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TimS comments on The more privileged lover - Less Wrong
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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.
Why? I realize this is a traditional social norm, but you seem to be in favor of doing away with traditional social norms related to sex.
Apocryphally, there once was a time when the sex norm was "no sex before marriage, minimal unchaperoned contact between sexes." When people say "traditional social norm" in the context of relationships, this is the one I assume is being referenced. One fictional presentation is Pride and Prejudice, which is set sometime between the late 1790s and the early 1810s in England.
Regardless of when, if ever, this norm was dominant, or if it was applied in a sex-neutral way, or any of the other critiques one might raise, the fact of the matter is that this norm is dying, if not dead, in the youth of the secular West.
The norm that replaced it is that sex is permissible, and is less frowned upon the more committed the relationship is. One night stands bad, sex later in the relationship ok. One archetypal example of this norm is The Rules (published in the 1990s), which is explicitly written as a guidebook for how women should act to maximize their utility (presuming that a certain understanding of marriage maximizes a woman's utility).
The problem with the current norms is that they create a sense that one does wrong not to have sex once the relationship has reached a certain, fairly low, level of commitment. Under the prevailing norms, if the guy has taken the girl to 4 or 6 or 8 very nice dates, he should expect sex. Much like how, after I put 6 quarters in a vending machine, I expect a soda. That's a very entitled view when dealing with another person's choices.
In short, I don't think the norm you discussed here is particularly traditional, in that both the chaperone-model and the modern-dating-model seem to incorporate it. If anything, it is more central to the modern-dating model, because the chaperone model could probably be made to function without it.
I am opposed to the current social norms about sexuality. But I don't think those are the traditional social norms about sexuality. Don't get me wrong, I'd oppose the traditional norms as well, but they are dying without any action on my part, and aren't really the topic of conversation in this thread.
This isn't quite the current norm yet (witness the negative reaction PUA tends to get on non-PUA sites). Although why shouldn't it become the norm?
Taboo "entitled". To use your example, is it entitled of me to expect a soda after putting 6 quarters into a vending machine.
Are there several not's missing for misplaced in that paragraph?
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.