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

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

Nicely put, but I would argue, along with a lot of other people, that gender differentiation goes into high gear an awful lot sooner than puberty. I also have to say that perceptions of sci-fi as male should take into account the massive changes in gendered reading habits over the last few years. I'm also deeply suspicious of any use of 'biological' needs in arguments over human behaviour.
I like the term 'deletion', though, and her ideas about maturity. Remind me, did you say you'd read any Judith Butler? (beer really helps!)

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Oh, lord yes, with the gender differentiation going on way before puberty. But I agree with the assertion that enforcement goes into high gear, and also that one's own consciousness of it increases at puberty. My mother bought me a Batman cape when I was about 7, and didn't bat an eye at my jumping out of trees shouting "Batman!" at random passers-by. The passers-by had some objections, tho'! :-) Cut to 5 years later, and the bitter bitter fights I had with my mother about wearing dresses/bras/sitting properly etc etc. I know that's just me, but I also know I wasn't the only one.

Children these days seem to be getting that intensive kind of conditioning earlier and earlier, but that may well have to do with increased sexualisation in the media.

As for the biological argument, I don't think Lois was prioritising that over social conditioning - just that it's an area which could do with some additional consideration. Of course, I can't be sure without asking, but she's definitely not of the biology = destiny school (except with regard to actual reproduction). Since her SF has the fairly significant plot device of "uterine replicators" for gestating babies, she's got some interesting notions along reproductive lines as well.

But, yeah, I can see how that statement could look suss - I've forgotten what dodgy theory of animal social organisation = human sociology theory (especially wrt polyamory) we're up to now. There are the wolves, or dogs. Chimps, or gorillas. Or bonobos. Oh yeah, the last one was deer (http://community.livejournal.com/dot_poly_snark/371720.html). Heh.

As for Judith Butler, alas, I haven't tried to read her when I have had sufficient beer. She's the "performativity as gender" chickie? (ah, just looked, yes). I wish someone would do a translation of her, because I find most of the theorists who derive some of their stuff from French academe write as if they're writing academic French. I haven't had the 4 years+ tertiary education to read her without rolling my eyes at her language, unfortunately (so too with Foucault, Derrida, et al, alas).

I think I know the broad outline of her ideas, and the influence she's had on gender (and queer) theory. I also think I agree with a lot of her conclusions (that we construct gender as a response to expectations, or "regulative discourse", I should say), but not all of them. I should probably try making my way though Undoing Gender, which is supposedly more digestible. Perhaps that's the translation I've been after. :-)

Thank you for the food-for-thought and I-should-read-more-of-this-stuff prodding! And yes, the idea of "deletion" with that connotation of reduction particularly appealed to me. So to with those ideas about maturity.

Speaking of maturity, one of my thoughts is that a community shows its maturity by an increased tolerance of deviance (as one also does in a personal sense by tolerating it in oneself). Know of any academic bods who addressed that one? I know Foucault went on about deviance and societal responses to it, but did he also discuss the conditions for greater acceptance?

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

The Batman cape is definitely better than what you might have received if your mother was ordering off the Discovery Science (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2006/12/science-is-fun.html) site.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell, that's disgusting. I don't know if it's just my perception, but I sense a real backlash going on for girls in some respects. Sure, it's cool to play soccer and go to Scouts. But make sure you always wear PINK and you always have to decorate yourself with kiddie makeup, and forget about learning about boring science stuff, because only nerdboys do that.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

And guess who's had a couple of glasses of wine this evening? Blah blah blah. Really, I should feel right at home with the French academics, given my level of verbosity! Pot, meet kettle.

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

Go, bebe. I would have been AT LEAST as bad, but my cold meds are knocking me in the wrong direction. Bah.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Eep. Hope you feel better soon, lovey.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

I'm also deeply suspicious of any use of 'biological' needs in arguments over human behaviour.

I note that elsewhere, Lois talks about "a certain amount of biology overlain by a lot of culture." She really does lean in the direction of "nurture" over "nature".

In this particular usage, I suspect she's casting about for a way to say "a need that is more fundamentally 'real' than the many completely-artificial social constructs of patriarchal capitalist Western society". "Instinctive" would probably be the term I'd've picked, though it, too, is problematic and I'm not entirely happy with it myself.

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

I see what you're saying, but any attempt to define a universal/innate/instinctive will always make me unhappy. It's all the damn wishy-washy cultural theory I wound up studying. It makes me a right fascist whenever someone pulls out the word 'real'! I would say that the completely-artificial social constructs you're talking about are no more real or unreal than any other cause for behaviour, and the same applies to 'biological' forces. Which are the stronger for any one individual, well, it depends.
I'm babbling. Ignore me.

[(Anonymous)]

I concede that my use of the word "real" is just as unsatisfactory as "instinctive". There's an I-think-valid concept that I'm trying to work with, but I don't seem to be able to come up with the right terminology. (All that damn cultural theory I *didn't* study, in my case....)