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 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.