= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
buybuydandavis comments on The more privileged lover - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (108)
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:
Yes, that is the position that I think is wrong. That's why the next sentence I wrote was:
"But that's not how any reasonable person should expect the world to work."
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.
Conversational implicatures can be cancelled.
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.