I found the anonymity-inducing paragraph interesting for a number of reasons. The submitter asserts that she’s not like most girls, but then goes on to list a bunch of things, half of which, in my experience, most girls, including most self-described feminists, would also say about themselves. She likes looking pretty, and getting better at sex—shocking! Within the bedroom, I also suspect a plurality of women are at least somewhat submissive.
Regarding “get in the kitchen!”—submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to “Go do your favorite thing!” But that’s not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like “Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it’s too low status for males to bother themselves with it.” That may not be the intended connotation of everyone who says it, but it doesn’t take that many bad apples in the barrel to get people pattern-matching, so this is what more feminism-inclined people hear when they hear “Get in the kitchen,” and that’s why they get offended.
Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we’d invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention. Right now, there’s a bad pooling equilibrium where some women dress sexy because they want that kind of attention, and some women want to dress sexy without getting that kind of attention, and there’s no way to tell them apart. At the moment, it doesn’t seem like my suggestion would work in the real world, because clearly the submitter is concerned about the other kind of female being able to identify her, or there would be no need for the anonymity here. (If, despite everything she just said about herself, the anonymity is about keeping her identity from men, then either she has an as-yet unidentified alief, or I’m really confused.)
As a male who prefers to dominate in the bedroom but sincerely wants an equal partner outside of it, I think that the submitter is, despite a valiant attempt at self-awareness, overgeneralizing from personal experience in assuming that most people desire to have social relations in public mirror their bedroom preferences. Actually, given that I have some sadistic tendencies, I’d be very strongly opposed to society trying to structure social relations around what arouses me personally, even as part of an aggregation of preferences.
Also, I’m mildly curious about
And the same testosterone that makes me good at a male-dominated subject, makes sure I’m really easily turned on.
I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones. Unless the submitter is a professional athlete, I’m curious what field she benefits in by having more of a hormone that provides additional strength and aggressiveness.
Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we’d invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.
If some women set themselves apart in this way with an unambiguous signal, I think they’d attract negative attention from people who disapprove of their attitudes.
It’s possible they’d be at increased risk from sexually predatory men, but I think it’s even more likely they’d be stigmatized by other women who take it upon themselves to enforce social norms.
I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones.
Brain architecture is significantly influenced by hormones during the gestation period.
Regarding “get in the kitchen!”—submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to “Go do your favorite thing!” But that’s not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like “Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it’s too low status for males to bother themselves with it.”
Also of “you ought to be feeding us because you’re not important/competent enough to otherwise contribute”
Regarding “get in the kitchen!”—submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to “Go do your favorite thing!” But that’s not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like “Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it’s too low status for males to bother themselves with it.” That may not be the intended connotation of everyone who says it, but it doesn’t take that many bad apples in the barrel to get people pattern-matching, so this is what more feminism-inclined people hear when they hear “Get in the kitchen,” and that’s why they get offended.
I interpreted it in view of this:
I am most fulfilled when I’m in a M-dom f-sub relationship.
Which is to say, she feels fulfilled by being told to do something, and takes particular pleasure in it because it’s something she’s good at.
At that point, I stop agreeing with you that she is typical of average women, however. In the grandparent, I agreed that a plurality of women are submissive in bed. I emphatically do not agree that most women I have met are secretly suffering from not being lifestyle-submissive.
I assume you’re disagreeing with my top-level comment. I’ll try to elaborate.
“Submissive” has some heavily loaded connotation. Most women (I have met) prefer to have the man ask them out; this is submissive behavior. Most women prefer to be chased, than to chase. Most women in relationships prefer the man to plan and execute dates. Most women prefer to be asked to marry, rather than to ask to marry. So on and so forth.
These are all submissive behaviors that aren’t typically labelled as such, and most women don’t suffer from not being submissive, they -are- submissive. That doesn’t mean “I’ll do whatever you want”. It doesn’t mean “I don’t expect anything from you.” It doesn’t mean “There are no boundaries in our relationship, do whatever you want.” Same as in sex, part of the dominance-submission framework is understanding what is and isn’t acceptable, and ideally having some kind of framework in place (if simply communication—safewords in a sexual context as one example) for dealing with the boundary cases where it’s not really clear.
Dominance/submission aren’t binary, they’re pretty wide spectrums. Women, generally speaking, are on the submissive side of that. (Much to my chagrin, actually, since I’m a switch with a personal preference to be submissive. Fortunately guys are on the table for me as well, so that’s not too much of an issue.)
Most women (I have met) prefer to have the man ask them out; this is submissive behavior.
This is not obvious to me. That makes sense if you think of it as hunter and pursued; you could alternatively view it as supplicant and bestower of favor.
I have no idea. Nor can I think of a good way to test this, since neither of us seems likely to accept women’s self-reporting of the answer as an accurate reflection of what their system 1 is actually doing.
My wild-ass guess is that it’s not even computing anything from scratch in the first place, it’s just reading from a look-up table. (This doesn’t answer the question who wrote that table in the first place, though—but see this.)
I think that’s actually the common model that sex is something women have and men want. So, which of the two simply depends on whether you’re inclined to grant it or not, and on the side you view it from. This may be an unrelated phenomenon to dom/sub (or, alternately, the source of a dom/sub effect.)
That’s an interesting “model”, but it doesn’t seem to be making any predictions here—it fits whether Wilde is right or wrong, so it’s probably irrelevant.
Are you suggesting that “I prefer that you ask me for things and I get to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’” is a submissive posture in general? Or is this limited to the kinds of romantic/sexual contexts you’re talking about here?
Either way, can you point me at some references for this claim? It seems pretty counterintuitive to me.
References for a subjective evaluation? Er, no. At best I might be able to pull some evidence together about how the average person evaluates the situation.
But let’s turn this on its head. Do you think the US president’s veto power gives the president a dominant power position in terms of legislature? Who has more power over legislature—the president, who can say no, or the legislature, who get to determine the questions the president gets to say “No” to?
References for a subjective evaluation? Er, no. At best I might be able to pull some evidence together about how the average person evaluates the situation.
(blink) OK. If what you mean by “dominant” and “submissive” is a claim about how people feel about a situation, rather than a claim about who is able to implement their preferences, then I misunderstood your initial point and am content to drop the subject here.
To answer your question, though: in practice the legislative veto situation is a lot more complicated than you present it here, because there are lots of preferences had by both sides that have almost nothing to do with whether the law gets passed or not, and often the law itself is simply a stalking horse.
But leaving the specifics of veto politics aside, I certainly agree that there are contexts in which the person framing the request has more practical power (in the sense of being able to implement their preferences despite opposition) than the person acceding to or denying the request.
There are also contexts in which the reverse is true.
Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in, we’d invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.
I like this idea, but it isn’t obvious to me that the majority of wolf-whistlers will want to suppress their whistles when the signal is absent.
I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones.
I’ve heard career advice for women to the effect of “If you are in a male-dominated field, you need to act more aggressive, or else men will walk all over you because of their different social style.” Example: women get fewer salary increases simply because they don’t ask for them.
(This advice is sometimes given with the implication that this difference in social styles is culturally-enforced, rather than biological; I don’t know which of these factors is more important in creating the difference, but it does exist.)
The salary effect isn’t what I was referring to here, though. The submitter said the extra T made her “good at a male dominated subject.” I took that to mean she is more skilled at performing her job than she would be otherwise, rather than that she makes more money than she would otherwise.
Maybe that was a bad example; the salary effect isn’t what I was trying to get at, either.
I think that that kind of gap in assertiveness could affect women’s productivity as well. If you have trouble making your ideas heard in the workplace, then your effectiveness there is diminished. Being assertive about asking questions and taking more responsibility can build skills, too.
I really like the red bracelet idea. That could work for both men and women who want to advertise themselves as open to being hit on, whether or not they are actually available.
We have a tendency to escalate—if wearing a halter top could mean “it’s hot out”, some people will take it to mean “I want strangers to hit on me.” If you wear a bracelet whose official meaning is “I want strangers to hit on me,” some people will assume the wearer wants a step farther than that.
When Emma Goldman published essays in favor of “free love” (sex outside marriage) in 1910, she began to have trouble with men banging on her hotel door in the middle of the night, thinking that this meant she was sexually available to anyone at any time.
So my guess is that people wearing such bracelets would get more wanted attention but also more unwanted attention.
I would also expect some women complaining that men don’t distinguish between women who wear red bracelets because they are open to being hit on, and women who just want to wear red bracelets without getting that kind of attention. And then we would have campaigns telling men that it’s creepy to treat women with red bracelets differently.
More generally—sometimes signals are confusing because some people want them to be confusing. They want to eat their cake and have a plausible deniability about eating their cake, too. These people could be in a minority, but they will ruin the signals for the rest of the population.
I also like the idea of this sort of thing, though I can see ways it could go wrong quickly. (In particular: instant high intensity rape culture against anybody who wears the symbol, leading to only the most extremely accepting people wearing the symbol).
My mental worldbuilding involves both something a bit like this, and a modern both-genders form of fan flirtations.
I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones.
Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we’d invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.
We did. It’s called dressing provocatively.
It’s just it got ruined when a bunch of people decided to complain about people wolf-whisling those wearing the bracelet.
It’s just it got ruined when a bunch of people decided to complain about people wolf-whisling those wearing the bracelet.
Alternate hypothesis: Not everyone dressing in the way that you call “dressing provocatively” intends to dress that way with any such goal like that in mind. Large amounts of how people dress are culturally dependent, and many women dress for complicated reasons involving internal signaling to other women, not to men. These are only the most basic issues at hand.
And some people will wear red bracelets because they like the color red, and they like bracelets—or they’ll start wearing red bracelets because -other- people wear red bracelets and it’s the “in” thing to do (internal signaling to other women). And then other people will wear red bracelets to show solidarity with those who object to being catcalled while wearing red bracelets, and then the whole signaling gig is up.
I guess that in the hypothetical Prismattic was thinking of, there would be common knowledge that people who wear red bracelets enjoy wolf-whistles, so that wearing a red bracelet and not enjoying wolf-whistles would amount to lying. (Think of it like the rings people in the early 20th century in Ireland wore on their lapels in order to communicate that they were able and willing to speak Irish.)
Highly culturally dependent though on what constituted dressing provocatively. In much of the Middle East for example, dressing provocatively consists of having one’s face or hair uncovered if one is a woman. Even in some parts of the US similar standards apply. Look for example at Kiryas Joel. Even within the same small cultural group things can get complicated (if you want to have some real fun, get a bunch of Modern Orthodox Jews together and ask them what constitutes dressing provocatively, and you’ll see an extremely wide range of answers). And that’s before the other issues of signaling, practicality (e.g. it is hot out so I’m going to wear less), or other issues. And even the same people can have different notions of what counts as dressing provocatively depending on the social setting (e.g. walking down the street or at a beach). This is different than the ring which is substantially less ambiguous. And such signals do sometimes work in sexual or gender contexts, look at the signal systems used by much of the gay community (e.g. earrings and hankerchiefs).
The earring signal has been completely destroyed by straight people who got earrings because it was cool, and… handkerchiefs? What?
A quick Googling immediately informs me why I haven’t encountered this. This code wouldn’t work where I grew up; Hispanic gangs use colored handkerchiefs as their own form of signaling.
...and apparently my white handkerchiefs I always carry with me signal that I’m into masturbation. Huuuh. Oh well.
Getting back on track, the lack of cultural unity was not in fact generally a problem a few decades ago, before the internet. Each community could have its own standards and this wouldn’t pose too much of an issue, and this is more or less the way things worked. This system dissolved long before television, which was heavily regulated (hell, they weren’t allowed to show belly buttons), became able to seriously impact standards of provocative clothing.
(I’m not arguing those were “the good old days” by any stretch of the imagination, mind. I’ll take society as it exists today. But certainly we had this kind of signaling capability before and it was dismantled.)
Even at the time and within communities that nominally observed it, the handkerchief code was so convoluted as to be generally considered more of a joke than a real thing.
(I’m not arguing those were “the good old days” by any stretch of the imagination, mind. I’ll take society as it exists today. But certainly we had this kind of signaling capability before and it was dismantled.)
I think we’re blowing things out of proportion here. Clothing, and appearance more generally, has widely-recognized signaling value in sexual matters, even today. It’s just that the signals involved are quite a bit fuzzier than ‘dressing provocatively means that wolf-whistling is welcome’. And it’s not even clear that this is a bad thing.
Apart from wedding/engagement rings, can you name a single piece of clothing [eta: or ensemble, vaguely-defined or otherwise] with a widely-recognized heterosexual sexual signal? By widely recognized, I expect that at least half of all men, and at least half of all women, would know what it means?
Getting back on track, the lack of cultural unity was not in fact generally a problem a few decades ago, before the internet. Each community could have its own standards and this wouldn’t pose too much of an issue, and this is more or less the way things worked. This system dissolved long before television, which was heavily regulated (hell, they weren’t allowed to show belly buttons), became able to seriously impact standards of provocative clothing.
I think you are overestimating pre-internet uniformity here. If for example one spent time in Crown Heights one would have Orthodox Jews, generic African-Americans (mainly Christian), and some Muslim African-Americans. Each group has different ideas of what would constitute provocative clothing. Or to use a different example: when I was an undergrad I was involved in an interfaith Jewish-Muslim group. One thing that struck me was that among many of the Orthodox Jews, women wearing pants was considered what you would probably call provocative, but hair covering wasn’t an issue. In contrast, for many of the Muslim women, the reverse held (pants fine, uncovered hair immodest).
I’m not sure what your point is with those two quotes. Are you trying to say that OrphanWilde already addressed what I was saying? If so, the points are different: Orphan was discussing was how distinct groups have different standards. The point I was making that in small geographic areas one can have a large number of groups with different standards that all have to interact with each other. And the example of the Modern Orthodox showed, even within a small, superficially uniform group, there can be a lot of variation.
The earring signal has been completely destroyed by straight people who got earrings because it was cool,
Either those straight people by wearing those earrings were deliberately lying about their sexual orientation (which doesn’t sound likely to me), or there wasn’t actual common knowledge about the earrings’ meaning.
That assumes that the straight people in question cared about what their piercings signaled. Given the culture of the group which popularized ear piercings in men, I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption.
Well, if I really don’t care about whether people will mistake me for a gay man, I won’t complain when they do mistake me for a gay man, either, so there’s no problem (except for the momentary confusion in gay men who were going to hit on me).
Not for you. There -is- a problem for gay men, who are no longer able to reliably interpret the signal. It directly raises the odds of rejection on the average approach based on that signal.
I wouldn’t care about gay men momentarily mistaking me for gay, because there is an immediate opportunity to correct the misapprehension. Attractive women mistaking me for gay, on the other hand, would be problematic. If they never strike up a conversation in the first place, you never get the chance to clarify.
I’m not sure that’s a problem. I’ve heard that women are more likely to start conversations with men they think are gay because they won’t get hit on. There are PUA techniques based to initially pretending to be gay.
I had linked “common knowledge” to the wrong place, sorry. (Fixed now.) Do you mean that not only everyone (within a given society, except for tiny minorities of non-neurotypicals and the like) knew that people dressing provocatively were communicated that they enjoyed wolf whistles, but also that everyone knew that everybody knew that, and everybody knew that everybody knew that everybody knew that, and so on, so that someone dressing provocatively would immediately lose all plausible deniability?
Less specifically (that is, not referring to “wolf whistles” in particular), and more “a majority” than “every single person above -.5 sigmas of social consciousness”, but yes. Hell, even as recently in the 90′s, there was a difference between the way married people and available people dressed. Clothing is declining as a useful sexual signal.
I’m not sure what using plausible deniability as a social metric serves in this case. People who wear a red bracelet without knowing what it means should be admonished, in a society in which the bracelet serves as a signal, not punished.
It’s more a case of people arguing for their right to wear red bracelets without getting cat calls.
Or possibly even women wearing red bracelets hoping to get cat calls from high status/attractive males, getting cat calls from geeks and using the plausible deniability to complain.
I found the anonymity-inducing paragraph interesting for a number of reasons. The submitter asserts that she’s not like most girls, but then goes on to list a bunch of things, half of which, in my experience, most girls, including most self-described feminists, would also say about themselves. She likes looking pretty, and getting better at sex—shocking! Within the bedroom, I also suspect a plurality of women are at least somewhat submissive.
Regarding “get in the kitchen!”—submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to “Go do your favorite thing!” But that’s not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like “Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it’s too low status for males to bother themselves with it.” That may not be the intended connotation of everyone who says it, but it doesn’t take that many bad apples in the barrel to get people pattern-matching, so this is what more feminism-inclined people hear when they hear “Get in the kitchen,” and that’s why they get offended.
Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we’d invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention. Right now, there’s a bad pooling equilibrium where some women dress sexy because they want that kind of attention, and some women want to dress sexy without getting that kind of attention, and there’s no way to tell them apart. At the moment, it doesn’t seem like my suggestion would work in the real world, because clearly the submitter is concerned about the other kind of female being able to identify her, or there would be no need for the anonymity here. (If, despite everything she just said about herself, the anonymity is about keeping her identity from men, then either she has an as-yet unidentified alief, or I’m really confused.)
As a male who prefers to dominate in the bedroom but sincerely wants an equal partner outside of it, I think that the submitter is, despite a valiant attempt at self-awareness, overgeneralizing from personal experience in assuming that most people desire to have social relations in public mirror their bedroom preferences. Actually, given that I have some sadistic tendencies, I’d be very strongly opposed to society trying to structure social relations around what arouses me personally, even as part of an aggregation of preferences.
Also, I’m mildly curious about
I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones. Unless the submitter is a professional athlete, I’m curious what field she benefits in by having more of a hormone that provides additional strength and aggressiveness.
If some women set themselves apart in this way with an unambiguous signal, I think they’d attract negative attention from people who disapprove of their attitudes.
It’s possible they’d be at increased risk from sexually predatory men, but I think it’s even more likely they’d be stigmatized by other women who take it upon themselves to enforce social norms.
That’s why only “in an ideal world”, methinks.
Brain architecture is significantly influenced by hormones during the gestation period.
Also of “you ought to be feeding us because you’re not important/competent enough to otherwise contribute”
I interpreted it in view of this:
Which is to say, she feels fulfilled by being told to do something, and takes particular pleasure in it because it’s something she’s good at.
That is a plausible reading.
At that point, I stop agreeing with you that she is typical of average women, however. In the grandparent, I agreed that a plurality of women are submissive in bed. I emphatically do not agree that most women I have met are secretly suffering from not being lifestyle-submissive.
I assume you’re disagreeing with my top-level comment. I’ll try to elaborate.
“Submissive” has some heavily loaded connotation. Most women (I have met) prefer to have the man ask them out; this is submissive behavior. Most women prefer to be chased, than to chase. Most women in relationships prefer the man to plan and execute dates. Most women prefer to be asked to marry, rather than to ask to marry. So on and so forth.
These are all submissive behaviors that aren’t typically labelled as such, and most women don’t suffer from not being submissive, they -are- submissive. That doesn’t mean “I’ll do whatever you want”. It doesn’t mean “I don’t expect anything from you.” It doesn’t mean “There are no boundaries in our relationship, do whatever you want.” Same as in sex, part of the dominance-submission framework is understanding what is and isn’t acceptable, and ideally having some kind of framework in place (if simply communication—safewords in a sexual context as one example) for dealing with the boundary cases where it’s not really clear.
Dominance/submission aren’t binary, they’re pretty wide spectrums. Women, generally speaking, are on the submissive side of that. (Much to my chagrin, actually, since I’m a switch with a personal preference to be submissive. Fortunately guys are on the table for me as well, so that’s not too much of an issue.)
This is not obvious to me. That makes sense if you think of it as hunter and pursued; you could alternatively view it as supplicant and bestower of favor.
Well, what percentage of women would you anticipate regard it as the former versus the latter?
I have no idea. Nor can I think of a good way to test this, since neither of us seems likely to accept women’s self-reporting of the answer as an accurate reflection of what their system 1 is actually doing.
My wild-ass guess is that it’s not even computing anything from scratch in the first place, it’s just reading from a look-up table. (This doesn’t answer the question who wrote that table in the first place, though—but see this.)
I think that’s actually the common model that sex is something women have and men want. So, which of the two simply depends on whether you’re inclined to grant it or not, and on the side you view it from. This may be an unrelated phenomenon to dom/sub (or, alternately, the source of a dom/sub effect.)
That’s an interesting “model”, but it doesn’t seem to be making any predictions here—it fits whether Wilde is right or wrong, so it’s probably irrelevant.
Are you suggesting that “I prefer that you ask me for things and I get to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’” is a submissive posture in general? Or is this limited to the kinds of romantic/sexual contexts you’re talking about here?
Either way, can you point me at some references for this claim? It seems pretty counterintuitive to me.
References for a subjective evaluation? Er, no. At best I might be able to pull some evidence together about how the average person evaluates the situation.
But let’s turn this on its head. Do you think the US president’s veto power gives the president a dominant power position in terms of legislature? Who has more power over legislature—the president, who can say no, or the legislature, who get to determine the questions the president gets to say “No” to?
(blink) OK. If what you mean by “dominant” and “submissive” is a claim about how people feel about a situation, rather than a claim about who is able to implement their preferences, then I misunderstood your initial point and am content to drop the subject here.
To answer your question, though: in practice the legislative veto situation is a lot more complicated than you present it here, because there are lots of preferences had by both sides that have almost nothing to do with whether the law gets passed or not, and often the law itself is simply a stalking horse.
But leaving the specifics of veto politics aside, I certainly agree that there are contexts in which the person framing the request has more practical power (in the sense of being able to implement their preferences despite opposition) than the person acceding to or denying the request.
There are also contexts in which the reverse is true.
How d’ya know that’s not a biased sample?
I don’t, which is why I made sure to make it clear that that was the sample set I was working with.
I like this idea, but it isn’t obvious to me that the majority of wolf-whistlers will want to suppress their whistles when the signal is absent.
Not without enforcement they wouldn;t.
I’ve heard career advice for women to the effect of “If you are in a male-dominated field, you need to act more aggressive, or else men will walk all over you because of their different social style.” Example: women get fewer salary increases simply because they don’t ask for them.
(This advice is sometimes given with the implication that this difference in social styles is culturally-enforced, rather than biological; I don’t know which of these factors is more important in creating the difference, but it does exist.)
The salary effect isn’t what I was referring to here, though. The submitter said the extra T made her “good at a male dominated subject.” I took that to mean she is more skilled at performing her job than she would be otherwise, rather than that she makes more money than she would otherwise.
Maybe that was a bad example; the salary effect isn’t what I was trying to get at, either.
I think that that kind of gap in assertiveness could affect women’s productivity as well. If you have trouble making your ideas heard in the workplace, then your effectiveness there is diminished. Being assertive about asking questions and taking more responsibility can build skills, too.
I really like the red bracelet idea. That could work for both men and women who want to advertise themselves as open to being hit on, whether or not they are actually available.
We have a tendency to escalate—if wearing a halter top could mean “it’s hot out”, some people will take it to mean “I want strangers to hit on me.” If you wear a bracelet whose official meaning is “I want strangers to hit on me,” some people will assume the wearer wants a step farther than that.
When Emma Goldman published essays in favor of “free love” (sex outside marriage) in 1910, she began to have trouble with men banging on her hotel door in the middle of the night, thinking that this meant she was sexually available to anyone at any time.
So my guess is that people wearing such bracelets would get more wanted attention but also more unwanted attention.
I would also expect some women complaining that men don’t distinguish between women who wear red bracelets because they are open to being hit on, and women who just want to wear red bracelets without getting that kind of attention. And then we would have campaigns telling men that it’s creepy to treat women with red bracelets differently.
More generally—sometimes signals are confusing because some people want them to be confusing. They want to eat their cake and have a plausible deniability about eating their cake, too. These people could be in a minority, but they will ruin the signals for the rest of the population.
EDIT: Oops, this was already said here.
I also like the idea of this sort of thing, though I can see ways it could go wrong quickly. (In particular: instant high intensity rape culture against anybody who wears the symbol, leading to only the most extremely accepting people wearing the symbol).
My mental worldbuilding involves both something a bit like this, and a modern both-genders form of fan flirtations.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio
We did. It’s called dressing provocatively.
It’s just it got ruined when a bunch of people decided to complain about people wolf-whisling those wearing the bracelet.
Alternate hypothesis: Not everyone dressing in the way that you call “dressing provocatively” intends to dress that way with any such goal like that in mind. Large amounts of how people dress are culturally dependent, and many women dress for complicated reasons involving internal signaling to other women, not to men. These are only the most basic issues at hand.
And some people will wear red bracelets because they like the color red, and they like bracelets—or they’ll start wearing red bracelets because -other- people wear red bracelets and it’s the “in” thing to do (internal signaling to other women). And then other people will wear red bracelets to show solidarity with those who object to being catcalled while wearing red bracelets, and then the whole signaling gig is up.
This is the reason we can’t have nice things.
I guess that in the hypothetical Prismattic was thinking of, there would be common knowledge that people who wear red bracelets enjoy wolf-whistles, so that wearing a red bracelet and not enjoying wolf-whistles would amount to lying. (Think of it like the rings people in the early 20th century in Ireland wore on their lapels in order to communicate that they were able and willing to speak Irish.)
I think you’re missing some dry social commentary there: This is exactly how dressing provocatively was at one time regarded.
Highly culturally dependent though on what constituted dressing provocatively. In much of the Middle East for example, dressing provocatively consists of having one’s face or hair uncovered if one is a woman. Even in some parts of the US similar standards apply. Look for example at Kiryas Joel. Even within the same small cultural group things can get complicated (if you want to have some real fun, get a bunch of Modern Orthodox Jews together and ask them what constitutes dressing provocatively, and you’ll see an extremely wide range of answers). And that’s before the other issues of signaling, practicality (e.g. it is hot out so I’m going to wear less), or other issues. And even the same people can have different notions of what counts as dressing provocatively depending on the social setting (e.g. walking down the street or at a beach). This is different than the ring which is substantially less ambiguous. And such signals do sometimes work in sexual or gender contexts, look at the signal systems used by much of the gay community (e.g. earrings and hankerchiefs).
The earring signal has been completely destroyed by straight people who got earrings because it was cool, and… handkerchiefs? What?
A quick Googling immediately informs me why I haven’t encountered this. This code wouldn’t work where I grew up; Hispanic gangs use colored handkerchiefs as their own form of signaling.
...and apparently my white handkerchiefs I always carry with me signal that I’m into masturbation. Huuuh. Oh well.
Getting back on track, the lack of cultural unity was not in fact generally a problem a few decades ago, before the internet. Each community could have its own standards and this wouldn’t pose too much of an issue, and this is more or less the way things worked. This system dissolved long before television, which was heavily regulated (hell, they weren’t allowed to show belly buttons), became able to seriously impact standards of provocative clothing.
(I’m not arguing those were “the good old days” by any stretch of the imagination, mind. I’ll take society as it exists today. But certainly we had this kind of signaling capability before and it was dismantled.)
Even at the time and within communities that nominally observed it, the handkerchief code was so convoluted as to be generally considered more of a joke than a real thing.
I think we’re blowing things out of proportion here. Clothing, and appearance more generally, has widely-recognized signaling value in sexual matters, even today. It’s just that the signals involved are quite a bit fuzzier than ‘dressing provocatively means that wolf-whistling is welcome’. And it’s not even clear that this is a bad thing.
Apart from wedding/engagement rings, can you name a single piece of clothing [eta: or ensemble, vaguely-defined or otherwise] with a widely-recognized heterosexual sexual signal? By widely recognized, I expect that at least half of all men, and at least half of all women, would know what it means?
I think you are overestimating pre-internet uniformity here. If for example one spent time in Crown Heights one would have Orthodox Jews, generic African-Americans (mainly Christian), and some Muslim African-Americans. Each group has different ideas of what would constitute provocative clothing. Or to use a different example: when I was an undergrad I was involved in an interfaith Jewish-Muslim group. One thing that struck me was that among many of the Orthodox Jews, women wearing pants was considered what you would probably call provocative, but hair covering wasn’t an issue. In contrast, for many of the Muslim women, the reverse held (pants fine, uncovered hair immodest).
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The reply:
I’m not sure what your point is with those two quotes. Are you trying to say that OrphanWilde already addressed what I was saying? If so, the points are different: Orphan was discussing was how distinct groups have different standards. The point I was making that in small geographic areas one can have a large number of groups with different standards that all have to interact with each other. And the example of the Modern Orthodox showed, even within a small, superficially uniform group, there can be a lot of variation.
Sorry I thought you were pointing out something Orphan had acknowledged already—that’s a different point. Retracted & upvoted.
Either those straight people by wearing those earrings were deliberately lying about their sexual orientation (which doesn’t sound likely to me), or there wasn’t actual common knowledge about the earrings’ meaning.
That assumes that the straight people in question cared about what their piercings signaled. Given the culture of the group which popularized ear piercings in men, I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption.
Well, if I really don’t care about whether people will mistake me for a gay man, I won’t complain when they do mistake me for a gay man, either, so there’s no problem (except for the momentary confusion in gay men who were going to hit on me).
Not for you. There -is- a problem for gay men, who are no longer able to reliably interpret the signal. It directly raises the odds of rejection on the average approach based on that signal.
I wouldn’t care about gay men momentarily mistaking me for gay, because there is an immediate opportunity to correct the misapprehension. Attractive women mistaking me for gay, on the other hand, would be problematic. If they never strike up a conversation in the first place, you never get the chance to clarify.
I’m not sure that’s a problem. I’ve heard that women are more likely to start conversations with men they think are gay because they won’t get hit on. There are PUA techniques based to initially pretending to be gay.
I had linked “common knowledge” to the wrong place, sorry. (Fixed now.) Do you mean that not only everyone (within a given society, except for tiny minorities of non-neurotypicals and the like) knew that people dressing provocatively were communicated that they enjoyed wolf whistles, but also that everyone knew that everybody knew that, and everybody knew that everybody knew that everybody knew that, and so on, so that someone dressing provocatively would immediately lose all plausible deniability?
Less specifically (that is, not referring to “wolf whistles” in particular), and more “a majority” than “every single person above -.5 sigmas of social consciousness”, but yes. Hell, even as recently in the 90′s, there was a difference between the way married people and available people dressed. Clothing is declining as a useful sexual signal.
If the minority who doesn’t know something is large enough, you don’t lose plausible deniability by doing that.
I’m not sure what using plausible deniability as a social metric serves in this case. People who wear a red bracelet without knowing what it means should be admonished, in a society in which the bracelet serves as a signal, not punished.
It’s more a case of people arguing for their right to wear red bracelets without getting cat calls.
Or possibly even women wearing red bracelets hoping to get cat calls from high status/attractive males, getting cat calls from geeks and using the plausible deniability to complain.