That’s a complete non-sequitur. The first statement is not the sort of thing we’ve been talking about, and its ‘rephrasing’ has an entirely different meaning. Are you just trying to keep this conflict going?
Maybe my point wasn’t clear. Of course there are differences between the Obviously Offensive Statements that are Unquestionably Scaring Away Women, and the example I gave. However, once you give a few LW censors the power to make topics off limits based on their secret, inscrutable reasons, what’s to stop them from using it as a “get out of justification free” card?
what’s to stop them from using it as a “get out of justification free” card?
Common sense? And the fact that there aren’t any censors?
The advice is to be nice, on your own accord, when someone points out that you’re not doing so, if you feel like that’s okay, and there’s a way to do it without hurting the level of discourse. How hard is that?
Maybe we’re having different discussions here. I thought the discussion was about whether to make a certain topic off-limits for the site. Whatever enforcement mechanism for that decision is “the censors”. And since the criteria for something being objectifying is still unclear to most posters (and it’s unclear that Alicorn’s position is even representative of women), any enforced restriction on future will appear just as arbitrary as the examples I gave above.
Point being, it’s a bad, bad path to go down. If someone’s comment is Obviously Beyond the Pale and Driving Women Away, you should have to explain it to the commenter, not just rule it off limits.
I think you’re arguing against something that nobody has suggested. Eliezer has suggested a specific topic that he thinks is worth making off-limits on LW (maybe even temporarily), since it seems to bring us all off-track, just like he did with AI and the Singularity when LW started. He did not suggest that this should happen automatically every time someone thinks something is objectionable.
Separate from this was the idea that if someone mentions to you that you’re being inconsiderate and suggests an alternate phrasing that does not distort your meaning, it might be a good idea to fix it. In short, “don’t be a jerk”.
I think you’re arguing against something that nobody has suggested. Eliezer has suggested a specific topic that he thinks is worth making off-limits on LW (maybe even temporarily), since it seems to bring us all off-track, just like he did with AI and the Singularity when LW started. He did not suggest that this should happen automatically every time someone thinks something is objectionable.
Did you give any thought to how to “off-limits” decision would be enforced? From what I read, Eliezer_Yudkowsky was hinting that this be enforced by −5 downmods. So, there’s a consensus to majorly downmod people violating that limit, with many members participating.
… and you’re telling me this isn’t going to be used against people arbitrarily, far outside the scope of where you think it applies?
I guess I underestimated the inferential distance of what I was saying when I came into this subthread. Does that justify the downmods I’ve gotten, or are some downmodding for the wrong reason?
Separate from this was the idea that if someone mentions to you that you’re being inconsiderate and suggests an alternate phrasing that does not distort your meaning, it might be a good idea to fix it. In short, “don’t be a jerk”.
The problem is that there is nothing close to a consensus on whether the statements in question are “being a jerk”. Most people here still don’t see how “be a millionaire to get hot women” is being a jerk. (Or they don’t see how to generalize the prohibition on that statement, which amounts to the same thing.)
We’ve also seen examples where Alicorn has suggested changes that do change the meaning, like “If I were a millionaire I’d have a gardener” to ”...I’d have a garden”, which is not the same thing.
Put simply, giving in to this request to unquestioningly reword posts is not going to be limited to removing jerkiness, and it’s definitely going to change meanings.
Eliezer_Yudkowsky was hinting that this be enforced by −5 downmods.
He wasn’t hinting any such thing. He said explicitly that downvoting is sufficient, and there is no reason to go around banning anything. I didn’t see any reason to read any more than that into it. He was reassuring any alarmists out there that nothing needs to be done at the level of admin-level censorship.
Note: we can already downvote whatever we want!
Put simply, giving in to this request to unquestioningly reword posts is not going to be limited to removing jerkiness, and it’s definitely going to change meanings.
sigh The request is not to “unquestioningly reword posts”. The request is to be considerate, and if everybody is telling you over and over that you’re not being considerate and you still don’t get it, then maybe you should just realize you have a problem and make suggested edits.
We’re not on some “slippery slope”. We’re not wielding banhammers or introducing official censors. There are no nazis with dogs dragging you out in the middle of the night. Eliezer just made a request that people make a genuine effort to be nice where possible, and let’s not get into any affective death spirals.
He wasn’t hinting any such thing. He said explicitly that downvoting is sufficient,
Yes, the “hinting” was in reference to the specific level of −5, not the downvoting as such. −5 is the threshold for hiding from view, and shifts the comment to the bottom in the absence of (rarely used) changes in preferences.
Geez.
I didn’t see any reason to read any more than that into it. He was reassuring any alarmists out there that nothing needs to be done at the level of admin-level censorship.
Note: we can already downvote whatever we want!
But we aren’t officially encouraged to do it en masse on specific—to become less specific—topics!
The request is not to “unquestioningly reword posts”. The request is to be considerate, and if everybody is telling you over and over that you’re not being considerate and you still don’t get it, then maybe you should just realize you have a problem and make suggested edits.
People are ALREADY being considerate, and this topic is NOT in reference to people who are being told by many that they are inconsiderate, but rather, being told by one person, Alicorn. The question, then, is whether to elevate this specific concern to something of an endorsed downvote policy, because hey, Alicorn might be representative of all women, please ignore the immense success of PUAs.
Eliezer just made a request that people make a genuine effort to be nice where possible, and let’s not get into any affective death spirals.
If that’s all you got out of it, let me remind you that policy debates should not appear one-sided, and politics is the mind-killer.
People are ALREADY being considerate, and this topic is NOT in reference to people who are being told by many that they are inconsiderate, but rather, being told by one person, Alicorn.
That’s not true at all. If you think Alicorn was the only person bothered by this, then you haven’t been paying attention to the discussion—lots of other people have weighed in on it. I was going to say something before she did, and for reference, I’m not a woman. I don’t think this is just about driving women away from the site, because the issue was in danger of driving me away from the site as well.
Every non-Alicorn commenter “bothered” by it was only bothered because Alicorn claimed to be—which just regresses to the question of whether Alicorn is typical enough of a female to make us worry about scaring away females. If the women’s magazine’s cited by pjeby are representative—and they are—she’s not. As evidenced by such magazines, women do not, in general, find it “beyond the pale” to think in terms of “getting a man” as a predictable result of attaining certain attributes (looks rather than money).
At most, they might not like it when it’s used against them. But—remind me why such hypocrisy carries moral weight?
Many commenters have also been extremely considerate in trying to isolate what exactly what the offensive content was, and how to know if their statement is offensive. But because it’s so inscrutable, the best they can do is ask Alicorn to tell them when they’ve gone over the line, at which point they promise to change it to what she asks.
But if your “standards for behavior” necessitate giving you a unilateral veto over others’ statements in order to be adhered to, You’re Doing It Wrong. And in that case, you’re certainly not representative of your gender, your class, or your century.
Every non-Alicorn commenter “bothered” by it was only bothered because Alicorn claimed to be
You’re not listening. I was going to say something before Alicorn did. I was bothered.
What. The. Hell.
There have been a lot of comments lately about “feminists like Alicorn” and frankly based on my number of contributions to the conversation it would make a lot more sense to be talking about “feminists like thomblake”.
If the women’s magazine’s cited by pjeby are representative—and they are
Part of my day job is looking at every major magazine every week. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘representative’, but most magazines, and even most magazines targeted at women, do not read like Cosmo. And even if they did, that would not tell us anything about how women in general feel, just about what the magazine company thought might entice the target audience of the magazine to buy the magazine.
You’re not listening. I was going to say something before Alicorn did. I was bothered.
Oh, I was listening. I heard you make an all-too-convenient claim about what you were, like, totally about to do before Alicorn jumped in and make the exact feminist claim that you were going to make, and yet you still don’t understand well enough to teach to others how to know whether their statements objectify women without resorting to “I’ll tell you when I see it”.
Please understand why self-serving statements about what you would have done in the past are not good evidence.
Part of my day job is looking at every major magazine every week. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘representative’, but most magazines, and even most magazines targeted at women, do not read like Cosmo. And even if they did, that would not tell us anything about how women in general feel, just about what the magazine company thought might entice the target audience of the magazine to buy the magazine.
Yeah, why should anyone think Cosmo knows anything about how women think?
I heard you make an all-too-convenient claim about what you were, like, totally about to do before Alicorn jumped in and make the exact feminist claim that you were going to make
I sent thomblake a draft of “Sayeth the Girl” before I posted it and he offered to post something to the same effect in my place because he thought I would get more heat for it than he would.
So, one of the most-read women’s magazines isn’t suggestive of how women think, a major high-grossing film that describes Cosmo as “the Bible” and expects viewers to get the joke isn’t suggestive of how women think, the success of PUAs isn’t suggestive of how women think.
Now, stuff that agrees with thomblake’s noble defense of Alicorn … that is the real evidence.
Oh, and to the downmod squad: check out this comment before you view me as just another bad guy on the other team worthy of lower karma. Any of you confessed that much with your name on it?
So, one of the most-read women’s magazines isn’t suggestive of how women think, a major high-grossing film that describes Cosmo as “the Bible” and expects viewers to get the joke isn’t suggestive of how women think
I agree that Cosmopolitan knows a lot about how many women think, but this isn’t the same thing as Cosmo being representative of women-in-full-generality. The qualifier really does seem important here. Compare: Sports Illustrated or Esquire know a lot about how many men think, but (I submit) we wouldn’t want to say that these publications represent men-in-general. I mean, I would bet that most of the men here given their choice would rather read, oh, let’s say, IEEE Spectrum.
Oh, and to the downmod squad: check out this comment before you view me as just another bad guy on the other team worthy of lower karma.
Considering that the linked comment presently has 9 points, I wouldn’t rule out the hypothesis that your comments are largely being voted on by their perceived individual merit, rather than an aspersion cast upon everything you write as the words of a “bad guy.”
I agree that Cosmopolitan knows a lot about how many women think, but this isn’t the same thing as Cosmo being representative of women-in-full-generality.
It isn’t necessary for the latter claim to be true to make my point. (See below)
The qualifier really does seem important here. Compare: Sports Illustrated or Esquire know a lot about how many men think, but (I submit) we wouldn’t want to say that these publications represent men-in-general. I mean, I would bet that most of the men here given their choice would rather read, oh, let’s say, IEEE Spectrum.
Let’s go over this again:
1) Alicorn claimed that viewing women as something to “get” once you achieve a certain status, is objectifying and thus obviously beyond the pale. Not some idiosyncratic preference on her part, but something we really need to discourage, wherever it occurs.
2) Cosmo was brought up to show that, no, clearly women generally don’t find it beyond the pale to think of other humans in exactly these terms. Even if Alicorn is bothered, it is therefore not the case that women agree with her, and this language is therefore not something we should worry about in terms of scaring away women.
3) Alicorn and thomblake go to herculean efforts to downplay the relevance of such an obscure, poorly-regarded publication as Cosmo.
Now, your turn:
4) You say there’s a difference between the kind of woman who reads Cosmo and the kind who reads (???), just as there’s a difference between the kind of guy who reads Esquire vs. the guy who reads IEEE Spectrum.
Now for the hard part! For this comparison to make any point in your favor, you need to show how there’s a kind of language used in Sports Illustrated, etc., that most men here consider beyond the pale in its offensiveness, no matter who uses it.
Can you do it? No? Then you don’t have a point.
Considering that the linked comment presently has 9 points, I wouldn’t rule out the hypothesis that your comments are largely being voted on by their perceived individual merit, rather than an aspersion cast upon everything you write as the words of a “bad guy.”
Look again: the downmods are concentrated in this thread. Why do all my good posts just happen to fall in the other thread and accumulate upmods gradually, while the bad ones fall in this thread—and get modded minutes after they’re made.
Oh, and go on up/down rollercoasters, apparently being defended by some people trying to restore sanity. While again, the other thread has no such rollercoaster effect.
I avoid modding commenters in exchanges I’m directly involved in. I guess not everyone has that kind of restraint? (Alicorn, this is where you learn the dangers of unilateral disarmament.)
Now for the hard part! For this comparison to make any point in your favor, you need to show how there’s a kind of language used in Sports Illustrated, etc., that most men here consider beyond the pale in its offensiveness, no matter who uses it. Can you do it? No? Then you don’t have a point.
While it’s true that I probably can’t find an example of something most men here would find “beyond-the-pale offensive,” I don’t agree that that’s the correct standard to apply here. If I’m reading you correctly, you’re saying that Cosmo is evidence that Alicorn’s reactions are not gender-typical, and that therefore the fact that Alicorn was offended by some behavior, doesn’t tell us that that behavior discourages potential female users. But the fact that P(Cosmo-reader|female)!=P(female|Cosmo-reader) does seem relevant here, because honestly, Less Wrong’s potential female user base is probably not primarily composed of the type of women who read Cosmo; probably, it’s primarily composed of women like Alicorn. We really are drawing from the tails here. I made an analogy: I said that mainstream women’s magazines aren’t representative of the women here, just as men’s magazines aren’t representative of the men here, and you seem to be pointing out that the analogy isn’t perfectly symmetrical, saying that there’s nothing in the mainstream men’s magazines that would offend a majority of the men here to such a degree as Alicorn was offended by what she perceived as objectification, which you are saying is condoned by mainstream women’s magazines. Well, I agree that the situation isn’t perfectly symmetrical: gender issues are never perfectly symmetrical. But the analogy still seemed worth making. For what it’s worth, I’m male, and I’m frequently offended or annoyed by mainstream men’s culture claiming to represent the interests of men-in-general, when they certainly don’t represent me.
Even if Alicorn is bothered, it is therefore not the case that women agree with her, and this language is therefore not something we should worry about in terms of scaring away women.
Quite a number of people already here agreed that the language was bothersome. How many people need to agree before it’s a problem? It seems that we’ve already had a long enough discussion about it to establish that it’s a volatile issue here already.
It’s not an uncommon practice to refer to this or that book or publication as “the Bible of X”. The fact that Elle thinks Cosmo is the Bible of things relevant to her life is revealing of her character, not her gender.
Okay, so now your position is that the makers of Legally Blonde were trying to portray Elle as a member of a tiny, outlier subculture that regards Cosmo as authoritative. And therefore expected the audience to laugh about “hah, that strange, tiny subculture that revolves around Cosmo!” rather than, “heh, women sure do depend on Cosmo a lot!”
:-/
Like any bad lie, your position has forced you into defending ever-more-absurd positions entangled with it. Please reconsider.
This does seem a bit out of line to me. I dropped the whole Cosmo issue when Alicorn made it clear that she considers “getting” a man to be equally objectifying language. I’d sure hate to be on the receiving end of somebody browbeating me about Sports Illustrated being evidence of how men act, if it was something I personally considered reprehensible.
Of course, in that case, I’d also happily admit that my disagreement with Sports Illustrated might put me in an atypical minority among men, and that therefore I might not be reliably considered to speak for my the majority of my gender in the matter.
I might be able to claim to be more representative of male rationalists on Less Wrong (ha!) except for the fact that we’re actually more different than similar… as are the female rationalists here, who’ve weighed in with a variety of opinions that are even more diverse than the male opinions, AFAICT. (Or at least, opinions that are less equivocal than the male ones.)
All of which tends to support the contention that the only way to be considerate towards rationalists is on an individual basis. Heck, the male rationalists here have occasionally been at each other’s throats about what constitutes appropriate courtesy for charitable interpretations of each others’ theses. Rationalists, it seems, are a diverse lot, and respect has to go both ways.
So it’s probably better not to be the one who’s escalating things.
Your first paragraph was merely presumptive, false, and ignorant. Your second was also accusatory and rude. Please reconsider.
Edit: To go into more detail in case the above statements are not immediately obvious.
Okay, so now your position is that the makers of Legally Blonde were trying to portray Elle as a member of a tiny, outlier subculture that regards Cosmo as authoritative.
I didn’t say tiny. I didn’t say outlier. I didn’t even say subculture. The people who worked on Legally Blonde portrayed Elle as an individual woman who spends a great deal of time on the sorts of things Cosmopolitan is known to write about. She therefore refers to as Cosmopolitan as “the Bible”, in much the same sense a cook might call The Joy of Cooking “their Bible”.
And therefore expected the audience to laugh about “hah, that strange, tiny subculture that revolves around Cosmo!” rather than, “heh, women sure do depend on Cosmo a lot!”
I think they’re supposed to go, “ha ha, look at this wacky, silly, caricatured protagonist who thinks everything revolves around makeup and fashion and romance!”
Like any bad lie, your position has forced you into defending ever-more-absurd positions entangled with it.
It’s not clear if you think I have lied or just that I have said things that resemble lies. Still, such entanglement is not at all obvious to me, mostly because you made distant and unwarranted leaps from what I actually said to the funhouse mirror version of what I said.
Ahem. You claimed that the scene was only intended to reveal a fact about just one (presumably ultra-unique) character, and you disputed my claim that the humor in the scene derived from the knowledge—assumed to be held by the audience—that women heavily rely on Cosmo.
I just did your work for you by presenting the best way I could think of to defend your alternate interpretation—that is, a framing that would have the filmmakers NOT assume “everyone knows” women rely on Cosmo.
Now, if you find anything presumptive, false, ignorant, accusatory, or rude about my post, all you have to do is come up with a better defense of your interpretation. But this is an uphill battle—you’re defending a position that appears quite ignorant of the prevailing culture.
You claimed that the scene was only intended to reveal a fact about just one (presumably ultra-unique) character
No. I claimed that the scene is revealing of Elle’s character and is not revealing of her entire gender. The very same movie, not to mention movies in general, contain other female characters who do not share her Cosmopolitan-topic obsession (the female professor; the rival; the woman she gives the magazine to); Legally Blonde also includes a horde of sorority sisters who are portrayed as being inch-deep replicas of Elle in everything except intelligence, who would presumably agree about the Biblical nature of Cosmo.
I just did your work for you by presenting the best way I could think of
Do me no favors. Please. If you find something I say indefensible, ask me to defend it, don’t paint a parodied strawman to make me look ridiculous.
Now, stuff that agrees with thomblake’s noble defense of Alicorn … that is the real evidence.
Straw man. I haven’t been pointing to evidence about ‘how women think’. I think it’s irrelevant to the discussion.
Any of you confessed that much with your name on it?
Well, I’d upvoted that comment, but I don’t see what your point is. What did you ‘confess’ there, and what does that have to do with people downvoting you?
Could you or someone else cite some specific examples of where discussion of pickup has brought things off track, and explain why this is worse than any other tangents we have here?
That’s a complete non-sequitur. The first statement is not the sort of thing we’ve been talking about, and its ‘rephrasing’ has an entirely different meaning. Are you just trying to keep this conflict going?
Maybe my point wasn’t clear. Of course there are differences between the Obviously Offensive Statements that are Unquestionably Scaring Away Women, and the example I gave. However, once you give a few LW censors the power to make topics off limits based on their secret, inscrutable reasons, what’s to stop them from using it as a “get out of justification free” card?
Common sense? And the fact that there aren’t any censors?
The advice is to be nice, on your own accord, when someone points out that you’re not doing so, if you feel like that’s okay, and there’s a way to do it without hurting the level of discourse. How hard is that?
Maybe we’re having different discussions here. I thought the discussion was about whether to make a certain topic off-limits for the site. Whatever enforcement mechanism for that decision is “the censors”. And since the criteria for something being objectifying is still unclear to most posters (and it’s unclear that Alicorn’s position is even representative of women), any enforced restriction on future will appear just as arbitrary as the examples I gave above.
Point being, it’s a bad, bad path to go down. If someone’s comment is Obviously Beyond the Pale and Driving Women Away, you should have to explain it to the commenter, not just rule it off limits.
I think you’re arguing against something that nobody has suggested. Eliezer has suggested a specific topic that he thinks is worth making off-limits on LW (maybe even temporarily), since it seems to bring us all off-track, just like he did with AI and the Singularity when LW started. He did not suggest that this should happen automatically every time someone thinks something is objectionable.
Separate from this was the idea that if someone mentions to you that you’re being inconsiderate and suggests an alternate phrasing that does not distort your meaning, it might be a good idea to fix it. In short, “don’t be a jerk”.
Did you give any thought to how to “off-limits” decision would be enforced? From what I read, Eliezer_Yudkowsky was hinting that this be enforced by −5 downmods. So, there’s a consensus to majorly downmod people violating that limit, with many members participating.
… and you’re telling me this isn’t going to be used against people arbitrarily, far outside the scope of where you think it applies?
I guess I underestimated the inferential distance of what I was saying when I came into this subthread. Does that justify the downmods I’ve gotten, or are some downmodding for the wrong reason?
The problem is that there is nothing close to a consensus on whether the statements in question are “being a jerk”. Most people here still don’t see how “be a millionaire to get hot women” is being a jerk. (Or they don’t see how to generalize the prohibition on that statement, which amounts to the same thing.)
We’ve also seen examples where Alicorn has suggested changes that do change the meaning, like “If I were a millionaire I’d have a gardener” to ”...I’d have a garden”, which is not the same thing.
Put simply, giving in to this request to unquestioningly reword posts is not going to be limited to removing jerkiness, and it’s definitely going to change meanings.
He wasn’t hinting any such thing. He said explicitly that downvoting is sufficient, and there is no reason to go around banning anything. I didn’t see any reason to read any more than that into it. He was reassuring any alarmists out there that nothing needs to be done at the level of admin-level censorship.
Note: we can already downvote whatever we want!
sigh The request is not to “unquestioningly reword posts”. The request is to be considerate, and if everybody is telling you over and over that you’re not being considerate and you still don’t get it, then maybe you should just realize you have a problem and make suggested edits.
We’re not on some “slippery slope”. We’re not wielding banhammers or introducing official censors. There are no nazis with dogs dragging you out in the middle of the night. Eliezer just made a request that people make a genuine effort to be nice where possible, and let’s not get into any affective death spirals.
Yes, the “hinting” was in reference to the specific level of −5, not the downvoting as such. −5 is the threshold for hiding from view, and shifts the comment to the bottom in the absence of (rarely used) changes in preferences.
Geez.
But we aren’t officially encouraged to do it en masse on specific—to become less specific—topics!
People are ALREADY being considerate, and this topic is NOT in reference to people who are being told by many that they are inconsiderate, but rather, being told by one person, Alicorn. The question, then, is whether to elevate this specific concern to something of an endorsed downvote policy, because hey, Alicorn might be representative of all women, please ignore the immense success of PUAs.
If that’s all you got out of it, let me remind you that policy debates should not appear one-sided, and politics is the mind-killer.
That’s not true at all. If you think Alicorn was the only person bothered by this, then you haven’t been paying attention to the discussion—lots of other people have weighed in on it. I was going to say something before she did, and for reference, I’m not a woman. I don’t think this is just about driving women away from the site, because the issue was in danger of driving me away from the site as well.
Every non-Alicorn commenter “bothered” by it was only bothered because Alicorn claimed to be—which just regresses to the question of whether Alicorn is typical enough of a female to make us worry about scaring away females. If the women’s magazine’s cited by pjeby are representative—and they are—she’s not. As evidenced by such magazines, women do not, in general, find it “beyond the pale” to think in terms of “getting a man” as a predictable result of attaining certain attributes (looks rather than money).
At most, they might not like it when it’s used against them. But—remind me why such hypocrisy carries moral weight?
Many commenters have also been extremely considerate in trying to isolate what exactly what the offensive content was, and how to know if their statement is offensive. But because it’s so inscrutable, the best they can do is ask Alicorn to tell them when they’ve gone over the line, at which point they promise to change it to what she asks.
But if your “standards for behavior” necessitate giving you a unilateral veto over others’ statements in order to be adhered to, You’re Doing It Wrong. And in that case, you’re certainly not representative of your gender, your class, or your century.
Not true.
You’re not listening. I was going to say something before Alicorn did. I was bothered.
What. The. Hell.
There have been a lot of comments lately about “feminists like Alicorn” and frankly based on my number of contributions to the conversation it would make a lot more sense to be talking about “feminists like thomblake”.
Part of my day job is looking at every major magazine every week. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘representative’, but most magazines, and even most magazines targeted at women, do not read like Cosmo. And even if they did, that would not tell us anything about how women in general feel, just about what the magazine company thought might entice the target audience of the magazine to buy the magazine.
Oh, I was listening. I heard you make an all-too-convenient claim about what you were, like, totally about to do before Alicorn jumped in and make the exact feminist claim that you were going to make, and yet you still don’t understand well enough to teach to others how to know whether their statements objectify women without resorting to “I’ll tell you when I see it”.
Please understand why self-serving statements about what you would have done in the past are not good evidence.
Yeah, why should anyone think Cosmo knows anything about how women think?
From the movie Legally Blonde:
ELLE He means well. He’s really brilliant and all. Brooke sits, not looking convinced.
BROOKE He better be, for what I ′ m paying him. Elle pushes her basket forward.
ELLE I brought you some necessities. Pink sheets. Aromatherapy candles. Loofah. And The Bible.
She holds up a “Cosmopolitan”.
I sent thomblake a draft of “Sayeth the Girl” before I posted it and he offered to post something to the same effect in my place because he thought I would get more heat for it than he would.
I submit that the movie “Legally Blonde” is also not compelling evidence of how women think. I have no idea how to read that suggestion charitably.
So, one of the most-read women’s magazines isn’t suggestive of how women think, a major high-grossing film that describes Cosmo as “the Bible” and expects viewers to get the joke isn’t suggestive of how women think, the success of PUAs isn’t suggestive of how women think.
Now, stuff that agrees with thomblake’s noble defense of Alicorn … that is the real evidence.
Oh, and to the downmod squad: check out this comment before you view me as just another bad guy on the other team worthy of lower karma. Any of you confessed that much with your name on it?
I agree that Cosmopolitan knows a lot about how many women think, but this isn’t the same thing as Cosmo being representative of women-in-full-generality. The qualifier really does seem important here. Compare: Sports Illustrated or Esquire know a lot about how many men think, but (I submit) we wouldn’t want to say that these publications represent men-in-general. I mean, I would bet that most of the men here given their choice would rather read, oh, let’s say, IEEE Spectrum.
Considering that the linked comment presently has 9 points, I wouldn’t rule out the hypothesis that your comments are largely being voted on by their perceived individual merit, rather than an aspersion cast upon everything you write as the words of a “bad guy.”
It isn’t necessary for the latter claim to be true to make my point. (See below)
Let’s go over this again:
1) Alicorn claimed that viewing women as something to “get” once you achieve a certain status, is objectifying and thus obviously beyond the pale. Not some idiosyncratic preference on her part, but something we really need to discourage, wherever it occurs.
2) Cosmo was brought up to show that, no, clearly women generally don’t find it beyond the pale to think of other humans in exactly these terms. Even if Alicorn is bothered, it is therefore not the case that women agree with her, and this language is therefore not something we should worry about in terms of scaring away women.
3) Alicorn and thomblake go to herculean efforts to downplay the relevance of such an obscure, poorly-regarded publication as Cosmo.
Now, your turn:
4) You say there’s a difference between the kind of woman who reads Cosmo and the kind who reads (???), just as there’s a difference between the kind of guy who reads Esquire vs. the guy who reads IEEE Spectrum.
Now for the hard part! For this comparison to make any point in your favor, you need to show how there’s a kind of language used in Sports Illustrated, etc., that most men here consider beyond the pale in its offensiveness, no matter who uses it.
Can you do it? No? Then you don’t have a point.
Look again: the downmods are concentrated in this thread. Why do all my good posts just happen to fall in the other thread and accumulate upmods gradually, while the bad ones fall in this thread—and get modded minutes after they’re made.
Oh, and go on up/down rollercoasters, apparently being defended by some people trying to restore sanity. While again, the other thread has no such rollercoaster effect.
I avoid modding commenters in exchanges I’m directly involved in. I guess not everyone has that kind of restraint? (Alicorn, this is where you learn the dangers of unilateral disarmament.)
While it’s true that I probably can’t find an example of something most men here would find “beyond-the-pale offensive,” I don’t agree that that’s the correct standard to apply here. If I’m reading you correctly, you’re saying that Cosmo is evidence that Alicorn’s reactions are not gender-typical, and that therefore the fact that Alicorn was offended by some behavior, doesn’t tell us that that behavior discourages potential female users. But the fact that P(Cosmo-reader|female)!=P(female|Cosmo-reader) does seem relevant here, because honestly, Less Wrong’s potential female user base is probably not primarily composed of the type of women who read Cosmo; probably, it’s primarily composed of women like Alicorn. We really are drawing from the tails here. I made an analogy: I said that mainstream women’s magazines aren’t representative of the women here, just as men’s magazines aren’t representative of the men here, and you seem to be pointing out that the analogy isn’t perfectly symmetrical, saying that there’s nothing in the mainstream men’s magazines that would offend a majority of the men here to such a degree as Alicorn was offended by what she perceived as objectification, which you are saying is condoned by mainstream women’s magazines. Well, I agree that the situation isn’t perfectly symmetrical: gender issues are never perfectly symmetrical. But the analogy still seemed worth making. For what it’s worth, I’m male, and I’m frequently offended or annoyed by mainstream men’s culture claiming to represent the interests of men-in-general, when they certainly don’t represent me.
Quite a number of people already here agreed that the language was bothersome. How many people need to agree before it’s a problem? It seems that we’ve already had a long enough discussion about it to establish that it’s a volatile issue here already.
It’s not an uncommon practice to refer to this or that book or publication as “the Bible of X”. The fact that Elle thinks Cosmo is the Bible of things relevant to her life is revealing of her character, not her gender.
Okay, so now your position is that the makers of Legally Blonde were trying to portray Elle as a member of a tiny, outlier subculture that regards Cosmo as authoritative. And therefore expected the audience to laugh about “hah, that strange, tiny subculture that revolves around Cosmo!” rather than, “heh, women sure do depend on Cosmo a lot!”
:-/
Like any bad lie, your position has forced you into defending ever-more-absurd positions entangled with it. Please reconsider.
This does seem a bit out of line to me. I dropped the whole Cosmo issue when Alicorn made it clear that she considers “getting” a man to be equally objectifying language. I’d sure hate to be on the receiving end of somebody browbeating me about Sports Illustrated being evidence of how men act, if it was something I personally considered reprehensible.
Of course, in that case, I’d also happily admit that my disagreement with Sports Illustrated might put me in an atypical minority among men, and that therefore I might not be reliably considered to speak for my the majority of my gender in the matter.
I might be able to claim to be more representative of male rationalists on Less Wrong (ha!) except for the fact that we’re actually more different than similar… as are the female rationalists here, who’ve weighed in with a variety of opinions that are even more diverse than the male opinions, AFAICT. (Or at least, opinions that are less equivocal than the male ones.)
All of which tends to support the contention that the only way to be considerate towards rationalists is on an individual basis. Heck, the male rationalists here have occasionally been at each other’s throats about what constitutes appropriate courtesy for charitable interpretations of each others’ theses. Rationalists, it seems, are a diverse lot, and respect has to go both ways.
So it’s probably better not to be the one who’s escalating things.
Your first paragraph was merely presumptive, false, and ignorant. Your second was also accusatory and rude. Please reconsider.
Edit: To go into more detail in case the above statements are not immediately obvious.
I didn’t say tiny. I didn’t say outlier. I didn’t even say subculture. The people who worked on Legally Blonde portrayed Elle as an individual woman who spends a great deal of time on the sorts of things Cosmopolitan is known to write about. She therefore refers to as Cosmopolitan as “the Bible”, in much the same sense a cook might call The Joy of Cooking “their Bible”.
I think they’re supposed to go, “ha ha, look at this wacky, silly, caricatured protagonist who thinks everything revolves around makeup and fashion and romance!”
It’s not clear if you think I have lied or just that I have said things that resemble lies. Still, such entanglement is not at all obvious to me, mostly because you made distant and unwarranted leaps from what I actually said to the funhouse mirror version of what I said.
Ahem. You claimed that the scene was only intended to reveal a fact about just one (presumably ultra-unique) character, and you disputed my claim that the humor in the scene derived from the knowledge—assumed to be held by the audience—that women heavily rely on Cosmo.
I just did your work for you by presenting the best way I could think of to defend your alternate interpretation—that is, a framing that would have the filmmakers NOT assume “everyone knows” women rely on Cosmo.
Now, if you find anything presumptive, false, ignorant, accusatory, or rude about my post, all you have to do is come up with a better defense of your interpretation. But this is an uphill battle—you’re defending a position that appears quite ignorant of the prevailing culture.
Maybe it’s best to just concede the point?
(P.S. The “lie” bit was a reference to Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies. But you knew that, right?)
No. I claimed that the scene is revealing of Elle’s character and is not revealing of her entire gender. The very same movie, not to mention movies in general, contain other female characters who do not share her Cosmopolitan-topic obsession (the female professor; the rival; the woman she gives the magazine to); Legally Blonde also includes a horde of sorority sisters who are portrayed as being inch-deep replicas of Elle in everything except intelligence, who would presumably agree about the Biblical nature of Cosmo.
Do me no favors. Please. If you find something I say indefensible, ask me to defend it, don’t paint a parodied strawman to make me look ridiculous.
I have told no lies of which I am aware.
Straw man. I haven’t been pointing to evidence about ‘how women think’. I think it’s irrelevant to the discussion.
Well, I’d upvoted that comment, but I don’t see what your point is. What did you ‘confess’ there, and what does that have to do with people downvoting you?
Could you or someone else cite some specific examples of where discussion of pickup has brought things off track, and explain why this is worse than any other tangents we have here?