I fail to see why it should be policy to cater to people who are clearly being unreasonable.
For one thing, because being unreasonable is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where everyone is always reasonable. So if doing something predictably results in a bunch of people being upset, then it might be better to avoid it even if it would be better for everyone if they weren’t upset by it.
For another, because what’s “clearly unreasonable” to one person may be “clearly reasonable” to another. It may seem “clearly unreasonable” for a woman to have a problem with having her appearance complimented by her male colleagues. But if what she’s found is that over and over again her male colleagues comment on her (and other women’s) appearance, and never on their ideas, while the reverse happens to the men around her … why, then, I have some sympathy if she gets frustrated by yet another compliment on her appearance. (It might in some sense be better for her to focus not on the compliments on her appearance but on the absence of response to her work. But actual things that actually happen are easier to see and more psychologically salient than absences, even when the absence is the bigger underlying problem.)
The problem is that it causes people to treat it as an archetypical example.
Only people who are—how shall I put it? -- clearly being unreasonable. One might prefer not to make policy on the basis of people who are clearly being unreasonable :-).
Seriously: yes, I agree that that’s a potential problem. The obvious solution seems to me to be to make it as clear as you possibly can when you’re talking about central examples and when you’re sketching the boundaries. Unfortunately, I bet there will always be (clearly unreasonable) people who don’t take any notice and either mix the two up or pretend to. I’m not sure much can be done about that.
But if what she’s found is that over and over again her male colleagues comment on her (and other women’s) appearance
Well, complimenting people wearing attractive clothes is is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where no-one ever notices other people’s clothes. So if wearing certain clothes predictably results in a bunch of people commenting on your appearance (and it annoys you), then it might be better to wear more modest clothes yadda yadda yadda.
You say that like you expect me to disagree, but I don’t think I do. (But I would generally avoid saying so to the people in question, which I might not on the other side, because it seems more obviously unreasonable to have to avoid wearing nice clothes to work than to have to avoid complimenting people’s clothing at work. I’m not terribly sure how much sense that makes, though.)
But I would generally avoid saying so to the people in question, which I might not on the other side, because it seems more obviously unreasonable to have to avoid wearing nice clothes to work than to have to avoid complimenting people’s clothing at work.
It seems even more unreasonable to be to wear sexy clothes (how did “sexy” turn into “nice”?) and then object when someone comments on them. Frankly the only way I can explain the woman’s actions are that she was either insulted that the complementer was too low status or trolling for an excuse to accuse someone of sexual harassment.
I don’t think it did, exactly. I just didn’t assume that clothes that could be described as “somewhat provocative/revealing” necessarily belonged in the bucket labelled “sexy” rather than the one labelled “nice”.
To be more precise: (1) what is viewed as provocative or revealing is highly dependent on who’s doing the viewing (see, e.g., Victorian England or many Muslim-dominated places today; but similar variation occurs at the individual as well as the societal level), and (2) person A may wear clothes that person B finds “revealing” without the least intention of attracting sexual attention of any sort.
I have no quantitative data (and doubt whether any exist) but have more than once heard women complain that their choice of clothing was treated by a man as some sort of attempt to provoke when in fact they were just wearing something they felt comfortable in or liked the look of. (I have a feeling there is pretty decent scientific evidence that men tend to overestimate the extent to which women’s behaviour is intended to signal sexual availability or interest, but don’t have references to hand. It seems like a plausible hypothesis on the usual handwavy evo-psych grounds, for what little that’s worth.)
I don’t know what she was wearing, I heard it from the lawyer doing the briefing, but he did mention her undoing some buttons. In any case, if I came to work wearing a suite, we dress casually, I’d expect people to comment on it.
I was about to go ‘sweatshirts for example are comfortable but definitely not provocative’, then I remembered reading that when men talk about comfortable clothes they tend to mean physically comfortable whereas women tend to mean socially/psychologically comfortable (as in this comment, though I don’t know if Nornagest is a woman).
(Then again, being comfortable in the latter sense with wearing certain clothes but not with being complimented for them sounds weird to me.)
Sure. It sounds a bit weird to me too, for what it’s worth. But the whole point here is that the reasons why something is unpleasant to one person may be far from apparent to another. Anecdotally, it seems that many women have the experience of being persistently treated (so to speak) as ornamental rather than functional, of having their male colleagues pay attention to their appearance while neglecting their work. Someone in that situation may not be glad of compliments to her appearance even if she has gone to some trouble to look good.
An analogy occurs to me. Let’s suppose that an important part of your employment is writing analytical reports of some kind. Stock market forecasts, competitive analysis of other companies’ products, software requirements, that sort of thing. You write these reports. You hand them over to your boss. And he takes a look and says “Nice choice of font.” or “I see you spelled ‘accommodate’ correctly, well done.” A single instance of this is harmless and you’d probably be glad of it. But it happens again and again, much more often than any substantive comment (positive or negative) on the actual content of the reports you’re writing. After a while, you might start taking these comments as indicating that your boss either thinks the content is no good, or for some reason simply doesn’t much care about the content. You might find that being complimented on your excellent use of quotation marks makes you feel bad, not good, about how valuable your carefully calculated and checked risk assessment is to the company.
And you might feel that way even if, as a matter of fact, you did put some care and skill into spelling and punctuating correctly and presenting the report attractively.
Sure. It sounds a bit weird to me too, for what it’s worth. But the whole point here is that the reasons why something is unpleasant to one person may be far from apparent to another.
Now who’s making highly implausible theories and arguing that they’re “possible”?
You write these reports. You hand them over to your boss. And he takes a look and says “Nice choice of font.”
Well, if I had made an unusual choice of font, I’d expect that reaction.
It doesn’t appear to me to be a highly implausible theory; it’s a thing many women actually complain about.
Well, if I had made an unusual choice of font
My understanding is that quite a few women report male attention going disproportionately to their clothes and appearance even when they aren’t wearing anything very unusual.
Also, there are other employees around who are proud of their use of quotation marks and specifically expect that they be complimented on them. Some of them even leave reports on their desks with pages of words prominently displayed just so that people will compliment them on their punctuation.
And there are even more employees who really want to be complimented on their use of quotation marks, but only from people with small noses. This unusual preference is something they don’t want to admit, so these other employees, when complimented by someone with a big nose, pretend to be like you and be offended because they are not being complimented on content, when that’s not true at all.
I think in an environment like that you should expect to get complimented on your punctuation quite a bit.
The problem with compliments isn’t so much that woman often don’t enjoy getting them. There are many cases where they don’t, but that’s not the central issue.
The problem is that it’s hard for a man to compliment a woman on her appearance and at the same time not let it influence how he treats the woman in their professional function. The availability heuristic is a central part of how humans make decisions and if the attribute that most available is “attractive” instead of “skilled-at-job” that matters.
The availability heuristic is a central part of how humans make decisions and if the attribute that most available is “attractive” instead of “skilled-at-job” that matters.
The problem with the problem is that not everyone actually means that. And the ones who don’t mean it end up reducing the credibility of the people who say it and really mean it.
Also, there are other employees around who are proud of their use of quotation marks and specifically expect that they be complimented on them.
Sure. But after a couple times I compliment on your punctuation and you don’t take it well, I should get the hint and realize that you aren’t one of those people. (And whether you do like to be complimented on punctuation by people with smaller noses¹ than mine is irrelevant; if you don’t like it when I do it, I should stop it, at least until I can afford a rhinoplasty.)
Some of them even leave reports on their desks with pages of words prominently displayed just so that people will compliment them on their punctuation.
I was about to go ‘but there’s a large difference between writing in a formal standard grammatically correct way and writing in a way that fishes for compliments!’, then I remembered that that’s probably much less the case in the America than where I am (see e.g. [1], [2]; by comparison where I am you can just wear canvas sneakers or tennis shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt or a sweater, and that’s not necessarily considered sexy but not necessarily slovenly either, regardless of your gender), so never mind.
“Native speakers” would be a less silly allegory, BTW.
And whether you do like to be complimented on punctuation by people with smaller noses than mine is irrelevant; if you don’t like it when I do it, I should stop it,
Using your analogy of native speakers, people want to be complimented on their punctuation by native speakers only. When complimented by anyone who doesn’t speak well enough, they lie and say “I don’t like it because you’re not complimenting me on the quality of my work”, when they’re really just using it as a cover for an implied insult of “I hate people with your accent”. This proceeds to the point where everyone knows that the former complaint is just an excuse for the latter.
Then you come along, and you really want to be complimented on the quality of your work. You’re going to be mistaken for those other guys quite a bit.
Doesn’t change my point. If you are predictably annoyed when I compliment on your punctuation and I know it, I’d better stop it if I don’t want to be a dick, regardless of why it annoys you.
I don’t believe that. For instance, if you are white, I am not, and you are offended by compliments because you are offended whenever a non-white person talks to you or even sit next to you, it’s not me that’s being a dick by offending you, it’s you who’s being one by being offended by things that you have no right to be offended by.
That’s essentially what’s going on here—some people who are offended are offended for a reason that doesn’t deserve to be respected (they dont like someone’s accent/they don’t want to be complimented by someone low status), and they lie and pretend they are offended for a reason that does deserve to be respected (they don’t want shallow compliments).
Not wanting to be complimented for being sexy by unsexy people doesn’t deserve to be respected? WTF? Would you be okay with it if someone you’re not only not attracted to in the slightest but perhaps even repulsed by said something to the effect that they would like to bang you (even though not with those words)?
I might want to restrict such things to being said only by someone who I’m in a relationship with, but that’s different from restricting such things to only being said by all beautiful people.
This proceeds to the point where everyone knows that the former complaint is just an excuse for the latter.
Then it’s not a lie. That’s not how natural languages work. If everybody knows that when people say X they mean Y, then X means Y, regardless of etymology. There’s no stone tablet in the sky that specifies what X actually means regardless of when people actually say X and when they don’t. (Or would you say that someone saying “it’s raining cats and dogs” in absence of domestic carnivorans falling down from clouds is lying?)
And if of the possible ways of wording a complaint someone chooses the one least likely to hurt my feelings, why should I hold it against them, rather than being grateful for that?
If everybody knows that when people say X they mean Y, then X means Y, regardless of etymology.
Hold on. I’m not arguing that X doesn’t mean Y. I’m arguing that X does mean Y, and that explains why people treat Y as X. (X=I don’t want to be complimented by ugly/low status people, Y=I don’t want to be complimented based on superficial attributes, by anyone).
when men talk about comfortable clothes they tend to mean physically comfortable whereas women tend to mean socially/psychologically comfortable (as in this comment, though I don’t know if Nornagest is a woman).
I meant “comfortable” as an attribute of the social situation in that comment, not of the clothes I’d be wearing in it. If I were wearing sweatpants to a wedding, for example, I’d likely find them comfortable but I wouldn’t be comfortable.
I thought that was what I was suggesting is best—at least if it happens that the women in question can actually avoid having the men focus on their appearance by making changes in clothing. I can’t help suspecting (though I have no actual evidence) that in such cases their options are actually “get unwanted compliments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas” and “get unwanted critical comments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas”, with perhaps a little middle ground where they get both positive and negative comments on their appearance and still have their work overlooked.
For one thing, because being unreasonable is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where everyone is always reasonable. So if doing something predictably results in a bunch of people being upset, then it might be better to avoid it even if it would be better for everyone if they weren’t upset by it.
For another, because what’s “clearly unreasonable” to one person may be “clearly reasonable” to another. It may seem “clearly unreasonable” for a woman to have a problem with having her appearance complimented by her male colleagues. But if what she’s found is that over and over again her male colleagues comment on her (and other women’s) appearance, and never on their ideas, while the reverse happens to the men around her … why, then, I have some sympathy if she gets frustrated by yet another compliment on her appearance. (It might in some sense be better for her to focus not on the compliments on her appearance but on the absence of response to her work. But actual things that actually happen are easier to see and more psychologically salient than absences, even when the absence is the bigger underlying problem.)
Only people who are—how shall I put it? -- clearly being unreasonable. One might prefer not to make policy on the basis of people who are clearly being unreasonable :-).
Seriously: yes, I agree that that’s a potential problem. The obvious solution seems to me to be to make it as clear as you possibly can when you’re talking about central examples and when you’re sketching the boundaries. Unfortunately, I bet there will always be (clearly unreasonable) people who don’t take any notice and either mix the two up or pretend to. I’m not sure much can be done about that.
I mostly agree (and upvoted), but...
Well, complimenting people wearing attractive clothes is is simply What People Do and it seems better to care about outcomes in the real world than outcomes in some imaginary world where no-one ever notices other people’s clothes. So if wearing certain clothes predictably results in a bunch of people commenting on your appearance (and it annoys you), then it might be better to wear more modest clothes yadda yadda yadda.
;-)
You say that like you expect me to disagree, but I don’t think I do. (But I would generally avoid saying so to the people in question, which I might not on the other side, because it seems more obviously unreasonable to have to avoid wearing nice clothes to work than to have to avoid complimenting people’s clothing at work. I’m not terribly sure how much sense that makes, though.)
It seems even more unreasonable to be to wear sexy clothes (how did “sexy” turn into “nice”?) and then object when someone comments on them. Frankly the only way I can explain the woman’s actions are that she was either insulted that the complementer was too low status or trolling for an excuse to accuse someone of sexual harassment.
I don’t think it did, exactly. I just didn’t assume that clothes that could be described as “somewhat provocative/revealing” necessarily belonged in the bucket labelled “sexy” rather than the one labelled “nice”.
To be more precise: (1) what is viewed as provocative or revealing is highly dependent on who’s doing the viewing (see, e.g., Victorian England or many Muslim-dominated places today; but similar variation occurs at the individual as well as the societal level), and (2) person A may wear clothes that person B finds “revealing” without the least intention of attracting sexual attention of any sort.
I have no quantitative data (and doubt whether any exist) but have more than once heard women complain that their choice of clothing was treated by a man as some sort of attempt to provoke when in fact they were just wearing something they felt comfortable in or liked the look of. (I have a feeling there is pretty decent scientific evidence that men tend to overestimate the extent to which women’s behaviour is intended to signal sexual availability or interest, but don’t have references to hand. It seems like a plausible hypothesis on the usual handwavy evo-psych grounds, for what little that’s worth.)
I don’t know what she was wearing, I heard it from the lawyer doing the briefing, but he did mention her undoing some buttons. In any case, if I came to work wearing a suite, we dress casually, I’d expect people to comment on it.
I was about to go ‘sweatshirts for example are comfortable but definitely not provocative’, then I remembered reading that when men talk about comfortable clothes they tend to mean physically comfortable whereas women tend to mean socially/psychologically comfortable (as in this comment, though I don’t know if Nornagest is a woman).
(Then again, being comfortable in the latter sense with wearing certain clothes but not with being complimented for them sounds weird to me.)
Sure. It sounds a bit weird to me too, for what it’s worth. But the whole point here is that the reasons why something is unpleasant to one person may be far from apparent to another. Anecdotally, it seems that many women have the experience of being persistently treated (so to speak) as ornamental rather than functional, of having their male colleagues pay attention to their appearance while neglecting their work. Someone in that situation may not be glad of compliments to her appearance even if she has gone to some trouble to look good.
An analogy occurs to me. Let’s suppose that an important part of your employment is writing analytical reports of some kind. Stock market forecasts, competitive analysis of other companies’ products, software requirements, that sort of thing. You write these reports. You hand them over to your boss. And he takes a look and says “Nice choice of font.” or “I see you spelled ‘accommodate’ correctly, well done.” A single instance of this is harmless and you’d probably be glad of it. But it happens again and again, much more often than any substantive comment (positive or negative) on the actual content of the reports you’re writing. After a while, you might start taking these comments as indicating that your boss either thinks the content is no good, or for some reason simply doesn’t much care about the content. You might find that being complimented on your excellent use of quotation marks makes you feel bad, not good, about how valuable your carefully calculated and checked risk assessment is to the company.
And you might feel that way even if, as a matter of fact, you did put some care and skill into spelling and punctuating correctly and presenting the report attractively.
Now who’s making highly implausible theories and arguing that they’re “possible”?
Well, if I had made an unusual choice of font, I’d expect that reaction.
It doesn’t appear to me to be a highly implausible theory; it’s a thing many women actually complain about.
My understanding is that quite a few women report male attention going disproportionately to their clothes and appearance even when they aren’t wearing anything very unusual.
Also, there are other employees around who are proud of their use of quotation marks and specifically expect that they be complimented on them. Some of them even leave reports on their desks with pages of words prominently displayed just so that people will compliment them on their punctuation.
And there are even more employees who really want to be complimented on their use of quotation marks, but only from people with small noses. This unusual preference is something they don’t want to admit, so these other employees, when complimented by someone with a big nose, pretend to be like you and be offended because they are not being complimented on content, when that’s not true at all.
I think in an environment like that you should expect to get complimented on your punctuation quite a bit.
The problem with compliments isn’t so much that woman often don’t enjoy getting them. There are many cases where they don’t, but that’s not the central issue.
The problem is that it’s hard for a man to compliment a woman on her appearance and at the same time not let it influence how he treats the woman in their professional function. The availability heuristic is a central part of how humans make decisions and if the attribute that most available is “attractive” instead of “skilled-at-job” that matters.
On the other hand the halo effect also exists.
The problem with the problem is that not everyone actually means that. And the ones who don’t mean it end up reducing the credibility of the people who say it and really mean it.
Sure. But after a couple times I compliment on your punctuation and you don’t take it well, I should get the hint and realize that you aren’t one of those people. (And whether you do like to be complimented on punctuation by people with smaller noses¹ than mine is irrelevant; if you don’t like it when I do it, I should stop it, at least until I can afford a rhinoplasty.)
I was about to go ‘but there’s a large difference between writing in a formal standard grammatically correct way and writing in a way that fishes for compliments!’, then I remembered that that’s probably much less the case in the America than where I am (see e.g. [1], [2]; by comparison where I am you can just wear canvas sneakers or tennis shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt or a sweater, and that’s not necessarily considered sexy but not necessarily slovenly either, regardless of your gender), so never mind.
“Native speakers” would be a less silly allegory, BTW.
Using your analogy of native speakers, people want to be complimented on their punctuation by native speakers only. When complimented by anyone who doesn’t speak well enough, they lie and say “I don’t like it because you’re not complimenting me on the quality of my work”, when they’re really just using it as a cover for an implied insult of “I hate people with your accent”. This proceeds to the point where everyone knows that the former complaint is just an excuse for the latter.
Then you come along, and you really want to be complimented on the quality of your work. You’re going to be mistaken for those other guys quite a bit.
Doesn’t change my point. If you are predictably annoyed when I compliment on your punctuation and I know it, I’d better stop it if I don’t want to be a dick, regardless of why it annoys you.
I don’t believe that. For instance, if you are white, I am not, and you are offended by compliments because you are offended whenever a non-white person talks to you or even sit next to you, it’s not me that’s being a dick by offending you, it’s you who’s being one by being offended by things that you have no right to be offended by.
That’s essentially what’s going on here—some people who are offended are offended for a reason that doesn’t deserve to be respected (they dont like someone’s accent/they don’t want to be complimented by someone low status), and they lie and pretend they are offended for a reason that does deserve to be respected (they don’t want shallow compliments).
Not wanting to be complimented for being sexy by unsexy people doesn’t deserve to be respected? WTF? Would you be okay with it if someone you’re not only not attracted to in the slightest but perhaps even repulsed by said something to the effect that they would like to bang you (even though not with those words)?
I might want to restrict such things to being said only by someone who I’m in a relationship with, but that’s different from restricting such things to only being said by all beautiful people.
Then it’s not a lie. That’s not how natural languages work. If everybody knows that when people say X they mean Y, then X means Y, regardless of etymology. There’s no stone tablet in the sky that specifies what X actually means regardless of when people actually say X and when they don’t. (Or would you say that someone saying “it’s raining cats and dogs” in absence of domestic carnivorans falling down from clouds is lying?)
And if of the possible ways of wording a complaint someone chooses the one least likely to hurt my feelings, why should I hold it against them, rather than being grateful for that?
Hold on. I’m not arguing that X doesn’t mean Y. I’m arguing that X does mean Y, and that explains why people treat Y as X. (X=I don’t want to be complimented by ugly/low status people, Y=I don’t want to be complimented based on superficial attributes, by anyone).
Tapping out.
I meant “comfortable” as an attribute of the social situation in that comment, not of the clothes I’d be wearing in it. If I were wearing sweatpants to a wedding, for example, I’d likely find them comfortable but I wouldn’t be comfortable.
(I’m a guy.)
Well, that’s not obvious to me, anyway...
Well, these aren’t mutually exclusive. Can’t we do both? Postel’s law, anyone?
Postel’s law would mean not throwing a fit when someone complements your clothing.
Yes, that too.
I thought that was what I was suggesting is best—at least if it happens that the women in question can actually avoid having the men focus on their appearance by making changes in clothing. I can’t help suspecting (though I have no actual evidence) that in such cases their options are actually “get unwanted compliments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas” and “get unwanted critical comments from men who focus on their appearance and ignore their ideas”, with perhaps a little middle ground where they get both positive and negative comments on their appearance and still have their work overlooked.