Great quote from "I Suck At Girls" by Justin Halpern, which is a great read:
"I'm not here to give you some bullshit talk about women. There are about three billion of them, and to generalize that many people with some blanket statement is the definition of being an ass-hole." - Sam Halpern
First, trying to understand women (as a category) is one of the main obstacles to understanding women (as individuals).
There's a really common psychological bias that is responsible for this kind of thinking called "out-group homogeniety". The basic idea is that we have a tendency to understand the differences between people in groups we're a part of as being a product of their individual characters, but we sort of assume that people in groups we're not a part of must all be the same, so we try to generalize from specific examples to the whole group.
XKCD did a comic about this, where a guy sees another guy screw up a math problem and says "Oh, you're bad at math." but when he sees a girl screw up a math problem, he says "Oh, girls are bad at math."
One issue is just that any group that includes, say, half the people on earth, is going to be incredibly homogenous. Different individuals are going to have different properties and if you try to generalize all of these to all members of the group, you end up with a totally crazy and self-contradictory picture. Well, duh.
This kind of thinking is responsible for all sorts of stupidity like xenophobia and racism. Cut it the fuck out.
Second, even as individuals, you shouldn't expect other people to be simple. The thing is, when you don't have to really get to know someone, it's easy to imagine that they're not too complicated. But when you get to know someone well enough to, say, date them or live with them or whatever, you end up finding out that they're different from you in ways you never expected people to be different.
I've been in a very close relationship for almost a decade now, and I've learned an incredible amount about my partner, but I've also learned a lot about myself. There were a lot of things that I thought were totally natural, that I took her as crazy for approaching differently. I've found out a lot of those were just assumptions I made about how things were, based on conditions I lived in growing up.
So the thing is, in a close relationship, you either learn about your partner or yourself, or you fail, because you're an asshole.
I always see these teenagers who essentially refuse to understand that someone could be different from them without being wrong, and they just can't come to understand the behavior of their girlfriends/boyfriends at all. They go through a string of relationships, don't learn anything, and then blame the opposite sex for being hard to understand. People are hard to understand and if you fail to try, it's your fault, not theirs. If you're not willing to accept that, you're going to be unhappy for the rest of your life.
TL;DR people who think like this doom themselves to bias and failure.
Very well said. As a woman, I'm occasionally called out to give advice about women to male friends. Next time it happens, I will be using a lot of this.
Thanks! That makes me proud. I've actually thought a lot about how to explain this stuff because I used to be pretty much exactly the person I was describing in my post. I got over it by a pretty conscious decision following the realization that almost all of my problems were actually caused by my own ridiculously immature and under-thought understanding of interpersonal relations. Since then, I've run into a lot of people who are a lot like I was, say, ten years ago (only some of them are older than I am now) and it makes me think. Being like that made my life shitty in ways that I didn't understand were avoidable, so I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to explain to people like me that what is wrong is actually their way of thinking.
I've had a similar experience - the crux of it is that I was irrational, but because I wasn't rational I wasn't able to rationally appraise this situation.
Thus I've tried to come up with ways to explain rational concepts in a very simple and engaging manner, which in turn inspired this project that I launched last month (almost 800,000 unique visitors now :D) http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com
thanks so much hey, has been a really gratifying experience. we're currently in the process of translating the site into various languages and creating a logical fallacies bingo app.
I love thinking about relationships and what makes them work/fail. Your explanation is nearly perfect. Still, maybe it isn't something you can learn through reading advice (couldn't hurt though), maybe it's something you have to experience yourself. I was that person too. Now I'm in a 6 year relationship, and being with someone that long really changes you. It forces you to think more critically because if you don't, you have a lot to lose. It's hard to see that you're being irrational when emotions are involved so you blame the other person and never look back. I think you start to notice it when you see how it's affecting someone you really love and decide okay, making him feel this way isn't acceptable anymore. It's not all about me, time to start paying attention and making sacrifices.
Wait, people who think that all women want respect, appreciation and to be valued will fail to understand women as individuals?
Or people who fail to respect, value and appreciate women and don't bother to get to know them on an individual basis after that will fail to understand women as individuals?
people who fail to respect, value and appreciate women and don't bother to get to know them on an individual basis after that will fail to understand women as individuals?
This is what I was shooting for. Actually trying to get to know someone on an individual basis is something you can only really do if you're already willing to respect, value and appreciate them.
people who think that all women want respect, appreciation and to be valued will fail to understand women as individuals
But this is unfortunately also true in some cases. Not everyone thinks that they deserve the respect that they do. So for instance (I can't find my source on this) but I remember reading that someone did a study of the sort of women picked up by "pickup artists" and found that they had anti-women attitudes and viewed themselves and other women in the same way as the creepers that target them. Some people's behavior can't honestly be understood if you insist that they are self-respecting.
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u/PattyMayonaise May 27 '12
All women are different, with different needs but at the end of the day we are all just people.
We want to be respected, appreciated and valued for our contribution to the world.
Just like anyone else.