepts to be able to construct a theory like that.

Comments

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

(Sorry for jumping all over your LJ like this, but, um, Bujold, construction of gender, how it interacts with status...how could I NOT?)

Note that both genders are focusing on guys.

??? *tilts head, squinches up eyebrows, concentrates*

Sorry, but I don't see that. The two parallel gender-specific sentences do appear in all important aspects to be exactly that...parallel. The precise choice of words differs, and the final clauses of the sentences don't exactly track, but ISTM that each of them can be boiled down to:

A attracts B by competing with other A's for status.

The final clauses, as noted, are not parallel, but if I may be allowed some indulgence I'll posit that in each case the conclusion is that "and the higher-status A's then attract B's more because of the status itself than because of any particular inherent quality of the A's" (this is more or less explicit in the "guys attract girls" example, but requiring rather more of a "leap of faith" in the "girls attract guys" example).

It is, as always, quite possible that I've thrown out the baby with the proverbial bathwater when I tweaked the statements to enhance their parallelism, but if so I'd muchly appreciate it if someone could point out where I went wrong.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

I don't think that that sentence was so much what Lois actually said in the previous statements, just a side note: "By the way, we should know that high-status boys are the beneficiaries of all this carry-on".

That assertion I tend to agree with (although there may be some exceptions), but Lois just didn't expand on it there. Perhaps because it's pretty self-evident, most of the time.

It's not so much As competing with other As for status so as to get Bs so much for boys, I think. Girls/women don't seem to compete for status as an end in itself as much as boys/men do. There are many many exceptions, of course, but it's pretty easy for a woman who seems to be all about gaining status to be tarred with the "dyke" brush, still. However, it's fine for a guy to be purely "success-orientated" without having to geneflect at the altar of "sacrificed (wo)manhood". High status men don't need to seduce their mates; I think the women still generally do.

</ insert standard disclaimer about <i>all men and all women not neatly falling into any categories defined>