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NancyLebovitz comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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To the PUA enthusiasts.....
If there are women who have been complimented for their intelligence, but are mysteriously not interested in LW, you could try insulting them until you find a few who are willing to accept that this community is a wonderful place they should pay attention to.
And maybe you can take charge of some of the women who are already in your life so that they'll post. After all, they prefer dominant men.
While I am not a PUA enthusiast I suspect my description of human social behavioural patterns (including those you attempt to caricaturize here) would cause you to apply that label to me. As such I consider your comment offensive as well as ignorant.
I think maybe you're still confusing "take charge" with "make people do something they don't want to do", vs. "encourage people to do things they already want to do, anyway, or that will get them highly-valued goals." (i.e. the normal definition of leadership)
For example, I sometimes "take charge" by making my wife stop work to relax and receive a massage, when I know she's working too hard and wouldn't think to ask for the massage. She protests the work stoppage and drags her feet to the bedroom, but afterwards is not only happy with the result but is also glad that I cared enough to do something more than just nag her about her overworking. (Something I used to do, that had only negative results for both of us.)
Is that paternalism? Hell if I know, and I don't really care. I love my wife, and I'm glad I can make her happy.
My wife is not a child. She runs a business that I would be scared out of my mind to try and run for even a day or two. She juggles more tasks than I care to think of. But at least to her, "being her man" means that it's my job to look out for some of her longer-term interests. To be an advocate for her dreams, her ambitions, her health, and her emotional well-being. A true friend, not a boss.
This is the real "alpha male" prototype, which the lesser PUA schools only vaguely imitate and only the superior schools teach. It is not being someone who disrespects or bullies others... no matter how much some of the masculine language might sound like it is.
Do try to bear in mind that, given that men chat about how "dangerous" we are, that almost anything we say to one another about the subject probably isn't going to sound pleasant to a someone who's not socialized in the same way.
Hell, I wasn't socialized that way myself, so I had similar objections to many of the PUA concepts until I "got it". Which, I might add, took some romance novel-reading on my part, as well a lot of discussion with my wife, in addition to some of the better PUA literature.
And during quite a bit of that discussion, I noticed that PUA concepts magically became not only non-objectionable but highly-desired and highly-valued when they were described in the terms one might find in a romance novel, rather than the terms guys might use amongst themselves. (Men tend to talk about everything like it's an object, including each other -- we're really not singling out women for objectification. ;-) )
That's why I believe that the non-deceptive PUA schools are actually teaching men to exhibit qualities that are in fact highly-valued by women, just using language that men "get". .. but which women and men may find offensive as well.
This is only an aside, but if you go and dig for the origins and theoretical meanings of the phrase "alpha male" you'll find that the phrase carries much emotional baggage but doesn't seem to do useful explanatory work.
I plan to cover this as part of my long-delayed post on "status".
If PUA was generally as you describe it, it might not be a problem. Does your wife also occasionally take charge of you in your best interests?
You are judging PUA by its best. I'm judging it by what shows up here. I haven't gone looking for the most offensive bits.
I grew up with a lot of "I just want you to be happy" combined with failure to listen. This is a major hot button for me, and I don't see any evidence that you (the range of PUA, not just the best) are careful about knowing whether you're overriding women in ways which are inconsistent with their interests.
She looks out for my interests, yes, but does not express them in a way that would match "taking charge". Instead, she... I don't know how to describe it in a way that doesn't sound weird or caricatured, like 50's TV housewives batting their eyelashes... gives me an idealized perception of myself to live up to, maybe?
(This is probably another one of those areas where discussion of effective tactics for women to use with men would sound offensive to men when discussed in language that women could actually understand and apply, but would be baffling to women when described in terms that men would perceive as valuable/desirable.)
Parents do that a lot. It means, "I just want you to do and be what would make me happy."
And I used to do the same thing to my wife.
As it happened, learning about PUA stuff was actually the cure for that, not the cause. In particular, it taught me to not interpret what she said in terms of what it would mean if I said it. PUA stuff, for me, is all about bridging the conceptual language barriers.
I had a similar hot button myself, one which my wife eventually helped me overcome.
Unfortunately, what happens with hot buttons like these is that we tend to project our own helplessness onto other people. For example, it took me forever to realize that, unlike my own past inability to say "no" to a request, my wife did not have the same problem... which meant that my continual avoidance of asking her for anything was unnecessary and harmful to our relationship. (Because of course, I still resented her for not doing any of the things I wasn't asking her to do!)
So the problem I see with your statement, is that it presumes disempowerment of women -- that they're going to be overridden and led astray by bossy men who don't listen. And ISTM that this is more paternalistic and anti-feminist in its implications, than "taking charge" actually is.
Have you considered the possibility that maybe you're projecting a personal feeling of helplessness onto others, or that the responsibility for ending such feelings of helplessness are up to each individual?
Yes, good people like my wife, good people like me will certainly help people with hot buttons like that. But isn't everyone ultimately responsible for addressing their own?
And, isn't that a big part of what the mission of this site is? To identify common patterns of irrational thinking that we are each responsible for dealing with in our own thoughts?
Not a judgment or an argument here, just some food for thought.
That's actually related to something I've been trying to frame for FAI-- using actual human friendliness as a starting point for some features we might want in an FAI. One piece is the question of how a "best self" for another person which is actually helpful is conceived.
In my experience, people can and do sometimes take advantage of each other-- there's such a thing as being socially outstrengthed.
I'll take this under consideration. I certainly learned too much about helpless anger when I was a kid, and I'm quite angry now.
It may be that you're right, and the only wrong with the situation is how fucked up I am-- or maybe your good will and perception isn't also quite as thorough as you think it is, or possibly the range of PUA includes worse than you want to believe of it.
In my expereience, this is due to over-restrictive SASS rules in the "outstrengthed" party, and can be repaired. (My wife and I have been doing extensive work in this area on ourselves.)
Yeah, helpless anger's usually associated with status perception, i..e, being taught you don' t have enough importance to be listened to, paid attention to, etc.
The key to resolving it is understanding that the reason you still feel like you have insufficient status, is because we internalize others behaviors' in relation to ourselves, to learn the rules for when to grant ourselves status. When it "clicks" that you can give yourself importance, it's possible to re-evaluate the rules you've internalized, and grant yourself status even in situations where you were historically taught that you were not worth listening to.
Oh, I'm well aware of how far down that goes, even if I only looked at some of the bitterness posted here!
I just don't like it when people who are arguing that you should say "some women" or "many women" don't also say "some PUA" or "many PUA".
The arts have a LOT of positive things to teach men, for the benefit of men and women both.
The issue about helpless anger at my end seems to be that I'd have to believe I shouldn't have been hurt when I was mistreated if I could choose whether or not I'm angry.
I actually have better resources now-- probably not as good as they should be, considering that I was screaming at a pocket the other day[1]-- but I also believe I was doing the best I could when I was a kid. I couldn't access choices I didn't know I had.
I'm trying to be more careful about saying "some PUA", and I've been referring to it as a group of sub-cultures.
You can grant accuracy, even to people who don't offer it. :-)
The kind of thing I imagine when I hear about PUA is a woman I met some time ago-- she would love to spend some time by the ocean, but her husband doesn't like the ocean and isn't willing to have her spend time away from him. He'd taken charge to the extent that she's presumably never going to see the ocean again unless she outlives him in good enough health do it.
He probably wasn't PUA-- this is probably from before PUA was invented. For all I know, she would prefer living with a man like that than someone who'd find a way to tolerate a trip to the beach, but speaking as a person who needs to see an ocean now and then, I find her situation horrifying.
It may be a matter of, not just the way I react to PUA, but the way a lot of others do, but you write as though the best side of PUA is all that's real about it.
Any thoughts on how women can distinguish early between "good guy in charge" vs. "bad guy bullying" vs. "average guy who's taking excessive advantage"?
[1] I kept getting phone calls which consisted of a ring and then rustling-- and the "person" wouldn't get off the line when I hung up. After the first few, I was yelling and slamming the phone. It turned out to be a phone carried in a pocket where the autodial was repeatedly pressed by accident.
This sounds really interesting, but I'm afraid I can't parse it.
I was pretty close to incoherent when I posted that.
I'm not sure whether I can make it clearer now, but I'll take a crack at it.
I grew up with a lot of criticism, and I wasn't supposed to show anger at it. I also was harassed by other students at school, and told to just ignore it. In other words, they were under no obligation to control their actions, while it was my job to control my involuntary reactions.
In addition, I realized recently that my mother modeled helpless anger herself. While she could pretty much get away with dumping anger on other people in the immediate family, she rarely got what she wanted from the people she was angry at, and it didn't seem to occur to her that the situation could be made any better.
My current emotional reaction is something like if I could have prevented my anger at the situations I was in as a kid, I was obligated to to so. If I can prevent anger now, it proves that I was getting things wrong then, and I deserved the way I was treated. And at that point, I get angry again.
I think that's what was going on when I posted-- the objective bit is that I felt very angry and was whaling away at my completely innocent keyboard.
I don't know whether sorting things out more clearly to the extent that I have in this post is likely to do any good, but there's some hope. At least there's some handle on the confusion between past and present..
FWIW, I've fixed similar patterns to this in myself by realizing that I actually did have the right to not want the (ciriticism, teasing, harassment), the right to act in order to stop it, the right to feel bad that it continued and no-one else stopped it, and the right to feel like a worthwhile person even if I fought back.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to put into words how to create those realizations (and that was really just a summary, rather than the full list), but I can at least say that if it causes you to break down sobbing with relief, you're probably going in the right direction.
The central process, though, is identifying which of your SASS needs were used to condition the learned helplessness, and then give yourself the right to meet that need in the circumstances where you were taught not to. For example, if you weren't supposed to show anger because your parents withdrew their acceptance of you, then you would need to give yourself the right to accept yourself when you show anger. And so on.
Individual rules can be complex, though, and based on what you describe in your comment, I would guess you've got maybe 15-20 such rules you'd have to tweak just to get started. But it's definitely fixable.
One book that may be of use to you is "Healing The Shame That Binds You" - it has an excellent set of examples of how shame-binds form, even though its techniques for fixing anything absolutely sucks.
(Psychologists rarely aim anywhere near high enough in their standards for devising ways to fix things, IMO; my personal standard is that you should be able to change something in 15 minutes or so, if you know what you're doing and precisely what you need to fix. As Eliezer says in one of his stories, it only takes a few minutes to have an insight, if you have all the data)
Your honesty and self insight are refreshing to hear.
I, personally, found it useful when I realised my anger was mine and I was free to be angry whenever I wanted and whenever it suited my purposes! I hope yours serves you as well as mine serves me at times. A useful advisor, anger, providing you can keep it aligned with the rest of you.
Good guy in charge would find some way to get her needs met. Just not liking the ocean shouldn't count -- dude's not being much of a man, there. At the very least, he shouldn't have a problem with her going.
Drawing the line between "bullying" and "co-dependent" is tough, though. There've been times in the past where my wife wanted to do something that I didn't, but she didn't want to go if I didn't want to come. (If I'd truly been taking charge at the time, I'd have gone with her, or helped her get the need met in some other way.)
Who do you blame when both people in a relationship are dysfunctional? Most of the time, people end up in long-term relationships with partners who have complementary dysfunctions.
I'd say that people in general should focus on getting rid of as many of their own dysfunctions as they can -- a functional person isn't going to get trapped by a bully or in their own co-dependence, and will rapidly ditch someone who doesn't fit.
(I'm reminded of an early relationship of mine, when I was about 20, with a woman almost twice my age. I was infatuated, but I didn't have the same emotional maturity she did. She broke it off because the relationship wasn't [emotionally, long-term] good for her, no matter how much she enjoyed our good times. Someone with a level of dysfunction closer to mine or more complementary to mine would've been stuck with me, expecting that things were supposed to be that way.)
(I wish this was a post so that my vote was worth +10).
I don't see why lack of easily offendable women on LW is seen as a problem that needs to be solved. As has been said before, the more people you let in, the more the discussion will regress to the internet mean.
There is a matter of truth at stake here: just how does human sexual interaction actually work? Is there a "double standard" at play, of the "Homo Hypocritus type involved? What does that tell us about the potential commons problems that the human race might have? What does it tell us about how the sexual male-female interaction could be improved for all?
These are interesting and important questions for rationalists, and it is a shame to kow-tow a small minority for whom the truth is just too painful.
If it were a discussion of "this is how human sexual attraction works", with a really general overview (that is, at least including a wide range of women's experiences as well as men's) rather than a "this is a discussion which is biased by men who are trying to get particular outcomes and are convinced that what's good for them is good for women or at least harmless to them", it could be useful..
Just to increase the range, check out Yes Means Yes. I'm not saying I agree with every word of it, but at least it's about attraction and consent mostly from a female point of view.
What do you mean by "biased"? Do you mean, there is some factual error that has been made? Or do you mean "Men will benefit from the information being disseminated here"?
Why does this matter? Would it be censorship-worthy if one had a discussion about how teenagers experience life without also discussion how people of other ages do?
I mean that since the men are strongly motivated by their own benefit, they are not likely to be careful in evaluating the effects of their actions on women.
I'm not sure about censoring, but I'd be dubious about a discussion of teenagers which didn't include any input from them, or where the adults insisted that their interpretation of teenagers' experience was complete and correct no matter what teenagers said.
I think you have it reversed. Men, by and large, in this day are conditioned to be overcautious about violating the (feminist-slanted) expectations of their behavior in regard to women. And they ponder, and they fret, and they wring their hands about whether they're crossing the numerous lines.
And women are repulsed by it, and turned off by it, and regard them as low status for it.
What you tend to see is the sliver of men not trapped in this mentality as being way, way overrepresented in the dating pool, for obvious reasons. Because a man who is careful about avoiding leaving any crack in a woman's fragile self-image ... well, who wants to date that kind of wuss?
But this is not a bias. The word "bias" means a factual error. Cruel or other-harming behavior is not described by the word "bias". Unless you think that there is motivated cognition rather than explicit cruelty going on.
But it seems that the effect of debate is to challenge bias, whereas the effect of censoring debate is to perpetuate it.
"Motivated cognition" is what I meant.
Bias has more than one meaning, and factual error caused by preconceptions is closer to the the common meaning, I think.
At this point, I'm not sure whether I've called for censorship. I've mostly been saying that PUA puts many women off for good reasons, it's not that women don't know their own interests as well as PUAs do.