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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)
I believe in maximizing the amount of resources I can from people, and therefore feeling I deserve what I plausibly can get -- but I don't see how that's a "right". I think what you realized is that you didn't have to deal with ciriticism, teasing, harassment, not that you had the right to not deal with those things.
I'm using "right" in the sense that a programmer speaks of "access rights". An access right is the ability to do something, not moral approval. Rights in the sense I'm speaking of here simply refers to making a set of actions reachable in the brain's planning trees, if that makes sense.
I've found, though, that asserting that one has the right to do something is helpful in imperatively making this connection in the brain, so that's the word I use. (It seems in many people to elicit an accompanying "territorial" emotional response, that may or may not be related to the mechanism used to mark actions accessible or inaccessible in the first place.)
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.
How did you come to realize that your anger was yours?
A difficult question for me to answer. It comes tied up with other realisations and beliefs:
I hope this answers your question at least partly.
Did you come to these realizations by thinking about philosophy, or by some other means? If it was by thinking about philosophy, how did you make the transition from abstraction to emotional change?
Heads up -- I failed to parse
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).