Harem queens in the corporate world 职场的宫斗明星
作者：Michael O.Church @ 2015-11-01 译者：Drunkplane（@Drunkplane-zny） 校对：龙泉（@L_Stellar） 来源：Michael O. Church，https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/11/01/harem-queens-in-the-corporate-world/
I recently came across a New York Times article about shitty behaviors that our society often associates with the female gender. It’s about the stupid, catty, bitchy behavior that makes for an entertaining evening in a film like Bridesmaids, but that actually wastes an enormous amount of emotional energy and gives the female gender a bad name. The choice paragraph, in my opinion, is this one (emphasis mine):
近日偶然读到《纽约时报》上的一篇文章，讲的是我们社会常常扣到女性头上的那些烂事，那些愚蠢的、阴险的、碧池的行为。这些破事充斥着《最爆伴娘团》这样的电影。它也许能为一个无聊的夜晚带来些消遣，实则是在浪费观众的感情，还给女性加上一个坏名头。下面的选段，在我看来就是个例子（粗体是我加的）：
There are two main theories of why women are competitive in indirectly aggressive ways. Evolutionary psychology, which uses natural selection to explain our modern behaviors, says that women need to protect themselves (read: their wombs) from physical harm, so indirect aggression keeps us safe while lowering the stock of other women.
关于为何女性通过间接的攻击性方式展开竞争，有两种理论。进化心理学利用自然选择解释现代人类行为，这种理论认为，女人要保护她们自己（意思是：她们的子宫）免受物理伤害，而间接攻击性可以在削弱其他女性的同时让自己处于安全境地。
Feminist psychology chalks up this indirect aggression to internalizing the patriarchy. As Noam Shpancer writes in Psychology Today, “As women come to consider being prized by men their ultimate source of strength, worth, achievement and identity, they are compelled to battle other women for the prize.” In short: When our value is tied to the people who can impregnate us, we turn on each other.
女权心理学家把这笔账算到父权制的内化头上。正如Noam Shpancer 在《今日心理学（Psychology Today）》上写的：“当女人需要男人的奖励来获得她们终极的力量、价值、成就和身份认同时，她们就被迫同其他女人开战来争取这份奖励。”简而言之，当我们的价值与那些能让我们受孕的人绑在一起时，我们只好彼此反目。
“Indirect aggression” is the author’s more-polite term for passive aggression, and here’s what I take out of the article. I’ll withhold personal comment, so please don’t get offended just yet. From the article:
“间接攻击性”只是作者对“消极攻击性”的礼貌说法。这里我摘抄了一些原文。至于我的个人看法就先忍着不说了，所以请不要觉得被冒犯。
women, in a system where their value is attractiveness as assessed by men, work to undermine each other.
在一个其价值就是对男人的吸引力的体制里，女人们想方设法诋毁彼此。
women generally prefer passive aggression over overt conflict.
比起公开的冲突，女人通常更倾向于消极攻击性。
women exhibit an especial and envious hatred toward highly attractive women, that is divorced from the reality of that person.
女人会对富有吸引力的女人表现出强烈的嫉妒心，不管这个有吸引力的女人实际状况如何。
Is this true of “women”? Well, it’s true of some women, and not of others.
这是真的吗？也许对一些女人适用，但对其他女人则不然。
Now, I want to talk about these horrible patterns of behavior: passive-aggression, cattiness, sabotage, bitchiness. I’ve seen a lot of this stuff in my decade in the software career. And, here’s the thing… most of the worst offenders have been men.
现在我想谈谈这些可怕的行为模式：消极攻击、阴险、搞破坏、碧池作派。在从事软件行业的十年中，我目睹了太多这种破事。而且，事实上，大部分最坏的讨厌鬼都是男性。
In my personal opinion, malicious social aggressions are not especially gendered. Women may be two to three years ahead in this game during high school and college, because they’re farther along (in general) when it comes to social development, but corporate executives’ cattiness makes high-school cheerleader drama look innocent in comparison.
我个人认为恶意的社会性攻击行为并不特别与性别挂钩。在高中或大学，女人也许早两三年开始玩这些手段，毕竟女性通常成熟得更早。但是跟公司里的高管比起来，啦啦队长们的伎俩实在太过幼稚。
That humans perceive certain styles of aggression as being gendered is, however, telling. Stereotypically “male” aggression’s virtue is that it is short-lived and honest; its vice is that it’s brutal and often disproportionate (and if it leads to violence, its effects can be permanent).
不过，人们将某些特定类型的攻击性视作与性别相关，还是有些道理的。刻板印象中，“雄性”攻击行为的特点是短暂而直白；缺点是其致命性且往往不成比例（如果还导致了暴力，那效果可能是永久的）。
For a contrast, the “female” aggression has the virtue of precision, but the vice of being dishonest, long-lived, and cancerous. In reality, we observe all classes of aggression in all genders of people, so why do we have this need to create a gendered correlation? I think the answer is, and I’m going to have to define this word (lest it be useless) patriarchy.
相反，“雌性”的攻击行为有着精确的特点，但缺点是遮遮掩掩、长时间的、癌症般恶性增殖的。现实生活中，我们在所有性别中都会观察到所有类型的攻击行为，那为何我们要创造出针对性别的分类呢？我想答案就是我将不得不定义的一个词（免得它没什么用）：父权制。
What is patriarchy? I’m going to use it to mean a society in which women are largely blocked from holding official power, and in which male dominance (often backed by threat of physical harm, whether delivered personally or through a military) is the prevailing force in determining which men get power.
什么是父权制？我将用它描述这样一种社会：在这种社会中女性基本被排除在正式权力之外，男性的支配地位（往往由威胁对他人进行身体伤害来获得，不管这种威胁是由个人还是军队来表达）是无处不在的力量，决定了哪些男人可以获得权力。
A large number of men, for the record, lose in a truly patriarchal society, because the high-status men take the lion’s share of the rewards and sexual attention and the rest get very little. The extreme of patriarchy is apolygynous society in which high-status men are afforded large numbers of “wives”, most of whom experience the status of chattel slaves.
准确地说，相当大部分的男人在一个真正的父权社会里是失败的，因为上层男性像狮子一样占据大部分资源和性关注，而其他男人则所得无几。极端的父权制表现为一夫多妻的社会形态，上层男性供养得起许多“妻子”，她们中大部分的地位其实就是男人的财产。
Patriarchy is morally reprehensible and it is good that our society is beginning to reject it, but it’s important to acknowledge its probable normalcy in our evolutionary frame. Men are physically stronger than women, and humans are not naturally monogamous, and there is a general observed tendency in humans to desire to “possess” others, at least in terms of their sexuality. That this would lead to a world, speaking of most of human history, in which powerful men owning harems isn’t surprising. In that lens, it seems inevitable.
父权制在道德上是应受谴责的，好在我们的社会已经开始抵制它了，但值得声明的是，在进化的框架内父权制可能是种常态。男人的身体比女人强壮，人类也不是天生就实行一夫一妻制，而人类被证明有一种“拥有”他人的倾向，至少是在性上拥有他人。这就导致在人类历史长河中，总是出现有权势的男人拥有“后宫”。从这个角度看，这似乎不可避免。
What is this supposedly “female” pattern of “indirect” social aggression all about? Well, it’s about polygynous patriarchy. In a monogamous society, children usually inherit the social status of the parents. If it’s a monogamous patriarchy, the status of the father will be weighted more heavily. In a polygynous patriarchy, the warlord or chieftain with 20 wives might have 150 children, so having a high-status father isn’t enough to confer social status to the children, because there are just too many alpha-brats to give that status and wealth to everyone.
这些跟“女性模式”的“间接”社会性攻击行为有什么关系？这就要说到一夫多妻制的父权制社会了。在一夫一妻制的社会中，孩子们总能继承父母的社会地位。但如果是在一夫多妻制的父权制社会里，军阀或酋长可能拥有20个妻子、150个孩子，这样一来，有一个地位显赫的父亲并不足以确保孩子的社会地位，因为有太多小兔崽子可以被给予地位和财富了。
Often, the children with the best chance of inheriting the father’s wealth, status and connections are those born to the most favored wives. If a woman achieves that status, her children will be heirs, and the other womens’ children will be labelled bastards. Obviously, a woman who is in a harem has an evolutionary incentive to want to be that favored wife.
通常，最有希望继承父亲财产、地位和社会关系的小孩是那些最受宠的妻子所生。如果一个妻子取得那样的地位，她的小孩就会是继承人，而其他女人的小孩就会被贴上私生子的标签。显然，“后宫”中的女人在进化论上有动机去成为那个受宠的妻子。
Passive aggression works well for a woman in a harem who is campaigning to become queen of the harem. Let’s consider how this contest works:
消极攻击行为对一个试图称霸后宫的女人来说很适用。让我们来看看这场竞赛是如何展开的：
fitness or “performance” or “merit” will be judged by an owner who is largely distant from the day-to-day operations (e.g. division of labor) within the harem.
男主人将对适应性也即“表现”或“优点”打分，而他并不了解后宫中的日常运作（比如劳动分工）。
overt violence against a potentially superior competitor will be judged as destruction of the owner’s property, and punished. It will also fail to make the target appear less fit, from an evolutionary perspective.
对潜在竞争者的公开暴力会被认为是对主人财产的破坏而遭受惩罚。从进化论的角度看，这也不会减损被攻击者的适应性。
however, emotional cruelty, abuses of power, and other “indirect” aggressions will cause a targeted competitor to become discouraged, stressed-out, or depressed, and therefore appear less healthy (that is, less fit) to the owner-husband.
然而，感情上的残酷、玩弄权术或其他“间接”攻击行为却能导致目标竞争者变得气馁、备受压力或抑郁，进而在男主人眼里变得更不健康（因而适应性较低）。
What is an aspiring harem queen going to do? She can’t gain her status through physical dominance, as men in such societies often did, because provable harm to other women will cause her to lose favor with the man who ultimately selects the winner.
一个野心勃勃的宫斗明星会如何行动呢？她不能像一夫多妻社会中的男人通常所做的那样，用暴力优势来获得地位，因为对其他女人公开的加害会让她失去男人的宠爱，而最终的胜者由男人决定。
Anyway, physical injury doesn’t make a woman look genetically unhealthy, and is therefore less likely to sway the opinion of the owner/husband (if we assume that he’s also acting under evolutionary imperative); while the long-term effect of emotional violence (and stress) will make the target appear sickly and suggest genetic inferiority.
总之，身体伤害不能让一个女人在遗传上看起来不健康，因而也就无法动摇男主人/丈夫的看法（假设他也遵从进化的视角行事）；而长期的情感暴力（和压力）会让目标看起来病态，暗示了其遗传劣势。
In the modern world, harems mostly don’t exist. There is some harem-queen behavior in American high schools and colleges, related to the severe desirability differential between the men and the women at that age, and the intense competition (for women trying to attract the few unusually mature men) that this creates.
在现代社会，后宫几乎不存在。在美国的高中和大学里存在一些宫斗行为，这同那个年龄段男女愿望的强烈差异有关，也同由此导致的强烈竞争（女人们试图吸引少数格外成熟的男人）有关。
18-year-old women are physically attractive to men of all ages; 18-year-old men are attractive to… no one they can legally date. So I suspect there is some incentive for harem queen behavior, given how few desirable men there are in those ghettos for adolescents that we call schools.
18岁的女人对所有年龄段的男人都有身体上的吸引力，而18岁的男人对他们能合法约会的人都……没有吸引力。所以考虑到在我们称之为学校的贫民区里很少有男人满怀野心，我怀疑这些宫斗行为有其激励因素。
Of course, the men become more desirable and mature as they grow up, and the women seem to grow out of any harem-type behavior, and given that the teenage years are a period in which everyone’s pretty fucked up, I’m going to guess that the overall behavior of women isn’t any worse than that of men. The movies give us adolescent “mean girls” for entertainment’s sake, but I don’t think that such meanness is gendered.
当然，随着年龄增长，男人会变得越来越有野心，而女人则似乎会逐渐抛弃这些宫斗行为。考虑到我们每个人的青少年时期都是一团糟，我猜总的来看女人的行为并不比男人更坏。为了娱乐性，电影总是给我们塑造出青春期的“恶毒女孩”，但我不认为这些恶毒跟性别有关。
Let’s jump away from adolescent drama (it’s not that interesting) and focus on the corporate world. The parallels are shocking.
让我们抛开这些青春期的闹剧吧（没那么有趣），看看职场，这里的勾心斗角令人震惊。
corporate competitors strive for a “favored subordinate” status, because the odds, for a person not born into it, of joining the ownership class are only slightly better than those of a woman in the neolithic era becoming a man.
公司里的竞争者拼命成为“受宠的下属”，因为对一个普通职员来说，挤进老板阶级的概率，也就比新石器时代的一个女人变成男人的概率大那么一点点。
fitness or “performance” is judged by parties who are distant from the action and oblivious to day-to-day operations and any emotional or political drama that might be going on. They are about as capable of assessing individual merit as neolithic harem-owning men were at assessing genetic health among their wives.
适应性或“表现”由远离公司日常运作的圈子裁决，他们不知道公司里上演的那些感情和政治戏码。他们评估个人优点的能力同新石器时代的后宫主人评估自己妻子的能力没差别。
like attractive women in pre-monogamous societies’ harems, people who threaten to out-perform the others draw undesirable attention and adversity within the harem. They’re sometimes singled out and set up to fail.
就像前一夫一妻社会后宫里的有吸引力的女人一样，那些造成“力压群芳”威胁的人，会在后宫里招来他们不想要的关注和麻烦。他们有时会被孤立并注定失败。
obvious interference with a potentially superior competitor’s performance (much less physical harm against that person) will push the perpetrator out of favor, as “The Company” will view that as damage to its own property.
对潜在的优胜者施以明显的干预（更不用说直接的身体伤害）会让作祟者失去宠信，因为公司会将这视作对公司财产的损害。
non-obvious (from the owner’s perspective) interference or aggression toward a potentially superior competitor can degrade that person’s apparent performance and is therefore the weapon of choice.
因此对潜在优势竞争者（对公司所有者）不明显又能损害他的方式也就成了可选的武器。
Corporate executives can be understood, then, as successful harem queens. Under this lens, the entire corporate world makes sense. The CEO isn’t the alpha male, but the champion bitch.
由此，公司的高管们可以被理解为成功的宫斗之星。在这个视角下，整个职场的情况才说得通。CEO不是男主人，而是成功加冕的碧池。
So who’s the alpha male? Well, it’s arguably “The Company” or “shareholders” or rich people or “capital”. We’ve personified Mammon, and then gone a step further. We’ve created an alpha male more powerful than any actual human can be. As I’ve said before, that’s not a corporate “person” but a god.
那么谁才是“男主人”？这尚有争议，有的说是“公司”，有的说是“债权人”、富人或是“资本”。既然我们已经把钱财(玛门)人格化了，然后又更进一步。我们已经创造出一个“男老大”，他比任何实实在在的人类都更有权力。正如我以前说过的，那是个神而不是企业的某人。
Worse yet, this alpha male isn’t one corporate “person”/god but the whole professional system, a supreme and supremely intangible meta-god among the myriad corrupt gods that our socioeconomic system has made.
更糟的是，这个男老大不是某个企业的人或神，而是整个职业系统，我们的社会经济体系造就的许许多多堕落之神中一个超然存在的、不可触摸的元神。
One could imagine, in a corrupt and slowly declining religious order, harem-queen behavior among the priesthood, and that’s basically what we have within the secular priesthood of corporatism. This kind of shitty behavior, clearly, was never limited to women. And now we have a society that runs on it.
你可以想象，在一个堕落的、逐渐衰败的宗教秩序下，神职人员间的宫斗伎俩，而那就是在世俗的公司主义下我们所面对的。这些破烂伎俩，显然不会仅仅局限于女人。我们现在的社会就在这个基础上运行。
Tyler Durden, in Fight Club, lamented that “We’re a generation of men raised by women”. Now, Fight Club was on to something. The male gender in the U.S. is failing and has been failing for some time. (It’s even worse in societies that are more thoroughly corporatized. Look up Japan’s salaryman culture and then read up on its hikikomori and “herbivore men”.)
Tyler Durden在《搏击俱乐部》中哀叹“我们是由女人抚养长大的一代”。现在，这部电影言中了某些事实。美国的男性正在并已经衰败。（在那些公司化更彻底的社会里，情况更糟。看看日本的白领文化再研究下“蛰居族”和“食草男”吧。）
There is a toxic something in many advanced societies that has been emasculating men over the past forty years. But it is not that we were “raised by women” (I’ve seen neither evidence of declining paternal involvement, nor that increasing maternal influence is detrimental) and it’s not the fault of feminism.
过去五十年，发达社会里的某种毒素一直在阉割男性，但不是所谓我们“被女人抚养长大”（我没有发现男权衰落的证据，也没有发现影响力日益增长的女权有什么坏处），也不是女权主义的错。
It’s the fault of corporatism. We’ve created a society that requires us to believe that our richest people are “alpha males”, when they are actually champion harem queens– preening private-sector social climbers. This has spawned a generation of men who are far too concerned with others’ opinions of them (and of the schools they went to, and of the jobs they held) and mostly unable to succeed on their own or think for themselves.
是公司职场主义的错。我们创造了一个社会，这个社会要求我们相信最富有的人就是“男老大”，而他们其实是胜出的宫斗明星——沾沾自喜的私企里的攀高枝者。这孕育出太过关心他人看法的一代（他人对自己所在学校的看法、对自己工作的看法），这代人大部分都无法靠自己取得成功或是独立思考。
One might make the counterargument that the macho-subordinate “bro” culture that is observed in some corporate environments (such as most Silicon Valley startups) is, to the contrary of my argument, excessivelymasculine. Actually, it’s just stupidly masculine. There’s a lot of posturing going on in it, and women are justified to find that posturing threatening, but it’s just another form of the harem-queen game.
有人可能持相反的观点，认为在一些公司环境（比如多数硅谷创业公司）里看到的职员间的“兄弟”文化很是阳刚——同我所说恰恰相反。其实，那不过是愚蠢的阳刚罢了。这里面有太多的故作姿态，而女人们理应视这姿态为一种威胁，那不过是另一种形式的后宫游戏罢了。
The difference, in the young macho-subordinate culture, is whom these wannabe harem-queen men are whoring themselves out to. In the adult corporate world, their target is the amorphous nondescript alpha-male-figure (i.e. the invisible ultra-powerful humanoid that evolves into a god) known as “capital”.
所不同的是，在这种年轻的兄弟文化中，当婊子玩手腕的是男人自己。在成年人的公司世界里，他们的目标是无形的、难以捉摸的男老大形象（比如看不见的拥有终极权力的类人的神），它更广为人知的名字是“资本”。
A seasoned corporate executive knows that his job isn’t to slut it up for a specific manager or CEO but to make himself maximally attractive to the system itself, and that system’s god persona is too aloof for it to be assigned a definite gender, so it does not suffice to appease one presumed aspect of it. Consequently, it demands an appearance that is bland, inoffensive, and neutrally toned.
一个老练的高管明白，他的工作不是为了某个特定的经理或CEO职位而变身荡妇，而是最大限度地让自己对这个系统保有吸引力；他也明白这个系统是如此的超然冷漠，它不能被安上一个性别。因而仅仅满足某个设想的要求是不够的。于是所需要的就是一种圆滑无棱角的、不具攻击性的、中性的腔调。
On the other hand, the macho-subordinate brogrammers haven’t figured out yet that they should focus on their attractiveness to a larger system rather than their immediate bosses. They’re still powdering themselves for the visual delight of, say, a 30-year-old and invariably male founder. This drives them not toward the manicured, soft-faced look of the corporate executive, but toward the absurdity of the frat boy who exhibits the worst traits of masculinity in caricature, but whose membership in such a pointless, groupthink-driven organization shows his desperate need for approval. Therefore, the macho-subordinate brogrammer culture of Silicon Valley does not refute my claim that corporate competition is a harem-queen dynamic; rather, it supports it.
另一方面，那些阳刚的程序员兄弟们还没弄明白，他们应该在意的是自己对更大系统而非顶头上司的吸引力。他们还在为了博取一个30岁左右的、男性的、公司初创人的欢心而涂脂抹粉。这不会让他们看起来更像美过甲的、面容姣好的公司高管，只会把他们推向古惑仔式的荒诞，让他们展示漫画中那种男子气概里最糟糕的特质，而这种哥们义气在这种无意义的、团队思维导向的公司组织里只是暴露了他们对晋升的极端渴望。因此，硅谷程序员间流行的阳刚文化并未与我的观点相悖，即，公司里的竞争其实就是宫斗戏码，相反，恰恰支持了我的观点。
Right now, the world is run mostly by cowardly, talentless, champion harem queens angling for approval from that invisible god we call “capital”. That’s unfortunate, and my view is that it has to end. In order to get this far, human society had to overcome many challenges, and it seems that the 21st century is destined to bring us more challenges (e.g. climate change, religious radicalism, economic inequality and petroleum depletion) and I don’t think that we can handle a single one of them with the business leadership that we’ve got.
如今这个世界基本上被一群懦弱平庸的宫斗明星所把持，他们费尽心思讨“资本”这个看不见的神欢心。这情况太不幸了，在我看来，必须终结。为了达到这个目的，人类社会必须克服许多挑战。21世纪似乎注定带给我们更多挑战（比如气候变化、宗教极端主义、经济不平等和石油的耗尽），而我不认为我们能在现有的商业领导下解决其中任何一个问题。
So who should be running the world? To be honest, there are some men whom I consider supremely qualified, and there are some women whom I consider supremely qualified. Gender, to me, is irrelevant. However, we need independent thinkers, and this means that the harem-queen world (for which, many of the worst offenders are men) has got to go.
那么谁应该来掌控这个世界？老实说，我认为有一些男人很有资格，一些女人也非常合格。性别，对我来说，无关紧要。我们需要独立的思考者，而这意味着后宫世界（其中最恶劣的嫔妃很多是男性）必须滚蛋。
（编辑：辉格@whigzhou）
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