Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage—at least that’s the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you’re not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
(EDIT: Of course, blathering about “attractive women” on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance; but that’s probably meta-level thinking that’s beyond most people missing a heroin dosage. Men missing sex seem remarkably insensitive to what actually drives away women, just as women missing men are remarkably insensitive to such considerations as “Where does demand exceed supply?”)
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage—at least that’s the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you’re not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.
To use the food analogy, masturbation is like subsisting on flavorless but nutritionally adequate food, the proverbial “bread and water.” Sex with someone who finds you desirable is more like that rich, delicious dessert that advertisers hope you’ve been fantasizing about recently. (Note the with someone who finds you desirable. It’s important.)
If we have to use the drug metaphor, masturbation is more like giving a heroin addict all the methadone he wants.
To someone who deeply disdains human society, it probably is equivalent. Suppose that it were possible to soothe your hunger by just rubbing your stomach—how many people would do it and forgo food completely?
Pornography may reduce rape though I haven’t investigated the methodology too thoroughly. If true, it is certainly another sign that lack of sexual satisfaction is a big problem.
The heroin metaphor certainly entails exaggeration, but I’m undecided as to whether that makes it inappropriate. Do you have a proposed substitute?
In many contexts like this, we need to replace “sex” with “intimacy.” Or simply “attention.”
It’s not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we’re desired by somebody. From what I’ve read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren’t interested in that sort of thing.
It’s not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we’re desired by somebody. From what I’ve read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren’t interested in that sort of thing.
Actually, it’s something of a cliche that the more a sex worker is paid, the less important sex is the interaction, such that it becomes a smaller portion of the time spent, or perhaps doesn’t occur at all.
(Where my information comes from: my wife runs a “sex shop” (selling products, not people!), and I was once approached by one of her customers to do a website for a prostitute review service, and I looked over some of the review materials, as well as some existing review sites to understand the industry and its competition before I declined the job. A significant portion of what gets reviewed on these “hobbyist” sites (as they’re called) relate to a prositute’s personality and demeanor, not her physique or sexual proficiency per se. Certainly, this only correlates with what guys who post prostitute reviews on the internet want, but it’s an interesting correlation, nonetheless.)
I’ve heard that, too. As I said earlier, as far as I can tell, men tend to want girlfriends more than they want sex toys that have a woman’s body, and some women are better actors than others. If I were to hire an escort, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between someone who was genuinely interested in me and someone who was acting, and I don’t want to pay someone to deceive me.
Incidentally, there’s a disturbing similarity between hiring an escort and hiring a therapist—you’re paying someone to act like they’re interested in you, even if they’re not.
Of course, blathering about “attractive women” on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance
Now you sound like one of these scientists suggesting that the scientific community should pretend that religion and science are compatible, even though they believe that that statement is false, purely because doing so will upset the deluded ones.
Rationality and negation(pickup works to a significant degree) are about as incompatible as religion and science. We would expect based upon our understanding of evolutionary psychology, specifically about reproduction strategies for male and female animals that something like this would happen. AND on top of that we have the empirical evidence that companies are making money by selling pickup skills to males at $2000 for a weekend seminar.
I think that on LW, we should call a spade a spade, even if it upsets womens’ cherished beliefs about themselves.
I am personally glad that you wrote a long post shattering my cherished false beliefs about myself a while ago, even if it did upset me at the time and involved objectifying me.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage
There’s a few important differences (for instance, heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome), but I’m sure you know that.
if you’re not starving at the moment
Why would you assume that? Is there some reason it seems more likely to you that I’m having regular sex and therefore am completely without the ability to sympathize, than that I just don’t objectify people even if I haven’t had a fix of person lately?
heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome
Would that matter if you were missing a heroin dosage? Would you be able to pause that long to think about it, even if the actual consequence of your actions were to drive the heroin dosages away?
Why would you assume that?
To be blunt about this, human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare. Not nonexistent, but rare. A man experiencing or remembering the pain of sex deprivation is justified in assuming that the prior probabilities are strongly against a randomly selected woman being able to directly empathize with that pain.
human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare.
How in the world would this be possible to know, unless you’re using some kind of behaviorist account of pain?
I’d suggest reading the Hite Reports on Male / Female Sexuality, say. The number one complaint of married men, by far, is about insufficient frequency of sex.
Similarly: If the expression “After three days without sex, life becomes meaningless” doesn’t seem to square with your experience...
Similarly: The vast majority of people who pay money (the unit of caring) to alleviate sex deprivation are men.
Given the statistical evidence, the anecdotal evidence, and the obvious evo-psych rationale, I’m willing to draw conclusions about internal experience.
But drawing from this evidence that lack of sex for many (most?) men is emotionally equivalent to heroine withdraw seems a bit much.
In the very least if this were the case I would expect some direct evidence, rather than a list of things which could be chalked up to the differences in how men and women have been trained to spend money and words on the subject of sex.
I’ll see if I can find the Hite Reports. As for the other things you mention:
I have never heard that expression before. Do some people actually, seriously believe that life is literally meaningless after three days without sex [that involves another person, I assume, since if solo sex did the trick there would be no reason for anybody without a crippling disability to get to this point]? Why are there not more suicides, if this is the case?
I have read that comic before. I don’t think this demonstrates anything other than that the male characters are less picky about how they satisfy their desires than the female character. Suppose you deprived me and some other person of food for 24 hours and then put us in a room with a lot of mint candy. The other person would probably eat some mints; I wouldn’t, because eating mint causes me pain. Would you think this yielded information about how hunger felt to me and the other person? (Note: of course I would eat mint if I were starving or even about to suffer serious malnutrition, but you can’t die of deprivation of sex with other people.)
Women who are willing to have sex with strangers (which comprise just about 100% of the class of prostitutes) can, for the most part, get it for free (or get paid to have it!) with trivial ease. Of course fewer women pay for it: the thing that is for sale (sex with a stranger) is not what women tend to want.
It seems to me that the conclusion to draw isn’t (at least not necessarily) that men experience worse suffering when they don’t have sex, but that “sex” does not just mean “friction with a warm human body” to women, and so it can’t be had as easily as you think.
So from evidence that men, on average, report/perform greater suffering from lack of sex, you can conclude that a specific woman has never felt as much sexual frustration as a specific man, or indeed, anything similar enough to allow for empathy? That seems far from airtight.
It’s also worth noting that there are a great many men who seek physical and emotional intimacy from other men. So if your hypothesis is that men objectify their potential partners solely because their intimacy is temporarily unavailable, then a small but consistent portion of the partner-as-object-to-be-won rhetoric would be about men, which I have not observed.
You do realize, I hope, that there are more than 2 ways for sex to express itself in humans, and humans can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex. See XX male syndrome and Androgen insensitivity syndrome for just a couple of the many examples. Admittedly, generalizing from about 99% of the population doesn’t seem like too bad of an epistemic move, but it’s something to keep in mind.
What I wish you meant by this: ”...so of course we’re warming up the banhammer now!”
What you seem by this: ”...so we won’t be doing a thing to make this a space any less toxic for an inexplicably underrepresented majority.”
I was really hoping this would be a come-for-the-fan-fiction-stay-for-the-awesome-forum situation, but if this community’s priorities are accurately reflected (and please, please do prove me wrong) by the response “Come back and ask us to respect your humanity once everyone else has gotten their rocks off,” then that is...exceedingly disappointing.
Barring full-scale banhammer wielding… probably not, I’m afraid.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage—at least that’s the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you’re not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
(EDIT: Of course, blathering about “attractive women” on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance; but that’s probably meta-level thinking that’s beyond most people missing a heroin dosage. Men missing sex seem remarkably insensitive to what actually drives away women, just as women missing men are remarkably insensitive to such considerations as “Where does demand exceed supply?”)
Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.
Masturbation is not sex. If the only good thing about sex is having an orgasm, you’re doing it wrong!
(That’s not to say the analogy to heroin addiction is a reasonable one.)
No, but it should be similar enough to break the analogy to starvation or heroin deprivation.
Well, that seems right, but allow me to clarify.
To use the food analogy, masturbation is like subsisting on flavorless but nutritionally adequate food, the proverbial “bread and water.” Sex with someone who finds you desirable is more like that rich, delicious dessert that advertisers hope you’ve been fantasizing about recently. (Note the with someone who finds you desirable. It’s important.)
If we have to use the drug metaphor, masturbation is more like giving a heroin addict all the methadone he wants.
I’m just questioning the idea that masturbation is to sex-starved people as food is to actually starving people.
(Course, that’s not exactly what you said either.)
To someone who deeply disdains human society, it probably is equivalent. Suppose that it were possible to soothe your hunger by just rubbing your stomach—how many people would do it and forgo food completely?
Actually, if I didn’t have to eat, I probably wouldn’t.
Pornography may reduce rape though I haven’t investigated the methodology too thoroughly. If true, it is certainly another sign that lack of sexual satisfaction is a big problem.
The heroin metaphor certainly entails exaggeration, but I’m undecided as to whether that makes it inappropriate. Do you have a proposed substitute?
May I make a suggestion:
In many contexts like this, we need to replace “sex” with “intimacy.” Or simply “attention.”
It’s not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we’re desired by somebody. From what I’ve read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren’t interested in that sort of thing.
Actually, it’s something of a cliche that the more a sex worker is paid, the less important sex is the interaction, such that it becomes a smaller portion of the time spent, or perhaps doesn’t occur at all.
(Where my information comes from: my wife runs a “sex shop” (selling products, not people!), and I was once approached by one of her customers to do a website for a prostitute review service, and I looked over some of the review materials, as well as some existing review sites to understand the industry and its competition before I declined the job. A significant portion of what gets reviewed on these “hobbyist” sites (as they’re called) relate to a prositute’s personality and demeanor, not her physique or sexual proficiency per se. Certainly, this only correlates with what guys who post prostitute reviews on the internet want, but it’s an interesting correlation, nonetheless.)
I’ve heard that, too. As I said earlier, as far as I can tell, men tend to want girlfriends more than they want sex toys that have a woman’s body, and some women are better actors than others. If I were to hire an escort, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between someone who was genuinely interested in me and someone who was acting, and I don’t want to pay someone to deceive me.
Incidentally, there’s a disturbing similarity between hiring an escort and hiring a therapist—you’re paying someone to act like they’re interested in you, even if they’re not.
Now you sound like one of these scientists suggesting that the scientific community should pretend that religion and science are compatible, even though they believe that that statement is false, purely because doing so will upset the deluded ones.
Rationality and negation(pickup works to a significant degree) are about as incompatible as religion and science. We would expect based upon our understanding of evolutionary psychology, specifically about reproduction strategies for male and female animals that something like this would happen. AND on top of that we have the empirical evidence that companies are making money by selling pickup skills to males at $2000 for a weekend seminar.
I think that on LW, we should call a spade a spade, even if it upsets womens’ cherished beliefs about themselves.
I am personally glad that you wrote a long post shattering my cherished false beliefs about myself a while ago, even if it did upset me at the time and involved objectifying me.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Saying you could have expressed a proposition better isn’t disagreeing with the proposition.
Right. Specifics on “could have expressed a proposition better” would be of high utility/
There’s a few important differences (for instance, heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome), but I’m sure you know that.
Why would you assume that? Is there some reason it seems more likely to you that I’m having regular sex and therefore am completely without the ability to sympathize, than that I just don’t objectify people even if I haven’t had a fix of person lately?
Would that matter if you were missing a heroin dosage? Would you be able to pause that long to think about it, even if the actual consequence of your actions were to drive the heroin dosages away?
To be blunt about this, human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare. Not nonexistent, but rare. A man experiencing or remembering the pain of sex deprivation is justified in assuming that the prior probabilities are strongly against a randomly selected woman being able to directly empathize with that pain.
How in the world would this be possible to know, unless you’re using some kind of behaviorist account of pain?
I’d suggest reading the Hite Reports on Male / Female Sexuality, say. The number one complaint of married men, by far, is about insufficient frequency of sex.
Similarly: If the expression “After three days without sex, life becomes meaningless” doesn’t seem to square with your experience...
Similarly: http://www.wetherobots.com/2008/01/07/youve-been-misinformed/
Similarly: The vast majority of people who pay money (the unit of caring) to alleviate sex deprivation are men.
Given the statistical evidence, the anecdotal evidence, and the obvious evo-psych rationale, I’m willing to draw conclusions about internal experience.
But drawing from this evidence that lack of sex for many (most?) men is emotionally equivalent to heroine withdraw seems a bit much.
In the very least if this were the case I would expect some direct evidence, rather than a list of things which could be chalked up to the differences in how men and women have been trained to spend money and words on the subject of sex.
I’ll see if I can find the Hite Reports. As for the other things you mention:
I have never heard that expression before. Do some people actually, seriously believe that life is literally meaningless after three days without sex [that involves another person, I assume, since if solo sex did the trick there would be no reason for anybody without a crippling disability to get to this point]? Why are there not more suicides, if this is the case?
I have read that comic before. I don’t think this demonstrates anything other than that the male characters are less picky about how they satisfy their desires than the female character. Suppose you deprived me and some other person of food for 24 hours and then put us in a room with a lot of mint candy. The other person would probably eat some mints; I wouldn’t, because eating mint causes me pain. Would you think this yielded information about how hunger felt to me and the other person? (Note: of course I would eat mint if I were starving or even about to suffer serious malnutrition, but you can’t die of deprivation of sex with other people.)
Women who are willing to have sex with strangers (which comprise just about 100% of the class of prostitutes) can, for the most part, get it for free (or get paid to have it!) with trivial ease. Of course fewer women pay for it: the thing that is for sale (sex with a stranger) is not what women tend to want.
It seems to me that the conclusion to draw isn’t (at least not necessarily) that men experience worse suffering when they don’t have sex, but that “sex” does not just mean “friction with a warm human body” to women, and so it can’t be had as easily as you think.
So from evidence that men, on average, report/perform greater suffering from lack of sex, you can conclude that a specific woman has never felt as much sexual frustration as a specific man, or indeed, anything similar enough to allow for empathy? That seems far from airtight.
It’s also worth noting that there are a great many men who seek physical and emotional intimacy from other men. So if your hypothesis is that men objectify their potential partners solely because their intimacy is temporarily unavailable, then a small but consistent portion of the partner-as-object-to-be-won rhetoric would be about men, which I have not observed.
You do realize, I hope, that there are more than 2 ways for sex to express itself in humans, and humans can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex. See XX male syndrome and Androgen insensitivity syndrome for just a couple of the many examples. Admittedly, generalizing from about 99% of the population doesn’t seem like too bad of an epistemic move, but it’s something to keep in mind.
If I were missing my heroin dosage, I weren’t able to do all that smart discussion going on here.
What I wish you meant by this: ”...so of course we’re warming up the banhammer now!”
What you seem by this: ”...so we won’t be doing a thing to make this a space any less toxic for an inexplicably underrepresented majority.”
I was really hoping this would be a come-for-the-fan-fiction-stay-for-the-awesome-forum situation, but if this community’s priorities are accurately reflected (and please, please do prove me wrong) by the response “Come back and ask us to respect your humanity once everyone else has gotten their rocks off,” then that is...exceedingly disappointing.