TimS comments on The more privileged lover - Less Wrong
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Comments (108)
Look, sex needs a yes from every partner (at least two total "yes" responses). You're describing a "yes" and a "no." Thus, no sex. In terms of the sex act, it literally doesn't matter why one partner says no.
EDIT: Asking why we privilege "no" over "yes" is . . . let's just say problematic.
In terms of the relationship, I agree with the other commentators that the relationship you've described doesn't seem like it is going anywhere, and thus, has no reason to continue.
I can see that someone who has made it beyond childhood without learning this (perhaps by willfully ignoring the answer) has a problem. But does asking, in itself, create an additional problem?
Asking is not separately problematic from not internalizing the correct answer.
But there is a social context, and we can't pretend we are writing on a blank slate. In the social context that exists, asking the question substantially raises an observer's probability that the questioner has not completely internalized the correct answer. Essentially, asking the question is somewhat like privileging the hypothesis.
EDIT: Of course, there is mostly a problem because this particular topic (consent for sex) is so filled with conflict. With a topic that is less contentious, there is less reason to think that asking the question implies anything about what the questioner thinks
See also this comment, describing the issue in terms of implicit assertions.
I agree ( possibly module details of exactly what constitutes consent). However, this is the kind of thing that's hard to justify on utilitarian grounds. For example, why does this apply to sex but not other forms of touching?
To take an even more extreme example: what would you make of a Namboothiri's complaint that a Dalit got within 96 feet of him without his consent and thus caused him to become ritually polluted?
In terms of utilitarian practicality, I'd say that prohibiting others from approaching within 96 feet of you is a far greater imposition on others than prohibiting others from having sex with you.
From a utilitarian point of view, it's not that having sex must always entail the consent of all participants, it's just that situations where no sex has worse consequences than nonconsensual sex (say, a person is given an ultimatum by sadistic pirates to rape a woman or have their village razed) are vanishingly rare and improbable.
And these "worse consequences" are? How would you explain them to say the super-happies from Three Worlds Collide or for that matter to the human culture from Three Worlds Collide?
Greater total distress between the participants, and the broader community if applicable, over time.
I don't know if the Superhappies could relate to the idea of reproductive defensiveness, and while I understand what Eliezer was going for with the human sexual culture in Three Worlds Collide, I think it's pretty unlikely that our culture will ever actually develop in that way.
Reproductive defensiveness is a lot like sexual pleasure in that it varies in degree from person to person, but is probably, in a general way, hardwired into our species. For women particularly, inability to exercise choice in picking a reproductive partner could mean the difference between continuation and extinction of a genetic line. And speaking as a man, I've felt a repulsion from having sex with a partner (a "don't stick your dick in the crazy" response,) which was absolutely visceral. Having sex with the wrong partner can create disadvantageous social ties which can be positively ruinous for an individual.
Some cases are necessarily going to be borderline; an individual can be ambivalent regarding whether to have sex with a particular partner or not. But when one allows others to push the borders of their willingness to engage in sex, they're liable to start down a slippery slope where it becomes more and more difficult to refuse sex they don't want (particularly if they acquire a reputation which travels between partners.) I've very often seen people who gave in to pressure to have sex they didn't want come away with long lasting regrets, whereas people who've gained long term satisfaction from sex they pressured a particular other person who didn't want it into having seem much harder to find.
How is it difficult to justify on utilitarian grounds? If one were both a deontologist and committed to elegance in one's theories, admittedly not the most common combination outside of ancaps, one might be in a poor place to say that one form of subjective harm must be resolved in favor of the offended party without saying so for all harms. But if you think that contingent facts matter, then you can just look at the world and see that rape produces these harms and ritual pollution does not. In fact, if you really squint you can just look and see that ritual pollution as such doesn't exist at all, unlike the brain's inborn mapping of me-ness onto a body.
As it happens, contingently, there do seem to be - even beyond sex - ways of touching people that very generally do, and do not, make them uncomfortable. The fact that there's no remotely elegant way to distinguish between the two doesn't mean not touching people in ways that make them uncomfortable is almost always a bad idea! Bad touching is bad! So this does in fact seem to apply to touching in general, with the caveats that 1) for a lot of kinds of touching a norm like "prior, verbal, enthusiastic consent is required" would be unweildly, and we can take consent as the default instead, and 2) that while there is basically never outside of contrived ethical thought experiments a really great reason to have sex with someone against their consent, there are commonly if unfortunately really great reasons to physically restrain or even kill people without their consent.
What value of “very generally” are you using? IME there are ways of touching people which would likely make (say) a American freak the hell out but would likely be barely noticed by (say) an Italian.
EDIT: “IME” is nowhere near an unbiased sample of all human experience, so it is probably much more complicated than that. OTOH there's a female American LWer who described how uncomfortable she was when someone had kissed her on the cheeks, but I have a very hard time imagining that happening with a female Italian. (EDIT 2: To clarify, in informal contexts in Italy, kissing a woman on the cheeks is roughly analogous to shaking a man's hand -- I could imagine a woman not wanting her cheeks kissed or a man not wanting his hand shaken, but it'd most likely be someone they'd already have some reason to dislike.)
Generally enough in any given person's social context that they should have a decent but not infallible sense of what's acceptable. Obviously there's a great degree of cultural variation.
Would you consider that an acceptable justification for the treatment of Dalits? What about for a culture that permitted non-consensual sex?
See Yvain's parable of the salmon and Vladimir's reply.
If there are people who are genuinely not make uncomfortable by suddenly having sex with them, and you know this, then sure. (That such people could exist on a culture-wide level I find tremendously implausible, but LCPW and all that.) Of course what we usually mean when we talk about "cultures that permit non-consensual sex" is ones where a husband can rape his wife all he likes, or just rape culture more generally, which is obviously a different axis of variation than how much personal space people tend to have.
Is it just me, or is non-consensual sex obviously a bad thing? And by bad, I mean orders of magnitude worse than how good consensual sex is. It would take an awful lot of happy sex to make up for non-consensual sex, and I support social policies that prevent non-consensual sex more than whatever the ratio is of happy sex that is of equivalent utility (you can't just support preventing non-consensual sex, because "nobody has sex ever" prevents non-consensual sex).
Banning Dalits from going within 96 feet of Namboothiris has much more harm done to Dalits than Namboothiris' feelings of ritual pollution. This isn't the case with non-consensual sex. Furthermore, the feelings of ritual pollution can be avoided without Dalit cooperation, by the simple expediency of having Namboothiri-only isolated communities.
"Obviously bad" isn't a utilitarian justification.
To play the Devil's advocate:
(Disclaimer: I think that caste society is unjust and I don't actually wish to change our society to be more rape-tolerant. But I am no utilitarian. This comment is a warning against creating fake utilitarian explanations of moral judgements made on non-utilitarian grounds.)
I think that's also culture-related: there might have been cultures where in certain cases being raped is less of a status hit than consenting to sex with the same person, in which case someone might falsely claim to have been raped to avoid the status hit.
In many cultures including at least tradition Judeo-Christian ones adultery is a major sin and a betrayal of one's husband but being raped is not the victims fault so she can't really be blamed.
Yes, this did cause some adulterers to claim to have been raped, heck fake rape allegations happen to this day.
To steel man this:
Taboo "toughing." I don't know what you are referencing.
EDIT: If the replies below are correct that this is a typo for "touching," then the answer to your question is that non-consensual touching is also not allowed. But it's not as big a deal because the misconduct is less harmful.
I think it's a typo for "touching".
I read it as a typo and that they meant to say "touching"
Yes it was a typo. As for your question, see my reply here.
Ah, that makes sense.
(I had guessed it generically meant “interactions you'd rather not participate in”, and was going to answer: “Does it really just apply to sex? I want to sell you my empty water bottle for $2000. You don't want to buy my empty water bottle for $2000 (and if I'm wrong about this, please PM me). Guess whose desire is going to stay unsatisfied, and why.”)
No it's not. He's not suggesting that anyone be forced to have sex. It's about differing preferences for levels of sexual intimacy. Why is the partner who wants more automatically the bad guy?
The scenario is two people with different preferences that both can't be fulfilled simultaneously. Whether David gets his way, or Jane gets her way, one of them gives up what they want.
Yes, religion is privileged as a source of values one is not supposed to question. But that is hardly all of it, and not primarily the issue, IMO. Jane could be an atheist, and still say she wants to wait until marriage. She would probably get slightly less sympathy for her position, but I don't think it would fundamentally change the situation.
If David gives in, he's being respectful and considerate. If Jane does, she's being bullied, used, and some would probably claim raped. Why is the pro sex preference abusive, and the anti sex position unobjectionable?
Some of it is anti sex bias. And some of it, as men's rights activists will point out, is anti male bias. Men are supposed to satisfy the needs of women. And women? They are to supposed to have their needs satisfied by men. Take any need or preference, and a man will get less sympathy for asserting that need than a woman, and less sympathy if he refuses his partner's need.
I agree. The central point of my comment was that discussion of religion was a distraction, which is why I said that "it literally doesn't matter why one partner says no."
I agree with army1987 that it is unclear whether the OP intended to invoke the gender dynamics in addition to the sex dynamics (but I recognize that you disagree).
Regarding the having-sex dynamics, I don't have much to add to what I said above. Some . . . people are going to be assholes operating under the mistaken impression that you are a vending machine, and that if they feed you enough suck-up coins, you will dispense whatever it is they want. But that's not how any reasonable person should expect the world to work.
Regarding the gender dynamic, I was avoiding mentioning it quite deliberately. I don't think this is an example of anti-male bias. No matter how sexually excited any man is, he is perfectly capable of not having sex - regardless of the context. Asserting otherwise is invoking the myth of the boner werewolf.
Help me understand this question. When I have a car and you offer me money for it, your offer is pro-selling and my refusal is anti-selling. If you bully me enough and take the car, you run the risk of being accused of theft. So what? Criticizing me in that circumstance includes an implied premise about the appropriate amount of selling, and we generally leave those sorts of decisions to the individuals involved.
Again, this looks like you're trying to school someone (this time me) on the issue of consent. I know that taking someone's car without their consent is theft. Why did you feel it necessary to explain that to me? The natural parallel in this discussion would be rape, but you just finished saying that you weren't suggesting that either. So what are you suggesting?
Ok. People in relationships compromise on their preferences all the time. They do things to make their partner happy, which they wouldn't do if their partner didn't want to do it. Why is sex an area where any suggestion of compromise and having more sex than one would otherwise prefer is considered treating the less amorous partner as a "a vending machine"?
Partial answer: Social norms (and quite possibly behavioral instincts) prefer sexual negotiations to be implicit rather than explicit. So for example saying outright "If you do not have sex---good sex--- with me at least twice a week I will leave you for another mate" is vulgar, coercive and also unlikely to work. On the other hand making equivalent behavioral signals that indicate that you are the kind of person who has sexual options and have the kind of personality that considers satisfying your preferences to be important and having the other person's instincts adjust to the implied incentives is basically just everyday social behavior.
Well, our culture has spent the past 50 years discarding a lot of traditional social norms about sex. Assuming you agree that we were right to discard those norms, why shouldn't that norm also be discarded?
Yes! A THOUSAND times, Yes!
But people who want to restore the traditional norms are not supportive of this effort.
You do realize which social norm was being referred to? (It was the one you implied would be followed by any "reasonable person" in this comment.)
Hrm?
"I want more sex" is a totally valid reason to break up with someone. It's much healthier to say it explicitly rather than communicate via passive-aggressive behavior.
To quote you:
I agree with that.
And that's another thing the OP missed. How about telling Jane how you feel, and though you want to be with her, the situation is unacceptable as is?
He seems to be unwilling to do this, thinking it will make him a bad guy who is "pressuring" her into sex. And certainly many would see it that way. Others would see it as him giving her the option of weighing the trade off herself. If he really wants to be with her, he should treat her like an adult and let her make her own choices.
That doesn't really address the issue, because being explicit cuts both ways, whether a sexual advance or a sexual rebuff.
But your "everyday social behavior" strikes me as quite dysfunctional. To put a relationship under continual threat on an everyday basis strikes me as extremely harmful to a relationship, and I believe I've read research to that effect. People should expect that their mates will leave them if they're unhappy with the relationship, but making that a prominent subtext of everyday give and take seems quite unpleasant to me.
You are disapproving of a straw man. Things like 'continual threat on an everyday basis' are (once again) your construction, not mine.
My judgement tells me it is time for me to embrace the BANTA and leave this thread. Neither the subject ("let's decide who to shame and blame!") nor the style seem desirable.
You wrote:
I wrote:
Doesn't look like a straw man to me, but have fun embracing the Banta.
This is a way in which people compromise in relationships all the time. Plenty of couples have sex more than one partner wants, because the other partner pressures them into it. There's a big difference between this and a situation where one partner, knowing that the other partner wants it, still says no, and the other partner forces sex anyway. But that being said, couples that need to compromise a lot on things that are important to them tend to be considerably less happy together than ones who agree on the matters that are important to them, and a high degree of sexual compromise isn't a healthy sign for a relationship.
Did you read my mind or something? :-)
Of course he is perfectly capable of not having sex. I don't think anyone was doubting that (or even saying anything that used that as a background assumption).
When we talk about reducing rape risk in terms of women dressing less sexy, the unstated implication is that men won't be able to resist their sexual urges.
wedrifid:
Yes. That was yet another instance where you said something as if people needed to hear it, where I had not suggested otherwise in any way, and neither did the OP.
Who here is part of that "we"? Are you? "We" should imply that you are part of that group. Are you?
That's not my unstated assumption, and I doubt it's an assumption held by anyone here.
Then I'm confused by this entire conversation.
Relevant quotes:
or
IMO, mugasofer expressed himself poorly to begin with when he said "getting away with it risk", and despite your efforts to make the distinction between that and desirability risk, he continued to treat that phrase as if it meant "getting raped risk".
If you go through his responses, they're consistent with the latter, and not the former, and he states explicitly
and
A short skirt doesn't entitle anyone to rape, and he is clear on that. And I don't see anyone even touching on the idea you posed:
All I see is the implication that more men won't resist, not that more men won't be able to resist.
But men do resist. They risk all the time. The majority of male responses to sexual desire is to resist.
If you have to act in one of a few specific ways in order to fulfill my preference, and I can fulfill your preference by refraining from acting in a few specific ways, a bias in favor of your preference being fulfilled over mine can in some cases be explained without further reference to our personal attributes, or to attributes of the specific acts themselves.
Is this one of those cases? Perhaps; perhaps not. Bald assertion one way or the other isn't terribly convincing.