Why Do Privileged Women Feel So Victimized?

0:00 Young men are now more likely to be unemployed than young women,

0:03 yet young women are far more financially cynical.

0:06 21 points less likely than young men

0:08 to believe they will ever out earn their parents.

0:11 White women are more likely to feel the country

0:13 is racist than their non-white women middle-class partners.

0:18 Yeah, white women are awful.

0:21 [laughter] I I wonder how much of that is like related to that finding where

0:24 the only way that women could be agentic was like on behalf of someone else.

0:29 So like the more successful that you are

0:32 or the more that you have going in your favor,

0:34 the only like way that you can be agentic is to like be so deeply caring.

0:40 Um there are some ethnographies on adolescent girls and the only ones

0:46 that were allowed to be popular were if they were super super nice.

0:50 And so they had to like kind of over deliver

0:53 on like kindness in order to be allowed to be popular.

0:55 And so it feels a little bit like that same pattern that like perhaps women

1:00 do this so the the envy or resentment of other women won't bring them down.

1:05 Um Joyce Benenson has this um Hero, friend of the show.

1:08 Oh, she's the best.

1:09 I'm obsessed with her.

1:10 Um she has this paper on leveling showing that like women

1:14 are more likely to use a leveling strategy where they say like,

1:17 "Oh, we should all be equal." when someone is surpassing them.

1:20 And so I wonder if like once you

1:23 have all of these things operating in your favor,

1:25 you kind of have to be like a martyr in order

1:28 to like continue on, otherwise people might not like you.

1:32 your victimhood points from?

1:33 Uh I won't say who said it in our group chat,

1:35 but someone replied to Rob Henderson bringing this up and said,

1:38 "Middle-class hay fever, Rob.

1:40 When there's no high load of parasites,

1:43 people's immune system gets bored and starts looking for things

1:46 to react to and you get allergies to dust and pollen.

1:49 When the middle class has no threats,

1:50 their threat system gets bored and starts looking

1:52 for trivial things to blow out of proportion.

1:54 White privilege, gender identity, ultra-processed foods, it's all pollen.

1:58 You don't have oat milk?

1:59 You're traumatizing me.

2:01 No explicit segregation and blatant racism?

2:03 Sensitivity to microaggressions increases." That's what I was going to say

2:06 is I think it's more time to introspect and ruminate.

2:09 Because you have girls and young women not just picking up

2:13 on X in their partner and like scrutinizing them and looking for flaws,

2:16 but then doing that to themselves.

2:17 So constantly pathologizing, diagnosing themselves,

2:21 wondering what's wrong with them, overanalyzing their personality traits.

2:25 And so I do think it's just more time and less bigger problems,

2:29 like say having children, where you put your neuroticism,

2:32 you funnel it into something productive.

2:35 And instead it then turns inwards or also against your partner.

2:39 But there is status afforded to women doing that in that ecosystem,

2:42 in that social system of higher education where women are dominating now.

2:48 They're rewarded for espousing views like that.

2:50 So, you know, they're showing that they know

2:52 the ideology of the leading status people in their world.

2:57 This is me showing fealty to the cause I understand this thing.

3:01 What's the data around men and women being demonized and seen as victims?

3:08 So we have some studies showing that like we have

3:12 this like kind of cognitive heuristic of victim and perpetrator.

3:16 And when men and women are like involved in any instance of harm,

3:20 we're more likely to see women in the victim

3:21 role and men in the perpetrator role.

3:24 We're more [clears throat] likely to blame men

3:26 and more likely to have sympathy for women.

3:29 And so it would suggest like perhaps some of the reason we don't see

3:32 a lot of sympathy for men is it's

3:33 like cognitively harder to see them as victims.

3:37 And then for women the same it's just cognitively easier

3:41 to see them as victims and so we feel that sympathy.

3:44 But this is it kind of sucks for both sexes.

3:47 So in the domain of harm, men are disadvantaged and they're not seen as victims.

3:51 But for women in the domain in other

3:54 domains where you'd want to be the agentic person,

3:56 like a if you're deciding on a CEO or a president,

4:00 women aren't seen as as agentic and as capable.

4:04 So it's not like one sex is clearly doing better than the other.

4:07 They're both facing these like

4:09 One doesn't get sympathy and one doesn't get belief.

4:11 Mhm.

4:12 Yeah, I guess that's one of the challenges I think that women face when they

4:15 go into the workplace that they feel like

4:16 if they need to be assertive and dominant,

4:18 they have to temper the throttle of it a little bit

4:21 for fear of being They don't want to be a right?

4:24 Or a diva.

4:25 Yeah, I feel like there's like a agency warmth continuum and women

4:29 are expected to be here and if they go farther along agency,

4:33 they're seen as low in warmth, But the same is true for men,

4:36 they're higher on the agency side and so if they show warmth by crying,

4:39 they're not seen as as competent.

4:41 So like we're both encouraged to stay in our lane.

4:45 But if women show too much warmth,

4:46 they're seen as pliable and not competent because it's seen that people

4:50 that are a little bit more brusque are seen as higher competence, right?

4:54 Warmth is negatively associated with competence, I think.

4:57 And I just think this kind of protectiveness that we have about women,

5:03 it just gets repackaged as oppression in a way.

5:06 And I get that you could be paternalistic

5:08 and overly and a lot of kind of, you know,

5:10 abuse of women does occur under the guise of for their own good and protection.

5:15 But it is astounding the extent to which we

5:18 are more protective of women than men, I think.

5:21 to really contort yourself into a lot of knots, you know,

5:24 to see the women are wonderful effect

5:28 and think of it as oppression toward women.

5:31 Like can you Can Do you know much

5:33 of the stats around the women are wonderful effect?

5:35 Like all of the different ways that people prefer women to men?

5:38 I know one study that looked at this kind of where

5:40 they looked at job hiring discrimination and it's gone down against women,

5:45 but people overestimate its presence.

5:48 And so they assume it's still there

5:50 even though the data suggests clearly it's not.

5:52 So it's like we're almost like just sensitized

5:55 to detect it even if it's not there.

5:57 And even when you learn about some discrepancy, if it's against women,

6:02 people are up in arms about it, but if it's against men, it's like no biggie.

6:06 Is Is attractiveness under acknowledged as a kind of privilege?

6:10 Oh, I think so.

6:11 Yeah, so on both ends of the spectrum.

6:13 So the pretty privilege, which also has its costs.

6:16 There's costs associated with being seen as pretty.

6:19 Other women particularly see you as more promiscuous and things like that.

6:22 But there are enormous benefits across

6:24 the board being attractive, male or female.

6:27 But then at the other side of the spectrum,

6:29 there's enormous costs being unattractive.

6:31 And there is new research that shows that we're

6:34 not readily able to recognize this form of privilege.

6:38 We acknowledge other forms of privilege, but attractiveness,

6:41 we're reluctant to acknowledge that it even exists.

6:44 And we also have evidence that women are far more attractive than men.

6:48 It's not just one OKCupid study.

6:51 Loads of data unpublished from our lab finds this attractiveness discrepancy.

6:55 There's tons of data.

6:57 Women are just more attractive.

6:58 So arguably a feminine advantage in the domain of attractiveness,

7:02 when that can be translated into so many resources,

7:06 there are studies to show that beauty is status for women.

7:09 Women defer to more beautiful women in the way

7:11 that men defer to more formidable men.

7:15 So this is an advantage and it could be another thing that's actually a less

7:20 acknowledged point about what's putting women off having

7:22 children is that they hear these horror stories.

7:25 They They literally have to take a massive beauty

7:27 hit and that's just there's no way around that.

7:30 Less than they've ever had to take, but it's still there.

7:32 It's so funny that um having kids would impact your beauty,

7:38 but the effect of pretty privilege is denied and hidden.

7:42 It's like, "Well, you if that is playing into it,

7:44 you have to admit the fact that it's there." Yes.

7:47 Yeah, I don't think I think people would

7:49 acknowledge at face value that's one of the reasons.

7:51 Well, you do see them sometimes women are like,

7:53 "I'm not sacrificing my body for that." And you know,

7:56 it We have new data come out that shows that relationships having

8:00 being a parent similar levels of happiness to not being a parent,

8:05 greater levels of meaning to for the parents,

8:08 especially for women, but lower relationship satisfaction for the parents.

8:12 So it does take a toll on the relationship,

8:15 but certainly on the woman's mate value thereafter.

8:17 Having the kids, the toll it takes on her beauty.

8:20 So you can kind of see why women,

8:22 if there's all these benefits they can translate their beauty,

8:25 which is their status, into, they'd be reluctant to to sacrifice all that.

8:29 I mean, this is kind of what we were talking about before,

8:31 which is that I think social media platforms have incentivized women

8:35 to see themselves less as human and less and more as products.

8:39 And so their life becomes about marketing themselves and optimizing themselves.

8:43 And so I think yeah, having a child disrupts being the perfect pristine product.

8:49 But then we're in this really weird scenario where don't you want

8:52 to look good in order to reproduce and have children base level,

8:56 but now Instagram comes along and Instagram it gives women so

9:01 much dopamine and status that then that becomes their higher priority.

9:05 Yeah, because it's a misconception about evolutionary

9:08 psychology that we have these fitness optimizing mechanisms.

9:11 We actually have We're adaptation executioners.

9:14 So it's not like it's just that behavior is that over

9:17 evolutionary time would have resulted in more offspring are passed on.

9:22 So women still have the desire to have sex for the most part.

9:26 People don't come into the world with oh

9:28 I I really want to increase my reproductive success.

9:31 I want to have offspring.

9:33 But they do want to be seen as a high mate value to others,

9:37 have sexual urges and over time

9:39 those things would have resulted in reproductive success.

9:41 So now it's a bit of a a mismatch.

9:44 Joyce Benenson, she has this like cross-cultural

9:47 study where she shows like among young people,

9:49 one of their primary goals is finding a romantic partner,

9:53 but one of their lowest goals is having kids.

9:56 And so she makes this argument that like we probably

9:59 evolved a desire to attract a mate but we didn't

10:02 need to evolve the desire to have kids because so

10:04 long as you were having sex you were having kids.

10:06 Didn't have reliable contraception.

10:09 It's a hugely evolutionary novel technology that's really

10:12 just thrown the whole thing up in the air.

10:14 I think also with young women sometimes

10:16 the relationship becomes an accessory to display online.

10:20 What was your line about that in the episode that we did a couple of years ago?

10:23 It was relationships are just brand partnerships now.

10:26 Yeah, yeah, it's it's something to display.

10:29 And so the characteristics that maybe you'd

10:32 select for before social media are very different.

10:34 Now it's presenting it to other women and how other women

10:37 will react seeing your yeah your launch of a partner online.

10:42 Yeah, the soft launch.

10:44 They're not about this stuff.

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