He has this post about the "dark side of game": http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/03/dark-side-of-game.html
This post from him really flipped me out: http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2011/02/life-sucks-marriage-still-good.html
because of this quotation: "yes we still had sex on Friday night (she squirted), Saturday night (she cried), Sunday morning (she tolerated it) and Sunday night looks good too (she's gonna go for the handjob option when I offer it). "
which, uh, doesn't sound like his wife is all that into the sex. On the other h...
I am tickled to be referenced as "Clarisse Thorn herself". Since that conversation, though, I have to say that I've thought about Kristen's Feministe comment a lot, and I think I understand it better now (though I'm still not sure I agree).
(1) shows a guy who is trying to exert dominance by telling her what to do. "You have lovely eyes, they'd be remarkable if you wore makeup" includes a proposed "solution" to the "problem" he's outlining. (3), on the other hand, is just mockery. "That guy will rot your brain" doesn't tell her what to do.
I see the distinction now, but I'm not convinced that the speakers did, nor am I convinced that most hearers would.
My problem with this model is that sexuality is extremely important to me and a guy pretty much has to prove that he's sexually interesting in order to be worth my time. This is difficult to accurately gauge through conversation -- even men who are in my sexual subcultures/etc can be less-than-ideal sexual matches. It might be good for me to follow a more strategic drawn-out pattern than sex on the first date, but that would require me to spend a lot of time on men who may not end up being sexually awesome (and also it removes the pleasure of having sex ...
I recommend the movie "Filming Desire" for what I found to be a very interesting and nuanced feminist analysis of objectification, and what happens when women try to represent sex for ourselves rather than buying into how the dominant culture represents sex (i.e., how men with stereotypical desires represent sex).
Here is an edited version of a comment I recently wrote on my own post "Ethical Pick-Up Artistry" [ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/23/ethical-pick-up-artistry/ ], which I think is tangentially relevant:
I don’t really lik...
No, I didn't comment on the post I'm thinking of. It was overwhelmingly sexist (in comments people made jokes about women being gold-diggers, for example), but it didn't have to do with BDSM.
I've gotten better at "sounding rationalist" since I commented on that "is masochism necessary" post, and I've also gotten better at not getting angry. I look back at how I wrote my comment there and I'm a little surprised at myself.
As I said, I spent a while trying to find it, but I couldn't. I really wish I could find it, because it was a stellar example. After I failed to find it I thought that maybe it was actually a post at OvercomingBias (don't even get me started on Robin Hanson), but I couldn't find it when looking for that either. I think I must have deleted the email in a fit of rage.
I agree -- different resources are necessary for different questions. I personally tend to read sociology papers whenever I can get my grubby little paws on them. Note that I have a feminist bent, so I tend to look for feminist-leaning resources. For example, I recently read this fascinating study: http://das.sagepub.com/content/10/3/293.short
I have a big crush on HughRistik. It is important to note that he is not an accurate representation of PUAs. He is considerably more concerned with ethics, more friendly to feminism, more willing to acknowledge systemic problems in the PUA subculture, and smarter than the vast majority of PUAs. Quotation from one of his writings:
"There are a lot of problems with the seduction community that feminists correctly observe, including misogyny, cynicism towards relationships, and a few tactics that are bad for consent." from: http://feministcritics....
The first LW post I was ever directed to was so bad (and the comments were waaaay worse) that I didn't comment, decided never to look at this site again, and had to be convinced by the steady campaigning of a friend.
Of course, feminism (and sexuality) is my pet issue. Note the quote from Alicorn in the "sayeth the girl" post that rhollerith posted: "I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended."
Maybe this is more evidence that I'm particularly hard to offend? Not sure.
I spent a while trying to find the first post I was ever directed to, but I couldn't -- sorry.
I found your blog, and I liked it, and it occurred to me that the mode of thinking and expression that's common in feminist (or kinky, or gender-conscious) circles isn't unrelated to the LessWrong mode. They're different languages, but they're similar in being explicit about social dynamics that are normally implicit, and encouraging people to self-modify their minds and second-guess their own thoughts in a way that provokes a knee-jerk "but that's unnatural!" reaction in "normal" people. So maybe this is a good blog for feminists.
Of course, it depends more on the individuals involved than anything else, but I would say that a non-negligible percentage of rationalists are unwilling to question gender biases (and in fact, many get defensive because they prefer to consider themselves rational and non-sexist, and then in their defensiveness, fail to examine their biases). This is common enough that the geek feminist blog Restructure has a whole post called The Myth Of White Male Geek Rationality: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/myth-of-white-male-geek-rationality/
Yes -- and I find that the "Women hate the dark arts because they can't deal with reality" trope is a very common one (perhaps less common on LW, but common in general). It may be that the OP didn't intend to imply that, but it may also not be an unreasonable implication to draw given the frequency the argument is made.
Another thought -- along the lines of my first paragraph, one common term that's used to insult sex-positive feminists (by feminists who don't identify as sex-positive) is "fun feminists". The idea being that we wouldn't hold our position if it weren't "fun", or that we've been distracted from the "important" stuff by the "fun" stuff, or that we get undeserved attention for being more "fun". This obviously makes some of us feel like we have to prove that we're not that fun :P
Hey Eliezer,
Interesting point. I think part of the problem is that sex theorists have to work very hard to get ourselves taken seriously, so many of us overcompensate. Another problem is that while sex is totally fun, sex also comes with an enormous potential to harm, so it's important to take it seriously at least somewhat.
Also, sex is a highly-triggering area for most people. I specifically try to include some humor and/or sexy anecdotes in my writing, but I find that I am considerably likely to be misinterpreted when I do so, and when I'm misinterpre...
I'm a little surprised to see the issues of LWers interacting with women reduced to "being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality" ... with a link to PUA stuff.
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of "explicit awareness of social reality".
2) It's quite telling that the implication of the post is that "women don't like explicit awareness of social reality", rather than the (more accurate) "women don't like PUA".
One way to encourage women to participate in rationalist communities migh...
Nitpick: It had "PUA" in the title, but the formerly-linked article was not about seduction/gender in any way.
I will not make this particular mistake again (is there a term for "Boo Lights"?), but I still think the idea of explicitly practicing high-value social skills in a group is a good one.
Good point re: religious dogma. I think there are studies showing that religious/conservative folks are much better at volunteering and donating to charity than liberal/secular folks. It's too bad.
Re: lawyer/secretary, well, the longer I focus my time on activism the more likely it becomes that if I were more "gainfully employed" I'd be a secretary ... :P
Yeah, it looks like it. Funny, I was sure he lived in Long Island, but I don't remember why. Chalk another one up to memory being fallible even when I was "very sure" about the details.
Here's a New Yorker piece: http://facstaff.unca.edu/moseley/zellkravinsky'skidney.pdf
The second point is something that really gets me. It seems to me that rather than feeling bad about donating to one charity rather than a more efficient or more "important" other charity, we should feel bad about spending money on frivolities rather than donating to charity. Nonprofit organizations are forced to compete against each other for slender resources in many ways, including donor dollars -- why can't they compete against things that have less moral value instead? It would be awesome if there were more social pressure to donate to ch...
I (for one) have tried dedicating all my time to doing activism that seemed "more important" (HIV in Africa) rather than the activism that is most interesting to me (various types of sexuality stuff in America), and I was both less happy and less effective
There's a story I like to tell when I hear this. Louise and Claire are both concerned about global warming. Louise is full of passion for the subject and does what moves her most; through her hard work persuades a thousand people to unplug their phone chargers at night. Claire can't get wo...
we should feel bad about spending money on frivolities rather than donating to charity.
This is standard religious dogma. Secular activists rarely have the gumption to make it part of their pitches.
Interestingly, however, there is some social stigma against donating "too much".
When you take seriously something other people are hypocritical about, it makes them edgy.
most of us are sex-positive activists, and sex-positive activism is arguably an extremely "low priority" type of activism.
Not for me. Keep up the good work :D
...Ad
I generally like this essay on this topic: http://pdf23ds.net/implications-and-debate/
If you read the comments, however, please note that the original essay contained a lot of language that was pretty aggressive and insulting to feminists and sex/gender writers. Some writers (including myself) called out that language in the comments. The essay was then edited multiple times, but no notes were left that it had been edited. This was a great way to make commenters who had complained about the original essay (such as myself) look like crazy bitches, which doesn't seem like a very charitable debating tactic to me. ;)
Otherwise, though, yeah, it's a good essay.
Women are much less likely to be capable of achieving orgasm through penetrative sex than men, so the ban on penetrative sex for her may be less asymmetrical than you seem to think. After all, if she can easily achieve orgasm by several methods other than penetrative sex, but he prefers penetrative sex over other methods, then while there may be some jealousy active in the penetrative sex prohibition, it may also not be that much of a "sacrifice" for her.
It is also entirely possible that she feels more jealous when she knows her husband's partne...
EDIT: OH my God, I forgot the special LW markup, ARGH. Comment has been edited.
I have an enormous amount of experience with the polyamory community and with observing polyamorous relationships, but I was convinced that I myself had a "monogamy orientation" until recently, when I became less sure. Regardless of whether or not a person is "oriented" towards monogamy or polyamory, however, I think it's useful for both monogamous and polyamorous people to discuss relationships in the kind of depth that is common in the poly community; in ...
Just read through these links, and I have to say that the concept of "fun" leapt out at me as being largely missing.
I suspect there's a major problem where a lot of the people who spend the most time writing about polyamory or BDSM or, hell, sexuality in general, are people who literally have nothing more important in their identities. They're trying way too hard to sound adult and serious. You want to scream at them to just lighten up.
I'm starting to get that dreadful "I could do better than that" feeling which makes me do things like write Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or explain Bayes's Theorem...
Also: I recently saw a list of diseases ranked by doctors from most to least stigmatized; the list was accompanied by analysis that claimed that more respected doctors work on less stigmatized illnesses. I saw it on the Internet but alas, I can't find it now. I did find this, though: http://healthpolicy.stanford.edu/news/internet_use_can_help_patients_with_stigmatized_illness_study_finds_2006127/
This is a really interesting post and I will most likely respond on my own blog sometime. In the meantime, I haven't read the whole comment thread, but I don't think this article has been linked yet (I did search for the title): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=all
It's called "The Americanization of Mental Illness". Definitely worth a read; in particular, here is an excellent quotation:
It turns out that those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less c...
I'm not a technician -- so I'm not sure. But I have noticed that I pretty much always seem to be able to leave comments on Wordpress blogs, for example, whereas I frequently have trouble here and sometimes at Blogspot as well. It helps not to require a login, but Wordpress seems to function okay for me even when it's logging me in.
Thank you, I'm aware of that. But that still requires a person to be a pretty obsessive user of this site. Unless I have a lot of free time (like today), there's no way I can go back and check every single site where I've left comments and see how my comments are doing. At least LW aggregates reply comments to my input, but that doesn't solve the bigger problem of me having to come back to LW in the first place.
It's also worth noting that this comment interface is difficult to use in many places with slow/bad connections, like, you know, the entirety of...
(I'm sorry if this comment gets posted multiple times. My African internet connection really sucks.)
Hi. 25 years old, HIV/AIDS worker in Africa, pro-BDSM sex activist in Chicago. Blog at clarissethorn.wordpress.com.
I very rarely comment because comments here are expected to be very well-thought-out. Stating something quick, on the basis of instinct, or without stating it in perfectly precise language seems to me to be dangerous.
Another reason this site has a higher percentage of lurkers is, obviously, because of the account requirement. There's anothe...
That's fair. And I'll add that for a site populated mainly by entitled white guys (I kid, I kid), this site does much better at being generally feminist than most within that demographic.
PS It's kind of exciting to be talking to you, EY. Your article on heuristics and biases in the context of extinction events is one of my favorites ever. I probably think about it once a week.
Ah, Spider Robinson. I remember buying a stack of his books at Borders around age 12 and having the clerk give my mother an alarmed look. Mom just waved her hand ....
I think it's pretty normal for science-fiction-reading middle- to upper-middle-class kids to think that alternative sexuality is "normal" and to feel guilty for being vanilla/monogamous/whatever. (I used to feel a lot of pressure to be polyamorous.) Interestingly, though, there still seems to be a lot of internalized stigma about certain forms of sexuality, as demonstrated for ex...
Hi Doug! Yes, I remember you. I've actually read a number of posts here, and I've commented once here before, but I was too angry and irrational and in feminist-community mode during that little fracas, so I decided to give myself lots of time to cool off before posting again. (Note that the original post has been edited to the point where it is no longer clear what pissed me off.) (I also discussed some of the cultural differences between this site and the feminist blogosphere that contributed to that blowup in the comments here.)
I go by Clarisse and I'm a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered workshops on both sexual communication and BDSM to a variety of audiences, including New York’s Museum of Sex, San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, and several Chicago universities. I created and curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum; I have also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable BDSM institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. Currently, I'm working on HIV mitigat...
Someone who believes that homosexuality is not immoral, but believes it is a dysfunction.
Actually I have more answers, but this question is just too toxic. So I'll go meta: Anyone who responds to this question either by saying that rationality is indicated either by signalling acceptance of more-outlandish sexuality, or by signalling intolerance, is indicating their own irrationality; they are turning this question into a tribal test.
Emotionally, I feel I have two tribes: the meatspace upper-middle-class collegiate culture and my Internet circle of acquaintances.
In the meatspace tribe, vanilla heterosexuality or homosexuality are considered normal and unremarkable, things like 2 girls 1 cup, goatse, etc. are considered disgusting/gross-out material - and I cannot remember anyone acknowledging anything else.
In the Internet tribe, sexual relations of any kind between consenting adults are considered fine provided that they are carried out in private, sexual intercourse between teenage mi...
Hi Clarisse, and Welcome to LessWrong! I've seen your blog, and I'm happy to see you commenting here. (I comment as "Doug S." on various feminism-related blogs - I'm not very prolific, but you may have seen a couple here and there.)
Heh. My tribal beliefs are from reading Spider Robinson books as a teen. Ciphergoth is an example of the sort of person I grew up thinking of as normal, and I've always felt a little guilty about not being bisexual. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to go outside that mainstream, which is one reason I went to the lengths of postulating legalized rape in Three Worlds Collide.
Presentation is endorsement, unless it's framed with disclaimers.
Let's return to the LGBTQ example. Consider the following potential sentences:
"Many people think of homosexuality as a sexual perversion. But there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly homoerotic to me:"
Would you call that a neutral statement? Would you claim so passionately that it revealed no bias on the part of the person who said it?
I made no moral accusations and I threatened no social rejection. I pointed out your bias. I did it with strong words; maybe I should apologize for that; I'm an orator, I don't usually run in specifically "rationalist" circles, and I'm used to a different kind of conversation.
In terms of discouraging discussion, here's what I think discourages discussion:
1) Any request for ideas that implies that people who have some experience with the matter at hand are "perverts" -- this insults and scares off people who could contribute to your di...
:::::::::: You don't know this site very well. We would discuss those questions if they seemed relevant. ::::::::::
Good!
I just think it's important for people who have these conversations to consider the point that "what's relevant" or "what's worthy of examination" is often, itself, socially constructed.
:::::::::: Can you see how this might reasonably connect to masochism in particular, and not sexuality in general? ::::::::::
Yes. But my concern is not masochism in general. I am responding to the ways in which sexual masochism has be...
:::::::::: Many people do think of BDSM as a sexual perversion. I didn't invent this reality; I just live here. ::::::::::
This answer strikes me as a bit facile. Sure, lots of people think of BDSM as a sexual perversion. Lots of people also consider it a sexual preference. You chose to use words that stigmatize BDSM, and you chose not to present words that don't stigmatize BDSM. You could have made the same point without using stigmatizing words. Stating that you have no opinion after the fact is an attempt to dodge responsibility for that.
The way we ...
Hi. I'm Clarisse Thorn, a BDSM educator and activist. I blog at [ http://clarissethorn.wordpress.com/ ]. Props to Michael Bishop for directing me to your post.
Wow, where to begin. I'll try not to get too upset, but for me, this was a really bad start to your post:
::::::::::: Many people think of masochism as a sexual perversion :::::::::::
Why did you start right out by referring to BDSM as a "sexual perversion"? Couldn't you have chosen some less judgmental words? Seriously, it would have been so easy. You could have just said "sexual...
I very often read things in this community that suggests that sexuality is very much not one of the matters on which they have succeeded in being rational.
For the record, I'm a practicing sadomasochist; I enjoy both sadism and masochism, and have a large range of paraphenalia to that end. I'm having an absolutely fantastic time with it, and though I know tastes differ, from where I'm sitting if you're not a sadomasochist then you're missing out on the great fun we're having.
It's been a long time since I logged into LW; I just saw this. Actually, I released a book this year in which I analyze manipulation fairly extensively through the lens of the pickup artist subculture. It's called Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2012/03/08/confessions-of-a-pickup-artist-chaser-now-available/