Amen! If the guy isn’t confident enough to get over a little ‘hard to get’, then he’s probably inexperienced and not worth bothering with. Many women do this both consciously and unconsciously. However, “Leave me the fuck alone,” may be the unambiguous rejection signal you’re looking for.
Well, I mean that it’s a universal signal as opposed to varying in each person. There are many other signals that mean the same thing, but they are not universally applicable in all circumstances.
Okay then. For now, I suggest you consider the incentive structure that results from women who have held both of these positions at some time or another.
“Geez! Why can’t this guy take a hint and buzz off?”
“Pff, only a complete wuss would go away just because I asked him to. If he were worth my time he would have kept it up.”
This is an oversimplification of something very complex involving many subtle nuances. It’s sorta like saying Newton was wrong because a bowling ball falls faster than a feather… What is meant by asked for example. “Leave me alone” vs “I’m just going to have to walk across that room mister,” are not equivalent.
This is an oversimplification of something very complex involving many subtle nuances.
I’m sure it is, but just for the record, your explanation isn’t going to deconfuse any poor male who isn’t deconfused to begin with. (Perhaps you already know that.)
Well, pardon my frustration, but point of these questions is to make sense of and reveal these nuances, which is why the earlier answers you gave weren’t what I was looking for.
Obviously, if a woman says something sarcastic and teasing, that’s … flirting, not a rejection. The problem cases are more common and more ambiguous. If a request for a date is flatly turned down, how do you know if it’s a test, or if further pursuit constitutes harassment? If I’m ignored, is that a test, or am I beting told to go away?
It may seem clever to use this as a filter, but, as I think I’ve demonstrated, there are disastrous consequences to it. You can’t simultaneously promote “No means No, morons!” and “I like when guys aren’t deterred by rejection.”
The stakes are even higher when it comes to date rape, but I’m sure as hell not going to spell out the mapping on that one.
I think it’s safe to say that the majority of women who flatly reject an offer for a date or continually ignore an advance, do NOT want to be pursued further. There are exceptions, and some people do change their minds, but if that’s what you meant by ‘rejection,’ then No means No. Hard to get is a more complicated dance than “Will you go out with me,” “Uhhh.… you’re not my type. No.”
But it’s not nearly as simple as you just portrayed it.
I mean, we all like to feel superior as we shake our heads in contempt at the poor guy who just won’t give up. She’s obviously not into you, man! She told you “no”. Just let it go!
Er … until we look over there and see the women talking glowingly about how charming and romantic it was for her husband/fiance/current boyfriend to keep pursuing her even when she flatly told him no, and is now glad that he didn’t take her seriously then.
Given those cases, it’s quite a bit more understandable why a man would refuse to give up on such an “obvious” case.
Let’s assume for a moment that these cases are exceptional. (I would in any case agree that they’re not the norm, but not rare either.) Does that exceptionality not suffice to explain the commonality of overpersistent (and overcautious) men?
Of the people heading to Hollywood with big dreams, the ones that become movie stars are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
Of the people working up the corporate ladder, millionaire executives/VPs are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
Of the people trying to become professional athletes, those that can make a living at it are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
So the “woman who rejects firmly and later changes her mind” is the exception? So what. It’s still understandable why such cases would have a disproportionate motive force.
But I supsect that if there’s any bias in counting up these cases, it would understate their availability in our recollection. Remember, once the suitor has become “the good guy”, the halo effect kicks in. See now, my guy never acted in contravention of the “No means No” rule. See, I didn’t give a real no. My guy isn’t one of those freaks who would disobey the rules we promote...
That’s assuming she continues to remember her impression of him at the time of rejection in the first place.
By the way: of the people voting on my comments in this discussion, your downvotes are the exception ;-)
Of the people heading to Hollywood with big dreams, the ones that become movie stars are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
Actually, they largely don’t. There is such a thing as overconfidence bias, you know. Most people would be better off ex-ante if they did not try to become top executives, movie stars, or pro athletes. Similarly, contraventing flat, “just say no” refusals is not a rationally optimal choice.
I know—I didn’t mean they’re justified by a standard rational utility maximization analysis. The point was just that it’s consistent with general overconfidence/miscalibration we observe in people in many other areas, even under the unfavorable assumptions thomblake gave.
ETA: Note that I said the incentives explain the numerous people who compete, not that the incentives justify such action. Also, I said it was “disproportionate motive force”. And no, I didn’t edit the original post just so it would have all that. :-P
Perhaps you’re hearing these stories because they’re exceptional?
More to the point, how do we trust these second- and third-hand stories to be reported accurately? My guess is that the “just say no” refusals were anything but, and that the stories are extremized. At the very least, the participants would have had plenty of side information which we’d know nothing about.
Me neither. But I do often hear about such cases second-hand. So even if these cases aren’t common, they may have a big impact on those who witness them.
Obviously, if a woman says something sarcastic and teasing, that’s … flirting, not a rejection. The problem cases are more common and more ambiguous? If a request for a date is flatly turned down, how do you know if it’s a test, or if further pursuit constitutes harassment. If I’m ignored, is that a test, or am I beting told to go away?
Someone who says “I’m just going to have to walk across that room mister” or similar, is not necessarily being sarcastic/flirtatious. More generally, there’s genuine uncertainty about “hard to get” plays: the best that can be said about them is that they are not solid evidence either way, although they do “up the ante”, so they’re not without effect from a “strategic” point of view.
Luckily, a reasonably knowledgeable guy generally has collected enough bits of evidence to make a proper decision. Nevertheless, even the most confident pick-up artist would take a statement such as “leave me alone” at face value unless there was very solid evidence to the contrary.
Most guys have the opposite problem: they are overconfident (or more rarely, underconfident) about their counterparty’s interest in them, and find it hard to properly update their estimate in the face of available information. The only way around this problem is for such people to train in LessWrong-style debiasing and improve their “dating/seduction/etc.” skills, as detailed in the OP. Focusing on the “nuance” of verbal statements is a mistake.
Nevertheless, even the most confident pick-up artist would take a statement such as “leave me alone” at face value unless there was very solid evidence to the contrary.
Yes.
Most guys have the opposite problem: they are overconfident (or more rarely, underconfident) about their counterparty’s interest in them, and find it hard to properly update their estimate in the face of available information.
What leads to this impression? My impression is that the majority of males are underconfident. But it may vary depending on subculture and peer group.
Tangent, but there are two different kinds of “overconfidence”:
Having beliefs that are more strongly peaked than is justified
Believing more positive things about yourself and your abilities than is justified
If you’re 95% sure that you will not be President of the USA, then you’re underconfident in the first sense but overconfident in the second sense.
The two sometimes go together in that if you believe you’re better at finding out the truth than you are, you’ll have more strongly peaked probability distributions than you should.
Nevertheless, even the most confident pick-up artist would take a statement such as “leave me alone” at face value unless there was very solid evidence to the contrary.
Yes.
Not yes. I remember listening to one PUA (don’t remember the name, has a strong foreign accent) say that if they tell you to go away, you should tease them about it, and not go away.
And for him, it apparently works.
Great job there, women. I just love when I can’t tell if you’re serious that I should go away.
If a man can become accustomed to ignoring women’s requests for him to leave, making the judgment that his desires are more important than her sense of security, then does he still count as a “respectful man”? If not, then his breeding successfully doesn’t increase the number of “respectful” genes in the gene pool either.
The same men that are currently respecting women’s requests to go away, are generally respectful in numerous other ways, such as not beating them. If the same men simply invert their rules of engagement with respect to women who initially [1] tell them to go away, they are still going to be respectful in all of these other ways; it’s just that they won’t be at a reproductive disadvantage.
(Even if you posit some effect whereby these respectful men infect the rest of their personality by doing this, they’re still more respectful than the kind of man who doesn’t currently obey requests to leave.)
Of course, it would be even better if women only told suitors to go away when they really meant it, and strongly avoided all men that refuse to (even if they change their mind about him), but why should they change? I mean, this practice really only hurts non-humans such as high-functioning autistics.
[1] Obviously, there’s some point where even disrespectful men and this PUA go away.
I’m curious as to why you think that; so far as I’m aware, the general stereotype of autistics is that they’re “logical” and have no natural skill for understanding social interactions (which is, of course, both imprecise and incomplete, though in my case they’re probably pretty fair descriptions). According to that stereotype, at least, I would think polyamory would be proportionally quite popular among autistics (and judging by the way in which it clusters with other subcultures with disproportionate rates of autism-spectrum personalities like computer programmers and science fiction fans, this does seem to be true to at least some extent).
For what it’s worth, my diagnosis was AS and there seems to still be quite a bit of uncertainty about its relation to autism; the competing viewpoints I’ve heard are that AS is on the “autism spectrum”, that there’s no meaningful distinction between AS and high-functioning autism, and that AS and autism don’t have much to do with each other at all. I lend the most credence to the first view, but not by much; the case for it is almost as unsupported as the other two. In any case, I’m not emotionally attached to either label.
Ahh, now I see what you were getting at. Much as I hate to say it, I think you’re giving me too much credit. While I’ve had a thoroughly delightful amount of success at polyamorous dating, I’ve only ever dated one person who I’d successfully seduced away from monogamy; she’s also the most serious and long-term S.O. I’ve had. The other polyamorous relationships I’ve had (of which there have been 4-7, I think, depending on where you draw the line) have all been with people who already considered themselves to be poly.
And while I have had a hand in convincing a couple other friends and acquaintances to give polyamory a shot, I don’t think I deserve most of the credit there, as the social circles I’m involved with have plenty of other poly people, many more persuasive (to most people; I’m not sure whether rationalists are a special case) than I.
That just pushes my confusion back a level. If you’re AS, how are you able to have such enormous social circles and ease of making strong enough personal connections?
Again, I wouldn’t say enormous. When I say my social circles have lots of poly people in them, I’m really talking in terms of proportions. Of the 10-15 people I have strong personal connections with (“friends”), about half are poly. Among folks with whom I have less strong connections (“acquaintances”), that fraction is a bit lower, but still above that of an equivalently-sized random sample of liberal, geeky, college-educated people between the ages of 18 and 25.
But yes, relative to other AS people, I am very socially successful, by dint of effort, analysis, and at least a decade of concentrated trial and error. I wasn’t born with a fully-functional socialization module, but I’ve gotten pretty good at emulating one; combined with my many other enthralling character traits (like arrogance, which was also a learned behavior), I tend to do pretty well in many social situations. I also try to avoid (the many) social situations I don’t yet understand well, which leads to my general social competence appearing to be greater than it is.
Thesecomments may provide further context and/or explanation.
Point taken. But is the gene pool really at much risk? It seems clear that the modern mating environment already penalizes abusive/disrespectful men more than almost all environments since the agricultural revolution. By the way, do you really care that much about the gene pool, or was that just a stray comment you threw out to vent your frustration?
I agree that it would be better if women behaved the way you described. But currently, women who behave that way are also penalized; they can lose status through being labelled as a “bitch” or “dyke.” This would change if direct aggressiveness in women (instead of passive aggressiveness) was more socially acceptable. But as it is, a woman who genuinely wants a man to leave will often eventually give in to his persistence just to avoid coming off as cold or unreceptive, even if she doesn’t really come to like him much more. Would the kind of relationship that ensues from such an encounter be the type you want?
By the way, do you really care that much about the gene pool, or was that just a stray comment you threw out to vent your frustration?
I care that being nice is a self-limiting policy. It would be one thing if the effects were limited to that interaction. But a policy of turning over all the opportunities to disrespectful men, because they’re disrespectful, is only delaying and amplifying the problem, not working toward a solution.
In other words, do you get to ignore to ignore legitimate criticisms of destructive policies because the person who makes them isn’t flawless? Yes, I think you do.
I didn’t mean any personal insult (I didn’t even mean to call you a Nice Guy, which isn’t itself an insult). The insinuation that you meant anything other than what you said was inappropriate, and I apologise. The argument ad genome is still silly though, the rate of technological advance is now so fast compared to the time-scale that natural selection operates on that we no longer have to worry about natural selection as a factor in our evolution. I do agree that destructive policies should be countered on a social level.
We don’t need to worry much about population genetic changes due to selective pressures now… because they already happened. There is already dimorphism between the sexes: on average, men have greater upper body strength and slightly higher aggressiveness. Basically, on average men are bigger physically, and they have the potential to be bigger jerks.
According to David Geary’s Male, Female, the dominant hypothesis for greater male strength is sexual selection. Since women were more selective, men had to compete more fiercely, and strength was an adaptation for their competition. If a selection pressure was strong enough to create physical sexual dimorphism, then it was also strong enough to create mental sexual dimorphism, which could be the source of greater male aggressiveness (and greater male systemizing).
So we don’t need to worry that sex differences in preferences will lead males to evolve into being bigger jerks, because it probably already happened before we were even homo sapiens. We are having this conversation over 200,000 years too late.
So we don’t need to worry that sex differences in preferences will lead males to evolve into being bigger jerks, because it probably already happened before we were even homo sapiens. We are having this conversation over 200,000 years too late.
See the second part of my reply to Wrongbot: “gene pool” is probably the wrong term to use here, but there are clearly societal effects that result from respectful men “erring on the side of not being a dick”—that practice becomes more common, taught to later cohorts, and the dating pool gets saturated with disrespectful men.
And again, though one could say that “erring on the side of being a dick” means being disrespecful, it would be wrong because the man would still be respectful in all other ways.
Yes, I find your “cultural evolution” argument plausible. Even within a cohort of men, there will be a learning effect, where successful behaviors are learned by operant conditioning and observational learning.
According to David Geary’s Male, Female, the dominant hypothesis for greater male strength is sexual selection.
This sounds wrong to me, but maybe my intuition is failing. I had thought that the obvious reason for greater male strength is that men don’t need to devote resources to having babies, and that physical strength is generally an adaptive use of resources. So it’s not that men are stronger, it’s that women are weaker: calories that they could spend building muscle have been diverted to baby-making, and to preparing for it.
These differences in skeletal structure and the associated throwing competencies, combined with the large male advantage in arm and upper body strength, indicate strong selection pressures for these physical competencies in men. In fact, these sex differences are consistent with the view that the evolution of male-male competition in humans was influenced by the use of projectile (e.g., spears) and blunt force (e.g., clubs) weapons (Keeley, 1996; see also the Physical modules section of Chapter 8); during agonistic encounters, male chimpanzees often use projectile weapons (e.g., stones) and sticks as clubs and do so much more frequently than female chimpanzees (Goodall, 1986). The finding that men have a higher threshold and greater tolerance for physical pain than do women, on average, is also in keeping with the view that male-male competition is related to human physical dimorphisms, given that success at such competition is almost certainly facilitated by the ability to endure physical pain (Berkley, 1997; Velle, 1987); of course, women can endure considerable pain under some circumstances, such as childbirth.
Nonetheless, it might be argued that these physical sex differences have emerged from a sex difference in the division of labor, such as hunting, rather than direct male-male competition (e.g., Frost, in press; Kolakowski & Malina, 1974). Although the sexual division of labor contributes to the differential mortality of men and women in preindustrial societies and might influence the reproductive variance of men, comparative studies of the relation between physical dimorphisms and male-male competition suggest that the sexual division of labor is not likely to be the primary cause of these physical dimorphisms (see also The evolution of sex differences and the sexual division of labor section of Chapter 3). Recall, for primates and many other species, there is a consistent relation between physical sex differences and the nature of intrasexual competition (see Chapter 3). For monogamous primates—those with little direct male-male competition over access to mating partners—there are little or no differences in the physical size or the pattern of physical development of females and males (Leigh, 1995). For nonmonogamous primates—those characterized by direct male-male competition over access to mating partners—males are consistently larger than females, and this difference in physical size is consistently related, across species, to the intensity of physical male-male competition and not to the foraging strategy of the species (Clutton-Brock et al., 1977; Mitani et al., 1996; Plavcan & van Schaik, 1997a).
...
On the basis of the sex differences in parental investment (Chapter 4), the nature of intrasexual competition and in mate choice criteria (Chapter 5) in adulthood, sex differences in the self-initiated developmental experiences of boys are girls are expected and are found. Although there are, of course, many similarities in the childhood experiences of boys and girls, there are also considerable differences. Girls and boys show different patterns of physical development (Tanner, 1990), different play interests and styles, as well as different social behaviors and motives, and many of these differences can be readily understood in terms of sexual selection in general and intrasexual competition in particular (Darwin, 1871).
As an example, the delayed physical maturation of boys, relative to girls, and the sex difference in the timing, duration, and intensity of the pubertal growth spurt follow the same pattern as is found in other nonmonogamous primates (Leigh, 1995, 1996). Across these primate species, the sex differences in these features of physical maturation are consistently related to the intensity of physical male-male competition, as contrasted with any sex differences in foraging strategy (Mitani et al., 1996). The sex difference in the pattern of human physical competencies, such as a longer forearm and greater upper body strength in men than in women, is also readily explained in terms of selection for male-on-male aggression, selection that involved the use of projectile and blunt force weapons (Keeley, 1996). Stated more directly, the sex differences in physical development and physical competencies have almost certainly been shaped by sexual selection, and the majority of these differences have resulted from male-male competition over access to mates (Tanner, 1992); of course, some physical sex differences, such as the wider pelvis in women, have been shaped by natural selection.
It is very likely that many of the sex differences in play interests and social behaviors have also been shaped by sexual selection. The sex differences in rough-and-tumble play, exploratory behavior and size of the play range, the tendency of boys to form coalitions in their competitive activities with other boys, and the formation of within-coalition dominance hierarchies are also patterns that are associated with male-male competition in other primates, particularly primates in which males are the philopatric sex (Goodall, 1986; Smith, 1982). In this view, all of these features of boys’ play and social behavior involve a preparation for later within-group dominance striving and coalition formation for intergroup aggression. Through parenting practices, such as degree of physical discipline, the selective imitation of competitive activities, and actual experiences within same-sex groups, boys learn how to best achieve within-group social dominance and practice the specific competencies associated with male-male competition in their particular culture. They learn how to achieve cultural success (e.g., by leading raids on other villages or becoming a star football player).
Not all developmental sex differences are related to male-male competition, however. For instance, the relational aggression that is common in girls’ groups might be a feature of female-female competition and a number of other physical and behavioral sex differences that become evident during development have likely been shaped by natural selection or mate choice. The sex difference, favoring boys, in manipulative and exploratory object-oriented play appears to be related to the evolution of tool use and a sex difference, favoring men, in the range of tool-related activities in adulthood. Although it is not certain, these sex differences have likely been shaped, in part, by natural selection (e.g., through a sex difference in the foraging strategies of our ancestors). Similarly, the sex difference in play parenting, favoring girls, reflects the later sex difference in parental investment, favoring women, and has almost certainly been shaped by natural selection (Pryce, 1995). Finally, many of the physical changes associated with puberty, such as the development of a masculine jaw in men and relatively large breasts in women, have likely been shaped by the mate choice preferences of the opposite sex and might be condition-dependent indictors of physical and genetic health (Thornhill & Müller, 1997).
Thanks for tracking that down. I’m more sympathetic to this point of view than I was, but I think that one of its premises is unfounded. From your selection:
The sex difference in the pattern of human physical competencies, such as a longer forearm and greater upper body strength in men than in women, is also readily explained in terms of selection for male-on-male aggression, selection that involved the use of projectile and blunt force weapons (Keeley, 1996).
That citation may answer my doubt, but this argument seems to be undermined by the extensive use of weapons early homo sapiens made while hunting, a point where they diverged pretty sharply from other primates. Weapon-use was also involved in male-male aggression, yes, but it doesn’t seem overwhelmingly clear that sexual selection was the primary factor.
That citation may answer my doubt, but this argument seems to be undermined by the extensive use of weapons early homo sapiens made while hunting, a point where they diverged pretty sharply from other primates.
Other primates used weapons, too. Here is a famous one. Was the target of the first man-thrown projectile an animal while hunting, or another man? Who knows, but once one use was discovered, the second probably followed soon after.
Weapon-use was also involved in male-male aggression, yes, but it doesn’t seem overwhelmingly clear that sexual selection was the primary factor.
Sexual selection has two components: intersexual selection (mate choice based on preferences of the opposite sex) and intrasexual competition/selection (competition within members of your own sex. If weapon-use was related to male-male aggression, then it was related to the intrasexual competition component of sexual selection.
Clearly, weapon-use would be beneficial both for hunting and warfare. But I wonder if these selection pressures were stronger in warfare? Animals don’t throw spears back at you.
Furthermore, even if male weapon-use is adapted for hunting, that doesn’t necessary mean we are only seeing pressures from natural selection, not sexual selection also. As far as I remember from one of my anthropology classes, most of hunter-gatherer calories in certain societies don’t come from hunting. The hypothesis is that male hunting skills aren’t emphasized because of their importance for feeding people, which could be acted on by natural selection; rather, hunting had become yet another domain where males competed with each other to gain status and attract females. I can try to find a source on this.
Right. I don’t disagree that male-male aggression played some role. I am just uncertain about whether it exerted a stronger selection pressure than the natural selection effect of hunting ability on survival.
The sudden adoption of weapons which required upper body strength doesn’t provide much evidence to distinguish between the two.
And don’t feel obligated to go out of your way to track down sources for me; I’d prefer to know more about this issue, ceteris paribus, but I don’t think it’s terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
See the second part of my reply to WrongBot: though genetic selection, you are correct, isn’t going to quickly produce a higher fraction of jerks, there is still a memetic effect, and one from dating pool saturation, and they suffice to show that “unilateral disarmament” just makes the problem worse.
“Nice Guy[TM]” is a particular term of abuse in feminist circles, where it means, roughly, “someone who is only being nice to you because he wants to get in your pants (and will probably react badly if you make it clear that he won’t be able to).”
That’s a harsher definition of “Nice Guy” than the one I absorbed from the portion of the feminist interweb that I’ve read so far, I understood it to mean (and used it to mean) a guy who is unattractive but thinks that he ought to be attractive since he is polite and considerate.
Hey cowards—you can vote me down all you want, if that makes you feel better. It still won’t change the f’ed up incentive structure that results from women favoring men who trivialize of their rejections.
That is the real problem, not the fact that I’m talking about it.
I didn’t downvote you for articulating an admittedly fucked up incentive structure. I downvoted you for bitterly criticizing all women because you find the behavior of some women to be inconvenient.
(Tangent: why dance around “fuck”? We all know what you meant, and I’m pretty sure this community has figured out that particular words aren’t intrinsically evil.)
If you want to know what to do about the fucked up incentive structure that so irks you, it’s really quite simple: don’t be a dick. If you have to run the risk of ruining someone’s evening or making them feel unsafe, that’s really not worth a minor bump to your odds of getting laid on a particular night out.
I didn’t downvote you for articulating an admittedly fucked up incentive structure. I downvoted you for bitterly criticizing all women because you find the behavior of some women to be inconvenient. … you have to run the risk of ruining someone’s evening or making them feel unsafe, that’s really not worth a minor bump to your odds of getting laid on a particular night out.
1) It is appropriate to target women in general with this critcism. Even if they don’t engage in this kafkaesque practice, they fail to criticize women for promoting it, even as they complain about the (predictable) results of this policy.
When I dislike a practice common among “my own”, I criticize my own, even and especially if I’m pure as snow on that issue. That goes double for when I criticize the countermeasures that only exist because of this practice. Why should I expect any less from women?
2) It’s not about what I want, or about inconviences. If the good men unilaterally disarm by following your policy, their numbers get thinned out over time, as typically happens under unilateral disarmament. Why do you consider that to be a pro-woman policy?
You’re going to have to present some evidence that “good” men are systematically disadvantaged in getting relationships if you want this to be a universally accepted premise in this discussion. But if we’re only speaking anecdotally, then in my experience jerks find it easier to get laid, but good men find it easier to obtain long term relationships involving children. Anyhow, if you want to bring up the betterment of the gene pool as a serious argument, then you have to prove that abusive men are at more of a reproductive advantage than they were historically.
And how do you get “unilateral disarmament” from “going away when a woman tells me to go away” anyway? What about the relationships that ensue from encounters that both partners enjoy and want to continue? Hint: the majority of healthy relationships.
Women can’t change the way they behave until they’re assured that behaving with assurance and aggressiveness won’t penalize them socially or put them at risk of violence (since women can’t back up their assertiveness with physical force). You’re severely oversimplifying the issue if you think it’s just a matter of women “choosing” to behave differently than they do.
You’re going to have to present some evidence that “good” men are systematically disadvantaged in getting relationships if you want this to be a universally accepted premise in this discussion.
I did—the PUA I mentioned. I can cite more if you want.
Anyhow, if you want to bring up the betterment of the gene pool as a serious argument, then you have to prove that abusive men are at more of a reproductive advantage than they were historically.
That seems like an unnecessarily high threshold to meet. If a policy is destructive on its face, I needn’t wait for the damage to suggest it not be done.
And how do you get “unilateral disarmament” from “going away when a woman tells me to go away” anyway?
That’s game-theoretic terminology. “Uniltareral disarmament” refers to abandoning a selfish strategy (analogous to giving up your weapons in an international conflict), irrespective of whether the other players abandon it as well. I contend that giving up the strategy of “persisting after being told to go away” is a case of UD.
Hint: the majority of healthy relationships.
Well, that’s what we all wish were true and want to believe anyway. Recalling the earlier part of the thread I resurrected, there is a non-trivial number of cases of healthy relationships that originated from excessive persistence (edit: sorry, sentence wasn’t complete first time around).
Women can’t change the way they behave until they’re assured that behaving with assurance and aggressiveness won’t penalize them socially or put them at risk of violence (since women can’t back up their assertiveness with physical force).
What? Only telling a suitor to go away when you really mean it is aggressiveness? The entire problem I’m citing is that women tell suitors to go away in more cases than they really mean (at least retrospectively). That would imply that any problem would be in the opposite direction!
You’re severely oversimplifying the issue if you think it’s just a matter of women “choosing” to behave differently than they do.
I didn’t say that it was. Remember, the problem I cite is not that women reject when they don’t really mean it, but that they do so and also complain about men who ignore their rejections. You really can’t have it both ways.
Please do cite more. Understand that your claims are difficult for me to just accept, because in my experience when women offer men a flat refusal, in the vast majority of cases they mean no. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but you seem to be implying that when women offer a flat refusal, there’s a significant, even close to 50% chance that they actually mean yes. You need more evidence than the word of a PUA or an anecdote about a woman you know to support that claim for people who haven’t had the same experiences as you.
1) It is appropriate to target women in general with this critcism. Even if they don’t engage in this kafkaesque practice, they fail to criticize women for promoting it, even as they complain about the (predictable) results of this policy.
When I dislike a practice common among “my own”, I criticize my own. That goes double for when I criticize the countermeasure that only exist because of this practice. Why should I expect any less from women?
People generally treat criticisms of one’s own group differently from criticisms of other groups, though which is considered to be more acceptable varies. Compare “America: love it or leave it” and the reclamation of racial slurs, for example. I generally lean more towards the latter camp because, ceteris paribus, criticisms that come from within a group are less likely to have untoward motivations.
2) It’s not about what I want, or about inconviences. If the good men unilaterally disarm by following your policy, their numbers get thinned out over time, as typically happens under unilateral disarmament. Why do you consider that to be a pro-woman policy?
I’m sorry, but the genetic argument is ridiculous. Even 500 years would be a preposterously short amount of time for a selection pressure this weak to have a significant effect, and I find it trivially unlikely that humans will both exist and not have mastered genetic engineering (assuming genetics are even still relevant) after we’ve seen another five centuries of progress.
People generally treat criticisms of one’s own group differently from criticisms of other groups, though which is considered to be more acceptable varies. …
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don’t mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
“I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?”
Right?
I’m sorry, but the genetic argument is ridiculous. Even 500 years would be a preposterously short amount of time for a selection pressure this weak to have a significant effect, …
Phrasing my point in terms of a gene pool might be imprecise, but there are relevant effects at all the relevant levels.
For one thing, the genetic effects are augmented by memetic effects. That is, it’s not that there’s just a “disrepect women” gene that is being selected for. It’s that children will learn from their parents, even if they don’t say, “Hey, you’ve got to ignore women who tell you to go away.”
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
So there are enough natural selection-related effects that even if you ignore the purely genetic effects—which as you point out, are going to be minimal—that we do have to worry about the propagation of disrespectful men as a result of respectful men not using all the effective strategies that the former use.
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
I’ve realized the same issue myself. At least, the “dating pool dominated by disrespectful men” part. It may not currently be the case that women believe that their only option is a disrespectful man. But I have noticed that some women seem to conflate high levels of care for their comfort and consent with wimpiness or a lack of masculinity.
If scrupulous men restrain themselves out of deontological moral principles, even if it’s the “right” thing to do, what is the effect on the larger system? The effect is that our good little deontologists may select themselves out of the dating pool, leaving only men who are less scrupulous. That’s good for women, how, exactly?
Silas is right that the incentive structure is broken. There are incentives for men to engage in advances that take risks with women’s comfort levels (high-risk, high-reward), to fulfill common female preferences for excitement or being “swept off their feet.” I’m not completely sold on Silas’ specific example, because I don’t think that on average there is a great benefit to pursuing past a rejection on an approach, but I think these double-binds occur in other areas (for instead, asking permission for a kiss). The problem is that for men to “disarm” themselves of such behavior, it puts them at a pragmatic disadvantage vs. men who don’t, at least with typical heterosexual women (so if you’re a geeky woman reading this, remember that this criticism is probably not about you).
Another problem is that women who respond in a way that incentivizes men taking risks with their comfort levels is that their responses “vote” for a set of norms that is counter to the interests of other women. If it’s correct that the majority of women respond this way, then we may be seeing a tyranny of the majority where their needs for certain male behaviors and outlooks dominate the needs of other women. It’s tempting to suggest that women get together for a big pow-pow, and come up with a unified set of norms for how they like to be approached, or at least with ways to signal their preference sets in advance… then get back to men. Of course, that’s impossible in the real world.
From the perspective of morality, we tend to look at the agents of a morally-questionable behavior, which are men in this case. Yet on a societal level, it’s just not going to work very well to try to persuade people to throw away utility for an above-average level of scruples that people they are interacting with don’t really seem to care about. To actually change society, it is necessary to look at the patterns of incentives that people are under, and the source of the incentives. In other words, we need to think more like economists and psychologists, and less like moral philosophers.
I like the careful way you’ve picked this apart and have upvoted your comment.
However, I’m wary that the logic has no bottom. If everyone gets worse to compete (there is no reason to suppose that only men who are scrupulous, or even only men who suppose themselves scrupulous, will do this), where is the floor? You have to hard-code in some deontic principle to prevent everyone from trending less and less careful. Depending on how fast things change, female choice on the whole could become irrelevant (if you ignore her when she says “no” once, and then ignore her twice to compete, and then four times because everyone got the last memo and you don’t stand out anymore, and then...). If that happens, there’s no way for the entire female gender to go “oh, crap! We don’t like this at all and will start preferring sweet guys to incentive the behavior we want!” Female preference no longer needs to enter into the equation if ignoring it is the way to “succeed”. Yes, this is a horror story; but I’m not actually sure it doesn’t resemble things that happen on a smaller scale in some places.
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
It’s fun to watch you discover the visceral horror of natural selection, especially sexual selection. Yea that’s right, there is no ground floor, you fall forever. If females exhibit even a mild preference for bigger tails, or bigger brains, or higher persistence, or whatever else, then in relatively few generations the tails or brains or persistence will grow preposterously huge.
About your last paragraph: everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around. A population’s changes depend on the mating criteria of females, not the mating criteria of males.
everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around.
Although I have said “chooser” and “chosen” wherever possible, the terms map onto female and male in most species. Male choice does occur, however, in monogamous (or quasi-monogamous) species like sea horses and humans, where both mates have a similar interest in their brood and are willing to spend time assessing, and being assessed by, potential mates. A very few species thoroughly reverse the usual pattern, making females compete for access to males. Mormon cricket females in food-poor areas actually fight to obtain males’ packages of edible sperm, while the coy males refuse about half the copulations they are offered. Among jacanas, a lily-trotting waterbird, males incubate the eggs while females fight with one another and guard their current males. Moorhen females are larger and brighter than males and more likely to fight and court. Small moorhen males are actually in better condition than big ones, and spend more time incubating. Females compete most for small fat males!
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
No, because if you successfully convince most men to do this, then you will actually increase the selection pressure towards aggressive courting behavior.
That’s the bit that some men get so bitter about—from their perspective, proposals like yours look just like deliberate attempts to weed the “nice guys” out of the gene pool, or at least the dating pool. Thus, the conspiracy theories about how women, the media, and “society” at large are collaborating to give men bad dating advice that increases selection pressures towards “bad boys”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the advice.
(Personally, I think it’s silly to ascribe to malice in this situation what is adequately explained by failure to think in such a systemic and evolutionary fashion… which is too high a bar for the average person, regardless of gender.)
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
I, personally, can’t have more then a trivial effect on “the success of the ones who say ‘no’ and don’t mean it,” but I can have a large effect on my own dating success, simply because there are millions of the former and only one of the latter. A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
Yup. And I’m not (yet) speaking about what is the most moral solution. Maybe it’s the only “moral” solution for men to boycott women who incentivize male behavior that puts their comfort levels (and those of other women) at risk. Still, I think we can only decide the moral solution once we understand the practical problem.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
Yup. And not just boycotting for “lying” (or misstating preferences), but for incentivizing any behavior that takes risks with women’s comfort levels. If someone wants to ask men to unilaterally disarm themselves of this behavior, that’s fine, but they need to know the consequences of what they are asking, and that it will doom men who listen to spend long periods in saintly celibacy while women compete over less scrupulous men and form seemingly normal and happy relationships with them.
“Follow our moral prescriptions that society doesn’t believe are necessary, and martyr your dating life while changing nothing about society! Sign up here!”
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
Exactly. The ability of individual men like you and me to circumvent this problem, and find women who don’t have problematic preferences sets, doesn’t make the problem go away on a societal level. There are only so many women without those problematic preference sets to go round.
Yes, this applies to apes as well. If an attractive woman offered me sex and I refused (most likely due to being busy with something or someone else), I’d want her to offer it again later. But in refusing I don’t lie about my preferences: if I really mean to answer “never” I say “never”, and if I mean “not now” I will say “not now”. This is a frequent complaint leveled at human females: they often say words to the effect of “never” but later behave as if they’d said “not now”, and vice versa.
I can see why that would be troubling as well. While User:Alicorn has provided clear reasoning why a human could reasonably turn down apey things—just as I might turn down paperclips in the right circumstances—it still does not make sense to claim you desire no paperclips, when you simply want to take possession of the paperclips later.
Apes often use words to achieve their goals, not just to make true information known. Claiming a falsehood may be beneficial. The ape may not even understand that it’s making a false claim. For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it). But even though such behavior is advantageous for individual female apes, ape society as a whole could benefit from denouncing it.
For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it).
The antecedent doesn’t seem likely to be true to me: wouldn’t a high value male have lots of opportunities for mating, and thus not bother wasting time persisting in the face of someone who doesn’t seem interested?
Grossly simplified, it works like this. If you’re a low-value woman, you won’t be testing a high-value man for persistence. If you’re a high-value woman, a high-value man will still need persistence to get you. So being persistent doesn’t hurt the man in either case.
Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it was in the middle of manufacturing a larger batch via a process that could not safely be interrupted, but want the opportunity to recur when it was finished; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that the offerer would, contingent on its acceptance, destroy a larger number of paperclips, but want the opportunity to recur when the destroyable paperclips were in the safe zone; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that, by acting unpredictably/as though it has high standards for numbers of paperclips an offer must include to be accepted, it would be offered more paperclips.
All of these scenarios have analogues to primate acceptance of offers to mate. (“I’m taken”; “he looks like he’d cause negative utility to me”; “I can’t just take every offer that comes by or people will think I’m a slut and nobody decent will want me”.)
The most relevant scenario, however, is not one that would cause Clippy to reject paperclips under analogous circumstances. Clippy values paperclips qua paperclips and is less picky about them than the typical human is about romantic/sexual relationships. I can’t think of a reason Clippy would reject an offer of paperclips when accepting wouldn’t result in other paperclips being destroyed or not made and when the transfer of paperclips could be kept a secret. However, primates are often acting in accordance with their values in turning down clandestine, low-risk sexual relationships while single.
Please regard this as responsive to the substance of Alicorn’s sibling post:
“The reason that men (who care about women) can’t ‘just’ obey stated preferences is because that effectively cedes the dating pool to men who aren’t as respectful to women … as I’ve said about six times now.
“The reductio about an indefinite persistence threshold (if men ignore the first rejection, must they ignore the second, etc.) fails in that it is only necessary for respectful men to be as persistent as disrespectful men, and no more. This suffices to prevent disrespectful men from saturating the dating pool. Women, for their part, can ‘opt out’ of any negative effects of such a policy by simply being consistent with rejections, while men cannot (for the above reasons).”
(I would have just replied directly, but that would make me a terrorist.)
Silas, if you can’t address Alicorn directly, then it’s probably not best to address her indirectly by asking me to pass an argument along to her. (Update: Thanks for changing your language to make your post more clearly directed towards me.)
However, I’m planning my own reply to Alicorn, and if you think there is a point that I am leaving out, or something that needs to be emphasized, I invite you to reply to me personally either in the thread (if your reply is framed as a communication to me rather than to Alicorn) or by PM. If I agree with an argument that you pose to me, or convince me that a certain point needs more emphasis, then such an argument might naturally find it’s way into my discourse not just with Alicorn, but in general.
The reason that men (who care about women) can’t ‘just’ obey stated preferences is because that effectively cedes the dating pool to men who aren’t as respectful to women … as I’ve said about six times now.
Agreed. Well, there are ways to be successful while acting consistently with the stated preferences of some women, but it still requires a bunch of work-arounds and a greater level of attraction.
The reductio about an indefinite persistence threshold (if men ignore the first rejection, must they ignore the second, etc.) fails in that it is only necessary for respectful men to be as persistent as disrespectful men, and no more.
Well, in the short term, yes. But if more men start pursuing in an aggressive way, then there is more competition, which could create incentive to pursue more aggressively than other men. On the other hand, there could be a ceiling on how much aggressiveness in advances can be successful. This sounds like an empirical question.
There are some cultures where men pursue women very aggressively in ways easily cause street harassment, and it’s plausible that these norms occurred through a run-away process where men had to one-up each other in terms of aggressiveness.
Women, for their part, can ‘opt out’ of any negative effects of such a policy by simply being consistent with rejections, while men cannot (for the above reasons).”
Theoretically, yes. But there are some additional practical considerations given that women have preferences for masculine, culturally successful men. It could be that in a certain culture, what is considered “masculine” mating behavior also risks making women uncomfortable a large proportion of the time. Unattractive men who exhibit that behavior are considered an annoyance. Attractive men who exhibit that behavior are accepted as mates. Men who do not exhibit that behavior in the first place are considered unattractive, and end up as rejected and invisible, because the women don’t see they as appropriately masculine and attractive in the first place. This is truly a lose-lose situation for both genders.
From a practical standpoint, women can demand that men make advances in less aggressive ways, and reject them for displaying too much aggression. Yet from a psychological perspective, it might be harder to get mainstream heterosexual women to do that, because it would mean going for guys who don’t display culturally masculine courtship behaviors that those women may associate with attractiveness, and it would mean rejecting guys who are attractive to them.
Maybe mainstream heterosexual women can just “get over” this psychology if they are educated about the effect of their aggregate choices on cultural norms… but maybe it’s not that easy.
(I would have just replied directly, but that would make me a terrorist.)
Please just reply directly, instead of making these kinds of comments. No one (except Eliezer) has the authority to tell you not to reply to someone’s comment on an open comment section.
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don’t mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
“I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?”
Right?
You’re right, I don’t mean that. I would say, rather, that the burden of conscientiousness is greater when one is criticizing a group to which one does not belong; dangerous thoughts and all that. My problem was not with what you were saying, necessarily, but that the manner in which you said it ignored this burden of conscientiousness. If you had said, “I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?” I doubt I would have had any problem with the comment.
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
Why do you make the bolded assumption? In cultures where long-term monogamous relationships are the norm, dating capability annihilates itself by taking those who possess it off the market.
And for that matter, why are you worried about women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option? If disrespectfulness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon as you suggest, we should expect to see respectful men as almost entirely marginalized. And yet the past fifty years have displayed the opposite trend: there is much more belief now that women should expect/demand a certain level of respect from their romantic partners. Whether or not this is acted upon proportionately (and while I suspect that it is, I have neither scientific nor personal evidence that this is so), I’m not sure how your model explains what evidence I do have.
If you had said, “I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?” I doubt I would have had any problem with the comment.
Okay, but that’s exactly my complaint. Now what?
Why do you make the bolded assumption?
I’m referring to confidence effects: i.e. the more success you have earlier, the more you have later.
And for that matter, why are you worried about women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option? If disrespectfulness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon as you suggest, we should expect to see respectful men as almost entirely marginalized. …
We do—hence the widespread phenomenon, noticed even among women, of women being attracted to “bad boy” types, which was attenuated in more conservative eras. Plus, the increasing frequency of divorce and domestic violence.
Divorce has been on a steady upward trend. If fraction that are due to domestic violence is constant, that’s all that’s necessary for my point. If not, you’re right, I don’t have e.g. battered women’s shelter stats handy, but even if you ignore that part, the divorce rate alone is strong enough evidence.
The divorce rate increasing is not good evidence that domestic violence is increasing. It can be explained by divorce becoming easier legally (no fault divorce), less stigmatized socially and less financially crippling for women (they have more opportunity to generate their own income and arguably divorce has become more favourable to women when it comes to dividing up assets).
Increased social awareness and decreasing tolerance of domestic violence could also lead to increased divorce rates without the domestic violence rate increasing. Women are less likely to feel trapped in abusive relationships by social and economic pressures than they were in the past.
I had the same reaction. I’d be surprised if this is true since violent crime generally has been on a downward trend. I did some googling and couldn’t turn up much data, though a couple of hits seemed to support my suspicion that this is a difficult question to answer due to historical widespread under-reporting of domestic violence and a suspected increase in frequency of reporting more recently.
I’m not sure why this is evidence that women increasingly believe that disrespectful men are their only option or that respectful men are almost entirely marginalized. Is the argument that the increased number of divorces largely affect respectful men, in that when divorces were more difficult to obtain, women could only obtain divorces when their spouses were demonstrably problematic (and therefore, more likely to be disrespectful), and that easier divorce procedures allow women to divorce respectful men more easily?
I’m not an expert on either current or historic divorce law, but it’s my understanding that under earlier regimes, in many instances, women could not obtain divorces easily even with abusive husbands, because of proof difficulties. Perhaps more easily obtainable divorces just allowed more women to divorce disrespectful men.
To everyone making this same brilliant point: the divorce rate continued to increase after the relaxation of these restrictions on it, which would mean we’re not just seeing the conversion of “would have divorced” cases. And if the causes after that relaxation remain constant in relative proportion, that means more domestic violence.
But assuming there is more domestic violence, and that women are initially marrying more abusive and/or disrespectful men, if there’s also more divorce, this could mean that women are less tolerant of these abusive disrespectful men. So does it provide evidence for women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option or respectful men being almost entirely marginalized?
Alright, point taken. Because I can’t reliably document a trend of men becoming more disrespectful, obviously there’s nothing to worry about with an incentive structure that penalizes men for being respectful, and women should keep using “doesn’t listen to me” as a standard for which men they like, and also complain that men don’t respect them enough.
And if the causes after that relaxation remain constant in relative proportion, that means more domestic violence.
I’m sure we all appreciate the basic math lesson but you haven’t provided any evidence that the proportions have remained constant and given all the cultural and legal changes affecting the divorce rate there is very little reason to expect that they would.
Just because that PUA gets women after they’ve told him to go away, doesn’t mean that when they told him to go away they didn’t mean it. It just means that he eventually changes their minds (at least temporarily). There’s a Master vs. Slave thing going on.
Just because that PUA gets women after they’ve told him to go away, doesn’t mean that when they told him to go away they didn’t mean it. It just means that he eventually changes their minds (at least temporarily).
But if they don’t stick to their original rejection, then they are incentivizing (there, I finally started using that word!) the very behavior they claim to oppose.
There’s a Master vs. Slave thing going on.
Yes, I had earlier drawn the analogy to akrasic purchases from telemarketers. But why aren’t there women who, on principle never go out with a man they rejected once, just as there are people who, on principle, never purchase a product through telemarketing / spam?
Edit: And why isn’t there social pressure against going out with a man you had recently rejected, just as there’s social pressure against buying from telemarketers / spam. (“You idiot! That just encourages them!”)
I think Silas is actually pushing in a correct direction. I’m just not sure there needs to be a solution.
The thing is, if you’re a (straight) man, it’s no credit to you if you’re with a woman who’s a pushover. And if you’re a (straight) woman, it’s also no credit to you if you’re with a man who’s a pushover. Having a date who can stand up to you is a sign that you’re a quality person—persuasive, attractive, admirable, etc.
And as long as men are proposers and women are accepters, this means that women want men who are relentless in pursuing them, and men want women who relentlessly evade them. (Something like the Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn dynamic.)
I don’t see this as a problem … in most cases. Obviously we don’t want men to threaten or attack women. And we don’t want too much of a stigma against women who say “yes” right away. But, appropriately moderated, it’s not a terrible dynamic. And I think we do moderate it; increasingly, people consider rape unacceptable, and consider female sexual eagerness acceptable, if a little ill-advised.
Okay, but how would men get reliable advice on which kinds of “standing up” are okay, and which kinds convert them into an evil terrorist creepy stalker guy that all women should stay away from? Or to distinguish between “stop for real” and “try harder”? And how would the existence of this advice not destroy its usefulness to women, as I warned about before?
Edit: And if there doesn’t need to be a solution, that suggests I shouldn’t care about date rape, stalking, abuse, etc. because this is all just the predictable result of women filtering for non-pushovers. But that’s ridiculous—surely, something needs solving.
Is it not obvious that physical force, or the credible threat of physical force, pushes things into a new category?
Physical force includes a sexual advance that isn’t welcome. If women react the same way whether or not the advance is welcome … do you want to finish that sentence?
Are you, personally, Silas, ever unsure if you’re being a stalker?
I’ve been kicked out of a group and given a very kafkaesque explanation after I tried to contact a female who had been friendly toward me, but then suddenly did a 180 and became (somehow!) ultra-scared of me before I had a chance to understand what was going on.
I’ve heard several females complain about a guy who followed them to or from home and yet suffered no consequences.
Sadly, the answer is yes. And even more sadly, these women know exactly what they need to do differently, but don’t do that.
But women usually don’t react the same way to welcome and unwelcome advances. At the very least, women are far more likely to react positively to a welcome advance than to an unwelcome one. Therefore, a negative response should cause you to update your estimate of her receptiveness down. Maybe not to zero, but definitely below 50%, and don’t you want to err on the side of not causing her significant fear or distress?
I’m not sure what your second to last paragraph even means—elaborate?
As for women knowing exactly what they need to do differently, you still haven’t addressed my point on the social penalties for women who behave assertively (by sticking to their guns instead of yielding to pressure and giving in despite an initial refusal). At any rate, why are you putting the onus on women? I might as well say that if men just changed so that they always respected women’s stated preferences, then women would soon adapt to become more honest and direct. But don’t you see how this is just wishful thinking? Instead of bemoaning the fact that people don’t behave the way you’d like them to, try to think of ways that the current social structure can be changed. Perhaps by persuading parents to teach their sons to be more respectful and their daughters more assertive, portraying respectful men and assertive women more positively in entertainment, and so on.
But women usually don’t react the same way to welcome and unwelcome advances. At the very least, women are far more likely to react positively to a welcome advance than to an unwelcome one. Therefore, a negative response should cause you to update your estimate of her receptiveness down.
Of course, but the point is this only counts as weak evidence.
Maybe not to zero, but definitely below 50%, and don’t you want to err on the side of not causing her significant fear or distress?
No, not to zero (that’s impossible), and probably not even to 50% (given the tendency of women to change their minds on account of persistence, as some women here have already testified to). And like I’ve explained several times already, I don’t want to err in the direction if it means ceding the romantic world to men who are even less respectful of women (see the end of this comment, or heck, any post I’ve made today on this topic for why unilateral disarmament is dangerous in this case).
I’m not sure what your second to last paragraph even means—elaborate?
I’m not sure what I could say that would make it clearer than it already is. Women have told me that men have done things much closer to stalking than I have ever conceived of, yet received nothing in the way of punishment.
As for women knowing exactly what they need to do differently, you still haven’t addressed my point on the social penalties for women who behave assertively (by sticking to their guns instead of yielding to pressure and giving in despite an initial refusal)
Yes, I did, because you claimed that they face an incentive structure that causes them too be insufficiently assertive, yet the very problem under discussion is that they act too assertively, in that they reject more often than they really mean (assertiveness is not in general bad, of course). Since you’ve cited a factor that would have the opposite effect from what you need it to in order to make your point, I’m not sure why you think it’s relevant.
I might as well say that if men just changed so that they always respected women’s stated preferences, then women would soon adapt to become more honest and direct. But don’t you see how this is just wishful thinking? Instead of bemoaning the fact that people don’t behave the way you’d like them to, try to think of ways that the current social structure can be changed. Perhaps by persuading parents to teach their sons to be more respectful and their daughters more assertive, portraying respectful men and assertive women more positively in entertainment, and so on.
There’s a fundamental difference that breaks the symmetry you assert: for men to always respect is an “unstable equilibrium”, while for women to always be truthful is not.
In other words, the more men we convert to respectful, the stronger the incentives are for the remaining men to ignore rejections from women because they have less competition for these women. Any universal practice of respect by men would be instantly shattered by the tremendous incentives for any man to defect.
In contrast, for women to be truthful does not increase the incentives for other women to use fake rejections. That is why addressing it on the male side is much more of an uphill battle, and one which rewards exactly the wrong men.
As for what to do, am I not doing exactly the right thing my alerting women to the toxic incentive structure they create by this practice and what arguably underlies many of the ills of men they complain about, but for which few of them ever make the connection? That’s the first step on the road genuine progress in this area, don’t you think?
And like I’ve explained several times already, I don’t want to err in the direction if it means ceding the romantic world to men who are even less respectful of women
UNSOLICITED PERSONAL ADVICE- FEEL FREE TO IGNORE:
It seems to me that you’d be better off preferring women who are more direct and open about their preferences (since I assume you prefer this within a relationship as well as at its start), and taking explicit rejection at face level would help select for this.
You would indeed be filtering your dating pool, but in a fashion that accords with your preferences.
(Edit: Because this might seem a bit subtle, I was implying that there are only two women who are direct and open about their preferences, not that I dislike both direct and indirect types of women.)
(Edit2: Incidentally, this has kind of already happened once in that I asked a woman out the day I met her in a group I went to the first time, and she said no, but then two days later out of the blue tracked me down and reversed her decision. But, since every group persistently treats me as an outsider, I can’t yet make such occurrences regular.)
(Edit3: As usual, such non-advice advice assumes that there’s a massive pool of women I can easily rotate through for compatibility, or that I can trivially conjure one up; and for which I already know the unspoken rules of engagement for such situations [despite having lived a life for which I got actively harmful training sets]. But why would I need advice if I could even get that far?)
(Edit: Because this might seem a bit subtle, I was implying that there are only two women who are direct and open about their preferences, not that I dislike both direct and indirect types of women.)
I got your joke the first time ;)
Even to the extent that women (or anyone) are capable of correctly articulating their preference set, there simply isn’t any norm encouraging women to do so in interactions with men. Men are supposed to figure it out. This may not be a bug; it may be a feature of common female decision processes around men, consistent with greater female selectivity and testing of men.
The problem is that different, and mutually exclusive female preference sets exists. What’s a man to do in that case? When men must choose their behavior under conditions of uncertainty about female preferences, the incentive is for men to cater to the most common preference sets in the female population until they have more information.
Mutually-exclusive female preferences wouldn’t be such a problem if men could just explicitly ask women what their preferences are. Yet there is a disincentive for men to do so! Imagine a man on a date asking a woman “sooo, are you one of those women who like to be asked for a kiss goodnight, or are you one of those women who just wants me to go for it?” would solve so many sorts of problems that men deal with. Yet it would generally be seen as weird or unattractive for a man to ask such a question on a date. And a woman who finds it unattractive when men ask for kisses probably also finds it unattractive when men ask about her preferences for kissing. The problem is recursive: it will also be unattractive to ask if someone doesn’t mind being asked about their preferences.
Unfortunately, it seems that according to some of the common female preference sets, explicitly asking about their preferences signals undesirable qualities, such as lack confidence, hesitancy, lack of ability to read her, and accordance of higher status to her preferences than his.
It seems that the preference of some women for men to basically read their minds is so strong, that they are willing to risk men making them uncomfortable by making guesses about their preferences which are bound to be wrong some of the time. Moreover, these women seem willing to place an incentive on men to not ask other women for their preferences, even if those women might prefer to be asked rather than men creeping them out with wrong guesses.
The other possible male solution in addition to guessing is to behave in a way that averages the preferences of the female population. In the case of initiating kisses at the end of dates, there might be an equilibrium like this: don’t ask verbally, but move in slowly watching for signs of discomfort, see if the woman moves in also, and then kiss. Yet this solution doesn’t optimally fulfill the preferences of women who like to be explicitly asked, nor the preferences of women who like to be thrown up against walls unhesitantly!
Of course, there are indirect ways to make reasonable hypotheses about women’s preferences, but that takes skill and experience. For instance, you can get women to talk in ways that reveal their preferences without seeming like you are asking, and incurring the signaling costs of asking. Conversational maps can help you steer the conversation in directions that women will reveal their preferences. I have success with this method, but I still sometimes make errors in guessing preferences, and I think it would be better to have a solution that doesn’t require me being a frickin’ wizard.
The incentive for majority female preferences to be overrepresented in the preferences that men attempt to satisfy is another example of the the tyranny of the majority that females with the most common preferences sets hold over other women.
While women have mutually exclusive preferences that men can’t predict in advance, there will always be some women not getting what they want. This system is broken. Women are probably better positioned to fix this brokenness, because women have less costly ways of having men know their preferences (e.g. telling them), while men’s methods of finding out women’s preferences are either error-prone (e.g. guessing) or vulnerable to signaling qualities at odds with other aspects of majority-female preferences (e.g. asking).
I guess it depends on how deeply ingrained the preference of having men guess their preferences is for the (probably large) subset of the female population that has it.
When I read this, it made me wonder how much of my staunch insistence on obedience to stated preferences has to do with my identification of myself as unreadable. (People trying to guess what I want by looking at me do not do appreciably better than I would expect them to if they were presented with a written summary of the immediate context. Some people do worse than that.) But if I am unusually hard to read—and I may well be—then I should be cautious in generalizing my preferences to others with different relevant traits.
It seems that you are capable and interested in explicit discussions of your preferences, and that you think analytically about them. What do you think is the link between your emphasis on stated preferences and identification as unreadable? Do you think, “hey, I know I’m unreadable, so I’ll give you the information you need to know explicitly instead of expecting you to make guesses? Or do you think it is part of a general social orientation towards explicit communication, and away from implicit communication?
I agree that you are probably atypical in this regard. As far as I can tell, the preferences of mainstream heterosexual women (MHW) have the following features:
MHW are consciously unaware of the majority of their preferences.
MHW have difficulty articulated their preferences in ways that match up with their choices and responses, according to observers.
The portion of their preferences that MHW articulate and are aware of is like the tip of the iceberg of their actual preferences.
One of the preferences of MHW is that men guess their other preferences.
MHW select men on their ability to satisfy preferences that they don’t/can’t articulate or that they aren’t even aware of.
If someone doesn’t like explicit analysis and discussion of their preferences, then this is actually quite a reasonable strategy. It just has negative externalities on men, and on women like you who don’t share those preferences, by training men to behave in ways that are counter to what you would prefer.
As far as I can tell, the preferences of mainstream heterosexual women (MHW) have the following features:
I’d actually say that all of the ones you listed apply to most, if not all, human beings (replacing “MHW select men… ” with “People value people”… ). I’d also say that this is human nature and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to modify.
They definitely apply to people, but they seem to apply more to mainstream heterosexual women. See this article on my blog for some research.
Women’s preferences for male behavior (e.g. masculinity) has more potential collisions with ethical behaviors (e.g. asking someone preferences) than men’s preferences in women do, since men just don’t care so much about behavior. Men are under more behavioral constraints.
Hope you find it interesting. It’s a group blog, so not all of it is written by me, and it’s written in a slightly more polemical style than I use for LW. Here are some of the posts which have some of my best arguments (though they are most a couple years old, and I could probably articulate some things better nowadays):
Your coauthors seem cool too. It’s all so… so sane. I realize I sometimes come off as LW’s resident screamy feminist/ethicist/footstomping engine of disapproval, but I have my own issues with anti-discrimination type movements in general and can extrapolate to how men poking at gender issues might feel. Your blog (I just read all the posts you linked and am on page three of the general archive) is thoughtful and seems to handily avoid kneejerk reactions in any direction, so yay for it. :)
P.S. I love the quote by Mystery about “comfort”. I still have the impression that pickup material in general is some nice things in a big box of nastiness, but I am pleased that you have gone to trouble of sifting out some nice things so I can be aware of them and enjoy their niceness.
I really enjoyed your blog post on “Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large” (TAPAICAL). I think that wherever one’s sympathies and experiences lie, it will be obvious to a rationalist that TAPAICAL has some very bad epistemic hygiene.
You captured some of the biggest problems here:
Hell yes! You are ignorant and evil and so swaddled in privilege it’s a wonder you know how to brush your own teeth! That means we can’t learn anything from you about our specialty topics because we have valuable first-person experiences that you can never understand. Ever. They are forever out of your reach. You will always be an ignorant outsider to most of our discussions because you can’t touch these intrinsic, special parts of our identities. And because of that, you must take at face-value everything that we say about how to deal with us and people like us, and then sit there and take it when the general guidelines we propose don’t work on someone else (because we’re not all the same yanno) and they yell at you (as is their right because you didn’t treat them appropriately!), OR YOU CAN BE EVIL.
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that Oppressed People have valid moral claims. I’m not willing to concede that just because Oppressed People deal with shitty, unfair things, that their conceptual analysis about those shitty, unfair things must be correct.
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that, on average, Oppressed People have some special insight into society and the fairness about how they are treated. I’m not willing to concede that such insight is so absolute that allies to Oppressed People should just turn off their brains and follow TAPAICAL blindly.
TAPAICAL doesn’t just seem motivated to be right, TAPAICAL is also motivated by power. As you observe, even though TAPAICAL is willing to admit in principle that it is fallible, it responds negatively to any challenges to its core ideas from outsiders. Even insiders need to be careful challenging TAPAICAL’s doctrines, lest they be accused of “internalized oppression” or “collaboration.” As a result, conceptual trash builds up in TAPAICAL, and nobody, either inside or outside, can clear it out.
It’s especially frustrating dealing with TAPAICAL when you agree with many of its moral claims, but you just have a problem with some of the exclusionary concepts it is using. If TAPAICAL would just fix the obvious problem, or respond satisfactorily to your criticism, then you could hope right on board. But since TAPAICAL is motivated by political power, it won’t. Instead, TAPAICAL treats an attempt at criticism as an act of war that must be retaliated against, rather than responding to criticism the way a rationalist would.
If you aren’t with TAPAICAL, you are against it. You can’t change TAPAICAL, except in very incremental ways once you’ve built up appropriate creds.
Although TAPAICAL may be mostly associated with the highest profile anti-ism movements, I think it’s really an example of broader human psychology. It’s similar to how every cause wants to become a cult. I hypothesize that any anti-oppression movement will try to enforce the discursive hierarchy you describe if it is given enough power. You can see elements of TAPAICAL outside leftist movements, such as in the Men’s Rights Movement, and the seduction community.
Unfortunately, TAPAICAL’s intellectual authoritarianism makes it very difficult to whole-heartedly ally with it, especially if you aren’t in the relevant Oppressed Group. Are we really to believe once the Oppressed Group gains equality, TAPAICAL is going say “Ok, now that we’re equal, we’re going to stop being so dogmatic and power-hungry, and we’ll listen to all your criticisms now.”
If you ever feel motivated to do something like a top-level post on TAPAICAL, I would be quite interested to read it.
P.S. I love the quote by Mystery about “comfort”. I still have the impression that pickup material in general is some nice things in a big box of nastiness, but I am pleased that you have gone to trouble of sifting out some nice things so I can be aware of them and enjoy their niceness.
Yes, it’s definitely a mixed bag. There are a lot of really good ideas in the community (such as Mystery’s analysis of comfort) that are stated much better than anywhere else.
I think the link goes like your first guess. Also, I find that one of the things I am most interested in learning about the people around me is whether they are disposed to respect my preferences. If I rely in their ability to read me—which I expect, for good reasons, to approach nil—then what they do isn’t informative about that disposition. They might be trying to do exactly what they think I prefer, and be annoying me because they have bad information, not because they choose to act at cross purposes. If I tell them what I want (and that I’m unreadable, etc. etc.), then their behavior becomes informative about their disposition to respect my preferences. Then, if they demonstrate that they have this disposition, I can choose to be around them more, and if they demonstrate that they don’t, I can avoid them and try to limit their influence on my life.
I agree with all of your numbered remarks and the summary at the end, except for a small caveat about (2). While it is true that MHW will articulate preferences that may not resemble the ones they reveal through behavior, and true that their articulated preferences are suspect, I think their revealed preferences are suspect too. The most obvious case of this is the known tendency of abuse victims to re-create the patterns that have been characteristic of their prior relationships. This looks like a revealed preference to be an abuse victim. I consider this little to no evidence in favor of the conclusion that the people exhibiting this behavior prefer to be abuse victims.
This leaves a bit of a muddle the question of where reliable information about common MHW preferences might be obtained. It looks sort of grim. You could try to extrapolate from people more likely to have accurate articulated preferences (like me), but the very factors that make me more likely to have accurate articulations probably also affect what it is that I prefer. (For instance, I prefer that people take my articulations at face value, which someone without good articulations might well not!)
Some avenues of possible investigation:
Try different ways of requesting preference articulation. (The question “what do you want?” is apt to get a cached list of social-circle-approved adjectival criteria. I think one might have better luck asking a MHW to say what her favorite scene in her favorite romance story is; or what three things she’d like to change about her current/most recent boyfriend; or an example of a couple she’s friends with being adorable/compatible/mutually supportive/something like that.)
Extrapolate from some subset of the MHW population likely to have especially… revealing… revealed preferences. (People with very high subjective happiness ratings; people with long-lasting relationships that don’t exhibit signs of abuse; there are probably other categories I’m not thinking of.)
Forget about learning MHW preferences and adopt conservative, general rulesets designed at minimizing risk to vulnerable people. (This is what I’ve advocated historically. I still think it has the best chance of avoiding the worst failure modes; but it is probably possible to do better on net.)
“sooo, are you one of those women who like to be asked for a kiss goodnight, or are you one of those women who just wants me to go for it?” would solve so many sorts of problems that men deal with. Yet it would generally be seen as weird or unattractive for a man to ask such a question on a date.
You can ask this in an attractive and confident way, and it’ll go over fine. It’s the insecurity that would be seen as unattractive. “So tell me what you like. You like it when a guy does X?”
You can ask this in an attractive and confident way, and it’ll go over fine.
Maybe in some cases, sure. What evidence leads you to this claim?
Basically, with sufficient attractiveness, confidence, and charisma, you can get lots of things to work. That doesn’t make such behaviors optimal, even for men who have those qualities.
Furthermore, confidence and charisma take time and experience to build, so it’s problematic to require them for what should be very basic dating tasks. It creates significant barriers of entry for men… but maybe that’s not a bug, but a feature.
with sufficient attractiveness, confidence, and charisma, you can get lots of things to work.
Yes, exactly!
That doesn’t make such behaviors optimal, even for men who have those qualities.
Optimal, in this situation, is probably just kissing without hesitation. My point was that if you really want to ask someone’s preference about something in general, you can do it in a confident way, and you probably won’t lose points for it.
Furthermore, confidence and charisma take time and experience to build, so it’s problematic to require them for what should be very basic dating tasks.
Yes, but the only way to build them is to practice doing things (like asking how someone wants to be kissed) with confidence. Also, you don’t have to be George W. Bush, you just have to be able to ask a question confidently.
I’d be surprised if you disagree, based on your other posts.
I would hypothesize a nontrivial subset of women who would be turned off by such a question even when asked charismatically. Maybe I just view this is a more unattractive question than you do, though it do acknowledge that it will work just fine with nontrivial subsets of women also.
My point was that if you really want to ask someone’s preference about something in general, you can do it in a confident way, and you probably won’t lose points for it.
I think this depends on the wiring of who you are dealing with. With some people, the best you will be able to do is partially mitigate the loss of points.
Yes, but the only way to build them is to practice doing things (like asking how someone wants to be kissed) with confidence.
We seem to agree that it’s possible to surmount this barrier to entry with practice (and often lots of failure). I’m just pointing out the problematic nature of barriers to entry for men in the dating market that women are not subject to. The primary way for non-intuitively attractive men to efficiently learn to navigate the dating world is to go through a period of practice when they make lots of women uncomfortable, and forge their own emotions in a crucible of rejection until they can satisfy women’s greater selectivity for behavioral traits and play the role of initiator.
The fact that some individual men (including myself) can triumph over this system does not make it not broken. What didn’t kill me made me stronger, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 years down the line I run into emotional damage that I’m incapable of recognizing now because I buried it so deeply out of practical considerations.
(Edit3: As usual, such non-advice advice assumes that there’s a massive pool of women I can easily rotate through for compatibility, or that I can trivially conjure one up; and for which I already know the unspoken rules of engagement for such situations [despite having lived a life for which I got actively harmful training sets]. But why would I need advice if I could even get that far?)
Have you tried online matchmaking sites? A priori, these seem like the natural solution to this kind of problem, and I’ve furthermore heard some anecdotal evidence that they work.
Of course, I’m not an expert on this, don’t have much data, and haven’t even tried it myself. But it sounds like it might be worth trying, if you’re seriously interested in finding a mate.
That’s pretty much what I was thinking about saying, with the addendum that, SilasBarta, I think your desire for straightforward communication is a good bit stronger than a preference.
How so? To the extent that I make a big deal about this, it’s because of concerns for others: a) the general effect on the pool of men that women typically encounter, and b) the fact that putting me between a rock and a hard place inevitably leads to me making decisions that others dislike.
Certainly, I do prefer directness, but that’s not why I start these discussions and introduce game theoretical concerns; and, if I had assimilated the unspoken rules of engagement about e.g. what pursuit actions increase attraction after a rejection, what rejections are real, etc., it wouldn’t bother me so much and wouldn’t rank so highly as a preference.
As for what to do, am I not doing exactly the right thing my alerting women to the toxic incentive structure they create by this practice and what arguably underlies many of the ills of men they complain about, but for which few of them ever make the connection? That’s the first step on the road genuine progress in this area, don’t you think?
As you have experienced, being given advice without recognition of the difficulties and costs of following it is not necessarily useful.
I will tentatively suggest two reasons (in addition to the possibility that many women just like being dominated)-- one is that a lot of women are unsure of their own desires in regards to men, and afraid to act on them if they know what they are.
The other is being afraid that telling a persistent man to go away and meaning it is actually dangerous.
To the extent that either motive is in play, it would take a great deal of work for women to change what they’re doing.
As you have experienced, being given advice without recognition of the difficulties and costs of following it is not necessarily useful.
Point taken, though I’d note that it’s equally unuseful for women to complain about aggressive behavior from men without recognizing the position they put men in with inconsistent treatment of persistence.
I will tentatively suggest two reasons (in addition to the possibility that many women just like being dominated)-- one is that a lot of women are unsure of their own desires in regards to men, and afraid to act on them if they know what they are.
This would just as well be a reason to offer greater understanding to men who are too persistent, as they have no way of knowing if that persistence is wanted.
The other is being afraid that telling a persistent man to go away and meaning it is actually dangerous.
lmnop was making a similar point, and I don’t understand it. If women reject men in more cases than they really want (and this is apparent from those like SarahC and LauraABJ who merrily encourage men to keep trying, and ridicule men who don’t), then it means their incentives to turn men down is too high. It can’t explain why women are too reluctant to reject.
What about consistency bias? A person might end up remembering an encounter as more romantic/intimate if she were involved in physically intimate acts and hadn’t screamed “rape;” so if a guy takes any less than the maximum of liberties he could without provoking objection, he’s left some potential attraction on the table.
That’s an additional possibility, but I’m not feeling particularly sympathetic to that hypothetical man.
What I’m apt to see is accounts by women who have to work to figure out whether some sexual situation that they didn’t like (or worse) was bad enough for them to feel justified in not liking it.
But if you, personally, are less respectful of women’s requests, this won’t make men who are less respectful than you any more inclined to be respectful. It may lead them to be even less respectful (ie engaging in coercion or assault) because they’re now under more competition. Besides, by continuing to be respectful of women’s requests, you wouldn’t be “ceding the dating world,” you’d only be ceding the portion of the dating world that’s comprised of women who consistently give false rejections, which in my experience is a clear minority. Whereas by adopting a policy of ignoring women’s rejections, you’re likely to hurt the majority, who rejected you honestly. This seems unethical.
Regarding your claim that stalking, sexual assault and other “ills” would decrease if women were only more honest—serial rapists are great at deluding themselves into thinking the women they raped “wanted it.” Even if more women were completely honest in their rejections, how do you know that some men wouldn’t simply delude themselves into thinking otherwise, thus internally justifying their behavior?
Thank you for clarifying that paragraph. I wasn’t sure whether you were indicating whether the women or the stalker men didn’t receive punishment. It seems that you mean the men. You would be correct. Perhaps good men should band together to punish the men who behave threateningly to women, for instance by socially ostracizing those men and making it clear that such behavior is low status?
But if you, personally, are less respectful of women’s requests, this won’t make men who are less respectful than you any more inclined to be respectful. It may lead them to be even less respectful than they were because they’re now under more competition.
Good point.
Besides, by continuing to be respectful of women’s requests, you wouldn’t be “ceding the dating world,” you’d only be ceding the portion of the dating world that’s comprised of women who consistently give false rejections, which in my experience is a clear minority. Whereas by adopting a police of ignoring women’s rejections, you’re likely to hurt the majority of women, who rejected you honestly.
I find your reasoning plausible in this particular case. I don’t consider there being a great incentive on men to ignore explicit female rejections on an approach, because I don’t see such behavior as actually granting a significantly higher probability of success most of the time.
I do think there are other situations where common female preferences create a tradeoff between what is most likely to work, and what women are most likely to be comfortable with. For example, a man approaching a woman in public at all risks making her feel uncomfortable, yet there are incentives for men to do so. Similarly, kissing someone at the end of a date without asking has a higher risk of causing discomfort than kissing after asking, but also has practical issues because a certain percentage of women prefers to not be asked (sorry, only anecdotal evidence from female friends on that one).
Regarding your claim that stalking, sexual assault and other “ills” would decrease if women were only more honest—serial rapists are great at deluding themselves into thinking the women they raped “wanted it.” Even if more women were completely honest in their rejections, how do you know that some men wouldn’t simply delude themselves into thinking otherwise, thus internally justifying their behavior?
There are always going to be deluded people, sure. But wouldn’t it be a good thing if there was less delusion-fuel floating around?
I do think there are other situations where common female preferences create a tradeoff between what is most likely to work, and what women are most likely to be comfortable with. For example, a man approaching a woman in public at all risks making her feel uncomfortable, yet there are incentives for men to do so. Similarly, kissing someone at the end of a date without asking has a higher risk of causing discomfort than kissing after asking, but also has practical issues because a certain percentage of women prefers to not be asked (sorry, only anecdotal evidence from female friends on that one).
When you say “prefer not to be asked”, are you just referring to not wanting a verbal question, or does it include not wanting something like a move toward kissing which includes a pause to check for (at least) receptiveness?
I was thinking of preferring to not get a verbal question. It may be the case that some women also find it sexy when men (they are attracted to and have had an interaction with) move in for a kiss without pausing. I don’t know the percentages on either of those questions, and I think the second set of preferences is less common and may not need to be worried about so much.
Does anyone know of any studies that ask people how they like to receive sexual advances? This would be interesting to study, but difficult because of social desirability bias.
OKCupid has a lot of data on that; several of their questions that cover it. But they haven’t published their data on the OKC blog, just their results, and they haven’t published that particular result yet—possibly because of PR concerns.
Unfortunately, I doubt that even anonymized self-reporting would accurately reflect the real-world results on something like that.
Certainly it would be nice if there were less delusion-fuel, as you call it, floating around. But I’m guessing that most men who make a habit of ignoring women’s preferences won’t actually change their behavior if the minority of women who lie becomes a smaller minority. They will just find another rationalization.
If we really want to reduce stalking, assault and other such behaviors by men, then I don’t think targetting women and demanding that they be more honest will be a very efficient use of our time. Abusive men are far more likely to be dissuaded by scorn and social ostracization directed at them by other men, and that’s something concerned men can implement directly.
But I’m guessing that most men who make a habit of ignoring women’s preferences won’t actually change their behavior if the minority of women who lie becomes a smaller minority. They will just find another rationalization.
Sure, there will always be some diehard jerks. I’m more concerned with well-meaning guys who engage in behaviors that take risks with women’s comfort levels (which is a broader category than “ignoring women’s preferences”).
If we really want to reduce stalking, assault and other such behaviors by men, then I don’t think targetting women and demanding that they be more honest will be a very efficient use of our time.
Maybe not, but I do think that if there was less incentive for men to take risks with women’s comfort levels when making advances, we would see less of certain classes of unwanted advances. Furthermore, if there were less messages (both from women’s behavior and from the culture) that women like certain personality traits and behaviors (see the Draco In Leather Pants phenomenon; apologies for linking to TVTropes), then I think we would see less men exhibiting those traits and behaviors.
There’s a fundamental difference that breaks the symmetry you assert: for men to always respect is an “unstable equilibrium”, while for women to always be truthful is not.
It is also an unstable equilibrium for women to always be truthful, if an individual woman gets some informational advantage by seeing how a man reacts to playing hard-to-get.
Okay, this is getting tricky, so bear with me: if you start from a “universal consistent female rejection equilibrium”, then women do not gain from defecting to do a “rejection probe” because the male’s reaction would just be to give up, and thus be uninformative. Right?
Of course, that still wouldn’t refute the difficulty of moving to that equilibrium from the current one...
Do you mean, if you start from the state where women always reject someone they’re not interested in clearly, never change their mind about who they’re interested in, and where men always stop pursuing after a women’s clear rejection? In that case, yes, women don’t gain from defecting.
(Some of the effects you’re talking about can be explained by women changing their mind, which isn’t exactly dishonesty.)
Yes, that’s what I mean, and doesn’t it establish the asymmmetry I claimed?
As for nondishonest changing minds, this goes back to the telemarketing/spam problem: even if you like a product thereby offered, it’s still (widely regarded as) wrong to purchase it, as that encourages a harmful, unethical practice. I submit it’s wrong for the same reasons to reverse a rejection, even if it’s honest, as that encourages (harmful) persistence.
Perhaps a big part of the problem is how there’s no way to credibly signal different levels of rejection—heck, even a simple “no, I’m busy” can’t be taken literally!
Yes, that’s what I mean, and doesn’t it establish the asymm[]etry I claimed?
But in that situation, men don’t gain from defecting either, because we’re assuming women always reject someone they’re not interested in, and never change their mind.
But spam/telemarketing works, for a certain value of working. Even after being repeatedly told about the dangers of spam/etc there are still people who will end up falling for it ‘just this once’.
I suspect the problem is that a lot of people are vulnerable to persistence-based hacks, and that this is even more true in dating since the potential gain from giving in is much higher. (And the potential loss is low if you only consider local consequences—just a single evening of putting up with an annoying guy)
Perhaps a big part of the problem is how there’s no way to credibly signal different levels of rejection—heck, even a simple “no, I’m busy” can’t be taken literally!
Sometimes you can’t even take a “Yes, here’s my phone number, yes, you can call me” literally. I found that out the hard way. :(
On several occasions, girls have given me their phone number after a friendly conversation, and when I called or texted, I got back an angry message from the girl, or her boyfriend, saying that she had a boyfriend and not to talk to her again (even when I was dating someone and was just looking for friendship). I can only assume that the boyfriend had issues and changed her mind.
It’s more common to have a good conversation with a girl, have her give you her number and tell you to call her, and then have her screen your calls and never return them.
Same has happened to me at least once that I remember. If you’re a female and want to know how common this is, poll your male friends to see how many other instances come out of the woodwork. And if you are surprised, please recognize your atypicality.
At a restaurant I go to frequently, I had several pleasant conversations with one of the waitresses. I asked her for her phone number, so we could talk more. (I tried to indicate that I was interested in friendship rather than romance.) She wrote it on a napkin for me. I asked if I could call her on a specific evening, and she said that I could. When I called her, I received no answer, and from then on, she avoided me when I went to the restaurant. (I strongly suspect that the phone number was fake.)
A different waitress was kind enough to turn me down directly.
But women usually don’t react the same way whether or not the advance is welcome. At the very least, women are far more likely to react positively to a welcomed advance. Seriously, if you’re going to make that claim, where’s your evidence? Because you’re slipping into “no doesn’t equal no” territory here.
And why are you putting the onus on the women anyway? If men consistently listened to women’s requests for them to leave, then women would soon adapt so that they only told men to leave when they really wanted to, no?
The thing is, if you’re a (straight) man, it’s no credit to you if you’re with a woman who’s a pushover. And if you’re a (straight) woman, it’s also no credit to you if you’re with a man who’s a pushover.
Nah. From my experience, this matters way less to men than to women. Whether a woman “stands up to me” doesn’t factor into my judgment of her as a partner. Moreover, if a woman “evades” me, this is a turn-off for me.
Across both samples of participants, women consistently were more
exacting on the Surgency and Intellect-Openness factors. An analysis
of the individual adjective scales composing Surgency was particularly
revealing. Significant sex differences were found in preferences
for mates who were dominant (? = −4.33, jcx.OOOl; f = −3.46,
p < .001, for dating couples and newlywed couples, respectively). In
contrast, no significant differences were found at the item level for
sociable, talkative, or proud. These results suggest that the power,
ascendance, or dominance theme of Surgency was especially valued by
women, whereas the sociable theme showed no sex difference (see Wiggins,
1991). These findings support the hypothesis that the sexes differ
on personality attributes known to be linked with resource acquisition.
These results would be more probable if women cared more than men about avoiding “pushovers.”
I have definitely seen guys go for elusive women. Sometimes—just as it is with women—you don’t go with what they say, but with the pattern of behavior. And sometimes the pattern is that they chase the unattainable and unavailable. Or women who seem “classy,” hard to win and hard to impress. But it may not be as common as a male pattern.
Nah. Imagine that some women are exceptionally attractive to men for some arbitrary reason, but you cannot see this reason because you’re not a man. Then these women will start behaving more “elusively” out of necessity, thus prompting you to see the nonexistent causal pattern of men chasing elusive women. From my experience, women don’t accurately assess the attractiveness of other women (they fixate too much on clothing, accessories, “style” etc. instead of qualities that matter to men), so my theory should make you a little paranoid from now on :-)
Then these women will start behaving more “elusively” out of necessity, thus prompting you to see the nonexistent causal pattern of men chasing elusive women.
Then wouldn’t elusive behavior become a status signal of sorts? “Oh, person X is being elusive; there must be something there I’m not seeing!”
From my experience, women don’t accurately assess the attractiveness of other women (they fixate too much on clothing, accessories, “style” etc. instead of qualities that matter to men)
Then wouldn’t elusive behavior become a status signal of sorts? “Oh, person X is being elusive; there must be something there I’m not seeing!”
I doubt it would work on men. We can assess female attractiveness directly in like 2 seconds, no need for signals and definitely not enough time to notice elusive behavior.
I have definitely seen guys go for elusive women. Sometimes—just as it is with women—you don’t go with what they say, but with the pattern of behavior.
And this, my friend, is the “part of ‘No!’” that men “don’t understand”.
Again, it may seem clever to use explicit rejections and then expect men to “just know” that it’s fake by your “behavior” … but that creates a really rotten incentive structure.
And as long as men are proposers and women are accepters, this means that women want men who are relentless in pursuing them, and men want women who relentlessly evade them. (Something like the Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn dynamic.)
I think you’ve hit upon the root of the problem; like the other phenomena you mention, the strength of the trend seems to be diminishing.
Because I’m familiar with standard advice given to women, and I never see a taboo against “giving in” to continued unwanted advanced “just because you decide you like the guy now”.
That’s evidence that such a social taboo is not very common, but there could easily be women doing it on their own accord and just not talking about it much. “Don’t reward guys for keeping to bother you” seems obvious and unremarkable enough to follow without explicitly mentioning it all the time.
“Don’t reward guys for keeping to bother you” seems obvious and unremarkable enough to follow without explicitly mentioning it all the time.
Without wanting to cite fictional evidence I think it’s worth noting that guys being rewarded for continuing to bother an initially uninterested woman is a very common and long-lived trope in fiction.
Yes, and that’s in fiction that is most popular with women. To borrow the form of a Penny Arcade strip, it’s like this:
Jane: Geez, we go through all this effort to raise awareness about respect for women, and men never seem to get the message! Why is that? Lisa: (with a guilty look) It’s a goddamn … it’s a goddamn mystery!
Earlier, at a focus group session Lisa is participating in...
Focus group director: So, what kinds of behaviors do you women like to see in the male characters in the novels you read? Lisa and the rest of the group: Ignoring the woman’s rejections!!!
That wasn’t supposed to be an argument for such behavior being common (I’d guess it’s not particulary), just for the possibility of such behavior existing without being much talked about.
It may seem clever to use this as a filter, but, as I think I’ve demonstrated, there are disastrous consequences to it. You can’t simultaneously promote “No means No, morons!” and “I like when guys aren’t deterred by rejection.”
Yes you can. And that cuts back to the core of the OP.
Amen! If the guy isn’t confident enough to get over a little ‘hard to get’, then he’s probably inexperienced and not worth bothering with. Many women do this both consciously and unconsciously. However, “Leave me the fuck alone,” may be the unambiguous rejection signal you’re looking for.
So, unless I hear “Leave me the fuck alone” (or similar variants), I can safely assume it’s just a game of “hard to get”?
I’ll follow that advice, but only if you have to endure the consequences.
Well, I mean that it’s a universal signal as opposed to varying in each person. There are many other signals that mean the same thing, but they are not universally applicable in all circumstances.
Okay then. For now, I suggest you consider the incentive structure that results from women who have held both of these positions at some time or another.
“Geez! Why can’t this guy take a hint and buzz off?”
“Pff, only a complete wuss would go away just because I asked him to. If he were worth my time he would have kept it up.”
This is an oversimplification of something very complex involving many subtle nuances. It’s sorta like saying Newton was wrong because a bowling ball falls faster than a feather… What is meant by asked for example. “Leave me alone” vs “I’m just going to have to walk across that room mister,” are not equivalent.
I’m sure it is, but just for the record, your explanation isn’t going to deconfuse any poor male who isn’t deconfused to begin with. (Perhaps you already know that.)
Well, pardon my frustration, but point of these questions is to make sense of and reveal these nuances, which is why the earlier answers you gave weren’t what I was looking for.
Obviously, if a woman says something sarcastic and teasing, that’s … flirting, not a rejection. The problem cases are more common and more ambiguous. If a request for a date is flatly turned down, how do you know if it’s a test, or if further pursuit constitutes harassment? If I’m ignored, is that a test, or am I beting told to go away?
It may seem clever to use this as a filter, but, as I think I’ve demonstrated, there are disastrous consequences to it. You can’t simultaneously promote “No means No, morons!” and “I like when guys aren’t deterred by rejection.”
The stakes are even higher when it comes to date rape, but I’m sure as hell not going to spell out the mapping on that one.
I think it’s safe to say that the majority of women who flatly reject an offer for a date or continually ignore an advance, do NOT want to be pursued further. There are exceptions, and some people do change their minds, but if that’s what you meant by ‘rejection,’ then No means No. Hard to get is a more complicated dance than “Will you go out with me,” “Uhhh.… you’re not my type. No.”
But it’s not nearly as simple as you just portrayed it.
I mean, we all like to feel superior as we shake our heads in contempt at the poor guy who just won’t give up. She’s obviously not into you, man! She told you “no”. Just let it go!
Er … until we look over there and see the women talking glowingly about how charming and romantic it was for her husband/fiance/current boyfriend to keep pursuing her even when she flatly told him no, and is now glad that he didn’t take her seriously then.
Given those cases, it’s quite a bit more understandable why a man would refuse to give up on such an “obvious” case.
I’m not familiar with any such cases. Are they really as common as you think they are?
Perhaps you’re hearing these stories because they’re exceptional?
Let’s assume for a moment that these cases are exceptional. (I would in any case agree that they’re not the norm, but not rare either.) Does that exceptionality not suffice to explain the commonality of overpersistent (and overcautious) men?
Of the people heading to Hollywood with big dreams, the ones that become movie stars are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
Of the people working up the corporate ladder, millionaire executives/VPs are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
Of the people trying to become professional athletes, those that can make a living at it are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
So the “woman who rejects firmly and later changes her mind” is the exception? So what. It’s still understandable why such cases would have a disproportionate motive force.
But I supsect that if there’s any bias in counting up these cases, it would understate their availability in our recollection. Remember, once the suitor has become “the good guy”, the halo effect kicks in. See now, my guy never acted in contravention of the “No means No” rule. See, I didn’t give a real no. My guy isn’t one of those freaks who would disobey the rules we promote...
That’s assuming she continues to remember her impression of him at the time of rejection in the first place.
By the way: of the people voting on my comments in this discussion, your downvotes are the exception ;-)
Actually, they largely don’t. There is such a thing as overconfidence bias, you know. Most people would be better off ex-ante if they did not try to become top executives, movie stars, or pro athletes. Similarly, contraventing flat, “just say no” refusals is not a rationally optimal choice.
I know—I didn’t mean they’re justified by a standard rational utility maximization analysis. The point was just that it’s consistent with general overconfidence/miscalibration we observe in people in many other areas, even under the unfavorable assumptions thomblake gave.
ETA: Note that I said the incentives explain the numerous people who compete, not that the incentives justify such action. Also, I said it was “disproportionate motive force”. And no, I didn’t edit the original post just so it would have all that. :-P
More to the point, how do we trust these second- and third-hand stories to be reported accurately? My guess is that the “just say no” refusals were anything but, and that the stories are extremized. At the very least, the participants would have had plenty of side information which we’d know nothing about.
I know of no such cases.
I’ll see your anecdotal absence of evidence and raise you another anecdote.
(Two friends of mine, who recently got married, tell just such a story.)
Me neither. But I do often hear about such cases second-hand. So even if these cases aren’t common, they may have a big impact on those who witness them.
Someone who says “I’m just going to have to walk across that room mister” or similar, is not necessarily being sarcastic/flirtatious. More generally, there’s genuine uncertainty about “hard to get” plays: the best that can be said about them is that they are not solid evidence either way, although they do “up the ante”, so they’re not without effect from a “strategic” point of view.
Luckily, a reasonably knowledgeable guy generally has collected enough bits of evidence to make a proper decision. Nevertheless, even the most confident pick-up artist would take a statement such as “leave me alone” at face value unless there was very solid evidence to the contrary.
Most guys have the opposite problem: they are overconfident (or more rarely, underconfident) about their counterparty’s interest in them, and find it hard to properly update their estimate in the face of available information. The only way around this problem is for such people to train in LessWrong-style debiasing and improve their “dating/seduction/etc.” skills, as detailed in the OP. Focusing on the “nuance” of verbal statements is a mistake.
Yes.
What leads to this impression? My impression is that the majority of males are underconfident. But it may vary depending on subculture and peer group.
Tangent, but there are two different kinds of “overconfidence”:
Having beliefs that are more strongly peaked than is justified
Believing more positive things about yourself and your abilities than is justified
If you’re 95% sure that you will not be President of the USA, then you’re underconfident in the first sense but overconfident in the second sense.
The two sometimes go together in that if you believe you’re better at finding out the truth than you are, you’ll have more strongly peaked probability distributions than you should.
Some thread necromancy...
Not yes. I remember listening to one PUA (don’t remember the name, has a strong foreign accent) say that if they tell you to go away, you should tease them about it, and not go away.
And for him, it apparently works.
Great job there, women. I just love when I can’t tell if you’re serious that I should go away.
If you really can’t reliably tell when people are being serious or not, err on the side of respecting their articulated preferences.
Good thinking! There are too many respectful men in the gene pool, let’s try and thin them out a little.
If a man can become accustomed to ignoring women’s requests for him to leave, making the judgment that his desires are more important than her sense of security, then does he still count as a “respectful man”? If not, then his breeding successfully doesn’t increase the number of “respectful” genes in the gene pool either.
The same men that are currently respecting women’s requests to go away, are generally respectful in numerous other ways, such as not beating them. If the same men simply invert their rules of engagement with respect to women who initially [1] tell them to go away, they are still going to be respectful in all of these other ways; it’s just that they won’t be at a reproductive disadvantage.
(Even if you posit some effect whereby these respectful men infect the rest of their personality by doing this, they’re still more respectful than the kind of man who doesn’t currently obey requests to leave.)
Of course, it would be even better if women only told suitors to go away when they really meant it, and strongly avoided all men that refuse to (even if they change their mind about him), but why should they change? I mean, this practice really only hurts non-humans such as high-functioning autistics.
[1] Obviously, there’s some point where even disrespectful men and this PUA go away.
Was this intended to be derogatory? I’m reading it that way, but as a non-human I’m not particularly good at judging questions of tone.
Nope (at least not to autistics...); I’m non-human too.
Edit: By the way, when you casually wonder why people aren’t as polygamous as you, I think that hurts your case for being autistic, but whatever.
I’m curious as to why you think that; so far as I’m aware, the general stereotype of autistics is that they’re “logical” and have no natural skill for understanding social interactions (which is, of course, both imprecise and incomplete, though in my case they’re probably pretty fair descriptions). According to that stereotype, at least, I would think polyamory would be proportionally quite popular among autistics (and judging by the way in which it clusters with other subcultures with disproportionate rates of autism-spectrum personalities like computer programmers and science fiction fans, this does seem to be true to at least some extent).
For what it’s worth, my diagnosis was AS and there seems to still be quite a bit of uncertainty about its relation to autism; the competing viewpoints I’ve heard are that AS is on the “autism spectrum”, that there’s no meaningful distinction between AS and high-functioning autism, and that AS and autism don’t have much to do with each other at all. I lend the most credence to the first view, but not by much; the case for it is almost as unsupported as the other two. In any case, I’m not emotionally attached to either label.
It wasn’t the intellectual agreement with polygamy on your part that I was asking about, but how you’re able to convince so many to go along with it.
Ahh, now I see what you were getting at. Much as I hate to say it, I think you’re giving me too much credit. While I’ve had a thoroughly delightful amount of success at polyamorous dating, I’ve only ever dated one person who I’d successfully seduced away from monogamy; she’s also the most serious and long-term S.O. I’ve had. The other polyamorous relationships I’ve had (of which there have been 4-7, I think, depending on where you draw the line) have all been with people who already considered themselves to be poly.
And while I have had a hand in convincing a couple other friends and acquaintances to give polyamory a shot, I don’t think I deserve most of the credit there, as the social circles I’m involved with have plenty of other poly people, many more persuasive (to most people; I’m not sure whether rationalists are a special case) than I.
That just pushes my confusion back a level. If you’re AS, how are you able to have such enormous social circles and ease of making strong enough personal connections?
Again, I wouldn’t say enormous. When I say my social circles have lots of poly people in them, I’m really talking in terms of proportions. Of the 10-15 people I have strong personal connections with (“friends”), about half are poly. Among folks with whom I have less strong connections (“acquaintances”), that fraction is a bit lower, but still above that of an equivalently-sized random sample of liberal, geeky, college-educated people between the ages of 18 and 25.
But yes, relative to other AS people, I am very socially successful, by dint of effort, analysis, and at least a decade of concentrated trial and error. I wasn’t born with a fully-functional socialization module, but I’ve gotten pretty good at emulating one; combined with my many other enthralling character traits (like arrogance, which was also a learned behavior), I tend to do pretty well in many social situations. I also try to avoid (the many) social situations I don’t yet understand well, which leads to my general social competence appearing to be greater than it is.
These comments may provide further context and/or explanation.
Point taken. But is the gene pool really at much risk? It seems clear that the modern mating environment already penalizes abusive/disrespectful men more than almost all environments since the agricultural revolution. By the way, do you really care that much about the gene pool, or was that just a stray comment you threw out to vent your frustration?
I agree that it would be better if women behaved the way you described. But currently, women who behave that way are also penalized; they can lose status through being labelled as a “bitch” or “dyke.” This would change if direct aggressiveness in women (instead of passive aggressiveness) was more socially acceptable. But as it is, a woman who genuinely wants a man to leave will often eventually give in to his persistence just to avoid coming off as cold or unreceptive, even if she doesn’t really come to like him much more. Would the kind of relationship that ensues from such an encounter be the type you want?
I care that being nice is a self-limiting policy. It would be one thing if the effects were limited to that interaction. But a policy of turning over all the opportunities to disrespectful men, because they’re disrespectful, is only delaying and amplifying the problem, not working toward a solution.
Are you actually worried about the gene pool, or do you just think that “Nice guys” deserve more sex than they currently get?
In other words, do you get to ignore to ignore legitimate criticisms of destructive policies because the person who makes them isn’t flawless? Yes, I think you do.
I don’t understand what you mean here, could you rephrase it?
You replied to a criticism I made of a destructive policy by insinuating that I have embarassing qualities. Is that really appropriate?
I didn’t mean any personal insult (I didn’t even mean to call you a Nice Guy, which isn’t itself an insult). The insinuation that you meant anything other than what you said was inappropriate, and I apologise. The argument ad genome is still silly though, the rate of technological advance is now so fast compared to the time-scale that natural selection operates on that we no longer have to worry about natural selection as a factor in our evolution. I do agree that destructive policies should be countered on a social level.
We don’t need to worry much about population genetic changes due to selective pressures now… because they already happened. There is already dimorphism between the sexes: on average, men have greater upper body strength and slightly higher aggressiveness. Basically, on average men are bigger physically, and they have the potential to be bigger jerks.
According to David Geary’s Male, Female, the dominant hypothesis for greater male strength is sexual selection. Since women were more selective, men had to compete more fiercely, and strength was an adaptation for their competition. If a selection pressure was strong enough to create physical sexual dimorphism, then it was also strong enough to create mental sexual dimorphism, which could be the source of greater male aggressiveness (and greater male systemizing).
So we don’t need to worry that sex differences in preferences will lead males to evolve into being bigger jerks, because it probably already happened before we were even homo sapiens. We are having this conversation over 200,000 years too late.
See the second part of my reply to Wrongbot: “gene pool” is probably the wrong term to use here, but there are clearly societal effects that result from respectful men “erring on the side of not being a dick”—that practice becomes more common, taught to later cohorts, and the dating pool gets saturated with disrespectful men.
And again, though one could say that “erring on the side of being a dick” means being disrespecful, it would be wrong because the man would still be respectful in all other ways.
Yes, I find your “cultural evolution” argument plausible. Even within a cohort of men, there will be a learning effect, where successful behaviors are learned by operant conditioning and observational learning.
This sounds wrong to me, but maybe my intuition is failing. I had thought that the obvious reason for greater male strength is that men don’t need to devote resources to having babies, and that physical strength is generally an adaptive use of resources. So it’s not that men are stronger, it’s that women are weaker: calories that they could spend building muscle have been diverted to baby-making, and to preparing for it.
Some of Male, Female is online, so you can see Geary’s reasoning (emphases mine):
These differences in skeletal structure and the associated throwing competencies, combined with the large male advantage in arm and upper body strength, indicate strong selection pressures for these physical competencies in men. In fact, these sex differences are consistent with the view that the evolution of male-male competition in humans was influenced by the use of projectile (e.g., spears) and blunt force (e.g., clubs) weapons (Keeley, 1996; see also the Physical modules section of Chapter 8); during agonistic encounters, male chimpanzees often use projectile weapons (e.g., stones) and sticks as clubs and do so much more frequently than female chimpanzees (Goodall, 1986). The finding that men have a higher threshold and greater tolerance for physical pain than do women, on average, is also in keeping with the view that male-male competition is related to human physical dimorphisms, given that success at such competition is almost certainly facilitated by the ability to endure physical pain (Berkley, 1997; Velle, 1987); of course, women can endure considerable pain under some circumstances, such as childbirth.
Nonetheless, it might be argued that these physical sex differences have emerged from a sex difference in the division of labor, such as hunting, rather than direct male-male competition (e.g., Frost, in press; Kolakowski & Malina, 1974). Although the sexual division of labor contributes to the differential mortality of men and women in preindustrial societies and might influence the reproductive variance of men, comparative studies of the relation between physical dimorphisms and male-male competition suggest that the sexual division of labor is not likely to be the primary cause of these physical dimorphisms (see also The evolution of sex differences and the sexual division of labor section of Chapter 3). Recall, for primates and many other species, there is a consistent relation between physical sex differences and the nature of intrasexual competition (see Chapter 3). For monogamous primates—those with little direct male-male competition over access to mating partners—there are little or no differences in the physical size or the pattern of physical development of females and males (Leigh, 1995). For nonmonogamous primates—those characterized by direct male-male competition over access to mating partners—males are consistently larger than females, and this difference in physical size is consistently related, across species, to the intensity of physical male-male competition and not to the foraging strategy of the species (Clutton-Brock et al., 1977; Mitani et al., 1996; Plavcan & van Schaik, 1997a).
...
On the basis of the sex differences in parental investment (Chapter 4), the nature of intrasexual competition and in mate choice criteria (Chapter 5) in adulthood, sex differences in the self-initiated developmental experiences of boys are girls are expected and are found. Although there are, of course, many similarities in the childhood experiences of boys and girls, there are also considerable differences. Girls and boys show different patterns of physical development (Tanner, 1990), different play interests and styles, as well as different social behaviors and motives, and many of these differences can be readily understood in terms of sexual selection in general and intrasexual competition in particular (Darwin, 1871).
As an example, the delayed physical maturation of boys, relative to girls, and the sex difference in the timing, duration, and intensity of the pubertal growth spurt follow the same pattern as is found in other nonmonogamous primates (Leigh, 1995, 1996). Across these primate species, the sex differences in these features of physical maturation are consistently related to the intensity of physical male-male competition, as contrasted with any sex differences in foraging strategy (Mitani et al., 1996). The sex difference in the pattern of human physical competencies, such as a longer forearm and greater upper body strength in men than in women, is also readily explained in terms of selection for male-on-male aggression, selection that involved the use of projectile and blunt force weapons (Keeley, 1996). Stated more directly, the sex differences in physical development and physical competencies have almost certainly been shaped by sexual selection, and the majority of these differences have resulted from male-male competition over access to mates (Tanner, 1992); of course, some physical sex differences, such as the wider pelvis in women, have been shaped by natural selection.
It is very likely that many of the sex differences in play interests and social behaviors have also been shaped by sexual selection. The sex differences in rough-and-tumble play, exploratory behavior and size of the play range, the tendency of boys to form coalitions in their competitive activities with other boys, and the formation of within-coalition dominance hierarchies are also patterns that are associated with male-male competition in other primates, particularly primates in which males are the philopatric sex (Goodall, 1986; Smith, 1982). In this view, all of these features of boys’ play and social behavior involve a preparation for later within-group dominance striving and coalition formation for intergroup aggression. Through parenting practices, such as degree of physical discipline, the selective imitation of competitive activities, and actual experiences within same-sex groups, boys learn how to best achieve within-group social dominance and practice the specific competencies associated with male-male competition in their particular culture. They learn how to achieve cultural success (e.g., by leading raids on other villages or becoming a star football player).
Not all developmental sex differences are related to male-male competition, however. For instance, the relational aggression that is common in girls’ groups might be a feature of female-female competition and a number of other physical and behavioral sex differences that become evident during development have likely been shaped by natural selection or mate choice. The sex difference, favoring boys, in manipulative and exploratory object-oriented play appears to be related to the evolution of tool use and a sex difference, favoring men, in the range of tool-related activities in adulthood. Although it is not certain, these sex differences have likely been shaped, in part, by natural selection (e.g., through a sex difference in the foraging strategies of our ancestors). Similarly, the sex difference in play parenting, favoring girls, reflects the later sex difference in parental investment, favoring women, and has almost certainly been shaped by natural selection (Pryce, 1995). Finally, many of the physical changes associated with puberty, such as the development of a masculine jaw in men and relatively large breasts in women, have likely been shaped by the mate choice preferences of the opposite sex and might be condition-dependent indictors of physical and genetic health (Thornhill & Müller, 1997).
Thanks for tracking that down. I’m more sympathetic to this point of view than I was, but I think that one of its premises is unfounded. From your selection:
That citation may answer my doubt, but this argument seems to be undermined by the extensive use of weapons early homo sapiens made while hunting, a point where they diverged pretty sharply from other primates. Weapon-use was also involved in male-male aggression, yes, but it doesn’t seem overwhelmingly clear that sexual selection was the primary factor.
Other primates used weapons, too. Here is a famous one. Was the target of the first man-thrown projectile an animal while hunting, or another man? Who knows, but once one use was discovered, the second probably followed soon after.
Sexual selection has two components: intersexual selection (mate choice based on preferences of the opposite sex) and intrasexual competition/selection (competition within members of your own sex. If weapon-use was related to male-male aggression, then it was related to the intrasexual competition component of sexual selection.
Clearly, weapon-use would be beneficial both for hunting and warfare. But I wonder if these selection pressures were stronger in warfare? Animals don’t throw spears back at you.
Furthermore, even if male weapon-use is adapted for hunting, that doesn’t necessary mean we are only seeing pressures from natural selection, not sexual selection also. As far as I remember from one of my anthropology classes, most of hunter-gatherer calories in certain societies don’t come from hunting. The hypothesis is that male hunting skills aren’t emphasized because of their importance for feeding people, which could be acted on by natural selection; rather, hunting had become yet another domain where males competed with each other to gain status and attract females. I can try to find a source on this.
Right. I don’t disagree that male-male aggression played some role. I am just uncertain about whether it exerted a stronger selection pressure than the natural selection effect of hunting ability on survival.
The sudden adoption of weapons which required upper body strength doesn’t provide much evidence to distinguish between the two.
And don’t feel obligated to go out of your way to track down sources for me; I’d prefer to know more about this issue, ceteris paribus, but I don’t think it’s terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
Is there evidence that humans (or our pre-human ancestors) were less sexually dimorphic?
See the second part of my reply to WrongBot: though genetic selection, you are correct, isn’t going to quickly produce a higher fraction of jerks, there is still a memetic effect, and one from dating pool saturation, and they suffice to show that “unilateral disarmament” just makes the problem worse.
“Nice Guy[TM]” is a particular term of abuse in feminist circles, where it means, roughly, “someone who is only being nice to you because he wants to get in your pants (and will probably react badly if you make it clear that he won’t be able to).”
That’s a harsher definition of “Nice Guy” than the one I absorbed from the portion of the feminist interweb that I’ve read so far, I understood it to mean (and used it to mean) a guy who is unattractive but thinks that he ought to be attractive since he is polite and considerate.
Unfortunately, the two are often assumed to be the same thing.
Hey cowards—you can vote me down all you want, if that makes you feel better. It still won’t change the f’ed up incentive structure that results from women favoring men who trivialize of their rejections.
That is the real problem, not the fact that I’m talking about it.
Oh boy, I guess I’m one of the cowards.
I didn’t downvote you for articulating an admittedly fucked up incentive structure. I downvoted you for bitterly criticizing all women because you find the behavior of some women to be inconvenient.
(Tangent: why dance around “fuck”? We all know what you meant, and I’m pretty sure this community has figured out that particular words aren’t intrinsically evil.)
If you want to know what to do about the fucked up incentive structure that so irks you, it’s really quite simple: don’t be a dick. If you have to run the risk of ruining someone’s evening or making them feel unsafe, that’s really not worth a minor bump to your odds of getting laid on a particular night out.
1) It is appropriate to target women in general with this critcism. Even if they don’t engage in this kafkaesque practice, they fail to criticize women for promoting it, even as they complain about the (predictable) results of this policy.
When I dislike a practice common among “my own”, I criticize my own, even and especially if I’m pure as snow on that issue. That goes double for when I criticize the countermeasures that only exist because of this practice. Why should I expect any less from women?
2) It’s not about what I want, or about inconviences. If the good men unilaterally disarm by following your policy, their numbers get thinned out over time, as typically happens under unilateral disarmament. Why do you consider that to be a pro-woman policy?
You’re going to have to present some evidence that “good” men are systematically disadvantaged in getting relationships if you want this to be a universally accepted premise in this discussion. But if we’re only speaking anecdotally, then in my experience jerks find it easier to get laid, but good men find it easier to obtain long term relationships involving children. Anyhow, if you want to bring up the betterment of the gene pool as a serious argument, then you have to prove that abusive men are at more of a reproductive advantage than they were historically.
And how do you get “unilateral disarmament” from “going away when a woman tells me to go away” anyway? What about the relationships that ensue from encounters that both partners enjoy and want to continue? Hint: the majority of healthy relationships.
Women can’t change the way they behave until they’re assured that behaving with assurance and aggressiveness won’t penalize them socially or put them at risk of violence (since women can’t back up their assertiveness with physical force). You’re severely oversimplifying the issue if you think it’s just a matter of women “choosing” to behave differently than they do.
I did—the PUA I mentioned. I can cite more if you want.
That seems like an unnecessarily high threshold to meet. If a policy is destructive on its face, I needn’t wait for the damage to suggest it not be done.
That’s game-theoretic terminology. “Uniltareral disarmament” refers to abandoning a selfish strategy (analogous to giving up your weapons in an international conflict), irrespective of whether the other players abandon it as well. I contend that giving up the strategy of “persisting after being told to go away” is a case of UD.
Well, that’s what we all wish were true and want to believe anyway. Recalling the earlier part of the thread I resurrected, there is a non-trivial number of cases of healthy relationships that originated from excessive persistence (edit: sorry, sentence wasn’t complete first time around).
What? Only telling a suitor to go away when you really mean it is aggressiveness? The entire problem I’m citing is that women tell suitors to go away in more cases than they really mean (at least retrospectively). That would imply that any problem would be in the opposite direction!
I didn’t say that it was. Remember, the problem I cite is not that women reject when they don’t really mean it, but that they do so and also complain about men who ignore their rejections. You really can’t have it both ways.
Please do cite more. Understand that your claims are difficult for me to just accept, because in my experience when women offer men a flat refusal, in the vast majority of cases they mean no. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but you seem to be implying that when women offer a flat refusal, there’s a significant, even close to 50% chance that they actually mean yes. You need more evidence than the word of a PUA or an anecdote about a woman you know to support that claim for people who haven’t had the same experiences as you.
People generally treat criticisms of one’s own group differently from criticisms of other groups, though which is considered to be more acceptable varies. Compare “America: love it or leave it” and the reclamation of racial slurs, for example. I generally lean more towards the latter camp because, ceteris paribus, criticisms that come from within a group are less likely to have untoward motivations.
I’m sorry, but the genetic argument is ridiculous. Even 500 years would be a preposterously short amount of time for a selection pressure this weak to have a significant effect, and I find it trivially unlikely that humans will both exist and not have mastered genetic engineering (assuming genetics are even still relevant) after we’ve seen another five centuries of progress.
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don’t mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
“I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?”
Right?
Phrasing my point in terms of a gene pool might be imprecise, but there are relevant effects at all the relevant levels.
For one thing, the genetic effects are augmented by memetic effects. That is, it’s not that there’s just a “disrepect women” gene that is being selected for. It’s that children will learn from their parents, even if they don’t say, “Hey, you’ve got to ignore women who tell you to go away.”
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
So there are enough natural selection-related effects that even if you ignore the purely genetic effects—which as you point out, are going to be minimal—that we do have to worry about the propagation of disrespectful men as a result of respectful men not using all the effective strategies that the former use.
I’ve realized the same issue myself. At least, the “dating pool dominated by disrespectful men” part. It may not currently be the case that women believe that their only option is a disrespectful man. But I have noticed that some women seem to conflate high levels of care for their comfort and consent with wimpiness or a lack of masculinity.
If scrupulous men restrain themselves out of deontological moral principles, even if it’s the “right” thing to do, what is the effect on the larger system? The effect is that our good little deontologists may select themselves out of the dating pool, leaving only men who are less scrupulous. That’s good for women, how, exactly?
Silas is right that the incentive structure is broken. There are incentives for men to engage in advances that take risks with women’s comfort levels (high-risk, high-reward), to fulfill common female preferences for excitement or being “swept off their feet.” I’m not completely sold on Silas’ specific example, because I don’t think that on average there is a great benefit to pursuing past a rejection on an approach, but I think these double-binds occur in other areas (for instead, asking permission for a kiss). The problem is that for men to “disarm” themselves of such behavior, it puts them at a pragmatic disadvantage vs. men who don’t, at least with typical heterosexual women (so if you’re a geeky woman reading this, remember that this criticism is probably not about you).
Another problem is that women who respond in a way that incentivizes men taking risks with their comfort levels is that their responses “vote” for a set of norms that is counter to the interests of other women. If it’s correct that the majority of women respond this way, then we may be seeing a tyranny of the majority where their needs for certain male behaviors and outlooks dominate the needs of other women. It’s tempting to suggest that women get together for a big pow-pow, and come up with a unified set of norms for how they like to be approached, or at least with ways to signal their preference sets in advance… then get back to men. Of course, that’s impossible in the real world.
From the perspective of morality, we tend to look at the agents of a morally-questionable behavior, which are men in this case. Yet on a societal level, it’s just not going to work very well to try to persuade people to throw away utility for an above-average level of scruples that people they are interacting with don’t really seem to care about. To actually change society, it is necessary to look at the patterns of incentives that people are under, and the source of the incentives. In other words, we need to think more like economists and psychologists, and less like moral philosophers.
I like the careful way you’ve picked this apart and have upvoted your comment.
However, I’m wary that the logic has no bottom. If everyone gets worse to compete (there is no reason to suppose that only men who are scrupulous, or even only men who suppose themselves scrupulous, will do this), where is the floor? You have to hard-code in some deontic principle to prevent everyone from trending less and less careful. Depending on how fast things change, female choice on the whole could become irrelevant (if you ignore her when she says “no” once, and then ignore her twice to compete, and then four times because everyone got the last memo and you don’t stand out anymore, and then...). If that happens, there’s no way for the entire female gender to go “oh, crap! We don’t like this at all and will start preferring sweet guys to incentive the behavior we want!” Female preference no longer needs to enter into the equation if ignoring it is the way to “succeed”. Yes, this is a horror story; but I’m not actually sure it doesn’t resemble things that happen on a smaller scale in some places.
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
It’s fun to watch you discover the visceral horror of natural selection, especially sexual selection. Yea that’s right, there is no ground floor, you fall forever. If females exhibit even a mild preference for bigger tails, or bigger brains, or higher persistence, or whatever else, then in relatively few generations the tails or brains or persistence will grow preposterously huge.
About your last paragraph: everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around. A population’s changes depend on the mating criteria of females, not the mating criteria of males.
It’s almost that absolute, but not quite. Regarding role reversal in sexual selection, Alison Jolly writes in Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution, page 88-89:
No, because if you successfully convince most men to do this, then you will actually increase the selection pressure towards aggressive courting behavior.
That’s the bit that some men get so bitter about—from their perspective, proposals like yours look just like deliberate attempts to weed the “nice guys” out of the gene pool, or at least the dating pool. Thus, the conspiracy theories about how women, the media, and “society” at large are collaborating to give men bad dating advice that increases selection pressures towards “bad boys”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the advice.
(Personally, I think it’s silly to ascribe to malice in this situation what is adequately explained by failure to think in such a systemic and evolutionary fashion… which is too high a bar for the average person, regardless of gender.)
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
I, personally, can’t have more then a trivial effect on “the success of the ones who say ‘no’ and don’t mean it,” but I can have a large effect on my own dating success, simply because there are millions of the former and only one of the latter. A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
Yup. And I’m not (yet) speaking about what is the most moral solution. Maybe it’s the only “moral” solution for men to boycott women who incentivize male behavior that puts their comfort levels (and those of other women) at risk. Still, I think we can only decide the moral solution once we understand the practical problem.
Yup. And not just boycotting for “lying” (or misstating preferences), but for incentivizing any behavior that takes risks with women’s comfort levels. If someone wants to ask men to unilaterally disarm themselves of this behavior, that’s fine, but they need to know the consequences of what they are asking, and that it will doom men who listen to spend long periods in saintly celibacy while women compete over less scrupulous men and form seemingly normal and happy relationships with them.
“Follow our moral prescriptions that society doesn’t believe are necessary, and martyr your dating life while changing nothing about society! Sign up here!”
Exactly. The ability of individual men like you and me to circumvent this problem, and find women who don’t have problematic preferences sets, doesn’t make the problem go away on a societal level. There are only so many women without those problematic preference sets to go round.
Hmmm… If someone offered me paperclips, and I turned down the offer, I would want the being to keep offering.
I don’t know how this applies to apes, but it’s something to think about.
Yes, this applies to apes as well. If an attractive woman offered me sex and I refused (most likely due to being busy with something or someone else), I’d want her to offer it again later. But in refusing I don’t lie about my preferences: if I really mean to answer “never” I say “never”, and if I mean “not now” I will say “not now”. This is a frequent complaint leveled at human females: they often say words to the effect of “never” but later behave as if they’d said “not now”, and vice versa.
I can see why that would be troubling as well. While User:Alicorn has provided clear reasoning why a human could reasonably turn down apey things—just as I might turn down paperclips in the right circumstances—it still does not make sense to claim you desire no paperclips, when you simply want to take possession of the paperclips later.
Apes often use words to achieve their goals, not just to make true information known. Claiming a falsehood may be beneficial. The ape may not even understand that it’s making a false claim. For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it). But even though such behavior is advantageous for individual female apes, ape society as a whole could benefit from denouncing it.
The antecedent doesn’t seem likely to be true to me: wouldn’t a high value male have lots of opportunities for mating, and thus not bother wasting time persisting in the face of someone who doesn’t seem interested?
Grossly simplified, it works like this. If you’re a low-value woman, you won’t be testing a high-value man for persistence. If you’re a high-value woman, a high-value man will still need persistence to get you. So being persistent doesn’t hurt the man in either case.
Yes, but you would never turn down the offer in the first place, so it’s moot.
Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it was in the middle of manufacturing a larger batch via a process that could not safely be interrupted, but want the opportunity to recur when it was finished; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that the offerer would, contingent on its acceptance, destroy a larger number of paperclips, but want the opportunity to recur when the destroyable paperclips were in the safe zone; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that, by acting unpredictably/as though it has high standards for numbers of paperclips an offer must include to be accepted, it would be offered more paperclips.
All of these scenarios have analogues to primate acceptance of offers to mate. (“I’m taken”; “he looks like he’d cause negative utility to me”; “I can’t just take every offer that comes by or people will think I’m a slut and nobody decent will want me”.)
The most relevant scenario, however, is not one that would cause Clippy to reject paperclips under analogous circumstances. Clippy values paperclips qua paperclips and is less picky about them than the typical human is about romantic/sexual relationships. I can’t think of a reason Clippy would reject an offer of paperclips when accepting wouldn’t result in other paperclips being destroyed or not made and when the transfer of paperclips could be kept a secret. However, primates are often acting in accordance with their values in turning down clandestine, low-risk sexual relationships while single.
Thank you for this explanation. It makes more sense now. You’re a good human. c=@
Please regard this as responsive to the substance of Alicorn’s sibling post:
“The reason that men (who care about women) can’t ‘just’ obey stated preferences is because that effectively cedes the dating pool to men who aren’t as respectful to women … as I’ve said about six times now.
“The reductio about an indefinite persistence threshold (if men ignore the first rejection, must they ignore the second, etc.) fails in that it is only necessary for respectful men to be as persistent as disrespectful men, and no more. This suffices to prevent disrespectful men from saturating the dating pool. Women, for their part, can ‘opt out’ of any negative effects of such a policy by simply being consistent with rejections, while men cannot (for the above reasons).”
(I would have just replied directly, but that would make me a terrorist.)
Silas, if you can’t address Alicorn directly, then it’s probably not best to address her indirectly by asking me to pass an argument along to her. (Update: Thanks for changing your language to make your post more clearly directed towards me.)
However, I’m planning my own reply to Alicorn, and if you think there is a point that I am leaving out, or something that needs to be emphasized, I invite you to reply to me personally either in the thread (if your reply is framed as a communication to me rather than to Alicorn) or by PM. If I agree with an argument that you pose to me, or convince me that a certain point needs more emphasis, then such an argument might naturally find it’s way into my discourse not just with Alicorn, but in general.
Agreed. Well, there are ways to be successful while acting consistently with the stated preferences of some women, but it still requires a bunch of work-arounds and a greater level of attraction.
Well, in the short term, yes. But if more men start pursuing in an aggressive way, then there is more competition, which could create incentive to pursue more aggressively than other men. On the other hand, there could be a ceiling on how much aggressiveness in advances can be successful. This sounds like an empirical question.
There are some cultures where men pursue women very aggressively in ways easily cause street harassment, and it’s plausible that these norms occurred through a run-away process where men had to one-up each other in terms of aggressiveness.
Theoretically, yes. But there are some additional practical considerations given that women have preferences for masculine, culturally successful men. It could be that in a certain culture, what is considered “masculine” mating behavior also risks making women uncomfortable a large proportion of the time. Unattractive men who exhibit that behavior are considered an annoyance. Attractive men who exhibit that behavior are accepted as mates. Men who do not exhibit that behavior in the first place are considered unattractive, and end up as rejected and invisible, because the women don’t see they as appropriately masculine and attractive in the first place. This is truly a lose-lose situation for both genders.
From a practical standpoint, women can demand that men make advances in less aggressive ways, and reject them for displaying too much aggression. Yet from a psychological perspective, it might be harder to get mainstream heterosexual women to do that, because it would mean going for guys who don’t display culturally masculine courtship behaviors that those women may associate with attractiveness, and it would mean rejecting guys who are attractive to them.
Maybe mainstream heterosexual women can just “get over” this psychology if they are educated about the effect of their aggregate choices on cultural norms… but maybe it’s not that easy.
Please just reply directly, instead of making these kinds of comments. No one (except Eliezer) has the authority to tell you not to reply to someone’s comment on an open comment section.
I appreciate you having the courage to voice that opinion openly. (This was a very contentious issue, if you can believe it...)
You’re right, I don’t mean that. I would say, rather, that the burden of conscientiousness is greater when one is criticizing a group to which one does not belong; dangerous thoughts and all that. My problem was not with what you were saying, necessarily, but that the manner in which you said it ignored this burden of conscientiousness. If you had said, “I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?” I doubt I would have had any problem with the comment.
Why do you make the bolded assumption? In cultures where long-term monogamous relationships are the norm, dating capability annihilates itself by taking those who possess it off the market.
And for that matter, why are you worried about women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option? If disrespectfulness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon as you suggest, we should expect to see respectful men as almost entirely marginalized. And yet the past fifty years have displayed the opposite trend: there is much more belief now that women should expect/demand a certain level of respect from their romantic partners. Whether or not this is acted upon proportionately (and while I suspect that it is, I have neither scientific nor personal evidence that this is so), I’m not sure how your model explains what evidence I do have.
Okay, but that’s exactly my complaint. Now what?
I’m referring to confidence effects: i.e. the more success you have earlier, the more you have later.
We do—hence the widespread phenomenon, noticed even among women, of women being attracted to “bad boy” types, which was attenuated in more conservative eras. Plus, the increasing frequency of divorce and domestic violence.
[citation needed]
Divorce has been on a steady upward trend. If fraction that are due to domestic violence is constant, that’s all that’s necessary for my point. If not, you’re right, I don’t have e.g. battered women’s shelter stats handy, but even if you ignore that part, the divorce rate alone is strong enough evidence.
The divorce rate increasing is not good evidence that domestic violence is increasing. It can be explained by divorce becoming easier legally (no fault divorce), less stigmatized socially and less financially crippling for women (they have more opportunity to generate their own income and arguably divorce has become more favourable to women when it comes to dividing up assets).
Increased social awareness and decreasing tolerance of domestic violence could also lead to increased divorce rates without the domestic violence rate increasing. Women are less likely to feel trapped in abusive relationships by social and economic pressures than they were in the past.
Also, changes in social attitudes would also have increased the reporting of domestic violence.
I had the same reaction. I’d be surprised if this is true since violent crime generally has been on a downward trend. I did some googling and couldn’t turn up much data, though a couple of hits seemed to support my suspicion that this is a difficult question to answer due to historical widespread under-reporting of domestic violence and a suspected increase in frequency of reporting more recently.
I’m not sure why this is evidence that women increasingly believe that disrespectful men are their only option or that respectful men are almost entirely marginalized. Is the argument that the increased number of divorces largely affect respectful men, in that when divorces were more difficult to obtain, women could only obtain divorces when their spouses were demonstrably problematic (and therefore, more likely to be disrespectful), and that easier divorce procedures allow women to divorce respectful men more easily?
I’m not an expert on either current or historic divorce law, but it’s my understanding that under earlier regimes, in many instances, women could not obtain divorces easily even with abusive husbands, because of proof difficulties. Perhaps more easily obtainable divorces just allowed more women to divorce disrespectful men.
To everyone making this same brilliant point: the divorce rate continued to increase after the relaxation of these restrictions on it, which would mean we’re not just seeing the conversion of “would have divorced” cases. And if the causes after that relaxation remain constant in relative proportion, that means more domestic violence.
But assuming there is more domestic violence, and that women are initially marrying more abusive and/or disrespectful men, if there’s also more divorce, this could mean that women are less tolerant of these abusive disrespectful men. So does it provide evidence for women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option or respectful men being almost entirely marginalized?
Alright, point taken. Because I can’t reliably document a trend of men becoming more disrespectful, obviously there’s nothing to worry about with an incentive structure that penalizes men for being respectful, and women should keep using “doesn’t listen to me” as a standard for which men they like, and also complain that men don’t respect them enough.
I’m sure we all appreciate the basic math lesson but you haven’t provided any evidence that the proportions have remained constant and given all the cultural and legal changes affecting the divorce rate there is very little reason to expect that they would.
Just because that PUA gets women after they’ve told him to go away, doesn’t mean that when they told him to go away they didn’t mean it. It just means that he eventually changes their minds (at least temporarily). There’s a Master vs. Slave thing going on.
But if they don’t stick to their original rejection, then they are incentivizing (there, I finally started using that word!) the very behavior they claim to oppose.
Yes, I had earlier drawn the analogy to akrasic purchases from telemarketers. But why aren’t there women who, on principle never go out with a man they rejected once, just as there are people who, on principle, never purchase a product through telemarketing / spam?
Edit: And why isn’t there social pressure against going out with a man you had recently rejected, just as there’s social pressure against buying from telemarketers / spam. (“You idiot! That just encourages them!”)
I think Silas is actually pushing in a correct direction. I’m just not sure there needs to be a solution.
The thing is, if you’re a (straight) man, it’s no credit to you if you’re with a woman who’s a pushover. And if you’re a (straight) woman, it’s also no credit to you if you’re with a man who’s a pushover. Having a date who can stand up to you is a sign that you’re a quality person—persuasive, attractive, admirable, etc.
And as long as men are proposers and women are accepters, this means that women want men who are relentless in pursuing them, and men want women who relentlessly evade them. (Something like the Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn dynamic.)
I don’t see this as a problem … in most cases. Obviously we don’t want men to threaten or attack women. And we don’t want too much of a stigma against women who say “yes” right away. But, appropriately moderated, it’s not a terrible dynamic. And I think we do moderate it; increasingly, people consider rape unacceptable, and consider female sexual eagerness acceptable, if a little ill-advised.
Okay, but how would men get reliable advice on which kinds of “standing up” are okay, and which kinds convert them into an evil terrorist creepy stalker guy that all women should stay away from? Or to distinguish between “stop for real” and “try harder”? And how would the existence of this advice not destroy its usefulness to women, as I warned about before?
Edit: And if there doesn’t need to be a solution, that suggests I shouldn’t care about date rape, stalking, abuse, etc. because this is all just the predictable result of women filtering for non-pushovers. But that’s ridiculous—surely, something needs solving.
Is it not obvious that physical force, or the credible threat of physical force, pushes things into a new category?
Maybe it’s just that I’m used to a traditional, hard-and-fast understanding of the word “coercion.”
Are you, personally, Silas, ever unsure if you’re being a stalker?
I, CronoDAS, personally, have frequently been unsure if I’m being a stalker.
Physical force includes a sexual advance that isn’t welcome. If women react the same way whether or not the advance is welcome … do you want to finish that sentence?
I’ve been kicked out of a group and given a very kafkaesque explanation after I tried to contact a female who had been friendly toward me, but then suddenly did a 180 and became (somehow!) ultra-scared of me before I had a chance to understand what was going on.
I’ve heard several females complain about a guy who followed them to or from home and yet suffered no consequences.
Sadly, the answer is yes. And even more sadly, these women know exactly what they need to do differently, but don’t do that.
But women usually don’t react the same way to welcome and unwelcome advances. At the very least, women are far more likely to react positively to a welcome advance than to an unwelcome one. Therefore, a negative response should cause you to update your estimate of her receptiveness down. Maybe not to zero, but definitely below 50%, and don’t you want to err on the side of not causing her significant fear or distress?
I’m not sure what your second to last paragraph even means—elaborate?
As for women knowing exactly what they need to do differently, you still haven’t addressed my point on the social penalties for women who behave assertively (by sticking to their guns instead of yielding to pressure and giving in despite an initial refusal). At any rate, why are you putting the onus on women? I might as well say that if men just changed so that they always respected women’s stated preferences, then women would soon adapt to become more honest and direct. But don’t you see how this is just wishful thinking? Instead of bemoaning the fact that people don’t behave the way you’d like them to, try to think of ways that the current social structure can be changed. Perhaps by persuading parents to teach their sons to be more respectful and their daughters more assertive, portraying respectful men and assertive women more positively in entertainment, and so on.
Of course, but the point is this only counts as weak evidence.
No, not to zero (that’s impossible), and probably not even to 50% (given the tendency of women to change their minds on account of persistence, as some women here have already testified to). And like I’ve explained several times already, I don’t want to err in the direction if it means ceding the romantic world to men who are even less respectful of women (see the end of this comment, or heck, any post I’ve made today on this topic for why unilateral disarmament is dangerous in this case).
I’m not sure what I could say that would make it clearer than it already is. Women have told me that men have done things much closer to stalking than I have ever conceived of, yet received nothing in the way of punishment.
Yes, I did, because you claimed that they face an incentive structure that causes them too be insufficiently assertive, yet the very problem under discussion is that they act too assertively, in that they reject more often than they really mean (assertiveness is not in general bad, of course). Since you’ve cited a factor that would have the opposite effect from what you need it to in order to make your point, I’m not sure why you think it’s relevant.
There’s a fundamental difference that breaks the symmetry you assert: for men to always respect is an “unstable equilibrium”, while for women to always be truthful is not.
In other words, the more men we convert to respectful, the stronger the incentives are for the remaining men to ignore rejections from women because they have less competition for these women. Any universal practice of respect by men would be instantly shattered by the tremendous incentives for any man to defect.
In contrast, for women to be truthful does not increase the incentives for other women to use fake rejections. That is why addressing it on the male side is much more of an uphill battle, and one which rewards exactly the wrong men.
As for what to do, am I not doing exactly the right thing my alerting women to the toxic incentive structure they create by this practice and what arguably underlies many of the ills of men they complain about, but for which few of them ever make the connection? That’s the first step on the road genuine progress in this area, don’t you think?
UNSOLICITED PERSONAL ADVICE- FEEL FREE TO IGNORE:
It seems to me that you’d be better off preferring women who are more direct and open about their preferences (since I assume you prefer this within a relationship as well as at its start), and taking explicit rejection at face level would help select for this.
You would indeed be filtering your dating pool, but in a fashion that accords with your preferences.
But what if I don’t like either of those women?!
(Edit: Because this might seem a bit subtle, I was implying that there are only two women who are direct and open about their preferences, not that I dislike both direct and indirect types of women.)
(Edit2: Incidentally, this has kind of already happened once in that I asked a woman out the day I met her in a group I went to the first time, and she said no, but then two days later out of the blue tracked me down and reversed her decision. But, since every group persistently treats me as an outsider, I can’t yet make such occurrences regular.)
(Edit3: As usual, such non-advice advice assumes that there’s a massive pool of women I can easily rotate through for compatibility, or that I can trivially conjure one up; and for which I already know the unspoken rules of engagement for such situations [despite having lived a life for which I got actively harmful training sets]. But why would I need advice if I could even get that far?)
I got your joke the first time ;)
Even to the extent that women (or anyone) are capable of correctly articulating their preference set, there simply isn’t any norm encouraging women to do so in interactions with men. Men are supposed to figure it out. This may not be a bug; it may be a feature of common female decision processes around men, consistent with greater female selectivity and testing of men.
The problem is that different, and mutually exclusive female preference sets exists. What’s a man to do in that case? When men must choose their behavior under conditions of uncertainty about female preferences, the incentive is for men to cater to the most common preference sets in the female population until they have more information.
Mutually-exclusive female preferences wouldn’t be such a problem if men could just explicitly ask women what their preferences are. Yet there is a disincentive for men to do so! Imagine a man on a date asking a woman “sooo, are you one of those women who like to be asked for a kiss goodnight, or are you one of those women who just wants me to go for it?” would solve so many sorts of problems that men deal with. Yet it would generally be seen as weird or unattractive for a man to ask such a question on a date. And a woman who finds it unattractive when men ask for kisses probably also finds it unattractive when men ask about her preferences for kissing. The problem is recursive: it will also be unattractive to ask if someone doesn’t mind being asked about their preferences.
Unfortunately, it seems that according to some of the common female preference sets, explicitly asking about their preferences signals undesirable qualities, such as lack confidence, hesitancy, lack of ability to read her, and accordance of higher status to her preferences than his.
It seems that the preference of some women for men to basically read their minds is so strong, that they are willing to risk men making them uncomfortable by making guesses about their preferences which are bound to be wrong some of the time. Moreover, these women seem willing to place an incentive on men to not ask other women for their preferences, even if those women might prefer to be asked rather than men creeping them out with wrong guesses.
The other possible male solution in addition to guessing is to behave in a way that averages the preferences of the female population. In the case of initiating kisses at the end of dates, there might be an equilibrium like this: don’t ask verbally, but move in slowly watching for signs of discomfort, see if the woman moves in also, and then kiss. Yet this solution doesn’t optimally fulfill the preferences of women who like to be explicitly asked, nor the preferences of women who like to be thrown up against walls unhesitantly!
Of course, there are indirect ways to make reasonable hypotheses about women’s preferences, but that takes skill and experience. For instance, you can get women to talk in ways that reveal their preferences without seeming like you are asking, and incurring the signaling costs of asking. Conversational maps can help you steer the conversation in directions that women will reveal their preferences. I have success with this method, but I still sometimes make errors in guessing preferences, and I think it would be better to have a solution that doesn’t require me being a frickin’ wizard.
The incentive for majority female preferences to be overrepresented in the preferences that men attempt to satisfy is another example of the the tyranny of the majority that females with the most common preferences sets hold over other women.
While women have mutually exclusive preferences that men can’t predict in advance, there will always be some women not getting what they want. This system is broken. Women are probably better positioned to fix this brokenness, because women have less costly ways of having men know their preferences (e.g. telling them), while men’s methods of finding out women’s preferences are either error-prone (e.g. guessing) or vulnerable to signaling qualities at odds with other aspects of majority-female preferences (e.g. asking).
I guess it depends on how deeply ingrained the preference of having men guess their preferences is for the (probably large) subset of the female population that has it.
When I read this, it made me wonder how much of my staunch insistence on obedience to stated preferences has to do with my identification of myself as unreadable. (People trying to guess what I want by looking at me do not do appreciably better than I would expect them to if they were presented with a written summary of the immediate context. Some people do worse than that.) But if I am unusually hard to read—and I may well be—then I should be cautious in generalizing my preferences to others with different relevant traits.
It seems that you are capable and interested in explicit discussions of your preferences, and that you think analytically about them. What do you think is the link between your emphasis on stated preferences and identification as unreadable? Do you think, “hey, I know I’m unreadable, so I’ll give you the information you need to know explicitly instead of expecting you to make guesses? Or do you think it is part of a general social orientation towards explicit communication, and away from implicit communication?
I agree that you are probably atypical in this regard. As far as I can tell, the preferences of mainstream heterosexual women (MHW) have the following features:
MHW are consciously unaware of the majority of their preferences.
MHW have difficulty articulated their preferences in ways that match up with their choices and responses, according to observers.
The portion of their preferences that MHW articulate and are aware of is like the tip of the iceberg of their actual preferences.
One of the preferences of MHW is that men guess their other preferences.
MHW select men on their ability to satisfy preferences that they don’t/can’t articulate or that they aren’t even aware of.
If someone doesn’t like explicit analysis and discussion of their preferences, then this is actually quite a reasonable strategy. It just has negative externalities on men, and on women like you who don’t share those preferences, by training men to behave in ways that are counter to what you would prefer.
I’d actually say that all of the ones you listed apply to most, if not all, human beings (replacing “MHW select men… ” with “People value people”… ). I’d also say that this is human nature and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to modify.
They definitely apply to people, but they seem to apply more to mainstream heterosexual women. See this article on my blog for some research.
Women’s preferences for male behavior (e.g. masculinity) has more potential collisions with ethical behaviors (e.g. asking someone preferences) than men’s preferences in women do, since men just don’t care so much about behavior. Men are under more behavioral constraints.
I didn’t know you had a blog. It looks nifty. Reading the archives now.
Hope you find it interesting. It’s a group blog, so not all of it is written by me, and it’s written in a slightly more polemical style than I use for LW. Here are some of the posts which have some of my best arguments (though they are most a couple years old, and I could probably articulate some things better nowadays):
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/01/04/are-men-oppressed-part-1-double-standards/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/01/08/are-men-oppressed-part-2-systematic-mistreatment/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/01/04/do-nice-guys-finish-last-noh/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/02/24/pickup-and-seduction-techniques-for-feminists-noh/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/11/09/sifting-through-the-feminist-sand-castle/
Your coauthors seem cool too. It’s all so… so sane. I realize I sometimes come off as LW’s resident screamy feminist/ethicist/footstomping engine of disapproval, but I have my own issues with anti-discrimination type movements in general and can extrapolate to how men poking at gender issues might feel. Your blog (I just read all the posts you linked and am on page three of the general archive) is thoughtful and seems to handily avoid kneejerk reactions in any direction, so yay for it. :)
P.S. I love the quote by Mystery about “comfort”. I still have the impression that pickup material in general is some nice things in a big box of nastiness, but I am pleased that you have gone to trouble of sifting out some nice things so I can be aware of them and enjoy their niceness.
Thanks, I’m glad you got something out of it.
I really enjoyed your blog post on “Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large” (TAPAICAL). I think that wherever one’s sympathies and experiences lie, it will be obvious to a rationalist that TAPAICAL has some very bad epistemic hygiene.
You captured some of the biggest problems here:
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that Oppressed People have valid moral claims. I’m not willing to concede that just because Oppressed People deal with shitty, unfair things, that their conceptual analysis about those shitty, unfair things must be correct.
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that, on average, Oppressed People have some special insight into society and the fairness about how they are treated. I’m not willing to concede that such insight is so absolute that allies to Oppressed People should just turn off their brains and follow TAPAICAL blindly.
TAPAICAL doesn’t just seem motivated to be right, TAPAICAL is also motivated by power. As you observe, even though TAPAICAL is willing to admit in principle that it is fallible, it responds negatively to any challenges to its core ideas from outsiders. Even insiders need to be careful challenging TAPAICAL’s doctrines, lest they be accused of “internalized oppression” or “collaboration.” As a result, conceptual trash builds up in TAPAICAL, and nobody, either inside or outside, can clear it out.
It’s especially frustrating dealing with TAPAICAL when you agree with many of its moral claims, but you just have a problem with some of the exclusionary concepts it is using. If TAPAICAL would just fix the obvious problem, or respond satisfactorily to your criticism, then you could hope right on board. But since TAPAICAL is motivated by political power, it won’t. Instead, TAPAICAL treats an attempt at criticism as an act of war that must be retaliated against, rather than responding to criticism the way a rationalist would.
If you aren’t with TAPAICAL, you are against it. You can’t change TAPAICAL, except in very incremental ways once you’ve built up appropriate creds.
Although TAPAICAL may be mostly associated with the highest profile anti-ism movements, I think it’s really an example of broader human psychology. It’s similar to how every cause wants to become a cult. I hypothesize that any anti-oppression movement will try to enforce the discursive hierarchy you describe if it is given enough power. You can see elements of TAPAICAL outside leftist movements, such as in the Men’s Rights Movement, and the seduction community.
Unfortunately, TAPAICAL’s intellectual authoritarianism makes it very difficult to whole-heartedly ally with it, especially if you aren’t in the relevant Oppressed Group. Are we really to believe once the Oppressed Group gains equality, TAPAICAL is going say “Ok, now that we’re equal, we’re going to stop being so dogmatic and power-hungry, and we’ll listen to all your criticisms now.”
If you ever feel motivated to do something like a top-level post on TAPAICAL, I would be quite interested to read it.
Yes, it’s definitely a mixed bag. There are a lot of really good ideas in the community (such as Mystery’s analysis of comfort) that are stated much better than anywhere else.
I think the link goes like your first guess. Also, I find that one of the things I am most interested in learning about the people around me is whether they are disposed to respect my preferences. If I rely in their ability to read me—which I expect, for good reasons, to approach nil—then what they do isn’t informative about that disposition. They might be trying to do exactly what they think I prefer, and be annoying me because they have bad information, not because they choose to act at cross purposes. If I tell them what I want (and that I’m unreadable, etc. etc.), then their behavior becomes informative about their disposition to respect my preferences. Then, if they demonstrate that they have this disposition, I can choose to be around them more, and if they demonstrate that they don’t, I can avoid them and try to limit their influence on my life.
I agree with all of your numbered remarks and the summary at the end, except for a small caveat about (2). While it is true that MHW will articulate preferences that may not resemble the ones they reveal through behavior, and true that their articulated preferences are suspect, I think their revealed preferences are suspect too. The most obvious case of this is the known tendency of abuse victims to re-create the patterns that have been characteristic of their prior relationships. This looks like a revealed preference to be an abuse victim. I consider this little to no evidence in favor of the conclusion that the people exhibiting this behavior prefer to be abuse victims.
This leaves a bit of a muddle the question of where reliable information about common MHW preferences might be obtained. It looks sort of grim. You could try to extrapolate from people more likely to have accurate articulated preferences (like me), but the very factors that make me more likely to have accurate articulations probably also affect what it is that I prefer. (For instance, I prefer that people take my articulations at face value, which someone without good articulations might well not!)
Some avenues of possible investigation:
Try different ways of requesting preference articulation. (The question “what do you want?” is apt to get a cached list of social-circle-approved adjectival criteria. I think one might have better luck asking a MHW to say what her favorite scene in her favorite romance story is; or what three things she’d like to change about her current/most recent boyfriend; or an example of a couple she’s friends with being adorable/compatible/mutually supportive/something like that.)
Extrapolate from some subset of the MHW population likely to have especially… revealing… revealed preferences. (People with very high subjective happiness ratings; people with long-lasting relationships that don’t exhibit signs of abuse; there are probably other categories I’m not thinking of.)
Forget about learning MHW preferences and adopt conservative, general rulesets designed at minimizing risk to vulnerable people. (This is what I’ve advocated historically. I still think it has the best chance of avoiding the worst failure modes; but it is probably possible to do better on net.)
You can ask this in an attractive and confident way, and it’ll go over fine. It’s the insecurity that would be seen as unattractive. “So tell me what you like. You like it when a guy does X?”
Maybe in some cases, sure. What evidence leads you to this claim?
Basically, with sufficient attractiveness, confidence, and charisma, you can get lots of things to work. That doesn’t make such behaviors optimal, even for men who have those qualities.
Furthermore, confidence and charisma take time and experience to build, so it’s problematic to require them for what should be very basic dating tasks. It creates significant barriers of entry for men… but maybe that’s not a bug, but a feature.
The Old Spice “experience” commercial put it very well:
I’d be surprised if you disagree, based on your other posts. If you’re asking for actual studies, I can cite studies that show the dominance of non-verbal over verbal communication though some famous ones have been criticized on the grounds that they don’t accurately reflect normal social interactions.
(Also see this applied to cryonics.)
Yes, exactly!
Optimal, in this situation, is probably just kissing without hesitation. My point was that if you really want to ask someone’s preference about something in general, you can do it in a confident way, and you probably won’t lose points for it.
Yes, but the only way to build them is to practice doing things (like asking how someone wants to be kissed) with confidence. Also, you don’t have to be George W. Bush, you just have to be able to ask a question confidently.
I would hypothesize a nontrivial subset of women who would be turned off by such a question even when asked charismatically. Maybe I just view this is a more unattractive question than you do, though it do acknowledge that it will work just fine with nontrivial subsets of women also.
I think this depends on the wiring of who you are dealing with. With some people, the best you will be able to do is partially mitigate the loss of points.
We seem to agree that it’s possible to surmount this barrier to entry with practice (and often lots of failure). I’m just pointing out the problematic nature of barriers to entry for men in the dating market that women are not subject to. The primary way for non-intuitively attractive men to efficiently learn to navigate the dating world is to go through a period of practice when they make lots of women uncomfortable, and forge their own emotions in a crucible of rejection until they can satisfy women’s greater selectivity for behavioral traits and play the role of initiator.
The fact that some individual men (including myself) can triumph over this system does not make it not broken. What didn’t kill me made me stronger, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 years down the line I run into emotional damage that I’m incapable of recognizing now because I buried it so deeply out of practical considerations.
Have you tried online matchmaking sites? A priori, these seem like the natural solution to this kind of problem, and I’ve furthermore heard some anecdotal evidence that they work.
Of course, I’m not an expert on this, don’t have much data, and haven’t even tried it myself. But it sounds like it might be worth trying, if you’re seriously interested in finding a mate.
That’s pretty much what I was thinking about saying, with the addendum that, SilasBarta, I think your desire for straightforward communication is a good bit stronger than a preference.
How so? To the extent that I make a big deal about this, it’s because of concerns for others: a) the general effect on the pool of men that women typically encounter, and b) the fact that putting me between a rock and a hard place inevitably leads to me making decisions that others dislike.
Certainly, I do prefer directness, but that’s not why I start these discussions and introduce game theoretical concerns; and, if I had assimilated the unspoken rules of engagement about e.g. what pursuit actions increase attraction after a rejection, what rejections are real, etc., it wouldn’t bother me so much and wouldn’t rank so highly as a preference.
As you have experienced, being given advice without recognition of the difficulties and costs of following it is not necessarily useful.
I will tentatively suggest two reasons (in addition to the possibility that many women just like being dominated)-- one is that a lot of women are unsure of their own desires in regards to men, and afraid to act on them if they know what they are.
The other is being afraid that telling a persistent man to go away and meaning it is actually dangerous.
To the extent that either motive is in play, it would take a great deal of work for women to change what they’re doing.
Point taken, though I’d note that it’s equally unuseful for women to complain about aggressive behavior from men without recognizing the position they put men in with inconsistent treatment of persistence.
This would just as well be a reason to offer greater understanding to men who are too persistent, as they have no way of knowing if that persistence is wanted.
lmnop was making a similar point, and I don’t understand it. If women reject men in more cases than they really want (and this is apparent from those like SarahC and LauraABJ who merrily encourage men to keep trying, and ridicule men who don’t), then it means their incentives to turn men down is too high. It can’t explain why women are too reluctant to reject.
What about consistency bias? A person might end up remembering an encounter as more romantic/intimate if she were involved in physically intimate acts and hadn’t screamed “rape;” so if a guy takes any less than the maximum of liberties he could without provoking objection, he’s left some potential attraction on the table.
That’s an additional possibility, but I’m not feeling particularly sympathetic to that hypothetical man.
What I’m apt to see is accounts by women who have to work to figure out whether some sexual situation that they didn’t like (or worse) was bad enough for them to feel justified in not liking it.
But if you, personally, are less respectful of women’s requests, this won’t make men who are less respectful than you any more inclined to be respectful. It may lead them to be even less respectful (ie engaging in coercion or assault) because they’re now under more competition. Besides, by continuing to be respectful of women’s requests, you wouldn’t be “ceding the dating world,” you’d only be ceding the portion of the dating world that’s comprised of women who consistently give false rejections, which in my experience is a clear minority. Whereas by adopting a policy of ignoring women’s rejections, you’re likely to hurt the majority, who rejected you honestly. This seems unethical.
Regarding your claim that stalking, sexual assault and other “ills” would decrease if women were only more honest—serial rapists are great at deluding themselves into thinking the women they raped “wanted it.” Even if more women were completely honest in their rejections, how do you know that some men wouldn’t simply delude themselves into thinking otherwise, thus internally justifying their behavior?
Thank you for clarifying that paragraph. I wasn’t sure whether you were indicating whether the women or the stalker men didn’t receive punishment. It seems that you mean the men. You would be correct. Perhaps good men should band together to punish the men who behave threateningly to women, for instance by socially ostracizing those men and making it clear that such behavior is low status?
Good point.
I find your reasoning plausible in this particular case. I don’t consider there being a great incentive on men to ignore explicit female rejections on an approach, because I don’t see such behavior as actually granting a significantly higher probability of success most of the time.
I do think there are other situations where common female preferences create a tradeoff between what is most likely to work, and what women are most likely to be comfortable with. For example, a man approaching a woman in public at all risks making her feel uncomfortable, yet there are incentives for men to do so. Similarly, kissing someone at the end of a date without asking has a higher risk of causing discomfort than kissing after asking, but also has practical issues because a certain percentage of women prefers to not be asked (sorry, only anecdotal evidence from female friends on that one).
There are always going to be deluded people, sure. But wouldn’t it be a good thing if there was less delusion-fuel floating around?
When you say “prefer not to be asked”, are you just referring to not wanting a verbal question, or does it include not wanting something like a move toward kissing which includes a pause to check for (at least) receptiveness?
I was thinking of preferring to not get a verbal question. It may be the case that some women also find it sexy when men (they are attracted to and have had an interaction with) move in for a kiss without pausing. I don’t know the percentages on either of those questions, and I think the second set of preferences is less common and may not need to be worried about so much.
Does anyone know of any studies that ask people how they like to receive sexual advances? This would be interesting to study, but difficult because of social desirability bias.
OKCupid has a lot of data on that; several of their questions that cover it. But they haven’t published their data on the OKC blog, just their results, and they haven’t published that particular result yet—possibly because of PR concerns.
Unfortunately, I doubt that even anonymized self-reporting would accurately reflect the real-world results on something like that.
Certainly it would be nice if there were less delusion-fuel, as you call it, floating around. But I’m guessing that most men who make a habit of ignoring women’s preferences won’t actually change their behavior if the minority of women who lie becomes a smaller minority. They will just find another rationalization.
If we really want to reduce stalking, assault and other such behaviors by men, then I don’t think targetting women and demanding that they be more honest will be a very efficient use of our time. Abusive men are far more likely to be dissuaded by scorn and social ostracization directed at them by other men, and that’s something concerned men can implement directly.
Sure, there will always be some diehard jerks. I’m more concerned with well-meaning guys who engage in behaviors that take risks with women’s comfort levels (which is a broader category than “ignoring women’s preferences”).
Maybe not, but I do think that if there was less incentive for men to take risks with women’s comfort levels when making advances, we would see less of certain classes of unwanted advances. Furthermore, if there were less messages (both from women’s behavior and from the culture) that women like certain personality traits and behaviors (see the Draco In Leather Pants phenomenon; apologies for linking to TVTropes), then I think we would see less men exhibiting those traits and behaviors.
It is also an unstable equilibrium for women to always be truthful, if an individual woman gets some informational advantage by seeing how a man reacts to playing hard-to-get.
Okay, this is getting tricky, so bear with me: if you start from a “universal consistent female rejection equilibrium”, then women do not gain from defecting to do a “rejection probe” because the male’s reaction would just be to give up, and thus be uninformative. Right?
Of course, that still wouldn’t refute the difficulty of moving to that equilibrium from the current one...
Do you mean, if you start from the state where women always reject someone they’re not interested in clearly, never change their mind about who they’re interested in, and where men always stop pursuing after a women’s clear rejection? In that case, yes, women don’t gain from defecting.
(Some of the effects you’re talking about can be explained by women changing their mind, which isn’t exactly dishonesty.)
Yes, that’s what I mean, and doesn’t it establish the asymmmetry I claimed?
As for nondishonest changing minds, this goes back to the telemarketing/spam problem: even if you like a product thereby offered, it’s still (widely regarded as) wrong to purchase it, as that encourages a harmful, unethical practice. I submit it’s wrong for the same reasons to reverse a rejection, even if it’s honest, as that encourages (harmful) persistence.
Perhaps a big part of the problem is how there’s no way to credibly signal different levels of rejection—heck, even a simple “no, I’m busy” can’t be taken literally!
But in that situation, men don’t gain from defecting either, because we’re assuming women always reject someone they’re not interested in, and never change their mind.
But spam/telemarketing works, for a certain value of working. Even after being repeatedly told about the dangers of spam/etc there are still people who will end up falling for it ‘just this once’.
I suspect the problem is that a lot of people are vulnerable to persistence-based hacks, and that this is even more true in dating since the potential gain from giving in is much higher. (And the potential loss is low if you only consider local consequences—just a single evening of putting up with an annoying guy)
Sometimes you can’t even take a “Yes, here’s my phone number, yes, you can call me” literally. I found that out the hard way. :(
I find this surprising, and request details to assist my updating.
On several occasions, girls have given me their phone number after a friendly conversation, and when I called or texted, I got back an angry message from the girl, or her boyfriend, saying that she had a boyfriend and not to talk to her again (even when I was dating someone and was just looking for friendship). I can only assume that the boyfriend had issues and changed her mind.
It’s more common to have a good conversation with a girl, have her give you her number and tell you to call her, and then have her screen your calls and never return them.
Same has happened to me at least once that I remember. If you’re a female and want to know how common this is, poll your male friends to see how many other instances come out of the woodwork. And if you are surprised, please recognize your atypicality.
At a restaurant I go to frequently, I had several pleasant conversations with one of the waitresses. I asked her for her phone number, so we could talk more. (I tried to indicate that I was interested in friendship rather than romance.) She wrote it on a napkin for me. I asked if I could call her on a specific evening, and she said that I could. When I called her, I received no answer, and from then on, she avoided me when I went to the restaurant. (I strongly suspect that the phone number was fake.)
A different waitress was kind enough to turn me down directly.
But women usually don’t react the same way whether or not the advance is welcome. At the very least, women are far more likely to react positively to a welcomed advance. Seriously, if you’re going to make that claim, where’s your evidence? Because you’re slipping into “no doesn’t equal no” territory here.
And why are you putting the onus on the women anyway? If men consistently listened to women’s requests for them to leave, then women would soon adapt so that they only told men to leave when they really wanted to, no?
Nah. From my experience, this matters way less to men than to women. Whether a woman “stands up to me” doesn’t factor into my judgment of her as a partner. Moreover, if a woman “evades” me, this is a turn-off for me.
For some evidence about people being into pushovers, check out the results of this study by Botwin and Buss
These results would be more probable if women cared more than men about avoiding “pushovers.”
I have definitely seen guys go for elusive women. Sometimes—just as it is with women—you don’t go with what they say, but with the pattern of behavior. And sometimes the pattern is that they chase the unattainable and unavailable. Or women who seem “classy,” hard to win and hard to impress. But it may not be as common as a male pattern.
Nah. Imagine that some women are exceptionally attractive to men for some arbitrary reason, but you cannot see this reason because you’re not a man. Then these women will start behaving more “elusively” out of necessity, thus prompting you to see the nonexistent causal pattern of men chasing elusive women. From my experience, women don’t accurately assess the attractiveness of other women (they fixate too much on clothing, accessories, “style” etc. instead of qualities that matter to men), so my theory should make you a little paranoid from now on :-)
Then wouldn’t elusive behavior become a status signal of sorts? “Oh, person X is being elusive; there must be something there I’m not seeing!”
Yes, definitely.
I doubt it would work on men. We can assess female attractiveness directly in like 2 seconds, no need for signals and definitely not enough time to notice elusive behavior.
Status is a factor in male partner preferences, it’s just massively dwarfed by other factors.
Being elusive isn’t a big factor on direct desirability, but non-clinginess and a level of independence can be important for relationship preferences.
And this, my friend, is the “part of ‘No!’” that men “don’t understand”.
Again, it may seem clever to use explicit rejections and then expect men to “just know” that it’s fake by your “behavior” … but that creates a really rotten incentive structure.
I think you’ve hit upon the root of the problem; like the other phenomena you mention, the strength of the trend seems to be diminishing.
What is your evidence that there are no such women?
Because I’m familiar with standard advice given to women, and I never see a taboo against “giving in” to continued unwanted advanced “just because you decide you like the guy now”.
That’s evidence that such a social taboo is not very common, but there could easily be women doing it on their own accord and just not talking about it much. “Don’t reward guys for keeping to bother you” seems obvious and unremarkable enough to follow without explicitly mentioning it all the time.
Without wanting to cite fictional evidence I think it’s worth noting that guys being rewarded for continuing to bother an initially uninterested woman is a very common and long-lived trope in fiction.
Yes, and that’s in fiction that is most popular with women. To borrow the form of a Penny Arcade strip, it’s like this:
Jane: Geez, we go through all this effort to raise awareness about respect for women, and men never seem to get the message! Why is that?
Lisa: (with a guilty look) It’s a goddamn … it’s a goddamn mystery!
Earlier, at a focus group session Lisa is participating in...
Focus group director: So, what kinds of behaviors do you women like to see in the male characters in the novels you read?
Lisa and the rest of the group: Ignoring the woman’s rejections!!!
I suspect that women are very underrepresented among people who:
a) frame dating someone a “reward” for them, and
b) carefully monitor the game-theoretic implications of their actions
Are you female? Do you think you have sufficient understanding of what empathic inferences you can make from your mind to theirs?
That wasn’t supposed to be an argument for such behavior being common (I’d guess it’s not particulary), just for the possibility of such behavior existing without being much talked about.
Yes, there can always be invisible evidence.
Yes you can. And that cuts back to the core of the OP.
Oh, the “the fuck” part is essential? Good to know.