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:
- Comments and posts that casually objectify women or encourage the objectification of women. "Objectification" is what happens when a person is treated or discussed as an object, not as an autonomous being. (Non-women can also be objectified, and that too should be stopped.)
- Casual use of masculine and/or heteronormative examples in posts and comments that aren't explicitly about gender. It's just not that hard to come up with an unsexed example. Be especially careful when using the second person. If you need to use an example with a gender, there's no reason to consider male the default - consider choosing randomly, or you could use a real person as an example (who isn't presumed to archetypically represent anyone in the audience) instead of a hypothetical one (who might be).
- Sweeping generalizations about women, if they are not backed up by overwhelming hard data (responsibly gathered and interpreted). The cost of being wrong about this sort of thing is high, even if the culprits don't bear it themselves, and extreme care should be taken.
- Fawning admiration of pickup artists who attain their fame by the systematic manipulation of women. If it is necessary to refer admiringly to a pickup artist or pickup strategy (I'm not sure why it would be, but if), care should be taken to choose one whose methods are explicitly non-depersonalizing, and disclaim that specifically in the comment.
We could use more of the following:
- Thoughtful use of qualifiers and disclaimers in talk about sex and gender. Robin is not right.
- Attention to the privileges of masculinity and attempts to reduce that disparity. (Note that of course there are also female privileges, but until Less Wrong hosts custody battles or we start suspecting that some of us might be violent criminals, they are unlikely to come into play nearly so much in this location.)
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.
Alicorn, perhaps you've changed the wording on this post since I originally read it, because though my initial reaction was negative, upon writing a reply I have very little disagreement with your actual prescriptions in this post. I do have some disagreements with your framing of the discourse on LessWrong.
"Objectification" can be a difficult term due to people defining it in different ways. Yet given the way you define it here, I agree with advocating against talking about or treating people in a way that denies their autonomy or depersonalizes them.
Whether particular examples exhibit objectification is another question. I don't think that phrases such as "getting women" necessarily implies objectification, but since it is often used in that way, I think it's worthwhile to expend a little bit more effort to avoid it.
I agree on the issue of pronouns. "They" isn't really that bad.
As for generalizations: if data is not provided, then whatever evidence (e.g. anecdotes) leads to that notion should be presented, and/or the speculative nature of the claim should be acknowledged.
"Manipulation" is not rigorously defined in this discussion, and people use it to mean different things. Some people use it mean any form of social influence/persuasion (and may defend "manipulation"). Other people use it mean unethical social influence; I think we both share this usage.
I also disagree with fawning admiration of pickup artists who gain their fame by forms of unethical social influence. It's not clear whether you are suggesting that all pickup artists engage in unethical social influence, or just some.
I would also advocate studying the methods of pickup artists who's methods are non-depersonalizing. Or if depersonalizing methods are studied due to some relevance to rationality, I would prefer to see the depersonalizing aspect critiqued.
I agree with attention to unjust advantages based on gender ("privilege" is another non-rigorous term that shouldn't be used without a definition), as long as it runs both ways. I would caution you against assuming that the only systematic disadvantages men experience in society are in the legal system (but kudos for acknowledging the existence of some male disadvantages).
In Love in America, feminist sociologist Francesca Cancian argues that the conceptualization and discourse over love in Western is biased towards feminine expressions of love, and marginalizes masculine expressions of love. She calls this phenomenon the feminization of love.
While I mainly agree with your prescriptions, I disagree with your framing of the content of the discussions on less wrong that relate to gender. You say:
You make the male discourse on the site sound a lot more unified than it actually is. In all objections you've made to certain discourse here, you have received substantial support by males (some of which you acknowledge, which makes me confused by your "masculine guys vs offended women" dichotomy in portraying LessWrong). In the example of "jerkitude" you cite, pjeby took the person involved to task and leveled multiple criticisms, such as a view of "entitlement." So did ciphergoth.
Someone made arguments that came of as overgeneralized and sexist; others came and critiqued him vocally. Sounds like the working of a healthy rationalist community to me, not of a locker room full of uncritical fawning over PUAs.
Finally, your post might give the idea (which I don't know whether you intend or not), that typical discussions on LessWrong that turn the subject of pickup are of a fawning nature. I think that this idea is false.
Personally, while I've always emphasized that pickup is relevant to rationality, I've included multiple criticisms of the community.
In this post, I accuse the seduction community of naive realism, and committing the availability heuristic in their model of women leading to oversimplification. In this post, I mention that some practices in the seduction community are unethical, and discuss my use of moral constraints on pickup techniques. In this post, I argue that some attitudes in the seduction community are overly cynical towards women, and detrimental to success in long-term relationships. In this post, I express skepticism that certain pickup theories are true even if they lead to success, and I suggest that the community falls prey to ideological thinking and that some of its techniques are morally questionable.
I actually have the creds to back up these criticisms. Btw, could you briefly list the pickup materials you have been exposed to so far so I can better qualify your claims about it?
Some of these posts attracted upvotes, but none attracted long threads. Maybe few people read them because I wasn't controversial enough. What I think this shows is that the subject of pickup and seduction can be discussed in a manner that is both complimentary and critical (an example I've attempted to show with my past posts on the subject), yet other threads suggest that people are more interested in participating in polarizing discussions of the subject.
While this may simply be an oversight, your post fails to acknowledge more reasoned and less sexist discussion of pickup on LessWrong that is critical of it (like mine, at least in my hopes), and critiques of pickup ideology when it has been presented (e.g. pjeby's critique of Sirducer's posts), presented by some of the very people who think there is value in the community and discussing it on LessWrong. While I support your requests for non-sexist and gender neutral language, I think your portrayal of the discussions of pickup on LessWrong is skewed due to these omissions.
P.S. I am planning on getting back to you in the name thread... I've been enjoying that discussion.
I haven't, or if I have I am suffering from amnesia.
I have acknowledged that there are some tactics described by pickup artists that seem to me perfectly aboveboard ethics-wise. It is possible that some pickup artists use those tactics exclusively. I would not object to uncri... (read more)