Some observations on public discourse about gender roles

Recently I came in more contact with people speaking a lot about feminism and traditional roles in families and household organisation, etc. I noticed, in this domain, there’s a lot of attitudes which go approximately like this: “Everything is fine with me, it’s their fault anyway, so they should give me (our gender) what we want, or need, and it should go without me saying anything. And if they don’t deliver, we’ll be angry and call it oppression.”

Now, I am not saying that there are not significant problems with for instance division of work in households between men and women, or gender pay gaps. These phenomena absolutely exist and we need to solve them for the good of our societies. But I doubt that calling that a problem exists and then silently expecting others to solve it for us will work. What might work instead, is an open dialogue. But I am digressing, so let’s get back on track.

Thinking about this (relatively loud) group of feminists who complain, but are not ready to enter a dialogue reminded me of something I learned in couples therapy literature: meta-emotion and specifically ability to ask for what you need and resolving conflicts related to that.

Meta-emotion and assertiveness to get what you need

In relationships psychology, Gottman therapy and Attachment theory they generally identify 2 types of attitudes to emotions (meta-emotion) in individuals:

1. emotion coaching/secure attachment
2. “screwed-up attachment”/anxious/avoidant meta-emotion

Emotion coaching people are free in their expression of emotions and generally speaking have no problem to ask what they want and resolve situations (often conflicts) when they don’t get it. People with other types of meta-emotion would typically have problems doing so. This is not to say, something is wrong with the second group. Personally, I just think they have a somewhat harder time interacting with others, especially when they need something from them. But that is not a character problem as such, just a logistical difficulty - although many try to resolve such problems by (conscious, or unconscious) use of psychological manipulation. And that is of course problematic.

Hypothesis

Could it be that this loud and (perhaps even ineffective) group of activists on feminist issues is statistically more on the side anxious/avoidant meta-emotion?

The intuition is that if they were on the emotion coaching/secure attachment spectrum, they would probably (in aggregate) be able to resolve their individual household troubles with their partner easier and thus would be very open to a dialogue.

On the positive side, though, these people are loud and point a finger to a real issue, while those who resolve it silently at home maybe would not be - and the problem would persist unresolved. And if it so, I am curious how large would this silent group be?

Observing these discussions about roles and issue in shifts away from traditional roles division, I realised there are plenty of people there who have a very healthy understanding of what actually goes on. Typically they are able to see that the problems feminism speak about are not women-only, but are shared problems which can only be resolved together with participation of men and women alike in an open dialogue. Very often, these people would express something like this: “I recognise this as a problem in our society, but I am lucky to have a partner/friends around me who are working/ready to work on this too.” Maybe it’s not luck what they speak about, but their secure meta-emotion attitude and their own strength and ability to speak about these topics freely without negative emotions and resolving them with their partners and friends.

And continuing on this, if at least something is correct in the above hypothesis, I would be curious about relationship dynamics there. The prevalence of secure attachment is reported at about 50-60% of population. Assuming random coupling (which is not exactly true, but let’s keep it simple), we get that about 25-40% of couples are secure-secure attachment pair. So it’s fair to say that about 30% of each gender are happy with their relationship and are able to resolve their gender roles at home.

If this little hypothesis above is correct, these would form the mostly silent (at least not loud) group and the radicals would be recruited from the remaining 70% of population.

Now if the statistical division of meta-emotion is stable and does not change over time (which I sincerely hope is not the case!), then it means the amount of people who are unhappy with the division of household chores and roles in their relationships will remain stable somewhat stable (or at least unsatisfactory) too and the issues of feminists won’t get ever resolved. That would be a sad future indeed.

Just to wrap it up, in a consequence, this whole speculation I wrote here would lead to a proposal how to resolve many issues feminists point their fingers to: we need to move as many people to emotional coaching/secure attachment mode of meta-emotion in the first place, and then many of these gender roles problems canbe easier to solve.

I am curious to hear from all sides how wrong I am. Let;s how much emotion coaching we get in the discussion - if there will be any…

#feminism #meta-emotion #relationships