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buybuydandavis comments on The more privileged lover - Less Wrong
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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."
So were you using "assholes" ironically there?
Dude, it's a linked quote. If you can't understand what I meant, go read it in context.
In brief, the person behaving like an asshole by treating other people as vending machines is doing social interaction wrong. No irony is intended.
EDIT: For additional clarity: There are two independent points at issue here.
1) Explicit communication about sex is better than implicit communication, particularly passive-aggressive implicit communication.
2) Regardless of the explicitness one uses to ask for sex, sometimes the answer is no. Being offended that someone won't have sex with you when you have (been really nice / taken that person to several expensive dinners / bought the person a drink / etc) is very entitled behavior.
There is no contradiction and barely any relationship between those two points. This sub-branch of comments was about the first issue (norms of communication). You raised my quote about the second issue (entitlement norms) as if it contradicts the communication norm, and I just don't see it.
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.