I don't approve of the goals and interests they seem to share as a group (although I do approve of their personhood).
Isn't it actually their methods you disapprove of? Disapproving of a pretty innate male desire to engage in frequent intercourse seems unfair at best and Puritan at worst. Their goals do not involve manipulating women any more than my goal of driving to the store is also a goal to drive my car. If a man can pick up a woman simply by talking honestly to her about his romantic feelings, do you still disapprove of his actions because he may share the same goal as the pickup artist?
My favored outcome is usually just transparent, bald-faced announcement of all my intentions. I actually go about saying things like "I did work today and seek praise!" or "I have the inexplicable urge to make you jealous, so I'm probably going to talk about my ex in a minute" or "I don't like your friend and you should probably take anything bad I say about her with a grain of salt" or "I'm going to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince you to help us move next week unless it doesn't take that long". Of course I accompany these things with either actual smiles or emoticons because I like to project an air of adorable friendliness, but of course I'm actually adorable and friendly so that's okay ;)
Why is this less morally objectionable than the manipulative NLP of a pickup artist? "I did work today and seek praise" is an extraordinarily manipulative (and clever) statement. It, and the others, are obviously intended to subvert cached thought, catching off guard the recipient who may not rise to the bait of responding positively to the more common, "Today was a tough day" or "I hope I did okay, what do you think?" By using unusual and unexpectedly honest phrasing and presenting yourself as "adorable and friendly", are you really being transparent, or are you actually employing a manipulative method of your own? After all, if it never worked, surely you would self-update to a better technique. And wouldn't claiming you are actually being transparent be a defense against your own cached representation of in order to preserve your internal belief that you are not being manipulative?
Isn't it actually their methods you disapprove of?
I guess in addition to defining "respect" I should have defined "goal". In attempting to fully describe a goal, I'd usually be inclined to include caveats about what methods wouldn't be okay for me to use to achieve that goal. For instance, it's my goal to watch the entirety of Stargate SG-1, but not if I have to steal the DVDs from WalMart to do it.
...Why is this less morally objectionable than the manipulative NLP of a pickup artist? "I did work today and seek praise" is
Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support, but usually after I or, more rarely, someone else sounds the alarm, and usually without much persistence or apparent investment. There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems, which does nothing to disincentivize being piggish around here - some people seem to earnestly care about the problem, but this isn't enforced by the community at large, it's just a preexisting disposition (near as I can tell).
I would like help reducing the incidence of:
We could use more of the following:
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.