PUA functions to support the unstated assumptions it seeks to exploit. PUA Bob has beliefs about how women should behave, and he behaves consistent with those beliefs. Bob’s behavior tends to reinforce those beliefs in others. That would be true even if the beliefs were not considered “unstated” by society. But because society does consider them unstated (and punishes making them explicit), reinforcing the beliefs includes reinforcing that they should be unstate-able.
The assumptions of society are not the same as assumptions of PUAs. For example, society assumes that men should buy women drinks; but PUAs assume that women prefer men that assertively step out of the crowd—for example by not buying them drinks when socially expected to.
I fail to see how exactly PUA Bob by not buying women drinks reinforces the societal beliefs. He exposes them and invalidates them, though he does not do it explicitly, so it leaves open door to alternative interpretations, such as: “If you are Bob, you don’t have to buy women drinks, but otherwise you have to”; but then is it really Bob’s fault if someone comes to this anti-Occam conclusion?
Bob has assumptions that he perhaps shares on his website, such as “if you [man] step out of the crowd, you become more attractive to a [typical] [heterosexual] woman”. Are these assumptions secret? No. By being a minority opinions, they are not as widely known as “men should buy women drinks”, but if every other PUA writes them on their webpage, I wouldn’t call them “unstated”.
So it seems to me that the only unstated thing is that Bob, while refusing to buy a drink to Alice, did not explicitly say: “Alice, I am not buying you a drink, because I would like to have sex with you, and according to my hypothesis (which if you are interested to know more you can find fully explosed on my website “www.bob.pua”), not buying you a drink makes you percieve me as standing out of the crowd, which increases my chances.” This would be most honest. But can we really expect everyone to speak like this in any situation?
I admit I chose “not buying drink” as the most harmless example. For other examples the analysis may be different. I’m trying to say that a PUA may be etically OK, while still essentially remaining a PUA—a person trying to increase their sexual pleasure by analyzing human true sexual preferences and optimizing according to them. Again, I admit other people may disagree with this definition of PUA, but this is how I perceive it.
My takeaway from this is that we still don’t share a definition of what an unstated assumption is.
PUA has some explicit techniques to seem more appealing to target women. Some of the power of some of those techniques is that they transgress certain norms. I assert that one property of those norms is that society disapproves of discussing them.
But that’s independent of the empirical question that I’d state as follows:
If the effectiveness of behavior X depends on the fact that it transgresses norm A, is it more accurate to say that behavior X supports or hurts the continued existence of norm A? If the answer to that question depends on the circumstances, what specific circumstances make a difference?
I guess the circumstance is: does exhibiting behavior X make the norm A stronger or weaker?
This needs to be analyzed further. Naively, any behavior that transgresses a norm seems to weaken it, but that’s not necessarily the case. First, the transgression must be known. Secret transgression weakens the norm for the person who did it, but has no influence on others. Second, the transgression must be rewarded. If people see the transgression and then see punishment, that makes the norm stronger.
In this case, not buying a drink is a public act, and (when successfully done by PUA) it is rewarded, so I conclude that it hurts the norm.
You need to be a little more explicit here. What particular norm is damaged by what particular behavior?
Let’s look at a different example. One possible norm is “Homosexuality is wrong.” A norm that supports it is “Homosexuality is strange and exotic.” That is, if people believe homosexuality is not strange or exotic, they probably would be less likely to believe homosexuality is wrong.
Enter Katy Perry’s song “I kissed a Girl (and I liked it)” (lyrics here—spoiler: she kissed a girl). It’s pretty clear that the character singing the song is not really a lesbian. But she gets a thrill from kissing a girl—and expects her boyfriend would get a similar thrill.
Chorus:
I kissed a girl and I liked it, the taste of her cherry chapstick. I kissed a girl just to try it, I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it. It felt so wrong, it felt so right. Don’t mean I’m in love tonight. I kissed a girl and I liked it
This song seems to transgress the norm “Homosexuality is wrong.” But notice how strongly it reinforces the norm “Homosexuality is strange and exotic” It’s an empirical question whether the strengthening of the primary norm from the strengthening of the secondary norm outweighs the weakening of the primary from the violation of that norm. (I suspect the strengthening outweighs the weakening).
To return to PUA, the buyer of the drinks is a side issue.
I think the norm feminist opposes is the idea that women should be offering sex without commitment (or that sex should be used to buy commitment). PUA obviously has no problem with those norms, and actively seeks to support the first.
On the other hand, a topic that appears in a popular song is less taboo (less exotic) than a topic no one speaks about. The more people sing about it, the less unexpected is if someone does it. The evidence goes both ways, and this direction honestly seems stronger to me.
I think it is good to be sensitive about other people, societal norms etc., but too much of it makes a bias. Just like one does not become wise by reversing stupidity, one does not become fair by reversing unfairness. Trying to signal sensitivity may lead to finding the most offensive interpretation of everything people do. (An unrelated example: Recently in my country a political party was medially accused of racism because their pre-election billboard had a white background.) Then anyone who is not perfectly self-thought-policed, or just not signalling hard enough becomes one of the bad guys.
Back to the PUA example: I thought feminists were previously opposing the norm that women should be having sex only with commitment. So now that this norm was successfully defeated, I would say that it is rational to approach women with expectation that there is a non-zero probability that they would consent to sex without commitment. How high is the probability, that is hard to guess, it depends on many variables. I would guess that “being in a bar, accepting drinks from strangers” is an evidence in favor of this hypothesis. And I think most PUAs don’t believe that every woman will offer them sex without commitment. It is a long time since I read their websites, but I remember estimates like 1 in 10. The idea was to use the law of large numbers, and approach 10 women in one evening.
So, how not to strengthen the norms? Let’s say there is a norm saying “every X is Y”, and an older norm saying “no X is Y”. I believe that “some X are Y (and some X are not Y)”, and I am looking for someone who is “X and Y”. How exactly should I act so that my behavior cannot be interpreted as strenghtening either of the norms? Bonus points if the behavior will seem natural, because creepy behavior scares people away.
I think that some of the inferential distance we have is based on different concepts of what a norm is. You seem to think they are lists of rules that each person consciously examines to decide what to do. I agree that many norms work that way. By I also think there are norms that are not explicitly examined at the moment of decision-making, that essentially at the level of cognitive bias. The distinction between TimS-norms and cognitive bias is that bias are universal across all humans, while TimS-norms are culturally dependent and sometimes change over time. I think a significant amount of the differences between our conclusions on how to cause social change is based on this difference in our conceptions of norms.
I thought feminists were previously opposing the norm that women should be having sex only with commitment.
Feminists have taken different positions on this issue. The feminists of the 1870s didn’t reject that the social purpose of women was childrearing. They simply opposed involuntary motherhood (i.e. advocated for the accessibility of contraceptives for women). That was the first wave of feminism.
Nowadays, most active feminists are either second wave or third wave. Third wave feminism is more sympathetic to “sex positive feminism,” which endorses the position that female enactment of sexuality could benefit female autonomy. By contrast, second wave feminism generally endorses anti-pornography positions. I suspect that some of the differences in approaches coincides with the discussion we are having about whether norm transgression can (or does in this instance) reinforce a norm. Regarding PUA, sex positivity seems like it would have a lot fewer problems with it than Dworkin or I might.
The assumptions of society are not the same as assumptions of PUAs. For example, society assumes that men should buy women drinks; but PUAs assume that women prefer men that assertively step out of the crowd—for example by not buying them drinks when socially expected to.
I fail to see how exactly PUA Bob by not buying women drinks reinforces the societal beliefs. He exposes them and invalidates them, though he does not do it explicitly, so it leaves open door to alternative interpretations, such as: “If you are Bob, you don’t have to buy women drinks, but otherwise you have to”; but then is it really Bob’s fault if someone comes to this anti-Occam conclusion?
Bob has assumptions that he perhaps shares on his website, such as “if you [man] step out of the crowd, you become more attractive to a [typical] [heterosexual] woman”. Are these assumptions secret? No. By being a minority opinions, they are not as widely known as “men should buy women drinks”, but if every other PUA writes them on their webpage, I wouldn’t call them “unstated”.
So it seems to me that the only unstated thing is that Bob, while refusing to buy a drink to Alice, did not explicitly say: “Alice, I am not buying you a drink, because I would like to have sex with you, and according to my hypothesis (which if you are interested to know more you can find fully explosed on my website “www.bob.pua”), not buying you a drink makes you percieve me as standing out of the crowd, which increases my chances.” This would be most honest. But can we really expect everyone to speak like this in any situation?
I admit I chose “not buying drink” as the most harmless example. For other examples the analysis may be different. I’m trying to say that a PUA may be etically OK, while still essentially remaining a PUA—a person trying to increase their sexual pleasure by analyzing human true sexual preferences and optimizing according to them. Again, I admit other people may disagree with this definition of PUA, but this is how I perceive it.
My takeaway from this is that we still don’t share a definition of what an unstated assumption is.
PUA has some explicit techniques to seem more appealing to target women. Some of the power of some of those techniques is that they transgress certain norms. I assert that one property of those norms is that society disapproves of discussing them.
But that’s independent of the empirical question that I’d state as follows:
I guess the circumstance is: does exhibiting behavior X make the norm A stronger or weaker?
This needs to be analyzed further. Naively, any behavior that transgresses a norm seems to weaken it, but that’s not necessarily the case. First, the transgression must be known. Secret transgression weakens the norm for the person who did it, but has no influence on others. Second, the transgression must be rewarded. If people see the transgression and then see punishment, that makes the norm stronger.
In this case, not buying a drink is a public act, and (when successfully done by PUA) it is rewarded, so I conclude that it hurts the norm.
You need to be a little more explicit here. What particular norm is damaged by what particular behavior?
Let’s look at a different example. One possible norm is “Homosexuality is wrong.” A norm that supports it is “Homosexuality is strange and exotic.” That is, if people believe homosexuality is not strange or exotic, they probably would be less likely to believe homosexuality is wrong.
Enter Katy Perry’s song “I kissed a Girl (and I liked it)” (lyrics here—spoiler: she kissed a girl). It’s pretty clear that the character singing the song is not really a lesbian. But she gets a thrill from kissing a girl—and expects her boyfriend would get a similar thrill.
Chorus:
This song seems to transgress the norm “Homosexuality is wrong.” But notice how strongly it reinforces the norm “Homosexuality is strange and exotic” It’s an empirical question whether the strengthening of the primary norm from the strengthening of the secondary norm outweighs the weakening of the primary from the violation of that norm. (I suspect the strengthening outweighs the weakening).
To return to PUA, the buyer of the drinks is a side issue.
I think the norm feminist opposes is the idea that women should be offering sex without commitment (or that sex should be used to buy commitment). PUA obviously has no problem with those norms, and actively seeks to support the first.
On the other hand, a topic that appears in a popular song is less taboo (less exotic) than a topic no one speaks about. The more people sing about it, the less unexpected is if someone does it. The evidence goes both ways, and this direction honestly seems stronger to me.
I think it is good to be sensitive about other people, societal norms etc., but too much of it makes a bias. Just like one does not become wise by reversing stupidity, one does not become fair by reversing unfairness. Trying to signal sensitivity may lead to finding the most offensive interpretation of everything people do. (An unrelated example: Recently in my country a political party was medially accused of racism because their pre-election billboard had a white background.) Then anyone who is not perfectly self-thought-policed, or just not signalling hard enough becomes one of the bad guys.
Back to the PUA example: I thought feminists were previously opposing the norm that women should be having sex only with commitment. So now that this norm was successfully defeated, I would say that it is rational to approach women with expectation that there is a non-zero probability that they would consent to sex without commitment. How high is the probability, that is hard to guess, it depends on many variables. I would guess that “being in a bar, accepting drinks from strangers” is an evidence in favor of this hypothesis. And I think most PUAs don’t believe that every woman will offer them sex without commitment. It is a long time since I read their websites, but I remember estimates like 1 in 10. The idea was to use the law of large numbers, and approach 10 women in one evening.
So, how not to strengthen the norms? Let’s say there is a norm saying “every X is Y”, and an older norm saying “no X is Y”. I believe that “some X are Y (and some X are not Y)”, and I am looking for someone who is “X and Y”. How exactly should I act so that my behavior cannot be interpreted as strenghtening either of the norms? Bonus points if the behavior will seem natural, because creepy behavior scares people away.
I think that some of the inferential distance we have is based on different concepts of what a norm is. You seem to think they are lists of rules that each person consciously examines to decide what to do. I agree that many norms work that way. By I also think there are norms that are not explicitly examined at the moment of decision-making, that essentially at the level of cognitive bias. The distinction between TimS-norms and cognitive bias is that bias are universal across all humans, while TimS-norms are culturally dependent and sometimes change over time. I think a significant amount of the differences between our conclusions on how to cause social change is based on this difference in our conceptions of norms.
Feminists have taken different positions on this issue. The feminists of the 1870s didn’t reject that the social purpose of women was childrearing. They simply opposed involuntary motherhood (i.e. advocated for the accessibility of contraceptives for women). That was the first wave of feminism.
Nowadays, most active feminists are either second wave or third wave. Third wave feminism is more sympathetic to “sex positive feminism,” which endorses the position that female enactment of sexuality could benefit female autonomy. By contrast, second wave feminism generally endorses anti-pornography positions. I suspect that some of the differences in approaches coincides with the discussion we are having about whether norm transgression can (or does in this instance) reinforce a norm. Regarding PUA, sex positivity seems like it would have a lot fewer problems with it than Dworkin or I might.