Single Sex Cultures

Facebook may give a false impression of the gender balance of friends, I grant.  It may make all people look like they primarily have older women and young mothers as friends. Yet you can find FB networks that seem more male if your poke around.  I went down a rabbit hole on a few people last week and sometimes also knew the people deeper in the network and what type of people they were.  One network had almost no men in it, only single (or now-single) women of my generation, plus a minority with husbands, and a further minority of those with once child. Lots of pictures of them going places with each other, though widely separated in time. There were some disquieting moments, and I will say no more than that.  

As soon as I start to draw conclusions about a group like that, I fairly automatically consider whether the same applies to men of my generation, or women of a younger generation, etc. I think it prevents jumping to conclusions, but each also provides insight into the others. 

Tangential thought: Women unfriend on FB more often than men, and I wonder if there is a further distinction generationally.  The current stereotype is that it is all these woke young people, especially females, unfriending people over nothing.  I'm not so sure. Anyone who is siloed is likely to put up with less and less from anyone outside the silo.

I pair this with what keeps showing up in my YouTube feed (probably because I click an occasional one) of short clip relationship advice, men advising other men about women, men advising women about men, women advising women about men, women advising men about women, and also from fairly definite, even extreme points of view.  There is a common pattern of showing a clip of a person who they think just gets it wrong, wrong, wrong, pointing out their stupidity or bad character in fairly stern language. "Ladies, this woman is complaining about where all the good men are, but notice that she never says anything about..." or "This man is toxic, and girls, if you run into one like this you need to get away as quickly as you can." Many of these seem to make valid points, but only on one side of the balance scale. Women heavily critical of other women, women critical of men - these seem to dominate.

I recall that the YouTube algorithm will funnel you into more and more extreme political and cultural content, and I wonder if the same thing is happening here, as young men and young women are herded into inflexible Positions.

Cultures that are single-sex, or single generation, or one educational class, one marital class, and certainly especially those in combination will push you toward attitudes of "you don't have to put up with that." It is most noticeable in the courtship and relationship discussions "Guys, you don't have to put up with this from women. If you are over sixty, there are plenty of other choices out there." But it expands to being about not having to put up with whatever from your own sex, or from contractors, or from bosses, or from neighbors. The more you are only with your own people, the more poisonous it gets.  And in such situations there doesn't have to be any anger or displayed rancor.  Who could sustain anger that continually? It is just part of the culture.  Nice people, being nice, reassuring each other how nice they are, teaching each other to be a just a little less tolerant. 

There may be something of positional competition in that as well, of gaining status within your cohort by advocating that less and less be tolerated from another cohort. You shouldn't put up with this from your children/parents/coworkers/wives.  Big Kahuna.

But it may flow in both directions.  The sub-sub-culture may also be teaching each other what they should be more tolerant of. I may be only focusing on the negatives here. It seems to be making us all worse people.  When we speak about the negatives of social media, this may be the driver.  We depend on peers to reinforce our values, and we tend to adjust our beliefs as a herd. When we are only among ourselves it might get poisonous. I think of this in long-term cultural, even evolutionary psych terms - have we ever been so siloed? Have older women ever been so isolated from younger ones?

As fewer young people marry and have children, fewer people attend a church, fewer people have an actual workplace they attend or a club they belong to this can only increase. What will drive you into contact with a variety of generations if you don't have these things.  Bowling Alone, indeed. I have to suspect this is getting worse. 

When women invaded the all-male institutions one of the great contributions was a subtle one - it caused men to notice some things about themselves and how business was done.  Not all men took to the lessons, but most did, almost unconsciously incorporating their understanding of female POVs. (And the subtleties of this increased as well, as they noticed that some differences were not gender or class-based, but generational.) Now there are all-female subcultures who could probably benefit from an invasion of males, especially of another generation. Reality checks are good things.