Indeed! Now torn between 'desire to provide accurate data', 'desire to project correct image for future google searches', 'desire to look clever' and 'worry about advisability of confessing to anti-social personality traits in a public forum using my real name'.
Ironically any signalling of actual anti-social traits would have already taken place in the earlier declaration of potential violent tendencies. But given that you are signalling approximately normal human behavior---and behavior that tends to be respected in practice anyhow---the only negative signal you could actually give now is a weak signal that you are unable to signal smooth-hypocrisy.
I'm slightly reassured by my belief that most men would feel the same way. On the other hand if that belief's wrong, it needs changing.
Almost universally, at least the 'relative' part. That is nearly all males would be more inclined to take offense and make violent dominance displays with female observers present. There is more to gain by making the move and more to lose by failing to. I am not sure whether the absolute part "I would [take offense at what a drunk stranger says]" applies to most males or not. Possibly. I know it doesn't to myself---in general I don't get offended by direct insults, particularly those with obscenities. Rather, I take offense at passive aggressive insults that superficially conform to polite norms. And as with djcb if the speaker is a random drunk stranger almost nothing they could say will offend me.
Incidentally, do you know of any evidence indicating that a given male's differential likelihood of making violent dominance displays in the presence of female observers correlates, or fails to correlate, with his belief (1) that an arbitrarily selected female observer will be impressed by such displays, and/or with his desire to impress female observers?
I mean, "X is more likely to do Y in the presence of Z if and only if X believes Z will be impressed by Y and wishes to impress Z" is kind of an unnecessarily complicated way of expressing someth...
Recently, an extended discussion has taken place over the fact that a portion of comments here were found to be offensive by some members of this community, while others denied their offensive nature or professed to be puzzled by why they are considered offensive. Several possible explanations for why the comments are offensive have been advanced, and solutions offered based on them:
Each of these explanations seems to have an element of truth, and each solution seems to have a chance of ameliorating the problem. But even though the discussion has mostly died down, we appear far from reaching an agreement, and I think one reason may be the lack of a general theory of the phenomenon of "offense", in the sense of giving and taking offense, that we can use to explain what has happened, so all of the proposed explanations and solutions feel somewhat arbitrary and unfair.
(I think this article has it mostly right, but I’ll give a much shorter account since I can skip the background evo psych info, and I’m not being paid by the word. :)
Let’s consider what other behavior are often considered offensive and see if we can find a pattern:
What do all these have in common? Hint: the answer is quite ironic, given the comment that first triggered this whole fracas.
As you may have guessed by now, I think the answer is status. Specifically, to give offense is to imply that a person or group has or should have low status. Taking offense then becomes easy to explain: it’s to defend someone’s status from such an implication, out of a sense of either fairness or self-interest. Let’s go back to the three hypotheses I collected and see if this theory can cover them as special cases.
“to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person” Well, to be like a non-person is clearly to have low status.
“analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it” A typical situation in which one group analyzes the behavior of another is a scientific study. In such a study, the researchers usually have higher status than the subjects being studied. But even to offer a casual analysis of someone else’s behavior is to presume more intelligence, insight, or wisdom than that person.
“exclusion from the intended audience” To be excluded from the intended audience is to be labeled an outsider by implication, and outsiders typically have lower status than insiders.
But to fully understand why this particular comment is especially offensive, I think we have to consider that it (as well as many PUA discussions) specifically advocates (or appears to advocate) treating women as sex objects instead of potential romantic partners. Now think of the status difference between a sex object and a romantic partner...
Ethical Implications
Usually, one avoids giving offense by minding one’s audience and taking care not to use any language that might cause offense to any audience member. This is very easy to do one-on-one, pretty easy in a small group, hard in front of a large audience (case in point: Larry Summers’s infamous speech), and almost impossible on an Internet forum with a large, diverse, and invisible audience, unless one simply avoids talking about everything that might possibly have anything to do with anyone’s status.
Still, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to avoid giving offense when we can do so without affecting the point that we’re making, or consider skipping a minor point if it necessarily gives offense. After all, to lower someone’s social status is to cause a real harm. On the other side of this interaction, we should consider the possibility that our offensiveness sense may be tuned too sensitively, perhaps for an ancestral environment where mass media didn’t exist and any offense might reasonably be considered both personal and intentional. So perhaps we should also try to be less sensitive and avoid taking offense when discussing ideas that are both important and inextricably linked with status.
P.S. It's curious that there hasn't been more research into the evolutionary psychology and ethics of offense. If such research does exist and I simply failed to find them, please let me know.