Often I hear guys complain that an advance is deemed “creepy” if it’s unwelcome, but not if the same thing were said or done by an attractive man. I also see a lot of emphasis on “confidence”. Guys are often advised to “be more confident” in the way they approach or “escalate” with women.
The problem is, sexual advances are often gambles where the potential downsides are paid by the party approached, not by the one who does the approaching. When you think of it this way, complaining about unwanted advances is perfectly justified, and telling guys to “be more confident” is totally upside-down.
The advice here is in general very “high risk”: if the girl didn’t want to be kissed and the guy grabbed her and moved in suddenly in that way, that would really suck for her. Often these types of risks are also high-reward: a welcome advance of this type is often hotter than a more timid one. Being pressed against a wall and kissed is awesome if it’s welcome, and horrifying if it’s not.
What’s truly valuable is a well-calibrated and highly accurate model of how your advances will be received. That lets you carry off these high risk, high reward advances. But time and again I see people advocating confidence—as though just predicting that every advance will succeed were the solution. Wishing does not make it so.
To avoid being creepy, the focus should be on keeping your model well-calibrated, and on being fairly risk averse. If you think your advance is unlikely to succeed, you either shouldn’t make it in the first place, or you should be careful to give the other person a graceful way to decline.
So, in the example of kissing that girl for the first time from before, I’d be suggesting he get verbal consent. He’s having trouble predicting whether she wants to be kissed from the non-verbal interaction, so he has to take the lower risk option, even though it comes with a lower reward.
This idea of a well-calibrated model is also behind my objection to a lot of PUA advice. It often sounds to me like the negative externality is “priced out”. Guys are advised that they have nothing to lose from approaching a lot of women. Well, that might be so, but the women do have something to lose, even if it’s only a mild discomfort, and it’s totally unethical to not care about that. The fact that the downsides are external should strongly encourage risk aversion.
To avoid being creepy, the focus should be on keeping your model well-calibrated, and on being fairly risk averse.
How is he to get calibrated while being risk averse and not taking data? Calibration implies knowing the boundary between yes and no.
For the first time kiss, I thought the “suddenly” was exactly the wrong advice. The proper tactic, IMO, is to go slowly and incrementally. Confidence is projected by going slowly but with clear intent. That also allows a woman to decline graciously. She should not be asking “what was that”, because you should have made it clear before doing it.
In most physical and emotional human endeavors, rushing is the sign of a mind focused on success/failure instead of the act. Do not try, do.
So, in the example of kissing that girl for the first time from before, I’d be suggesting he get verbal consent.
That seems a comment based in ideology, and not reality. I guess there must be some women for whom that would work, but I believe most women would find that a massive cold shower—perhaps permanently. The offer and consent should be nonverbal. Going slowly and incrementally allows you to minimize any delta between act and consent.
That seems a comment based in ideology, and not reality. I guess there must be some women for whom that would work, but I believe most women would find that a massive cold shower—perhaps permanently. The offer and consent should be nonverbal. Going slowly and incrementally allows you to minimize any delta between act and consent.
I think this is really an imagination failure for how “verbal consent” would work. An example that includes a minor verbal component: I often smile and say something like “come here” while shifting myself around (e.g. putting my arm around him/her). We then meet half way. This works just fine.
I’ve had someone say something like “God! I’ve been trying to find a break to kiss you for the last five minutes, but we keep just having too much to say!”. That was absolutely fine too.
A friend once told me he said something like, “you know what’s awesome? Make outs are awesome”.
I can’t remember whether I’ve ever done something as direct as whispering “can I kiss you”, but it’s hard to imagine that being a deal breaker for anyone I’ve hooked up with.
The post that advice was in reply to made it clear that they had an ongoing thing, and that they’d already talked about having more-than-friends feelings for each other. In that kind of situation, the girl knows whether she wants to be kissed, and so it actually only matters a little bit how you get there. She’s not going to change her mind about the whole thing just because the initial approach was a little bit clumsy.
Out of interest, do you have the same opinion about explicit verbal consent in other situations? Like, would you say something like, “Can I take these off?” A more specific example: The other week I was making out and cuddling with a girl, and we’d already explicitly negotiated that we wouldn’t be having sex. So at some point we were spooning, and I asked “Can I touch your breasts?”. She hesitated, so I said, “Ah, that’s a no, don’t worry”. She was obviously relieved, and we continued without any problems. This sort of thing only comes up a small minority of the time, but when it does I think it’s actually pretty important to verbalise things. So I’m wondering whether you have a different system, or just never find yourself needing to check in with someone that directly?
I think this is really an imagination failure for how “verbal consent” would work. An example that includes a minor verbal component: I often smile and say something like “come here” while shifting myself around (e.g. putting my arm around him/her). We then meet half way. This works just fine.
I imagine a great many things, and many of those I don’t call “verbal consent”.
I don’t see that as much different than doing a little “come here” sign with your finger. That’s not a question, and you didn’t receive verbal consent in reply. You can accomplish the same effect just by doing—approach, but don’t continue without a positive response in answer.
With the breasts, no, I wouldn’t explicitly ask in that way. Hands go on body, hands caress slowly toward breasts. Pay attention to response. Another way is to look where you intend the hands to go, and go there. Perhaps a comment on the breasts first.
“Can I take these off?” Probably more like “Let’s take these off.” Which again, is more like what you generally do. You don’t say “will you come here?”, you say “come here”.
I don’t see that as much different than doing a little “come here” sign with your finger. That’s not a question, and you didn’t receive verbal consent in reply. You can accomplish the same effect just by doing—approach, but don’t continue without a positive response in answer.
In that specific case the verbal aspect isn’t so important, no. And the big difference from the context in the advice thread is that I don’t have trouble communicating my intent with the body language anyway. But it has felt once or twice that saying something, even something token, has given them more of an opportunity to say something back, and this has led to a non-awkward refusal. I’m not surprised if you find that unconvincing, it’s a personal thing and pretty context-specific.
With the breasts, no, I wouldn’t explicitly ask in that way. Hands go on body, hands caress slowly toward breasts. Pay attention to response. Another way is to look where you intend the hands to go, and go there. Perhaps a comment on the breasts first.
“Can I take these off?” Probably more like “Let’s take these off.” Which again, is more like what you generally do. You don’t say “will you come here?”, you say “come here”.
For me it really depends on my model of what I think they want. Like, assume I’m pretty sure that there’ll be a line somewhere. Obviously, the right thing to do isn’t just “escalate until they give an explicit ‘no’ (either verbally, or by moving my hand away)”. But even if you just proceed cautiously and keep gauging their response, they’re likely to spend a lot of the time thinking about when/whether you’re going to push past where they’re comfortable, and steeling themselves to give that no when it happens. Especially with girls, most will have had more than a few negative experiences with pushy guys.
I mean, I’m not exactly timid or inexperienced, but I still hate it when a guy just grabs a condom and rips it open, if that makes me say “no”.
For the first time kiss, I thought the “suddenly” was exactly the wrong advice.
I think what the ‘suddenly’ is really getting at is that the first-time kiss should be seen as a pleasant surprise from your partner’s POV. It’s certainly possible to make this compatible with a slow and intentful approach (where you can gauge implied, non-verbal consent), but it does require a bit of strategizing. However, actual verbal consent seems to be incompatible with this goal—for this and other reasons, I agree that it wouldn’t really work in practice.
However, actual verbal consent seems to be incompatible with this goal—for this and other reasons, I agree that it wouldn’t really work in practice.
Among other limitations, I think the verbal consent business puts one in the wrong frame of mind—getting into a verbal, logical mode is not conducive to getting busy.
Not sure about that. Sex-positive consent-culture feminists typically suggest combining verbal consent w/ verbal seduction and nonverbal consent w/ nonverbal seduction.
This, is, however, all after one is clearly in lover-space and not the friend-zone, leading up to actual sex/kissing/whatever.
‘Rescripting Sex’ (Pervocracy 2012) is a good explanation of this. Unfortunately I don’t see how to adapt it for very early nonphysical interactions/flirting/whatever.
My preferred solution is better norms but that will never happen.
The point is that both men and women are immersed in guess culture from day 1 when it comes to romance, and so asking rather than guessing really is rude to average people, even though guessing carries very real costs.
My usual way out of this is to introduce other levels of indirection. E.g., “I often wonder whether it’s OK to ask people X in situations like these. It’s tricky, because sometimes not having asked is taken as demonstrating a lack of interest in X, which is of course a problem when I genuinely am interested, but on the other hand sometimes asking is taken as expressing too much interest in X, which is of course a problem when it makes people uncomfortable. Oh, look, pie… would you like some?”
Of course, this is within the context of my goal being to communicate my state meaningfully enough that other people can make meaningful decisions, which I understand is only one of many possible goals.
I… uhh… don’t really understand what you mean. Except that I wish I had some pie right now.
Of course it’s often moot since I operate similar to Yvain does (i.e. though opera-worth crushes that have to be toned down to a ludicrous degree to avoid scaring off even totally interested people).
Wow. That was jarring. I like Yvain’s writing a lot, so the level of cluelessness on dating is a bit of a revelation about how compartmentalised social intuition can be from general reasoning.
Those posts are interesting and relevant, and I’ve had discussions about similar topics with people from different cultures.
With that framing, what I’m saying is that you want to be guessing very well, and you’re violating norms in a way that costs the other party utilons if you’re too “asky”—which is what the PUA advice amounts to.
But I’d also say there’s a continuum, depending on how you make the move.
Yeah, we should respect the guess culture. Imagine a limit of askiness, where you regularly force people to be explicit about not being attracted to you, while also communicating that you very much want them to be. I think that even with different cultural norms, that communication’s going to be painful for them, so it’s quite right that it’s considered rude to put them through it.
Imagine a limit of askiness, where you regularly force people to be explicit about not being attracted to you, while also communicating that you very much want them to be. I think that even with different cultural norms, that communication’s going to be painful for them, so it’s quite right that it’s considered rude to put them through it.
Here’s a hypothetical for you: a man looks at a woman from across the room, and proceeds to walk in her direction, gazing directly into her eyes in a way that indicates attraction/romantic interest. He’s walking from something of a distance, and actually only begins walking just after she happens to notice that he’s looking. He maintains his gaze.
Within a second or two, she’s going to display a reaction of some kind—a reaction that will be pretty darn indicative of whether the approach is welcome or not. And if it’s not, the man’s gaze shifts slightly, so that he’s looking past her, as though to someone further along the path, and his route diverges slightly, so that he passes without intruding on her personal space.
Is this “ask” or “guess”? Is the woman forced to be “explicit about not being attracted”, while the man is “communicating that you very much want them to be”? Is it a painful communication, and rude to put them through it?
I assume that the man and the woman are in a culture where they don’t take for granted a level of explicit awareness of social cues that eliminates significant ambiguity or plausible deniability about what messages are being sent and received in a hypothetical case like that, because I’ve never encountered a culture that behaved otherwise.
Given that assumption, this seems pretty clearly a guess-culture (which I prefer to refer to as “hint culture”; “guess culture” is a very ask-culture way of referring to hint-culture) interaction. So, no, the woman is not being explicit, is not being forced to be explicit, and the man is not being explicit either. That’s precisely what hint-culture is for.
The dichotomy breaks down a bit here, but the important property is that both parties maintain plausible deniability. An argument I’ve heard Steven Pinker make (but might not be originally his) is that you can avert awkwardness by avoiding the creation of shared knowledge, and that’s the reason the plausible deniability is important.
The dichotomy breaks down a bit here, but the important property is that both parties maintain plausible deniability.
Right. I mentioned this example partly because it’s a PUA technique in the category of “forced IOIs”, which is an awkward name for maintaining plausible deniability about whether a request has been made and whether it has been rejected, to avoid awkwardness and social status loss.
Yeah, I notice that PUA stuff suggests being very asky before rapport is established, while feminist consent-culture stuff suggests being very asky after rapport is established.
Not sure that ‘asky’ is the right word here, since PUA is all about adapting to a hint culture. What PUA is very clear about is that it’s important to make one’s attraction known (put the cards on the table, as it were) well before the rapport/comfort stage is reached, in order to avoid creating a friendzone/Nice-Guy problem.
Feminists also suggest that when talking about the Nice Guy issue, although they also tend to claim that the friendzone doesn’t really have a hard boundary between it and the lover-zone. Possilby an inferential distance thing, possibly PUAs too cynical and failing at naive stuff when they actually get the chance.
I have no idea how to do that, and if I (personally) tried, i would probably shunt into Opera-Worthy Crush Mode.
the friendzone doesn’t really have a hard boundary between it and the lover-zone.
The boundary is not that hard, but it’s definitely there. IIRC, trying to cross that boundary is called “remixing” in PUA-speak, and it’s considered to be quite difficult. Part of the problem is that you most likely ended up in the friend-zone for a reason, so a “remix” often involves radically changing your outward identity in order to appeal to your ‘target’ in a lover-like, not friend-like sense.
Asides from that, PUA does tend to cultivate a healthy skepticism about “remixing”, because trying to remix is taken to be a sign of attachment which one should be clearly aware of, and either accept or discard. Basically, you might as well start out afresh with someone who is not going to have that unwanted association of you as a mere “friend”.
The advocacy of ‘confidence’ in this context is properly about alief, not belief. You can appear and feel confident while also being well-calibrated with respect to the consequences of your social moves. Incidentally, I have to agree that the advice from reddit is high-risk—I would not support it unless perhaps you had very strong evidence that the woman is attracted to you, but even then, some residual risk remains.
I disagree about the externality from unwanted interaction being “priced out”, since freaking people out is something guys would want to avoid at all costs.
I read a lot of PUA advice as basically counselling guys like this: there’s nothing to lose from an unsuccessful approach, you know that, so update your aliefs accordingly. The downside’s all in your head. So, they agree guys start by worrying about freaking people out, but their line of thinking is that that doesn’t actually matter. Except, that part is all tacit. I think the prominent men writing the advice are mostly very low empathy, so they don’t actually understand why normal guys have that aversion.
Second, I see what you’re saying, in that you don’t have to be nervous while you make some well-calibrated move. But, a move that offers a graceful out is going to be less confident, too, just along a slightly different dimension. I’ll get personal here: I use online dating sites, and I’m a bi male. So I make and receive advances quite regularly.
Going through my message history on a popular site that isn’t exclusively about casual sex, this advance slightly irritated me, and I didn’t reply:
Sydney_fella80: top or bottom?
Here’s how I phrased a message with basically the same intent, to a girl who said she was on the site for NSA sex, and partially indicated her interests:
Hey,
I find you quite fantastically hot, and I’ve always wanted to hook up with a top girl (and bottom for one, specifically). I’m pretty far from your stated type though, so no worries if you’re not keen. If not, just take this as some NSA admiration.
Cheers
Matt.
I gave her an easy out by raising a likely reason to decline my advance for her—which she took, in a very friendly reply. The message was confident in the sense that it suggested that rejection wouldn’t faze me, but was not confident at all about the advance succeeding—which is conventionally considered less attractive.
Online the stakes are really low, because you can just not reply. But a differently worded advance can still make the other person feel slightly flattered, or slightly gross.
there’s nothing to lose from an unsuccessful approach
This is mostly correct, conditional on following ‘good practices’ when approaching (and an aspiring PUA will want to do this anyway,in order to minimize effort and maximize the probability of being successful). Basically, the unstated assumption is that if you manage to freak out your ‘target’, you’re most likely doing something very, very wrong. It’s not just a numbers game.
I agree with your point about always “leaving a line of retreat”. AIUI, this is actively discussed in good PUA advice.
Line of retreat is also discussed by feminists (and I advocate it as well, and always make sure to explicitly include it.)
Also ties into the complaint of some woman (source not remembered) who seemed to be coming from a feminist framework, who complained about nerdy men who became too attached too quickly so that saying no became too costly to say to somebody she respected.
“Often I hear guys complain that an advance is deemed “creepy” if it’s unwelcome, but not if the same thing were said or done by an attractive man.”
Yes that seems to be the crux of some criticism, and for good reason. Anyone who has been through high-school knows a lot of unattractive or socially undesirable men get tremendous backlash for behaviors that a desirable men get away with. It doesn’t help that sometimes the word creep is a slur for an unattractive person hitting on another. The complaint goes beyond the double-standard, it sends a message that people have a right not to feel creeped out even when the feeling is unwarranted, and therefore benign behaviors (too much chatting or asking for a number) should be avoided altogether by some, specifically the awkward.
And many may also feel genuinely unsafe, but the advice given by many is to improve social skills or courting behavior, and this doesn’t mitigate any real harm. The legitimate creep or the awkward geek is not any less dangerous because he read Dale Carnegie or a PUA website.
Granted, some of the anecdotes are cause for legitimate concern, but I’m not addressing those.
it sends a message that people have a right not to feel creeped out even when the feeling is unwarranted
The word “right” seems to be unwarranted here. It’s not clear that people have a moral right not to be exposed to rude or anti-social behavior, but this does not make the behavior any less rude or anti-social. There is such a thing as good etiquette, however minor and trifling it may be when contrasted with genuine ethical concerns.
The legitimate creep or the awkward geek is not any less dangerous because he read Dale Carnegie or a PUA website.
But an awkward geek may unwittingly behave in ways that make people mistake him for a creeper; reading Dale Carnegie is a good way to address this. As for legitimate creepers, it would be nice if they too could reform and stop posing a danger to others; unfortunately, most of them seem to be actively hostile towards other people and lacking in empathy, so this is not a likely prospect.
As for legitimate creepers, it would be nice if they too could reform and stop posing a danger to others; unfortunately, most of them seem to be actively hostile towards other people and lacking in empathy, so this is not a likely prospect.
I think your confusing what John meant. Learning PUA/Carnegie doesn’t change someone’s goals only the means. A legitimate creep who acquires better social skills, doesn’t become a normal non-creep, he becomes a charming sociopath.
And many may also feel genuinely unsafe, but the advice given by many is to improve social skills or courting behavior, and this doesn’t mitigate any real harm.
This is not true. Actually creepy folks use unwillingness to reflect on social skills of society in general as camouflage. When called on their behavior, they can say something like “I was only joking” and escape most of the consequences.
But if society as a whole was more explicit about social norms, then (1) people who have trouble picking up social norms would be happier because the norms would be easier to learn, (2) people who want others to follow the norms without being required to follow themselves would have less room to operate, and (3) people who want to change the social norms would have an easier time communicating the case for a change of the norms.
I guess it might first help to define what creepy folks are. If we mean someone who is socially oblivious who is interested in a date, then it is undeniably false that all are using it as a form of camouflage, as many could attest to.
By mitigating real harm I mean mitigating the risk of a woman being near a potentially dangerous or coercive man, where some in the comments have said the “creepy” fear actually stems from, but awkward people can also give out this false signal. If this is true, then taking steps to improve ones social skills makes the safe men more accessible, but also gives ammo to a potentially dangerous one as well. No risk of harm is reduced.
Anyone who has been through high-school knows a lot of unattractive or socially undesirable men get tremendous backlash for behaviors that a desirable men get away with.
I didn’t go to a coed highschool, but I imagine a lot of that backlash was status signalling, and the target of the advance wasn’t genuinely aggrieved. So, that isn’t just.
But factoring that out, I think it’s quite right to view a guy making a bunch of unwanted advances as rather a jerk, depending on how much he makes rejecting him suck for the targets. He’s generating a bunch of negative utility.
When I see guys with poor social skills complain about this, it basically amounts to saying that it’s not fair. Sure—it’s not fair that looks and charm get parcelled out unevenly, but so what? You still don’t get to make your problem someone else’s.
It’s not fair that we become more unattractive as we age, but a 70 year old man who constantly makes unwelcome advances on young women is rightly viewed with contempt.
It’s not fair that gay men and women can very seldom hit on strangers with a good expected utility either. It doesn’t make it okay for them to just “assume they’re gay until stated otherwise”, given that most people are straight.
“I think it’s quite right to view a guy making a bunch of unwanted advances as rather a jerk, depending on how much he makes rejecting him suck for the targets. He’s generating a bunch of negative utility.”
Yes in that situation one would be jerk, but not everyone was complaining about a bunch of advances (and I did say that some of the grievances were justified), but even one advance or something that could have been miscontrued as an advance. If we (safely) assume the anecdotes come from people who have freely given out their number or have let a guy talk over them, then it sets a tone that the socially awkward should come off as asexual as possible to avoid offending a member of the opposite sex. That doesn’t seem like a reasonable expectation to put on others.
The problem is, sexual advances are often gambles where the potential downsides are paid by the party approached, not by the one who does the approaching.
I don’t think the potential downside of having to reject someone is much bigger than getting rejected.
It’s valuable to learn to accept a rejection without feeling bad just as it’s valuable to learn to give out rejections without feeling bad.
What’s truly valuable is a well-calibrated and highly accurate model of how your advances will be received. That lets you carry off these high risk, high reward advances. But time and again I see people advocating confidence—as though just predicting that every advance will succeed were the solution. Wishing does not make it so.
Confident advances are more likely to be successful and pleasent to the person being approached than unconfident advances.
What’s truly valuable is a well-calibrated and highly accurate model of how your advances will be received.
There no way to develop a well-calibrated model without making some mistakes along the way.
There no way to develop a well-calibrated model without making some mistakes along the way.
Would you say you were a proficient driver before you had your first car accident? We learn skills in fault intolerant contexts all the time. There’s a bunch of learning theory work about Bayesian models not needing negative examples too, although I don’t really think it’s relevant here.
I don’t think the potential downside of having to reject someone is much bigger than getting rejected.
There’s two things here. First, even if that’s true, the person who’s doing the rejecting didn’t ask to be approached. So even if the downsides are small, you’re playing dice on their behalf. And if you’re wrong a lot, and generate a bunch of negative utility for people who didn’t sign up for any risks, I think you deserve some culpability.
As for just how bad giving out a rejection is, again, I think it really depends on the advance.
Here’s the idea taken to the extreme: sometimes, waking someone up with oral sex is a very welcome advance. But you better be damn sure, because if you’re wrong, you’ve potentially done a great deal of harm. There’s a continuum of less presumptuous advances, through the press-them-against-the-wall example, to something like putting your arm out in front of them to block a door, or even just making the move in an elevator, that may make someone more or less uncomfortable if they have to reject the advance. This is the sense of “confident” that I’m talking about.
The answer isn’t, “that’s a consent violation and nobody should do that ever”. It’s that if you do do that, and you were wrong, you can’t excuse yourself from culpability by claiming it was an honest mistake.
I made mistakes ALL THE TIME when learning to drive, and my driving instructor normally caught them and yelled at me in time for it not to be a problem. You’re creating a false dichotomy when you compare any mistakes with a car crash.
There’s two things here. First, even if that’s true, the person who’s doing the rejecting didn’t ask to be approached.
It depends. Last week I was at a seminar where most seats are filled with people. I sat down next to the place where a girl put her bag and jacket with whom I chatted previously.
She sat the lecture next to me. Afterwards she asked me whether I was okay with her sitting next to me. In her mind she did make a choice to sit next to me for which I didn’t ask.
I don’t think it’s automatically more ethical to engineer a situation in a way where the other person thinks they are making the approach and proclaim you have no responsibility for being approached.
Most people are pretty bad at interpreting what goes on in an interaction and who actually initiates various things. Sometimes people interpret things wrong and do make honest mistakes.
As for just how bad giving out a rejection is, again, I think it really depends on the advance.
I grant that point. It makes sense to calibrate with acts that don’t produce much harm. Especially with acts that don’t contrain the ability of the other person to issue the rejection.
or even just making the move in an elevator, that may make someone more or less uncomfortable if they have to reject the advance. This is the sense of “confident” that I’m talking about.
I don’t think making a move in an elevator is an expression of confidence. I haven’t read a specific analysis of the situation from a PUA guy but I would expect them to advice against that behavior.
I don’t think making a move in an elevator is an expression of confidence. I haven’t read a specific analysis of the situation from a PUA guy but I would expect them to advice against that behavior.
I think tabooing “confidence” would end up being revealing here. I suspect yours, confidence-1, would read something like “not signalling anxiety or nervousness”, whereas I’m talking about confidence-2, the anticipated probability of success, which informs the expected value of an approach.
I accept responsibility for the miscommunication. In my initial post I talked about PUAs advocating “confidence”, and equated that to confidence-2. You and others have pointed out that actually some or all of the advocacy is for confidence-1, which I didn’t at first appreciate. I haven’t read all that much PUA stuff, so I’ll accept what you’ve said and leave it at that.
Anticipating success in an approach in no way implies that it’s a good idea to constrain another person to reject you.
If a girl thinks that she only gave you her phone number because you coerced her to give it to you, why should she answer the phone when you call and look forward to going on a date with you?
The way people backwards rationalize their behavior matters a lot.
Often I hear guys complain that an advance is deemed “creepy” if it’s unwelcome, but not if the same thing were said or done by an attractive man. I also see a lot of emphasis on “confidence”. Guys are often advised to “be more confident” in the way they approach or “escalate” with women.
The problem is, sexual advances are often gambles where the potential downsides are paid by the party approached, not by the one who does the approaching. When you think of it this way, complaining about unwanted advances is perfectly justified, and telling guys to “be more confident” is totally upside-down.
Take this example of a highly upvoted piece of advice on how a guy should try to kiss a girl for the first time: http://www.reddit.com/r/dating_advice/comments/1bymdq/never_datedbeen_in_a_relationship_i_m21_want_to/c9bu81j
The advice here is in general very “high risk”: if the girl didn’t want to be kissed and the guy grabbed her and moved in suddenly in that way, that would really suck for her. Often these types of risks are also high-reward: a welcome advance of this type is often hotter than a more timid one. Being pressed against a wall and kissed is awesome if it’s welcome, and horrifying if it’s not.
What’s truly valuable is a well-calibrated and highly accurate model of how your advances will be received. That lets you carry off these high risk, high reward advances. But time and again I see people advocating confidence—as though just predicting that every advance will succeed were the solution. Wishing does not make it so.
To avoid being creepy, the focus should be on keeping your model well-calibrated, and on being fairly risk averse. If you think your advance is unlikely to succeed, you either shouldn’t make it in the first place, or you should be careful to give the other person a graceful way to decline.
So, in the example of kissing that girl for the first time from before, I’d be suggesting he get verbal consent. He’s having trouble predicting whether she wants to be kissed from the non-verbal interaction, so he has to take the lower risk option, even though it comes with a lower reward.
This idea of a well-calibrated model is also behind my objection to a lot of PUA advice. It often sounds to me like the negative externality is “priced out”. Guys are advised that they have nothing to lose from approaching a lot of women. Well, that might be so, but the women do have something to lose, even if it’s only a mild discomfort, and it’s totally unethical to not care about that. The fact that the downsides are external should strongly encourage risk aversion.
How is he to get calibrated while being risk averse and not taking data? Calibration implies knowing the boundary between yes and no.
For the first time kiss, I thought the “suddenly” was exactly the wrong advice. The proper tactic, IMO, is to go slowly and incrementally. Confidence is projected by going slowly but with clear intent. That also allows a woman to decline graciously. She should not be asking “what was that”, because you should have made it clear before doing it.
In most physical and emotional human endeavors, rushing is the sign of a mind focused on success/failure instead of the act. Do not try, do.
That seems a comment based in ideology, and not reality. I guess there must be some women for whom that would work, but I believe most women would find that a massive cold shower—perhaps permanently. The offer and consent should be nonverbal. Going slowly and incrementally allows you to minimize any delta between act and consent.
I think this is really an imagination failure for how “verbal consent” would work. An example that includes a minor verbal component: I often smile and say something like “come here” while shifting myself around (e.g. putting my arm around him/her). We then meet half way. This works just fine.
I’ve had someone say something like “God! I’ve been trying to find a break to kiss you for the last five minutes, but we keep just having too much to say!”. That was absolutely fine too.
A friend once told me he said something like, “you know what’s awesome? Make outs are awesome”.
I can’t remember whether I’ve ever done something as direct as whispering “can I kiss you”, but it’s hard to imagine that being a deal breaker for anyone I’ve hooked up with.
The post that advice was in reply to made it clear that they had an ongoing thing, and that they’d already talked about having more-than-friends feelings for each other. In that kind of situation, the girl knows whether she wants to be kissed, and so it actually only matters a little bit how you get there. She’s not going to change her mind about the whole thing just because the initial approach was a little bit clumsy.
Out of interest, do you have the same opinion about explicit verbal consent in other situations? Like, would you say something like, “Can I take these off?” A more specific example: The other week I was making out and cuddling with a girl, and we’d already explicitly negotiated that we wouldn’t be having sex. So at some point we were spooning, and I asked “Can I touch your breasts?”. She hesitated, so I said, “Ah, that’s a no, don’t worry”. She was obviously relieved, and we continued without any problems. This sort of thing only comes up a small minority of the time, but when it does I think it’s actually pretty important to verbalise things. So I’m wondering whether you have a different system, or just never find yourself needing to check in with someone that directly?
I imagine a great many things, and many of those I don’t call “verbal consent”.
I don’t see that as much different than doing a little “come here” sign with your finger. That’s not a question, and you didn’t receive verbal consent in reply. You can accomplish the same effect just by doing—approach, but don’t continue without a positive response in answer.
With the breasts, no, I wouldn’t explicitly ask in that way. Hands go on body, hands caress slowly toward breasts. Pay attention to response. Another way is to look where you intend the hands to go, and go there. Perhaps a comment on the breasts first.
“Can I take these off?” Probably more like “Let’s take these off.” Which again, is more like what you generally do. You don’t say “will you come here?”, you say “come here”.
In that specific case the verbal aspect isn’t so important, no. And the big difference from the context in the advice thread is that I don’t have trouble communicating my intent with the body language anyway. But it has felt once or twice that saying something, even something token, has given them more of an opportunity to say something back, and this has led to a non-awkward refusal. I’m not surprised if you find that unconvincing, it’s a personal thing and pretty context-specific.
For me it really depends on my model of what I think they want. Like, assume I’m pretty sure that there’ll be a line somewhere. Obviously, the right thing to do isn’t just “escalate until they give an explicit ‘no’ (either verbally, or by moving my hand away)”. But even if you just proceed cautiously and keep gauging their response, they’re likely to spend a lot of the time thinking about when/whether you’re going to push past where they’re comfortable, and steeling themselves to give that no when it happens. Especially with girls, most will have had more than a few negative experiences with pushy guys.
I mean, I’m not exactly timid or inexperienced, but I still hate it when a guy just grabs a condom and rips it open, if that makes me say “no”.
I could probably work up some context specific thing too. I largely had the first kiss in mind. I don’t think it’s a winner for that.
Part of going slow is feeling if they’re relaxed and comfortable. If I’m relaxed. If they’re uncomfortable, it’s time to back off.
I think what the ‘suddenly’ is really getting at is that the first-time kiss should be seen as a pleasant surprise from your partner’s POV. It’s certainly possible to make this compatible with a slow and intentful approach (where you can gauge implied, non-verbal consent), but it does require a bit of strategizing. However, actual verbal consent seems to be incompatible with this goal—for this and other reasons, I agree that it wouldn’t really work in practice.
Among other limitations, I think the verbal consent business puts one in the wrong frame of mind—getting into a verbal, logical mode is not conducive to getting busy.
Not sure about that. Sex-positive consent-culture feminists typically suggest combining verbal consent w/ verbal seduction and nonverbal consent w/ nonverbal seduction.
This, is, however, all after one is clearly in lover-space and not the friend-zone, leading up to actual sex/kissing/whatever.
‘Rescripting Sex’ (Pervocracy 2012) is a good explanation of this. Unfortunately I don’t see how to adapt it for very early nonphysical interactions/flirting/whatever.
My preferred solution is better norms but that will never happen.
Here, read this post about ask culture and guess culture. Or get it closer to the source.
The point is that both men and women are immersed in guess culture from day 1 when it comes to romance, and so asking rather than guessing really is rude to average people, even though guessing carries very real costs.
I tend to get bogged down in infinite regress of ‘Should I ask if it’s okay to guess? Should I guess if it’s okay to ask if its okay to guess?’.
My usual way out of this is to introduce other levels of indirection. E.g., “I often wonder whether it’s OK to ask people X in situations like these. It’s tricky, because sometimes not having asked is taken as demonstrating a lack of interest in X, which is of course a problem when I genuinely am interested, but on the other hand sometimes asking is taken as expressing too much interest in X, which is of course a problem when it makes people uncomfortable. Oh, look, pie… would you like some?”
Of course, this is within the context of my goal being to communicate my state meaningfully enough that other people can make meaningful decisions, which I understand is only one of many possible goals.
I… uhh… don’t really understand what you mean. Except that I wish I had some pie right now.
Of course it’s often moot since I operate similar to Yvain does (i.e. though opera-worth crushes that have to be toned down to a ludicrous degree to avoid scaring off even totally interested people).
To be fair, I often get that reaction.
I’m reminded of Yvain’s Fourth Meditation On Creepiness, though I hadn’t heard of the ask- and guess- terminology before now.
Wow. That was jarring. I like Yvain’s writing a lot, so the level of cluelessness on dating is a bit of a revelation about how compartmentalised social intuition can be from general reasoning.
Those posts are interesting and relevant, and I’ve had discussions about similar topics with people from different cultures.
With that framing, what I’m saying is that you want to be guessing very well, and you’re violating norms in a way that costs the other party utilons if you’re too “asky”—which is what the PUA advice amounts to.
But I’d also say there’s a continuum, depending on how you make the move.
So you’re saying we should respect the guess culture of other people? Or do you want to switch over to ask culture?
Yeah, we should respect the guess culture. Imagine a limit of askiness, where you regularly force people to be explicit about not being attracted to you, while also communicating that you very much want them to be. I think that even with different cultural norms, that communication’s going to be painful for them, so it’s quite right that it’s considered rude to put them through it.
Here’s a hypothetical for you: a man looks at a woman from across the room, and proceeds to walk in her direction, gazing directly into her eyes in a way that indicates attraction/romantic interest. He’s walking from something of a distance, and actually only begins walking just after she happens to notice that he’s looking. He maintains his gaze.
Within a second or two, she’s going to display a reaction of some kind—a reaction that will be pretty darn indicative of whether the approach is welcome or not. And if it’s not, the man’s gaze shifts slightly, so that he’s looking past her, as though to someone further along the path, and his route diverges slightly, so that he passes without intruding on her personal space.
Is this “ask” or “guess”? Is the woman forced to be “explicit about not being attracted”, while the man is “communicating that you very much want them to be”? Is it a painful communication, and rude to put them through it?
I assume that the man and the woman are in a culture where they don’t take for granted a level of explicit awareness of social cues that eliminates significant ambiguity or plausible deniability about what messages are being sent and received in a hypothetical case like that, because I’ve never encountered a culture that behaved otherwise.
Given that assumption, this seems pretty clearly a guess-culture (which I prefer to refer to as “hint culture”; “guess culture” is a very ask-culture way of referring to hint-culture) interaction. So, no, the woman is not being explicit, is not being forced to be explicit, and the man is not being explicit either. That’s precisely what hint-culture is for.
The dichotomy breaks down a bit here, but the important property is that both parties maintain plausible deniability. An argument I’ve heard Steven Pinker make (but might not be originally his) is that you can avert awkwardness by avoiding the creation of shared knowledge, and that’s the reason the plausible deniability is important.
Right. I mentioned this example partly because it’s a PUA technique in the category of “forced IOIs”, which is an awkward name for maintaining plausible deniability about whether a request has been made and whether it has been rejected, to avoid awkwardness and social status loss.
Yeah, I notice that PUA stuff suggests being very asky before rapport is established, while feminist consent-culture stuff suggests being very asky after rapport is established.
Not sure that ‘asky’ is the right word here, since PUA is all about adapting to a hint culture. What PUA is very clear about is that it’s important to make one’s attraction known (put the cards on the table, as it were) well before the rapport/comfort stage is reached, in order to avoid creating a friendzone/Nice-Guy problem.
Feminists also suggest that when talking about the Nice Guy issue, although they also tend to claim that the friendzone doesn’t really have a hard boundary between it and the lover-zone. Possilby an inferential distance thing, possibly PUAs too cynical and failing at naive stuff when they actually get the chance.
I have no idea how to do that, and if I (personally) tried, i would probably shunt into Opera-Worthy Crush Mode.
The boundary is not that hard, but it’s definitely there. IIRC, trying to cross that boundary is called “remixing” in PUA-speak, and it’s considered to be quite difficult. Part of the problem is that you most likely ended up in the friend-zone for a reason, so a “remix” often involves radically changing your outward identity in order to appeal to your ‘target’ in a lover-like, not friend-like sense.
Asides from that, PUA does tend to cultivate a healthy skepticism about “remixing”, because trying to remix is taken to be a sign of attachment which one should be clearly aware of, and either accept or discard. Basically, you might as well start out afresh with someone who is not going to have that unwanted association of you as a mere “friend”.
The advocacy of ‘confidence’ in this context is properly about alief, not belief. You can appear and feel confident while also being well-calibrated with respect to the consequences of your social moves. Incidentally, I have to agree that the advice from reddit is high-risk—I would not support it unless perhaps you had very strong evidence that the woman is attracted to you, but even then, some residual risk remains.
I disagree about the externality from unwanted interaction being “priced out”, since freaking people out is something guys would want to avoid at all costs.
I read a lot of PUA advice as basically counselling guys like this: there’s nothing to lose from an unsuccessful approach, you know that, so update your aliefs accordingly. The downside’s all in your head. So, they agree guys start by worrying about freaking people out, but their line of thinking is that that doesn’t actually matter. Except, that part is all tacit. I think the prominent men writing the advice are mostly very low empathy, so they don’t actually understand why normal guys have that aversion.
Second, I see what you’re saying, in that you don’t have to be nervous while you make some well-calibrated move. But, a move that offers a graceful out is going to be less confident, too, just along a slightly different dimension. I’ll get personal here: I use online dating sites, and I’m a bi male. So I make and receive advances quite regularly.
Going through my message history on a popular site that isn’t exclusively about casual sex, this advance slightly irritated me, and I didn’t reply:
Here’s how I phrased a message with basically the same intent, to a girl who said she was on the site for NSA sex, and partially indicated her interests:
I gave her an easy out by raising a likely reason to decline my advance for her—which she took, in a very friendly reply. The message was confident in the sense that it suggested that rejection wouldn’t faze me, but was not confident at all about the advance succeeding—which is conventionally considered less attractive.
Online the stakes are really low, because you can just not reply. But a differently worded advance can still make the other person feel slightly flattered, or slightly gross.
This is mostly correct, conditional on following ‘good practices’ when approaching (and an aspiring PUA will want to do this anyway,in order to minimize effort and maximize the probability of being successful). Basically, the unstated assumption is that if you manage to freak out your ‘target’, you’re most likely doing something very, very wrong. It’s not just a numbers game.
I agree with your point about always “leaving a line of retreat”. AIUI, this is actively discussed in good PUA advice.
Line of retreat is also discussed by feminists (and I advocate it as well, and always make sure to explicitly include it.)
Also ties into the complaint of some woman (source not remembered) who seemed to be coming from a feminist framework, who complained about nerdy men who became too attached too quickly so that saying no became too costly to say to somebody she respected.
“Often I hear guys complain that an advance is deemed “creepy” if it’s unwelcome, but not if the same thing were said or done by an attractive man.”
Yes that seems to be the crux of some criticism, and for good reason. Anyone who has been through high-school knows a lot of unattractive or socially undesirable men get tremendous backlash for behaviors that a desirable men get away with. It doesn’t help that sometimes the word creep is a slur for an unattractive person hitting on another. The complaint goes beyond the double-standard, it sends a message that people have a right not to feel creeped out even when the feeling is unwarranted, and therefore benign behaviors (too much chatting or asking for a number) should be avoided altogether by some, specifically the awkward.
And many may also feel genuinely unsafe, but the advice given by many is to improve social skills or courting behavior, and this doesn’t mitigate any real harm. The legitimate creep or the awkward geek is not any less dangerous because he read Dale Carnegie or a PUA website.
Granted, some of the anecdotes are cause for legitimate concern, but I’m not addressing those.
The word “right” seems to be unwarranted here. It’s not clear that people have a moral right not to be exposed to rude or anti-social behavior, but this does not make the behavior any less rude or anti-social. There is such a thing as good etiquette, however minor and trifling it may be when contrasted with genuine ethical concerns.
But an awkward geek may unwittingly behave in ways that make people mistake him for a creeper; reading Dale Carnegie is a good way to address this. As for legitimate creepers, it would be nice if they too could reform and stop posing a danger to others; unfortunately, most of them seem to be actively hostile towards other people and lacking in empathy, so this is not a likely prospect.
I think your confusing what John meant. Learning PUA/Carnegie doesn’t change someone’s goals only the means. A legitimate creep who acquires better social skills, doesn’t become a normal non-creep, he becomes a charming sociopath.
This is not true. Actually creepy folks use unwillingness to reflect on social skills of society in general as camouflage. When called on their behavior, they can say something like “I was only joking” and escape most of the consequences.
But if society as a whole was more explicit about social norms, then (1) people who have trouble picking up social norms would be happier because the norms would be easier to learn, (2) people who want others to follow the norms without being required to follow themselves would have less room to operate, and (3) people who want to change the social norms would have an easier time communicating the case for a change of the norms.
In general the stricter the social norms the less room for trying to change them.
In small groups, social norms can seem very resilient and yet actually be very fragile.
I guess it might first help to define what creepy folks are. If we mean someone who is socially oblivious who is interested in a date, then it is undeniably false that all are using it as a form of camouflage, as many could attest to.
By mitigating real harm I mean mitigating the risk of a woman being near a potentially dangerous or coercive man, where some in the comments have said the “creepy” fear actually stems from, but awkward people can also give out this false signal. If this is true, then taking steps to improve ones social skills makes the safe men more accessible, but also gives ammo to a potentially dangerous one as well. No risk of harm is reduced.
I didn’t go to a coed highschool, but I imagine a lot of that backlash was status signalling, and the target of the advance wasn’t genuinely aggrieved. So, that isn’t just.
But factoring that out, I think it’s quite right to view a guy making a bunch of unwanted advances as rather a jerk, depending on how much he makes rejecting him suck for the targets. He’s generating a bunch of negative utility.
When I see guys with poor social skills complain about this, it basically amounts to saying that it’s not fair. Sure—it’s not fair that looks and charm get parcelled out unevenly, but so what? You still don’t get to make your problem someone else’s.
It’s not fair that we become more unattractive as we age, but a 70 year old man who constantly makes unwelcome advances on young women is rightly viewed with contempt.
It’s not fair that gay men and women can very seldom hit on strangers with a good expected utility either. It doesn’t make it okay for them to just “assume they’re gay until stated otherwise”, given that most people are straight.
“I think it’s quite right to view a guy making a bunch of unwanted advances as rather a jerk, depending on how much he makes rejecting him suck for the targets. He’s generating a bunch of negative utility.”
Yes in that situation one would be jerk, but not everyone was complaining about a bunch of advances (and I did say that some of the grievances were justified), but even one advance or something that could have been miscontrued as an advance. If we (safely) assume the anecdotes come from people who have freely given out their number or have let a guy talk over them, then it sets a tone that the socially awkward should come off as asexual as possible to avoid offending a member of the opposite sex. That doesn’t seem like a reasonable expectation to put on others.
I don’t think the potential downside of having to reject someone is much bigger than getting rejected.
It’s valuable to learn to accept a rejection without feeling bad just as it’s valuable to learn to give out rejections without feeling bad.
Confident advances are more likely to be successful and pleasent to the person being approached than unconfident advances.
There no way to develop a well-calibrated model without making some mistakes along the way.
Would you say you were a proficient driver before you had your first car accident? We learn skills in fault intolerant contexts all the time. There’s a bunch of learning theory work about Bayesian models not needing negative examples too, although I don’t really think it’s relevant here.
There’s two things here. First, even if that’s true, the person who’s doing the rejecting didn’t ask to be approached. So even if the downsides are small, you’re playing dice on their behalf. And if you’re wrong a lot, and generate a bunch of negative utility for people who didn’t sign up for any risks, I think you deserve some culpability.
As for just how bad giving out a rejection is, again, I think it really depends on the advance.
Here’s the idea taken to the extreme: sometimes, waking someone up with oral sex is a very welcome advance. But you better be damn sure, because if you’re wrong, you’ve potentially done a great deal of harm. There’s a continuum of less presumptuous advances, through the press-them-against-the-wall example, to something like putting your arm out in front of them to block a door, or even just making the move in an elevator, that may make someone more or less uncomfortable if they have to reject the advance. This is the sense of “confident” that I’m talking about.
The answer isn’t, “that’s a consent violation and nobody should do that ever”. It’s that if you do do that, and you were wrong, you can’t excuse yourself from culpability by claiming it was an honest mistake.
I made mistakes ALL THE TIME when learning to drive, and my driving instructor normally caught them and yelled at me in time for it not to be a problem. You’re creating a false dichotomy when you compare any mistakes with a car crash.
It depends. Last week I was at a seminar where most seats are filled with people. I sat down next to the place where a girl put her bag and jacket with whom I chatted previously.
She sat the lecture next to me. Afterwards she asked me whether I was okay with her sitting next to me. In her mind she did make a choice to sit next to me for which I didn’t ask.
I don’t think it’s automatically more ethical to engineer a situation in a way where the other person thinks they are making the approach and proclaim you have no responsibility for being approached.
Most people are pretty bad at interpreting what goes on in an interaction and who actually initiates various things. Sometimes people interpret things wrong and do make honest mistakes.
I grant that point. It makes sense to calibrate with acts that don’t produce much harm. Especially with acts that don’t contrain the ability of the other person to issue the rejection.
I don’t think making a move in an elevator is an expression of confidence. I haven’t read a specific analysis of the situation from a PUA guy but I would expect them to advice against that behavior.
I think tabooing “confidence” would end up being revealing here. I suspect yours, confidence-1, would read something like “not signalling anxiety or nervousness”, whereas I’m talking about confidence-2, the anticipated probability of success, which informs the expected value of an approach.
I accept responsibility for the miscommunication. In my initial post I talked about PUAs advocating “confidence”, and equated that to confidence-2. You and others have pointed out that actually some or all of the advocacy is for confidence-1, which I didn’t at first appreciate. I haven’t read all that much PUA stuff, so I’ll accept what you’ve said and leave it at that.
Anticipating success in an approach in no way implies that it’s a good idea to constrain another person to reject you.
If a girl thinks that she only gave you her phone number because you coerced her to give it to you, why should she answer the phone when you call and look forward to going on a date with you?
The way people backwards rationalize their behavior matters a lot.