The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Women: Is It Possible You’re Entirely Too Self-Conscious and Judgmental?

Posted on | December 11, 2013 | 61 Comments

Julie Eckert has written an article for Verily magazine called “The Care and Keeping of Online Personas” which is interesting in what it unwittingly conveys about the female worldview, namely their innate concern about courtesy, relationships and “popularity.”

This girlish concern for social status is something I’ve noticed since I was in elementary school. Among boys, social status is basically a matter of physical dominance: The big guys shove everybody else around, and if you’re not the biggest kid on the playground, your safety is dependent in large measure on having buddies, belonging to a gang of friends, being part of what is basically a self-defense league.

Male relationships therefore tend to be utilitarian alliances. You have your old buddies and best friends, but these friendships are absent a lot of the emotional fuss and bother that typify female friendships, because that kind of drama-queen act — the backstabbing and gossip and the “Mean Girls”-style cliqueish exclusion — would quickly be settled by physical violence among guys. Courtesy among men is basically a matter of (a) being careful not to piss off a stranger who might decide to kick your ass, and (b) being loyal to your friends, so you can count on having back-up if a fight does break out.

Female relationship are more complex and nuanced and inscrutable, and there’s always that whole “Pretty and Popular Club” thing: Keeping score of who’s friends with who, and who’s not friends with who, and did you see the hideous dress that slut Tiffany wore?

Please, ladies: Don’t give us guys any lectures about “equality,” as if we haven’t seen how you constantly scheme to enhance your own social status relative to other women, and as if we haven’t heard the workplace complaints of women about their female managers, who are in many case brutal tyrants to their female subordinates.

Anyway, Julie Eckert offers many excellent tips about maintaining decorum in the world of social media, but in a way that makes me ask: “Are women thinking way too hard about this stuff?” That is to say, have the real-life status games women play transferred themselves to the online world, where the related phenomena of judgmentalism (toward others) and self-consciousness (about how one is perceived by others) are now applied to social media?

“OMG! Did you see Tiffany’s new avatar? Isn’t it horrible? And did you see how she was tweeting to Josh? What a low-rent tramp!”

Realizing I’m at risk of sounding like Professor Henry Higgins — “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” — I also realize there’s no point trying to change human nature. Women are women.

Follow Julie Eckert on Twitter.

 

Category: Culture, Feminism

Comments

61 Responses to “Women: Is It Possible You’re Entirely Too Self-Conscious and Judgmental?”

  1. M. Thompson
    December 12th, 2013 @ 2:15 am

    Sounds like great fun!

  2. Alessandra
    December 12th, 2013 @ 2:19 am

    LOL

  3. Quartermaster
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:43 am

    The problem is that the US has never allowed Israel to do that. The closest they have been allowed to come was 1973, and Ivan stepped in and said they were going down to help the Arabs. Nixon put a stop to that.

    Israel had an Egyptian Army cut off in the Sinai and was moving in to destroy it when we stopped them.

  4. Quartermaster
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:46 am

    You win now and again. But it’s only when your brain has not been fogged by booze or drugs. You are correct about the progressive amendments, and they will never be repealed because the country doesn’t have the time left to it.

  5. Quartermaster
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:47 am

    They always get the girl in the end too, don’t they? I seem to remember the movies usually ended that way.

  6. Women: Is It Possible You’re Entirely Too Self-Conscious and Judgmental? | Dead Citizen's Rights Society
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:47 am

    […] Read the rest … […]

  7. richard mcenroe
    December 12th, 2013 @ 10:38 am

    All Presidents (except Edwards) elected on the women’s vote… and the women’s vote was the only reason Edwards was a candidate.

  8. ChelieinTX
    December 12th, 2013 @ 11:31 am

    And other women are the reason why I prefer to hang out with men. I’m not a “did you see what she’s wearing” kind of girl (although I care what I look like, I honestly only see what is GOOD about what other women are wearing); I’m not all about money (can’t take it with me!); I don’t REQUIRE a man to make my life fulfilled (I would love to help the right man fulfill his life). I’m odd like that. I have also learned that unless I cannot make it otherwise, I will never work with a woman as my manager again. They are catty, manipulative, paranoid witches.

  9. Quartermaster
    December 12th, 2013 @ 2:33 pm

    You prolly said that a time or two when you were, say, 8 yo. Yer daddy begged to disagree.

  10. Quartermaster
    December 12th, 2013 @ 2:33 pm

    And who she’s been with.

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    December 15th, 2013 @ 11:50 am

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