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malcolmocean comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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I just want to say that as a man, I'm horrified by what submitters A & B observed/endured, and I hope they learn some day that most of us guys aren't like that. I was forward in an unintentionally creepy way (probably 1.5-2x as bad as the "attractive college dormmate" story) several years ago. I realized how awful my behavior was, apologized for it, still regret it, and haven't done anything like that since then.
I do attribute reading PUA stuff for my creepiness. Since then, my model has been refined, and I've seen plenty of empirical data suggesting that being a jerk like I was is counterproductive if you're trying to get laid. (Not to say being a jerk would be A-OK even if it did work.) If girls like jerks, it seems to be because they're confident/comfortable with themselves/sexually assertive and not because they have unpleasant personalities. My observations suggest that in the average case, it works better to be a friendly assertive guy than an unfriendly assertive guy.
Furthermore, I'm not even convinced that women are attracted to high-status men so much as they get uncomfortable around socially awkward ones. I suspect most of the gain moving from low-status to high-status comes on the early part of the curve, from low-status to OK-status. Does getting deeply comfortable with yourself take work? Yes, but it takes an obese woman work to lose weight, so it's not like women don't face their own challenges. And like losing weight, getting deeply comfortable with yourself is useful for other reasons, so maybe guys should be glad they're given this incentive.
This site ended up being way more useful to me than any PUA thing. After quitting porn and masturbation for 4+ months, my standards for women I considered attractive changed, I became more confident, I actually had a visceral desire to have sex (instead of being resentful that I wasn't getting any in the abstract), and I started to notice women giving me subtle signs of interest that I hadn't seen before.
This page may be a good starting point: Was the Cowardly Lion Just Masturbating Too Much?. This subreddit, which has half as many subscribers as the subreddit devoted to PUA, is full of stories like mine and will hopefully convince you that this is a real phenomenon.
As far as I can tell, "nice guy syndrome" is a phenomenon that originated in this generation due to porn's effects on the brain. Philip Zimbardo also thinks something is up.
One of my friends, who actually studied so much PUA that he briefly became a coach, was very good at not being creepy. The way he did this was being clear about his intentions. Not necessarily explicit: he would still use innuendo etc. The point was, if he was into a woman, he would flirt with her a lot, assuming she was at all warm to the prospect. If not, he was still very friendly, but interacted in a markedly different way.
This meant that women don't have to guess about what he's up to. He recounted a story that took place in our university residence, involving another male friend of ours and a female friend they both knew. We'll call my PUA friend K, the woman F, and the other friend B. So, F was sitting in her room when K pushed her door ajar, saw her, and then went it and sat down on her bed, and said something to the effect of "Hey, what's up?"
F responded warmly, "Oh, man, the weirdest thing just happened... B just came into my room unannounced and started talking to me... it was kinda creepy..."
K paused, and asked with a grin, "You mean, just like I did, just now" and she reflected that yeah, the behaviour had been almost identical. The key difference, they agreed, was that K was always very open when he was into someone, so his platonic entrance was seen as being that: platonic. B, on the other hand, falls into more of the Nice Guy category.
Bayes' Time!
For K, if he's into a woman, he almost always flirts with her. If he's not, he does a little, but sparingly. B, on the other hand, rarely flirts (proficiently) with women. In fact, he might flirt more with women he's not into, because he has less fear of rejection. But to within error bars, he basically doesn't flirt.
This means that K is providing very strong evidence to women about whether or not he's interested. As mentioned, he backs off when they appear not to be as well, which is irrelevant to the comments about evidence but important for clarifying that he's not obsessive. B does not. B doesn't really give any evidence at all, and the resulting uncertainty is creepy/awkward/uncomfortable. It makes women uneasy, because they aren't sure of his intentions. If they knew he liked them, they might be able to update him on whether or not they do. If they knew he didn't, then they could relax. But not knowing sucks.
I'd also like to point out that obviously there are many more ways to be creepy than being ambiguous (e.g. simply being forward in a way that doesn't connect with the other person). This post was merely designed to deconstruct one form of creepiness, linking it (inversely) with PUA.
I wonder whether it's relevant that K comes across as consciously knowing that he's interested, and thus capable of reasoning about what he wants (and how to get it ethically and within social bounds); whereas B is acting on instinct and without awareness, so may suddenly come out with a proposition (or a grope) out of nowhere. If you aren't reasoning about your goals in a social interaction, your goal-directed actions may be rather random and unpredictable, which is bad for your partner.
I think that's part of it too, yeah. B trying to keep all female friends as potential partners, but not actively pursuing any of them, just kind of randomly "going for it".
Oddly, I have exactly this complaint from the other end; I want to condition my actions on whether or not a woman has any interest (show some myself if so, otherwise leave her alone) but can't correctly evaluate the conditional unless it's made explicit, which no one ever does.
I totally know this feeling. Not sure what to do about it except developing the skill of friendly flirting... which I realize is hardly easy. If you do the flirting part right and you're otherwise presentable, then you probably won't appear "creepy" unless you persist far too long.
Maybe what's going on is that women can tell K is very responsive to their signals, and they know that if they started giving him negative feedback, he'd leave them alone in an instant. So they have less to fear. Just a theory, I'm def. not an expert on this stuff.
That's probably part of it. Also, the women don't even have a chance to give B negative feedback, because he never gets to the "like you, like you" stage. Like they're fine being friends with him just awkward about the other stuff, but it's never explicit enough to actually address.