I am firmly on the side of the idea that we are not Homo sapiens, the wise ape, but very much Pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. We are not wise, in fact we will act very foolishly for the sake of a good story.
It doesn’t even really need to be good.
Playing with fire puts us in a different ecological niche, which is enough for a different genus.
I have read the book and seen the TV show. I have not watched the movie.
The book is a pretty clear picture of real life events, but the TV show is a complete fiction. Eric Taylor is to Gary Gaines as Jed Bartlet is to JFK. I’m sure even if Gaines were to randomly start acting like his fictional counterpart for a couple weeks, people would still look askance at him. Gary Gaines is a real person and far from perfect, but Eric Taylor is an unrealistically romanticized version of that person.
The point is, as Prof. Taylor pointed out, it works. It works because we’ve been conditioned to believe that it works.
Does it work as smoothly in real life as it does in fiction? Of course not, but that’s why fiction works so well to shape us. The fiction is what we aspire to be.
That’s why we need better stories.
Humans also have reproportioned limbs making them primarily bipedal, bony chins and detached hyoid bones, hidden estrus, and all sorts of odd things like that. From a biological perspective, it seems obvious our differences from Pan are not that much smaller than their differences from Gorilla, or other things used to separate mammal genera. And yes, those and fire make enough difference that our one species has invaded the whole world.
But as people used to throw all the other simians together and keep us separate despite the similarities, because they wanted to regard humans as special, now we can throw us in with chimpanzees despite the differences, because we want to regard humans as nothing special. The narrans part rings true.
Narrator: It obviously didn’t work.
It didn’t work for the female college professor. Would it work for a male college professor, male football coach, or female football coach? All speculation. All I know is if one of my professors, of any gender, tried to act like a stereotype of a high school football coach, I’d think they were completely unfit for their job.
From personal experience, whenever I’ve tried to put on a swagger, whether it would be to act more masculine or act more NT, it’s fallen way short. Yes, it works for certain men in certain roles, but that doesn’t mean that it always works, or even usually works. It’s somewhat disingenuous to say that it failed because the professor is a woman. It’s more like, it failed because it’s nonsense that we’ve developed a cargo cult mentality around because it works occasionally.
Then again, toxic masculinity pretty much is a cargo cult. It’s all about what a “real” man does and says and wears and eats and drinks and reads and lifts and blablabla, but there’s no basis to any of it besides some bastardized evo psych bullshit that legitimate evolutionary psychologists disavow.
Completely agreed.
I see your point that the stories we tell also tell us how we should act and what morals we should have, and better stories will lead to better character.
However, my point was that this is an exaggerated character. Exaggerated characters and neat storylines don’t exist in the real world. To me, she may as well have acted like James Bond or Ron Swanson.
Did we read the same article?
She said herself that it worked, but that it did is part of the problem.
So why am I not delivering TED Talks on how women can gain power by imitating white male football coaches on TV? Because this was an experiment in affect, language, demeanour and gender, and one I found deeply saddening. Being a good partner, mother, professor and citizen to me has always meant being deferential, inclusive, transparent about what I am thinking, as concrete and thoughtful as possible in explaining my decisions, and collaborative with students, family and colleagues. But these features are not often respected as signs of good leadership, and they are exhausting to perform. I won’t promote getting one’s way by force and intimidation. I won’t promote the silencing of dissent through verbal muscularity.
It worked in that the point of behaving that way is to get one’s way. Students did their assignments. The damaging curriculum change did not go through. Her family did as they were told. All markers, funnily, of what our society defines as a successful leader.
She, however, doesn’t define success as “I got mine, fuck you”, which is why she doesn’t reccomend it. But take a look at our societal “success stories” and you’ll see that far too many do.
Getting people to produce more low quality work is not success. If she succeeded, it was only on paper. I’ve had supervisors who were that type, and all they’ve really got me to do was churn out a load of crap after another load of crap after yet another load of crap. If I could normally do X amount of work in Y time, I was now doing 2X, but another Y time was needed for testing, and another Y was needed to make improvements when the tests failed. I could probably have kept the time down on either of those, but I hated the job so much that I quit and new worker bees needed time to be spun up 
I did misremember the part about the amount of energy it took to keep up the act, mostly because in my experiences it takes far more energy to put on an act than it does to not do it. I would debate and analyze because it’s in my nature, and it would take serious effort to suppress that impulse. Likewise, going out for drinks with coworkers would be like acting in a play while temporarily deaf. I would have to respond appropriately to everything going on around me in character, not as someone who doesn’t like going out for drinks and is confused by the style process. I say “while temporarily deaf” because my understanding of social cues is to an NT person’s like lip reading is to hearing, at the most charitable. Wearing these masks gets exhausting fast.
The point is that her masculine behavior is perceived as successful. It’s not about our individual interpretation of success, hers or ours, but rather about the general culture which perceives that sort of behavior as evidence of success in and of itself.
It’s still cargo cult thinking.
Sure. Be that as it may, given how many people buy into it, it has power in our lives, for people who don’t conform, for women who are socialized in a different manner, etc. The point isn’t really that the status quo here is good or positive or as it should be, but that it’s negative and toxic. The reason for taking on the experiment was to show how that kind of behavior translate into “success” for men who act like this (in terms of better pay, more respect, quicker promotions, etc), and how replicating that in her own life changes how others react to her. She’s trying to illustrate a dangerous set of social tendencies and how it impacts opportunities for women (or men who might not conform to that kind of expected behavior).
We have stories about “cargo cults” which may not match the original…
But it’s the equivalent, in terms of these stories, of waving the paddles and seeing if other people think you have kago coming in.
Exactly. Just because something doesn’t affect you the same way it does most people doesn’t mean it’s ineffective.
Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field never worked on me. I don’t know why, but every big Apple announcement he made just left me “meh” at best, angry he was claiming to invent something which already existed at worst.
But it would be foolish to offer that as proof that Steve Jobs was ultimately not successful by most modern measures.
THIS IS WHY GIRLS DON’T GO INTO STEM:
It’s not that we aren’t smart enough, but this kind of shit can break anybody.
My husband almost certainly has an eating disorder. It was one of the most difficult psychological issues in our marriage. My therapist is the one who identified the problem. It had never occurred to me that a man could have an eating disorder, and when I tried to find out any information, most of what I could find was about gay men who had body issues similar to some women, not manly men who work out way too much and do odd things to control eating patterns. And I didn’t even dare to speak of it to him because while he might recognize his ADHD and PTSD, no way he’d accept at any level an eating disorder.
I used to teach a student who is now a researcher focused on those sorts of male eating/exercise disorders.
https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/display/person795047
It may be worth your while to look up his stuff.
ETA:
Oh, that school is about to get Saint Barbara’d and catch an expensive civil suit; you betcha.
If I were the doctor treating the boy who got kicked in the nuts, I’d tell him “oooh, those are gonna have to come off” and then launch into a big long spiel about preparing for life as a woman, and how he (sorry, “she”) will be alright because she’ll always be able to find a good boyfriend to take care of her.
Both unfortunately and fortunately, I am not a doctor.
You just described Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey and probably rest of the CEOs of almost every major corporations in the US. I know you just described the person who owns the last company I worked for who is lauded as the epitome of successful businessman and philanthropists around here (he is famous for firing the lowest performing sales person on his car lot every month, regardless of past sales records or reasons for falling behind. He’s in a lot more than just cars, now).
It is considered successful behaviour in our society. Mostly because we have a weird filter mechanism. You can also only get away with it if you’re white (and for best results, male) which also explains the makeup of most major corporations at the top level.