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NancyLebovitz comments on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA - Less Wrong
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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.