“If you want to appear more attractive to men, show cleavage and arch your back.” --> “Duh, already know that, of course that’s how men are.”
vs.
“If you want to appear more attractive to women, act dominant by ordering her around, thinking of her like a disobedient child, and generally making yourself appear scarce and unavailable.” --> “Shut up!!! Shut up, you F*ING terrorist! Women are NOT like that, you worthless misogynist! You should be RESPECTFUL and DEFERENTIAL and give them lots of gifts. That’s what we want, chauvanist. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go meet my boyfriend, who is such a jerk to me. I hope he’s not late … again.”
I’m sure you can see that exactly one of those pieces of advice is ambiguous, and easily disambiguated as advice to engage in genuinely wrong behavior. I think that some sorts of people, which I would expect to overlap with the sorts of people opposed to pickup, tend to directly leap from a statement being potentially harmful to express, to that statement and its speaker being Bad. (Another example: statements about the basis of intelligence and race/sex correlations, with their genuine usefulness to bigots.) I don’t think that this is entirely incorrect of them, either instrumentally or epistemically — such statements are Bayesian evidence of bad character, for both direct and signaling reasons.
I accept that the advice I listed can be ambiguous. I also claim that a very large class of men has been so horribly misled by the official line on male-to-female interaction rules, that even the above advice, in its crude form, in its rank misogyny, would actually cause them to be more attractive to women—which just goes to show the depths of their deception.
Btw, what was sarcastic? Men who present the plain truth on this are the target of severe vitriol from women (even and especially those for whom it is true) and men who recognize its truth, but want to appear part of the “reasonable” crowd. My illustration of the vitriol is exaggerated, but not by much. And the misleading advice women promote does in fact mirror the official line (in mainstream books, advice from women, behavior taught in schools, etc.). What are you objecting to?
Btw, what was sarcastic? Men who present the plain truth on this are the target of severe vitriol from women (even and especially those for whom it is true) and men who recognize its truth, but want to appear part of the “reasonable” crowd.
And yet, you seem to object to framing the truth in terms that women usually like and respond positively to… which makes me wonder WTF your actual goals are here.
Oh noes, people don’t like language they don’t like, and I am being forced to use the language of the oppressors in order to talk with them about anything. Help, I’m being oppressed!
Damn, dude, this is like saying you ought to have the right to describe people using racial epithets, simply because the epithets are included in statements that are true, like “That [epithet] is wearing blue jeans.”
In NLP there’s a saying that the meaning of a communication is the response you get. If you want a different response, try a different communication already, and stop bothering everyone with this low-status whining. It’s a disgrace to everyone you claim to be speaking for, and everything you claim to be standing for.
And yet, you seem to object to framing the truth in terms that women usually like and respond positively to… which makes me wonder WTF your actual goals are here.
Where are you getting that? I’m not objecting to framing the truth in a professional, reasoned tone. I’m objecting to your attempt to claim that two phrasings mean the same thing, when they really don’t, thereby promoting a sort of uninformative politician-speak, as I explained here (and which you didn’t address):
It sounds like you’re saying women are truthful as long as you stick to euphemisms and politician-speak(“a man saying what he wants”) and stay away from practical implications (“a man ordering a woman to use a different fashion”).
You seem to really be taking the concept of “ordering a woman around” to mean so freaking many benign things that the term no longer has any meaning. Doing so voids the usefulness of words and cripples the ability to clearly communicate on the issues.
“A man who knows what he wants, and isn’t afraid to say it” does not, as you claim, equate to giving orders. And yet, PUAs do advise “giving orders”, while an uninformed man who was simply told to “know what you want, and don’t be afraid to say it” would not at all see how this means giving orders … because the concept thereof isn’t entailed by that advice!
While a professional, uninflammatory tone is preferable, it should never delete the substance of the claim, but that’s exactly what your supposed rephrasings do.
I’m objecting to your attempt to claim that two phrasings mean the same thing, when they really don’t
The meaning of the communication is the response you get, and the intended response to the behavior described as “ordering around” is that the woman feel that she is with a man who “knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to say it”.
By omitting the intended response from the discussion, it is you who are distorting the communication.
So, why does it then surprise you if women feel excluded, when you are systematically excluding their goals and values from the discussion?
You are insisting that your particular selection of concepts is “the truth”, when it is also the truth that women describe the benefits of these behavioral patterns in ways you deride as “uninformative politician-speak”.
But clearly, it is NOT uninformative to women! They know what they like, but have difficulty breaking it into smaller chunks because they have evolved recognition machinery for it. And that is not their fault.
And just because at one time you didn’t understand what this woman-speak means in men-speak, does not entitle you to claim that all women are therefore deluded, unhelpful liars and hypocrites, engaging in a campaign of mass deception to keep oppressed low-status men in their place with the conspiratorial assistance of the mass media.
This entire post was because of “exclusionary speech”—talking about women in a way that excludes their goals and values from consideration. That’s exactly what you’re doing—not just omitting those goals and values from your own statements, but actually objecting when anybody else brings them up.
The meaning of the communication is the response you get, … By omitting the intended response from the discussion, it is you who are distorting the communication.
No, by casually equating means (“give orders”) with ends (“a woman who feels she is with a confident man who knows what he wants”) -- an equation you just now revealed you are using! -- it’s you who’s distorting communication.
So, why does it then surprise you if women feel excluded, when you are systematically excluding their goals and values from the discussion?
No, I’m systematically using words by their standard meanings; the discussion of the ends is not, like you claim, being excluded; it’s just that you need to identify it as such. Don’t say “X and Y are the same instruction because they would, in the best case scenario, get the same reaction.” That’s wrong, and a misuse of language.
You are insisting that your particular selection of concepts is “the truth”, when it is also the truth that women describe the benefits of these behavioral patterns in ways you deride as “uninformative politician-speak”.
No, I’m calling it uninformative when it uses the wrong terms and acts surprised that I didn’t read minds for the real intended meantings.
But clearly, it is NOT uninformative to women! They know what they like,
No, like I said before, even if you can claim specific instances of women giving advice that (by hidden transformations) is true and useful, it’s still drowned out in the sea of advice that is ineffective and countereffective. How should I have known that this advice is reliable, but the (far more numerous) instances of “oh, be deferential to her, make sure not to cross these six trillion feminist lines” isn’t? How should the majority of men have known it?
but have difficulty breaking it into smaller chunks because they have evolved recognition machinery for it. And that is not their fault.
Just women, or women and men? I make a genuine effort to convert my “recognition machinery” into something communicable. I don’t tolerate “you wouldn’t understand” as a curiousity-stopper from anyone, not me, not men. Why do you (seem to) think women are so frail and stupid that they shouldn’t be expected to carry out this introspection?
No, I’m calling it uninformative when it uses the wrong terms and acts surprised that I didn’t read minds for the real intended meantings.
This is the part where the problem is: you aren’t separating “words that make sense to me” from “real intended meanings”… which then leads to an exclusionary result.
No, like I said before, even if you can claim specific instances of women giving advice that (by hidden transformations) is true and useful, it’s still drowned out in the sea of advice that is ineffective and countereffective. How should I have known that this advice is reliable, but the (far more numerous) instances of “oh, be deferential to her, make sure not to cross these six trillion feminist lines” isn’t? How should the majority of men have known it?
How should you have known that the world is round, when all of the immediately-available evidence is that it’s flat… unless you specifically go looking for obscure and “hidden” information?
Reality is not under any obligation to be comprehensible to human beings, so what makes you think you have a moral right to have comprehension handed to you on a silver platter?
Why do you (seem to) think women are so frail and stupid that they shouldn’t be expected to carry out this introspection?
Because, being a human, I’m too “frail and stupid” to carry out the reverse introspection in response to a casual inquiry. I also don’t expect the average person of either sex to have the degree of intellectual rigor required to refrain from confabulating, when asked.
(My own experience shows me that it is hard to get people to not confabulate, about any topic. Non-confabulation is unnatural to most humans and requires sometimes-difficult training, even if you’re highly motivated to learn… and people who think they already understand confabulation and the need to refrain from it are usually the ones who have the most difficulty learning not to.)
There are points in here that have value but they are not a reasonable (or particularly relevant) as a reply to the objection that Silas has made. Silas makes enough of a target of himself. You need not pad him out with straw.
I’m objecting to your attempt to claim that two phrasings mean the same thing, when they really don’t
The meaning of the communication is the response you get, and the intended response to the behavior described as “ordering around” is that the woman feel that she is with a man who “knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to say it”.
No. The intended response to the behaviour is not that. Or, at least, it is not just that. You can not demand that Silas use language that does not express what he is trying to say just because it happens to fit neatly into your own model.
More generally, it is unreasonable to expect people to comply to the quote from the NLP guru, regarding the meaning of a communication, least of all on a site that emphasises epistemic rationality. Yes, it is a useful concept but your appeal to ‘the meaning is the response’ to try to reverse a claim of who is distorting the communication is ‘clever’ but far from sound.
But clearly, it is NOT uninformative to women!
Your words do not convey the information (to women, or anyone else) that Silas was trying to convey. Don’t insist that he use them.
And just because at one time you didn’t understand what this woman-speak means in men-speak, does not entitle you to claim that all women are therefore deluded, unhelpful liars and hypocrites, engaging in a campaign of mass deception to keep oppressed low-status men in their place with the conspiratorial assistance of the mass media.
You are taking significant liberty in applying negative spin to Silas’s claims here. More liberty than that which you presume to deny Silas in his claims. Be consistent.
But omitting the part of the behavior that women do say they value, is the part that makes the language exclusionary, and provokes the objections and social stigma that SilasBarta claims to be arguing against.
His thesis appears to be, “Most women (and some men) don’t like it when people say truth X”—I am saying, “Most women (and some men) are generally fine with it when you also give sufficient information for them to connect truth X with their goal or value Y, and I see no reason to exclude that connective information… since it does in fact produce the negative reaction described.”
While a professional, uninflammatory tone is preferable, it should never delete the substance of the claim, but that’s exactly what your supposed rephrasings do.
Agree, some of the suggested replacements destroy the communication. pjeby is naturally trying to force your words into a nice sounding (mostly true) framework that does not necessarily have room for your actual position. That’s just what pjeby does in general. But in this instance do consider HughRistik’s comment:
Right, they mean “acting as if.” By the way, Silas summary of that advice is a tiny bit extreme. I do hear “be dominant,” and I sometimes hear “give orders,” but “ordering her around” in general is not something I hear so commonly. I do hear “treat her like your bratty little sister” sometimes.
You know what I think replacing ‘ordering her around’ with ‘give orders’ does? It gets rid of politician-speak. You are trying to embed a message in there, and it obfuscates the advice. (And this is just an example from a trend!)
You know what I think replacing ‘ordering her around’ with ‘give orders’ does? It gets rid of politician-speak. You are trying to embed a message in there, and it obfuscates the advice. (And this is just an example from a trend!)
I don’t know what trend you mean or if there’s a chain of things I’ve been doing wrong; I do admit that I didn’t even notice that “order her around” and “give orders” were different phrases to begin with, since I kept lumping them together. Your distinction between the two is noted, and appreciated.
Consider the suggested trend to be “not being hyper-vigilant about differences like ‘order her around’ vs ‘give orders’ when the political context makes nearly anything an invitation to umbrage”.
I’m sure you can see that exactly one of those pieces of advice is ambiguous, and easily disambiguated as advice to engage in genuinely wrong behavior. I think that some sorts of people, which I would expect to overlap with the sorts of people opposed to pickup, tend to directly leap from a statement being potentially harmful to express, to that statement and its speaker being Bad. (Another example: statements about the basis of intelligence and race/sex correlations, with their genuine usefulness to bigots.) I don’t think that this is entirely incorrect of them, either instrumentally or epistemically — such statements are Bayesian evidence of bad character, for both direct and signaling reasons.
PS: Don’t be so sarcastic.
I accept that the advice I listed can be ambiguous. I also claim that a very large class of men has been so horribly misled by the official line on male-to-female interaction rules, that even the above advice, in its crude form, in its rank misogyny, would actually cause them to be more attractive to women—which just goes to show the depths of their deception.
Btw, what was sarcastic? Men who present the plain truth on this are the target of severe vitriol from women (even and especially those for whom it is true) and men who recognize its truth, but want to appear part of the “reasonable” crowd. My illustration of the vitriol is exaggerated, but not by much. And the misleading advice women promote does in fact mirror the official line (in mainstream books, advice from women, behavior taught in schools, etc.). What are you objecting to?
And yet, you seem to object to framing the truth in terms that women usually like and respond positively to… which makes me wonder WTF your actual goals are here.
Oh noes, people don’t like language they don’t like, and I am being forced to use the language of the oppressors in order to talk with them about anything. Help, I’m being oppressed!
Damn, dude, this is like saying you ought to have the right to describe people using racial epithets, simply because the epithets are included in statements that are true, like “That [epithet] is wearing blue jeans.”
In NLP there’s a saying that the meaning of a communication is the response you get. If you want a different response, try a different communication already, and stop bothering everyone with this low-status whining. It’s a disgrace to everyone you claim to be speaking for, and everything you claim to be standing for.
Where are you getting that? I’m not objecting to framing the truth in a professional, reasoned tone. I’m objecting to your attempt to claim that two phrasings mean the same thing, when they really don’t, thereby promoting a sort of uninformative politician-speak, as I explained here (and which you didn’t address):
You seem to really be taking the concept of “ordering a woman around” to mean so freaking many benign things that the term no longer has any meaning. Doing so voids the usefulness of words and cripples the ability to clearly communicate on the issues.
“A man who knows what he wants, and isn’t afraid to say it” does not, as you claim, equate to giving orders. And yet, PUAs do advise “giving orders”, while an uninformed man who was simply told to “know what you want, and don’t be afraid to say it” would not at all see how this means giving orders … because the concept thereof isn’t entailed by that advice!
While a professional, uninflammatory tone is preferable, it should never delete the substance of the claim, but that’s exactly what your supposed rephrasings do.
The meaning of the communication is the response you get, and the intended response to the behavior described as “ordering around” is that the woman feel that she is with a man who “knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to say it”.
By omitting the intended response from the discussion, it is you who are distorting the communication.
So, why does it then surprise you if women feel excluded, when you are systematically excluding their goals and values from the discussion?
You are insisting that your particular selection of concepts is “the truth”, when it is also the truth that women describe the benefits of these behavioral patterns in ways you deride as “uninformative politician-speak”.
But clearly, it is NOT uninformative to women! They know what they like, but have difficulty breaking it into smaller chunks because they have evolved recognition machinery for it. And that is not their fault.
And just because at one time you didn’t understand what this woman-speak means in men-speak, does not entitle you to claim that all women are therefore deluded, unhelpful liars and hypocrites, engaging in a campaign of mass deception to keep oppressed low-status men in their place with the conspiratorial assistance of the mass media.
This entire post was because of “exclusionary speech”—talking about women in a way that excludes their goals and values from consideration. That’s exactly what you’re doing—not just omitting those goals and values from your own statements, but actually objecting when anybody else brings them up.
Are you really not noticing this?
No, by casually equating means (“give orders”) with ends (“a woman who feels she is with a confident man who knows what he wants”) -- an equation you just now revealed you are using! -- it’s you who’s distorting communication.
No, I’m systematically using words by their standard meanings; the discussion of the ends is not, like you claim, being excluded; it’s just that you need to identify it as such. Don’t say “X and Y are the same instruction because they would, in the best case scenario, get the same reaction.” That’s wrong, and a misuse of language.
No, I’m calling it uninformative when it uses the wrong terms and acts surprised that I didn’t read minds for the real intended meantings.
No, like I said before, even if you can claim specific instances of women giving advice that (by hidden transformations) is true and useful, it’s still drowned out in the sea of advice that is ineffective and countereffective. How should I have known that this advice is reliable, but the (far more numerous) instances of “oh, be deferential to her, make sure not to cross these six trillion feminist lines” isn’t? How should the majority of men have known it?
Just women, or women and men? I make a genuine effort to convert my “recognition machinery” into something communicable. I don’t tolerate “you wouldn’t understand” as a curiousity-stopper from anyone, not me, not men. Why do you (seem to) think women are so frail and stupid that they shouldn’t be expected to carry out this introspection?
This is the part where the problem is: you aren’t separating “words that make sense to me” from “real intended meanings”… which then leads to an exclusionary result.
How should you have known that the world is round, when all of the immediately-available evidence is that it’s flat… unless you specifically go looking for obscure and “hidden” information?
Reality is not under any obligation to be comprehensible to human beings, so what makes you think you have a moral right to have comprehension handed to you on a silver platter?
Because, being a human, I’m too “frail and stupid” to carry out the reverse introspection in response to a casual inquiry. I also don’t expect the average person of either sex to have the degree of intellectual rigor required to refrain from confabulating, when asked.
(My own experience shows me that it is hard to get people to not confabulate, about any topic. Non-confabulation is unnatural to most humans and requires sometimes-difficult training, even if you’re highly motivated to learn… and people who think they already understand confabulation and the need to refrain from it are usually the ones who have the most difficulty learning not to.)
There are points in here that have value but they are not a reasonable (or particularly relevant) as a reply to the objection that Silas has made. Silas makes enough of a target of himself. You need not pad him out with straw.
No. The intended response to the behaviour is not that. Or, at least, it is not just that. You can not demand that Silas use language that does not express what he is trying to say just because it happens to fit neatly into your own model.
More generally, it is unreasonable to expect people to comply to the quote from the NLP guru, regarding the meaning of a communication, least of all on a site that emphasises epistemic rationality. Yes, it is a useful concept but your appeal to ‘the meaning is the response’ to try to reverse a claim of who is distorting the communication is ‘clever’ but far from sound.
Your words do not convey the information (to women, or anyone else) that Silas was trying to convey. Don’t insist that he use them.
You are taking significant liberty in applying negative spin to Silas’s claims here. More liberty than that which you presume to deny Silas in his claims. Be consistent.
But omitting the part of the behavior that women do say they value, is the part that makes the language exclusionary, and provokes the objections and social stigma that SilasBarta claims to be arguing against.
His thesis appears to be, “Most women (and some men) don’t like it when people say truth X”—I am saying, “Most women (and some men) are generally fine with it when you also give sufficient information for them to connect truth X with their goal or value Y, and I see no reason to exclude that connective information… since it does in fact produce the negative reaction described.”
Agree, some of the suggested replacements destroy the communication. pjeby is naturally trying to force your words into a nice sounding (mostly true) framework that does not necessarily have room for your actual position. That’s just what pjeby does in general. But in this instance do consider HughRistik’s comment:
You know what I think replacing ‘ordering her around’ with ‘give orders’ does? It gets rid of politician-speak. You are trying to embed a message in there, and it obfuscates the advice. (And this is just an example from a trend!)
I don’t know what trend you mean or if there’s a chain of things I’ve been doing wrong; I do admit that I didn’t even notice that “order her around” and “give orders” were different phrases to begin with, since I kept lumping them together. Your distinction between the two is noted, and appreciated.
Consider the suggested trend to be “not being hyper-vigilant about differences like ‘order her around’ vs ‘give orders’ when the political context makes nearly anything an invitation to umbrage”.