Apropos of everything else, I would just remark that Submitter E should’ve taken way more care of staying pseudonymous. [Details redacted]
Also, it’s a bit disturbing and creepy to see a woman conflating her private sexual and lifestyle preferences with internet quasi-ev-psych and PUA jargon. I’ve read quite a few good blog posts by women who talk of combining feminist views on society and gender roles with a personal desire for performing traditional femininity and a submissive role in a relationship/BDSM.
This whole matter is hardly a paradox at all; personally, I am of the opinion that “biology” or “evolutionary psychology” as applied to gender roles and sexuality don’t create any more complications for social well-being and equality than any “biological” or “innate” tendencies to violence, aggression, selfishness, etc—and modern civilization is pretty good [1] at handling those latter ones!
(Or, in plain terms, imagine a man talking about enjoying competitive sports and violent videogames in the same sort of essentializing language that E used above. It’d probably sound like a teenager bragging about how cool and “wild” and edgy he is; even if the object-level description of personal preferences would be correct, the connotations would be similarly skewed into a misleading narrative.)
And also:
it’s much harder to empathise with someone you don’t agree with
That’s...damn… that’s like the whole bloody point of why we hold empathy for genuinely different/strange/foreign people to be so rare and valuable! Seriously, what the hell, it’s like saying “Diplomacy is much harder when you have to compromise with the other side!”, or “Democracy would work better if only my fellow citizens didn’t want things that I don’t want!” You can emulate and share in someone else’s emotions and feelings that you do not approve of, understanding their perspective from the inside without adopting it. Yes, it can require hard work, emotional exertion, tolerance and mental flexibility, but it pays off, for oneself and for society.
[1] Still not very good, of course, but today’s Western culture is probably the most peaceful and civil in history so far—when you account for all the structural factors and externalities like state repression, warfare, suppression of minorities, blah blah...
I’m female and submissive and I’ve always been attracted to guys about eight years older than me. (When I say “always”, I mean since my first serious crush at age 13.) My parents are feminists, they’re the same age as each other, and they strongly believe in power equality in relationships. Thus, growing up, I always thought there was something terribly wrong with me.
In college, I learned about PUA and alpha males an all of that. Suddenly, here was an ideological system that treated my desires as natural instead of perverted. I was immediately entranced, and began to read PUA blogs very seriously. I saw a lot of truth in the PUAs’ discussions of male-female interactions. From what I could tell, feminism was just another optimistic belief system built on a very common but very rotten foundation: the idea that humans are rational creatures, that our rationality elevates us high above our brutal and bestial forebears. I saw that while we may have intelligence and cunning far exceeding that of our ancestors, we often use that intelligence to serve animal aims—for instance, procreation. I had many supposedly just-friends relationships with guys, but I saw that sexual desire often lay coiled beneath our calm and innocent intellectual discussions.
So to me, PUA seemed much more honest than the rest of the world of ideas, and much more correct about the facts of human nature (at least as it exists in this society). This gave me a pretty high prior for PUA being right about things, and so I believed their essentialist and evo-psych explanations. These days, I’m less certain about PUA claims that women are inherently submissive, or more at the mercy of their emotions than men—but I still see why these ideas seem plausible and appealing. They fit the data pretty well, and give a nice generative model for it and everything. =P
...I’m not really sure why I’m telling this story. When I read this post, I thought “oh, interesting, submitter E seems to have a lot in common with me—and she also felt drawn to PUA ideas”. So I guess I wanted to give some perspective on why that might be. I do agree with you, Multiheaded, that it’s dangerous to equate one’s own sexual preferences with gender essentialism, evo-psych arguments, etc.
From what I could tell, feminism was just another optimistic belief system built on a very common but very rotten foundation: the idea that humans are rational creatures, that our rationality elevates us high above our brutal and bestial forebears.
I believe that at least a large part of feminism was created by women who were unhappy in an environment which didn’t suit their personalities and/or made it very easy for men to abuse women.
Suddenly, here was an ideological system that treated my desires as natural instead of perverted.
Revolutions generally come with from an impulse to throw off imposed ideals, but usually end up imposing new ideals. The king is dead. Long live the king.
The desire for freedom is freedom from a constraint, and doesn’t allow the naturally coalition building and power accretion of those who would impose constraints.
...I’m not really sure why I’m telling this story.
My guess—you saw the value to yourself of seeing your views not being portrayed as perverted, and took the opportunity to give the same kind of support to others who might feel that way.
I think PUAs’ essentialist explanations are correct statistically, the way men are taller than women statistically, but there still are quite a few five-foot-six (1.68 m) men and five-foot-eleven (1.80 m) women.
...a very common but very rotten foundation: the idea that humans are rational creatures, that our rationality elevates us high above our brutal and bestial forebears.
In the interests of luminosity, to what extent do you believe this statement is an example of the naturalistic fallacy?
That is, if feminism is an ethical stance, then it is concerned with how people ought to act, not how they do act. Your justification of PUA seems to be that it better describes reality, which wasn’t the goal of feminism to begin with.
Hang on, I don’t think that feminism is non-disprovable! If you think I do then you’ve misinterpreted me in a big way.
I don’t agree that feminism is an instrumentally rational theory, I think it’s justifiable (and justified) on moral grounds. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make any predictions about the way the world actually is or will be because it isn’t a science, it’s an ethics, and ethical theories make predictions about how the world should be.
Of course, that makes it harder to disprove but not impossible. If I thought that morals were totally relative and non-disprovable then I’d give up on them altogether and start building a tower-o’-doom do whatever I wanted without thinking hard about whether or not it was right. I really do believe that consequentialism is the way to a correct theory of ethics, and I think that it leads to feminism, given our current situation.
If I thought that morals were totally relative and non-disprovable then I’d give up on them altogether and start building a tower-o’-doom.
I very much doubt it. Analogously, theists subscribing to the divine command theory of ethics who end up losing their faith generally don’t slaughter everyone they know and assemble a giant blasphemous meat-effigy out of the pieces.
Touche. I was speaking for effect: obviously I don’t actually want a tower-o-doom so I wouldn’t build one even if it was morally permissible. On the other hand, if I thought morals were relative, I wouldn’t be able to mount an argument for NOT committing atrocities that didn’t boil down to, ‘please don’t do that’. I think I can mount a better argument than that, so it follows that I think ethical statements are objectively justifiable.
UPDATE: edited the grandparent in response to Nornagest’s accurate criticism.
On the other hand, if I thought morals were relative, I wouldn’t be able to mount an argument for NOT committing atrocities that didn’t boil down to, ‘please don’t do that’.
Do you consider “we prefer nobody do that and are willing to enforce our preferences in that matter against anyone who doesn’t share them” to boil down to “please don’t do that”?
More or less. Both of them are along the lines of ‘don’t do what you want, do what I want instead’. A good moral argument on the other hand should convince the other person to adopt a different set of desires, more along the lines of ‘don’t want what you want, want what I want instead’.
Do you prefer good moral arguments to other methods of altering someone else’s preferences? (Or perhaps I should back up and first ask, do you think there are other methods of altering someone else’s preferences?)
There are other ways of altering people’s preferences, sure. In simple situations where you have the option of argument and think it’ll work I guess I favour moral argument for convincing, since it tends to give the other person more agency. I could give a thorough justification for those opinions but I think we’ve strayed from the topic of conversation a little here.
I really do believe that consequentialism is the way to a correct theory of ethics, and I think that it leads to feminism, given our current situation.
So you believe that encouraging people to act in accordance with feminism will lead to maximizing utility? Because evolutionary psychology/PUA has something to say about this claim.
It’s worth noting that our concepts of feminism probably differ from one another at least slightly—really these days feminism is just an umbrella term for a big splintered tree graph of ideologies and social theories and ethical theories and literary perspectives… Half of the time they disagree with one another, and there’s a lot of variance when it comes to sanity.
But, broadly, yes. None of the terms of my utility function are labeled ‘feminism’, but when I ‘run the numbers’ I find that the function tends to endorse courses of action and social heuristics that are roughly functionally equivalent to some strains of feminism. I have read some of the ev-psych/PUA literature and I found it unconvincing for a variety of specific reasons and some overarching general ones.
That might correlate with utility or happiness, but that’s an empirical question, not a given.
No one is claiming it is.
Edit: The argument is not “evolution has selected us for X, therefore we should do X”. It’s “evolution has selected as for X, therefore humans have property Y, therefore organizing society according to principal Z leads to more efficient utility generation.”
2nd try replying to this, since people worried first was hard to parse:
I think that sexism is mostly folk psychology—false when tested, but not untestable given smart experimenters. Thus, feminism predicts that sexist hypotheses are not the way the world actually is, and that’s empirical.
But, there are a lot of people rallying under flags with “feminism” on them, and they vary widely. So many of them probably just assume the current facts as we know them (good) and so merely claim that under those facts certain things may be wrong, ethically. And you have others who actually believe sexist claims but still want to be called feminist. So maybe tabooing is needed.
I think the empirical claims of feminism are now successful, but they did exist.
I can’t seem to parse this literally. Do you mean that some past empirical claims of feminism are no longer true do the success of the political advocacy of feminism? That seems true (with some controversy on the degree of ‘some’).
I think one problem is what wedrifid says: it is difficult to work out what your comment actually means.
“the empirical claims of feminism are now successful”: what does it mean for an empirical claim to be successful? Is that the same as “true”, or something else?
“but they did exist”: why “but”? what’s the opposition between existing and “being successful”?
I gather that you were disagreeing with Argency’s statement that feminism “doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make any predictions about the way the world actually is or will be” on the grounds that you consider that feminism does (among other things) make claims about how the world is. Fair enough (and for what it’s worth I’d agree), but it seems to me that the obvious diagnosis is that you and Argency disagree about what “feminism” means, in which case merely saying “but it does make empirical claims” doesn’t achieve much.
So: two problems. A statement whose meaning is hard to make sense of, treating a disagreement as one about how the world is when it’s probably actually more about how to use one particular word. I’d guess that whoever downvoted you had one or both of those in mind.
(I’d also say: being downvoted by one person is not particularly strong evidence of anything; don’t get upset about it. But if you find yourself being downvoted a lot, the chances are that either you should change something or else LW just isn’t a good place for you.)
Ah yeah successful should maybe have been accepted, or universal, or maybe claims should have been arguments. Thanks!
I’d also say: being downvoted by one person is not particularly strong evidence of anything; don’t get upset about it.
My first attempt to clarify was downvoted too :(
the obvious diagnosis is that you and Argency disagree about what “feminism” means
… oh. It is a very vague word … I figured they were just underestimating the coherence of opposing arguments, since it’s easy to when the position in question is quite discredited so you don’t encounter them… I’ll try asking them what they meant, good idea.
There are actually quite a few female authors in the PUA arena, including wives advocating men adopt some of these techniques on the basis that it improved their own relationship. I don’t find it surprising here.
Well, yeah, you’re right. I’ll limit myself to a general remark that the post could’ve probably been written in a less revealing way while still getting her opinion across.
Also, it’s a bit disturbing and creepy to see a woman conflating her private sexual and lifestyle preferences with internet quasi-ev-psych and PUA jargon.
Why? Aren’t sexual and lifestyle preferences the prototypical application of ev-psych, and I’d say PUA as well?
I’ve read quite a few good blog posts by women who talk of combining feminist views on society and gender roles
Perhaps, but feminism is not really incompatible with reasonably sane forms of ev-psych or PUA. Also, this post is really about female privilege rather than feminism persay. The submitter has actually identified a very interesting source of female privilege (i.e. ‘biased point of view’), namely the fact that being conventionally attractive allows her to easily relate to men and get positive attention from them. Most men will not have any comparable experience, and it’s easy to see how this might unwittingly bias female points of view about such things as PUA, etc.; perhaps even about gender relations generally. Similar points could be raised about what she says re: her emotions and intuitions, since again, these will probably not be shared by most males.
Also, it’s a bit disturbing and creepy to see a woman conflating her private sexual and lifestyle preferences with internet quasi-ev-psych and PUA jargon. I’ve read quite a few good blog posts by women who talk of combining feminist views on society and gender roles with a personal desire for performing traditional femininity and a submissive role in a relationship/BDSM.
I’m not sure I understand the first sentence, or where the second sentence is going. Do you mean by conflating … preferences with jargon that you don’t like her using the jargon to describe her experiences? And you prefer she use feminist language like you’ve read in some other posts?
(Or, in plain terms, imagine a man talking about enjoying competitive sports and violent videogames in the same sort of essentializing language that E used above. It’d probably sound like a teenager bragging about how cool and “wild” and edgy he is; even if the object-level description of personal preferences would be correct, the connotations would be similarly skewed into a misleading narrative.)
I didn’t get that connotation from E’s submission, possibly because I do like cooking and stuff and I’m male.
Apropos of everything else, I would just remark that Submitter E should’ve taken way more care of staying pseudonymous. [Details redacted]
Also, it’s a bit disturbing and creepy to see a woman conflating her private sexual and lifestyle preferences with internet quasi-ev-psych and PUA jargon. I’ve read quite a few good blog posts by women who talk of combining feminist views on society and gender roles with a personal desire for performing traditional femininity and a submissive role in a relationship/BDSM.
This whole matter is hardly a paradox at all; personally, I am of the opinion that “biology” or “evolutionary psychology” as applied to gender roles and sexuality don’t create any more complications for social well-being and equality than any “biological” or “innate” tendencies to violence, aggression, selfishness, etc—and modern civilization is pretty good [1] at handling those latter ones!
(Or, in plain terms, imagine a man talking about enjoying competitive sports and violent videogames in the same sort of essentializing language that E used above. It’d probably sound like a teenager bragging about how cool and “wild” and edgy he is; even if the object-level description of personal preferences would be correct, the connotations would be similarly skewed into a misleading narrative.)
And also:
That’s...damn… that’s like the whole bloody point of why we hold empathy for genuinely different/strange/foreign people to be so rare and valuable! Seriously, what the hell, it’s like saying “Diplomacy is much harder when you have to compromise with the other side!”, or “Democracy would work better if only my fellow citizens didn’t want things that I don’t want!” You can emulate and share in someone else’s emotions and feelings that you do not approve of, understanding their perspective from the inside without adopting it. Yes, it can require hard work, emotional exertion, tolerance and mental flexibility, but it pays off, for oneself and for society.
[1] Still not very good, of course, but today’s Western culture is probably the most peaceful and civil in history so far—when you account for all the structural factors and externalities like state repression, warfare, suppression of minorities, blah blah...
Regarding PUA jargon…
I’m female and submissive and I’ve always been attracted to guys about eight years older than me. (When I say “always”, I mean since my first serious crush at age 13.) My parents are feminists, they’re the same age as each other, and they strongly believe in power equality in relationships. Thus, growing up, I always thought there was something terribly wrong with me.
In college, I learned about PUA and alpha males an all of that. Suddenly, here was an ideological system that treated my desires as natural instead of perverted. I was immediately entranced, and began to read PUA blogs very seriously. I saw a lot of truth in the PUAs’ discussions of male-female interactions. From what I could tell, feminism was just another optimistic belief system built on a very common but very rotten foundation: the idea that humans are rational creatures, that our rationality elevates us high above our brutal and bestial forebears. I saw that while we may have intelligence and cunning far exceeding that of our ancestors, we often use that intelligence to serve animal aims—for instance, procreation. I had many supposedly just-friends relationships with guys, but I saw that sexual desire often lay coiled beneath our calm and innocent intellectual discussions.
So to me, PUA seemed much more honest than the rest of the world of ideas, and much more correct about the facts of human nature (at least as it exists in this society). This gave me a pretty high prior for PUA being right about things, and so I believed their essentialist and evo-psych explanations. These days, I’m less certain about PUA claims that women are inherently submissive, or more at the mercy of their emotions than men—but I still see why these ideas seem plausible and appealing. They fit the data pretty well, and give a nice generative model for it and everything. =P
...I’m not really sure why I’m telling this story. When I read this post, I thought “oh, interesting, submitter E seems to have a lot in common with me—and she also felt drawn to PUA ideas”. So I guess I wanted to give some perspective on why that might be. I do agree with you, Multiheaded, that it’s dangerous to equate one’s own sexual preferences with gender essentialism, evo-psych arguments, etc.
I believe that at least a large part of feminism was created by women who were unhappy in an environment which didn’t suit their personalities and/or made it very easy for men to abuse women.
Revolutions generally come with from an impulse to throw off imposed ideals, but usually end up imposing new ideals. The king is dead. Long live the king.
The desire for freedom is freedom from a constraint, and doesn’t allow the naturally coalition building and power accretion of those who would impose constraints.
My guess—you saw the value to yourself of seeing your views not being portrayed as perverted, and took the opportunity to give the same kind of support to others who might feel that way.
I think PUAs’ essentialist explanations are correct statistically, the way men are taller than women statistically, but there still are quite a few five-foot-six (1.68 m) men and five-foot-eleven (1.80 m) women.
In the interests of luminosity, to what extent do you believe this statement is an example of the naturalistic fallacy?
That is, if feminism is an ethical stance, then it is concerned with how people ought to act, not how they do act. Your justification of PUA seems to be that it better describes reality, which wasn’t the goal of feminism to begin with.
Most of the ethical claims of things like feminism are I would argue, instrumentally rational rather than terminally rational claims.
“Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies!”
(But enough talk, have at thee!)
I agree. I was responding to Argency’s claim that feminism only makes purely ethical claims and is the non-disprovable.
Hang on, I don’t think that feminism is non-disprovable! If you think I do then you’ve misinterpreted me in a big way.
I don’t agree that feminism is an instrumentally rational theory, I think it’s justifiable (and justified) on moral grounds. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make any predictions about the way the world actually is or will be because it isn’t a science, it’s an ethics, and ethical theories make predictions about how the world should be.
Of course, that makes it harder to disprove but not impossible. If I thought that morals were totally relative and non-disprovable then I’d give up on them altogether and
start building a tower-o’-doom do whatever I wanted without thinking hard about whether or not it was right. I really do believe that consequentialism is the way to a correct theory of ethics, and I think that it leads to feminism, given our current situation.EDIT: see
strikethroughI very much doubt it. Analogously, theists subscribing to the divine command theory of ethics who end up losing their faith generally don’t slaughter everyone they know and assemble a giant blasphemous meat-effigy out of the pieces.
Touche. I was speaking for effect: obviously I don’t actually want a tower-o-doom so I wouldn’t build one even if it was morally permissible. On the other hand, if I thought morals were relative, I wouldn’t be able to mount an argument for NOT committing atrocities that didn’t boil down to, ‘please don’t do that’. I think I can mount a better argument than that, so it follows that I think ethical statements are objectively justifiable.
UPDATE: edited the grandparent in response to Nornagest’s accurate criticism.
Do you consider “we prefer nobody do that and are willing to enforce our preferences in that matter against anyone who doesn’t share them” to boil down to “please don’t do that”?
More or less. Both of them are along the lines of ‘don’t do what you want, do what I want instead’. A good moral argument on the other hand should convince the other person to adopt a different set of desires, more along the lines of ‘don’t want what you want, want what I want instead’.
OK, fair enough.
Do you prefer good moral arguments to other methods of altering someone else’s preferences? (Or perhaps I should back up and first ask, do you think there are other methods of altering someone else’s preferences?)
There are other ways of altering people’s preferences, sure. In simple situations where you have the option of argument and think it’ll work I guess I favour moral argument for convincing, since it tends to give the other person more agency. I could give a thorough justification for those opinions but I think we’ve strayed from the topic of conversation a little here.
“generally”...?
It sometimes happens.
So you believe that encouraging people to act in accordance with feminism will lead to maximizing utility? Because evolutionary psychology/PUA has something to say about this claim.
It’s worth noting that our concepts of feminism probably differ from one another at least slightly—really these days feminism is just an umbrella term for a big splintered tree graph of ideologies and social theories and ethical theories and literary perspectives… Half of the time they disagree with one another, and there’s a lot of variance when it comes to sanity.
But, broadly, yes. None of the terms of my utility function are labeled ‘feminism’, but when I ‘run the numbers’ I find that the function tends to endorse courses of action and social heuristics that are roughly functionally equivalent to some strains of feminism. I have read some of the ev-psych/PUA literature and I found it unconvincing for a variety of specific reasons and some overarching general ones.
Also, I agree with Prismattic.
Evolution has selected for successful reproduction. That might correlate with utility or happiness, but that’s an empirical question, not a given.
No one is claiming it is.
Edit: The argument is not “evolution has selected us for X, therefore we should do X”. It’s “evolution has selected as for X, therefore humans have property Y, therefore organizing society according to principal Z leads to more efficient utility generation.”
2nd try replying to this, since people worried first was hard to parse:
I think that sexism is mostly folk psychology—false when tested, but not untestable given smart experimenters. Thus, feminism predicts that sexist hypotheses are not the way the world actually is, and that’s empirical.
But, there are a lot of people rallying under flags with “feminism” on them, and they vary widely. So many of them probably just assume the current facts as we know them (good) and so merely claim that under those facts certain things may be wrong, ethically. And you have others who actually believe sexist claims but still want to be called feminist. So maybe tabooing is needed.
I think the empirical claims of feminism are now successful, but they did exist. Sexism, after all, has empirical claims.
I can’t seem to parse this literally. Do you mean that some past empirical claims of feminism are no longer true do the success of the political advocacy of feminism? That seems true (with some controversy on the degree of ‘some’).
For “successful” read “accepted”. (Some are now accepted as historical facts.)
OK I’m downvoted so I must have missed something. Help guys?
I think one problem is what wedrifid says: it is difficult to work out what your comment actually means.
“the empirical claims of feminism are now successful”: what does it mean for an empirical claim to be successful? Is that the same as “true”, or something else?
“but they did exist”: why “but”? what’s the opposition between existing and “being successful”?
I gather that you were disagreeing with Argency’s statement that feminism “doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make any predictions about the way the world actually is or will be” on the grounds that you consider that feminism does (among other things) make claims about how the world is. Fair enough (and for what it’s worth I’d agree), but it seems to me that the obvious diagnosis is that you and Argency disagree about what “feminism” means, in which case merely saying “but it does make empirical claims” doesn’t achieve much.
So: two problems. A statement whose meaning is hard to make sense of, treating a disagreement as one about how the world is when it’s probably actually more about how to use one particular word. I’d guess that whoever downvoted you had one or both of those in mind.
(I’d also say: being downvoted by one person is not particularly strong evidence of anything; don’t get upset about it. But if you find yourself being downvoted a lot, the chances are that either you should change something or else LW just isn’t a good place for you.)
Ah yeah successful should maybe have been accepted, or universal, or maybe claims should have been arguments. Thanks!
My first attempt to clarify was downvoted too :(
… oh. It is a very vague word … I figured they were just underestimating the coherence of opposing arguments, since it’s easy to when the position in question is quite discredited so you don’t encounter them… I’ll try asking them what they meant, good idea.
There are actually quite a few female authors in the PUA arena, including wives advocating men adopt some of these techniques on the basis that it improved their own relationship. I don’t find it surprising here.
It seems to me that you’re objecting to people comfortable with liking what they like.
She likes what she likes. The teenage boy likes what he likes. Where’s your empathy for them?
(fixed)
Well, yeah, you’re right. I’ll limit myself to a general remark that the post could’ve probably been written in a less revealing way while still getting her opinion across.
Why? Aren’t sexual and lifestyle preferences the prototypical application of ev-psych, and I’d say PUA as well?
Perhaps, but feminism is not really incompatible with reasonably sane forms of ev-psych or PUA. Also, this post is really about female privilege rather than feminism persay. The submitter has actually identified a very interesting source of female privilege (i.e. ‘biased point of view’), namely the fact that being conventionally attractive allows her to easily relate to men and get positive attention from them. Most men will not have any comparable experience, and it’s easy to see how this might unwittingly bias female points of view about such things as PUA, etc.; perhaps even about gender relations generally. Similar points could be raised about what she says re: her emotions and intuitions, since again, these will probably not be shared by most males.
I’m not sure I understand the first sentence, or where the second sentence is going. Do you mean by conflating … preferences with jargon that you don’t like her using the jargon to describe her experiences? And you prefer she use feminist language like you’ve read in some other posts?
I didn’t get that connotation from E’s submission, possibly because I do like cooking and stuff and I’m male.
And thus, the quoted piece is … self-evidently true? One of us is misunderstanding the person the quoted.