(A side note: the forces and qualities we’re about to discuss are masculine and feminine representationally, not specifically male or female. Within sexes there are extremes at either end, and a lot of overlap in the middle. But a big difference emerges in their cultures, the dominant and extreme examples of that type, and the existence of these cultures is perfectly explicable by statistics. Both men and women are heavily over-represented at the extremes of their endemic tendencies, and well-represented in the averages, and that’s what you notice, not the outliers.)
Men and women are adapted neurologically and emotionally to engage in this process. Women carry a higher threat response detection system, and men carry a higher threat system response system. Psychologically we characterize these qualities as neuroticism and aggression. Biologically they seem to be mediated by relative levels of sex hormones.
It is often hard to get men listen or to pay attention to or care about an issue. Much harder than it is to get women to listen or care. But once men do notice they will attempt to smash the problem. They don’t try to just listen to or understand it, they try to attack it, remove it, solve it, and confront it so that it will go away and the threat response alert will subside. The threat response system of women, that negative emotion, is actually much harder to understand and deal with for men, and is very stressful to them, so they maintain a fairly high barrier to it. And when they do listen to it their instinct is aggression, response, and enforcement. Deal with the problem and remove it.
So a lot of how society goes and what it does and is like, what the rules that govern it are, depends on a handful of things. First, how willing are the sexes to listen to each other the appropriately? Conversely, how willing are they to dismiss or misunderstand or mischaracterize or dismiss the concerns and strategies of the other sex? How willing and able are they to stand up to the other sex when it’s actually needed? And how do they negotiate that process?
Other factors that matter a lot are: first, how much license and purview is there for the use of aggression by men to solve problems? And in what way are they using it, and what systems exist to control and direct and properly make use of that instinct productively and not destructively? In other words, how well has the society harnessed and socialized and made proper use of masculine aggression?
Another thing that matters a lot is how the threat detection system of women is being heard and responded to, and what mechanisms exist for shaping or altering the way in which information is absorbed and alerts are generated. How well has the society harnessed and regulated and socialized a healthy version of feminine neuroticism? And there certainly is an unhealthy version of threat sensitivity. One where concerns about threats are too widespread or reactions to them are too extreme, resulting in overreaction, overstimulation, depression, paralysis, excessive fear. Both unregulated aggression and unregulated neuroticism can result in an authoritarian society.
Often when people talk about the feminizing of society or the masculinizing of society they are referring specifically to these two tendencies. The tendency toward negative emotions, and the tendency toward aggressive responses. There is a way in which you could get the worst of both worlds, where you have highly elevated threat sensitivity combined with highly aggressive responses. Those two together are kind of societal nightmare scenario, and disaster won’t be far behind.
At the same time, extremely low threat sensitivity combined with a lack of assertiveness and aggressiveness in confronting dangers is also a terribly dangerous combination, in a world where are genuine threats do exist. Too much and too little of both masculine and feminine tendencies are equally dangerous. Both societies are quite likely to destroy themselves or others, but in different ways.
The second, through a failure to see and a failure to care and a failure to act, and the first, through fearing too much and caring too much and doing too much. One imbalance pushes you toward an extreme of undifferentiated chaos and dissolution, while the other drives you toward excessive and tyrannical order and oppression.
The ideal balance of both exists in a proper relationship between the two, that makes use of the strengths and the failures of each self correct. The danger of excessive alert is mitigated by insensitivity and a higher threshold to responding to those alerts, and a higher potential for confrontation and action is mitigated by a higher sensitivity threshold. The danger of a tendency toward excessive alertness is mitigated by a lower potential for aggressive response, and the higher potential for aggressive response is mitigated by the lower potential for excessive alert.
Locating both tendencies at the same time in a single person, or a single group, uniformly is pathway to the recipe for disaster I already outlined. By maintaining both separately in tension with one another, you create a balance that makes use of the strengths of both, while mitigating the weaknesses of both.
Anyway, the true problem is that they aren’t really meant to work in isolation from one another. They are meant to work in concert. Each is tuned biologically and psychologically for optimization in specific circumstances. But those circumstances themselves are not the limit of life or its demands. And it is possible for manipulation of those circumstances, either through accidents of history or by structures of design or through technology, to cause unintended consequences and distortions in how they work.
For example, an instinct that is tuned to be useful in one circumstance may be misleading or problematic in another. Aggression and lack of sensitivity that can be useful in dealing with external threats and problems in an unstructured environment may not be as useful when it’s used internally in more intimate and structured environment. At the same time,a heightened sensitivity to threats that is tuned very well for an internal and highly structured intimate environment might prove to be excessive and give distorted results when its object is extended to a wide and varied and wild unstructured external environment.
Neither is exactly right or wrong. Both sensitivity and insensitivity can be a problem. And aggression and lack of aggression can be a problem. Because, you genuinely don’t know which is required or how much of each is needed in the vast variety of circumstances that life is going to provide. That’s why we’ve got both, and why both are balanced in a fundamental tension.
If you try to just resolve or remove that tension, you’ll break the system. Each one needs its limitations, its safeguards, its antagonistic opposite. You cannot simply endorse one or the other. They both need to be operating in concert with one another, with an understanding that each is tuned for a specific purpose and set of circumstances where it will operate optimally.
That doesn’t mean you can’t take them into differing and opposing circumstances, in fact you’ll likely have to. Life will require and demand you to set foot outside realms that your natural biological and psychological makeup isn’t tuned for. That’s normal. The important thing is to be aware of the full toolset so you can, at minimum, be self-aware and do some self-correction of your natural instincts. That doesn’t mean suppression, it means adaptation. Aggression that might be useful in confronting one set of circumstances will need to learn to adjust and tune itself properly to work as it should in another set.
The dangers of an overly masculinized society can tend in two main directions. Along the axis of barbarity, you have the tendency not to care about conditions, to let them be wild and rough, like a frontier mining camp or a roving band of warriors. There’s power, but it’s wild and unregulated and not directed toward any higher goal or conditions, it’s just a struggle of one against another. It’s tooth and claw. Along the axis of tyranny, you can have a focused and powerful excess of aggression that seeks to confront and remove every possible problem, with no concern for the consequences. Excess of civilizing power, a steamroller that rolls over everything, a cannon that blasts away everything in its path. The first possibility particularly tends to result when you have men in a society alone, without the influence of women. It’s a chaotic society, but if you’re entering a wild and dangerous new territory, it is the sort of society that can come in and survive and not be too concerned about all the danger and chaos. But it’s not the sort of place anyone would want to live long term, much less raise a family or be able to enjoy the peace and prosperity of a stable situation.
Tyrannical societies can actually exist with the blessing and motivation of the women, if that aggression serves their interests in creating the sort of conditions they desire. You might not find a lot of women who want to directly participate in it (though there have been some notable exceptions), but you might find plenty who motivate it, simply by their demand for an ordered and controlled landscape and the removal of perceived threats. If their standards for order are exceptionally high, and their threat concerns are exceptionally high, and you combine that with a fully empowered masculine aggression that’s willing to go to any lengths to address those concerns, well, stuff will get done, for sure. The world will be ground beneath the boot of that empire. That’s not necessarily an overly masculine and aggressive society at its heart, but the outward effects will certainly appear that way. It’s fairly likely that the women, in their own way, are on board and contributing to the action of the men, rather than counterbalancing it. But there are also societies where the aggressive action of the men has become disconnected from its counterbalances and limits and the concerns of women and has become tyrannical in a destructive way, so that internal and external harm is being done. It may be useful to have a lion to throw at the world, but you probably don’t want a lion acting that way in your own house. You end up with a system that marches on, caring nothing for what effects it has, so long as it gets where it’s going. It never stops to count the cost, not only to others, but to itself, throwing away whatever slows it down and not caring. That’s a masculinized society gone wrong, one that accepts the agression run rampant either in chaos or in tyrannical order, and no longer has any feelings or sensitivity or alarms to alert it to the unintended (or even the reality of the intended) consequences. It’s power without conscience, either focused and directed or unrestrained and wild. It’s organization without relationship. It’s mechanical and heartless. It treats the world, including people, as merely things to be manipulated. The special interest in things, in mechanisms (rather than people), and the ability to dissociate from the specific characteristics of a situation or person so you can approach it as an abstract or technical problem, is a common quality among men, and it’s had some amazing results, allowing us them to tackle all kinds of problems very effectively, but it can have some terrible results also, if you go all in on the abstract, technical, and mechanistic approach without retaining and valuing any voice from conscience, without any sensitivity to the emotional and personal realities of the things you’re manipulating. From the perspective of power over the world, it’s very useful to focus on technical power, in viewing the world abstractly or scientifically or mathematically. But although that’s one way to approach the world, and abstraction and dissociation do grant technical knowledge and power, it is not a complete way to address reality, or human activity and understanding. It isn’t wrong, in fact it’s very useful. But it isn’t sufficient. It’s narrow, and can easily get lost in its own pragmatism, rushing ahead without asking why or asking other pertinent questions about the net effects. It’s usefulness and power are non-specific, and depends for its value to an enormous degree on the checks and feedback that a more personal and wholistic approach address. A science or a technique are only as good as their underlying assumptions, the fundamental concepts of meaning and value that form their heart. And those concepts are not themselves matters of technique or manipulation. They are intimate, so close to where we are standing that it’s infinitely easy to take them for granted. And they’re complex, extending across multiple dimensions of meaning and value, many of which are in tension and can be easily thrown out of balance by placing too much power behind one or another. That is why technology often gets used in such unanticipated ways, and has so many unanticipated effects. Because the people who made them insufficiently appreciated that it was humans that would actually make use of those technologies. They they were tools only, and their use would be guided by differences in value and meaning other than those of the people who made them. And once you let it out into the world you don’t really have control of it any more or know what people will do with it. This applies to objects, obviously, but also to institutions, structures, and even ideas. The failure to anticipate what someone with different assumptions and inclinations that you might do with your idea has been a point of pain for many a philosopher and political idealist. You incorrectly assumed that the limits for its use were built in, when in reality you simply assumed them because that’s what you would do. Some people simply get on with their part of the work and don’t really worry about what’s being done with it at all. Abstraction and did association allow you that luxury, to simply play your part in the machine, do your part well, and not really worry about anything more complex than that. Institutions, ideas, businesses, ideologies, these are all machines in their own way. We build them for a purpose and set them running. Their abstraction and distance and many moving parts make them very powerful. We can build a machine of action made up of tens of thousands of people. It may be so complex that it’s not even in theory possible for one hand to truly know what the other is doing. Does that make the machine evil? No. It’s merely a powerful tool, an automation, a mechanism. It’s power is only as good or as bad as the fundamental values and meaning that guide it. And it’s only as good as the systems that provide balance and feedback and maintain the value and sanctity of the individual are. Because the world doesn’t need institutions. People, individuals, need institutions. People make them up, but the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The whole point of our tools is to serve our values and our meaning, to better the individuals that created them.
If we don’t take care, we can create a monster without even realizing it, giving it a corrupt heart and no ears to hear nor eyes to see. We are dangerous gods. That isn’t the same as being bad. We can be dangerous to evil, dangerous and effective for good. All goodness, as well as all evil, relies on having a fundamental capacity to assert and promote and preserve a value or meaning. That’s true from snails to trees to people to politics. What makes us dangerous is what makes us powerfully good or powerfully evil in effect. But the processes that determine which way that arrow flies lie deeper and closer and are tangled right up in the core of being.
Mythologically, this is why dangerous forces like fire and lightning and storms have often been personified as male. Because that is where we often see this story repeated. The father gods and the warrior gods have the power to order the world and civilization, but also to strike it down. One god might set up a kingdom, but his brother might murder him and set it ablaze. They come from the same origin, the same source of power, but one is the just king and the other is the evil king. It’s not for nothing that Mufasa and Scar are brothers, to use a contemporary example. And there are dozens of examples across myth and literature. It’s part of the essential truth of our experience we constantly retell to remind ourselves.
One problem with the idea of an overly feminine society is the frequent problem of people being unwilling to admit that it exists. It isn’t unequal, though it can be, but it is different. And often you can’t see it until it crosses over into its minority domain.
The power of the thing in itself; the power of art, of the whole undifferentiated, integrated, living complexity.
Making Nobody Happy 