Having a Yes Means Yes social policy would change the onus of responsibility for making sure that sex is consensual from the woman—who is obligated to say no if she doesn’t want to—to both parties who must say yes to proceed.
I’m in my late 40s, and in my experience women of my generation generally do not want the onus put on them in sexual or romantic matters, and prefer the onus to be on the man to make overtures. It’s for the man to pursue, and the woman to say no. If a man doesn’t pursue, and soon enough, the woman loses interests and will often attribute the lack of pursuit to a character flaw in the man. I don’t know that she’s wrong.
When I was younger I used to spin webs of “wouldn’t it be better if people did X instead”. Maybe it would be. Maybe it would be better if people were unicorns instead of people. But they aren’t. At least most of them aren’t. Things are the way they are for reasons, not magic.
They don’t want to take responsibility? Then they can join the club consisting of everybody else. That just makes them wrong, not justified. Responsibility is absolutely needed, for everyone, all the time. Being born bad at it, or being excused from it, being ridiculed when you do take it, whatever.., makes no change to what your responsibilities are as a person.
(IOW your argument seems to be about ‘how things are’, with no actual serious consideration of how they can realistically be improved; it seems to be entirely orthogonal to the main post.)
To be clear, I agree with you that a lot of women don’t want the onus put on them, I was trying to make that point in what I wrote, although I obviously did not make it directly enough.
I do think that with a cultural shift, this is changeable. I don’t think making that cultural shift would be easy, although I do think its possible and that some liberal culture is moving that direction. Also, I know culture around sex is very different in other countries, and I have no idea how this all plays out elsewhere.
I find attitudes around mating rituals surprisingly traditional even among people otherwise ideologically opposed to anything traditional, and supposedly beyond old fashioned gender roles.
I find it puzzling and extremely alien the way many women who I find quite reasonable otherwise rather unreasonably, in my mind, refuse to make a move, instead hoping that their desired man will. But that’s the way it is. This rule has barely budged compared to other sexual rules, which have changed enormously in the last 40 years.
Yes, thank you for the example about how multiple variables would need to be changed for this system to work, and how ideas get dismissed on the basis that they can only be implemented in the current system without looking at the other variables.
We should consider separately whether a situation A could be improved by changing into a situation B (by changing multiple variables), and how to realistically get from A to B.
Because, I can talk about all the variables that should be changed… but the only variable I can change is my own behavior. (Technically, my own behavior is also a set of variables, but that is important for different kind of decisions.) So we sometimes get into a multi-player Prisonners’ Dilemma. (For example, I can wait until women start showing their interest in me first, but… some other guy may just move faster; and the punchline is that at the end most of those women will appreciate that he did.)
There is also a technical risk in changing multiple variables. What if we succeed in changing some of them, but fail in changing others of them, and end up with a situation C which may be even worse than A? And that’s actually pretty likely, because you often can’t change many variables at the same time, and when you change only half of them, you may get a worse situation, which may make people say: “OK, this is just getting worse, let’s stop.”
Also, the more variables we change, the harder it is to predict the consequences. There is a big chance that something unexpected happens, and the reality will look differently than the B we predicted. And if it happens to be worse than A, now what? Change all the variables back? How politically likely is that?
Uhm… it’s complicated. I don’t want to make it a fully general counterargument against multi-variable changes, but it should increase the burden of proof significantly.
Great point. It is definitely much harder to change many variables than one.
I think that what is the correct thing to do depends lot on context and importance.
For example, picking the right government system, or preventing rape, are worth a lot of effort in my book. And worth some seriously challenging systemic changes. In other cases, it may be best to only consider what can be accomplished with single variable shifts, and to throw out more complex possibilities.
Also, I think a lot of things you simply can’t shift by only changing one thing at a time, so in those cases, it is many or nothing.
One thing that helps is to do a lot of study before making changes. If you can run models ahead of time, that is awesome. Then the cost of looking at many variables is greatly reduced, because its not a big deal if a model fails.
I’m sure that’s what you’d prefer, all other things being equal. And if you could order up women from Dell, custom designed to your specs, you’d check that box.
But in practice, the very nice gal you’ve taken an interest in turns out not to be like that. And the next one. And the next after that. Is this single feature so important that you’d rather be alone than consider a woman not “up to spec”?
(I suspected that there was some inferential distance due to cultural/pondian differences, but I recently spent a week and a half in a country overseas where (according to Wikipedia at least) there are even fewer atheists than in the US, and ISTM that women willing to own up to wanting sex exist there too. So, if you’re having trouble finding such people, unless you’re in an Islamic theocracy or something I have to guess you’re just looking in the wrong places.)
I’m in my late 40s, and in my experience women of my generation generally do not want the onus put on them in sexual or romantic matters, and prefer the onus to be on the man to make overtures. It’s for the man to pursue, and the woman to say no. If a man doesn’t pursue, and soon enough, the woman loses interests and will often attribute the lack of pursuit to a character flaw in the man. I don’t know that she’s wrong.
When I was younger I used to spin webs of “wouldn’t it be better if people did X instead”. Maybe it would be. Maybe it would be better if people were unicorns instead of people. But they aren’t. At least most of them aren’t. Things are the way they are for reasons, not magic.
They don’t want to take responsibility? Then they can join the club consisting of everybody else. That just makes them wrong, not justified. Responsibility is absolutely needed, for everyone, all the time. Being born bad at it, or being excused from it, being ridiculed when you do take it, whatever.., makes no change to what your responsibilities are as a person.
(IOW your argument seems to be about ‘how things are’, with no actual serious consideration of how they can realistically be improved; it seems to be entirely orthogonal to the main post.)
To be clear, I agree with you that a lot of women don’t want the onus put on them, I was trying to make that point in what I wrote, although I obviously did not make it directly enough.
I do think that with a cultural shift, this is changeable. I don’t think making that cultural shift would be easy, although I do think its possible and that some liberal culture is moving that direction. Also, I know culture around sex is very different in other countries, and I have no idea how this all plays out elsewhere.
I find attitudes around mating rituals surprisingly traditional even among people otherwise ideologically opposed to anything traditional, and supposedly beyond old fashioned gender roles.
I find it puzzling and extremely alien the way many women who I find quite reasonable otherwise rather unreasonably, in my mind, refuse to make a move, instead hoping that their desired man will. But that’s the way it is. This rule has barely budged compared to other sexual rules, which have changed enormously in the last 40 years.
Yes, thank you for the example about how multiple variables would need to be changed for this system to work, and how ideas get dismissed on the basis that they can only be implemented in the current system without looking at the other variables.
We should consider separately whether a situation A could be improved by changing into a situation B (by changing multiple variables), and how to realistically get from A to B.
Because, I can talk about all the variables that should be changed… but the only variable I can change is my own behavior. (Technically, my own behavior is also a set of variables, but that is important for different kind of decisions.) So we sometimes get into a multi-player Prisonners’ Dilemma. (For example, I can wait until women start showing their interest in me first, but… some other guy may just move faster; and the punchline is that at the end most of those women will appreciate that he did.)
There is also a technical risk in changing multiple variables. What if we succeed in changing some of them, but fail in changing others of them, and end up with a situation C which may be even worse than A? And that’s actually pretty likely, because you often can’t change many variables at the same time, and when you change only half of them, you may get a worse situation, which may make people say: “OK, this is just getting worse, let’s stop.”
Also, the more variables we change, the harder it is to predict the consequences. There is a big chance that something unexpected happens, and the reality will look differently than the B we predicted. And if it happens to be worse than A, now what? Change all the variables back? How politically likely is that?
Uhm… it’s complicated. I don’t want to make it a fully general counterargument against multi-variable changes, but it should increase the burden of proof significantly.
Great point. It is definitely much harder to change many variables than one.
I think that what is the correct thing to do depends lot on context and importance.
For example, picking the right government system, or preventing rape, are worth a lot of effort in my book. And worth some seriously challenging systemic changes. In other cases, it may be best to only consider what can be accomplished with single variable shifts, and to throw out more complex possibilities.
Also, I think a lot of things you simply can’t shift by only changing one thing at a time, so in those cases, it is many or nothing.
One thing that helps is to do a lot of study before making changes. If you can run models ahead of time, that is awesome. Then the cost of looking at many variables is greatly reduced, because its not a big deal if a model fails.
If having to say “yes” or “no” in response to an offer counts as having an onus put on you… Then I’d prefer one of the few women who aren’t like that.
I’m sure that’s what you’d prefer, all other things being equal. And if you could order up women from Dell, custom designed to your specs, you’d check that box.
But in practice, the very nice gal you’ve taken an interest in turns out not to be like that. And the next one. And the next after that. Is this single feature so important that you’d rather be alone than consider a woman not “up to spec”?
Then there’s probably something wrong with the way I decide which people to meet in the first place.
(I suspected that there was some inferential distance due to cultural/pondian differences, but I recently spent a week and a half in a country overseas where (according to Wikipedia at least) there are even fewer atheists than in the US, and ISTM that women willing to own up to wanting sex exist there too. So, if you’re having trouble finding such people, unless you’re in an Islamic theocracy or something I have to guess you’re just looking in the wrong places.)
All sorts of people exist everywhere. I intended only a valid observation on the general population, not a rule without exceptions.
Who is claiming magical or otherwise non-sensical causes?