In this concrete case, you are denouncing the actions of a commentator whose only alleged transgression, to the best of my understanding, consists of bringing up for discussion certain propositions that arguably violate some of the above mentioned standards.
Something a bit more than that has been alleged, at least by me. If I accepted your characterization of the situation, I would not have been so vehement in denouncing.
I honestly see no strawman-like misrepresentation of your expressed views in it.
I believe you that you don’t see it, since you have just finished doing it again.
Something a bit more than that has been alleged, at least by me. If I accepted your characterization of the situation, I would not have been so vehement in denouncing.
Then would you be so kind to specify precisely what this additional part of the allegations consists of? I would be really grateful to see it spelled out, not least because, assuming you are correct, it would rectify some of my own misconceptions.
(In the interest of avoiding a confrontational tone, perhaps I should also add that I am not among the people who have downvoted your recent comments.)
Then would you be so kind to specify precisely what this additional part of the allegations consists of? I would be really grateful to see it spelled out.
Why certainly. I have nothing better to do than to repeat allegations which I am coming to regret making. :)
Here I alleged that komponisto deliberately tried to “creep people out”, the people in question being women, and the “creepiness” being allusions to sexual violence—definitely not threats, but disturbing all the same. Before my allegation, various other people reported in passing that his comments had a “creepy” character, though, so far as I know, they did not allege intent.
I also hinted at and then later made explicit, my belief that his motive for seeming creepy was to draw criticism, fake being emotionally damaged by the criticism, and then use this charade to make some point about gender politics.
So, as you see, I, at least, was not making a big deal about his having advocated unusual and unpopular ideas. As far as I can see, whenever he was asked to fill in some of the details regarding those ideas, he declined.
(In the interest of avoiding a confrontational tone, perhaps I should also add that I am not among the people who have downvoted your recent comments.)
Go ahead and downvote any comments you disapprove of. It is your right and perhaps even your duty. Besides, as a result of the intervention of some angel, I currently have more karma than I deserve.
Just curious. Your interest in “avoiding a confrontational tone”. Is that something you have come by recently? Something I said?
Now you present speculations about someone’s motives that go far beyond what was actually written in his comments. Yet, it remains the case that the only (arguable) offense he actually committed was bringing up (arguably) objectionable propositions for discussion. Notice the contrast with truly incontrovertible offenses that can be committed in writing, such as threats, lies, insults, libel, plagiarism, etc. In this case, a mere instance of bringing up an undesirable proposition was enough to motivate your accusations, with no such incontrovertible malicious behaviors accompanying it.
If you’re going to treat bringing up objectionable discussion topics as prima facie evidence of underhanded bad intentions, note that others can play that same game too. To take the most relevant example, there is just as much, if not even more, justification to interpret protestations of offense as an underhanded ploy for making ideological points and seeking emotional satisfaction instead of rational debate.
Therefore, if you want to judge people and enforce standards of discourse based on implicit judgments of their motives, rather than just the plain content of what they’ve written, you should be aware that such interpretations and the resulting judgments will be necessarily subjective and a matter of disagreement—and there is no rational reason why your particular criteria should be favored over others’.
Now you present speculations about someone’s motives that go far beyond what was actually written in his comments.
Yes. I am happy that you are now finally criticizing me for what I actually did rather than for some straw man caricature you have made up. You will find you have lots of company in your criticism.
Yet, it remains the case that the only (arguable) offense he actually committed was bringing up (arguably) objectionable propositions for discussion.
Uh oh. We are now back to that old “bringing up propositions for discussion” thing. Even though I have repeatedly said that that was not part of my thinking at all. I foresee trouble ahead. …
If you’re going to treat bringing up objectionable discussion topics as prima facie evidence of underhanded bad intentions …
Excuse me. The “objectionable topic” was whether women should grant “sexual favors” more freely. It was brought up in a comment which began by criticizing a woman’s observation that “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence....”. Why does the commenter think this observation deserves criticism? Because it shows “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men”. That is the context within which the “discussion topic” was introduced. Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
Great, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
It was brought up in a comment which began by criticizing a woman’s observation that “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence....”.
The original problem I had with this comment was that it triggered a certain schema of men trying to figure out ways of interacting with women sexually, and then women accusing them of bad things.It kind of looked to me something like this:
PUAs: Let’s do a lot of work fulfilling women’s criteria and figure out some more reliable ways of being successful with them.
SarahC: Wait, if you guys do that, you could think that you are guaranteed success with women, and then if you get turned down… it could turn into RAPE!
That perceived reaction is not quite what SarahC said (and my version of what PUAs say is not quite what she has heard). And it’s not her full reasoning. But until she clarified and explained more about her priors (e.g. George Sodini), there seemed to be some sort of slippery slope going on in her comment, which the above is an exaggeration of.
There is quite a gap between getting turned down and becoming violent. Yes, even for men. Although men being violent is highly visible, the base rate of rejections that men respond violently or punitively to is very low (in Western middle-class Anglo-American culture, at least). That’s because since men typically have to make the advances and women are more selective, men get rejected a lot. Some PUAs approach hundreds or thousands of women in the space of years; there just isn’t time to be violent or make a stink with every woman who rejects them. The fact that PUAs can even approach so many women indicates that they have some abilities to handle rejection.
Now, what about the feeling of some men that it’s unfair when women turn them down, and whether this view should be linked to creepiness or violence?
Again, this is an issue of inferential distance. I’ll try to spell out a scenario where men might feel it’s unfair when women turn them down, yet nevertheless not be bad people with bad intentions:
Let’s examine the case of shyness (EDIT: It’s interesting that I picked this example when drafting this post… I couldn’t post it last night due to a 500 error, and then I wake up this morning and see that komponisto admits to having experienced social anxiety disorder). You know the percentage of women who say that shyness is attractive in men? 2% (the study is by Burger & Cosby, but I’ll have to dig up the cite later). Shyness is extremely damning of the attractiveness of men in the eyes of most women, but it really doesn’t seem to hurt the chances of women so badly unless we are talking about something like full-blown clinical like social phobia (and if anyone has some reasons to believe that shyness in women is more of a dating handicap than I do, I would like to hear it).
So if you are a shy, awkward guy in college who has trouble getting dates, but you see shy, awkward women getting dates, you might feel a little frustrated at the situation (especially since the shy, awkward woman probably don’t consider you a viable date). Why is a trait, such as shyness treated unequally based on gender?, you might ask. You might start start feeling that this unequal treatment is a little unfair.
Now, fairness can be conceptualized in different ways. “Fair” is often relative to a certain standard of how things should be. When fairness is used as a synonym for justice, then unfairness entitles the “wronged” party to redress, perhaps by violence or state-enforced violence. That’s not the type of fairness I’m thinking of. The kind of fairness I’m thinking of is more like a sense of equality. You might feel that in an ideal world, shy men wouldn’t be systematically disadvantaged relative to non-shy men and shy women for a psychological condition that isn’t their fault and is difficult to change. Of course, you can recognize that we don’t live in this ideal world, and abhor any attempt to create it by force or coercion.
Btw, I’m not convinced by this ideal world argument; I just present it as a plausible example of how a man could feel that doesn’t make him a Bad Person. Feeling an abstract sense of unfairness, even a misplaced one, isn’t the same thing as feeling a sense of injustice that you are entitled to recompense for from some particular individual.
I think women’s preferences for certain personality traits are so intimately woven into their sexual psychology that to try to change them would be to re-engineer women’s psychology from the ground up. It’s a lot easier to imagine this ideal world “fairness” argument applying to men’s preferences for looks in women, actually. Discriminating against potential mates due to physical appearance seems a lot more arbitrary than discriminating based on personality traits.
Unfortunately, our culture encourages naive notions of “fairness” and nondiscrimination, so it’s easy to see how as this hypothetical shy guy, you could believe that they apply in dating, especially after hearing arguments that men shouldn’t judge women’s dating potential based on looks so much. You simply don’t realize that many women feel the same way towards shy guys that you feel towards [insert type of women you are least attracted to here]. The reason for not making those connections might partly be a failure of empathy or imagination, but I think it’s really a failure of knowledge, because society propagates a lot of ignorance and falsehoods about the relative importance of certain male personality traits to women on average.
If you are a shy guy who wants to better understand women’s perspective on what they value, people in our culture will systematically lie to you that “oh plenty of women like shy guys,” or “every woman wants something different,” or “don’t change yourself for anyone, eventually you will find the one for you” (note the horrible rationality of all these platitudes). The bias in our culture is that men and women go for the same things until proven otherwise, except for admitting that men care more about looks. When even the men who try to understand women’s dating criteria are lied to and silenced, there is a limit to how much we can blame men for not knowing the finer points of female sexual psychology, and thinking that certain aspects of women’s preferences are arbitrary (like men’s preferences for looks), capricious, or otherwise unfair.
SarahC didn’t exactly show “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men,” but her original post, and others in the discussion, did show a lack of knowledge of the potential psychology of unattractive men, leading to the slippery slope from notions of “guaranteed success” to men feeling “unfairness” when they are turned down, to “violence.” That procession only makes sense with a limited model of the minds of romantically frustrated men.
Women are not experts on the mindsets of unattractive, romantically frustrated men (and many men are not, either). In fact, women may have the most biased notions of those mindsets, because their impression of those men is dominated by the subset of them who are creepy, entitled jerks. Romantically frustrated men who are entitled jerks make themselves and their mindsets known to women. Romantically frustrated men who are decent people suffer in silence, and nobody cares. Unfortunately, when the second group of romantically frustrated men air their concerns on the internet, sometimes they trigger pattern matches with the creepy group of romantically frustrated guys. (Ironically, the guys who care most about avoiding such pattern matches may learn to self-censor themselves, leaving only guys without such sensitivity doing the complaining.)
It’s not women’s fault that creepy romantically frustrated men and the things they believe are so cognitively available. There are very good reasons for that. It also leads to bias which needs to be watched out for in discussions with men they care about communicating with.
The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences to a woman in real life may be nontrivial. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he secretly feels, but does not express, frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences: probably much lower, because there are all sorts of decent men that feel those things and suffer in silence. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration over women’s preferences on LessWrong: that’s probably closer to the second lower probability than the first, because LW is known as a place where people often talk about uncomfortable things that they wouldn’t say in other contexts.
This has gotten messy, but I think your insights have been accurate throughout.
I am sympathetic to romantically frustrated men. I’m a shy woman, and I recognize that I can get away with it because I’m female—that if I had been born male, society would have punished me more for aspects of my personality.
I kind of regret yelling “Rape!” in a crowded theater by now, because by now I’ve been shown that the nastier side of PUA is unrepresentative. Folks here are obviously not the people I need to be concerned about, and the people who actually do endanger women probably wouldn’t listen to me or anyone. :(
Btw, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m picking on SarahC in this comment; I don’t have any beef with her clarified view. Actually, in general her level of open-mindedness and updating in discussions on gender on LW is extremely impressive.
Great, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
To be brutally honest, I think you are missing the point here.
You have produced a fine critical analysis of SarahC’s comment, the same that komponisto criticized so clumsily. If komponisto had produced the analysis you just did, this blowup might not have happened.
I think it would be more productive if you were to analyze this comment of mine responding to komponisto. Admittedly, I now know it was not his intention to be abusive, but what I said there pretty much explains my reasons for believing it should be condemned.
Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness? And the significance is, what… that komponisto willfully triggered a woman’s express worry about violence instead of being sensitive?
That would make sense, if komponisto’s whole post hadn’t been about how the jump from rejection to violence is premature. He was sensitive to that worry, he just disagreed with its basis and explained why.
SarahC’s original post: Complaint X could lead to Y, and Y is bad.
komponisto: Actually, X doesn’t lead to Y so strongly as you think. And it might be controversial to say so, but X!
That’s how it looks to me, and I don’t see anything wrong with the form of komponisto’s argument. Having to tiptoe around slippery slopes that other people link to bad things would be a bad practice on a rationalist forum. Of course, you may not think that SarahC’s initial post was a slippery slope. But komponisto and I do. I revised my impression when SarahC gave me more information on where she was coming from and made me change my impression that her overall argument is a slippery slope, but komponisto didn’t have access to this information when he wrote his post.
I would just like to propose that if you are a woman (or anyone else) who is bringing up violence against women or rape (of women) in a discussion of sexuality with men, please consider showing the full inferential path that led you to that notion… if your goal is to have a dialogue with the men involved, rather than protect yourself or cause them to run into self-censorship. This is not a claim about how women (or anyone else) is obligated to approach such topics; it is a speculation about what I think will help me (and perhaps other men) be cognitively and emotionally able to consider them in a minimally-biased manner.
Unfortunately, decent men in our culture often get unfairly lumped in with misogynistic jerks and other male miscreants unfairly, which leads to the development of an “unfair accusation of rape/violence/sexual harassment/being a jerk/being a creep” set of psychological triggers, which can bias the same decent men against being able to properly hear views on those subjects that are fair. While it’s not the responsibility of women (or anyone else) to tiptoe around those triggers, it is useful to know they are there for discussions aimed to promote understanding.
It is also possible to talk about women’s sexual autonomy and self-determination without bringing up sexual violence. The focus on rape can also obscure other issues of sexual ethics with less harmfulness but more prevalence. For instance, people consenting to unwanted sexual situations they aren’t terribly enthusiastic about. Not raping people is a low bar in sexual ethics. There are clearly more fundamental principles about sexual ethics and choice at work here in addition to not raping people that include that moral principle; I feel many discussions about sexuality and “seduction” would be better by talking about what those principles are and how they should be respected, rather immediately bringing in the word “rape.”
I’ve been meaning to drop this into the discussion, and this seems like a good place.
It’s a discussion of studies which conclude that a great deal of rape isn’t done by typical men who aren’t clear about signals and consent, it’s done by a small percentage of men with a conscious strategy of predation, frequently against intoxicated women.
That is interesting. I find one of the main points compelling: that true serial rapists exist and are much more likely to employ intoxication strategies that have plausible defenses rather than stereo-typical violent assault strategies.
That being said, I have issues with some of the quantative conclusions and the unsupported generalizations. There are serious methodological limitations in these studies that place large uncertainty bounds on trying to get any estimate of occurence for undetected rapists in the population.
One of the conclusion she seems to support (quoting Lisak), is simply not supported by the data:
This picture conflicts sharply with the widely-held view that rapes committed on university campuses are typically the result of a basically “decent” young man who, were it not for too much alcohol and too little communication, would never do such a thing. While some campus rapes do fit this more benign view, the evidence points to a far less benign reality, in which the vast majority of rapes are committed by serial, violent predators.
For starters, the data discussed shows most rapes are not of the violent type, and the data is not strong enough to support anything along the lines of “the vast majority of rapes” are X.
While serial rapists do exist and this is a real issue, there is a great danger in turning this into a moral panic where one views all men as potential rapists and 10% of men as actual rapists (as some of the comments in her blog suggested). That is simply a moral panic response.
Rape in the real world is complex. We like stories that simplify the world into a realm of clear black and white morality with villains, victims, and heroes. The word rape itself conjures up the image of the violent serial rapist like we see in horror films. Do such people exist—certainly, and they are something we must protect against.
But I am reasonably sure that most cases in the real world are much less TV-drama worthy and painted a shade of grey. Most cases involve two people who willingly intoxicate themselves with varying degrees of alchohol and have some idea that this lowers their standards and decreases responsibility. Essentially all cases of sexual intercourse involve some level of influence or manipulation by one or both parties. At some point you have to draw a line around fuzzy borders, but it’s never simple.
And wherever you draw that line, make sure it cuts both ways. For instance if you believe that one person initating sex with another who is unconscious at the time is automatically rape (no matter how they feel when they wakeup or later), then be aware that this would suddenly make a large number of women rapists. Clearly consent signaled before or after has some relevance.
That being said, the Yarbrough case looks like an example of some shade of a serial rapist, but I’m not convinced you can generalize from that single example across the rest of the datapoints.
For instance if you believe that one person initating sex with another who is unconscious at the time is automatically rape (no matter how they feel when they wakeup or later), then be aware that this would suddenly make a large number of women rapists.
Sadly, it’s only recently that rape other than male-raping-female has begun to be criminalized, and there are still many places where rape by a female is not illegal. In Scotland, for instance, rape was a gender-specific crime until just 2009.
Very interesting. While some PUAs have messed up attitudes, the guys in that link just sound like a fundamentally different phenotype. If PUAs were as uncaring and hateful as some people think they are, then PUAs would probably be doing what these guys are doing and working on alcohol and coercion skills, rather than obsessing over the minutiae of body language and signaling.
Another interesting part of account in that thread is the level of self-deception in the perpetrator interview, assuming that it’s not simply insincere. The strategy seems to be something like “figure out the way to get what you want without caring about the law/morality and only care about avoiding getting caught/prosecuted, then self-deceive yourself into thinking that it’s OK.”
I found this paragraph from Nancy’s article interesting for why PUA may be getting a worse reputation than they deserve.
Many of the motivational factors that were identified in incarcerated rapists have been shown to apply equally to undetected rapists. When compared to men who do not rape, these undetected rapists are measurably more angry at women, more motivated by the need to dominate and control women, more impulsive and disinhibited in their behavior, more hyper-masculine in their beliefs and attitudes, less empathic and more antisocial.
Since a lot of what PUA teach is that women like to be controlled, it probably sets off warning bells that PUA in general might be overly controlling and fit in this category.
The fact that the vast majority are likely to be less controlling than average, because they aren’t naturally good at it, can’t be ascertained by the language used.
This is probably largely to blame for the negative reactions many women have to PUA. It fits this pattern completion that many men are undetected manipulation rapists.
PUA’s fit a handful of these patterns, but some are so broad so as to fit most anyone. For example; everyone is at least somewhat motivated by a need to dominate and control—to varying degrees and men more on average. Alchohol makes people more impulsive and disinhibited—that is one of the main reasons we so enjoy it.
PUAs, like most men, are not angry at women (quite the opposite), are not generally impulsive, and are certainly not antisocial.
Told by who? This doesn’t match my impressions of typical PUA psychology.
Generalized anger towards women is, I believe, a pretty rare trait for men to have in general. And the psychology of a typical guy who PUA appeals to is more likely to be overly academic, cerebral and introspective. These types of guys have over-active pre-frontal-cortices—the exact opposite of impulsive angry types. They are overly concerned about what people think, overly concerned about the minute details of social interactions, and over think and over analyze everything they say in social contexts.
Typically speaking, they aren’t angry at women, they are afraid of them. This psychological profile is also less prone to anger in general—more mild, reserved, shy, nerdy, etc etc.
Behavioral inhibition to the unfamiliar is a temperamental construct that refers to a characteristic propensity to react to both social and nonsocial novelty with inhibition.
Yes, PUAs tend to be shifted in the directions you describe. Though as the movement becomes more and more popular, we will start seeing different male phenotypes in it.
These types of guys have over-active pre-frontal-cortices—the exact opposite of impulsive angry types.
Yes. My pre-frontal cortex is like a maze. It took me years to learn to be able to do things that I want to do without my cortex choking the impulse. This is a great psychology for careful, high-precision tasks, but it’s a horrible psychology for social interaction.
This psychology is part of my posting style that a few people have noted lately. It’s not as easy as it looks, but in general my brain is massively wired for “look before you leap.”
Yes. My pre-frontal cortex is like a maze. It took me years to learn to be able to do things that I want to do without my cortex choking the impulse. This is a great psychology for careful, high-precision tasks, but it’s a horrible psychology for social interaction.
Yea, i’m the same. Perhaps it’s a universal brain phenotype variant that gives one a prediliction and edge for intellectual careers and endevours.
But I really do wish I could easily just switch to the more social brain phenotype some people have on a whim. Alcohol of course can do this to some extent, but it’s far from perfect and has so many side effects.
Long ago I tried prozac for a couple of months and it had a dramatic effect on my personality—I became naturally more extroverted. It is vaguely like a milder, saner version of the MDMA enthogen effect but made permanent. I don’t think it made me actually less intelligent, but the personality shift made me effectively less intelligent—it just naturally changes what you are interested in and how you actually think. It is not the best state of mind for everyday intellectual work. It would be much better if they had a quick acting version with low side effects, but unfortunately it takes weeks to take effect, has a long half-life, side effects, and tolerance/dependence issues.
PUA practice and techniques, especially inner-game stuff, can help a good deal, but it seems like it can never really actually make one more extroverted in the way that some drugs can. I wonder if there are techniques that could enduce more extroverted states of mind with sufficient time and training.
Long ago I tried prozac for a couple of months and it had a dramatic effect on my personality—I became naturally more extroverted. It is vaguely like a milder, saner version of the MDMA enthogen effect but made permanent. I don’t think it made me actually less intelligent, but the personality shift made me effectively less intelligent—it just naturally changes what you are interested in and how you actually think. It is not the best state of mind for everyday intellectual work. It would be much better if they had a quick acting version with low side effects, but unfortunately it takes weeks to take effect, has a long half-life, side effects, and tolerance/dependence issues.
Rhodilia_rosea. It has similar but milder effects and is far better suited to intermittent usage.
Alcohol of course can do this to some extent, but it’s far from perfect and has so many side effects.
If alcohol gives you the desired effect then phenibut will most likely do so more effectively and without alcohol’s deleterious effects on cognition judgement and liver health. The unfortunate thing is that it builds up tolerance relatively quickly so is best used just once or twice a week rather than every day.
I’ve become more extroverted as a result of a lot of Alexander Technique and such—I think a lot of the ability to be comfortable with people is the ability to physically get into sync with them.
I didn’t go into the bodywork with the intent of becoming more comfortable with people—I was trying to stop feeling so disconnected from myself.
I’ve heard about Alexander Technique having those types of effects from other people—do you think it is because of the subconscious effects of better posture itself, or better awareness of body language and mirroring?
I learned about body language and mirroring through PUA reading, and it is eye-opening once you become aware of it. It’s strange and alarming how often it works (how conscious mirroring results in the other reciprocating—presumably unconsciously).
I hadn’t thought about the effects of more free/efficient movement [1], but I wouldn’t be surprised if it helps. Subjectively, it seems like more pleasure, less anxiety, and more awareness when I’m around people. Logically, I think mirroring and entraining are a part of it, but I don’t feel it that way.
[1] Alexander Technique is not about posture. It produces results which look something like “good posture”, but without the stiffness.
AT is about getting out of the way of your kinesthetic sense rather than adding more conscious control to the details of what you’re doing.
Do they talk about end-gaining? A big part of the challenge of Alexander Technique (as I understand it) is to let/tell yourself to release, and then not try to force results.
If becoming PUAs reduces their anger in the later stages, it seems much better than nothing (where they would presumably stay angry). Are you saying that PUA communities should devote more resources to reducing the anger of new members? Or are you suggesting that PUA communities increase the anger of new members before reducing it?
Disclaimer: My whole understanding of PUAs comes from HughRistik (on this site and elsewhere) and other people on this site.
This reminds me of the movie “Anger Management” where the coach deliberately makes the student angry and then asks “why so angry”. If we adopt the axiom that anger is always wrong no matter what other people do to you, we’ve already lost. Please judge people by the consequences of their actions, not by the emotions they feel.
The focus on rape can also obscure other issues of sexual ethics with less harmfulness but more prevalence. For instance, people consenting to unwanted sexual situations they aren’t terribly enthusiastic about.
That’s pretty much what’s disturbed me from the beginning about PUA, though I think you’re underestimating the effects of niceness training.
Ahh, I see and I share your loathing of that kind of niceness.
It took me a while to work out how you were relating this to pickup arts—because I associate the kind of behaviors that rely on exploiting weak boundaries (and in particular exploiting them) to get sex with manipulative ‘nice guys’ and not pickup artists. Pickup arts are more or less all targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness. Not out of any ideological purity but simply because they are targeted at gendter typical women with high self esteem who, approximately by how those terms are defined in the culture, are emphatically not nice when it comes to sex. Manipulative ‘nice guys’ on the other hand notorious for being masters at throwing around feelings of guilt and obligation.
That said, I can see how PUAs could be frustrating or even threatening to women who do not appreciate sexual persistence.
Bizarrely, my initial reaction to your post was to feel tired and angry—that’s why I took some time to chill. I think what was going on at my end might have been effort shock—it’s hard work to be clear and reasonable when I’m trying to explain something that has me frightened and angry to people who don’t seem to have any understanding of what I’m talking about, and kind of shocking that it took that much work to get to a moderate amount of understanding. You may be feeling the same way some of the time.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and I’m wondering how you distinguish between women who have weak boundaries and those who don’t.
And also whether you guys have anything about noticing if a woman is trying to signal that she’s attracted to you. I’m not saying it’s the most common thing, but I’ve heard enough from both men and women about that sort of signal failing that I don’t think it’s totally rare.
More generally, it bothers that you make claims that PUA is a net gain for women when there hasn’t been (and probably can’t be) a way to really check on the total effect.
The funny thing is that it’s been quite a while since I figured out that women typically get much more sexual attention than they want [1], and men typically get much less, and that this leads to drastic difficulties in mutual comprehension. That was the abstraction—the current discussion is trying to actually do the work of figuring out what highly emotionally charged prototypes are in play and whether they’re relevant.
Something which gave me more sympathy for you guys: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People—a very funny memoir by a British man with oppositional disorder (or, you prefer, a wild talent for saying and doing the wrong thing) who gets a job at Vanity Fair, a high end fashion and gossip magazine. The book (get the paperback if you’re interested—it’s got an epilogue) includes his very convoluted courtship, and it does include ignoring some ‘go away’ messages in a very high stakes game. It would be interesting to see his wife’s version of the interactions which led up to their marriage.
[1] One of my female friends finds this formulation annoying because it leaves out the non-trivial number of sexually frustrated women. However, I’m talking about attention, as well as sex.
targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness
For the most part, I would say that this is true, and that targeting “want” is the general principle of PU. I do think it is a legitimate worry that some particular techniques might lead a small segment of the audience to go along with things they aren’t particularly enthusiastic about. That probably is not the intent of those techniques, and it’s an accidental result when the PUA misperceives the assertiveness or vulnerability of the person he is dealing with. In all forms of influence and sales, it’s just a difficult feat to maximize the ability of the other person to say “yes” at the same time as maximizing their ability to say “no.”
This is why I’m such a big of Juggler Method, which involves encouraging the other person to show commitment to the interaction and how it unfolds.
Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness?
No, you are not getting it at all. The combination of:
Criticising someone for raising the fear of rape issue
Giving a reason for the criticism that raising this fear shows an insensitivity to unattractive men
And then raising the infamous suggestion.
ETA: And to frost the cake, next came the nonchalant observation that “There is apparently no greater female nightmare scenario than mating with a less-than-optimally-attractive male.”
Again, if you’re going to condemn people based on such far-fetched inferences about their motives, you should note that you don’t have the monopoly on this strategy.
When it comes to controversial topics, a rational discussion can be had only if the participants discipline themselves to address the substance of what’s been written, and nothing more than that. If instead it is permitted to throw moral accusations at people based on indirect inferences about their supposed underhanded motives and personality defects, everyone can easily start playing that same game, and the discussion will inevitably degenerate into a mindless flame-war and propaganda contest.
Believe me, if I were so inclined, I could use an approach very similar to yours to concoct equally convincing (though perhaps to different people) attacks on many other participants in these controversies, and I’m sure many others reading this would be up to that task. When you make such arguments, you are not bringing insight; you are making propaganda.
That said, I think this particular conversation has reached the point where we might as well rest our disagreements, so I’ll let you have the last word if you wish.
Believe me, if I were so inclined, I could use an approach very similar to yours to concoct equally convincing (though perhaps to different people) attacks on many other participants in these controversies, and I’m sure many others reading this would be up to that task.
I would, and I’ve certainly considered it. The problem is that the main people who are potential targets are doing too good a job as rationalists to deserve it… so for now, I’m saying to myself “Don’t go there, girlfriend!.” I did bring up some political issues here and here, but I did my best to not make them attacks.
That’s the problem with LessWrong… people often start updating just when you’re gearing up to deliver your indignant beatdown.
Something a bit more than that has been alleged, at least by me. If I accepted your characterization of the situation, I would not have been so vehement in denouncing.
I believe you that you don’t see it, since you have just finished doing it again.
Perplexed:
Then would you be so kind to specify precisely what this additional part of the allegations consists of? I would be really grateful to see it spelled out, not least because, assuming you are correct, it would rectify some of my own misconceptions.
(In the interest of avoiding a confrontational tone, perhaps I should also add that I am not among the people who have downvoted your recent comments.)
Why certainly. I have nothing better to do than to repeat allegations which I am coming to regret making. :)
Here I alleged that komponisto deliberately tried to “creep people out”, the people in question being women, and the “creepiness” being allusions to sexual violence—definitely not threats, but disturbing all the same. Before my allegation, various other people reported in passing that his comments had a “creepy” character, though, so far as I know, they did not allege intent.
I also hinted at and then later made explicit, my belief that his motive for seeming creepy was to draw criticism, fake being emotionally damaged by the criticism, and then use this charade to make some point about gender politics.
So, as you see, I, at least, was not making a big deal about his having advocated unusual and unpopular ideas. As far as I can see, whenever he was asked to fill in some of the details regarding those ideas, he declined.
Go ahead and downvote any comments you disapprove of. It is your right and perhaps even your duty. Besides, as a result of the intervention of some angel, I currently have more karma than I deserve.
Just curious. Your interest in “avoiding a confrontational tone”. Is that something you have come by recently? Something I said?
Edit: fixed missing links.
Now you present speculations about someone’s motives that go far beyond what was actually written in his comments. Yet, it remains the case that the only (arguable) offense he actually committed was bringing up (arguably) objectionable propositions for discussion. Notice the contrast with truly incontrovertible offenses that can be committed in writing, such as threats, lies, insults, libel, plagiarism, etc. In this case, a mere instance of bringing up an undesirable proposition was enough to motivate your accusations, with no such incontrovertible malicious behaviors accompanying it.
If you’re going to treat bringing up objectionable discussion topics as prima facie evidence of underhanded bad intentions, note that others can play that same game too. To take the most relevant example, there is just as much, if not even more, justification to interpret protestations of offense as an underhanded ploy for making ideological points and seeking emotional satisfaction instead of rational debate.
Therefore, if you want to judge people and enforce standards of discourse based on implicit judgments of their motives, rather than just the plain content of what they’ve written, you should be aware that such interpretations and the resulting judgments will be necessarily subjective and a matter of disagreement—and there is no rational reason why your particular criteria should be favored over others’.
Yes. I am happy that you are now finally criticizing me for what I actually did rather than for some straw man caricature you have made up. You will find you have lots of company in your criticism.
Uh oh. We are now back to that old “bringing up propositions for discussion” thing. Even though I have repeatedly said that that was not part of my thinking at all. I foresee trouble ahead. …
Excuse me. The “objectionable topic” was whether women should grant “sexual favors” more freely. It was brought up in a comment which began by criticizing a woman’s observation that “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence....”. Why does the commenter think this observation deserves criticism? Because it shows “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men”. That is the context within which the “discussion topic” was introduced. Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
Great, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
The original problem I had with this comment was that it triggered a certain schema of men trying to figure out ways of interacting with women sexually, and then women accusing them of bad things.It kind of looked to me something like this:
PUAs: Let’s do a lot of work fulfilling women’s criteria and figure out some more reliable ways of being successful with them.
SarahC: Wait, if you guys do that, you could think that you are guaranteed success with women, and then if you get turned down… it could turn into RAPE!
That perceived reaction is not quite what SarahC said (and my version of what PUAs say is not quite what she has heard). And it’s not her full reasoning. But until she clarified and explained more about her priors (e.g. George Sodini), there seemed to be some sort of slippery slope going on in her comment, which the above is an exaggeration of.
There is quite a gap between getting turned down and becoming violent. Yes, even for men. Although men being violent is highly visible, the base rate of rejections that men respond violently or punitively to is very low (in Western middle-class Anglo-American culture, at least). That’s because since men typically have to make the advances and women are more selective, men get rejected a lot. Some PUAs approach hundreds or thousands of women in the space of years; there just isn’t time to be violent or make a stink with every woman who rejects them. The fact that PUAs can even approach so many women indicates that they have some abilities to handle rejection.
Now, what about the feeling of some men that it’s unfair when women turn them down, and whether this view should be linked to creepiness or violence?
Again, this is an issue of inferential distance. I’ll try to spell out a scenario where men might feel it’s unfair when women turn them down, yet nevertheless not be bad people with bad intentions:
Let’s examine the case of shyness (EDIT: It’s interesting that I picked this example when drafting this post… I couldn’t post it last night due to a 500 error, and then I wake up this morning and see that komponisto admits to having experienced social anxiety disorder). You know the percentage of women who say that shyness is attractive in men? 2% (the study is by Burger & Cosby, but I’ll have to dig up the cite later). Shyness is extremely damning of the attractiveness of men in the eyes of most women, but it really doesn’t seem to hurt the chances of women so badly unless we are talking about something like full-blown clinical like social phobia (and if anyone has some reasons to believe that shyness in women is more of a dating handicap than I do, I would like to hear it).
So if you are a shy, awkward guy in college who has trouble getting dates, but you see shy, awkward women getting dates, you might feel a little frustrated at the situation (especially since the shy, awkward woman probably don’t consider you a viable date). Why is a trait, such as shyness treated unequally based on gender?, you might ask. You might start start feeling that this unequal treatment is a little unfair.
Now, fairness can be conceptualized in different ways. “Fair” is often relative to a certain standard of how things should be. When fairness is used as a synonym for justice, then unfairness entitles the “wronged” party to redress, perhaps by violence or state-enforced violence. That’s not the type of fairness I’m thinking of. The kind of fairness I’m thinking of is more like a sense of equality. You might feel that in an ideal world, shy men wouldn’t be systematically disadvantaged relative to non-shy men and shy women for a psychological condition that isn’t their fault and is difficult to change. Of course, you can recognize that we don’t live in this ideal world, and abhor any attempt to create it by force or coercion.
Btw, I’m not convinced by this ideal world argument; I just present it as a plausible example of how a man could feel that doesn’t make him a Bad Person. Feeling an abstract sense of unfairness, even a misplaced one, isn’t the same thing as feeling a sense of injustice that you are entitled to recompense for from some particular individual.
I think women’s preferences for certain personality traits are so intimately woven into their sexual psychology that to try to change them would be to re-engineer women’s psychology from the ground up. It’s a lot easier to imagine this ideal world “fairness” argument applying to men’s preferences for looks in women, actually. Discriminating against potential mates due to physical appearance seems a lot more arbitrary than discriminating based on personality traits.
Unfortunately, our culture encourages naive notions of “fairness” and nondiscrimination, so it’s easy to see how as this hypothetical shy guy, you could believe that they apply in dating, especially after hearing arguments that men shouldn’t judge women’s dating potential based on looks so much. You simply don’t realize that many women feel the same way towards shy guys that you feel towards [insert type of women you are least attracted to here]. The reason for not making those connections might partly be a failure of empathy or imagination, but I think it’s really a failure of knowledge, because society propagates a lot of ignorance and falsehoods about the relative importance of certain male personality traits to women on average.
If you are a shy guy who wants to better understand women’s perspective on what they value, people in our culture will systematically lie to you that “oh plenty of women like shy guys,” or “every woman wants something different,” or “don’t change yourself for anyone, eventually you will find the one for you” (note the horrible rationality of all these platitudes). The bias in our culture is that men and women go for the same things until proven otherwise, except for admitting that men care more about looks. When even the men who try to understand women’s dating criteria are lied to and silenced, there is a limit to how much we can blame men for not knowing the finer points of female sexual psychology, and thinking that certain aspects of women’s preferences are arbitrary (like men’s preferences for looks), capricious, or otherwise unfair.
SarahC didn’t exactly show “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men,” but her original post, and others in the discussion, did show a lack of knowledge of the potential psychology of unattractive men, leading to the slippery slope from notions of “guaranteed success” to men feeling “unfairness” when they are turned down, to “violence.” That procession only makes sense with a limited model of the minds of romantically frustrated men.
Women are not experts on the mindsets of unattractive, romantically frustrated men (and many men are not, either). In fact, women may have the most biased notions of those mindsets, because their impression of those men is dominated by the subset of them who are creepy, entitled jerks. Romantically frustrated men who are entitled jerks make themselves and their mindsets known to women. Romantically frustrated men who are decent people suffer in silence, and nobody cares. Unfortunately, when the second group of romantically frustrated men air their concerns on the internet, sometimes they trigger pattern matches with the creepy group of romantically frustrated guys. (Ironically, the guys who care most about avoiding such pattern matches may learn to self-censor themselves, leaving only guys without such sensitivity doing the complaining.)
It’s not women’s fault that creepy romantically frustrated men and the things they believe are so cognitively available. There are very good reasons for that. It also leads to bias which needs to be watched out for in discussions with men they care about communicating with.
The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences to a woman in real life may be nontrivial. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he secretly feels, but does not express, frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences: probably much lower, because there are all sorts of decent men that feel those things and suffer in silence. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration over women’s preferences on LessWrong: that’s probably closer to the second lower probability than the first, because LW is known as a place where people often talk about uncomfortable things that they wouldn’t say in other contexts.
This has gotten messy, but I think your insights have been accurate throughout.
I am sympathetic to romantically frustrated men. I’m a shy woman, and I recognize that I can get away with it because I’m female—that if I had been born male, society would have punished me more for aspects of my personality.
I kind of regret yelling “Rape!” in a crowded theater by now, because by now I’ve been shown that the nastier side of PUA is unrepresentative. Folks here are obviously not the people I need to be concerned about, and the people who actually do endanger women probably wouldn’t listen to me or anyone. :(
Btw, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m picking on SarahC in this comment; I don’t have any beef with her clarified view. Actually, in general her level of open-mindedness and updating in discussions on gender on LW is extremely impressive.
To be brutally honest, I think you are missing the point here.
You have produced a fine critical analysis of SarahC’s comment, the same that komponisto criticized so clumsily. If komponisto had produced the analysis you just did, this blowup might not have happened.
I think it would be more productive if you were to analyze this comment of mine responding to komponisto. Admittedly, I now know it was not his intention to be abusive, but what I said there pretty much explains my reasons for believing it should be condemned.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness? And the significance is, what… that komponisto willfully triggered a woman’s express worry about violence instead of being sensitive?
That would make sense, if komponisto’s whole post hadn’t been about how the jump from rejection to violence is premature. He was sensitive to that worry, he just disagreed with its basis and explained why.
SarahC’s original post: Complaint X could lead to Y, and Y is bad.
komponisto: Actually, X doesn’t lead to Y so strongly as you think. And it might be controversial to say so, but X!
That’s how it looks to me, and I don’t see anything wrong with the form of komponisto’s argument. Having to tiptoe around slippery slopes that other people link to bad things would be a bad practice on a rationalist forum. Of course, you may not think that SarahC’s initial post was a slippery slope. But komponisto and I do. I revised my impression when SarahC gave me more information on where she was coming from and made me change my impression that her overall argument is a slippery slope, but komponisto didn’t have access to this information when he wrote his post.
I would just like to propose that if you are a woman (or anyone else) who is bringing up violence against women or rape (of women) in a discussion of sexuality with men, please consider showing the full inferential path that led you to that notion… if your goal is to have a dialogue with the men involved, rather than protect yourself or cause them to run into self-censorship. This is not a claim about how women (or anyone else) is obligated to approach such topics; it is a speculation about what I think will help me (and perhaps other men) be cognitively and emotionally able to consider them in a minimally-biased manner.
Unfortunately, decent men in our culture often get unfairly lumped in with misogynistic jerks and other male miscreants unfairly, which leads to the development of an “unfair accusation of rape/violence/sexual harassment/being a jerk/being a creep” set of psychological triggers, which can bias the same decent men against being able to properly hear views on those subjects that are fair. While it’s not the responsibility of women (or anyone else) to tiptoe around those triggers, it is useful to know they are there for discussions aimed to promote understanding.
It is also possible to talk about women’s sexual autonomy and self-determination without bringing up sexual violence. The focus on rape can also obscure other issues of sexual ethics with less harmfulness but more prevalence. For instance, people consenting to unwanted sexual situations they aren’t terribly enthusiastic about. Not raping people is a low bar in sexual ethics. There are clearly more fundamental principles about sexual ethics and choice at work here in addition to not raping people that include that moral principle; I feel many discussions about sexuality and “seduction” would be better by talking about what those principles are and how they should be respected, rather immediately bringing in the word “rape.”
Thank you for your attention.
I’ve been meaning to drop this into the discussion, and this seems like a good place.
It’s a discussion of studies which conclude that a great deal of rape isn’t done by typical men who aren’t clear about signals and consent, it’s done by a small percentage of men with a conscious strategy of predation, frequently against intoxicated women.
That is interesting. I find one of the main points compelling: that true serial rapists exist and are much more likely to employ intoxication strategies that have plausible defenses rather than stereo-typical violent assault strategies.
That being said, I have issues with some of the quantative conclusions and the unsupported generalizations. There are serious methodological limitations in these studies that place large uncertainty bounds on trying to get any estimate of occurence for undetected rapists in the population.
One of the conclusion she seems to support (quoting Lisak), is simply not supported by the data:
For starters, the data discussed shows most rapes are not of the violent type, and the data is not strong enough to support anything along the lines of “the vast majority of rapes” are X.
While serial rapists do exist and this is a real issue, there is a great danger in turning this into a moral panic where one views all men as potential rapists and 10% of men as actual rapists (as some of the comments in her blog suggested). That is simply a moral panic response.
Rape in the real world is complex. We like stories that simplify the world into a realm of clear black and white morality with villains, victims, and heroes. The word rape itself conjures up the image of the violent serial rapist like we see in horror films. Do such people exist—certainly, and they are something we must protect against.
But I am reasonably sure that most cases in the real world are much less TV-drama worthy and painted a shade of grey. Most cases involve two people who willingly intoxicate themselves with varying degrees of alchohol and have some idea that this lowers their standards and decreases responsibility. Essentially all cases of sexual intercourse involve some level of influence or manipulation by one or both parties. At some point you have to draw a line around fuzzy borders, but it’s never simple.
And wherever you draw that line, make sure it cuts both ways. For instance if you believe that one person initating sex with another who is unconscious at the time is automatically rape (no matter how they feel when they wakeup or later), then be aware that this would suddenly make a large number of women rapists. Clearly consent signaled before or after has some relevance.
That being said, the Yarbrough case looks like an example of some shade of a serial rapist, but I’m not convinced you can generalize from that single example across the rest of the datapoints.
Sadly, it’s only recently that rape other than male-raping-female has begun to be criminalized, and there are still many places where rape by a female is not illegal. In Scotland, for instance, rape was a gender-specific crime until just 2009.
Very interesting. While some PUAs have messed up attitudes, the guys in that link just sound like a fundamentally different phenotype. If PUAs were as uncaring and hateful as some people think they are, then PUAs would probably be doing what these guys are doing and working on alcohol and coercion skills, rather than obsessing over the minutiae of body language and signaling.
Another interesting part of account in that thread is the level of self-deception in the perpetrator interview, assuming that it’s not simply insincere. The strategy seems to be something like “figure out the way to get what you want without caring about the law/morality and only care about avoiding getting caught/prosecuted, then self-deceive yourself into thinking that it’s OK.”
I found this paragraph from Nancy’s article interesting for why PUA may be getting a worse reputation than they deserve.
Since a lot of what PUA teach is that women like to be controlled, it probably sets off warning bells that PUA in general might be overly controlling and fit in this category.
The fact that the vast majority are likely to be less controlling than average, because they aren’t naturally good at it, can’t be ascertained by the language used.
This is probably largely to blame for the negative reactions many women have to PUA. It fits this pattern completion that many men are undetected manipulation rapists.
PUA’s fit a handful of these patterns, but some are so broad so as to fit most anyone. For example; everyone is at least somewhat motivated by a need to dominate and control—to varying degrees and men more on average. Alchohol makes people more impulsive and disinhibited—that is one of the main reasons we so enjoy it.
PUAs, like most men, are not angry at women (quite the opposite), are not generally impulsive, and are certainly not antisocial.
I’ve been told here that a lot of PUAs start out angry at women.
Told by who? This doesn’t match my impressions of typical PUA psychology.
Generalized anger towards women is, I believe, a pretty rare trait for men to have in general. And the psychology of a typical guy who PUA appeals to is more likely to be overly academic, cerebral and introspective. These types of guys have over-active pre-frontal-cortices—the exact opposite of impulsive angry types. They are overly concerned about what people think, overly concerned about the minute details of social interactions, and over think and over analyze everything they say in social contexts.
Typically speaking, they aren’t angry at women, they are afraid of them. This psychological profile is also less prone to anger in general—more mild, reserved, shy, nerdy, etc etc.
See also behavioral inhibition:
Yes, PUAs tend to be shifted in the directions you describe. Though as the movement becomes more and more popular, we will start seeing different male phenotypes in it.
Yes. My pre-frontal cortex is like a maze. It took me years to learn to be able to do things that I want to do without my cortex choking the impulse. This is a great psychology for careful, high-precision tasks, but it’s a horrible psychology for social interaction.
This psychology is part of my posting style that a few people have noted lately. It’s not as easy as it looks, but in general my brain is massively wired for “look before you leap.”
Yea, i’m the same. Perhaps it’s a universal brain phenotype variant that gives one a prediliction and edge for intellectual careers and endevours.
But I really do wish I could easily just switch to the more social brain phenotype some people have on a whim. Alcohol of course can do this to some extent, but it’s far from perfect and has so many side effects.
Long ago I tried prozac for a couple of months and it had a dramatic effect on my personality—I became naturally more extroverted. It is vaguely like a milder, saner version of the MDMA enthogen effect but made permanent. I don’t think it made me actually less intelligent, but the personality shift made me effectively less intelligent—it just naturally changes what you are interested in and how you actually think. It is not the best state of mind for everyday intellectual work. It would be much better if they had a quick acting version with low side effects, but unfortunately it takes weeks to take effect, has a long half-life, side effects, and tolerance/dependence issues.
PUA practice and techniques, especially inner-game stuff, can help a good deal, but it seems like it can never really actually make one more extroverted in the way that some drugs can. I wonder if there are techniques that could enduce more extroverted states of mind with sufficient time and training.
Rhodilia_rosea. It has similar but milder effects and is far better suited to intermittent usage.
If alcohol gives you the desired effect then phenibut will most likely do so more effectively and without alcohol’s deleterious effects on cognition judgement and liver health. The unfortunate thing is that it builds up tolerance relatively quickly so is best used just once or twice a week rather than every day.
I’ve become more extroverted as a result of a lot of Alexander Technique and such—I think a lot of the ability to be comfortable with people is the ability to physically get into sync with them.
I didn’t go into the bodywork with the intent of becoming more comfortable with people—I was trying to stop feeling so disconnected from myself.
I’ve heard about Alexander Technique having those types of effects from other people—do you think it is because of the subconscious effects of better posture itself, or better awareness of body language and mirroring?
I learned about body language and mirroring through PUA reading, and it is eye-opening once you become aware of it. It’s strange and alarming how often it works (how conscious mirroring results in the other reciprocating—presumably unconsciously).
You sure you aren’t a PUA nancy?
I hadn’t thought about the effects of more free/efficient movement [1], but I wouldn’t be surprised if it helps. Subjectively, it seems like more pleasure, less anxiety, and more awareness when I’m around people. Logically, I think mirroring and entraining are a part of it, but I don’t feel it that way.
[1] Alexander Technique is not about posture. It produces results which look something like “good posture”, but without the stiffness.
AT is about getting out of the way of your kinesthetic sense rather than adding more conscious control to the details of what you’re doing.
PUAs love the Alexander Technique. It’s right there in Neil Strauss’ book.
Do they talk about end-gaining? A big part of the challenge of Alexander Technique (as I understand it) is to let/tell yourself to release, and then not try to force results.
A lot of AA members start out as alcoholics, but lets make sure we understand how the causality works.
A lot of men start out angry at women and by learning how the game works and gaining some skills in playing it they eliminate the source of the anger.
I have some concern for how they treat women when they (the PUAs) are still in the early stages.
If becoming PUAs reduces their anger in the later stages, it seems much better than nothing (where they would presumably stay angry). Are you saying that PUA communities should devote more resources to reducing the anger of new members? Or are you suggesting that PUA communities increase the anger of new members before reducing it?
Disclaimer: My whole understanding of PUAs comes from HughRistik (on this site and elsewhere) and other people on this site.
This reminds me of the movie “Anger Management” where the coach deliberately makes the student angry and then asks “why so angry”. If we adopt the axiom that anger is always wrong no matter what other people do to you, we’ve already lost. Please judge people by the consequences of their actions, not by the emotions they feel.
That’s pretty much what’s disturbed me from the beginning about PUA, though I think you’re underestimating the effects of niceness training.
Are you talking about the positive or toxic effects of niceness training?
Toxic. Sufficient niceness can get women into sex they don’t want, and also into pretending to want it.
Ahh, I see and I share your loathing of that kind of niceness.
It took me a while to work out how you were relating this to pickup arts—because I associate the kind of behaviors that rely on exploiting weak boundaries (and in particular exploiting them) to get sex with manipulative ‘nice guys’ and not pickup artists. Pickup arts are more or less all targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness. Not out of any ideological purity but simply because they are targeted at gendter typical women with high self esteem who, approximately by how those terms are defined in the culture, are emphatically not nice when it comes to sex. Manipulative ‘nice guys’ on the other hand notorious for being masters at throwing around feelings of guilt and obligation.
That said, I can see how PUAs could be frustrating or even threatening to women who do not appreciate sexual persistence.
Bizarrely, my initial reaction to your post was to feel tired and angry—that’s why I took some time to chill. I think what was going on at my end might have been effort shock—it’s hard work to be clear and reasonable when I’m trying to explain something that has me frightened and angry to people who don’t seem to have any understanding of what I’m talking about, and kind of shocking that it took that much work to get to a moderate amount of understanding. You may be feeling the same way some of the time.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and I’m wondering how you distinguish between women who have weak boundaries and those who don’t.
And also whether you guys have anything about noticing if a woman is trying to signal that she’s attracted to you. I’m not saying it’s the most common thing, but I’ve heard enough from both men and women about that sort of signal failing that I don’t think it’s totally rare.
More generally, it bothers that you make claims that PUA is a net gain for women when there hasn’t been (and probably can’t be) a way to really check on the total effect.
The funny thing is that it’s been quite a while since I figured out that women typically get much more sexual attention than they want [1], and men typically get much less, and that this leads to drastic difficulties in mutual comprehension. That was the abstraction—the current discussion is trying to actually do the work of figuring out what highly emotionally charged prototypes are in play and whether they’re relevant.
Something which gave me more sympathy for you guys: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People—a very funny memoir by a British man with oppositional disorder (or, you prefer, a wild talent for saying and doing the wrong thing) who gets a job at Vanity Fair, a high end fashion and gossip magazine. The book (get the paperback if you’re interested—it’s got an epilogue) includes his very convoluted courtship, and it does include ignoring some ‘go away’ messages in a very high stakes game. It would be interesting to see his wife’s version of the interactions which led up to their marriage.
[1] One of my female friends finds this formulation annoying because it leaves out the non-trivial number of sexually frustrated women. However, I’m talking about attention, as well as sex.
For the most part, I would say that this is true, and that targeting “want” is the general principle of PU. I do think it is a legitimate worry that some particular techniques might lead a small segment of the audience to go along with things they aren’t particularly enthusiastic about. That probably is not the intent of those techniques, and it’s an accidental result when the PUA misperceives the assertiveness or vulnerability of the person he is dealing with. In all forms of influence and sales, it’s just a difficult feat to maximize the ability of the other person to say “yes” at the same time as maximizing their ability to say “no.”
This is why I’m such a big of Juggler Method, which involves encouraging the other person to show commitment to the interaction and how it unfolds.
Then you should frown on men who start their own businesses and make money, because it potentially has the same toxic effect on women. Wait, what?
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness?
No, you are not getting it at all. The combination of:
Criticising someone for raising the fear of rape issue
Giving a reason for the criticism that raising this fear shows an insensitivity to unattractive men
And then raising the infamous suggestion.
ETA: And to frost the cake, next came the nonchalant observation that “There is apparently no greater female nightmare scenario than mating with a less-than-optimally-attractive male.”
Again, if you’re going to condemn people based on such far-fetched inferences about their motives, you should note that you don’t have the monopoly on this strategy.
When it comes to controversial topics, a rational discussion can be had only if the participants discipline themselves to address the substance of what’s been written, and nothing more than that. If instead it is permitted to throw moral accusations at people based on indirect inferences about their supposed underhanded motives and personality defects, everyone can easily start playing that same game, and the discussion will inevitably degenerate into a mindless flame-war and propaganda contest.
Believe me, if I were so inclined, I could use an approach very similar to yours to concoct equally convincing (though perhaps to different people) attacks on many other participants in these controversies, and I’m sure many others reading this would be up to that task. When you make such arguments, you are not bringing insight; you are making propaganda.
That said, I think this particular conversation has reached the point where we might as well rest our disagreements, so I’ll let you have the last word if you wish.
I would, and I’ve certainly considered it. The problem is that the main people who are potential targets are doing too good a job as rationalists to deserve it… so for now, I’m saying to myself “Don’t go there, girlfriend!.” I did bring up some political issues here and here, but I did my best to not make them attacks.
That’s the problem with LessWrong… people often start updating just when you’re gearing up to deliver your indignant beatdown.
Last word: watch this space