Power, yes. Her point of view not being relevant? I don’t know, I guess it depends on how you treat your sister.
Remember, the claim of PUAs (who advocate such techniques; not all do) is that a large enough percentage of women responds well to such treatment and enjoy it. You may well be skeptical of that claim. I am skeptical that the percentage is as high as some PUAs make it sound.
If you disagree with the tactic, I suggest that you follow it down to the root and look at the premises, and what reasons PUAs have to believe that women are reasonably likely to enjoy this kind of treatment. If the woman’s sexual preference is to be treated that way, then it’s not treating her point of view as not “revelant,” it the opposite: the PUA is taking into account the woman’s point of view by giving her what she enjoys. Whenever we look at weird and wacky PUA tactics, we really need to be thinking about what responses PUAs have got from women that make them think (correctly or incorrectly) that such behavior is viable and reasonable. We cannot assume that such behavior is primarily driven by their own preferences, or that it merely a jerk-like imposition on the part of PUAs.
The fact that PUAs advocate a certain behavior as attractive to women is sufficient to locate the hypothesis that they might actually be correct, and we should consider that hypothesis along with the hypothesis that PUAs are biased, or that such behavior is an imposition of their own preferences rather than women’s.
I have my own objections to the “bratty little sister” frame, primarily because I want to be dating someone who is an equal. A little teasing is always great, but if I wouldn’t want an interaction with a woman where I persistently felt that my role was too close to the role of a big brother, while her role was too close to that of a bratty little sister. Moreover, I think that many men have this same preference, and so would be best served by forms of seduction that promote equality.
Note that my objection is from my own preferences (and the preferences that I think more people should hold); I think the effectiveness and ethics of such behavior is less clear-cut.
You say “power relationship” like it’s a bad thing. My own preference may be similar to yours in that I dislike persistent and overarching power dynamics in my relationships (and I think that a lot of power dynamics are actively harmful), but lots of people, male and female, really do like relationships with gendered power dynamics, and seem to do just fine in them. As long as these relationships are chosen freely, I don’t have a sufficient basis to say that there is something wrong with the preferences of those people, or with satisfying those preferences.
Tentatively offered, but it’s possible that if PUAs framed their recommended behavior in terms of “some women” or “many women” rather than implying that what they’re doing works well with all women, there’d be a lot less social friction.
This may or may not be something you want, but part of this conversation is why there are so few women at LW.
Tentatively offered, but it’s possible that if PUAs framed their recommended behavior in terms of “some women” or “many women” rather than implying that what they’re doing works well with all women, there’d be a lot less social friction.
I would also like to see more rigor in describing the responses of different subsets of women. When PUAs talk among themselves, qualifiers do get to be a drag, even if a PUA has more complex views. I think more rigor would be worth it, and I find the tendency of PUAs to use language with negative implications annoying and socially unintelligent (“social intelligence” is a buzzword in the community).
In this regard, I found your comments elsewhere in the thread quite helpful to my understanding:
Yes, my broader point is that a lot of the observations of PUAs are based on the women they meet the most often. The type of women they meet the most often is club-goers of above average attractiveness. The average intelligence of these women is likely to be around the population average, they are probably above average in extraversion, and they have highly “people-oriented” interests (and they may well be above average in neuroticism and below average in conscientiousness).
and
So when we see PUAs holding cynical attitudes towards women, such as “chick crack,” or talking about women as children or pets (these last attitudes are rare, but not unheard of), we should consider that they are unfairly comparing average women to themselves. When PUAs talk about women like they are a different species, perhaps it is because average-intelligence people-oriented female extraverts do seem like a different species from 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts.
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist. To the extent this lack of qualifiers has been imported into the limited discussion of PUA techniques on LW (which I think it has to at least some extent), then this may be part of why the discussion has met with resistance and offense.
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist.
Exactly. We are seeing two relevant categories of women that I will give the following labels to:
“Atypical women.” This category of women has a combination of the following traits: gender-nonconforming, thing-oriented, introverted, non-neurotypical. Highly intelligent people of both genders also tend to be gender-atypical. Women likely to be interested in posting on LW are likely to fall into this category. Feminists, queer women, polyamorous women, kinky women, artists, and nerds also tend to fall into this category. (Feel free to ask why I would group any of those categories of women together.)
“Typical women.” This category of women is more gender-typical and people-oriented.
This division is inspired by Gangestad et al.’s finding that people fit into two taxa: a majority taxon of gender typical people (85%+ of people), and a minority taxon of gender of atypical people (queer people were mostly in this taxon). If anyone is bothered by terms like “atypical women” or “typical women,” bring it up and we’ll talk about the stats.
I would categorize the relationship of these two taxa of females as follows:
The model PUAs have of women in the gender-atypical minority taxon sucks.
The model that many women in the gender-atypical taxon have of other women in the gender-typical taxon, also sucks.
As a result, PUAs and women in the minority taxon often miss each other like ships in the dark, and have fundamentally different experiences in heterosexual interaction, even they have a lot of psychological similarities.
Yet I’ve actually met plenty of women who would fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon who do understand typical women, experience difficulties interacting with them, and are sympathetic to male difficulties interacting with these women. A female friend of my mine in college insists that “women are evil.” Another female friend (highly introverted and thing-oriented) once told me that she doesn’t like most women and can’t relate to them; she considers them annoying and full of drama.
I think that controversy about pickup would diminish if PUAs promoted a better model of atypical women, and in turn, atypical women had a better model of the more typical types of women that PUAs encounter most often and base most of their theories on. Women in the minority taxon have a valid complaint that PUAs do not correctly categorize their preferences and persistently overgeneralize. Not only is this bad communication on the part of PUAs and a marginalization of the perspective of these women, it is also PUAs shooting themselves in the foot by failing to understand a group of women that potentially contains compatible long-term mates for them.
PUAs also have a valid complaint that many women in the minority taxon who criticize pickup simply don’t understand what men are dealing with when interacting with gender-typical women. These women are engaging in the “typical mind fallacy,” which marginalizes the perspectives of PUAs on their interactions with most women. It also marginalizes the perspectives of gender-typical women, particularly extraverts, who are less motivated to engage in this sort of discussion on the internet. Ironically, women with majority preferences are probably the least likely to engage in arguments about female preferences on the internet, while women with minority preferences are probably most likely to be interested in such discussions.
When I posted more on PUA forum years ago, I argued for better models of different female personalities, with mixed success. I have a lot more field experience and research now, I am pretty much the only person who has put it all together.
While most PUAs are going out to clubs and meeting women they often have trouble relating to, I almost exclusively date women who would fall into the gender atypical taxon (since I do, too). While intellectually I would like to see PUAs expand their models, it is nice that I experience very little competition in my niche.
You may have no idea how crazy-making it is to keep hearing “we mean well to women” when the version of women described bears no resemblance to oneself. Note that atypical women have a long history (somewhat weakened by feminism) of being told that they should be typical women. And when I say long history, I don’t just mean previous generations, some of it’s still in play. And, while that post about PUAs as trauma survivors straightens out a lot about what’s going on, it seems as though PUA is a bunch of tools for becoming more like typical men which simply make the PUA students’ lives better, being more like typical women has a lot of features which atypical women feel strongly would make their lives worse.
I’m not sure that “thing-oriented” quite covers the range of atypical women. I expect that I’d count as atypical, and I’m more word-oriented. “Not primarily people-oriented” might cover the ground better.
The model PUAs have of women in the gender-atypical minority taxon sucks.
I think that this depends a lot on what you mean by “model”. If you mean their calibration of what specific behaviors (e.g. yelling, being silly, very aggressive, etc.), then yes, I’d agree—it’s calibrated for “club girls” and nightclub environments.
But my observation is that the atyipcal women (whom I’ve pretty much exclusively dated) still respond to what the PUA’s would call dominance traits—just not the same signifiers for those traits. The main difference is that atypicals prefer you to show dominance over things other than them. (Except maybe in the bedroom, given explicit discussion and consent.)
For example, having a purpose and sense of direction in life, knowing what you want, being decisive, etc. are still a factor in atypicals’ attraction algorithm. Intellectual dominance, in the sense of being articulate, knowledgeable, insightful, etc. Not having these qualities tends to get you filtered out.
Atypicals don’t engage in status testing by being jerks (well, maybe some occasional sarcasm); they do it mainly by seeing if you can keep up with them intellectually—can you match them, pun for pun, double entendre for double entendre? Do you get their obscure references?
This is still status testing/flirting, just different.
(Hm, actually, it’s occurring to me that some atypicals I’ve known still had the whole orbiter hierarchy thing going on, and tended to end up sleeping with the highest-dominant jerks in their group… just reasonably intelligent jerks. This behavior pattern seems to be more correlated with whether a woman is found attractive by a lot of guys, rather than whether she’s neurotypical per se.)
Are you going to publish, or at least blog, on this subject? As someone who downplays the importance of gender, I would like to see my assumptions flipped on their head.
It occurs to me that just as there are “naturals” that appeal more to typical women there are likely “naturals” that appeal more to atypical women. I never thought about it before since one usually measures one’s attractiveness on the majority’s terms but I might actually be a natural of the latter type and not have ever realized it until this moment. Strange.
Yet I’ve actually met plenty of women who would fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon who do understand typical women, experience difficulties interacting with them, and are sympathetic to male difficulties interacting with these women. A female friend of my mine in college insists that “women are evil.” Another female friend (highly introverted and thing-oriented) once told me that she doesn’t like most women and can’t relate to them; she considers them annoying and full of drama.
Most of of my female friends fit this category. I can emphasise with what they are saying, I grew up with sisters, after all, and at times didn’t envy them their ‘friends’. Then nature of peer competition is differentiated somewhat between the sexes and the gender-atypical women I know are poorly suited to it. But being male I actually find I have far less of that sort of trouble, given that I am not often a direct competitor. That and I have the opportunity to use innocent flirtation to release some of the competitive tension without zero-sum conflict.
Yup, you are observant. Since poly women have more male-typical sexuality (polyamory, high sociosexuality) and nerdy women have more male-typical interests and psychology, I think I’m justified in locating the hypothesis of an underlying masculinization factor. This masculinization is probably biological (specifically, prenatal… and yes, I do have more research on this). I hypothesize that masculinization or feminization are some of the most important dimensions in personality and interests (which is consistent with mainstream psychology, though a bit non-PC) and I am working on figuring out the practical implications of those dimensions with respect to dating. So far, I’m ahead of the seduction community on this subject.
Your theories and (apparent) research match my own.
As for practical implications of those dimensions, and how they apply to gender atypical people, my understanding is mostly procedural and intuitive abstractions. And my theories are biased towards practical implications for me that, while they look like they could be more generally applicable, may not be. Thinking other people are more similar to ourselves than they are is a typical human failing (right up there next to thinking we’re unique, go figure).
One thing I have noticed is that what is described as ‘masculine and feminine’ sexuality seems to be more than one distinct concept. Some of those ‘polyamorous, nerdy women with male-typical interests and psychology’ execute clearly female instinctive patterns in a masculine way. So a concrete minded person with basic competence from the seduction material would think ‘masculine’, someone with more experience, more curiosity or more IQ may burst out laughing as they see the same patterns play out in an entirely different way. And ya know, while it can be easy to learn the rules which work with the gender-typical stereotype, learning to interact with those with a more distinct psychology is just a whole heap more fun! It’s more ‘real’.
Power, yes. Her point of view not being relevant? I don’t know, I guess it depends on how you treat your sister.
Remember, the claim of PUAs (who advocate such techniques; not all do) is that a large enough percentage of women responds well to such treatment and enjoy it. You may well be skeptical of that claim. I am skeptical that the percentage is as high as some PUAs make it sound.
If you disagree with the tactic, I suggest that you follow it down to the root and look at the premises, and what reasons PUAs have to believe that women are reasonably likely to enjoy this kind of treatment. If the woman’s sexual preference is to be treated that way, then it’s not treating her point of view as not “revelant,” it the opposite: the PUA is taking into account the woman’s point of view by giving her what she enjoys. Whenever we look at weird and wacky PUA tactics, we really need to be thinking about what responses PUAs have got from women that make them think (correctly or incorrectly) that such behavior is viable and reasonable. We cannot assume that such behavior is primarily driven by their own preferences, or that it merely a jerk-like imposition on the part of PUAs.
The fact that PUAs advocate a certain behavior as attractive to women is sufficient to locate the hypothesis that they might actually be correct, and we should consider that hypothesis along with the hypothesis that PUAs are biased, or that such behavior is an imposition of their own preferences rather than women’s.
I have my own objections to the “bratty little sister” frame, primarily because I want to be dating someone who is an equal. A little teasing is always great, but if I wouldn’t want an interaction with a woman where I persistently felt that my role was too close to the role of a big brother, while her role was too close to that of a bratty little sister. Moreover, I think that many men have this same preference, and so would be best served by forms of seduction that promote equality.
Note that my objection is from my own preferences (and the preferences that I think more people should hold); I think the effectiveness and ethics of such behavior is less clear-cut.
You say “power relationship” like it’s a bad thing. My own preference may be similar to yours in that I dislike persistent and overarching power dynamics in my relationships (and I think that a lot of power dynamics are actively harmful), but lots of people, male and female, really do like relationships with gendered power dynamics, and seem to do just fine in them. As long as these relationships are chosen freely, I don’t have a sufficient basis to say that there is something wrong with the preferences of those people, or with satisfying those preferences.
Tentatively offered, but it’s possible that if PUAs framed their recommended behavior in terms of “some women” or “many women” rather than implying that what they’re doing works well with all women, there’d be a lot less social friction.
This may or may not be something you want, but part of this conversation is why there are so few women at LW.
I would also like to see more rigor in describing the responses of different subsets of women. When PUAs talk among themselves, qualifiers do get to be a drag, even if a PUA has more complex views. I think more rigor would be worth it, and I find the tendency of PUAs to use language with negative implications annoying and socially unintelligent (“social intelligence” is a buzzword in the community).
In this regard, I found your comments elsewhere in the thread quite helpful to my understanding:
and
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist. To the extent this lack of qualifiers has been imported into the limited discussion of PUA techniques on LW (which I think it has to at least some extent), then this may be part of why the discussion has met with resistance and offense.
Thanks, I’m glad you found my comments useful.
Exactly. We are seeing two relevant categories of women that I will give the following labels to:
“Atypical women.” This category of women has a combination of the following traits: gender-nonconforming, thing-oriented, introverted, non-neurotypical. Highly intelligent people of both genders also tend to be gender-atypical. Women likely to be interested in posting on LW are likely to fall into this category. Feminists, queer women, polyamorous women, kinky women, artists, and nerds also tend to fall into this category. (Feel free to ask why I would group any of those categories of women together.)
“Typical women.” This category of women is more gender-typical and people-oriented.
This division is inspired by Gangestad et al.’s finding that people fit into two taxa: a majority taxon of gender typical people (85%+ of people), and a minority taxon of gender of atypical people (queer people were mostly in this taxon). If anyone is bothered by terms like “atypical women” or “typical women,” bring it up and we’ll talk about the stats.
I would categorize the relationship of these two taxa of females as follows:
The model PUAs have of women in the gender-atypical minority taxon sucks.
The model that many women in the gender-atypical taxon have of other women in the gender-typical taxon, also sucks.
As a result, PUAs and women in the minority taxon often miss each other like ships in the dark, and have fundamentally different experiences in heterosexual interaction, even they have a lot of psychological similarities.
Yet I’ve actually met plenty of women who would fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon who do understand typical women, experience difficulties interacting with them, and are sympathetic to male difficulties interacting with these women. A female friend of my mine in college insists that “women are evil.” Another female friend (highly introverted and thing-oriented) once told me that she doesn’t like most women and can’t relate to them; she considers them annoying and full of drama.
I think that controversy about pickup would diminish if PUAs promoted a better model of atypical women, and in turn, atypical women had a better model of the more typical types of women that PUAs encounter most often and base most of their theories on. Women in the minority taxon have a valid complaint that PUAs do not correctly categorize their preferences and persistently overgeneralize. Not only is this bad communication on the part of PUAs and a marginalization of the perspective of these women, it is also PUAs shooting themselves in the foot by failing to understand a group of women that potentially contains compatible long-term mates for them.
PUAs also have a valid complaint that many women in the minority taxon who criticize pickup simply don’t understand what men are dealing with when interacting with gender-typical women. These women are engaging in the “typical mind fallacy,” which marginalizes the perspectives of PUAs on their interactions with most women. It also marginalizes the perspectives of gender-typical women, particularly extraverts, who are less motivated to engage in this sort of discussion on the internet. Ironically, women with majority preferences are probably the least likely to engage in arguments about female preferences on the internet, while women with minority preferences are probably most likely to be interested in such discussions.
When I posted more on PUA forum years ago, I argued for better models of different female personalities, with mixed success. I have a lot more field experience and research now, I am pretty much the only person who has put it all together.
While most PUAs are going out to clubs and meeting women they often have trouble relating to, I almost exclusively date women who would fall into the gender atypical taxon (since I do, too). While intellectually I would like to see PUAs expand their models, it is nice that I experience very little competition in my niche.
Thank you for working this out..
You may have no idea how crazy-making it is to keep hearing “we mean well to women” when the version of women described bears no resemblance to oneself. Note that atypical women have a long history (somewhat weakened by feminism) of being told that they should be typical women. And when I say long history, I don’t just mean previous generations, some of it’s still in play. And, while that post about PUAs as trauma survivors straightens out a lot about what’s going on, it seems as though PUA is a bunch of tools for becoming more like typical men which simply make the PUA students’ lives better, being more like typical women has a lot of features which atypical women feel strongly would make their lives worse.
I’m not sure that “thing-oriented” quite covers the range of atypical women. I expect that I’d count as atypical, and I’m more word-oriented. “Not primarily people-oriented” might cover the ground better.
I think that this depends a lot on what you mean by “model”. If you mean their calibration of what specific behaviors (e.g. yelling, being silly, very aggressive, etc.), then yes, I’d agree—it’s calibrated for “club girls” and nightclub environments.
But my observation is that the atyipcal women (whom I’ve pretty much exclusively dated) still respond to what the PUA’s would call dominance traits—just not the same signifiers for those traits. The main difference is that atypicals prefer you to show dominance over things other than them. (Except maybe in the bedroom, given explicit discussion and consent.)
For example, having a purpose and sense of direction in life, knowing what you want, being decisive, etc. are still a factor in atypicals’ attraction algorithm. Intellectual dominance, in the sense of being articulate, knowledgeable, insightful, etc. Not having these qualities tends to get you filtered out.
Atypicals don’t engage in status testing by being jerks (well, maybe some occasional sarcasm); they do it mainly by seeing if you can keep up with them intellectually—can you match them, pun for pun, double entendre for double entendre? Do you get their obscure references?
This is still status testing/flirting, just different.
(Hm, actually, it’s occurring to me that some atypicals I’ve known still had the whole orbiter hierarchy thing going on, and tended to end up sleeping with the highest-dominant jerks in their group… just reasonably intelligent jerks. This behavior pattern seems to be more correlated with whether a woman is found attractive by a lot of guys, rather than whether she’s neurotypical per se.)
Are you going to publish, or at least blog, on this subject? As someone who downplays the importance of gender, I would like to see my assumptions flipped on their head.
You could probably make a living off that.
It occurs to me that just as there are “naturals” that appeal more to typical women there are likely “naturals” that appeal more to atypical women. I never thought about it before since one usually measures one’s attractiveness on the majority’s terms but I might actually be a natural of the latter type and not have ever realized it until this moment. Strange.
I hadn’t thought of it in that way either, but I think you may be right.
Most of of my female friends fit this category. I can emphasise with what they are saying, I grew up with sisters, after all, and at times didn’t envy them their ‘friends’. Then nature of peer competition is differentiated somewhat between the sexes and the gender-atypical women I know are poorly suited to it. But being male I actually find I have far less of that sort of trouble, given that I am not often a direct competitor. That and I have the opportunity to use innocent flirtation to release some of the competitive tension without zero-sum conflict.
For that pair I’d be going with the whole ‘being strongly correlated’ thing.
Yup, you are observant. Since poly women have more male-typical sexuality (polyamory, high sociosexuality) and nerdy women have more male-typical interests and psychology, I think I’m justified in locating the hypothesis of an underlying masculinization factor. This masculinization is probably biological (specifically, prenatal… and yes, I do have more research on this). I hypothesize that masculinization or feminization are some of the most important dimensions in personality and interests (which is consistent with mainstream psychology, though a bit non-PC) and I am working on figuring out the practical implications of those dimensions with respect to dating. So far, I’m ahead of the seduction community on this subject.
Your theories and (apparent) research match my own.
As for practical implications of those dimensions, and how they apply to gender atypical people, my understanding is mostly procedural and intuitive abstractions. And my theories are biased towards practical implications for me that, while they look like they could be more generally applicable, may not be. Thinking other people are more similar to ourselves than they are is a typical human failing (right up there next to thinking we’re unique, go figure).
One thing I have noticed is that what is described as ‘masculine and feminine’ sexuality seems to be more than one distinct concept. Some of those ‘polyamorous, nerdy women with male-typical interests and psychology’ execute clearly female instinctive patterns in a masculine way. So a concrete minded person with basic competence from the seduction material would think ‘masculine’, someone with more experience, more curiosity or more IQ may burst out laughing as they see the same patterns play out in an entirely different way. And ya know, while it can be easy to learn the rules which work with the gender-typical stereotype, learning to interact with those with a more distinct psychology is just a whole heap more fun! It’s more ‘real’.
I rather doubt that. It is my impression that there are more female commenters on popular PUA blogs than there are here.