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Clarity comments on Open thread, Feb. 01 - Feb. 07, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Why is the manosphere so maligned? It seems it's easier to ban men's rights activists than a whole lot worse people in society. Julien Blanc was banned from Australia for, from what I can see, basically amounts to BDSM and RooshV is widely accused of wanting to legalise rape and has recently been banned from Australia on that basis. I did a bit of snooping and found RooshV's article is specifically about how to stop rape and legalising rape of private property to specifically counter false rape accusations. It's a bad policy, but so is the libel. I'm really curios about why the 'manosphere' is so much more maligned than other social movements, and why anti-men's movements have so much traction?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
You sum it up aptly with this comment. You complain about the treatment of Roosh and Julien, both of whom deliberately foster controversy for the sake of increasing their own fame/infamy, and who more-or-less wholly deserve that hatred, since they've worked so hard to get it. You -don't- complain about the treatment of AVoiceForMen, which has retreated from their couple of over-successful-for-their-tastes attempts to engage in the same kind of tactics, and which far fewer people have heard of.
Or, in short: Masculinists imitate the most -popular- feminists, not realizing, or not caring, that their popularity is a result of their controversy, and not paying attention to the fact that feminism is a discredited cause at this point precisely because of those tactics. (Most of the truly good feminists have stopped talking, because they've noticed, too.)
More, they imitate tactics that would never work for them - feminism leans extremely heavily on the (sexist, note) desire to protect women, which is why so much feminist rhetoric revolves around rape and domestic violence - things which occur approximately equally to men, but which nobody cares about. MRAs are prone to harp on and on about rape and domestic violence against men, failing to notice that these things don't really attract sympathy for women as a class of human beings anymore, since they've been so severely overplayed (and then interpret the apathy that is increasingly universal as specific to them).
Tim Hunt will be glad to hear that, so when is he getting his job back?
Discredited doesn't mean toothless.
I don't think PUA sympathies are any less common than feminist leanings, but rather that the former isn't considered "okay" in polite company whereas the latter is often encouraged.
There are a lot of fundamental reasons the manosphere is attacked so frequently. One of them is that people tend to value a sense of mystery in their romantic and sexual interactions. For the average person, knowing all the moving parts in the interaction dynamics and seeing the dry cause-and-effect relations ruins the "magic". Thus no matter how strongly people incorporate a subconscious understanding of how heterosexual encounters work, they don't want it verbalized. Getting angry and offended is a great way to engage a cognitive firewall that prevents belief incorporation, so that's what they do.
Banning Roosh from Australia is an opportunity for surface-level political signaling.
You're assuming PUA theory is an accurate description of the details of romance.
It's less a map of the territory, and more a set of directions for getting from point A to B, with hints at the geography. Depending on the specific flavor, it's more accurate than some, less accurate than others.
For an average heterosexual man, the overall thrust of the advice (be confidently dominant) is more-or-less correct with regard to the average heterosexual woman, and significantly more correct than the standard modern advice men receive (be humble and nice). The actual details advocated in PUA vary by flavor, but cluster loosely around "correct" (unfortunately often falling into the uncanny valley of human relations, as nothing is more off-putting than something that is almost, but not quite, right).
And implementations... well, the general gist is right, and the details are close to right, but hand that to somebody who doesn't understand why they're doing what they're doing, and you get something terrifying, because now you're several degrees off of "close enough" and firmly into the territory of "this person isn't behaving like a person", which is more or less exactly what the word "creepy" conveys.
I think that a few sections of PUA provide a well-developed and accurate system for navigating one of the sides of female sexual/romantic psychology in a certain subset of the population. To be specific, I believe the original Roissy is a good example of someone who developed a solid system for gaining the genuine interest of physically healthy women looking to activate their short-term oriented feelings of sexual infatuation and romantic enjoyment.
With that said, however, I don't think my post assumes that PUA theory is accurate (though my phrasing may have revealed my bias). It merely assumes that a significant number of people don't want to see convincing-sounding detailed descriptions of how the sexual- and romantic-escalation process works (whether or not the descriptions are true), and that many within that group use feelings of anger or annoyance to get those descriptions out of their head before they destroy their inner atmosphere of magic and mystery, or make the beautiful relationships in their life feel dry and mechanical.
RooshV, Julien Blanc, and perhaps 'manospherians' more generally, are not representative of typical PUA advice. (Notably, most PUAs would not advocate 'surprise BDSM' as Julien Blanc did.) Clarity is probably right that 'manospherian' sympathies are not well-regarded, but this has little to do with PUA itself.
For reference, who would you say is representative of typical PUA advice?
These days I would point to /r/seduction on reddit as a good example. Notably, the now mildly-infamous '/r/TheRedPill' section split off from the '/r/seduction' folks arguing that they were being too PUA-focused and apolitical, i.e. they were not focusing enough on 'manosphere' concerns.
Interesting point about the split.
One way to understand what kind of people these communities attract is to consider "what's in it for them". Most people who are focused only on understanding sexual/romantic dynamics well enough to get a girlfriend they're happy about being with will dip their feet into the community for a few months or a couple years and then disappear. It's the perpetual failures, and more importantly the people with a political agenda, who stay.
Roosh wrote Bang in 2007! That's a long time ago. He's in his 30s now and openly says that he's not interested in closing with a high number of women per year anymore. I don't know what your opinion is, but my impression is that Roosh's early work was pretty solid in terms of the basic mechanics of going from the approach to the close (though nothing past that, like LTRs). But nowadays his agenda is political, and I assume you're saying that PUA (e.g. r/seduction) is apolitical and practical, whereas the manosphere (e.g., RooshV Forum, r/TheRedPill) is political and focused on macro trends.
Kind of unfortunate I guess. Almost everything in the "manosphere" comes directly from the original Roissy of 2007-2009 (e.g., this post). Even The Misandry Bubble is just Roissy Macro written with more academic patience and less penetrating intelligence. While Roissy's practical system was also quite good, most people in the manosphere have given up talking about micro dynamics with any sort of insight. It gets pretty shaky with charlatens like Rollo Tomassi, who seem in it only for the political agenda (and consequently have their head in the clouds).
The reason I say it's unfortunate is because they've really made no progress since Roissy and a few other people (e.g., Ricky Raw here) laid the macro groundwork all those years ago. They're just getting louder and more active politically. Too bad the real Roissy didn't have the discipline and desire to use his intellectual power for something more rigorous. And nobody has stepped up to take his place. All we have now is the lightweights who talk practical and the counterfeit heavyweights who like to make a scene in the public sphere.
Well, the political agenda is also a natural evolution. After getting laid enough times, it gets dull. Also if one is at all philosophically inclined, one notices that the very existence and need for PUA is a symptom of how dysfunction certain aspects of society are. Thus one is naturally led to politics.
That's what I was getting at, though I didn't mention the mechanism. People who are not philosophically inclined will tend to learn the basics of PUA, get a bit of success going, and then go back to their life. Those who are, well, there's a natural evolution which leads into politics related to growing older, losing interest in closing with many women per year, and so forth.
I suppose mentioning the "perpetual failures" in the same sentence and also using the negative-connotation word "agenda" may have made it seem like I was criticizing PUA practitioners who develop an interest in the political side of PUA theory. But I meant nothing of the sort. I myself have a strong philosophical demeanor and a deep interest in understanding the current tides of human organization and the pathologies underlying the modern-day erosion of proper societal coordination.
If you read "The Feeling Good Handbook" than it claims that vunerability is central for love relationships. There are PUA people like Mark Manson who are pro-vunerability but Roosh certainly isn't.
Quite a lot of PUA behavior leads those people to not living long-term relationships because the PUA paradigm prevents them from opening up and being vulnerable.
'Vulnerability' is a highly ambiguous term, though. You can definitely show an 'emotional' side (good!vulnerability) without slipping into unattractive 'beta/doormat' mode (bad!vulnerability).
In what way does the PUA paradigm prevent people from opening up and being vulnerable?
You may have the causality backwards. PUA is a tool for creating short-term sexual attraction, and the men most invested in improving this tool will be men geared more toward short-term relationships than the average person. Rather than PUA causing men to lose out on the joy of long-term relationships, it may simply be that the community is disproportionately populated by men who's thinking was already firmly oriented toward short-term flings.
Basically people close down if you tell them to force themselves to approach strangers in relatively hostile enviroments. That what the resident person I know who wrote a book on comfort zone expansion and who run a weekly meetup on comfort zone expansion has to say on the topic.
PUA trains man to consistently reflect on whether their behavior is attractive and then change their behavior based on that reflection. Commonly that means that a man thinks he isn't supposed to show weakness when he's in a relationship. It trains the idea that if the man stops engaging in PUA type behavior his girlfriend will cheat on him. That creates resonance with fear of the girlfriend leaving that prevents opening up.
Two of key people in the game are publically out as being depressed a decade afterwards. Tyler and Mystery. That even through those two have actual success in attracting woman and they make a lot of money coaching people.
Herbal/Tynan isn't but then he stopped the PUA lifestyle, by his own account lost skills and is now seeking a wife to settle down with. Losing skills is quite interesting because it indicates that the skills are superficial and not deeply rooted. The fact that Mystery reports still having approach anxiety years after being a PUA is another indication of a failure to actually do deep changes.
I haven't actually meet Mystery or Tyler in person but I do know over a handful of people who make money with selling products to the PUA demographic and who see PUA often as causing those effects. Basically most people linked to MALEvolution think that way.
Well, you're certainly right that the people who stay in the community are likely unrepresentative of the average. But there are many people who stay because they're seeking to be PUA wingmen/coaches (either amateur or paid-for), or simply to improve their outcomes and their understanding of seduction- and social dynamics. To some extent, this describes 2007!Roissy and 2007!RooshV too, but even then they were quite controversial and 'political', in a way that many others in the community would have found distasteful and unhelpful.
The flip side of it though is that if the 'heavyweight' political folks are right about what they infer from PUA micro dynamics (I'm far from convinced about this, but we can assume it for the sake of this argument) there might not even be much need for further work on the micro side. Overall, PUA has seen remarkably little change since 2007, though there's definitely been a welcome emphasis on 'inner game' and 'being a natural' as being the next level, and low-level tactics and tricks as useful training wheels that can eventually be dispensed with to a large extent.
Good point.
I don't see the connection. Even if the coordination system of society is falling apart, that doesn't mean that men can't enjoy the fruits of PUA ability in the short term. Why would Roissy Macro being correct not leave room for further refinement in the practical art of seduction?
In the US that might be true, when looking at the people I know in Germany who make money in that industry, a lot of them say that the 2007 PUA stuff creates more harm than good.
Instead of getting told to force myself to do approaches that make me feel unconfortable I get told that it would be good for me to do more non-violent communication style expressions of my own desires.
But even in the US there are people who speak at PUA conferences and take the label of PUA as an insult and claim there are there to get the people away from PUA style thinking.
So how does that actually help with seducing girls? Because that sounds like it simply decayed into yet another "generic self-help movement".
Because women are perceived to be the weaker sex therefore it is rude to argue against them. Most people don't want to be seen as rude, except actually rude people who don't care. It doesn't matter if MRM have a point, they will inevitably be both seen as rude and actually have a disproportionate number of rude people.
I think you're correct about it being rude. More than rude, it's a social taboo to criticize feminism. The statement "women are perceived to be the weaker sex" does not seem to generally apply. It's more that we've internalized the more that "Anything that looks like an attack on the concept of equal rights is to be shunned." That gets extrapolated to "Anything that looks like an attack on the tools we've used to get more equal rights should be shunned." Note that the latter is not a position I endorse.
It's complicated. To speculate, I'd say it's a mix:
The social taboo against criticizing feminism is built on the taboo against male violence against women. Note how readily some people label criticism or disagreement as "harrassment" and "violence", or how women who disagree with feminism are erased from the debate -- this is how the former gets labeled as the latter.
If we succeed to reframe the situation -- if we see a man verbally disagreeing with a feminist, but our emotions correspond to "a strong man is beating a weak woman" -- then the instinct to protect the woman gets activated.
At least it is my experience that in eyes of most observers I would lose any debate with a sufficiently skilled female feminist, because she could twist even the most polite verbal disagreement as "attacking her" simply by starting to cry. People pattern-match all the time. They see a man opposing a crying woman; their brains may try to analyze what happened, but their hearts already gave a clear verdict.
Yeah. I don't know how to fix it, either, and it frustrates me (I also don't know how to keep from perpetuating it, because I tend to cry during confrontations by default).
Well, in my social circles a woman who'd use crying as a way to win an argument would lose major status. "Now, now, dear, don't worry your pretty little head about this" is something you don't want to hear :-/
Oh, but that's when you can win by "gracefully conceding" the argument. You're showing your own protective instinct, and everyone else can see that what you're really doing is bowing out because having a proper debate is clearly not a possibility.
My thoughts are as always: internet drama, ABSOLUTELY NO (not mis-)communication between anyone, and slippery slopes. I'd add confirmation bias in and put it in the oven although the cake won't taste good.
I am not going to follow that link here at work; for the benefit of others who may be similarly cautious, would someone like to explain what "legalizing rape of private property" means? On the face of it, rape is something that can only be done to people, and there aren't many people around these days who would justify having people as private property.
It's a typo. RooshV wants to legalize rape that happens in private property.
OK, so I briefly considered that interpretation but thought it was more unlikely than that he had some unorthodox meaning attached to "rape of private property".
So apparently he wants rape to be legal as long as it happens on private property.
OK, Clarity, in what possible sense is it a "libel" to accuse Roosh of
if in fact he
I mean, that does in fact mean legalizing a whole lot of rapes. (I would bet that a large majority of rape happens on private property, even if you adopt a narrower definition of rape than the law generally does.)
If I say I want insider stock trading to be legal provided you wear a suit when you do it, I am proposing to legalize insider trading. If I say I want murder to be legal unless it's done with a gun, I am proposing to legalize murder. If I say I want making copies of copyrighted works to be legal if it's done by men rather than women, I am proposing to legalize copyright infringement. And: if I say that I want rape to be legal if it's done on private property, I am proposing to legalize rape.
(For the absolute avoidance of doubt: I am not, in fact, making any of those proposals.)
I believe the relevant term is "satrie". Or should we start accusing Swift of promoting cannibalism.
If you say you want insider stock trading to be legal as long as you wear a suit, but your rationale is "it's so easy to convict innocent people of insider stock trading that the benefits from stopping false convictions outweighs the harm done by the insider trading", then that's the noncentral fallacy--a noncentral use of "want". Normally saying that someone wants X carries the connotation that they like X and don't believe X causes harm, which isn't true in this case.
If you don't want people to be convicted of rape based on evidence obtained by torture, you also "want rape to be legal" (specifically, you want the subset of rapes "rapes where evidence is only obtained by using torture" to be legal) but describing it that way would be misleading. You don't think rape is good, you just think encouraging torture is worse than rape. It would be possible to think that encouraging false accusations is worse than rape as well (especially if false accusations are common) and want to allow some rapes so you can discourage false accusations in the same way that you might want to allow some rapes to discourage torture.
(I really hope it's okay to even talk about this. I would rather not get banned.)
I don't think anyone is saying that Roosh wants rape. Only that he wants (many instances of) rape to be legal. Which is in fact what he wants (or, at least, what he says he wants; he may not be sincere).
There is a risk of the noncentral fallacy here -- if someone proposes to make a small minority of atypical instances of something legal, that's not fairly described by saying they want to legalize whatever-it-is. But AIUI most rapes are committed on private property, even if (as I can imagine Roosh might want to) you take "rape" to imply outright nonconsent and force or threat or the like. (I confess I don't have statistics to hand to back up this claim.) If I'm right about this, then Roosh is proposing to legalize most rapes, and I think it's reasonable to describe that by saying he want to legalize rape.
I'm sure it's true[1] that he wants to do this because he sees bad side-effects of the illegality of rape, rather than because he would like there to be more rape. But I think this is very often the case when people propose to legalize things, and therefore saying "Roosh proposes to legalize rape" doesn't amount to claiming he likes rape.
[1] Or at least true-according-to-what-he-says; again, he might not be sincere.
Given that people call the gatherings proposed by Roosh to be gatherings of rapists, I'm not sure whether that's true.
I don't think "sincere" is the best word to use here.
You're contrasting "interpret him literally" with "assume he's not sincere", but I don't see a connection. It's entirely possible that he's completely sincere in his attempt to communicate certain information through a satirical article. That is, he may be honest in his communication attempt but speaking in a way where interpreting him in too straightforward of a way would lead to misinterpretation.
This is I believe what he's doing. See here for another post of mine, building on the points I made in my previous reply to you. It seems clear to me that he's writing a satirical polemic against a societal trend that he believes exists where women are not expected to bear personal responsibility for certain actions (such as voluntarily increasing their time preference through alcohol consumption).
For reference, did you read his article in full?
My impression is that incivility and social obliviousness is really what gets to people. The couple people I've seen banned here over the past year or so, even though many people pointed to the non-PC content of their posts as the reason for the ban, I believe that was a misinterpretation. They were banned for being unlikeable and uncivil. Simple as that.
This mirrors my experience on almost any forum out there, except where systematic censorship exists for the benefit of a certain established agenda (like selling a product).
The proposal has nothing to do with that. This is Roosh's real proposal: "Pay more attention to me! I'm still edgy and obscene and dangerous!"
And it's working.
Oh, very likely, but Clarity claimed that people were libelling Roosh for proposing to legalize rape when actually he's just proposing, er, to legalize rape. My bemusement at this has basically nothing to do with how sincere Roosh is or what ulterior motives he may have for proposing to legalize rape.
(Unless his proposal is so obviously not intended to be taken seriously that the objection should be not "he wants to legalize rape" but something more like "he thinks legalizing rape is a reasonable thing to propose as a joke", I guess.)
His overall point is that the current memes circulating in the general public on the topic of rape are ineffective at handling the issue, and furthermore that they're so ineffective that getting rid of them altogether and doing something as extreme as legalizing rape on private property would actually lead to a better aggregate outcome for not only men but also women.
At least that's my interpretation.
Note that Roosh writes a lot of satirical essays that are supposed to systematically introduce various details that he thinks are important while suggesting a general conclusion. This I think is a common tactic for people who write on controversial topics or have a lot to allude to and brainstorm about but don't have a fully fleshed out conclusion to simply state directly.
Here is another example of his non-literal exposition style.
The idea of how the law is supposed to benefit woman is by making woman so fearful of getting raped that they don't go home with a boy after a club night.
It's that woman are too promiscuous and have to be forced by fear to to less promiscuous. It's an ugly argument.
You're taking it too literally. See here for a better explanation of what Roosh means.
I agree with this framing for this specific case, but I do want to point out that there are huge noncentral fallacy issues with this framing in general; if I say "hey, we should add an age difference exemption to all the statutory rape laws that don't have one yet" that would be arguing for legalizing some rapes (because it involves redefining rape).
(The steelman of Roosh is basically arguing that, instead of changing campus culture to reflect the law, we should change the law to reflect campus culture. So it's certainly skeevy enough that "legalizing rape" has fair connotations, and that's even before one drops out of the steelman lens and into the literal lens.)
Yup, I agree. That's why I remarked that I think a large majority of rapes fall into the category he's proposing should be legal, even if you adopt a relatively narrow definition of rape.
Of course, I could be wrong. (And I could have said more explicitly that "legalize some instances of X" is by no means always fairly summarized as "legalize X".)
That's his PR strategy, for sure. He wouldn't be nearly as popular if he wrote rigorously thought-out expositions using neutral language and containing a lot of qualifiers to make sure nobody thinks he's a bad person.
While I think part of his mission puts being famous and notorious as an end in and of itself, I don't think we should assume he's not also genuinely motivated by an attempt to disseminate information that he believes is important. For a brief attempt to translate the overall point of his article on legalizing rape into language that's more literal, see this post I just submitted elsewhere in this thread.
I'm not particularly interested in reading it; he's neither my ally nor my enemy, and I find neither what he says, nor how he says it, particularly entertaining or useful. I'd guess it's something along the idea that "Removing safety rails make people behave more safety-consciously", or consideration of its converse, "Safety rails make people behave less safety-consciously". Which is true, but... premature. Society isn't there quite yet. We have at least another decade, although things are accelerating a bit, so it's hard to pin down a time.
Shrug I encountered exposure to his ideas back when I read Captain Capitalism, before that blog turned into yet another outlet for the backlash against the constant overreach of social justice types. I find him... unnecessary.
ETA: Ugh. I regret having participated in this.
No need to read it. I don't think Roosh is very good. For me reading him even for a few minutes feels like akrasia. I guess I'm more entertained by the style than you are, but entertainment is different than education. My priority is the latter.
For reference, it's not just the safety-rail consideration, though that's relevant too. It's also that the current cultural landscape removes personal responsibility in many cases. Women will sometimes regret having sex the same way anyone may regret eating a cookie (they felt good then, but feel bad now). While no man would be proud of being the sexual equivalent of junk food during a one-night stand with a woman, I think today's society is a bit trigger happy in such situations in saying the man took advantage of the woman instead of saying that she indulged in the moment and later thought herself hedonistic.
Making rape legal on private property would be the most extreme version of expecting personal responsibility from women. It certainly goes (way) too far, but within the fog of satire I believe Roosh has a point. Though, again, I wouldn't recommend his writing to someone looking for thoughtfulness or rigor.
Ahh..the: it's not rape if she liked it argument!
rape is a serious accusation and all though some women may feel the way you described/misuse the legal system... I doubt that it's a common occurrence, most women are ashamed to admit they've been raped...don't think many would put themselves through the stress of it willy nilly.
Haven't read the article, but even if the idea of legalizing rape on private property is looked at as sincere for even a second... it falls flat on its face. Marital rape is a thing that happens, seems likely this legalization would condone it. And so long as we're talking about responsibility, it would be the responsibility of the owners of properties legally raping people to put up a sign saying as much..kinda like the beware of angry dog ones...except about rape...which I don't think would catch on.
I assume the "it's not rape if she liked it" argument refers to circumstances where the woman doesn't consent to the sexual encounter, but then changes her mind part of the way through. In other words, we're talking about a shift from "don't want" (when the sex started) to "want" (before the sex is over), and describing the general result as "she liked it". It would be more precise, of course, to phrase it as, "She didn't like it and then she did like it."
Now, which part of my post were you saying fit that argument?
I assume you meant this part.
With the considerations above in mind, I don't see how my point fits the "it's not rape if she liked it" argument. While that argument refers to situations where the woman felt averse to sex but then changed her mind part of the way through (with no specification about how she felt afterwards, the following day, and so on); on the other hand my example refers to situations where the woman wanted the sex both during the initial escalation and throughout the entire act (but then felt regret later on).
Let me know if I misinterpreted you.
I'm under the impression that when alcohol is involved the average person is more likely to use the words "taken advantage of" than "raped" unless the woman is passed out.
I wasn't necessarily referring to misusing the legal system, though that's probably an issue in certain isolated cases. My concern, instead, is that Western culture at this time in history seems to allow women an escape route from admitting personal responsibility for certain actions.
Women may not be flocking to the justice system, but there's certainly a trend where female sexual hedonism is blamed on the men who take up the offers.
It was a satirical article and Roosh has no intention of trying to legalize rape on private property. I don't necessarily suggest reading the article, as it's long and liable for misinterpretation from anyone unfamiliar with the PUA community, but if you want to criticize his reasoning in a disciplined and responsible manner then you're going to have to take the plunge.
If you do decide to read the article, feel free to post in this sub-thread any counterarguments you come up with.
Instead of figuring out an answer to that I'll concede it was a poor choice of words
yep, true, sorry for the typo
Julien is a person who wanted to get famous by baiting feminist bloggers and succeeded at it in a way that might have been more than he asked for. His behavior has very little to to with values of the BDSM community. The BDSM community focuses strongly on explicit consent and not touching people when they haven't consented to being touched.
Calling for making rape legal on private property does happen to be a call to want to legalise a good portion of the rape that's happening.