= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (682)
Here's my attempt at explaining Eliezer's explanation. It's based heavily on my experiences as someone who's apparently quite atypical in a relevant way. This may require a few rounds of back-and-forth to be useful - I have more information about the common kind of experience (which I assume you share) than you have about mine, but I don't know if I have enough information about it to pinpoint all the interesting differences. Note that this information is on the border of what I'm comfortable sharing in a public area, and may be outside some peoples' comfort zones even to read about: If anyone reading is easily squicked by sexuality talk, they may want to leave the thread now.
I'm asexual. I've had sex, and experienced orgasms (anhedonically, though I'm not anhedonic in general), but I have little to no interest in either. However, I don't object to sex on principle - it's about as emotionally relevant as any other social interaction, which can range from very welcome to very unwelcome depending on the circumstances and the individual(s) with whom I'm socializing*. Sex tends to fall on the 'less welcome' end of that scale because of how other people react to it - I'm aware that others get emotionally entangled by it, and that's annoying to deal with, and potentially painful for them, when I don't react the same way - but if that weren't an issue, 'let's have sex' would get about the same range of reactions from me as 'let's go to the movies' - generally in the range of 'sure, why not?' to 'nope, sorry, what I'm doing now is more interesting', or 'no, thanks' if I'm being asked by someone I prefer not to spend time with.
Now, I don't generally talk about this next bit at all, because it tends to freak people out (even though I'm female and fairly pacifistic and strongly support peoples' right to choose what to do with their bodies in general, and my cluelessness on the matter is unlikely to ever have any effect on anything), but until recently - until I read that explanation by Eliezer, actually - it made no sense to me why someone would consider being raped more traumatic than being kidnapped and forced to watch a really crappy movie with a painfully loud audio track. (Disregarding any injuries, STDs, loss of social status, and chance of pregnancy, of course.) Yeah, being forced to do something against your will is bad, but rape seems to be pretty universally considered one of the worst things that can happen to someone short of being murdered. People even consider rape that bad when the raped person was unconscious and didn't actually experience it!
According to Eliezer - and this makes sense of years' worth of data I gathered while trying to figure this out on my own - this seemingly irrational reaction is because people in our society tend to have what he calls 'sexual selves'. As you may have picked up from the above text, I don't appear to have a 'sexual self' at all, so I'm rather fuzzy on this part, but what he seems to be describing is the special category that people put 'how I am about sex' information into, and most people consider the existence and contents of that category to be an incredibly important part of their selves**. The movie metaphor could be extended to show some parallels in this way, but in the interests of showing a plausible emotional response that's at least close to the same ballpark of intensity, I'll switch to a food metaphor: Vegans, in particular, have a reputation for considering their veganism a fundamental part of their selves, and would theoretically be likely to consider their 'food selves' to have been violated if they discovered that someone had hidden an animal product in something that they ate - even if the animal product would have been discarded otherwise, resulting in no difference in the amount of harm done to any animal. (I know exactly one vegan, and he's one of the least mentally stable people I know in general, so this isn't strong evidence, but the situation I described is the only one other than complete mental breakdown in which I'd predict that that otherwise strict pacifist might become violent.) Even omnivores tend to have a 'food self' in our society - I know few people who wouldn't be disconcerted to discover that they'd eaten rat meat, or insects, or human flesh.***
The rules that we set for ourselves, that define our 'food selves', 'sexual selves', 'movie-watching selves', etc., are what Eliezer was talking about when he mentioned 'boundaries of consent' (which is a specific example of one of those rules). They describe not just what we consider acceptable or unacceptable to do or have done to us, but more fundamentally what we consider related to a specific aspect of our selves. For example, while a google search informs me that this may not be an accurate piece of trivia, I've never heard anyone claim that it's implausible that people in Victorian England considered ankles sexual, even though we don't now. Another example that I vaguely remember reading about, in a different area, is that some cultures considered food that'd been handled by a menstruating woman to be 'impure' and unfit to eat - again, something we don't care about. Sometimes, these rules serve a particular purpose - I've heard the theory that the Kosher prohibition on eating pork was perhaps started because pork was noticed as a disease vector, for example - but the problems that are solved by those rules can sometimes be solved in other ways (in the given example, better meat-processing and cooking technology, I assume), making the rule superfluous and subject to change as the society evolves. It's obvious from my own personal situation that it's also possible - though Eliezer never claimed that this was the case for 3WC - for certain 'selves' that our society considers universal not to develop at all. (Possibly interesting example for this group: Spiritual/religious self.)
Eliezer didn't share with us the details of how the 3WC society solved the relevant underlying problems and allowed the boundaries of sexuality and consent to move so dramatically, but he did indicate that he's aware that those boundaries exist and currently solve certain problems, and that he needed to consider those issues in order to create a plausible alternative way for a society to approach the issue. I don't see any reason to believe that he didn't actually do so.
* I am, notably, less welcoming of being touched in general than most people, but this is not especially true of sex.
** I find this bizarre.
*** I have a toothache. The prescription pain meds I took just kicked in. If the rest of this post is less insightful than the earlier part, or I fail to tie them together properly, it's because I'm slightly out of my head. This may be an ongoing problem until Tuesday or Wednesday.
FWIW, I think people don't find it implausible because they know, even if only vaguely, that there are people out there with fetishes for everything, and I have the impression that in heavily Islamic countries with full-on burkha-usage/purdah going, things like ankles are supposed to be erotic and often are.
That interpretation sounds odd to me, so I checked wikipedia, which says:
'Conventional' seems to be the sticking point. Ankles are conventionally considered sexual in that culture, so it's not a fetish, in that context; it's a cultural difference.
It seems to make the most sense to think of it as a kind of communication - letting someone see your ankle, in that culture, is a communication about your thoughts regarding that person (though what exactly it communicates, I don't know enough to guess on), and the content of that communication is the turn-on. In our culture, the same thing might be communicated by, say, kissing, with similar emotional results. In either case, it's not the form of the communication that seems to matter, but the meaning, whereas in the case of a fetish, the form does matter, and what the action means to the other party (if there's another person involved) doesn't appear to. (Yes, I have some experience in this area. The fetish in question wasn't actually very interesting, and I don't think talking about it specifically will add to the conversation.)
I'm... not quite following. I gave 2 examples of why an educated modern person would not be surprised at Victorian ankles and their reception: that fetishes are known to be arbitrary and to cover just about everything, and that contemporary cultures are close or identical to the Victorians. These were 2 entirely separate examples. I wasn't suggesting that your random Saudi Arabian (or whatever) had a fetish for ankles or something, but that such a person had a genuine erotic response regardless of whether the ankle was exposed deliberately or not.
A Western teenage boy might get a boner at bare breasts in porn (deliberate but not really communicating), his girlfriend undressing for him (deliberate & communicative), or - in classic high school anime fashion - a bra/swimsuit getting snagged (both not deliberate & not communicative).
It seems like we're using the word 'fetish' differently, and I'm worried that that might lead to confusion. My original point was about how the cultural meanings of various things can change over time - including but not limited to what would or would not be considered a fetish (i.e. 'unusual to be aroused by'). If nearly everyone in a given culture is aroused by a certain thing, then it's not unusual in that culture, and it's not a fetish for people in that culture to be aroused by that thing, at least given how I'm using the word. (Otherwise, any arousing trait would be considered a fetish if at least one culture doesn't or didn't share our opinion of it, and I suspect that idea wouldn't sit well with most people.)
I propose that the useful dividing line between a fetish and an aspect of a given person's culture is whether or not the arousing thing is universal enough in that culture that it can be used communicatively - that appears to be a good indication that people in that culture are socialized to be aroused by that thing when they wouldn't naturally be aroused by it without the socialization. I also suspect that that socialization is accomplished by teaching people to see the relevant things as communication, automatically, as a deep heuristic - so that that flash of ankle or breast is taken as a signal that the flasher is sexually receptive, without any thought involved on the flashee's part.
It makes much more sense to me that thinking that someone was sexually receptive would be arousing than that somehow nearly everyone in a given culture somehow wound up with an attraction to ankles for their own sake, for no apparent reason, and without other cultures experiencing the same thing. There may be another explanation, though - were you considering some other theory?
This seems true to me. No American male would deny that he is attracted to at least one of the big three (breasts, buttocks, face), and attracted for their own sake, and for no apparent reason. (Who instructed them to like those?)
Yet National Geographic is famous for all its bare-breasted photos of women who seem to neither notice nor care, and ditto for the men. The simplest explanation to me is just that cultures have regions of sexiness, with weak ties to biological facts like childbirth, and fetishes are any assessment of sexiness below a certain level of prevalence. Much simpler than all your communication.
It seems I was trying to answer a question that you weren't asking, then; sorry about that.
Well, the awareness that there are people who have a fetish for X in this culture might make it less surprising that there is a whole culture that finds X sexy.
You're at least partly right about the communication theory. One big turn on for most people is that someone is sexually interested in them, as communicated by revealing normally hidden body parts. Supposedly in Victorian times legs were typically hidden, so revealing them would be communicative.
Another part of this is that the idea of a taboo is itself sexy, whether or not there is communicative intent. Just the idea of seeing something normally secret or forbidden is arousing to many people.
I'm curious about your example that came up in your life, if you're willing to share.
I suppose that's true, though it's not obvious to me that something would have to start as a fetish to wind up considered sexual by a culture.
This appears to be true - I've heard it before, anyway - but it doesn't make sense, to me, at least as a sexual thing.
Except, as I'm thinking of it now, it does seem to make sense in the context of communicating. Sharing some risky (in the sense that if it were made public knowledge, you'd take a social-status hit) bit of information is a hard-to-fake signal that you're serious about the relationship, and doing something risky together is a natural way of reciprocating with each other regarding that. It seems like it'd serve more of a pair-bonding purpose than strictly a sexual one, but the two are so intertwined in humans that it's not really surprising that it'd do both.
My first boyfriend had a thing for walking through puddles while wearing tennis shoes without socks. Pretty boring, as fetishes go.
It wouldn't. That's not what I meant: I meant that someone considering Victorian culture, say, where it was allegedly commonplace to find ankles sexy, might not find it too surprising if he knew about people with an ankle fetish in this culture. As in "I know someone who finds ankles sexy in this culture, so it's not that weird for ankles to be considered sexy in a completely different culture."
Communicating risky information is more of a pair-bonding thing than a sexual one. I was thinking about seeing something taboo or hidden as sexual. Say it's in a picture or it's unintentional, so there's no communicative intent. A lot of sexuals find it exciting just because it's "forbidden". You might be able to relate if you've ever been told you can't do something and that just made you want it more.