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conchis comments on Religion, Mystery, and Warm, Soft Fuzzies - Less Wrong
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But are "Women who would be annoyed by the statement 'Women are alluring'" a large potential audience?
I would think that the audience for this specific sentence would break down into (roughly):
a) Those it directly applies to (hetro males, bi females, etc.), who immediately agree 'Yes, women sure are alluring!' b) Those it does not apply to , but who regard it as complimentary (e.g. hetro females), 'Yes, I sure am alluring!' c) Those it does not apply to, but who understand its intention without feeling that it marginalises them. 'I don't get what the big deal about women is, but I know LOTS of people who find women alluring' d) Those it does not apply to, who feel actively excluded. 'I don't find women alluring, the author is trying to exclude me - he really should change the text to something that I like."
I would have thought that category d) is tiny.
Note to Emily: I am really not trying to exclude you or pick on you! I just find it really surprising you would feel excluded by a (positive, and relatively uncontroversial!) comment about women from a male author.
Is this an expression of your prior about the size of the category, or your posterior? Have you updated your prior on learning (to your surprise) that people apparently do feel excluded/get distracted by this sort of thing?
I can't claim to speak for anyone else, but to me, your focus on "positive, and relatively uncontroversial" seems to miss the point. The problem is that the original statement: (a) assumed that the relevant agents are exclusively male, and that women are merely passive objects that men are attracted to;* and that (b) it did so in a context where this implicit assumption is fairly common, which probably gets a bit frustrating after a while.
As an aside, would it surprise you if people felt excluded by your telling them that you find their concerns "really annoying"?
* While it was technically compatible with the agents being bi/homosexual females, it seems fairly fairly clear that this wasn't really a factor in the choice of wording.
Prior. I have updated very slightly towards Emily's position, but this is balanced by the responses from every female I have personally asked about this, all of whom fell into the a) or b) response. Of course, we all know that comparing two very small samples is far from ideal :-)
No, but excluding people is certainly not the intent. Every time I write something I assume that someone, somewhere will find it really annoying.