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Mirzhan_Irkegulov comments on Rational approach to finding life partners - Less Wrong
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No woman owes sex to no man. If you think that women have any kind of duty to sexually satisfy men, you are deluded and have very unhealthy and dangerous attitudes.
After reading your other comments it becomes clear, that your belief that women as a group should be encouraged to have sex with men against their will stems from your own insecurities. I know how it feels from the inside. It feels like “wrong” men unfairly get more sex than me, like I'm broken or worthless because women specifically choose other men or celibacy, like there is some worldwide women conspiracy to make my life miserable.
The problem is, I felt this way when I was, like, 16, and I don't feel that way anymore. It frightens me that there are men, who are no longer teenagers, who still live in a constant state of anxiety, that women are there to “get you” by refusing to have sex with you.
But you can be happy without sex, and sex is not a need. Of course sex is a good thing, and it's great, when there's more of it (consensual, obviously). But so can be said of video games, or action films, or hiking, or chess playing. People can be happy without them, and these are not needs, and so is true of sex.
The only problem I see with young male virgins in today's world is not lack of sex, but terrible self-esteem, depression and anxiety around the belief that they ought to have sex, but because there's something wrong either with them, or the world, they don't have it. Get rid of that crap from their minds, and you'll make young men happy, confident, self-respecting, motivated and self-reliant. And maybe, just maybe, this might even make them more attractive in eyes of women.
Contrast this with:
Compare your reaction to the first and second sentiment. What accounts for the difference?
In principle "no woman owes sex to no man" and "no boss owes a job to no potential employee" are indeed closely analogous (I myself lean libertarian-ish so I agree with both), but empirically the kind of people who "think that women have any kind of duty to sexually satisfy men" and the kind of people who "think that bosses have any kind of duty to employ you" seem demographically and culturally different to me -- if anything, I'd expect those two sentiments to anti-correlate for hysterical raisins (e.g. the former is more common among Red Tribers, the latter is more common among Blue Tribers, etc.). People are often bad at or uninterested in thinking about those kind of things at the meta level.
Also, empirically the former people do seem more dangerous to me (at least nowadays; probably not in e.g. 1917 Russia), e.g. applicants/former employees becoming violent toward bosses after being turned down/fired (or vice versa) don't seem particularly common to me.
Note that "duty to do X" isn't necessarily the same as "if they don't do X, someone has a right to force them to".
How would "I have a duty to hire you, but even if I don't, nobody has a right to force me to (or, at least, to punish me)" be worth the paper it's written on? How would a world where that's the case differ from one where "I have no duty to hire you, and therefore if I don't, nobody has a right to force me to", how can I tell the difference, and why should I care?
The question you are asking is, "what is morality?"
I'm not Mirzhan_Irkegulov, but my reaction to the two is very similar: both are correct, and in general no one has an obligation to have sex with anyone else and no one has an obligation to employ anyone else.
I'll guess that you're thinking about anti-discrimination laws, according to which in some circumstances an employer can get into trouble for not employing someone. But those are quite special circumstances that very rarely apply to sex (it might apply to prostitution, and I can kinda see a case for forbidding prostitutes to refuse clients on the basis of race etc., but also prostitution can be really dangerous and it's therefore probably better to say that prostitutes should have absolute discretion to refuse clients).
(The other obvious kind of case in which such obligations might exist is where a relationship is already in existence. You might reasonably be aggrieved if your spouse suddenly starts refusing to have sex, or if your employer fires you. But I don't think either side of this comparison is what anyone in the thread had in mind.)
Anyway. Apparently you consider that there should be harmony between one's answers to those questions. I'm pretty sure you don't think that employers should ever be obliged to employ particular employees. Do you think that women commonly have a duty to provide sex to men? In contexts other than existing long-term sexual relationships?
No, I'm thinking about the fact that politicians and pundits routinely talk about lowering unemployment, and this is universally agreed to be a desirable goal and not something creepy for implying that every worker 'deserves' a job, heck the "right to a job" is frequently listed in lists of "second generation human rights". Contrast this with the reaction advancedatheist got for suggesting men deserve a sexual relationship with women.
Oh, OK. So in that case, again, I think I think more or less the same in the two cases.
I don't know to what extent this resembles the opinions of the politicians and pundits you have in mind. I would expect that most agree about jobs but many disagree about sex (on account of not thinking as I do that in general more sex is a good thing).
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it's socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it's not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I'm not sure it indicates anything worse.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men. I don't know whether he actually does think that, but it's explicitly what Mirzhan_Irkegulov says he thinks advancedatheist thinks: "your belief that women as a group should be encouraged to have sex with men against their will".
However, it is generally understood that society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one. Furthermore, a lot of people don't seem to agree with your claim that "no one in particular is obliged to give them a job", at the every least they seem to think this is someone's duty even if they're not clear on whose.
Except sex used to be an even more sensitive topic in the past, and it was taken for granted the society had a duty to arrange for people to have the opportunity to get married.
The statement "women have an obligation to have sex with men" is ambiguous. However, Mirzhan_Irkegulov presumed that it was meant in a creepy way and is thus unacceptable. By contrast consider Part III, Article 6 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
Notice that it is also vague on just who is obliged to provide the employment but carries no such presumption of creepiness.
Okay, it seems to me that people use the word "right" with at least different meanings, and misunderstand each other as a result.
As a EU citizen, I have a right to travel to other EU countries in the sense that, if by mutual consent between me and an airline I buy a plane ticket and take a plane to Poland, I must not be stopped by the police or anybody else. (By comparison, I don't have a right to travel to Pakistan unless I get a visa first.) But it sounds like there are people using the word "right" with a narrower sense, according to whom I have no right to go to Poland because if I can't afford a plane ticket there's nobody who must take me there anyway.
Do we all agree that people should have a right to have a job in the former sense but not in the latter sense, and that people should have a right to have sex in the former sense but not in the latter sense?
(Well, maybe there is an intermediate sense whereby I have a right to fly to Poland iff there are no market failures preventing me from flying to Poland a non-negligible fraction of the times I would be able to do so in a perfectly efficient market. But I hope we all agree that 1. EU citizens probably don't all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren't excessive, though 3. requiring airlines to take EU citizens to Poland whenever the latter want whether the former want it or not wouldn't be anywhere remotely near a good way of achieving that; and 4. the same things applies to employment and to sex, except that the kinds of market failures that there exist are different in each case.)
So would you agree to the analogous thing for relationships, because advancedatheist's point is that there is a huge 'market failure' there right now?
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I'm not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking) also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others (much like I guess you'd agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others) and would stay so even in a hypothetical perfect efficient market.
More like, the 'powers that be' doesn't actually want to fix the market failure, and thinks offering inferior substitutes will at least cause the poeple complaning about it to shut up.
Well, the market failure was a lot less in the recent past.
I wouldn't agree that this is an explanation for a rise in unemployment.
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I'm pretty sure it's usually felt that one can't have an obligation to do something impossible. I think the actual sentiment is the one I already expressed: if someone wants to have a job, it is better if they can get one.
(On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I'm pretty sure it's (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work, and (2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working -- e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.)
Anyway, it's not clear to me what your actual argument is. Do you think that someone in this discussion (Mirzhan_Irkegulov, me, the United Nations General Assembly, I dunno) holds inconsistent opinions? If so, what inconsistent positions? Because all I'm seeing so far is that sex and jobs are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and my opinions on them are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and I don't see what the problem's meant to be.
Ok, now you're not even trying to argue in good faith. In fact I'm pretty sure that if the sexual analogy had never been brought up, you'd be arguing some variant of "just because things will never be perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make them as good as possible".
So how is this relevant to the argument at hand? I'm sure advencedatheist's comments were also aspirational in this sense.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships?
This is at least the second time you have thrown such an accusation at me [EDITED to clarify: the other time was in a different discussion; I'm not saying you've done it twice in this thread]. I promise it's wrong, at least as far as my conscious purposes go (who knows what might be going on underneath?). It would be good to debug what's going wrong here -- am I missing something that's so obvious to you that you can't imagine someone could honestly miss it? are you completely misinterpreting me? etc. so could you please explain in more detail how you get from what I wrote to "you're not even trying to argue in good faith"? Thanks.
(My best guess is that we have divergent understandings of what we are arguing about. I think we are arguing about whether it's a bad thing to say that women have an obligation to provide men with sex. Perhaps you think we are arguing about whether Mirzhan_Irkegulov was correct to accuse advancedatheist of thinking that women should be coerced into providing men with sex, or something like that. Or perhaps you think I am offering some kind of justification of everything said by Mirzhan_Irkegulov, which I am not.)
Yes, I endorse that principle. You obviously think I've been saying something inconsistent with it here, but I'm not sure what.
(The greater the extent to which people who want satisfying sexual relationships have such relationships, the better. The greater the extent to which people who want jobs have jobs, the better. Neither of those implies that anyone should be forced to provide sexual relationships or jobs. Encouraging or, worse, forcing people to have sexual relationships is creepier than encouraging or, worse, forcing people to give other jobs, and not being in a sexual relationship is generally less devastating than not having a job; these are important disanalogies between the two cases. I do not know whether advancedatheist is, as Mirzhan_Irkegulov claims, actually arguing for women to be somehow required to have sex with people they don't want to have sex with. If he is then he is saying something horrible. If he isn't then Mirzhan_Irkegulov is making a nasty incorrect accusation. Does any of that help to clarify anything?)
I honestly don't know what your argument is; see my last paragraph above. If you would care to answer the questions I ask there, we may be able to have a more fruitful discussion. But: it's relevant because I made a claim (no one thinks there's an obligation to provide everyone with a job) that on the face of it is inconsistent with something you cited (the International Covenant) and it seemed worth explaining why I don't think there is such an inconsistency.
Yes, sort of. Again: if you think you have found an inconsistency between my opinions about sex and my opinions about jobs, please tell me what inconsistency you think you have found so that I can actually address it, rather than just insinuating that there is one.
I'm not VoiceOfRa, but I'd like to throw a little twist into this comparison. Let's change from "no woman owes sex" : "no boss owes a job" to "a women has the right to withdraw consent to sex at any time" : "a boss has the right to fire anyone at any time". Still very similar?
As I said in my third paragraph, I think that particular question is some way removed from the points originally at issue in this discussion. But to both of those my reaction is "well, kinda". In more detail (reluctantly because I think it's a big digression):
I don't see any inconsistency in the above; my positions on the two questions aren't identical, for reasons tightly bound up with the ways in which the two questions themselves aren't identical.
I'm not attacking your position :-) It's just that I expect that my reformulation will bring a different set of responses from some people than the original one.
In the US that's already the case and even the people who don't think that wives should be allowed to refuse sex from husbands seem to see nothing wrong with that. Well, except when someone is fired is for saying something factually correct but offensive.
No it isn't. You can fire unprotected classes of people, for unprotected reasons.
As OrphanWilde already pointed out, no, it's not. Even other than protected classes of people and protected reasons, trade union jobs and many public sector jobs are not employment at-will.
Interestingly, the likes of James A. Donald lament that wives are now allowed to deny consent to sex or to divorce while apparently seeing nothing wrong with at-will employment.
Fortunately, the likes of James A Donald are not participating in this thread.
Replace "sex" with "not dying" and you have the standard deathist position.
Just replacing words and saying “see what this reminds you now of!” doesn't work, because the words might not type-match. Otherwise you could replace some words in any atheist speech and say “now that looks like a religion!”
Moreover, you miss the point. It's not that sex is bad or non-important or should be discouraged or whatever.
Except that feeling unhappy about it makes one more likely to fix the situation. Seriously, this is the exact same argument made by deathists, and generally a universal argument against caring about anything.
Except that in most men it doesn't, it just makes them more depressed, more self-hating, more bitter, more hateful towards women, more insecure. What a typical young man with no popularity among women believes is not “sex is good, therefore I should try to have more sex”. Instead, what goes through their mind is thoughts like:
...and all kinds of stressful, self-beating, epistemologically meaningless crap. Young men routinely create arbitrarily difficult challenges and end up in terrible emotional state and empathy-less relationships. Examples are having first sex at a certain age, or seducing that particular woman, or persuading a woman into a certain sex act, or having sex with certain amount of women, and so on.
You know how I know this? Go to 4chan, or any subreddit that has an angsty young male lamenting virginity. It has nothing to do with utility maximization, but all kinds of arbitrary internal demands or social pressure. The machismo culture doesn't make it better. The social expectations about how and when and whom with and how much sex should a young man have are constantly reinforced. I mean, seriously, the only argument you came up with in the other thread was about me not having sex. Suppose that I don't have sex. And that makes me wrong... how exactly?
Of course sex is good, and pleasurable, and helps bonding, and desirable. And of course, consequently, the more people have sex, the better. If you decide that sex is good and therefore you should strive to have more sex, then go for it. But the way most angsty young virgins strive for sex, the incentives they have, the beliefs they hold about themselves and other people, are dangerous for them and sometimes other people.
I've read parts of what is commonly called the "manosphere" and I can safely say, you have no idea what the f* you're talking about.
Maybe, maybe not. Can you give an example, a summary of what manosphere is all about, anything? So far you were unable to contribute to the discussion at all.
Should others have been frightened of you at 16?
I wasn't dangerous at 16, nor do I don't think advancedatheist is, not for women, not for anyone else. I don't even think advancedatheist is a bad person or deserve our hatred or anything else. I don't even believe it's appropriate to think there exist bad people or there is someone who “deserves” anything bad. I think it contradicts with consequentialism, and I agree with Yudkowsky, when he said that “Hitler doesn't deserve a stubbed toe” (but it still might've been a very good idea to kill him early, because again consequentialism).
I just find it very sad that there are so many men, young and old, who have low self-esteem, bitterness, depression, anxiety, sense of loneliness and many other mental issues and destructive behavior patterns, simply because they have irrational beliefs about women, relationship and sex.
For the record, I don't want to diagnose advancedatheist with any mental issues, it's just he repeats the same trope about women not giving to men what they owe, from comment to comment, and I believe he happens to be wrong.
I am no men-hating feminist lickspittle and I don't want to win brownie points from feminists by saying stuff they want to hear. I view this strictly from male perspective: believing certain things about women, relationship and sex makes you unhappy, bitter, unproductive and sometimes harmful for women. That's stupid and gotta go.
Scott Alexander in his blogpost Untitled called a feminist Amanda Marcotte a “Vogon spy in a skin suit” for lacking any empathy for male nerds who had problems with relationship. I'm not like that, I have empathy, because I was just like that at some point. Maybe, most men, who are happy to describe themselves as feminists, were just like that at some point.
I have empathy for women too. Many of them get crap on a daily basis from some subset of these bitter, insecure men, and I'm not even talking about rape. These beliefs that sex is a need for men, that you can't be happy and self-confident without sex, that women must satisfy men sexually, that men have a say in women sexual behavior, are destructive for both men and women. And even if in some parallel reality, where all women suddenly decided to “altruistically” satisfy all men's sexual desires, I don't believe it would solve any problems.
This actually isn't a gendered issue. "Fat acceptance" and "Nerd acceptance" are two sides of the same coin, but both sides insist it is gendered.
Sexual deprivation has real psychological effects. Shit, we should -expect- it to have real psychological effects; you're failing to function as the wind-up toy evolution designed you as. Why do people deny the psychological effects? Why do -you- deny the psychological effects, and insist they can just be overcome?
Because, by the standard morality of our society, problems must be solved. Admitting that it's a genuine issue for these people implies some obligation to do something about it, which implies some obligation by some people to have sex with other people, and that's just wrong.
Personally? I think it's fine to say that it's sad that some people lack what is probably the most fundamental kind of affirmation. And I think it's fine to say that it's sad, and I think it's fine to say that, y'know, the situation sucks for them, and they shouldn't just pretend otherwise. And I can think it's sad, and the situation sucks, without thinking that implies some kind of sexual obligation.
When you can't say there is a problem without also believing the problem can, and should, be solved, the problem to be solved often becomes the problem itself. And either the problem to be solved is that these individuals don't get sex - but the solution to that is both immediately obvious and immediately unacceptable - or the problem is the way these individuals -feel-, as a result of not getting sex. And because they can't acknowledge a problem without believing it can and should be solved, they choose the problem whose solution is acceptable to them: The problem is with the people who are suffering, rather than the suffering itself.
Ok, the idea, that the existing problem doesn't imply the existence of an immediate solution, is very insightful. Thank you for writing all this.
Too bad I don't know much modern cognitive and social psychology to confidently state why I believe that sexual deprivation might not have real psychological effects (under certain conditions) or that these effects may be overcome. So let's have this conversation again in a year or two. :)
What I base my current beliefs about “sex is not a need” is mostly CBT. CBT's core idea is the “cognitive model”, the statement that many of our moods and behaviors are influenced by the beliefs we have. For example, you believe that you're a horrible person, a loser, therefore you feel depressed and unmotivated. You believe that you were responsible for some bad event, therefore you feel guilty and ashamed. You believe that somebody or the world itself was unfair to you, therefore you feel angry and betrayed.
Moreover, the beliefs that cause destructive feelings and behaviors happen to be irrational in one way or another. They may be positivistically meaningless, overgeneralizing, vague, emotionally loaded, arbitrarily judgemental, black-and-white, not supported by evidence and so on. So what CBT researchers found out is that most of the time when people are depressed, anxious, insecure, compulsive and so on, they have corresponding irrational beliefs. But when they are productive and have healthy joy, sadness or remorse, their beliefs happen to be rather rational and grounded in reality.
And CBT works, it treats depression, anxiety, marital problems, drug addiction and many other things. Yes, it doesn't treat them well enough, otherwise we would make people superhuman on a daily basis. And I don't know why it doesn't work fanstastically yet, although I have some hypotheses. But it works somewhat well for some people.
What I hate is that we still treat human psyche as a black box, as magic. Why lack of sex causes psychological problems? Nobody knows, but people treat it as a simple one-step causation: less sex -> more problems. But “lack of sex causes psychological problems” becomes a sort of mysterious answer to mysterious question. Therefore instead of trying to reduce human psyche into smaller blocks and finding the root cause of psychological problem, we just conclude that people must have more sex.
CBT is an attempt at reducing human moods and behaviors. It lays out a causal network. It explains which beliefs cause which moods and actions, what is wrong with these beliefs, how to change them. And suddenly it works, to some extent, in some people.
Allen Carr's quitting smoking method is a good example: it's pure CBT and it demonstrably effective. When you read academic literature on smoking, there's lots of mysterious answers, high-level observations with no causality. Stuff like “when people quit smoking, they experience anxiety, agitation, heartbeat, digestive problems, nausea, etc”. Yes, they do, I don't argue with that. But the same people, who quit smoking using Carr's method, don't experience this. Not all, but many. So there are more factors at work that previously weren't understood. People do feel certain way under certain conditions, but don't under others.
So let me make myself clear. I don't necessarily know the perfect way to make a sexually deprived person fully psychologically healthy, nor do I think that if this way exist it's easy. Except, I can point to a CBT book and promise a significant probability of it helping.
But due to CBT I strongly believe that for people, who hold certain beliefs about women or sex, the best step is to rationally combat their beliefs, not to have more sex. It has much better chance of working, because it already has precedents.
How is this relevant to sexual deprivation? Because CBT works for it too. It worked for me, some people I know, and its underlying mechanism makes sense. It's convincing. Can I point to an authoritative peer-reviewed study that confirms my point? Not yet. Can I at least provide a more complex causal explanation, as to convince you as I am convinced? Probably not until I understand CBT and psychology in general better. So yeah, we can all just agree that we can admit it's all sad without implying any sexual obligation. And hope that science would solve this problem one day.
But yeah, sexual obligation is just wrong, and this idea should be explicit.