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SarahC comments on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA - Less Wrong
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I'm with you, Hugh.
If more geeks could come across as "exciting badboys, or masculine and high socially-skilled" then women who are subconsciously attracted to that type could actually wind up with someone intelligent and decent, instead of the usual jerks. You're raising the average quality level of the socially successful man.
The one thing I still have a problem with is self-help courses that guarantee you success with women. Nothing can guarantee you that. You can do things that can make you statistically more likely to succeed, but in the end, when you have consensual social interactions, the other person could always rebuff you. It can get creepy when men think they're entitled to a quota of women, and that it's unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence. You can get better at attracting women, and that's great, but women are free to reject you.
That's exactly what I was trying to get at.
Aside from hyperbolic marketing materials, what would make us think that PUAs believe that they are "guaranteed" success with women? What makes us think that they resist the notion that women are free to reject them?
Actually, by joining the seduction community, PUAs demonstrate a recognition that success with women is not guaranteed, and that they will only achieve it with a lot of work figuring out how to satisfy women's criteria.
PUAs call getting obsessed about any one particular woman "one-itis," which is one of the cardinal sins of pickup.
To understand the attitude that PUAs have towards rejection and towards the validity of women's preferences, let's take a look, not at the words of PUAs, but at the words of a man criticizing PUAs:
[...]
Basically, this writer recognizes and bashes PUAs for having an attitude towards women that "the customer is always right." Whenever you get rejected, you go back to the drawing board and try to figure out what you could have done differently. This attitude can be grueling on oneself... but it wins.
There are a few particular tactics in the seduction community that I do worry about pressuring women sexually. PUAs will sometimes persist through some forms of ambiguous resistance, or "token" resistance. For example, if a woman and a PUA are making out, and she says "we should stop soon" while continuing to vigorously make out, then the PUA will probably keep going until he gets a less ambiguous rejection. Similarly, if a woman says "we shouldn't do this" and then starts unbuttoning his shirt, the PUA will listen to her hands, not her words. If a woman does give an obvious "no," then the PUA might try initiating the same activity later if he has reason to believe she may have changed her mind.
I'm not quite sold on some of the ways that PUAs initiate with women who are conflicted about sex, yet even in these cases, PUAs will keep going not because they feel "entitled," but because they believe that the women involved will want them to keep going.
Just like everywhere else, PUAs are trying to fulfill what they perceive as the majority preferences of women, which may end marginalizing women with less-typical preferences. Unfortunately, it's a society-wide problem that many mainstream straight women seem to have trouble engaging in explicit verbal communication about sexuality and consent, which creates an incentive on men to make guesses, guesses which are sometimes wrong. More on that here.
While the attitude towards consent in the seduction community does leave some things to be desired, I don't think it's actually very far from the attitudes toward consent in the general culture, held by both men and women. It's another case where we bash the seduction community for merely verbalizing and copying what everyone else is already doing.
The rationality of negotiation over consent would be a great subject for discussion sometime.
For the most part, PUAs believe that they are fulfilling women's preferences, even though their measurement of women's preferences may sometimes be incorrect or biased (such as when assessing women who are experiencing conflict over their preferences). For the most part, PUAs butt out when they believe they have received an unambiguous rejection, and then try to examine where they "messed up."
Viliam's response brought my attention to this quote-of-a-quote. It struck me as massively ill-conceived.
This is just entirely backwards. The lessons on discipline - both academic and practical - that I learned during my training and brief career as a teacher have significant overlap with those of PUA. Taking actions in response to those of others that make it clear what behaviours they can get away with with you is an instrumental necessity with people in general.
Is the critic's complaint that the interaction is framed as 'pressing buttons that have a desired influence on future behaviour' rather than 'make a moral judgement and punish those whose behavior does not match your ideals'?
I thought about the mathematical sense of “group theory” first. I clearly need a break. (Well, I am taking one right now.)
The criticism is essentially correct, but needs to be put in more context.
And how whould this differ from supplicating, which many non-PUAs do? The uncalibrated version is: "If she wants cocky and funny, you provide gifts and submissivity. If she wants entertainment, you provide gifts and submissivity. Later she moves on to the next guy, and you never understand why." I don't see how catering to woman's needs could be worse than supplicating. At least, being cocky and funny, entertaining, et cetera teaches you some useful social skills, improves other aspects of your life, and perhaps there is a chance you will enjoy it.
In any voluntary relationship you have to be somehow compatible with the other person's expectation. It is a question of limits -- how much change is acceptable for you, and when you decide that the cost is too high. Just as non-PUA may decide to value his own dignity higher than maintaining relationship at any costs, so may decide a PUA. And the PUA would probably be in a better bargaining position.
This applies to dealing with fellow humans in general. How many imperfect people do you know? How often do you remind them of their percieved mistakes? How soon in your relationship you start doing it? Do they like it? I guess if an average human hates to be judged by strangers, it is probably not a good seduction strategy. (Exceptions exist: see "negs".) Just as it would be a bad business strategy, etc. Would you "discipline" your business partners, or would you try to find a "win/win" solution?
Only by an extremely strict definition of "guarantee" could this be construed as contravening any individual lady's autonomy.
You actually hint at this:
Sure, but the guarantee was never about individuals in the first place!
Consider each interaction a Bernoulli trial. If (pre-self help), the poor dude always strikes out [P(success) ~ 0], he will never have a successful interaction (however that's defined) unless he performs an enormous number of trials, which his poor self esteem won't allow. Say we raise his probability of success (through hypnotherapy and positive self-talk coaching), to 0.01. If our gentleman is so revved up that he then goes out and talks to 1000 women (performs 1000 trials), there's a >99.99% chance he'll have at least one success.
If this situation is typical, it would seem like an unreasonably restrictive use of language to balk the word "guarantee". Individuals always have unique characteristics, but that doesn't mean we can't make statements about averages.
Of course.
My point was about literal guarantees, and men who believe them. There are very stupid people in this world. It's easy to assume them away, but they do actually exist. George Sodini, I suspect, was a stupid man -- or, at least, deeply unrealistic. He had the Charles Guiteau attitude: fiercely convinced that he was owed something that would never have been likely. Being that unrealistic is dangerous to oneself and others.
I would guess that LW doesn't harbor so much of that, but I feel obligated to make these kinds of disclaimers because I do see people here who don't take social conventions for granted and who don't pick up cues very naturally.
To get back to the main issue, I think it's basically good to get better at picking up women, and even more generally good to build social/networking/charisma ability. I'm just inclined to be very careful about handing too much of an ideology to people who are high-risk for doing bad things with it.
The biggest problem with what I've seen of PUA and PUA converts is that it is very hard to distinguish these two affects.
Your typical shy guy poor dude, doesn't actually approach women with an actual trial very often. Sometimes it almost never happens.
Suppose the successful PUA can pickup 2-3% of intentional targets. They are probably targeting people everytime they are in a social situation that involves meeting new people. Perhaps this involves dozens of contacts a week, or even hundreds if they are the sort who is looking for a constant stream of one-nighters.
On the other hand, your typical poor dude may only make 1-2 intentional targets a month, if that. I was never a PUA. I developed enough social skills on my own to make a marked difference in my outlook a few years before Lewis Depayne showed up on usenet pushing Ross Jeffries stuff, which was laughable.
But I was definitely a poor dude before then. I attended a college for two years with 70% women, that a friend of mine described in retrospect as a "pussy paradise" without ever having any kind of romantic or sexual relationship. In retrospect, some of the rare targets of my attention were begging me to make a move in ways that I failed to notice. But in two years, I probably made actual attempts to hookup or date at most 9-10 women/girls, and in none of those cases did I ever make a move that demanded either rejection or acceptance. Because I was so, so sure that I would be rejected that I couldn't face the prospect. Is it any surprise that my success rate was 0%?
Even after my awakening, I maintained a relatively low frequency of attempts, but my ratio of hookups to serious attempts is far better than 3%, more like 50-60%.
My going hypothesis is that the mere act of getting guys to specifically attempt to approach women they are attracted to, and then attempt to seduce those who inspire their further interest and verify their success is enough to turn the average loser into someone who will be reasonably successful with women.
I didn't actually need any dark arts to go from a big 'loser' to somebody who, in the right social context (not a typical bar scene), has around a 50/50 shot to hook up with almost anybody who is looking and interests me. I just had to realize that sex is not something women have and men want to take from them, and that I am not hideous and unattractive.
Now, I've come to realize that I'm probably more attractive than average, naturally, and it was my combination of weak social skills and brutal social experience of growing up that warped my mental map about this until I was in my mid-20s. I don't actually believe that most guys would have the results that I do. But I'm hardly some kind of Super-Adonis. I'm fat, and don't pay a whole lot of attention to my appearance beyond being clean (tend to wear non-descript preppy business casual nearly everywhere I go because it's comfortable). I'm pretty sure I'd get negative numbers on Roissy's stupid SMV test.
The (fatal) flaw in your argument is that you multiplied probabilities without checking your model of reality for any obvious reasons to believe that the probabilities might be significantly dependent on each other.
In other words, if all we know about a man is that he is trying to mate, is the probability that he will succeed with woman #900 given that he struck out with #1 through #899 really the same as the probability that he will succeed with woman #1?
The general point still holds. P(at least one success) can be very large even if P(nth attempt succeeds) is small, for all n.
The independence assumption is implicit in my calling them Bernoulli trials, but you are correct that this may not be valid. Still, the general point stands. Good catch!
I don't have a link handy, but ISTR that one of AMP's promotional materials was a thing that showed several ways that inadvertently create "captured audience syndrome" via body language, conversation monopolizing, or other behaviors make a woman feel threatened or like she doesn't have the option of leaving.
If you happen to find it, I hope you post the link.
To rephrase komponisto's reply to this in a simpler manner, and minus the controversial bit:
I wish everyone would extend to the unattractive people of the world, of either sex, our right to feel bitter. This does not make us rapists. Thank you for your attention.
That's a good point.
It seems to be too easy to go from "Some bitter people are dangerous" to "Bitter people are dangerous"-- people make that sort of mistake anyway, and it's easier when there's some fear added.
Upvoted. But the right to feel bitter does not automatically imply the right to express bitterness. And even if you posit the right to express bitterness, expressing bitterness may still not be a rational response to the situation.
ETA: This probably-volatile comic-strip link suggests one reason why bitterness over one's own unattractiveness is often the result of a deficiency in epistemic rationality.
That sounds psychologically unrealistic to me. Rapists tend to have more sex and more partners than average. Maybe violence comes from a sense of desert, but that sense was not connected to "following the rules."
Similarly, I have heard lots of anecdotes of students becoming violent for being denied degrees, but have not been able to substantiate any of them.
If I may say so, there is something troubling about your third paragraph (edited, with emphasis added):
Try to imagine substituting other forms of consensual social interaction here, and seeing if the tone feels right. For example, right now the economy is bad in many places, and many people are unemployed. I can easily imagine that there are numerous self-help courses that teach people how to make themselves more attractive to employers, by teaching them how to behave during interviews, etc. Now obviously no such program can guarantee anyone a job. Imagine, however, that some poor soul -- let's make her a woman -- goes through these courses, does everything she can to improve her prospects, but still can't manage to secure a job. Presumably, a person in that position would naturally feel a sense of frustration; they may even feel that they are the victim of unfairness. Can you imagine applying a word like creepy to this -- general, unspecified, hypothetical -- woman's distress? ("Creepy" is about the strongest form of social condemnation that exists in near mode -- i.e. when we're not talking about distant political villains.) Would you feel the need to point out -- in a rather defensive-sounding way -- that employers are in fact free to reject those whom they regard as less-than-qualified candidates? It's unlikely you would worry too much about such a person turning to violence -- and to the extent you did, it would probably be in the standard sympathetic way in which thoughtful, liberal people usually discuss the relationship between poverty and crime.
I don't mean to single you out personally and question your motives, so please don't take what follows that way; but it seems to me that underlying remarks like these -- which I have seen and heard from many people in many places over the years -- is a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for "unattractive" men. I wonder if it's time someone made the bound-to-be-controversial suggestion that women in modern society are excessively conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors. There is apparently no greater female nightmare scenario than mating with a less-than-optimally-attractive male. The Darwinian reasons why this should be the case are too obvious to be worth stating; but it should be equally obvious that such behavior is less than rational in our modern era of contraception: sex simply doesn't have the same dangers that it did in the ancestral environment.
(I would guess that the analogously irrational male behavior is probably sexual jealousy.)
Is getting pregnant really the only danger? Sex can cause the release of mind altering drug that can cause you to pair bond (women more so than men). This can have a dramatic effect on your life if it is with the wrong person.
This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA: it focuses mainly on one night stands and short term relationships, which may reduce the ease and likelihood of pair bonding for the woman, later in life. PUA statistically works against the success rate of long term relationships.
I'd like more research on the nature of pair bonding, but it sounds plausible. Specifically whether men who've had lots of sexual partners are more likely to be leave women than those who have had few. If so women are likely to be more wary.
Ideally the PUA scheme would be replaced by something as well though. Advice on how to gain experience with women and what they really want, without short term dating and without getting into bad long term relationships.
I'm imagining something like the following, it roughly mirrors my development, although it was unconscious. Although it would probably be hard to follow for very sexually frustrated men.
1) Find women that you enjoy spending time with in a non-sexual way, either at work or a shared hobby/interest. Do not try to befriend them specifically, but befriend the group. On-line interaction might work, but you will do better if you see people in the flesh.
2) Do not focus on a specific woman. Do not think you want to have sex with them. That is friendzone them to borrow PUA terminology. If you are interested in long term monogamy this is an important skill to have*!
3) Casually watch their interactions with their boyfriends/husbands and the sorts of conversations they have. Do not try them out on your female friends, unless you are very sure they are interested in you. But knowing what behaviours are appropriate/attractive for the sort of women that you can get on with is important.
What they react to is probably a more accurate picture of what they want, than what they say they want though.
4) Improve some of the things that PUA people talk about, appearance, posture, demeanour etc
5) Some of your female friends may flirt with you, especially when drunk. This may be entirely innocent, and is likely to be if they are in a relationship. Practice and have fun but don't take it too seriously. If they do flirt, take it as a compliment and it means you are ready for dating. You should have a good idea of what sort of woman you get on with as well.
6) Try dating. Ask your female friends to suggest friends, try on-line dating.
However I'm pretty sure I learnt a lot about relationships from watching my Mum and Dad (and Aunts and Uncles, all in long term AFAIK monogamous relationships) interact as I was growing up as well, so I wasn't starting from no knowledge.
I haven't done much of 6 myself. Because people, in general, tend to drive me up the wall if I'm around them a lot. There are rare exceptions, though. And that isn't even taking into consideration other compatibility issues.
*Not friendzoning your partner, but your partners friends.
I've posted some thoughts on the orientation of PUAs to relationships. Although many PUAs do focus on short term relationships, most of what they are doing would be the same even for long-term relationships.
As far as I can tell, limiting factor of most PUAs in attracting women for either short-term or long-term relationships is that they are insufficiently masculine, high-status, and exciting. At least, with young women, who may well be skewed towards short-term mating (contra the stereotypical assumption that women always want relationships).
Young men are often accused of being "led by their dicks" when choosing mates. I think there is something analogous going on with young women. Even though in the abstract they may want relationships, they also want highly sexually attractive guys. And the most sexually attractive guy out there for many women isn't necessarily the guy who would make a good long-term relationship partner.
So if you are a young guy and you want a relationship with a young woman, you have to deal with competition from guys running a flashy short-term mating strategy. For a woman to notice you and be interested in getting to know you well enough to even think of you as a long-term mate, you have to outshine the local badboys. If you try to present yourself as stable, romantic, long-term mate from the start, you will be consistently overlooked.
Of course, not all women are following this type of mating strategy where most of their attention goes to the flashiest males, who they then try to "convert" into long-term mates. In fact, I'm willing to bet that there is at least a reasonable minority of women who only go for long-term mates. But it's common enough that men need to be aware of it. It pays for young men to have the kind of flashy presentation that PUAs teach, regardless of whether they are looking for short-term or long-term relationships.
I've seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life. My gut reaction is that this may be true for some female phenotypes, but not for others.
HughRistik:
I have my own pet theory about this, extrapolated from real-life observations and a number of other clues, which are not very strong individually, but seem to add up to a pretty strong web of evidence.
To put it as succinctly as possible, the problem stems from two not very pretty, but nevertheless real facts. First, the attractiveness of individual men to women has an extremely high statistical dispersion, even more so than vice versa. (In other words, the difference between men from different percentiles in women's eyes will be significantly greater than the difference between women in analogous percentiles in men's eyes.) Second, and more important, for a typical woman, the attractiveness of men she can get for non-serious temporary relationships is significantly higher than the attractiveness of her realistic options for permanent commitment. (This also holds far more so than the reverse.) It follows that when a woman with a variegated relationship history finally settles down, it will likely be with a man whose attractiveness is significantly lower than those she's been involved with in the past. It's not hard to see why this is a recipe for trouble, and clearly the implications are somewhat reactionary in nature.
On the other hand, if a woman settles down with a man who outclasses all those she'd been involved with earlier, her ability to bond with him probably won't be compromised. Trouble is, this is obviously increasingly unlikely as their number is greater.
Excellent point; I was thinking along similar lines in this comment.
I think part of the reason that I found komponisto's original comment in the thread to be less offensive than others was because it instantly reminded me of the hypothesis you describe, which is a potential way of rationalizing his comment.
The argument goes something like this: For many gender-typical heterosexual women, the guys who are the most sexually exciting may not always be the best relationship partners. This could be partly be because the men who are highly attractive to women are also highly attractive to other women, and have so much options that it's difficult for particular women to get them in a relationship. Men have lower standards for short-term partners than for long-term partners. It could also be because, for some women, there is a tradeoff between the traits that make a guy a good long-term partner, and the traits that make him sexually exciting. For example, certain masculine traits like dominance are sexually exciting to some women, but may nevertheless be frustrating to deal with in an actual relationship.
The argument proceeds by suggesting that since the most sexually exciting guys are the worst relationship prospects (for some women), everyone could be better off if women also "gave a chance" to slightly less attractive men who could be better relationship prospects. Women should decide what they want in men by taking into account more than just sex appeal, the argument goes, and the result would be that women don't restrict their dating to only the most sexually exciting guys around at the time.
Now, I call this "the argument" because I'm not sold on it myself. The fact is that people, especially young people, like excitement. I'm not really interested in saying that women should go for guys who bore them, even if those guys might be more stable. Yet I think that this argument should be one that we can entertain; it's a rationalization of komponisto's original argument, and it takes into account women's interests. Furthermore, to the extent that there is conflict between different elements of women's preferences (e.g. desire for excitement vs. desire for a long-term relationship), women may be free to decide which elements of their preferences are most important, and which they should act on.
The other reason that I'm skeptical of asking women to change is that it's not really their fault that there can be such a tradeoff between sexual attractiveness and long-term potential in males. To some degree, that tradeoff is inevitable because it's logically impossible for men to be dominant and non-dominant at the same time, and it's empirically difficult to find men who have high level of both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. Yet some of that tradeoff is cultural: male socialization seems to put men on "tracks" of either a drab "nice guy" long-term mating strategy, or a more exciting "bad boy" short-term mating strategy. The attractiveness of a lot of men in the former category is artificially deflated by harmful cultural forces.
It's not women's fault, if a lot of the time, the only choices they are faced with is "sexually exciting badboy who will get tired of me in a month," and "boring, sweet nerdy guy who I'm only marginally attracted to." This is a tough menu for women to face, and I don't think the choice they should make is obvious. It would be better for everyone if the second guy had a bit more of an edge, making him a credible object of female desire and credible contender to the badboy. Thanks to the seduction community, that guy can now get more of an edge.
(I propose that female attraction as a function of masculinity is non-linear for some women: it's more like a bell-curve or a threshold function. Some women always want more masculinity in men; others are happy with a certain amount. Unfortunately, the amount of masculinity that most women want is more than a lot of the guys who would make good long-term mates have. This could steer women towards dating guys who are masculinity-overkill and poor long-term mates, since those are the only guys above the threshold of attractiveness.)
HughRistik:
I absolutely agree with this observation. The saddest thing is that most of the "nice" guys could ramp up their masculinity with some reasonable effort, and without compromising any of the existing aspects of their personality that they value. This would make things much happier both for them and for women, who are nowadays indeed facing a severe shortage of men that are both good long-term prospects and above some reasonable threshold of masculinity. Yet it's virtually impossible to open this topic in public, let alone present any concrete advice on how to actually achieve this goal, without triggering all sorts of politically correct alarms.
If this is true, why aren't they doing it? I'm not convinced that the heightening of happiness you speak of is worth the lessening of happiness that those guys evidently believe would occur were they to change themselves (or alternatively, act like someone else for as long as it takes).
randallsquared:
Because the necessary information is difficult to obtain in a clear and convincing form, and it's drowned in a vast sea of nonsense that's produced on this subject by just about every source of information in the modern society. Therefore, a great many people are unaware of the problem, or even actively misled about it due to the prevailing hypocritical norms for discussing the subject.
They greatly overestimate the lessening of happiness they would experience from changing things. Saying "changing isn't worth it" seems like some sort of rationalization that leads people to settle for mediocrity, even from the perspective of their own values. And it's a purely theoretical conjecture: you (general "you") will never know until you've tried.
Yes, you will need some change in your self-image. But it's not like improving your social skills, body language, voice tonality, and fashion sense is going to shatter your sense of self and turn you into a fundamentally different person. You will feel continuity with your previous version; most of your values will be the same, and some of your values will actually be served better. The only way it would be a problem is for people who have very brittle self-images, like "I don't talk to people at parties." Why the hell not?
Of course, it's difficult for people who hold a value against changing their behavior to fit other people's criteria and expectations. For people with this value, I would ask: is it more important than some of your other values and goals?
So many introverts have been duped with platitudes like "you shouldn't change yourself for anyone." Yet the entire nature of social interaction involves people adjusting to fit the expectations of others (see impression management. Many introverts and nerdy people huff and puff and say "well, IDONTLIKETHATANDITSSTUPID." But I'm not sure whether social interaction works is inherently so bad, or whether it is merely unintuitive given some of the personality traits and socialization of introverted and nerdy people.
The goal of self-identity should not be trying to avoid having to make any changes or adjustments for others; the goal should be to reconcile one's desire for identity and individuality with the adjustments one makes in the social landscape.
I wonder if the women who go for "flashier" males make up a disproportionate portion of the dating pool, because women who tend to choose those types of males who are inclined to become long-term mates end up with long-term mates and stop dating?
It's sort of like how, according to my Econ 101 textbook, most people who are unemployed experience short-term unemployment, but most of the people unemployed at any given moment are experiencing long-term unemployment. For example, during one year, you'd have three people who are unemployed all year, and twelve people who are unemployed for only a month. If you look at who's employed at any given moment, you'll see the five long-term unemployed people and only one short-term unemployed, but the person who's short-term unemployed keeps changing while the long-term unemployed people are always the same ones.
(I think I said that awkwardly...)
HughRistik:
I just ran into an interesting link that's highly pertinent for this topic. Slumlord discusses a paper that provides for a very strong case that the answer is yes:
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-divorce-risk.html
(H/t Thursday via OB.) I haven't had the time to read the paper in detail, but on a casual look, it seems quite convincing.
It says they controlled for a variety of variables but the obvious question is whether families / cultures that discourage pre-marital sex also discourage divorce and whether this was controlled for. I don't have time to read the paper now so if anyone knows the answer to that I'd be interested.
I read Teachman's paper in the meantime; overall, it looks like a solid piece of work. The controls are definitely not broad enough to rule out the above hypothesis directly. This however should not be held against him, since this question is outside the scope of the study, and it would be a very difficult task to come up with controls that cover all such possible familial and cultural influences reliably.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the basic finding of the paper is inconsistent with the above hypothesis. One would expect that conservative families and subcultures discourage premarital sex and (especially!) cohabitation even between future spouses to a significant extent. Therefore, if the effect of premarital sex on divorce risk is entirely due to such influences, we would expect to see a difference between women who practiced cohabitation or premarital sex only with their future husbands and those who didn't practice it at all. Yet as Slumlord points out, the striking result is exactly that there is no such difference.
That said, this finding is inconsistent with a previous study that looked into the question of why exactly virginity at marriage predicts lower probabilities of divorce: J.R. Kahn & K.A. London, Premarital Sex and the Risk of Divorce. (Unfortunately, I haven't found an ungated version.) Kahn & London's conclusion was that this is because lack of premarital sex correlates with traditionalist attitudes, i.e. basically the above hypothesis. However, their conclusion is based on a complex statistical model that makes it look quite far-fetched to me. Frankly, I lack the statistical knowledge to judge it reliably and authoritatively, but in any case, Teachman's work looks like a much stronger and more straightforward piece of evidence that points in the contrary direction.
[Update: after rummaging through the literature a bit more, I found a letter to the editor by one Tim Heaton, published in the same journal (vol. 55, p. 240), which harshly criticizes the soundness of Kahn & London's statistics. This was followed by an unconvincing response by K&L, presenting the usual cop-out of the sort, yes, our methodology is lousy, but we couldn't do any better. On the whole, my above conclusions are further reinforced by this finding.]
I agree that men form lasting emotional bonds partly as a result of (more often than a cause of) physical intimacy. But this usually does not exclude desire for sex with other women. If a man immediately settles down with the first woman who will touch him, it just means he really hates looking for such women (perhaps irrationally so). In this case, his even finding one is (excluding abusive psychopaths) an improvement.
I agree, which is the reason that I specified "for the woman".
Ok, you have put the suggestion out there, it was indeed controversial, you received some criticism, but apparently no hit to your karma for suggesting it. Isn't it time now for you to flesh out just what it is you mean? "Excessively conservative" by what standard, and who or what makes that kind of standard? The phrase "granting sexual favors". Was that phrase just a convenient euphemism, or do you think that "granting favors" is the right framework for this discussion? (Surely, after all, the world might be a better place if we all did more favors for each other, but it seemed as if you were calling for one small segment of humanity - young, attractive single women to provide the favors, presumably for the benefit of a different small segment. You didn't mention any favors flowing in any other direction. Perhaps now might be the time to mention them.)
Also, you might clarify that bit about:
You see, I notice unattractive men getting married every day, and then going on to have children. Their wives don't seem to be having nightmares about it. That is the kind of thing you meant by "mating", isn't it? Or, if you are using "mating" to refer to some other behavior, and you want to continue to use that word to exclude the kind of mating I mentioned, please explain why your usage is the correct one.
As I indicated here (final paragraph), I do not currently feel that my further discussion of this topic would be worthwhile.
In other words, I wondered if it was time to make that suggestion, and the answer came back: no.
Ok, your call, of course.
Just to throw in my own two cents as to when it might be time:
Social norms change all the time, but they do so slowly, on a time scale of generations. I am unsure what causes such changes but it seems unlikely to me that a change in female sexual mores could be triggered by a discussion on a male-dominated rational discussion group. Furthermore, regardless of what triggers the change, the actual mechanism by which this kind of change becomes widespread is that some adventuresome soul tries it and comes back to report to her peers that it was safe, it was pleasant, it was actually kind of fun.
In other words, to promote the kind of change you are seeking, you need to talk to men, not women.
A job applicant who seems likely to resent being turned down will appear creepy to potential employers.
Men do the same sort of thing. Really. Hunt around a little for examples of fat-bashing.
The only gender difference I can see is that a significant proportion of men [1] are apt to verbally attack unattractive women just for existing, while women are more apt to wait for a pass to be made by an unattractive man.
Is there anything in PUA about what sets off the "creepy guy-- I don't want to be anywhere near him" response as distinct from mere "not sexually interested"? I'm not talking about "less than optimally attractive", and your phrasing it that way strikes me as dishonest arguing. The vast majority of women have children with less than optimally attractive men.
[1] It may well be under 5% of men who do that sort of thing-- it's still apt to be quite a buzz-kill for women on the receiving end of it.
I think this is actually an example of the sort of double standard that komponisto is talking about.
It's a pretty mainstream view that the fact that men find overweight women unattractive is either a problem with individual men's judgement (excessive focus on physical appearance over other attributes, unrealistic expectations for a partner's physical appearance etc.) or some kind of wider problem with society focusing on unrealistic or unrepresentative examples of physical beauty ('anorexic' models and actresses etc.).
While probably not a majority view, it seems to me that it is far more common to see this view expressed and this issue discussed in the media than the view that men who are generally perceived as unattractive by women are victims of either a problem with the judgement of individual women or a problem with the ideals of male attractiveness promoted by society or the media.
This sounds like over-generalizing from personal experience to me. My memories of school are of the most hurtful verbal attacks coming from girls but without some statistical data I'm going to assume that both of us are biased by the salience of particular instances of verbal abuse we have observed.
My personal experience is of harassment at school by girls, to a large extent for being short and for having feet that turned out. Later, I've been subject to some street harassment, but not a lot as such things go. And not enough to generally affect my experience of being out of doors. Weirdly, the worst was from a neighbor kid who looked like she was about five.
I've had more harassment about my weight from my mother than from the general public.
My take on what fat women in general have to put up with is from reading a lot of fat-acceptance material.
My impression is that mean girls at school are much more likely to go after other girls than boys, but I could well be mistaken.
NancyLebovitz:
This is true if you judge people's speech and reactions by the usual standards of discourse in polite society, but not if you take into account their actual hurtfulness and the actual level of repugnance and scorn being manifested.
Men are indeed apt to appraise women's attractiveness explicitly in crude and vulgar terms, much more so than vice versa. However, the ways in which women talk about unattractive men might sound gentler and far more polite, but it's naive to think that unattractive men don't get the message, and that they don't get hurt just as much as unattractive women who get called by various explicit bad names. Moreover, whenever I hear girls damning some unattractive guy with faint praise, I always feel like it would be more honest if they just scorned and trashed him explicitly, considering the status they assign to him for all practical purposes.
Another thing is that even when stated in the most explicit and crude terms, men's usual complaints and negative appraisals about women tend to sound harsher and more vulgar than the other way around. It just happens that the words typically involved in the former have a much more politically incorrect and inflammatory impact, even though the latter are not any less harsh and damning by any reasonable standard.
You're addressing a different aspect, I think. Do unattractive men have to deal with street harassment by women? Online attacks just because there's a picture of them?
ISTM that unattractive men are denounced online by women all the time, but it's usually based on what a man has said or done, not their appearance.
School-age unattractive males (up to and including college age) are "street harassed" by women as well. As a teenager, I was chased, threatened and verbally abused by females in a variety of venues, despite (or perhaps because) I just wanted to be left alone.
Women most assuredly do harass men, and I assure you they are much more creative in finding ways to inflict lasting emotional pain.
Thanks for the information.
I can believe that women are more skilled at inflicting emotional pain. In a fit of compulsiveness, I read a long discussion about abusive schoolgirls (sorry, no cite, probably about five years ago, and possibly on livejournal), and, yeah.
Yes, this was my experience as well.
How can you assure me? Through your own personal experiences, or can you point me to a series of scientifically-conducted studies on the issue? I assure you, only one of those would assure me.
I have little experience with men harassed by women, but based on how viciously some women harass each other, I am perfectly willing to agree that women can be very hurtful. All I object to is your apparent willingness to generalize your personal experiences with X into a comparison between X and Y.
I was comparing the subsets of X and Y that had bullied or harassed me personally.
You didn't actually mention Y, but even if you had, you wouldn't have data to support the comparison of abuses(X,Y) to abuses(Y, X), which seemed to be your claim.
As I said, I was comparing abused-by(X, me) to abused-by(Y, me), in rejection of the hypothesis that males are not subjected to cruel "street harassment" by females.
Yes, I've seen that happen at times. I make a habit of bullying the perpetrators wherever I see it (and where it is appropriate and convenient to do so) but it certainly happens.
People are cruel, particularly when dealing with lower status targets. It's disgraceful whatever the sex of the victim.
Another difference is that (some) men also talk in crude and vulgar ways about attractive women too.
And about males, and inanimate objects. And fictional stories. I'd go as far as to say that some men just talk in crude and vulgar ways. Also, they are usually hairier and more smelly.
Extremely short answer: Degree to which the unattractive male appears to submit to the social reality as she sees it.
Many "alpha" behaviours can be creepy.
Someone being submissive is not creepy.
This as a personal note, not as a general truth.
Violet:
Some of the very pinnacles of creepiness are achieved by men who attempt to pull off difficult and daring high-status behaviors but fall short of doing it successfully. I don't know if this is what you had in mind with the scare quotes, but with this interpretation, your comment is very accurate.
I remember there was an old post at Overcoming Bias discussing this sort of situation, where a man's failed attempt at a high-status display backfires and raises an awful red flag that he's a clueless sort of guy who doesn't know his proper place and will probably self-destruct for that reason. Unfortunately, I can't remember the title and I don't have the link archived.
I think they go more into a "that person is more likely defect for his own win than cooperate" and "that person does not seem safe".
Also being somewhat sensitive to the system people doing a status competition just stink on a personal level.
Then again I prefer androgynous cooperative helpful people, rather than overtly masculine (or feminine) ones.
Others might find the same behaviors very hot.
Absolutely this is why such a strong epithet as "creepy" is applied. The implication is that such a deranged individual is one step away from running amok, raping and killing.
It was rhetorical understatement, perhaps -- not quite the same thing as dishonest arguing. But note that what is meant here is "less than optimally attractive among their own options".
As for men and fat-bashing, etc., yes, that's also quite bad. However, I was under the impression that criticizing this was already far from taboo in elite circles
In any event, I don't want to deny any symmetry that may exist, and I don't think it would be fair to impute such a denial to me on the grounds that I specifically discussed only one side of the coin.
(And it's interesting how so far no one has noticed the parenthetical sentence at the end of my comment.)
The one about sexual jealousy? I thought it was foolish, but not in a way directly relevant to the part I was most motivated to critique, so I let it be. Women experience sexual jealousy too; implying that it's the special province of men has the weird consequence of implying that women would all rather be some flavor of poly, which is false.
It didn't imply that, any more than the earlier part implied that men never reject women.
The proposal was that male sexual jealously is analogous to female mate selectivity in the specific way I was discussing.
Also, really, I think "foolish" is unnecessarily hostile language. Wouldn't "incorrect" suffice?
In this thread, you have used language and expressed opinions which have sounded antagonistic and upsetting to me. I did not intend to be hostile in return, and apologize if my emotional state has caused me to use poor word choice in such a way as to upset you.
This is perhaps the best reason for creating some kind of spin-off or sub-community along the lines of that suggested in the post. Some people, for whatever reason, find this sort of discussion personally upsetting or objectionable. Currently that means there will either be posts and comments that cannot be made at all or conversations will end up being derailed with people claiming (and giving) offence.
If there was a spin off site for rationalist socialization discussion then comments on LW that enter the political minefield that is sex can be deemed off topic and redirected. Readers who are offended by discussion of PUA, etc, will be able to read LW freely. Commenters on the subsite who are irritated by repetitive responses that seem hostile to them will be able to manage that community with the standard "do not feed trolls" rule.
Does what the women are upset about make any sense to you?
Reading your post gives me the impression that you think topics related to sex just blow up for no particular reason, but I may be wrong.
wedrifid said:
I disagree. This is exactly the sort of discussion that needs to happen between rationalists with different sorts of life experiences (e.g. male and female rationalists). The controversial nature of these subjects shows why it needs to be hashed out, not that these subjects need to be avoided. Of course, individuals are free to bow out of these discussions.
Nancy said:
Yes, put particular details about the exchange don't quite make sense to me.
Originally, SarahC made the point that pickup won't guarantee men success with women, and women are still free to reject PUAs. I don't quite understand why she brought up this point in the first place, and I'm not sure why she speculated about a potential for violence. PUAs know very well that their methods don't guarantee success with any particular woman, and they work very hard on coping strategies to deal with rejection. She said:
This quote made me wonder if SarahC thinks that any complaint of unfairness by men in the dating world is evidence of "entitlement" and "creepiness." I didn't get on her case about this, because I know that she has run into some of the more icky PUA stuff, which could well give her the impression that PUAs hold such attitudes. Instead, I asked her why she might not believe that PUAs recognize the validity of women rejecting them.
Yet I think komponisto asked a good question: whether SarahC would judge complaints in other domains (like getting hired for a job) by the same standard, and consider frustration and complaints of unfairness to be evidence of "entitlement" and "creepiness."
Unfortunately, in the same comment, komponisto made this point:
More on that comment, later.
Alicorn pointed out that sexual interaction is qualitatively different from other forms of interaction, such as hiring. Furthermore, she observed that given the prevalence of sexual violence, we should have higher priors that men might react to rejection with violence, that we should have for job-seekers.
While granting the distinctions Alicorn observes between men trying to date women, and job hunters, I'm still not sure why we got on the subject of sexual violence. The reason is because Alicorn's priors may apply to the reference class of all men, but with PUAs, we have a different reference class. We know that PUAs are interested in figuring out and fulfilling women's criteria, which seems at odds with PUAs feeling "entitled" and that women's rejections of them are "unfair."
Alicorn may have some other reference classes that influence her priors about PUAs. Still, I don't think it was appropriate for SarahC to jump from the observation of PUAs claiming methods that consistent attract women, to the notion that PUAs might get frustrated if these methods don't work, hold a sense of creepy entitlement, and potentially respond with violence. I fully acknowledge that SarahC might have good reasons to hold such suspicions, but she hasn't yet shared what they are.
Now, let's return to reactions to komponisto's comment.
I fully understand why this comment pattern-matches so many negative things. It does sound like komponisto might be advocating that women be sexual with men in situations where they aren't sure they want to be sexual (or don't want to be sexual). I had the same reaction as pjeby.
It's useful for komponisto to know the problematic interpretations of his comment. It's understandable that Alicorn wasn't able to read it charitably, but that doesn't mean that a more charitable interpretation doesn't exist. pjeby suggested one, for instance:
The charitable interpretation: komponisto wasn't suggesting that women should do things they don't want with men; he was suggesting that they be less conservative in what they want with men in the first place. He explains in his next post:
After he said this, I was kinda wanting one of the women in the thread to say "OK, now I see what you mean."
In my view, discussions about sex on LW blow up for many reasons, and only one of those reasons is men being insensitive.
I've often noticed that women seem to be running a "creepiness detection routine" towards men's sexuality. In real life, there are good reasons for them to do so. In internet conversations, it's useful for men to know what kind of arguments trigger that routine, because those arguments potentially sound like their aren't respectful of women's bodily autonomy, self-determination, and consent.
Simultaneously, it's also useful for women to know that many men are sick of negative associations with their sexuality, and the expansive application of the word "creepy." Note MC_Echerischia's brusque response:
I think that women having a "creeped out" response triggered is useful data for discussion on LessWrong, but I don't want to see it running the discourse here. If such a reaction is presented, it's probably most useful to try to explain where it's coming from. Clarification of the creepy statement can always be requested.
I find it a shame that Alicorn isn't currently willing to discuss possible criticisms of women's preferences, and that komponisto subsequently bowed out of the discussion. I respect the preference of both those individuals to not want to engage in such a discussion at this time, but I think that those discussions are important, and I wish they could occur here.
Personally, I'm not very interested in criticizing women's preferences because I'm skeptical about how malleable people's preferences are, yet since (as mattnewport points out ) it's culturally acceptable to critique the basis for men's preferences in women, I think it should be an open question what level of choice people have over their mating preferences, and what could be reasons for them to change their preferences.
Yes.
I know the reasons well enough to realise that the 'blowing up' will not go away without creating a separate place for discussing such topics in an objective, rational manner. I wouldn't dream of demanding that people refrain from taking the discussion personally on LW. When on a subsite dedicated to game theory as directly applied to humans then I would expect people to refrain from sabotaging objective discussions, when there is a very real opportunity to simply not to expose themselves to them.
Claiming offence is an extremely powerful political weapon. In a value neutral sense, ensuring that a topic blows up is an attempt to assert political influence on the outcome. And politics is the mind killer. I would like there to be a place to discuss topics related to sex in a purely objective manner. Because it just facts. Facts are just true of false. Not outrageous or unacceptable.
So, if I understand you, under your proposal, comments like this one would no longer appear here on LW? Because people who cannot help making them would have another outlet?
One of the ancestors of that comment would probably be a link to the other site, yes.
I don't like the tone. You seem to be suggesting that wanting to make such a comment is a personal failing. I don't agree.
It's a good point, but I stand by what I said.
I've heard anecdotes of disgruntled graduate students attacking their schools because they weren't given their degrees. (The example that comes to mind is of a woman who set explosives in a lab.) I definitely consider that creepy. I would start worrying about safety if an obviously unqualified student kept ranting about how she deserved her degree.
Charles Guiteau, who assassinated James Garfield, was chronically unemployed but convinced that the government owed him a high office (he wanted to be an ambassador.) I would consider his obsession with "deserving" a position far out of his reach was a warning sign for criminal behavior.
So it's not just about sex. "Creepiness" is something I associate with being convinced you deserve something that it's totally unreasonable (socially) for you to be granted. Most unemployed workers are disappointed, sure, but that's not the same thing.
Reading this thread has inspired an interesting definition. Creepiness is an approximate estimate of how far someone would have to be pushed in order to do something evil. A history of criminal behavior is extremely creepy, because it's strong evidence of bad character. Physical deformity is creepy because it correlates well with mental illness, but it stops being creepy once it's understood well enough to rule out that possibility. Violating social norms can be creepy, or not, depending on what's known about why it was violated and the nature of the norm. And horror movie villains, of course, peg the creepiness scale, merely by being in that role, regardless of what other features they have.
By this definition, refusing to accept a disappointment that won't go away is very creepy, because the only real options for dealing with disappointment are to accept it, to work harder towards fixing the source of the disappointment, or to escalate. Escalating would be bad, and working harder has a limit that, in the case of the disgruntled student, has probably already been reached or nearly reached.
Not really-- there's a sort of creepiness which is about distaste at least as much as fear.
And I don't think creepiness is a reliable signal of dangerousness-- there are people who are very dangerous who aren't creepy, and it's my impression that there are a great many creepy people who don't do anything awful.
I will tentatively suggest that that some kinds of creepiness are some sort of off-key or out-of-sync body language (not necessarily on the Asberger's spectrum).
A story from one of John Malloy's Dress for Success books: He realized that one of his subordinates had done some very good work for him, and took the chance of offering the subordinate (who had disastrous body language) some consultations.
The subordinate looked distressed, and Malloy was worried that he'd said the wrong thing, but then the subordinate explained that some of his sons had the same body language and were running into similar social problems.
These seem like importantly different categories that merely happen to share some mental machinery.
True, but I suspect that's just because many things that used to be useful signals, aren't anymore. Strange body language, for example, may be a signal of distant origin (to the extent that body language differs from place to place).
I'm beginning to get the impression that you and perhaps some other commenters have no idea what the creepy guy experience is.
I'm not blaming you, but if there's that lack of commonality of experience, then that could explain some communication breakdowns.
Creepiness isn't just about low status, though I grant that if, say, a street person is making a pass, he might well come off as creepy.
However, the interesting case is that there are men who aren't obviously low status who just make a high proportion of women's skin crawl.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
Thoughts on what creepiness is:
(Hat-tip: I found Ursula Vernon from your LJ flist, Nancy.)
Thanks. That's a good essay, and I don't think I'd seen it before.
As she says, she doesn't know what the creepiness trigger is-- and whatever is going on, it isn't normal intimacy starting at the wrong time.
Here is a wild guess about creepiness.
Some men are much worse than average at detecting negative reactions (like fear) in the person they are talking to.
So, when a woman has a negative reaction to something in a conversation, it starts to get creepy when the man does not notice that reaction and persists in the behavior that caused the reaction. I gets creepier fast when the woman reacts more strongly than the first time and the man continues to persist.
Just guessing.
I'm guessing too, but the creepiness reaction has a large component of disgust/revulsion-- it isn't just about fear.
I've been trying to think of portrayals of creepiness, and whether it can be done in a movie (or might it be pheromones?)-- it's been a while since I've seen it, but iirc, Beetlejuice is an example.
Successful movie portrayal of creepiness: Anakin Skywalker, in Attack of the Clones. Critics commented on the surprising lack of chemistry between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman; I think the "romantic" scenes achieved exactly what they were supposed to.
I'm trying to think of examples of female-on-male creepiness that I've experienced and heard of, and the only examples I can think of fall into the categories of mere mild-discomfort-induction and outright stalking. Male creepiness appears to have a significant middle ground that seems to be almost completely absent in the other direction.
Perhaps this is related to the disproportionate prevalence of male-on-female rape and sexual harassment — because those are strongly negatively-valued events, it's worth having a sensitive filter that'll give false positives sometimes. But that depends on whether features associated with "creepiness" are less perceived as creepy in women by men or if they are actually less prevalent in women.
Edit: I have a friend who's internet-famous-in-some-circles and he has had a lot of experiences with young female (and a few male) fans who've crossed the line into conventional creepiness but not into stalking (plus a few who have...), but people act differently toward celebrities. Probably doesn't generalize very well at all to interactions between, say, two people meeting in a bar.
Not really.
That is odd, actually. Everyone I've met that I would describe as "creepy" is male. Plus I've never heard a woman described as such except in jest.
I think it's a lot harder for a woman to come off as creepy than a man. (Standard "within the culture I'm familiar with" disclaimers apply.) I've been made uncomfortable by girls when in high school, but not really "creeped out". You almost have to go to the level of movie villain before they start getting creepy.
From a comment to the Ursula Vernon essay below:
In my experience, it is much much rarer. As a guy, I have been more creeped-out by other guys than by women.
I can only think of one occasion. A female classmate who had had less than 5 minutes of conversation with me announced her cancer treatment and recent bad relationship, then made overtures about meeting outside of class. Basically, forcing intimacy waaaay too fast. This was followed by a lot of "oh look, we're coincidentally on the same bus" sort of events, despite my consciously unfriendly demeanor and monosyllabic conversation.
Damned if I know. There's at least some commonality of body language across the human race, and I don't know what the xenophobia/exoticism balance would have been for human prehistory.
My bet is in favor of exoticism-- my impression is that people who are relatively isolated are desperate for novelty.
Personal space and touchy-feeliness varies a lot by culture. I've heard of American women being freaked out by foreign men standing too close because the men just didn't realize it was too close in the US.
There's some sort of ambiguity in the word "deserve". I would say that every harmless person deserves to be loved, or deserves an enjoyable job, but that doesn't mean anyone owes anyone anything. The world is the way it is.
This is certainly a fair reply. I take it, then, that you wouldn't consider the mere expression -- much less the mere feeling -- of disappointment to be creepy?
As a practical matter, I suspect we agree a fair amount on the sorts of actual behaviors that should be considered alarming -- whether in the case of sex or anything else. Rather than disagreeing on what is or isn't bad behavior, my aim was just to point out the problem of amorous disappointment (in the specific case of males, as I have the impression -- which should be corrected if false -- that there tend to be differences in the basic causes of rejection between the sexes).
On reflection, though I do tend to think this aspect isn't discussed enough (edit: what I mean here is that the taboo level is too high), it probably wasn't especially useful for me to add my voice to this particular controversy. Perhaps I should indeed leave this kind of thing for the Robin Hansons of the world.
Sure, no, I don't have a problem with disappointment.
It does seem that men have more of a problem with amorous disappointment than women do. That definitely is "something wrong" and I'm not on board with women who basically think that men are in the wrong whenever they express desire.
TvTropes does have plenty of examples of women who don't handle it well, so at least it's something that exists in the popular imagination.
SarahC:
I disagree. I've been in situations where girls were determined to seduce me, and I kept rejecting their increasingly overt and desperate advances. They'd typically end up getting visibly annoyed, and there were also some ugly scenes of frustrated anger on their part. Similar things also happened sometimes when I would (mostly unintentionally) give a false hope to girls who were below my standards, though admittedly with much less overt drama compared to the former sort of situations.
Of course, such situations are less common than the inverse, and even more importantly, since women are typically physically weaker, men won't feel intimidated and threatened by their flipping out. These were just amusing youthful adventures for me, but I can easily imagine inverse scenarios being awfully scary for women. However, the idea that women somehow handle it more calmly and rationally when they're faced with the terrible feeling of being put down by a disappointing rejection is completely false.
That said, there are some significant differences in practice. Men are expected to take a more proactive role in approaching and initiating things, so by sheer necessity, they more often end up plunging into defeats based on unjustified expectations. Moreover, men and women tend to react very differently towards various kinds of signals of aloofness and disinterestedness in the early phases of meeting and dating. However, discussing these issues fully would mean getting too deep into technicalities -- the important point is that it's unjustified to present men as somehow worse overall in this regard.
That's as silly as suggesting that men should be more conservative in granting those favors.
I rather liked the rest of your comment (even though I likely would find your hypothetical job seeker a bit creepy), but this part struck me as nonsensical... why suggest that any group of people modify their tastes to suit some other group of people? (I suppose racism and sexism might be exceptions, but even so... it still seems the appropriate solution to such things is just to find people with better taste!)
OTOH, if what you really meant was, "people (of either gender) should be more sympathetic/less judgmental to the plight of the unattractive (of either gender)", then sure, that makes sense.
Sexual relationships are far more personal, and decided on far more idiosyncratic criteria, than employment relationships. There are fairly explicit and well-defined understandings of what constitutes qualification for a job that do not depend strongly on the personality of the hiring manager. If Human Resources is looking for a new shelf stocker or a new receptionist or a new medical transcriptionist and turn down our heroine as you describe, and they can be shown to be doing it for certain prohibited reasons, they are breaking the law.
Sex is qualitatively different from everything else. Pretend I repeated that a couple dozen times, because I think this concept might be the barrier to understanding in conversations like these.
You realize that it's not just made up that sometimes desire for sex turns into violence, right? Let's hear your priors on how likely it is for there to be a victim of sexual harrassment or assault reading this thread, and how likely it is for there to be someone who was stalked or attacked by a rejected job applicant reading this thread. I am concerned about sexual violence because I have friends who were raped or molested. I am concerned about sexual violence because I have a history providing me with direct empirical evidence that it exists. I am concerned about sexual violence because I live in a society that takes care to remind me, constantly, that I am not safe, that if certain things happen to me it will be because I wasn't careful enough, that it is eminently reasonable for me to draw the design of my life within circumscribed lines to protect myself from such danger and the stigma of victimization.
I have met you. I know that you are not an awful (or even creepy) person. I still can't read this charitably. I'm hoping you've just been primed by reading too much Hanson or something. Dude: People are not entitled to get things for free from people who don't want to give them, even if you think their reasons for not wanting to give are dumb. It is not acceptable to criticize women for inadequate generosity because they are not as promiscuous as would be convenient for straight men.
To the extent that sex is like a gift, you have to be in a relationship with someone that warrants the exchange of such gifts. I don't expect birthday presents from people who aren't in a birthday-present-exchanging relationship with me. To the extent that sex is like a commodity, guess what - it's for sale! No, you can't buy it from every person who might have it to offer, but not everybody who bakes cupcakes sells them either - you have to go to a cupcake store. If you want homemade cupcakes, you'll have to make friends with somebody who bakes.
It should also be obvious that eating large quantities of sugar is less rational in our era of processed food. Do you consume sweets? It should also be obvious that avoiding unnecessary physical activity is less rational in our era of labor-saving devices. Do you go to the gym as often as studies indicate you should? Women art godshatter too.
Some things I didn't get around to posting earlier-- Hanson is somewhat on my shit list because he's posted more than once about how the world would be a better place if women would have sex when they don't want to. He's a geek economist, so he gets to speculate about such things, but oddly enough, he doesn't consider the costs to women in such scenarios.
Consent and fear and all that: There was a previous discussion here about women giving out fake phone numbers, and there seemed to be no grasp of why a woman might do that instead of giving a straightforward refusal.
Imagine a world where all the socially acceptable partners for you are bigger, stronger, and probably more aggressive. You may prefer such yourself, but it's certainly the case that you'll take a status hit if you chose otherwise.
Furthermore, you've had niceness training-- it's hard work to directly contradict what someone else wants. Doing that amount of work is a gift which might not be bestowed on a spammer.
And you're not supposed to make the first move, for values of "not supposed to" which range from being blamed if you're raped to putting off potential partners if you do. I realize both of those vary according to who you happen to be around, and both may have faded somewhat in recent decades, but people do respond to potential risks.
None of this means that giving fake phone numbers is a wonderful thing, but there are actual human motivations for doing so which aren't just spite-- sometimes spite is involved, but the story isn't nearly that simple.
This is raw stuff, on all sides. I've been decently treated here, but some of the theorizing about women is enough to be a partial explanation for why this place is very high majority male.
I think a big component of sex dynamics is, as you said, physical strength. Since women are physically weaker than men, they can't rely on that to protect them from overly aggressive or hostile potential partners. The only thing keeping those overly aggressive or hostile potential partners in line are social norms against rape and abuse, which are already weak enough that, for example, rape apologism for famous athletes and victim blaming are common. Any talk that can potentially weaken those social norms then becomes a legitimate threat... unless the talk includes ways of subverting other social norms that balance its effect. For example, I think we could solve some problems by giving men "niceness training" instead of women.
A sidetrack: I think men's physical strength is a minor factor compared to their ability to organize for violence. If the organizational ability were reversed-- if men who seriously displeased women were mobbed by 4 or 5 armed and organized women and didn't have male back-up, the world would be very different.
This doesn't mean I want that world, but I find it interesting that males seem to almost reflexively organize for violence, and females pretty much never do. Information about girl gangs appreciated if I'm missing something.
"Niceness training" has some real problems-- it's being afraid to express strong desires which might be in conflict with other people's.
Kindness training-- encouraging people to actually treat each other well and having some skills for doing so-- would be a whole different thing, and a world where it was common is hard for me to imagine. It would be a world with little or no status enforcement.
As someone who taught women's self defense courses for years (and am an accomplished martial artist in my own right), I think the willingness to use force--and the expectation that others are willing to use force--is far more important than the effectiveness or quantity of that force.
I don't mean that skilled martial artists can defend themselves against unskilled but much stronger attackers; people usually assume this, and I agree. What I mean is that after spending a weekend teaching a woman to fight back against a physical assault she knows almost nothing more than she did before, but has the confidence in herself to use force, and that willingness makes all the difference.
Men are statistically more willing to use force to get what they want, and being aware of that, women are forced to be more cautious. I feel like this ought to be more relevant than men being more prone to organizing for violence, especially in the current day western world.
Interestingly, this is more of a negative skill: people don't so much need to learn how to be nice as how to stop being not-nice, especially to themselves. I've observed that whenever I stop judging myself negatively in some type of situation, I find myself spontaneously being much nicer to other people in the same sort of situation.
For example, after learning not to judge myself for having made a mistake, I find I'm nicer to people who've made mistakes. Previously, I had tried to "learn" the "skill" of being kind to people when they make a mistake, and had failed miserably at it. Assuming I remembered I was supposed to do it, it felt awkward and unnatural and my mixed feelings were probably quite transparent, even though I sincerely wanted to be nice.
Now, there are a wide variety of situations in which my natural inclination is just to be kind, nice, playful, or any of various other attributes, and I didn't need to learn any specific skills -- just getting rid of the emotional judgments I'd attached to specific situational or behavioral patterns.
NancyLebovitz:
I'm honestly baffled by what you might have in mind here. These days, in most of the First World, and especially the Anglosphere, there is virtually no organized violence except for the government security forces and the organized crime that's rampant among the underclass. Even the most rudimentary forms of it that were once extremely common are nowadays rare to nonexistent, and for non-underclass men it's a completely alien concept. (When was the last time you read about a mass bar fight, or some impromptu vigilante action against street criminals in your corner of the world?)
What would be, according to you, the situations where men's aptness for organized violence is relevant for the relations between the sexes in the contemporary West?
Ancestral environment, mostly. Other than that, I'll need to think about whether I just got entranced by an interesting theoretical riff, or actually had something worthwhile in mind.
This isn't the West, but it is contemporary: Iran is infamous for stoning women for mere adultery This seems like a clear instance of a mob organized for lethal violence. The disparity in sentencing between men and women cited in the linked article also make it relevant to relations between the sexes. (One thing that I don't know is what the gender composition of the killers at a stoning typically is.)
I don't read about them (bar fights aren't newsworthy), but they're hardly unheard-of hereabouts.
I believe the relevant violence is by street-criminals, and they're all over the place.
"Underclass"? And how, pray tell, does one recognize such a person? Hat color?
More or less.
Why would organizing for violence matter more than physical attributes?
(I don't know whether men or women are better at shooting. I've heard anecdotally that women are better first-time learners with guns, because they're more conscientious -- less horseplay and arrogance. But it would also make sense if men were better because of 3-d spatial skills. I'll be testing it out later this week when I learn to shoot; if anybody knows data on this I'd be curious.)
From what I've heard, people are generally not good at fighting off four or five opponents. Also, the ancestral environment doesn't include martial arts. And everybody's got to sleep sometime.
My own limited personal experience with firearms is that women have more difficulty because they seem to be more scared of them.
An accurate shot requires a smooth trigger pull, which requires not anticipating when during that pull the gun will go off---anticipation causes tension, causes the gun to move off target.
The first shot someone makes with a gun (ever) is often not too bad; the noise and force against their hand scares them, and then they have to learn to stay calm while pulling the trigger. This seems to be somewhat easier for the men I've taught to shoot than the women, though individual differences are greater than group differences. I'm not a firearms instructor by the way; I've been involved in teaching less than a dozen people to shoot, only three of them women.
Well said. You nailed the point and gave me a good belly laugh.
I think people familiar with ev psych tend to over-estimate the actual differences between the sexes. They certainly exist, but cultural conditioning and supply and demand effects magnify them into gender roles.
Well...yes, as an empirical matter, that was the thesis of my comment! Wasn't it clear that I was questioning, as a normative matter, whether that ought to be the case?
Just what is your uncharitable interpretation, such that you would feel the need to make this kind of disclaimer?
Probably. I can't claim to have thought about this kind of thing much before Hanson brought it up.
First of all, the phrase "it is not acceptable to criticize..." is kind of an alarm bell. Secondly, yes, the issue is precisely at the level of "wanting". Obviously, given that someone already doesn't want to give something, then their giving it would be bad, all else being equal. The question is, what to do about this problem of their not wanting, since their lack of wanting causes pain for others.
(Some, but not very many, as it happens.) Yes, indeed, it is less rational to consume as much sugar as possible nowadays: it leads to bad health consequences.
How about "it is hurtful and offensive to criticize..."? I realize that being hurtful and offensive is not a reason not to criticize something (see also: religion), but please recognize that I consider my freedom not to have sex with someone I don't want to have sex with sacrosanct, even above other freedoms that I also consider sacrosanct.
I took your original suggestion to mean that my preferences in that area should be up for debate. Since I am completely unwilling to debate whether or not I should be so reluctant to offer up "sexual favors", that makes me hurt and afraid.
If you had suggested that I might be happier if I was more willing to have sex with people, I might have bristled a little, but I would at least recognize ways in which that could be a defensible position. However, your initial suggestion came off as "the world would be better if women were altered so that they would be more easily convinced to have sex". Since you failed to mention any specific benefit to the women so altered, it sounds like coercion and is extremely offensive.
Given that this is your point of view, it is not possible for me to discuss this topic with you.
I cannot psychologically afford to have a bunch of people here calling me "extremely offensive". That isn't how I see myself. I'm not one of those people. A comment such as yours is already very distressing to me. Yet, it is now clear to me that if I were to honestly express myself, this is exactly what I would have to expect: more of this.
I stand to gain almost nothing from wading further into this minefield, and on the other hand risk losing almost everything. Except as incidental to other matters, on the topic of sex and gender on LW, I am officially finished.
Now, as they say, off to buy some strychnine....
I was offended by your original comment, but I don't want you to think that I translated being offended by your comment into finding you offensive. I've certainly found you reasonable, and you haven't yet seemed intentionally hostile. I don't by any stretch of the imagination consider you one of those people; if I did, I don't think I would feel that conversing with you would have any point.
I certainly understand you wanting to be finished with this topic. After being downvoted for nearly all my comments on this thread, I've begun to feel very unwelcome here, so I should probably take a break from this topic as well. Also, despite the fact that I feel like I've been arguing with you, I don't feel like you have been involved in making me feel unwelcome.
Don't give too much weight to early downvotes; they reflect only the opinion of the most active users, not necessarily most users. I've found it's best to give it a few days to see what LW in the large really thinks of what you said, and early trends sometimes reverse themselves on controversial topics.
My experience is similar. On especially controversial or social-political subjects I've sometimes found an early downvote to be a predictor of a higher later karma score, a far cry from a negative spiral.
I'm not feeling any too pleased with myself or the world, either.
I very tentatively suggest that this sort of discussion is made more awful than necessary (for all participants) to the extent that they think it's urgent to convince other people faster than one can reasonably expect for them to be convinced.
Kompo not being willing to discuss this 'minefield' of a topic on LW which is an indicator that other people will be similarly discouraged. If he and people like him aren't able to participate in the conversation we lose valuable perspective. I know, lets create another site where people like kompo will feel free to contribute!
Is someone stopping you? What obstacle to your progress can I remove so I can stop seeing complaints about it?
There is no complaint here. I am taking the opportunity to encourage XFrequentist to follow through with his proposal. I get the impression that he or she is better suited to the social engineering required to make the system a success. Since XFrequentist has actually made moves to test for support and interest he or she seems like the perfect person to take the lead here. I would, of course, be willing and able to provide technical support and hosting.
This is what this whole post was about. The tangent is, Cthulu forbid, interjecting something on topic.
Because it now is the case that sex is qualitatively different from everything else, attempts to make it be not so or create a norm that it be not so now impinge on the current, existent feelings of people (esp. women) who think about sex as how it now is.
In other words: Sexuality's differences from other things, if respected, are self-supporting. It opposes these features to try to alter them. Failing to respect sexual rules in these, among other, ways is Very Bad.
How about "it makes me afraid when people criticize"? Or is that irrelevant?
I am very good at getting people to give me presents. This ability is only targetable to a certain point, but it is partly under my control. Supposing, probably inaccurately, that I could scale up this capacity indefinitely - not stealing things I wanted, but just acting in such a way that encouraged people to give them to me significantly more than they'd otherwise be inclined - there are things it would be unethical for me to try to get in this way. I shouldn't encourage people to spend beyond their means, for example. I shouldn't encourage them to give me things that they need for themselves. I shouldn't encourage them to give me things that I only want a little bit that they have much stronger interests in. Even if their means are limited by choice, or their need for the needed object is evitable, or their reason for strongly valuing the prized possession is really stupid. If I find myself tempted to seek gifts of such things, the correct place to solve the "problem" is in my excessive interest in owning stuff that belongs to others.
This sounds suspicious to me -- a bit too Fully General. It seems that you could similarly Engrave In Stone For All Time any set of currently existing norms this way.
I'll have to think about this more to determine the extent to which I agree.
That's certainly better and more specific -- and would naturally prompt the followup: "afraid of what?"
I don't think it's as fully general as all that. Most norm sets don't have as their first rule that You Do Not Question The Norm Set. If they have such rules, it's rarely with the historical context of the rule being there to protect against horrific crimes.
I'm afraid of not at least trying to nip things in this family of thoughts in the bud. I'm afraid I'll be raped by a guy with expensive lawyers who will use anything I've publicly stated that they possibly can twist into making me look like a slut who deserved it. I'm afraid I'll say something ambiguous and be misunderstood and justify, in someone's mind, some hurt. I'm afraid that if I check my fear, I'll overshoot, and I'll wind up ever so reasonably agreeing with something that can be made to justify attacks on my friends, myself, and others, past and future.
I'm afraid that if I bring in my personal history or that of my friends, the ever-so-reasonable attack dogs on this website will demand that I provide details that are no one's business, pick apart the possible motivations of the villains and sympathize with them, and speculate about the participation of the victims. I'm afraid that if I don't make it personal, I'll look like I'm talking out of my ass. I'm afraid to have conversations about this with people who don't start by agreeing to the rules of engagement that may help keep me and people I care about safe.
Actually, my sense is the opposite: that most norm sets do have this rule. (The first of the infamous Ten Commandments might easily be interpreted this way, for example.) And rules are nearly always justified by the supposition that something Bad would happen if they weren't enforced. So I remain unconvinced, for the moment.
As for the rest, I'm not sure I'm clever enough to come up with a set of words that will simultaneously communicate to you my disagreement and benignity. So, at least for now, I shan't try.
Dude, saying this (or a simpler permutation thereof) would have helped me so many times in so many of my relationships. I really wish I'd learned that a kiss on the forehead and saying "Never mind, let's go bake brownies" is a much better response than two paragraphs of autistic complex-compound sentences explaining how what I'd said was reasonable but how the other's interpretation was also reasonable given the context. Such paragraphs went half-ignored and were translated as defensive self-justifying and blame-shifting moves. It was so annoying for so long, and I didn't update until like two weeks ago.
Normal people don't care about detailed explanations of the motivations behind what you say, they care about the imagined motivations behind what people would say in epistemic and emotional positions that are roughly similar to what they imagine to be yours. This leads to lots of confusion and frustration for the literal-minded.
Why is it then that the most vocal critics of pornography and prostitution are generally women? Women seem to treat porn stars and prostitutes (and to some extent 'sluts') as scabs. Ongoing efforts are made to make pornography and prostitution illegal for the same underlying reasons that any cartel attempts to use the government to increase individual members' profits by reducing competition.
I agree -- but also take note that it seems that a large portion of those advocating for sex workers' rights are women.
Because both industries are full of abuse that is mostly directed at women, which fact has been turned into general condemnation of sex work instead of specific address of the factors that directly precipitate said abuse. "Horn effect" (opposite of halo effect) probably bears some responsibility for the extension of this criticism to harmless subtypes of porn/sex work, such as animated pornography which plausibly never leads to abuse of its (voice) actors.
What exactly do you mean by "full of abuse" and how do you quantify it?
I have some friends who worked in that industry, and it has more gender equality than most others - such as almost any of the high tech sectors. Female actresses are paid far more on average and women are fairly heavily involved in the business side now as well. It's not all peaches and roses of course. But I suspect that most of the image of 'women being abused' is based on some hard preconceptions one brings in - namely that pornography is inherently wrong in the first place. If you start with that assumption, it will only be reinforced.
I have no direct personal experience with the production of porn or prostitution. Various blogs I read produce statistics about sex work indicating that prostitutes are commonly abused by clients, pimps, police, etc. I'm sure there's plenty of live action porn that's entirely on the up-and-up, and I'm glad your friends found that to be their experience; however, I have heard from people whose information I'm not confident in dismissing that porn participants are not overwhelmingly willing and uncoerced. (I have the impression that coercion is more prevalent in niches like bestiality porn than in mainstream stuff; and I'm told by people who would know such things that hard BDSM productions go to considerable length to prove their consensuality.)
While there definitely is some overlap between prostitution and porn, they are completely different industries separated by the legal divide. When a girl shows up on a porn set, she has undoubtedly given consent - and would typically sign a contract. As porn production companies can operate legally it is just completely against their interests to break the law - especially considering that their end product is video evidence. In the modern era there is no shortage of attractive young women all too willing to perform all kinds of sex acts on camera.
There are certainly incidents where girls are tricked into doing additional acts they didn't sign for, but there is a huge legal risk to that which you need to consider. You site strong reasons why BSDM productions go to great lengths to show evidence of consent (typically an interview with the actress that goes into details about the subsequent sex acts) - and these are factors which act as massive dis-incentives to coercion.
Prostitution on the other hand is actually illegal, and because anyone partaking in it is already breaking the law it attracts a criminal element and is considerably more dangerous for all parties involved. You can't really compare the two in terms of safety.
There's a big difference between something being consensual and something being non-abusive. Just because an actress signs a contract doesn't mean that she won't be abused, even if the contract holder never violates the letter or the spirit of the contract.
It's pretty common in many professions for bosses to abuse their workers in many different ways; the claim is that it is more common and more severe in sex industries. Like Alicorn, I'm glad that your friends didn't have those experiences, but I'm also under the impression that their experiences are not representative of the norm.
Also, you assume that prostitution is illegal; one of the best arguments for legalizing it is that it seems to significantly reduce the amount of abuse. That doesn't mean that there isn't a culture of abuse even in jurisdictions where prostitution is legal, just that there are more recourses to fighting it so that it is lessened.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this - what do you exactly consider 'abuse' in the context of pornography? Surely not the sex acts themselves, as they are legalized b contractual consent - part of the job. Do you mean verbal abuse?
Perhaps there is a lower standard for that in pornography, but to be honest from my understanding you will find more verbal abuse in the regular film industry.
And like the film industry, porn is largely built around small companies and many independent agents. At a larger production company the regular workplace rules would apply - sexual and non-sexual harrassement and all that.
But there are other notions of abuse. What about a producer who imports foreign girls for porn who speak poor english and provides them with a nice place to live and drugs? Sounds like a pimp, and yet life is never black and white, as there are plenty of young girls who think this is a fine idea and much more fun than being a strugglin waitress.
But I guess the drug part of those situations is illegal.
As prostitution is actually illegal, it can attract criminal elements and there you certainly have issues with other criminal behaviour - assault and other forms of actual illegal abuse. I believe these types of criminal incidents are rare in pornography because of it's legal legitimacy.
Indecent is an account of ten years in the sex trade-- the author's experience sounds as though it's between what you describe and what Jacob describes-- bad (mostly because of obnoxious clients) but not horrendous.
Amazon's first pages look interesting - any chance you have an e-copy? Bittorrent is proving useless.
Google has most of the book-- all but the last two chapters. I have a paper copy.
Her Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things that Are Very, Very Bad for Me is likewise amazing.
The most surprising essay-- she talks about the bacon deficiency economy in which restaurants never give you enough bacon, so she cooks and eats four pounds of bacon to be sure she has enough-- used to be online, but doesn't seem to be there any more.
I will tentatively recommend her books to any of the men here who can't seem to figure out why things keep blowing up when they write about sex, since it seems to me that they have a blank spot in their model of the universe about women having desires and making choices. She's quite emphatic about the inside of her head.
I'm making massive efforts not to blame the guys-- I have some scary blind spots myself, including one that I was at least past 35 before I realized I had. It turned out that I believed women had emotions and men had desires. That is, I believed men wanted things and women had reactions to getting or not getting what they wanted.
What clued me into the blind spot was noticing that men had facial expressions which seemed to indicate emotional reactions, and that I was surprised by this.
Possibly relevant: I was born in 1953-- I hope things were more stereotyped then than they are now, but I don't think things have completely changed.
Old comments, but I used to know the author and I feel I should pimp for her - pardon the pun.
It seems to me that when people advocate further criminalizing sex work on this basis they are either dissembling (in the way advocates for professional licensing dissemble that it is about 'protecting consumers' because it is more effective than admitting they are trying to protect their own interests) or simply horribly misguided in how best to address the (genuine) problems you describe.
I'm sympathetic, but I wonder if you're jumping to the "godshatter" conclusion too quickly in re: promiscuity.
"Godshatter" is a fairly strong claim to make about a piece of psychology; for one thing, it would seem to require human universality. But there are cultures with much more promiscuous female sexuality than the anglosphere.
I've met people who don't like candy. Does that mean that taste for sweets isn't a manifestation of the adaptation execution for seeking high-energy food?
Ever met somebody who doesn't like sugar at all?
More seriously,
(1) Claiming that the preferences of female westerners living circa 2010 about sex, are all or mostly innate, is a huge claim - and probably false.
(2) Even if true, it's not clear that innate preferences are automatically ethically unquestionable (more technically, two terminal values may conflict). For example, as someone who has a wonderful relationship with their stepfather, I'm very glad he isn't hung up on the fact that we're genetically unrelated. Most humans care a lot about that.
(3) You still leave yourself open to a nice symmetrical reductio where I mention some nasty male preference about sex, and then play my "godshatter" trump card. I agree with kompo that that argument is way too Fully General.
I will also agree with you that criticizing the preferences of a gender or of an individual, has political & social consequences that are potentially ugly. I suggest that this means we need to work harder conversationally, not ban or severely circumscribe the topic.
I'm exiting this thread now.
Have you met a culture that doesn't like candy?
I haven't met many cultures.
Very well said. I made similar points in two posts I made a while back.
Excerpt from #1
Excerpt from #2:
(These were acts of terrorism back then, too.)
It's remarkable that you keep harping on this like you're being oppressed here, and the comments of yours that you linked to are highly upvoted, and the comment of Alicorn's that you link to is highly downvoted.
It's also remarkable to me that you can consistently come across as a complete asshole and still require an explanation as to why you don't have success in interpersonal relationships. If I ever do find myself in the unlikely position of publishing a formal list of rules for success in dating, I'll be sure to include "1. Don't be Silas" so there's no further confusion.
Where do I come across as an asshole, and what corresponding assholish actions do you infer I do in my interpersonal relationships, including dating, based on them?
Are you really claiming that Alicorn doesn't get too much support for her unreasonable request that I not post any comment nested under hers?
No, I was not claiming that. I was implying that Alicorn's comment complaining about your behavior being downvoted and your comments being upvoted are evidence that you won that particular status contest here.
But I'll also go ahead and claim that Alicorn doesn't get too much support for her request that you not post any comment nested under hers. Votes, again, are some evidence there.
And I will further claim that the request was not unreasonable. You are a very distressing person to receive communcations from, and I would not think anyone was being untoward for requesting anything up to and including you not communicating with anyone ever. Obviously, it might behoove you to decline such a request, as is your right.
As for the first, you've received a great deal of advice on this matter in the past, and I've not the energy to spell it out at the moment in great detail. But in the above comment, here is one example:
"acts of terrorism" is uncharitable at best; you're specifically referring to the attitudes people have towards your comments, using what I hope is supposed to be extreme hyperbole (I don't think, for instance, anyone actually called the Department of Homeland Security about you).
"too" implies that there are readers who are currently taking these things to be "acts of terrorism".
And you're linking multiple times to a discussion that was specifically unpleasant for many of the people involved (and you frequently do so).
For the second, I'm not even sure what you mean... I take you being an asshole in interpersonal relationships (communicating with people on blogs and via youtube videos) to be evidence that you are the sort of person who will be an asshole in interpersonal relationships - I don't see the need to infer any further actions, as that is sufficient for me to prefer you not interact with myself or let you near my friends or my stuff, and imagine any sane person you were attempting to date would feel similarly.
Of course, I'm hardly a paragon of niceitude in this particular subthread.
If you have a reason to give a sudden lecture about my general not-niceness and deservingness of poor treatment, please take it to PM or email. You can contact me at sbarta at gmail.
If you want to instead provoke a nasty, public fight in which we recount each others' past wrongs, then continue as you are.
Indeed, (I don't know why your comment was downvoted) we've had this conversation before and ranting at you in a public forum serves nobody. I have a note on my desk reminding me that adderall increases hostility (just in case I'm flying off the handle), but apparently I need to locate it more prominently.
Thanks.
Well, at least I got some honest feedback, which is rare. "In adderallo veritas"?
How many hours a week of mercy fucks would you say that women owe to the world?
I don't think you should necessarily avoid talking about changing preferences. I do think you should consider that people only change their preferences for reasons that make sense to them, and that contextless statements that the world would be better if only people would make themselves more convenient for someone else (who coincidentally is more like you than they are) are not likely to go over well, and why.
When you said it was bound to be controversial, did you have any specific controversies in mind?
The obligation should be no stronger than the obligation to welcome a homeless person into your dwelling for a night's sleep, or to donate a large portion of one's savings+income to feed the starving - that is, nonexistent.
The typical person would not necessarily offer sex to all comers on a pro bono basis, but could fund professionals who choose such a line of work.
If it had been phrased as you put it, I don't think things would have blown up.
Correction: If it had been conceived as you put it, things wouldn't have blown up.
Glad to hear it. It's painful than seeing people try to blow up rationally :)
Well said, I noticed that same bias cropping up. I suppressed the impulse to reply in this case because on this one extinction seems to be more effective. Well, that and because I didn't want to confess to caring about unsexy men - it's one of those things that is not always correctly identified as a counter-signal.