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Rachael comments on Sayeth the Girl - Less Wrong
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The problem is real. I am a 21 year old woman and an aspiring rationalist, and my friends are mostly women and some are also aspiring rationalists. We find much of the conversation about women on this site so off-putting that I for one have never commented before. I read Eliezer's work and enjoy it very much indeed, which is why I stick around at all.
I am simply astounded at the men here confidently asserting that they aren't alienating women when they talk about "getting" "attractive women" and speak of women as symbols of male success or indeed accessories for a successful male. This reduces me and other females (including female rationalists) to the category of a fancy car or a big house, and I feel humiliated when I read it.
I am fully aware that some men think this way, and that in certain social scenes almost all the "players" in the social "game" see it this way. If getting ahead in a social game like that gives you loads of utility then thinking of women in this way might be rational. But if you would derive more utility from having long and close relationships with female rationalists, you might like to know that female rationalists will be less likely to seek out your company and attention if you persist in that attitude.
If a woman publicly asserts that she wants to "get" an "attractive man", would you also think that she is being alienating?
Most people, regardless of whether they are men or women, want attractive partners, and yet, in my experience, only men are accused of being alienating or superficial or even sexist when they are honest about their desires.
In addition, insofar as successful men are significantly more likely than not-so-successful men to attract women whom they find attractive, having an attractive girlfriend does signal that you are successful.
FWIW, I find individuals who talk about men as high-status possessions rather offputting as well, regardless of their gender.
That said, I've never tried to participate in a community I considered defined by such individuals.
I've seen "superficial". As to the other two, I believe the party line is that sexism requires both prejudice and institutionalized power in order to function, that males are uniformly more socially powerful, and thus that male-directed sexism is impossible. In itself that's little more than a definitional quibble, but in practice this shakes out to a belief that otherwise identical behaviors are less alienating when directed at men.
How seriously you take that probably depends more on your politics than on your observed experiences. That being said, I imagine I'd feel pretty alienated if I'd wandered into a 90%-female community that frequently discussed men in terms of status potential, and I further imagine that that sort of thought experiment should screen off most of the information we'd get from discussing which accusations are more common.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, I think it's generally much easier to convince a group to stop doing something because it's bad than to convince them that its okay when others do it, but only bad when they do it.
Would this imply that, in a truly sexually egalitarian society where niether side posses any systematic power disparities over the other, and both would be free to objectify the other without being sexist?
As a general rule, everyone is constantly accusing everyone else of everything.
This seems deep, open minded, egalitarian and... blatantly false. People aren't constantly accusing everyone else of everything. Moreover some people do more accusing than others, some people receive more accusations than others and some kinds of accusations are received more positively by observers than others. Anyone who believed (or, rather, anyone who alieved) your theory would make poor predictions of human behavior and make correspondingly bad social decisions.
I was honestly going more for silly, cynical, misanthropic and... obviously hyperbole.
If you do not mind me quoting a different part of this thread momentarily:
I do not understand what flawed patterns of thought I am encouraging. Could you elaborate a bit?
It's related to the fallacy of gray.
To me it seems like a joke.
To the extent that it is a joke it is a bad joke, inappropriate to the context, with an undesirable expected influence, encouraging flawed patterns of thought. ie. The feature of humor that allows it to bypass critical facilities would makes the joke interpretation worse than a more direct interpretation.
Something being a 'joke' does not make it immune from criticism. Or, rather, it often does make it immune from criticism but this is unfortunate. This comment in response to the text that it quotes being overwhelmingly positively received is a negative sign. I speculate (or perhaps merely hope) that in a different thread it may not have been given as much leeway.
Logical fallacy ad hominem tu quoque?
I was not trying to disprove Rachael. I was merely trying to point out the potential use of double standards.
Sure. I usually wouldn't care enough to object, but it would seem faintly wrong in a way that 'I want to have sex with an attractive guy,' or a concrete statement of any other desire, would not.
And I most certainly would not expect most heterosexual guys to participate in a web-community that often talked about how to "get an attractive man".
If you really meant that, then your experience seems weirdly limited. Or are we just talking about sexual desires? I think the statement still fails in that case, but not as soundly.
Female rationalists are rare enough that I for one think we should proactively endeavour to attract them here, rather than thoughtlessly alienating them and then being baffled by the backlash of those who are interested enough in this blog to even care.
Women reduce men to a fancy car and a big house all the time. I used to find it rather insulting. I'd rather be reduced to a sex object. The grass is always greener.
Both men and women get reduced to status symbols for their mates. That's the way it is. I don't get much heartburn over it anymore.
The whole point of this website is that we can do something about big problems. Like dying!
I feel like not treating each other like crap should be a much easier problem to tackle than dying. Your comment smacks of System Justification.
While it's worth noting that men can also be objectified, I don't see how it follows that this isn't a Bad Thing.
While the statement "unfortunately people from group A undergo experience X" doesn't logically entail anything about people outside group A, it often does pragmatically implicate that the speaker doesn't think that people outside group A experiencing X constitute a problem to be worried about at the moment (otherwise, the speaker would likely not have mentioned group A in the first place: when did you last hear anyone lamenting that so many right-handed people die in car accidents?); therefore, the fact that both people within and outside A experience X is a reason to ADBOC with such a statement.
An excellent point, if perhaps a little strong, (objectifying men could simply be less of an issue,) but dan is saying that "That's the way it is. I don't get much heartburn over it anymore."
It is absolutely worth pointing out that neither sex is immune to objectification. Objectification is still bad. Just because I've been forced to put up with something doesn't mean everyone should just suck it up.
Another interpretation of his point: “It's hypocritical for women to complain about being objectified by men, because they also objectify men themselves.” That's only a valid point if the women who resent being objectified are the same women who objectify men, which is probably not the case.
Other examples of this failure mode are “Jerusalemites hailed Jesus as a deity when he came back, but five days later they were shouting for Pontius Pilate to crucify him” (maybe he had both supporters and opposers, who weren't the same people?) and “people are always protesting about that politician, but he keeps on being re-elected” (maybe young people protest and old people vote for him, or something like that).
It's an inference drawn from a mixture of fallacies of composition and division and the availability heuristic.
"I notice Jerusalemites supporting Jesus, therefore Jerusalem supports Jesus. I notice Jerusalemites opposing Jesus, therefore Jerusalem opposing Jesus. Jerusalem both supports and opposes Jesus; therefore Jerusalem is fickle; therefore Jerusalemites are individually fickle ... and should feel bad about their fickleness."
Or awesome, depending on your preference in the specific instance.
For most meanings of "objectification", I figured this possibility is so unusual as to be irrelevant. Am I missing something?
What do we mean by "objectification"? I would argue that the Baysianism-utilitarianism epistemology cloud around here objectifies all people and all subsets of people by reducing them to the status of tools or victory points, and no one seems particularly concerned about this until the subset being objectified becomes that set of all females.
From Rachael's comment:
Or ... look it up. The top three or four results for "objectification of women" on your favorite search engine may be enlightening.
EY is opposed to not-caring-about-whether-your-sexual-partner-is-sentient (which is my understanding of the top Google hit for that phrase), FWIW.
It seems to be a bit more than that. Sometimes sexual objectification seems to include wishing a potential sexual partner were nonsentient — treating people as if they ought to be automata to serve your wishes, and that it's an outrage that they don't act like it.
It's one thing to say, "I wish I had a sexbot." It's another thing to say, "You shouldn't exist; instead there should exist a sexbot in your image, for me."
First thought was, “WTH? If all those people want is to masturbate using someone else's body, why don't they just pay for a prostitute?”, then I remembered that prostitution is illegal in plenty of places. (Now I'm curious whether stuff like date rape drug use is more prevalent in places where prostitution is illegal than where it isn't.)
I'd like to chime in and say that if this seems absurd and incredible and who does that ... Uhh. That's happened to me. It's not fun. Maybe a bit more tangled up, but almost exactly that.
There's no problem with seeing women as status tools or victory points if you explicitly state that what you're playing is a woman-collecting game, or a lay-collecting game, number-close game, etc. Some people might frown at your choice of game for moral reasons, but they'll admit that you're doing the strategically correct thing with respect to your game's objective.
The problem arises when you say that you're winning at "relationships" or you claim your game is what "everyone knows" to be how relationships work or that's how "the" game is played. That is when "everyone" gets pissed. We don't want to be lumped into that group.
That's not the claim. The claim is that everyone does this, but most people prefer to believe they're doing something else.
Oh, I think I agree in that case. Objectifying people is okay because people are really complicated and sometimes you only need to consider one property of a person in order to compute your goals if you're maximizing utility along some one axis. Sure!
Objectifying people is bad when it hurts them.
When people are concerned about it, it's probably because it hurts them.
Or because they expect to gain from indicating concern.
It seems to have multiple meanings and connotations all blurring into each other. Possible meaning include:
Most people mean many or all of these when they say "objectifying" due to connotations and sloppy terminology. A few also include "Treating someone as governed by instinct rather than as a sentient being", especially when discussing PUA.
Does that answer your question?
Prior discussion about that
I made the same point there as well.
Ah, that part I had glanced over. Well, that's a case of Generalizing from One Example: ‘[I don't mind {noise, clutter, being objectified}, therefore it's not a big deal and] if you complain about it you're oversensitive.’
Do you suggest that people should select their mates randomly?
Him:
Me:
So no, no I don't.
I thought that you implied that it was a Bad Thing, while you were just objecting the logic of the argument. Thanks for the clarification.
The multiple negation might be confusing, but basically:
"It's not just A that has horrible things happen to them, A^C also do!" does not imply "It is good/okay that A and A^C have horrible things happen to them".
This piques a nerve of mine. Thinking about others in terms of evolutionary psychology/ladder theory alone is a pretty huge screw-up, and I'm surprised that it happens frequently enough on this website that this has gotten so many upvotes. Then again, I'm fairly new. When did this happen?