The famous “[elevatorgate]” case is highly relevant to the topic, I’m surprised no one has brought it up.
The short version: Rebecca Watson was leaving a mixer after an atheist conference to go to her hotel room. A guy followed her to the elevator and invited her to come to his room for coffee. She felt creeped out/disturbed by the incident and wrote about it on her blog. The incident got a lot of attention after Richard Dawkins left a comment mocking Watson’s reaction.
Amanda Marcotte’s response was typical of the feminist reaction.
In sum, men who corner women know what they’re doing. And yes, they are relying on the fear of rape to grease the wheels towards getting laid. Rebecca may not have put it that way, but being a mean ol’ feminist bitch, I’m happy to say it. Also: duh. It also strikes me, in my dealing with geek culture, that there’s a taboo against rejecting someone, and creepy dudes also are happy to exploit that, knowing that women who reject them will be condemned for violating the “don’t be judgmental” rule.
The total lack of interest in seeing this from the elevator man’s perspective is typical. Neither Watson nor Marcotte seemed to have ever asked themselves why a person might prefer to invite someone for coffee in private, rather than in front of a bunch of people. He probably was shy, and didn’t want to risk being shot down in front of people. Instead they conclude that the only reason he would have waited to ask her until after she left was that he wanted to get her alone to intimidate her.
In high school, if a nerdy/awkward/unattractive boy showed interest or even spoke to a pretty, popular girl, he was often subjected to taunts of “creepy/stalker/weirdo” etc. The implicit demand is that loser men should not even dare speak to these women unless they have explicit permission.
You make rules. People abuse them. You make meta-rules against abusing the rules. People abuse the meta-rules.
You make rules to help less socially skilled people to raise from the bottom. More socially skilled people are better at playing these rules, so at the end, the less socially skilled people remain at the bottom. Any advantage you design for less socially skilled people, if it has positive total worth, it will be taken by the more socially skilled people.
If it’s making a rule explicit that socially skilled people already know and use, then this should narrow the difference between socially skilled people and some socially unskilled people.
There will be some socially unskilled people who don’t hear about the rule, don’t understand it, or can’t or won’t follow it. They’ll be relatively worse off.
I’ve always thought of this incident in terms of the calibration idea above.
The chance of his advance succeeding, given that in that context she was a celebrity and that they hadn’t established any rapport, were incredibly slim. It was a total hail mary. And it was made in a context that made rejection more uncomfortable (confined space), and it was pretty directly sexual.
In short, the advance was wildly miscalibrated: it was such a stunningly bad bet, she concluded that he just didn’t have her interests on the ledger at all. And that pissed her off, and I think that’s thoroughly reasonable.
Agree totally.
It was not, however, in itself worth the outrage. The only reason anybody remembers it as Elevatorgate is because of the huge war that developed over it.
Maybe I’m not geeky enough (or not part of a culture enough): Is there a taboo against rejecting someone in geek culture? What exactly does that mean? It seems like a bizarrely bad rule in and of itself, not just because it is exploited by “creepy dudes”.
1) Many geeks have (or at least had at some part of their lives) low social skills. Which makes them generally more forgiving to lack of social skills in other people, because there is a silent voice in their heads telling them “if having low social skills is enough reason to send someone away, then you should be sent away too”; or at least a fear that if there is a treshold of required social skills and it starts rising, at some point it could rise too high for them too, so it is better to oppose it while the treshold is low. From inside, tolerating people with low social skills feels like a virtue, like not being a bully.
Overdoing this can lead to suboptimal results. Presence of people with low social skills can drive other people away, or at least prevent new people from joining. Also there is something like the opposite of the “evaporative cooling”—if most human groups send people with low social skills away, and only some groups accept them, then those tolerant groups will have improportionally huge amounts of such people; they will collect the outcasts from other groups. In extreme situations it can lead to accepting people who later do something really bad (like hurt other group members)… at which moment every outsider will wonder: “How could you just not see all these obvious red flags?” Well, if you train yourself to ignore them, and become proud of your ability to do so...
2) Our kind is known for its failures to cooperate. To reject someone from the group, people have to cooperate at rejecting. Otherwise it is just you having a personal conflict with the person, and it’s probably you who will leave the group.
Generally, trying to reject someone will be pattern-matched by too many people to their own experience of being rejected or bullied at the high school. And the lack of social skills will not be helpful in trying to communicate this problem.
Overdoing this can lead to suboptimal results. Presence of people with low social skills can drive other people away, or at least prevent new people from joining.
It’s worth noting that the actual event in the elevator wasn’t actually all that bad (although it was creepy). Elevatorgate is only notable because it stirred the pot and brought a huge upwelling of rape threats and stuff like that to the surface.
In high school, if a nerdy/awkward/unattractive boy showed interest or even spoke to a pretty, popular girl, he was often subjected to taunts of “creepy/stalker/weirdo” etc. The implicit demand is that loser men should not even dare speak to these women unless they have explicit permission.
It’s important to note that “nerdy/loser/awkward/unattractive” men (and women) frequently in fact lack social skills, which is a major part of what leads to that label being applied in the first place.
I know people who would generally be considered physically unattractive but were very socially popular; similarly I know people who would generally be considered physically attractive who were socially unpopular despite this (significant) advantage.
Unfortunately, social skills are often difficult to learn or even notice one needs to improve, leading to widespread frustration among those who lack them but don’t realize this fact.
My general recommendation is that anyone reading this comment should improve their social skills, and I say this not as an indictment of the social skill level of the average LW reader but rather as advice that applies to nearly everyone, regardless of current status.
He probably was shy, and didn’t want to risk being shot down in front of people.
Citation needed.
Here is the original source text of ElevatorGate. (8-minute video, no transcription. Start around 3m15s to save 3m15s.). Here is her subsequent text response to comments.
I don’t see anything in there about the character of the man, only his actions. And even if his character was as you have imagined it to be, so what? Being wrong does not excuse being wrong.
I’m going to need a citation that supports your claim that I need a citation.
I’m not arguing that this must have been elevator-man’s motivation, but that not wanting to risk asking someone out in front of lots of others is a very common sentiment. I certainly remember the process of trying to ask a girl on a date in high school, and trying to find a moment alone was always a part of it. It’s certainly more reasonable than interpreting his actions as a form of intimidation.
I’m not arguing that this must have been elevator-man’s motivation, but that not wanting to risk asking someone out in front of lots of others is a very common sentiment. I certainly remember the process of trying to ask a girl on a date in high school, and trying to find a moment alone was always a part of it.
Everyone faces that problem. But even if this is a primary reason for the man’s actions (and I have seen nothing to favour the hypothesis), the man still found a really bad solution.
I explicitly said that it doesn’t matter whether that in particular was his motivation. There are a number of perfectly acceptable reasons for his behavior and I can think of several off the top of my head that are more plausible than “he was trying to intimidate her into having sex.”
I’m not arguing that this must have been elevator-man’s motivation, but that not wanting to risk asking someone out in front of lots of others is a very common sentiment.
Even if we grant this, it doesn’t affect the conclusion that Elevator Guy behaved unreasonably. The reason this particular incident attracted so much attention in the first place was because it involved such a perfect storm of disturbing/threatening factors. Each of these factors might have been considered quite mild when taken in isolation, but the problem was ‘death by a thousand cuts’.
You are interpreting “shy” as a fixed character trait rather than a situational one. Many people who are not ordinarily shy-acting are shy when it comes to asking someone something personal in front of a group of friends and acquaintances.
There was nothing that forced the guy in that interaction to start the interaction by asking something personal.
He could have started interacting with her by making harmless small talk.
The famous “[elevatorgate]” case is highly relevant to the topic, I’m surprised no one has brought it up.
The short version: Rebecca Watson was leaving a mixer after an atheist conference to go to her hotel room. A guy followed her to the elevator and invited her to come to his room for coffee. She felt creeped out/disturbed by the incident and wrote about it on her blog. The incident got a lot of attention after Richard Dawkins left a comment mocking Watson’s reaction. Amanda Marcotte’s response was typical of the feminist reaction.
The total lack of interest in seeing this from the elevator man’s perspective is typical. Neither Watson nor Marcotte seemed to have ever asked themselves why a person might prefer to invite someone for coffee in private, rather than in front of a bunch of people. He probably was shy, and didn’t want to risk being shot down in front of people. Instead they conclude that the only reason he would have waited to ask her until after she left was that he wanted to get her alone to intimidate her.
In high school, if a nerdy/awkward/unattractive boy showed interest or even spoke to a pretty, popular girl, he was often subjected to taunts of “creepy/stalker/weirdo” etc. The implicit demand is that loser men should not even dare speak to these women unless they have explicit permission.
It reminds me of when men talk about their clingy ex-girlfriends or “psycho girls” who are madly in love with them. It’s a way of talking about how desirable you are without nakedly bragging.
Some meta observations:
You make rules. People abuse them. You make meta-rules against abusing the rules. People abuse the meta-rules.
You make rules to help less socially skilled people to raise from the bottom. More socially skilled people are better at playing these rules, so at the end, the less socially skilled people remain at the bottom. Any advantage you design for less socially skilled people, if it has positive total worth, it will be taken by the more socially skilled people.
If it’s making a rule explicit that socially skilled people already know and use, then this should narrow the difference between socially skilled people and some socially unskilled people.
There will be some socially unskilled people who don’t hear about the rule, don’t understand it, or can’t or won’t follow it. They’ll be relatively worse off.
I’ve always thought of this incident in terms of the calibration idea above.
The chance of his advance succeeding, given that in that context she was a celebrity and that they hadn’t established any rapport, were incredibly slim. It was a total hail mary. And it was made in a context that made rejection more uncomfortable (confined space), and it was pretty directly sexual.
In short, the advance was wildly miscalibrated: it was such a stunningly bad bet, she concluded that he just didn’t have her interests on the ledger at all. And that pissed her off, and I think that’s thoroughly reasonable.
Agree totally. It was not, however, in itself worth the outrage. The only reason anybody remembers it as Elevatorgate is because of the huge war that developed over it.
Maybe I’m not geeky enough (or not part of a culture enough): Is there a taboo against rejecting someone in geek culture? What exactly does that mean? It seems like a bizarrely bad rule in and of itself, not just because it is exploited by “creepy dudes”.
Seems to me there are two important factors:
1) Many geeks have (or at least had at some part of their lives) low social skills. Which makes them generally more forgiving to lack of social skills in other people, because there is a silent voice in their heads telling them “if having low social skills is enough reason to send someone away, then you should be sent away too”; or at least a fear that if there is a treshold of required social skills and it starts rising, at some point it could rise too high for them too, so it is better to oppose it while the treshold is low. From inside, tolerating people with low social skills feels like a virtue, like not being a bully.
Overdoing this can lead to suboptimal results. Presence of people with low social skills can drive other people away, or at least prevent new people from joining. Also there is something like the opposite of the “evaporative cooling”—if most human groups send people with low social skills away, and only some groups accept them, then those tolerant groups will have improportionally huge amounts of such people; they will collect the outcasts from other groups. In extreme situations it can lead to accepting people who later do something really bad (like hurt other group members)… at which moment every outsider will wonder: “How could you just not see all these obvious red flags?” Well, if you train yourself to ignore them, and become proud of your ability to do so...
2) Our kind is known for its failures to cooperate. To reject someone from the group, people have to cooperate at rejecting. Otherwise it is just you having a personal conflict with the person, and it’s probably you who will leave the group.
Generally, trying to reject someone will be pattern-matched by too many people to their own experience of being rejected or bullied at the high school. And the lack of social skills will not be helpful in trying to communicate this problem.
Interesting. Though, I read the comment as suggesting a taboo against rejecting a romantic/sexual advance not against excluding someone from a group.
Oh, you are right! Seems like my thoughts switched to a different topic while composing the comment in my head. :D
The Cat Piss Man problem.
That’s GSF#1.
The standard essay is Five Geek Social Fallacies.
It’s worth noting that the actual event in the elevator wasn’t actually all that bad (although it was creepy). Elevatorgate is only notable because it stirred the pot and brought a huge upwelling of rape threats and stuff like that to the surface.
It’s important to note that “nerdy/loser/awkward/unattractive” men (and women) frequently in fact lack social skills, which is a major part of what leads to that label being applied in the first place.
I know people who would generally be considered physically unattractive but were very socially popular; similarly I know people who would generally be considered physically attractive who were socially unpopular despite this (significant) advantage.
Unfortunately, social skills are often difficult to learn or even notice one needs to improve, leading to widespread frustration among those who lack them but don’t realize this fact.
My general recommendation is that anyone reading this comment should improve their social skills, and I say this not as an indictment of the social skill level of the average LW reader but rather as advice that applies to nearly everyone, regardless of current status.
Citation needed.
Here is the original source text of ElevatorGate. (8-minute video, no transcription. Start around 3m15s to save 3m15s.). Here is her subsequent text response to comments.
I don’t see anything in there about the character of the man, only his actions. And even if his character was as you have imagined it to be, so what? Being wrong does not excuse being wrong.
I’m going to need a citation that supports your claim that I need a citation.
I’m not arguing that this must have been elevator-man’s motivation, but that not wanting to risk asking someone out in front of lots of others is a very common sentiment. I certainly remember the process of trying to ask a girl on a date in high school, and trying to find a moment alone was always a part of it. It’s certainly more reasonable than interpreting his actions as a form of intimidation.
There are many places where you can talk to a person alone that aren’t elevators that prevent physical escape.
Everyone faces that problem. But even if this is a primary reason for the man’s actions (and I have seen nothing to favour the hypothesis), the man still found a really bad solution.
I explicitly said that it doesn’t matter whether that in particular was his motivation. There are a number of perfectly acceptable reasons for his behavior and I can think of several off the top of my head that are more plausible than “he was trying to intimidate her into having sex.”
Even if we grant this, it doesn’t affect the conclusion that Elevator Guy behaved unreasonably. The reason this particular incident attracted so much attention in the first place was because it involved such a perfect storm of disturbing/threatening factors. Each of these factors might have been considered quite mild when taken in isolation, but the problem was ‘death by a thousand cuts’.
Here you go. And this. HTH.
Supplying a complete text and video citation in direct response to a claim gets downvoted to −5? There’s some fucked up people here.
Does a guy who’s really shy ask a woman who wants to go to bed that he doesn’t know at 4AM to come to his hotel room?
You are interpreting “shy” as a fixed character trait rather than a situational one. Many people who are not ordinarily shy-acting are shy when it comes to asking someone something personal in front of a group of friends and acquaintances.
There was nothing that forced the guy in that interaction to start the interaction by asking something personal. He could have started interacting with her by making harmless small talk.
What it means to be shy is that someone is bad at doing small talk.