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.
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.