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Morendil comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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Comments (647)
So, ignoring your caricature...
On one hand we have advice that is about body posture, and on the other hand we have advice that is about persuading yourself of things that are not true, such as thinking of an adult human as if they were a child.
And your question is why people react differently to either kind of advice, have I got that right?
So, ignoring your classification of cleavage as "body posture" ...
On one hand, we have advice for male-to-female engagement that has a solid history of enhancing male attractiveness and which is enjoyed by females, and on the other hand we have advice that is about manipulating men's hardwired judgment mechanisms, thereby subverting their better long-term interests.
And your question is why people condemn the first kind of advice, have I got that right?
Just because your objection parallels my comment in form doesn't automatically make its content a correct refutation; and someone other than me has warned you that the tactic doesn't serve you particularly well.
Do you or do you not agree that "think of her as a child" involves changing your mental state, while "show cleavage and arch your back" does not?
Your reply above directs attention away from this difference and toward the supposed "history of success" of the first form of advice.
This is shifting the goalposts, if your intent is still to understand why the first form is more often objected to. Whether the advice is sound or not is a separate matter.
Not sticking to one query is a classic reason why threads go out of hand (as this one has, once again).
I'm aware of how people get angry when their own argument methods are turned around and force them to think critically about the basis for their own beliefs -- though I don't think that's happening in your case. (The anger on your part isn't happening, I mean -- I do believe you are reflecting critically on your own beliefs, or at least are making a genuine effort.)
The point of me mimicking your form was not to be cute (although that was a neat side effect), but rather, to show that a simple reframing of the issue -- by highlighting different salient aspects -- would reverse the "obvious" answer to your question.
You claim advice about body posture to be benign, while believing false, offensive things is obviously bad by comparison. (The latter is a strawman of course: the advice is to, like an actor, go into a different mindset in order to have a generating function for your actions, which turns out to be preferable by the "target" of it. The advice is not to believe that adult women are disobedient children as if it were some more objective or universal aspect of reality.)
Of course I agree, but this is a poor metric. Isn't it more important what the advice causes in the other party's mind? If "think of her as a child" generates actions, on my part, that the woman deems preferable, what does it matter that my mental state is changed? If a woman uses attire and posture that causes me to "think below the waist", isn't the impact on my mental state more important -- because of the diminishing of informed consent [1] -- than the impact on the woman's mental state?
Because, as explained above, it's not apparent how that's a relevant metric or difference.
If the advice actually benefits women, that should negate any objectionability of the advice that is grounded on harm to women. Failure to speak frankly about the commonality of the kind of woman benefitting, while instead giving full weight to the supposedly-universal preferences of the most vocal feminists ... to me, that looks like a social failing.
[1] Yes, yes, I lose status by mentioning that this can happen, &c. C'est la vie.
It isn't usually a successful tactic, which is somewhat of a shame, given that it can serve to demonstrate how a particular (mis)use of argument is flawed. People on average don't have the respect for consistency that I would prefer.
OK, we're at least getting closer to something concrete:
It seems to me that "think of her as a child" is objectionable for the same reason that "think of the moon as being made of green cheese" would be: the proposition in question is false.
Whereas showing cleavage and arching your back have no comparable epistemic content. There is no "true shape of the breasts" or "true posture of the body", no facts of the matter that warrant a comparison as in the other case.
If it takes an essay to state where you stand on those, I'm happy to wait until later. But if you can briefly state your objection, I'd be interested to hear it.
In the grandparent here I merely allude to the claim that humans cannot change their body language, particularly sexual body language without it being about changing their mental state. Body and mind are just too linked, such that advice about 'thoughts' is often intended to work by changing posture and vise versa. But this is tangential and not related to the actual disagreement I have with your argument.
See earlier reply. You misunderstand the suggestion. Replace 'think' with 'treat her as though' (and don't leave out the 'disobedient' in either case) and I would expect the same (or a worse) reaction even though it completely avoids your technical epistemic objection.
ETA: I deleted the grandparent before Morendil replied. Not because I don't support it but because I decided it would just be distracting. It was. ;)
"Treat her as if she were a disobedient child" still strikes me as predictably objectionable, because the statement is being made about an adult woman, which should screen off obedience being an issue; obedience isn't expected of adults.
The specific bit of PUA advice we're discussing here amounts to paternalism. Showing cleavage doesn't. This is why people - men and women - object to the former more readily than to the latter. (Some men may approve of paternalism, but they are just wrong.)
What's so outlandish about all that?
I don't reject 'all that'. I did rejected a specific straw man you presented for the reasons I have already mentioned and. I don't feel obliged to suggest that your claims here are outlandish since I am not particularly opposed to your overall position. That is, I think both you and Silas have valid points but I would not support either position as they stand, preferring a different emphasis (and a whole heap less moral judgement).
(Allow me to engage in the obedience/paternalism subject in a different comment, since that moves us to a somewhat different claim, where the lines are not already drawn in the sand.)
This is my view also. I agree with practically all your commentary on their discussion.
It is expected by sexy adults. It is also often given to those same adults ;)
No it doesn't. Someone would have to think of a different pejorative term. If they were into that sort of thing.
People in general don't object to the former more readily than the latter. It varies drastically with personality type, sex and subculture. The people that most object to paternalism are male nerds while the people that (I expect to) most approve of paternalism are conservative religious women. I have seen each of those classes of advice condemned to different degrees in different communities that I have been involved in.
Ouch. That sounds like just the sort of ideal that provoke outrage in the face of practical advice.
I am not a huge fan of paternalism myself. In fact, I have in the past ended a relationship with a woman because I just wasn't willing to be as paternalistic as she desired. I don't begrudge her that preference and certainly don't think she is just wrong for preferring a more paternalistic dynamic than I do.
Why those groups in particular? They are toward those ends, but I think I would have (maybe superficially/naively) said "radical feminists" and "conservative religious men", respectively. Don't necessarily disagree, but I'm very curious.
Those were just listed off the top of my head and biased towards groups and situations in which the advice is most relevant.
I suppose you may be right about he radical feminists with respect to paternalism, although I don't naturally distinguish between common behaviour patterns based on the genitalia of the actor. I'm going with Morendil's word here but to the extent that 'paternalism' implies 'when done by males' I would perhaps want to use a different word.
This leaves out whether you mean adults who like sex or adults who you consider attractive, not to mention whether it's true of everyone in either of those categories, or whether it's just some proportion.
It also doesn't quantise just how 'often' the obedience is given to that proportion, what the exact scope of commands over which such obedience is granted, what measures of age and or maturity allow the designation 'adult', which group of adults are those doing the obeying and what level of obsequiousness is expected during compliance.
Hopefully what were clear were the assertions:
You've got this backwards. Manipulating a man's perception of attractiveness in order to secure short-term mating is in a man's (evolutionary) interest. Manipulating a woman's perception of attractiveness to secure short-term mating, on the other hand, is not in a woman's (evolutionary) interest.
(Also, you conveniently ignored the bit where both manipulations are enjoyed by the recipients. If I weren't so certain you sincerely believe in your biased perspective, I'd have to conclude you were deliberately trolling at this point.)
pjeby said:
Nope, this is outdated. I'll try to return to it, but there are actually a lot of hypotheses that suggest that some types of short-term mating were adaptive for females. See the good genes hypothesis, sexy son hypothesis, and Hrdy's work on female choice.
(Practically everything else you've said in this discussion is gold, btw, so I hope you'll forgive me for being brusque.)
Why would men have evolved to have perceptions of attractiveness that don't track (are more conservative, when not manipulated, than would be in) their evolutionary interest?
Also, I thought we were talking about normative interests, what's actually good for someone. Why are you bringing up evolutionary interests in the first place?
This. Also the bit where both manipulations affect hardwired judgment mechanisms, of course.
You're filling in things that aren't there. A woman can use her looks to get non-sexual favors out of men, and the advice that gets her to that level of looks is widely and unashamedly given (though not of course the suggestion to use it for bad manipulation).
The advice that would get men to a comparable level of attractiveness (i.e. even using non-sexual manipulation goals as the standard), by contrast, is not widely and unashamedly given.
The parallel therefore holds, despite the difference in goals.
Unless you're talking about non-sexual mating goals, you've now broken the symmetry yourself.
Why don't you spell out the mapping? Because everything looks parallel to me. Let's start from the beginning. I reversed Morendil's characterization of male vs. female attractiveness advice to cast the latter in a bad light:
On what basis do you dispute that this accurately describes effective female-sexiness-enhancing advice? Sure, men would enjoy it if she used it get sexual favors ... but they wouldn't enjoy it if she used it to get them to do non-sexual favors (with a false hint of the chance for sex).
So, the quoted advice most certainly does count as being "against men's long-term interests", like I claimed. And (to tie it back in to the original topic), women can easily get accurate information about how to get to this attractiveness state. Men? Not so much. (Sorry for the cliche.)
Are you saying that even known-false sexual attention from attractive females isn't enjoyed by men? Men pay for this at strip clubs and other places all day long.
I still don't see the symmetry here. If you're looking at things from the POV of mating goals, there is no bias -- women have just as much difficulty getting accurate information, if not more, since there isn't nearly as large a reverse-PUA industry for getting men to commit to long-term relationships.
If you're discussing non-mating goals, then materials like "How To Marry A Rich Man" are just as socially-denigrated as pickup.
Last -- and utterly devastating to your claims -- there are widely available materials that explain how to be attractive to women, but which do not aim at sex as their goal, and these materials do not suffer from the same social stigma (because, as with women's beauty materials, they are about improving the attractor rather than manipulating the attractee).
Specifically, plenty of books and other materials are available to teach men how to be stylish, sociable, and confident, quite well enough to improve their chances of being able to get sex from women with the "false hint" of a chance for a relationship or good genes.
The only way in which you can force an asymmetry to exist here, is if you either deliberately compare materials with asymmetric goals in areas where men and women are symmetric in inclination, or compare materials with symmetric goals in areas where men and women are asymmetric in inclination. This makes yours a tortured argument and extremely limited evidence of your position.
In contrast, under every other way of comparing the situation for men and women, we see:
Similar social stigma for things that state as their goal the manipulation of the opposite sex as an object to achieve the target audience's goals
Similar lack of stigma for things that state as their goal the improved attractiveness of the target audience for the benefit of themselves and the opposite sex, and
Similar stigma for either admitting to true-things-that-work but are socially repugnan, with the expected relative lack of available advice concerning such socially-stigmatized truths.
The only way I can see to claim asymmetry under these conditions is to start from a premise of asymmetry, and then torture the facts until they give in.
I must emphasise that "but do not have sex as the goal" is a completely different issue to "they are about improving the attractor rather than manipulating the attractee". Having sex as a goal isn't manipulative. In fact, acknowledging that sex is a goal can make the approach far less manipulative than if a façade of political correctness is maintained but sex is still sought after.
No, that clearly isn't what Silas is saying there. He is talking about hints that actually give a deceptive indication that sex is likely to be granted if favours are done. (To which I would always add a 'shame on you if she fools you twice' emphasis.)
Well, it wasn't clear to me -- especially since that would make it equivalent to men's false declarations of love or resources to get sex... and the information allowing men to do that is just as available as the information that allows women to know they could false-promise sex to get resources.
And in both cases, the behavior is looked down on by society.
So, it would've been an odd interpretation for me to read into what he said, given that I was trying to interpret his evidence in the best possible light, not the worst one. ;-)
(i.e., refute your opponent's strong points, not the weak ones)
I agree about the equivalence.
I suggest that the 'false declaration of love to get sex' is frowned upon far more than 'false hint of sex to get resources'. The treatment of the 'victim' in each case tends to be different too (the sympathy vs contempt balance is different).
I'm not sure which of Silas or your positions this claims supports since I'm not particularly attached to either. I argue that the significant asymmetry is different in nature to that being primarily debated here.
No, you clearly haven't. The caricature you use in your dichotomy is absurd.
If people men are literally persuading themselves that women they wish to attract are children and then seducing them then they are acting, by intent, as paedophiles. Clearly the message trying to be sandwiched into 'think of her as a disobedient child' means something different. Something a lot more analogous to cleavage presentation in terms of the role played in attraction.
It's a good thing the English language has a milder word for the milder fallacy: "paternalism". It's still a fallacy, though.
No. Someone seducing someone they believe is a child then it isn't anything to do with paternalism.
Again, your dichotomy is absurd. 'Thinking of her like a disobedient child' does not mean 'persuading yourself of things that are not true'. Dating advisors don't recommend that men seduce females that they believe are children but still sometimes give this advice. They do not mean ''persuading yourself of things that are not true'.
Right, they mean "acting as if." By the way, Silas summary of that advice is a tiny bit extreme. I do hear "be dominant," and I sometimes hear "give orders," but "ordering her around" in general is not something I hear so commonly. I do hear "treat her like your bratty little sister" sometimes.
Agree. "Give orders" is both a more accurate and useful advice and less provocative. That more balanced description would have saved rather a lot of hassle, even though there would still be disagreement.
The bit about the terrorists was also a little exaggerated. Amusing though.
It's not very precise, though. The part that actually makes the difference isn't having the orders, it's knowing what to "order".
Which is one reason that I think leaving out, "knowing what you want" is actually losing an important piece. Without being sufficiently clear as to what you want and why -- preferably a why that is good for the woman as well as you -- you don't have anything to "back up" your status bid.
I have seen much better ways of describing this than "give orders", but they all take more than a couple of words.
And so I think it's better, if we have to be imprecise in a discussion of this here, to err on the side of being imprecise in a way that doesn't omit women's goals and values, since that's the whole bloody point of this comment thread... to discuss ways to avoid exclusionary language.
No pj. There is a difference between 'not very precise' and 'saying something different to what I want him to be saying'.
'Knowing what you want' is important. But it is not what the subject of the expression is about. The advice "give orders" and applies even independently of knowing what you want.
That you are continuing to insist that Silas refine his words with words that don't mean the same thing is both poor communication and outright rude. Desist.
I see here three different concepts to track:
It seems the Silas and PJ both think that 2 and 3 are the same or very close (the PUA's are right), but they disagree on what that is.
So I don't think PJ is trying to tell Silas to say the thing Silas believes 2 and 3 are in a different way, so much as disagreeing with Silas about what 2 and 3 are. It is a challenge to Silas' assertion that the thing PUA's say that provokes offense is actually right.
Actually, I'd say the four things to track (and this is actually simplifying a bit) are:
Silas claims that #1 is "the truth" and #3 is "uninformative politician-speak". I claim that omitting #3 from the discussion is (rightly) perceived as exclusionary and is therefore not a good idea.
AFAICT, we both agree that #3 is insufficient information for a man to understand #2 without #1, but Silas appears to claim that #3 is actively misleading and contradictory, as well as unnecessary.
I dispute this claim, however, since I found #3 to be of vital importance in translating #1 into #2, as well as being polite to include in a conversation for a general audience.
Of course, there is still the possibility that we actually disagree on #2 -- in particular, it may be that Silas is correct in saying that #3 is misleading relative to his perception of #2. (In which case, I think he has a mistaken understanding relative to #4 -- or at least, the version of #4 that relates to my goals for relationships.)
Whew. Complicated enough for you yet? ;-)
To the extent Silas and I disagree wrt goals for #4, or what's actually meant by #2, the discussion is likely to be incoherent, so I suspect that may be the real problem. I've been attributing this incoherence to Silas being blinded by his emotions about the topic, but it's certainly possible that it's due to something else, such as a deeper disagreement on some premise we think we agree on.
I add:
I claim:
If you don't know the desired end result, how can you possibly modulate your "giving orders" in a way that will produce that result, vs. another way that will produce the result of "creepy", "bossy", "socially inept", etc.? Merely saying to "give orders" without any indication of what you're trying to accomplish doesn't strike me as particularly informative.
If someone had told me to "give orders" without the other context, there is no way I could possibly have gotten it right -- which is why I'm saying it's imprecise, and missing important information. For me, it is.
In other words, her point of view isn't relevant-- it's a power relationship.
Power, yes. Her point of view not being relevant? I don't know, I guess it depends on how you treat your sister.
Remember, the claim of PUAs (who advocate such techniques; not all do) is that a large enough percentage of women responds well to such treatment and enjoy it. You may well be skeptical of that claim. I am skeptical that the percentage is as high as some PUAs make it sound.
If you disagree with the tactic, I suggest that you follow it down to the root and look at the premises, and what reasons PUAs have to believe that women are reasonably likely to enjoy this kind of treatment. If the woman's sexual preference is to be treated that way, then it's not treating her point of view as not "revelant," it the opposite: the PUA is taking into account the woman's point of view by giving her what she enjoys. Whenever we look at weird and wacky PUA tactics, we really need to be thinking about what responses PUAs have got from women that make them think (correctly or incorrectly) that such behavior is viable and reasonable. We cannot assume that such behavior is primarily driven by their own preferences, or that it merely a jerk-like imposition on the part of PUAs.
The fact that PUAs advocate a certain behavior as attractive to women is sufficient to locate the hypothesis that they might actually be correct, and we should consider that hypothesis along with the hypothesis that PUAs are biased, or that such behavior is an imposition of their own preferences rather than women's.
I have my own objections to the "bratty little sister" frame, primarily because I want to be dating someone who is an equal. A little teasing is always great, but if I wouldn't want an interaction with a woman where I persistently felt that my role was too close to the role of a big brother, while her role was too close to that of a bratty little sister. Moreover, I think that many men have this same preference, and so would be best served by forms of seduction that promote equality.
Note that my objection is from my own preferences (and the preferences that I think more people should hold); I think the effectiveness and ethics of such behavior is less clear-cut.
You say "power relationship" like it's a bad thing. My own preference may be similar to yours in that I dislike persistent and overarching power dynamics in my relationships (and I think that a lot of power dynamics are actively harmful), but lots of people, male and female, really do like relationships with gendered power dynamics, and seem to do just fine in them. As long as these relationships are chosen freely, I don't have a sufficient basis to say that there is something wrong with the preferences of those people, or with satisfying those preferences.
Tentatively offered, but it's possible that if PUAs framed their recommended behavior in terms of "some women" or "many women" rather than implying that what they're doing works well with all women, there'd be a lot less social friction.
This may or may not be something you want, but part of this conversation is why there are so few women at LW.
I would also like to see more rigor in describing the responses of different subsets of women. When PUAs talk among themselves, qualifiers do get to be a drag, even if a PUA has more complex views. I think more rigor would be worth it, and I find the tendency of PUAs to use language with negative implications annoying and socially unintelligent ("social intelligence" is a buzzword in the community).
In this regard, I found your comments elsewhere in the thread quite helpful to my understanding:
and
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist. To the extent this lack of qualifiers has been imported into the limited discussion of PUA techniques on LW (which I think it has to at least some extent), then this may be part of why the discussion has met with resistance and offense.
I rather doubt that. It is my impression that there are more female commenters on popular PUA blogs than there are here.
Is that how you treat your bratty little sister?
The dynamic actually being referred to is a loving relationship where neither party takes the other too seriously, and where "big bro" is expected to look out for and protect "little sis", including at times possibly taking more care for her safety or long-term goals than she is, while not being moved by the occasional pout or tantrum. It's also a dynamic where "big bro" tries to live up to his sister's possibly-idealized image of him as the big strong guy looking out for her.
The purpose of the advice is to evoke an area of a man's life where he may already have an experience of being a leader/protector to a loved female who he didn't put on a distant pedestal of awe and fear. Not to put down women.
I'm an older sister. My sister wasn't a brat, and I wasn't a bully. I did take a little advantage on housework, and I think she's still angry about it. However, I never tried to break down her self-respect.
How flexible is the "bratty little sister" model for coverinig situations where the sister is right?
What does bullying have to do with it?
I've never seen anyone advocate breaking down a woman's self-respect, so I'm not clear on the relevance here either.
Brothers and sisters can disagree, can they not? Sister isn't required to agree with brother, nor vice versa.
Think of it this way: right now, you appear to think that the problem is that if the guy pushes one way, then she has to go along with that.
Now, reverse the model: pretend that if she pushes one way, the guy has to go along with that.
That's the mental model most men (AFC's or Average Frustrated Chumps in PUA lingo) have about relationships.
By default, "nice guys" think they have to agree with everything a woman says. This is especially the case if the woman is attractive to them, and they really want her to like him.
You might not think this is most men's model... but that's because most men don't approach the women they're attracted to in the first place! And the ones that do, tend to get written off as unattractive or not relationship material, precisely because they're too eager to please, doing too much, "well, what do you want to do?", etc.
PUA appears biased the other way, because it's trying to train AFCs that they need to actually have an opinion of their own, and be able to maintain that opinion even when a woman they're positively infatuated with disagrees.
Unfortunately, availability bias on the part of women means that you are going to think men are already too far biased this way, because the majority of the ones who come and hit on you in the first place are towards the further end of the wimpy-nice-confident-aggressive-asshole spectrum. PUA training is aimed at moving people at the low end of that scale towards the middle, not the high end off the scale.
In my view, there isn't enough explicitly stated material on how to detect when the sister is in the right in PUA materials; some of my own thought processes on this subject is shown here. I do think that many experienced PUAs do figure out better intuition about when the sister is being genuinely bratty, whether she is deliberately testing him or simply displaying her natural personality, or if she has some other motive, such as displaying serious objections or resistance to how the interaction is proceeding that require him to adjust his approach or back off entirely.
This process of adjusting one's behavior based on the woman's responses is called "calibration," and it is hard to teach through explicit description (which is why experienced PUAs often roll their eyes at how beginners go through phases of weird or otherwise undesirable behavior until they learn the correct calibration and how to interpret the teachings of the community). Some experienced PUAs will apologize to women if they judge that they have badly "miscalibrated."
It's nice to see that PUAs are working on this angle. It's cheering to think that paying attention to what you're doing leads to more benevolent behavior.
And it's very interesting from an FAI angle that calibration isn't programmatic. I've been trying to work up convincing arguments that an FAI will have to do ongoing attention and updating in order to treat people well.
For anyone who prefers equal relationships (and I've seen some happy marriages which look pretty equal), even the experienced PUAs have awful defaults (it takes experience to learn to apologize at all, only some PUAs do it, and it's only for bad mistakes), and it's scary to think about the men who haven't done that much work.
I think one piece of it is a cultural problem (maybe hard-wired, but I hope not) of figuring out how to apologize without it having the effect of grovelling for either person.