If it is indeed the case that everyone knows for certain what the signals mean, then they can be very specific communications of intent and consent: there is not actually any guessing going on! But if the point of using facial expressions and gestures rather than words is that the former are deniable, then it probably can’t be the case that everyone knows for certain: deniability relies on ambiguity.
If two people have slightly different interpretations of what the signals mean, then they can end up with extremely divergent interpretations of what happened in a particular exchange.
For that matter, if everyone in the bar grew up in the same town and went to the same schools, that’s a pretty different situation from if the bar is an assemblage of people from wildly different backgrounds who happen to have landed in the same location.
(I may be computing from stereotypes in saying this … but I expect that guess cultures prize uniformity, and fear diversity as a source of confusion; whereas tell cultures may consider uniformity boring, and prize diversity as a source of novelty.)
Sexually, it seems to me that if all you are doing is triggering the System 1 of the other person and neither person is waiting around for System 2 to engage and reflect, that may be very hot indeed — Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck” — but the failure modes are correspondingly huge.
If it is indeed the case that everyone knows for certain what the signals mean, then they can be very specific communications of intent and consent: there is not actually any guessing going on!
It’s possible to send signal A and the other person not understanding what the signal means and doing nothing.
But it’s also possible that they don’t understand the signal but the signal causes them to feel a certain emotion and that emotion lets them engage in an action without them having any idea of the casual chain.
The more I learn about how humans work the more I get those practical ethical dilemmas. Even worse, to really know what I’m doing I have to experiment and I’m curious ;)
Guess cultures are really tricky!
If it is indeed the case that everyone knows for certain what the signals mean, then they can be very specific communications of intent and consent: there is not actually any guessing going on! But if the point of using facial expressions and gestures rather than words is that the former are deniable, then it probably can’t be the case that everyone knows for certain: deniability relies on ambiguity.
If two people have slightly different interpretations of what the signals mean, then they can end up with extremely divergent interpretations of what happened in a particular exchange.
For that matter, if everyone in the bar grew up in the same town and went to the same schools, that’s a pretty different situation from if the bar is an assemblage of people from wildly different backgrounds who happen to have landed in the same location.
(I may be computing from stereotypes in saying this … but I expect that guess cultures prize uniformity, and fear diversity as a source of confusion; whereas tell cultures may consider uniformity boring, and prize diversity as a source of novelty.)
Sexually, it seems to me that if all you are doing is triggering the System 1 of the other person and neither person is waiting around for System 2 to engage and reflect, that may be very hot indeed — Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck” — but the failure modes are correspondingly huge.
It’s possible to send signal A and the other person not understanding what the signal means and doing nothing.
But it’s also possible that they don’t understand the signal but the signal causes them to feel a certain emotion and that emotion lets them engage in an action without them having any idea of the casual chain.
The more I learn about how humans work the more I get those practical ethical dilemmas. Even worse, to really know what I’m doing I have to experiment and I’m curious ;)