Human nature - the status of a sexist

It’s easy to read too much about issues you care about. You already know your opinion and the constant repetition from yet another author echoing the truth might make you feel validated and supported, but it doesn’t help much. You should read about tangential aspects of it, or entirely new subjects. I hope that this will be one or the other for everyone, about sexism and bullying. But for me, it’s a repeat, building on things I’ve written and said before. Sometimes I just need to get things off my mind and lay them out clearly.

              This link  (https://lithub.com/power-walking/?single=true) is an excellent description of how harassment distorts women’s lives, and often their self-perception. I want to list a few points she makes.

1.       She notes how harrassers always have an answer to any sort of retort. For example, ‘the woman who complains may well find herself being told she should be flattered, that she is lucky men find her attractive’. Later on she describes a couple of occasions when her amusing put-downs simply elicited violence: if the verbal assault failed them, harrassers resorted to another form of power.

Most feminist writers regard this as the entirety of the situation: verbal abuse is a reminder of male power and male violence even when physical violence isn’t explicitly threatened. That’s undoubtedly women’s experience of it. It doesn’t need a large proportion of any recurring event to turn bad for the human brain to learn the association. This is true for many forms of abuse.

‘If you tell them to leave you alone they will call you a bitch and ask you who *** **** you think you are. Every encounter, however seemingly benign, contains the possibility of violence. By the time it is over (you have entered a shop or a subway), your breath is coming quickly and your heart slamming against your ribcage. Why do men do this? Nobody asks the question and when I ask, I don’t get an answer… Women are taught not to answer back, for if we do we will escalate matters and then—the subtext—whatever follows will be our own fault.’

In all this she focusses on sexist harassment, linking it to racist harassment. A quotation from an academic called Helen Moffett is very informative: ‘Under apartheid, the dominant group used methods of regulating blacks and reminding them of their subordinate status that permeated not just public and political spaces, but also private and domestic spaces. Today it is gender rankings that are maintained and women that are regulated. This is largely done through sexual violence, in a national project in which it is quite possible that many men are buying into the notion that in enacting intimate violence on women, they are performing a necessary work of social stabilization.’

She even tells a story of a gay friend who stood up for her once, because ‘he grew up having much the same fight on the streets: the sexual insults, the shouted provocations. As a gay man he had learned to stand up to bullies’.

Bullies. That’s the word that stories of sexual harassment always remind me of. I’m a heterosexual male. On those rare occasions I’ve experienced behaviour that would be sexual harassment for a woman, I’ve found it a delightful change from the haughty disinterest and aloof asexuality that most women project. More on that later. But I do know bullying. I lived it for half my life and have spent a lot of time reliving it and pondering it.

              Let’s return to a few other things that stand out about sexual harassment.

2.       Men take particular delight in harassing attractive or seemingly successful woman. Women are verbally stripped; the words might be about their bodies, but it is their dignity that is stripped from them. Those who might have the most status, of any sort, are the juiciest targets. The article above gives a nice example of builders she got to observe: ‘The men were intent on denigrating what they could not possess’.

She also quotes an academic called Helen Moffett: ‘Under apartheid, the dominant group used methods of regulating blacks and reminding them of their subordinate status that permeated not just public and political spaces, but also private and domestic spaces. Today it is gender rankings that are maintained and women that are regulated. This is largely done through sexual violence, in a national project in which it is quite possible that many men are buying into the notion that in enacting intimate violence on women, they are performing a necessary work of social stabilization.’

We’re getting somewhere. The same behaviours can apparently enforce either racist or sexist distinctions. They’re not intrinsic to sexism. Other insightful people have noticed how these behaviours are similar in another situation in which one group is enforcing power over another. Let’s have another quotation:

3.       ‘In London men view street harassment as an equal opportunities occupation. I’ve endured sexually aggressive behavior from men of every color and class. In New York I am rarely publicly bothered by white men. How to account for the difference? In America the edges of racial politics are sharper and more bloodied...’

Maybe America’s history of a racial divide means that white men don’t feel any need to ‘enforce’ power over black women? The gulf is so great that there is no status that they can steal from black women; they lose more by even engaging in that way. I don’t know. It’s a suggestion.

              Before moving on, let’s remember that black women in Sierra Leone apparently experience less of this. Men are men the world over, but in Sierra Leone women have more respect and harassment is less, even though men are the same. Why do men abuse women on the streets?

              The reason I love the article I’ve constantly quoting is that it works through these stages of thought without me needing to dig up multiple references. Right at the end she gives us yet another clue when describing who gives way to whom on the streets: white women defer to white men; a far eastern man is pushed aside by white men; an old white man is pushed aside by a younger one.

              That might imply that white men are the problem. After all, that’s the conclusion of many feminists. Male violence, or white male violence. They reject the way that women are blamed for bringing it on themselves and sling the mud right back. It’s not that all women are inferior, it’s that all white men are privileged. Job done. Conclusion confirmed, yet again. We just need men to be nicer to women.

But not really. There are strands of thought we haven’t wrapped up. There are untidy, niggling little problems with this neat solution. Like any good scientist, or like a detective in a mystery, we should pursue those loose ends. Sometimes the obvious answer isn’t the answer.

             

              Let’s look at a different article. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/19/girls-miserable-free-happy-male-violence

It’s another recent one, and again, although I think it’s a great example for this purpose, I am sure that there have been hundreds like it.

              Suzanne Moore was inspired to write it by a survey done by Girl Guiding that found how unhappy young girls are. Girl Guiding might legitimately focus on girls, but most of Ms Moore’s explanations apply to all children and young adults. Social media makes everything worse, and girls spend a lot of time on social media. Why do they use such an awful thing? Her conclusion, more a reminder of a known fact than a conclusion of an argument, is ‘Girls do not feel safe in the outside world. Let’s name why: male violence’.

              Neat, huh? Physical violence outside forces people inside to the mental violence of social media, where people’s emotions are toyed with instead. It’s a clever little link in the story of female oppression. As with the last article (although much faster, as it’s a mass media article, not a blog post), we’ve reached a seemingly plausible solution. But there are those niggles again.

If girls are subject to this enormous pressure to overuse social media, why is the suicide rate higher for boys? What is ‘male violence’ anyway: is it male violence when a white woman expects a black woman to give way in the street?

Suzanne Moore quotes some song lyrics. I love the song.

“And those of us with ravaged faces/lacking in the social graces/Desperately remained at home/inventing lovers on the phone … it isn’t all it seems at 17.”

The song is sung by a woman, but those lines don’t refer to girls. They’re about ‘us’. There are young boys out there who don’t have the steroid-fuelled bodies of famous actors whose job it is to go the gym half the day. They are awkward, shy and bullied mercilessly. Is it male violence when a gaggle of teenage girls insults a loser nerd? Some feminists might say that it is: that the girls have learned ‘male’ ways of behaving in order to fit into patriarchy.

That’s semantics to me. If we define nasty things as ‘male’, then yes, even women doing nasty things doesn’t undo the definition. But this is bullying. It’s universal.

Harassers pick on women who have some sort of status that they find unobtainable. They try to bring down those who are highest. Bullies pick on clever children, or children with loving parents; children who have something they don’t; which translates to status (remember that even things have status signals, so why not situations like having loving parents?).

Harassers have an answer to everything. Abusers always have a way to turn debate and discourse back on the victim. Bullies also have stock lines; prepared responses that range from verbal comebacks to physical aggression.

You can make more connections yourself. I hope that’s convincing enough to make you think that bullying, harassment and even relationship abuse are similar enough that we should at least consider the hypothesis that they are all powered by some deeper aspect of human psychology. I don’t think we can call it male violence. That’s a surface appearance, and if we want to understand, confront and overcome it, we need to go to the root of the problem.

What is bullying? I’m not an academic, or even an amateur psychologist. But it seemed to me for the years I experienced it that it was about status. It’s about regulating a hierarchy. That’s familiar language… Remember that quotation from Helen Moffatt? Harassment reminded blacks of their subordinate status under apartheid, and now it is used to maintain gender rankings.

We all probably know that the people most likely to be bullies are those who experience mistreatment themselves. It’s such a widely-known factoid that victims are urged to sympathize with their tormentors. The Simpsons gave Nelson Muntz a bad home life decades ago in recognition of this finding about bullies.

What bullying does is put down others. If you are bullied at home, you’ve been put down. You’ll need to regain that lost status somewhere. Strange that that’s how status works. Of course, if you’re built up too much at home then you’ll have no regard for others either. We can all imagine that: some rich boy told that he’ll inherit the earth and who understands that no-one else matters as much, if at all, to the planet, himself or God. Not that he thinks those last two are very different. He idolizes abusive leaders who act like God.

That’s one way of creating toxic behaviour: it is privilege. The semi-conscious, vaguely malevolent bullying of others isn’t privilege. It’s behaviour that we can class as sexism, and because we can ascribe a lot of sexist outcomes to privilege, it’s easy to overlook the differences. Bullying is bullying. Status, hierarchy and power are linked to privilege, but scrambling for them is almost an admission that one doesn’t have enough privilege, not a demonstration of it.

Let’s return to why bullied people are bullies. Why does a bad relationship in one part of your life mean that you need to pass on that badness? Well, we seem to treat status as a physical thing that we have a store of. When someone takes it, you have less. If you can’t take it back off your family, you take it from peers outside the family. Why would we do something so unjust and immoral? Why do people ‘act out’, venting anger or sadness on those who haven’t caused it?

It’s not a conscious decision. We need neurobiology. Again, I’m not an expert. I have merely encountered some of the findings in this area. I did study metabolic physiology for my doctorate, however, so I can at least understand the jargon.

We measure our status in the brain; a little subconscious unit is watching our sensory inputs for status signals. That’s not just direct communication, but subtle signals from others, or for status associated with objects. We can imagine that every action and item has its own rating. These ratings are signaled in the brain as pleasure or pain. People have shown that social rejection lights up the same parts of the brain that signal physical pain.

We have a need for pleasure. This feedback system can be hijacked by drugs, but in general, if we’re not getting enough pleasure from all the brain circuits that create a pleasure output (food, water, sex, status, exercise, friendship…) then we seek something to top up our stimulation. Many of these things have their own special signals and hormones as well, so it’s hard to replace hunger with sex, for example. But they all feed into the same general gauge of happiness. So if you’re feeling rejected, you might not be hungry, but some serotonin-releasing chocolate might blunt the pain. Or if you have no status in society, some crack cocaine might feel good. If you know you’re a vile little worm inside and not worthy of respect or status, your status centre might be a bit short of pleasure and you might get a kick out of making someone else feel even more worthless.

It doesn’t matter if the person is a stranger: although we get more of an effect from those we respect and admire, our brain responds to anyone. You could tell a nice evolutionary story about evolving for small social groups in which everyone mattered, but you don’t need that story to understand the point. Telling people to ignore what others say doesn’t work. It’s hard-wired into our biology to notice and have neurotransmitter and hormonal responses to them. Women can’t just ignore male harassers. Victims of any bullying can’t just ‘rise above’ it.

We know that from crayfish to chimpanzees those who feel dominant have physiological changes. They have more serotonin signalling in the brain, which makes them feel happier in general. Males have more testosterone. We know that status affects development. We know that perceived l;ow status causes stress and pain. Stress and pain are also universal signals: that the stress hormone, cortisol, directly influences obesity, heart disease, over-eating and is possibly the central puzzle piece of depression.

These are powerful intellectual reasons to avoid being on the bottom of the heap. But no-one’s doing it that consciously. It’s just an itch people have, and being barbaric to other people scratches that itch. I’ve laid bare the mechanism (and perhaps taken its dignity too?).

The acronym ‘SCARF’ seems to be gaining popularity amongst psychologists. It stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. These are the things that some psychologists think contribute to fulfilment. I’ve used the word ‘status’ so far, but that’s just an easy-to-grasp part of the larger, more nebulous concept of what our brains are wired to value. Abuse can hurt people by attacking any of these pillars of contentment. I happen to care a lot about fairness, both individually and societally. But a lot of abuse and torture achieves a lot of its power from the lack of certainty. We talk about keeping people in suspense; not knowing what ill come next. This isn’t just nervous people being silly. It’s another hard-wired part of our brains. Suspense is only nice in otherwise comfortable situations when it can challenge the pattern-spotting parts of our brains without causing pain to our status-monitoring parts.

This brief foray into the links between biology and society inevitably leads us to even more loose ends that are tied into subjects we’ve covered. Why might poor people be unhealthier? We might have the inkling of a biological answer now. But you can chase those ideas up yourself… or maybe I will another time.

Let’s return to status interactions. You only get your drug-like hit of status when you perceive that you’ve enforced dominance in some way. If the other person isn’t submissive, you don’t get to steal their happiness. So if you get a biting answer back that shows you up for the brute animal you are, you respond with aggression, just like a brute animal would. You enforce the theft any way you can.

But, perhaps, some little part of your mind knows it was a mean thing to do. You feel a little lesser as a person: nasty and mean. You don’t respect yourself as much, and that distorts your perceptions of status. Little things that would mean nothing to people comfortable with themselves look like others have noticed how terrible you really are. You are sensitive, anxious and you bully others to get at least some happiness in your life. For some bullies it might be conscious; for others, it might be all they know of life, so much a part of them, their world and their behaviour that they can’t imagine anything different. There will be a spectrum of awareness.

              There are all sorts of addenda we could add that help explain other observations. Men are more sensitive to status signals. Society makes everyone feel low-status through advertising: things are given status by good advertising but not having them makes people feel bad. Very few people are high-status in a functional modern economy: the whole point of advertising is to steal a person’s happiness in order to make people buy the product that stole it.

That brings us onto wider examples of status warfare. Not only are our economic and social worlds governed by status concerns, but our political one. Successful politicians are those who put others down. British parliamentary ‘debate’ and politicians’ media appearances are not discussions of ideas, but opportunities to steal status with minor witticisms and mudslinging. They are adult bullying, but where the victims get voted out.

Although people used to pretend it was about ideas and truth, it’s not. That’s why we get articles such as this one:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/

This makes the case that politics in Poland, and across the western world, has been taken over by people who value loyalty over truth. The author ponders whether people know they won’t get power in meritocracy, but it’s at least partly about status. As our societies take status from people with more and more advertising and more and more inequality, they become more macho, aggressive and anxious about status. The rise of inequality has turned enough people into bullies that it has changed politics. Loyalty to the group is more important than truth; displaying that loyalty gets support from others, which translates into hits of pleasure that are good even if that support is just online comments. Loyalty to a lie is easier for most people than having the intelligence to advance the truth. Relying on loyalty is more democratic than talent and truth. It spreads political status around to make up for the way our economies have stolen it. Anyone can be loyal.

Solutions

My solution to bullying was a solution that doesn’t always work. I beat them up when they attacked me, and attained some measure of status that way. We needn’t go into details (again), but my early schooling was miserable, saved by fear. And when I moved away from home, to university, it was very hard to adjust. I missed the status I had had; my responses in social situations were inappropriate, and it was only after a couple of years that I became, in a remarkably apt phrase, a ‘well-adjusted’ man. And yet at times I still miss meting out justice myself; returning pain direct to sender, with interest. I still cringe inside with a mixture of anger and anxiety when I hear people laughing but I don't know the joke; I can't forget the times when I was the joke. I don't think this counts as a privileged life unsullied by hardship (although I'm aware that in most other ways I have had a nice life); I don't think that being bullied for any reason is inherently less of a problem than for another reason. It's the bullying and discrimination that matters.

In the adult world we still get abused, but there’s no recourse. The abuse is distant and thoughtless, and if it’s social unpleasantness then there’s nothing that can be done about it; the law doesn’t care, and there’s no set of more adult people commanding others to be nice, or fair. There are many people who lack that feeling of status that humans crave, and who are maladjusted to adult, civilized life, just as I was.

You can’t unlearn a yearning for status that is built into your biology, and you can’t quickly discard the tribalism that acts as a crutch for the crippling need that burdens you. In order to cure our deteriorating public discourse we need people to have other sources of status than tribes; we must take away their need for the crutch, and the crutch will, hopefully, fall away.

We need to plan towns and cities around building communities. We need thoughtful architecture, not isolated flats with isolating corridors that make people fearfully rush home; and not what affordable housing there is hidden with a back entrance.  We need jobs that value people, not which pay minimum wage and treat them as disobedient robots, and which people then value. We need people to have the time to engage in social and evening activities to build their community without feeling that they should be working long hours to keep their job; we need to destroy the culture of long hours.

There are many other things you’ll think of yourself, perhaps with the help of SCARF, but those were just a few solutions to show that they exist. It took me 2 years to learn that I couldn’t recreate and rely on fear as my source of status. It will take others as long to forget about their need for bullying, whatever form that takes.

When researchers give rats opium water, the rats rapidly end up drinking opium water to the exclusion of all else, killing themselves. Unless, that is, they have large cages filled with nice things to explore and play with, when they take opium water rarely. Opium use was extensive amongst Vietnam soldiers, but many managed to give up when they returned to nice lives back in the USA.

Bullying is just another addiction, like any other. Some people find their status in putting down women; others in putting down other races. Some find it in putting down other social campaigners, vying for greater purity or well-meaningness. Society doesn’t have just a sexism issue, or a bit of a racist issue as well. These are just common outlets for humanity’s overwhelming need to get their status hits. If we take one away, they’ll find another.

We need to give people nice lives, and as with all addictions, they’ll then find less need to spiral into disaster. We must make them forget about bullying because they don’t need it any more; we can’t persuade them out of their addiction, nor bully them away from it. Once people have forgotten, then we’ll have helped cure all forms of discrimination, all at once. Isn’t that an aspiration worth pursuing?