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Alicorn comments on Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks - Less Wrong
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It's not at all clear to me why I'd enter the classroom in the first place, unless I had a corresponding roomful of women and was going to play Yentl for my own amusement. I don't really consider myself someone with expertise in the matter! Apart from a few vague hints like my remarks about meeting people through other people, I've confined myself to ethical claims, not practical advice. My ethical claims have been peppered with reassuring remarks that they don't spell practical disaster (excessively demanding ethical philosophies tend not to be very popular), but they are still just ethical claims. I don't have that stellar of a dating history to draw on for practical help: mostly, I collect admirers through the Internet and they turn out to live far away. In terms of actually going to a physical location alone with a romantic interest on an explicitly-purposed date, I've been on two.
Nevertheless, can you provide a reality check for cousin_it's imagination? Supposing you did seriously take up an invitation to teach pickup, and considered you had something to teach, would your first reaction to entering the classroom be to turn on your heel and walk out in contempt?
I wasn't trying to rail against Alicorn in particular. The general point is still worthwhile. The most evocative analogy I know is that males are entrepreneurs and females are customers: anyone who's ever been approached by slimy salespeople can empathize with most women by analogy, and anyone who's ever tried to sell a product to an uncaring world can empathize with most men. But by default neither side ever really understands how the other feels unless they take extreme pains to empathize, and most advice going over the fence ends up being useless or worse. Ethical advice given to men by women especially falls in this category, because you don't preach ethics to a starving entrepreneur who (unlike you) gets kicked in the face every goddamn day. It's... y'know... unethical.
It's the mental leap from "aw, I feel bad that you are having trouble selling your product" to "aw, someone should take pity on you to the point of buying your product" that presents the problem. I do feel bad for people who have trouble selling, but I categorically refuse to translate that into an obligation on the part of the target market! That kind of thinking scares the crap out of me, because that is the kind of thinking that leads to various evil behaviors up to and including rape.
Yes, but just the same, if you knew about someone having trouble selling a good product, and you took pity on them, one way you would probably not react is by approaching a group of such people and lecturing them in detail about all the unethical practices they shouldn't do, most of which only apply long after a sale, and many of which are commonly used by successful salespeople in a way that satisfies their customers.
And when you think about it, that's pretty much what you do here, if you apply the transformation:
make a sale --> get a date
unethical post-sale practices --> unethical relationship practices, abuse
annoying-but successful sales practices --> PUA techniques, feminist-disapproved language
See the problem?
In Analogy City there are a large number of people who have no education or work experience because they grew up on welfare and never had the opportunity for much of an education. A group of the nations best salespeople decides to do some community service and teach some of these people how to sell things on the street. Among what they teach:
Don't wait to be turned down. Wash that car's windows and then demand to be paid, don't ask first. Take their picture, demand money. Hand them a homemade craft, then demand to be paid, etc.
Be aggressive. The customer's money is your money, it just isn't in your pocket yet.
Look extra poor so that rich people feel sorry for you and give you more. Employing young children is ideal.
Go to neighborhoods Xington, Yville, and Zburg because thats where the unsuspecting rich liberals targets live and they won't be jaded enough to turn you away.
Nothing that is taught is illegal, quite. But some of the people in the city feel that teaching these methods is, nonetheless, irresponsible and dangerous. Do these people have a valid complaint? If they decided to replace the old salesperson teachings with something else would you be surprised if these new teachings included admonitions not to be too aggressive or to give services without asking the customer if they wanted them?
(I seem to hold the uncommon view that both feminism and the teachings of most PUA types are compatible and good things. But insofar as the PUA culture includes beliefs like "men are owed more sex" I don't think the reactions of Alicorn and others are that off-base.)
I agree that there is compatibility between pickup and feminism that is under-explored.
Both PUAs and feminists are heavily focused on the same thing: the needs and preferences of women, and how men can fulfill them. The amount of time and effort PUAs spend trying to figure out and cater to women's sexual desires is crazy. Furthermore, they often consciously make a choice to develop aspects of their personalities and identities that they know will be attractive to women.
Yet PUAs differ from feminists in their views of what women's preferences actually are. PUAs assess female criteria from what women respond to, which may not be the same as stated female criteria. Also, even though PUAs attempt to fulfill a subset of women's desires, they are not always trying to fulfill all of women's desires all the time.
Both PUAs and feminists make some errors in assessing female preferences, but feminists are more wrong: I would give PUAs a B+ and feminists an F (see this and this for some research on female preferences). (On average, feminist women differ from typical straight women. For instance, feminists are probably more likely to have gender atypical gender expression and values, so it's not a stretch to think that they might have gender atypical preferences also. As a result, feminists, particularly feminists who criticize pickup, may be out of touch with typical straight women, and fail to recognize how the aggregate preferences of their sisters are incentivizing the very male behavior that they condemn. I've seen some feminists admit that they are attracted to traditionally masculine or dominant behavior in men, but I've never seen them also think through the implications of their preferences and the incentive structure that they enforce on males.)
Contrary to the guess in your post that PUA culture might include beliefs that men are owed more sex, my impression is that PUAs want women to have sex with them not because of a feeling of obligation, but because they have fulfilled female criteria for having sex.
Some PUAs believe that they "deserve" sex in general, but what they seem to mean is that they are "worthy" of sex, not that they deserve to have sex with any particular women. Other PUAs explicitly disavow the idea that they deserve anything:
...
The whole approach of seduction, as I understand it, is to raise the chance of women wanting to have sex with you for reason of being attracted to you and comfortable having sex with you. PUAs want women to want them.
This approach is not only more ethical than (a) trying to get consent to sex by bypassing women's sexual and emotional preferences (e.g. obligation, prostitution), or (b) trying to coerce women into have sex without consent... it also wins way more and sounds rather feminist!
These discussions are always difficult because they involve comparing movements and schools of thought rather than propositions. PUA culture definitely includes lots of people without especially misogynist ideas. But it also is going to include people who really do have anti-women sentiments.
Feminism is almost certainly more diverse. You seem more involved in those conversations than I am at this point so I'm sure you know this. So why do you think the feminist view on female match preferences is so contrary to the studies you list? I guess there are probably radical feminists who hold views about power dynamics in relationships which would contradict those studies- but surely liberal feminists (where I include myself) don't give a shit about the mating preferences of anyone. Obviously there are views in both camps that can't be reconciled, but I think the best of both can be.
Great blog btw. Is there a post or a series of posts that will summarize your criticisms of feminism? You list of agreements on the site is almost enough for me to want to count you as a feminist.
Thanks... I plan on getting back to this post soon, either here or on my blog, and if I don't feel free to bug me.
Just curious, did you ever followup on this?
The 'off base' part is the 'insofar as'. Objections, even valid objections can be off base if they are red herrings, objections to positions that really aren't held or being expressed in the context.
Of those analogies, it is ironic that '1)' and '3)' are actually among the first misconceptions that an analogous PUA instructor would drill out of a student. Covert contracts and supplication are terrible strategies and far more prevalent in conventional wisdom than in PUA subcultures.
All this might be the case. Like I said I don't think the PUA stuff is necessarily anti-feminist. But a lot of the commenters here do a pretty good job of being targets for these objections. Put it this way, it isn't a surprise we're seeing this reaction given some of the things that have been said.
Edit: Adding that this entire discussion just looks like people seeing political signaling and then jumping on their respective bandwagons.
I'd like to read more on this, but I couldn't figure out from your comment whether it refers to a real-world event or it's just pure fiction -- all Google searches I tried lead to this comment. If what you wrote above is based on a real event, could you post a link to it?
(To clarify -- I'm interested in salesmanship proper, not in getting laid.)
Analogy City is hypothetical.
Yes, I understand that -- I was wondering about the "Among what they teach" part.
Yes, as far as I know I made the whole thing up. There are programs at shelters which teach the homeless and recently homeless job interview skills and sometimes a trade. But I don't know of anything involving salesmen.
The 'Among what they teach' part was constructed more by translating objections through the analogy than by any significant reference to the reality of salesmanship. I do not think you can glean too much information about salesmanship from the comment in question.
I would be disappointed if you refrained from making this kind of contribution independently of the author out of deference to social bullying.
All these posts referring to people selling themselves as products and so on reflect an extremely commodified view of sex, which can be very harmful. I wouldn't continue with this analogy.
Well, understanding the relationship between men approaching with romantic interest, and salespeople approaching is very important, because men have a good understanding of -- and sympathy about -- the latter. I think the insight the analogy yields outweighs the negative connotations.
I'm a man, and I have little understanding and no special sympathy for salespeople, nor did I ever think of my romantic aspirations in terms of selling myself. I only ever had success when I stopped pursuing.
I meant sympathy for people being approached by salespeople. It's an especially important dynamic at play because women (supposedly) like being approached by some kinds of men, while (supposedly) view the others as similar to salespeople. So what makes a kind of advance wanted or unwanted? Therein lies the problem.
Oh, I see. I got the analogy backwards. (Should have reviewed the thread, obviously.)
Receiving an irritating hard sell isn't anywhere near as threatening as receiving unwanted persistent sexual attention. The latter is an implicit threat of bodily harm. Even momentary unwanted sexual attention isn't like an unwanted sales pitch, because the fear is that it will turn into a longer interaction.
Could you explain more explicitly what this problem is? There are two meanings I could extract. One of which I would object to (but suspect you did not intend.)
If you prefer, you could frame it as an audition to join a band...
Better. Not ideal, but better.
I've never really grasped the 'objectification' concept, but does this count?
Yes.
Surely this is objectifying the sex, not the participants?
Eh, whatever. It's kind of a silly analogy anyway, because commercial transactions involve persuading people to do things they don't like doing (paying money, giving away goods) in exchange for other things.
Could you point out where someone made that mental leap in this convo? I didn't notice it.
It's not made explicitly here. I don't accuse anyone present of making this leap, but it seemed worth warning against.
I agree that such a mental leap would be a big problem, but I don't think such a leap is implied by cousin_it's post, so I'm not entirely sure why you are bringing it up. Part of the problem of sales is that the target market is not obligated to buy.
Yet I do think your post raises a good point: sales and seduction have different ethical constraints. I believe that truly ethical seduction requires not merely consent, but enthusiastic consent, and minimization of reasonably predictable "buyer's remorse" after the fact. Sales is not always held up to the standard of enthusiasm and minimization of remorse on the part of the buyer (but perhaps it should be).
We have (at least in my country) consumer protection laws. One of them says you can return a product within 14 days of purchase and receive your money back. With this, I think ethical sales standards are fine as they are. Since it's not applicable to the seduction "market", it should be held to the highest ethical standard.
I don't approve of rape and I also despise seeing it used fallaciously to support a political agenda.
I didn't see her doing that.
Can you explain how you think I am fallaciously using rape to support a political agenda, if you think I'm doing that?
Silas explained one of the reasons this particular analogy doesn't hold. (You also argue against a straw man.)
As for political agenda: This is not the first time you have made statements of the kind <support of efforts towards developing male social skills> should be considered <negative feminist language up to and including rape>. I greatly prefer your insights into rationality over your comments on anything to do with males. The quality of reasoning is almost incomparable.
I will now attempt to clarify:
Males developing social skills is great. Social skills are wonderful, rewarding things to have, and I think anybody who would like to learn to interact with other people politely and pleasantly should.
"Social skills as possessed by men (who are attracted to women)" is a much broader category than "the ability to get into sexual or romantic relationships with women (who are attracted to men)". You can use social skills to interact with family members, platonic friends, co-workers, neighbors, classmates, teachers, strangers, students, clients, employees, bosses, fellow members of any club or other social or hobby organization, and any other class of person you will ever interact with. Potential mates are only one of these categories, although of course there is overlap.
Social skills as used by men to get into sexual or romantic relationships with women do not consist entirely of things I would describe with "negative feminist language". Many of these skills are, at least potentially, honest, respectful, and non-threatening.
The attitude that the "target market" of the "product" of the man attempting to pitch himself as a potential mate owes him something is the attitude that I condemn. If nobody has this attitude around here - which is what I must think you're getting at by saying I argue against a straw man - that's great! My heebie-jeebies are for naught! I can walk the streets of Lesswrongburgh safe in the knowledge that no one thinks they are entitled to my attention, affection, personal charms, or set of body parts.
If someone in the studio audience does think that the men who have or want to learn these social skills are owed something by the women in whom they show interest, then I contend that this thought is dangerous because it can lead to evil behaviors, up to and including rape. Among the excuses trotted out by rapists, right up there with "she had on X article of clothing and was asking for it", are variations on "she owed me". So when there starts to be talk about women owing anything to sexually interested men, this starts to make me feel like an Israeli hearing chitchat about how the land my house sits on is owed to Palestine. People who think they are owed something might try to take it.
Do you mean social skills which are used (almost) exclusively for these purposes? Most social skills are general, and in fact are more important to have than narrowly applicable ones.
More to the point, this thought is wrong. (I agree that it feels unpleasant, but I don't know how much it actually leads to such behavior vs. being used to explain it afterwards.)
Good point, to be extent that the insights I've gained from resources intended for developing dating skills have been far more useful for life in general than specifically with women.
I like what you say here and agree that people believing they are 'owed' something in social interactions and particularly those related to mating is absurd.
I don't know how much such ungranted feelings of entitlement encourage rape. Honestly, I've a great faith in the ability of humans to rationalise whatever they do and suspect other claims would flow just as easily. But I do know that belief that you are owed something by the universe is a recipe for failure in general. More so from women who quite reasonably feel this as 'creepy' and guys as 'pathetic'.
I think it is justifiable in some interactions (not in mating). I feel that people owe it to me to behave with a minimum of politeness towards me. Certain social interactions impose a much higher standard, e.g. salesmen who walk up to me uninvited owe it to me to be very polite indeed and never to argue with me ("customer is always right").
I seriously doubt there is anyone here who has committed rape or felt entitled to sex, for that reason. Here, what you find is a lot of men trying to overcome the lack of knowledge about how to get into a relationship. Men in that position are not the ones out committing rape, abusing girlfriends, abandoning their children, etc. Such victimizers already know how to get to the relationship step as second nature!
Now, with that said, there is a distantly-related (though not dangerous) feeling of entitlement that arises in discussions like these that needs to be addressed. Let me explain.
Let's say I'm told all throughout growing up, what is and is not appropriate behavior around women, and over time I internalize these rules, automatically identifying instances I see (of inappropriate behavior) as bad. This advice matches that given in popular, respected books about dating. And yet despite lots of interactions with women where I have romantic intent, I am utterly unable to generate interest in any of them.
First, let's get a few misunderstandings out of the way: Of course women are thinking, volitional beings who are not obligated to perform for anyone's sake and should not be viewed as slaves or property.
Even accepting all of that, one should anticipate that if I'm following the real female wants and expectations, and am an eligible, attractive male by conventional measures, that it should lead to some non-trivial fraction of these women developing interest. When none of them do, and when women flock in droves, full of desire, to the very same men who steamroll right over the rules I learned, and who appear to be extremely disrespectful toward women ... well, that's very strong evidence that I was not correctly taught what women do and don't want.
I believe that people are entitled to be correctly taught the social "rules of engagement". When men realize that the rules they were taught don't remotely mesh with reality, and they have to "go underground" to get the truth, they feel that they have been deprived of something to which they are entitled -- and I believe they are justified in feeling this way.
This feels nice (people who are like me aren't the raping kind!), and for that reason I suspect it. What evidence is there that such men, once they do get girlfriends/women, are less abusive than the general population?
Other than that I fully agree with your comment.
I don't see where Alicorn postulated a reason for men to feel entitled to sex – did you get the clauses reversed?
Plausibly nobody here has explicitly believed themselves to be entitled to sex, but I doubt none have implicitly held something like this attitude at some point.
I think this is an irrational fear, if I may say so.
While I'm not an expert on violent crime, I am fairly sure that most of it is committed by people acting on impulse, not people who have intellectually convinced themselves they are owed something. I may for instance believe and argue I am owed more money by society, but that doesn't mean I'm about to rob a bank.
People should likewise be free to express the opinion that they are owed more sex, without that being interpreted as a threat of violence.
My understanding is that both parts are needed... to use your money example, if you feel that you're entitled to money, and you find a wallet sitting on the sidewalk, you may impulsively decide to take the money out of it rather than return it intact, but if you don't have that feeling of entitlement, you're much less likely to feel the impulse in the first place to take the money out of it.
Let us agree that neither the person interested in sex, nor any third party, may in any way compel anyone to provide sex to them. And no-one has promised to have sex and then reneged on the non-enforceable promise. Then what is the meaning of "being owed more sex"?
A couple of points:
Although most crimes of battery, murder, etc. can be classified as crimes of passion, a ton of rape is "date rape". It can take place in ambiguous circumstances, without nearly as much violence as might be anticipated. I'm therefore uncertain how well you can apply statements about violent crimes to rape in general.
Bank robbery has a higher clearance rate than rape. Many rapists are never reported, much less caught and convicted. Bank robberies are generally pretty high-profile events; it's hard for one to go by without anyone knowing it has occurred.
The following looks like a plausible line of reasoning to me: 1. I am owed more sex from people who I'm interested in, such as Woman X. 2. Woman X will not have sex with me, and in so refraining, denies me something I am owed. 3. In general, it is appropriate to arrange to take things from people who will not give them when they are owed. For instance, if Woman X owed me five hundred dollars, I would be justified in bringing in authorities to oblige her to give me five hundred dollars. 4. The law will not compel Woman X to have sex with me. 5. When the law will not address injustices, such as failing to discharge an obligation, it is permissible for private citizens to address the injustice. 6. Compelling Woman X to have sex with me would be taking from her something that she owes me. 7. I can compel Woman X to have sex with me.
Sure, you could stop at any point in this chain of reasoning, reject some inference and avoid #7. But the subset of people who won't, may do serious harm to poor Woman X - who never owed anyone anything.
Unless I missed it, this is a claim no one has made. There is a very clear distinction between spreading memes that increase the likelihood of violence and making a threat. Obviously claims of desert don't necessarily entail a threatening violence to take the deserts- but that doesn't mean popularizing some memes doesn't have bad consequences. This is fairly basic memetics and how we account for a great deal of behavior. There might also be some positive consequence to spreading such memes but so far no one has argued that claiming loveless men are owed more sex will actually lead to any kind of beneficial change.
This isn't a clean dichotomy. Verbal argument might help to maintain and strengthen someone's feelings of entitlement, resentment, and rage, until these feelings reach the point of motivating a rape (or any kind of violent act) that wouldn't otherwise have occurred.
I'm not expressing an opinion on the actual issue, but this is somewhat a strawman. The more defensible version of the argument is that some land is owned by particular, sometimes identifiable Palestinians.
Yeah, I know. As I typed the example, I was thinking "this is a lousy example but I have no superior ones at the moment". Any suggestions for a replacement?
I've heard that lifetime incidence of being raped for women is about 3% worldwide. I expect it's considerably less in orderly societies. I definitely consider that high enough that were I a woman, rape would come to mind when thinking of frustrated males.
That said, there are a lot of steps between approaching women out of sexual interest, and rape. I imagine anyone capable of being reached by anti-rape arguments is not a psychopath; I also imagine that only psychopaths actually rape.
I'm also reminded of the recent woman-killer who brought a gun to his gym. Apparently he really did feel that (young?) women as a class owed him some level of sexual validation. It's true that this is rubbish thinking.
Except for some form of therapy+prostitution that doesn't exist except in science fiction, I don't see any help for men who go berserk to the extent of raping+killing in response to general rejection except certainty of punishment, which is any case useless against those who've already decided to off themselves. Perhaps a more convenient and self-only way of killing themselves could be made available.
I really doubt this; surely acculturation against (or for) rape has an effect.
That's much lower than the estimates I usually see. E.g., the Wikipedia article Estimates of sexual violence quotes a self-reported rate of 14.8% lifetime incidence among U.S. women, not counting failed rape attempts. This refers to this study[1], which quotes two previous studies with similar results, and also estimates a 22% lifetime incidence rate under a broader definition of sexual assault.
There are whole countries out there where the rape incidence in any single year is far above 3%. Even putting "unstable" countries and temporary situations (those lasting one generation or less) aside, there are many societies where the structure of marriage is such that we ought to estimate a daily incidence of rape, perhaps far above 50%.
[1] Tjaden P, Thoennes N. Full report of the prevalence, incidence and consequences of violence against women: findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Washington, DC, National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2000 (NCJ 183781).
Yeah, exactly. So these efforts are wasted on me, since after all, I'm not a psychopath. Why, if I could push a button that would KILL all the psychopaths, I'd do it!
Wait...
I've heard considerably higher quoted statistics for "sexual assault" (one in four women, it is said, will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime). I don't know what percentage of sexual assault cases are "actual" rape, though all things that fall under the sexual assault umbrella are frightening.
Don't think that, unless in so thinking, you also think that "a psychopath" can be a functional, indistinguishable member of society who you'd never once know even through extended association unless he happened to tell you about that one time at that frat party (or whenever).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_surrogate
Sadly, this is not true.
That seems entirely off-base to me.
Well... you're absolutely right! I'm on my second project right now, and would never dream of guilt-tripping a client into a sale :-) But still, a lot of successful projects get started without much regard for ethics. This especially applies to online communities: LessWrong's launch is actually an outlier. Creating hundreds of sockpuppet accounts to simulate active life on the site is pretty much standard industry practice, Myspace got its startup push from a huge spam emailing (insider info I saw somewhere), etc. Because the choice is either this or 5 visitors/day, month after month, who look at your comatose website and leave.
For an especially clear-cut example, SEO is certainly unethical from the customer's point of view, but I absolutely have to do it, and will. Sounds a bit like PUA practices, no?
SEO is not unethical when it focuses on findability. Making your site reachable by the people who are looking for it is not manipulative - it's just good customer service.
If you are doing something unethical, you should reconsider whether you "have to" do it. Hurting your customers is not good business, and you're making yourself an enemy of the people you purport to help.
I have been unable to find folks who'll verify this for me. I'm pretty well-read on Internet startups, and I've never found a serious source suggesting it.
This InformationWeek article cites Sanford Wallace as the source of this rumor, and I was unable to find anyone else claming this happened. Given his reputation, I seriously doubt this is true.
I think it's quite possible in principle to be successful at pickup and seduction, even for beginners, while maintaining regard to ethics. I run a quick expected value calculation on just about anything I do.
The reason it is difficult in practice is because some of the ethical standards applied to men learning conscious seduction are bogus and would not hold up if applied to female mating behavior, or to naturally skilled men who do exactly the same thing unconsciously. Such standards would ban large swathes of human social behavior if applied consistently.
Applying a reasonable moral framework is not much of an impediment to learning and practicing seduction, yet there are certain bloated, anachronistic, non-reality-based, moral frameworks that are. In the extreme, we can see radical feminists John Stoltenberg and Robert Jensen who have come to believe that participating in heterosexual sex is currently unethical because it is so oppressive to women, and turned towards celibacy (Jensen's essay is titled "Patriarchal Sex," but I don't see it available online for free anywhere).
I can recognize the attitude from my youth and I think it is really counterproductive. It leads to the kind of bitterness expressed in this line:
a man who sees himself that way isn't going to be attractive to women. If you restrict yourself to thinking about meaningless sex, then yes it is true that the relationship between men and women is pretty asymmetrical. An average woman can probably consume as much meaningless sex as she wants without too much effort, whereas for most men there is a lot of effort involved in obtaining meaningless sex. However, if you consider quality monogamous relationships the situation is much more symmetrical. There is a significant search effort for both sexes in finding a quality compatible partner that reciprocates their feelings.
For most people long-term committed relationships are the goal, so for most people the world is fairly symmetrical. It may not feel that way in your early 20s though.
For most people the goal is medium term relationships, interspersed with meaningless or nearly meaningless sex, and eventually a long term relationship with perhaps children.
Women (who want this) tend to get it. Men who want this, in many cases, get nothing for the first 10 years and then jump straight to the long-term relationship stage. Saying "it doesn't feel that way in your early 20s" seems to imply your teens and 20s don't really matter if it turns out all right in the end?
I was thinking about it across people rather than across an individual lifetime. If you asked all the adults in the US what kind of romantic relationship they are most interested in, most of them will say long-term monogamous. After all, most of them are in long-term monogamous relationships. This is consistent with what you are saying, just a different way of looking at it.
I will say though that while this kind of path is very common its not the only desirable or good one. Tons of people get married as virgins and lots of other peoples have lots of other different romantic paths. I also don't think that the involuntarily celibate path (at least up to a certain age) is the worst one available. Who would you rather be, a 24 year old nerd who has never had a date, or a 24 year old playa appearing on Maury for the 8th time to be told "you are the father!"?
Now that I am happily married the utility difference to me of one more or less relationship in my past is really small. So, in that sense my lack of romantic success between say 16 and 20 really doesn't matter. It matters about as much as the fact that I got a C in 9th grade geometry given that I went on to kick ass at math later on in high school and in college.
That being said, 9th grade math was really frustrating for me, as was trying to date in high school and college. One way I could have dealt with that frustration was to learn PUA techniques to increase my success. I doubt that would have worked well for me. I think it would have helped me if I had known then that it was only temporary. Once I got a good paying job, spent some time at the gym, and gained a little maturity, suddenly girls started wanting to go on a second date, even though I still wasn't a great conversationalist. In that case I still wouldn't have gotten laid much, but I would have stressed about it less.
But for the person whose present became your past, the utility difference was enormous. And that's what really matters. Even if you're sure you'll be happy later, you can't ignore being unhappy right now.
It's perfectly reasonable that you needed more skills or attributes for this success. But age should not, of itself, be one of these attributes, as long as you're dating people your own age.
I guess. I certainly felt back then that my lack of success with women was likely permanent. I think that if I had known then what my future was going to be like it would have increased my happiness, but I don't know for sure.
It seems like you are making the assumption that women and men of the same age have the same average attractiveness. I think that assumption is a cause of a lot of frustration among young men and leads to erroneous theories about how women date up and men date down and stuff like that. In my model of attractiveness, the average 21 year old woman is much more attractive than the average 21 year old man. Consequently, if you are a 21 year old man, and you want to date a relatively pretty girl your own age, she is probably way out of your league. Unless you have something exceptional going for you, or you get really lucky, its likely not going to happen.
Happily, attractiveness in men tends to rise in the 20s (and even into the 30s and beyond depending on career trajectory & fitness regimen) while it declines pretty rapidly for women in that time period. Even by 25 things will have converged a great deal. But especially for men who are still students, a girl who is the same age as them and in the same percentile of attractiveness as them for that age will be much more attractive than them when judged against the population as a whole.
If a man wants to date at 21 then yes, he either needs lots of charm, or he needs to go for women that are more his overall level of attractiveness. For instance, very overweight/ugly 21 year old women, high school girls, 32 year old trailer trash with 3 kids and a drinking problem, etc.
This sounds very much like an armchair investigation. Most modern marriages, i.e. today, not 15 years ago, are between couples of very similar ages and similar incomes. You've got an assumption that women strongly prefer older men - your conclusion that a young man will have difficulty dating at his own age requires this. This may have been true back in the day, before women could pay their own bills. It's certainly true of some subset of women. But if marriage numbers mean anything, and I would rather think they do, women in general aren't after meaningfully older men, which suggests that younger men are not at as strong a disadvantage as you have assumed.
I'm not sure what kind of attractiveness you mean to be talking about, but I'll chip in that maturity tends to be greater in young women than in young men. This equalizes as much as it ever does by the mid to late 20's.
An effect such as you describe certainly exists to some extent. I don't know from personal experience if it's as large as you say. (I suspect it varies a lot across different cultures.)
The question remains: when 21 year old women see that only men who are at least e.g. 25 years old are attractive enough for them, do they consciously rank attractiveness by age, or does age translate into other objective attributes like e.g. experience?
Is this actually true? Seriously appealing for evidence either way. (I have a pet theory that we overestimate how attractive the "average woman" is for Reasons.)
Is a pet theory a formerly stray theory that you decided to start feeding, because it was cute, and that you stroke in your super villain moments?
I used to have a pet theory but it died when I stopped feeding it evidence.
Your theory doesn't seem to stand up to the data, here and here. It seems it's women that underestimate male attractiveness. Men's judgments are almost symmetrical. Data is from Okcupid surveys.
(obvious confounds: people that use okcupid may not be representative of the population generally, both for the raters and ratees.)
In order to make the data from OKCupid correspond to an underestimation, you have to equate the arbitrary 1-5 rating with some absolute measure like "quintile of attractiveness." This does not necessarily hold.
There is some grounding in the OKCupid data, but it comes from the functional meaning of the point scores: when two people mutually rate each other four or five stars, they're both notified. A score of four or five is therefore a weak way of saying "I find this person attractive enough that I'd like to meet them". (We aren't necessarily talking strictly physical attraction, though; "everyone knows" that the scores are based on photos more than profile text, but I have no idea how true this actually is.) Scores in the 0..3 range have no direct effects, but they may be anchored in some way by the fraction of people rated 4 or 5.
This is all to the best of my knowledge; I haven't been active on OKCupid for a couple of years and they might have tweaked the interface since then. On the other hand, I do remember seeing those analytics pages when I was active.
Good point. That thought never influenced me when I was on OKCupid, but maybe that's just a guy thing :P
I'm not sure "underestimate" is the right description here; my opinion (as an androphile) is that the male attractiveness distribution is heavily skewed, basically in the way that women think it is, if the 1-5 scale measures the underlying strength of attraction rather than quintiles. (3s, 4s, and 5s all fall in the top quintile of male attractiveness, but it seems that there are much larger gradations there than there are in the top quintile of female attractiveness.)
And for the underlying question of access to sex, the message distribution is more important, but isn't scaled correctly for comparisons between the two.
I'm not an androphile myself, but that's my impression too, for various reasons (see e.g. the paragraph starting with “Similarly” in this post).
BTW, here's the post the graphs were taken from.
It doesn't show that woman underestimate male attractiveness. It shows that in online dating woman are in generally able to focus on the more attractive candidates.
What would that even mean? Remember that attractiveness is a two-place word. Women are underestimating how attractive men are to whom? Would a more natural description of the OKC data that men are in average less attractive to women than vice versa?
(I think you misunderstood what MugaSofer meant, which he better explained in his reply. IIUC what he hypothesized is that if you picked an actually median women and you asked people what fraction of the female population are less attractive than her, you'd get an answer much less than 50% -- e.g. because below-median women are underrepresented in mass media compared to above-median ones, or something.)
Well, for starters, it's mainly used by single people, so very desirable people are filtered out unless they are also very picky.
Both correct, my bad.
Huh. Those are some very interesting numbers, I'll have to look over those.
I was talking about people (possibly) overestimating how attractive the median woman is*, though, not people failing to identify how attractive specific women are - which I think is what those graphs relate to? How well estimated attractiveness actually predicts people being attracted?
*(leading to suggesting strategies for most women that actually only work for a high-attractiveness minority, perhaps.)
okCupid lets users rate other users on a 0-5 scale from pictures; for each user, you can average together all of the ratings to determine their mean attractiveness. (They're also stored such that you can only look at women's rating of men, and men's rating of women, rather than also looking at men's rating of men.)
When you ask men to rate women on a 0-5 scale, they do it basically uniformly- about 5% of women have an average rating close to 5, and about 5% of women have an average rating close to 0, and 20% of women have an average rating of about 2.5. When you ask women to rate men on a 0-5 scale, they skew heavily towards giving men 1s. Now, for your question what actually matters is the "would bang" line, which has to come from some other source. I would be amazed if there were not sufficient men on the margin willing to bang a 2.5. According to women, the median man is about a 1- it does not seem surprising that there are insufficient women on the margin willing to bang a 1.
Agreed.
(Exercise for the reader: next time you are in a bus/classroom/mall/somewhere, look at all the women around you, mentally sort them by attractiveness, and look at the median one.)
Survey data on sexual behavior:
http://www.iub.edu/~kinsey/resources/FAQ.html
It doesn't tell us about voluntary vs. involuntary abstinence, but it does have information about frequency, etc. Men are more likely to have had sex in the last year then women, but young women are slightly more likely to have had sex in the last year then young men.
I believe almost all of the effort involved deals with enforcing quality standards, and so as stated it seems true.
Indeed it does - it seems more probable under the standard assumptions than my pet theory, hence my interest in whether this prediction/folk wisdom has been empirically confirmed.
Yes, If one assumes that homosexual males and females have the same attitudes toward sex on average as their heterosexual counterparts. For example, there is no lesbian version of gay bathhouse, as far as I know.
This:
doesn't prove this:
which is false. Alpha men have are just as disproportionally desired as relationship partners, as they're as sex partners. Gotta ask where'd you get your conclusion anyway? What are your citations?
It's kindof late in the discussion to ask people to get out of their armchairs. A good deal of the disagreement here has been people disagreeing about the bare facts.
Really? I haven't seen too much disagreement about bare facts. I have seen more disagreement regarding the way things should be, the applicability of certain analogies, the validity of lines of reasoning and the relevance of refutations. Bare facts about the external world barely played a part in the disagreement.
Actually, I think joe might be right. Think of it this way: Women are dramatically more selective than men about sexual partners. Yet are they dramatically more selective about relationship partners than men? I doubt it, and I would anecdotally suggest that:
P( man is interested in a relationship with a woman | he is interested in sex with her ) < P(woman is interested in a relationship with a man | she is interested in sex with him )
So the selectiveness would then be more symmetrical for relationships than for casual sex.
This is compounded by the fact that since women are hypergamous and tend to try to "date up," the men at the top of the ladder have lots of options and can afford to be very picky about relationship partners. Anecdotally again, at the highest ranks of desirability, men seem to be at least as picky about relationship partners as women are.
But these aren't the men that women are most likely to want relationships with. Men at high levels of desirability don't need to enter relationships to find sex. Getting those dudes into a relationship is much harder for a woman, and takes skill. (This is where I think many female dating complaints come from. My suspicion is that females are typically trying to "date up" in terms of percentile attractiveness, while males struggle to date at their same level (or lower) of percentile attractiveness, because their female counterparts are busy chasing men of higher percentile attractiveness who just aren't that into those women.
If I'm right about the math and the empiricals, then we have an inevitable situation where both sexes experience a challenge: what you want, you can't get... and what you can get, you don't really want. Women (on average) are struggling to date up, which means that men are struggling to date people of similar percentile attractiveness.
So who wins in this situation? That's a complex question, and all I'll say for now is that the variance in the advantages of this system are probably greater for men than women: I bet the men at the top do better than most women, who in turn do better than most men, but I'd need to think about it more and conceptualize how I'm defining "better."
What would "dating down" look like, for a man?
The standard advice is that if your standards for being in a relationship are too low, to the point where it seems as though practically everyone meets them, this is called being "desperate" and will make people want to avoid you.
As with most sound dating advice there are exceptions and in most cases doing the 'wrong' thing with confidence and intent ameliorates or even reverses the effect. If a man chooses to date below the maximum attractiveness that he could get with effort for reasons other than desperation he can be expected to have more success (in the short term) than if he pushed his limits. The challenge he faces to maintain social dominance is reduced. Laziness (or pragmatism) is not the same as neediness.
Are they? ISTM the men most likely to have been in a stable, happy relationship with an awesome woman for years don't much resemble the men most likely to have one-night stands.
No, I don't think I would. I'd keep that in reserve if any of the students harassed me, which if they're that impressively awful they might, but I'd probably still give it a try. I mean, I attempt to teach philosophy to non-major freshmen once a week, and I don't give up on the ones who are abominable at it.
There are really two problems here. The first is that single men and women can have a hard time meeting each other. The second is a mismatch between the expectations of each and the reality.
We all have an idea of what we're looking for in a mate. That idea owes a lot to the media, and it isn't all that realistic. She is looking for a man with smouldering good looks and a deep sensitive streak (full disclosure: I'm a man, and most of the time I don't even care about my own feelings). He is looking for a woman who is paying for her math degree by stripping. Only very rarely are these expectations fulfilled.