PhilosophyTutor comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong

48 Post author: lukeprog 05 November 2011 11:06AM

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Comment author: PhilosophyTutor 25 November 2011 03:28:58AM *  -2 points [-]

Insisting that a guy's acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.

Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.

Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."

If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.

Comment author: lessdazed 25 November 2011 04:33:44AM -1 points [-]

Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.

You said this

Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is not rape.

In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.

However unless you believe that pick-up targets' relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target's free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.

and this

…it's well-established in general societal morals that obtaining sex by deception is a form of non-violent rape. If you're having sex with someone knowing that they are ignorant of relevant facts which if they knew them would stop them having sex with you, then you are not having sex with their free and informed consent.

What’s the charitable interpretation of that?