Twitter Thread #7: Mormonism, neuroticism, and male status

from March 2024, lightly edited for spelling

a mistake I often see people make in characterizing mormonism (my childhood and adolescent faith) is to imagine it as a place full of authoritarian dickhead men who rule with iron fists

the men who are like that tend to be lower status, where they exist at all

Mormonism explicitly only gives priesthood (and with it, the ability to be in charge of groups of mixed-gender adults as well as groups of men) to men, and people assume that this translates into hostile sexism; the reality is that it's generally a good way to entrench benevolent

It has been my sad conclusion after years of observing this that men are best behaved when they feel secure in their status over women and worst behaved when they fear a loss of it

imo this phenom also shows up in competent men - the sharpest dudes with moderate social savvy are usually very cool about women for exactly this reason

this metric can often be used to gauge someone's competence, esp in people who are intelligent to begin with

if you meet a smart dude who is very angry about women he is likely very anxious about his skill level in some field that matters a great deal to him

if you meet a mormon dude who says bullshit about women this is even more likely

if you meet a brilliant mormon man with garbage opinions on women you can rest assured he has *long* experience with being very, very bad at something that really, really mattered to him

this is tied to my belief that the entire political spectrum believes neuroticism to be both deeply negative and incredibly gendered, and is in fact the most negative and the most gendered of the big five traits

what we speak of as "weakness" is often poorly managed neuroticism about one's own status

ironically, what some call "toxic masculinity" is also often poorly managed neuroticism about one's own status

it matters that (afaict) all sides of the culture war can agree that a man who does not get distressed or angry easily is superior to a man who does

public misogyny with a resentful air is received on a felt level as masculine neuroticism about status. expression of it changed as we have loosened our prohibitions on male neuroticism; it has become bolder and braver, but male neuroticism is no less reviled under the hood

i don't know that that's going anywhere, in a meaningful sense, either, because a neurotic man is *dangerous* in a different way than a neurotic woman is

I am skeptical that we give neurotic men useful ways to manage their situation but I can only speculate from afar

i think there's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy problem with neurotic men in dating, a tendency to date more-neurotic-than-average women to soothe their status anxiety and then to have severely negative experiences with those women as a result

and from there, a sense of resentment that grows around the idea that female neuroticism is more accepted by basically everyone than male neuroticism

the neuroticism also increases the likelihood that they'll anxiously avoid examining this pattern, which entrenches it

neurotic men seem to feel torn between a resentment that women are given accommodations for their "weakness" and a recognition that to be given the same accommodations would deprive them of even more status

unfortunately all of the above conspires to make "public misogyny = neuroticism and weakness" a strong enough prediction to be useful for any woman vetting men

as with many qualities that are considered negative and gendered, women manage their emotional sensitivity differently on average than most men who experience the same

content focusing on how to manage neuroticism w/o suppression is overwhelmingly made and consumed by women

that content may not serve men at all, I couldn't say, but I think it can be easy to miss the ways women manage their emotional sensitivity if the only framework you're familiar with is some version of shutting it down and shutting up

this encourages the "women are babied" view

i.e. if you don't see women doing the one thing you understand as useful for a failing you have, you think they aren't doing anything at all

the gendered problem of neuroticism also means that neurotic women are often seen as particularly feminine, which contributes to the problem of men getting burned by histrionic women and retreating to AWALT, a problem obviously compounded in men who are neurotic themselves

this too imo is tied to status, this time in a more improv-related sense

the high status person in a scene is the one who is *reacted* to

and who is more reactive than a strongly neurotic woman

even discussions of women who seem appealing in their "craziness" or "vulnerability" are tinged by this, I think I'm not buying references to the wild sex, either, tbh, other than to suggest that reactiveness in sex is if anything more prized than it is anywhere else

there is no personality trait that is as consistently seen as feminine as neuroticism, and there is consequently imo no personality trait that is more harshly punished in men