After a short time, they ask you to buy them a drink.
I have never encountered or heard of this behaviour. I would be rather startled if someone I had just met asked me to buy them a drink. I’d guess they were too poor to get their own (and with all respect to poor people, my interest in pursuing a relationship with them would substantially diminish).
I can understand your explanation, but I would find an opposite explanation just as plausible (they are trying to determine if the cost of a drink is a mere trifle to you, hence buying them one = good).
Is this a culturally specific thing? Where is this action, with this meaning, a standard pattern of behaviour?
What you would do if one of your little sister’s sixteen year old-still has braces friends saw you in a bar and said “well, are you going to buy me a drink now?” (or substitute any other person who is obviously lower perceived statusvalue than you, e.g. gay man if you’re straight, fat/ugly/dumb/smelly person, anyone who you basically see as unworthy of you).
Take that, add some mocking humor/banter, and there’s your response.
Well hang on. It isn’t that simple. The man buying the woman a drink is more or less the courtship norm. They haven’t actually stepped that far out of line by asking for a drink so the way you respond has to be calibrated to their status. If their status isn’t that high and it was something of a gutsy move to ask for one, there is nothing wrong with letting them down softly with a “Nope. It isn’t anything personal, you seem cool. I just don’t buy drinks for women I just met” and you can segue into a conversation about how silly the norm is if you like. If the person has really high status then something more along the lines of lightly mocking them for being a spoiled brat who won’t buy their own drinks can go over fine.
If the person has really high status then something more along the lines of lightly mocking them for being a spoiled brat who won’t buy their own drinks can go over fine.
Umm, only with someone with whom I was already acquainted and I think the way I phrased it sounds worse than I meant it to sound. Spoiled is a bit much, I meant it to describe the extreme end of the possible responses you were suggesting. My point was more (1) when someone asks you to buy them a drink while they are testing your status they’re also putting themselves at risk for rejection. So if your status is fairly equal already, be nice about it. And (2) the greater the initial status differential between you and the other person, the more confident you need to be (which, as I understand it has been well tested, I can anecdotally testify to and which is consistent with dominance hierarchy theory.)
This was not a particularly constructive example to use in the original post, for several reasons.
There are basically two situations that lead to this: First, the other person is interested in you, but is somewhat awkward and uses this as a rather blunt test to measure your interest in them. Second, if person is not interested in you, but sees you as a means of getting a free drink.
As the latter tends to be more likely, and in the former, there are still ways you can show interest without buying them a drink, you should not buy them a drink. However, buying them a drink is not wrong insofar as no unpleasant social consequences result from it (as they might result from, for example, an unflattering comment about a person’s weight or appearance). All that happens is you’re out $3-10, depending on the bar.
It’s also worth noting that with certain people and in certain circumstances, you may actually be seeking someone with the qualities indicated by this request. If I were a rich and not particularly attractive older man, and the subject were a much-younger and attractive woman, this comment may actually suggest we could establish a mutually beneficial relationship. Our response to the request is really a response to the person making the request, and your hypothetical assumes we should a negative response, which is generally but not invariably true.
Your description of the
There are basically two situations that lead to this: First, the other person is interested in you, but is somewhat awkward and uses this as a rather blunt test to measure your interest in them. Second, if person is not interested in you, but sees you as a means of getting a free drink.
That doesn’t cover Mallah’s story. I think the free drinks explanation is largely a confabulation by girls who don’t know why they do it.
Second, if person is not interested in you, but sees you as a means of getting a free drink.
I believe that covers that story perfectly. he approached an attractive woman, who saw him as a sucker who’d buy her an expensive drink, which he did, whereupon she promptly ignored him. If that’s not exactly what I said, I don’t know what is.
It covers the story up to the point of her not taking the drink. Perhaps she just wanted to see if she could. I agree that getting him to buy the drink may be more significant than actually consuming it. Or it could simply be a way of chastising someone she didn’t believe should be talking to her. Or, perhaps, she simply forgot.
For practical purposes, she’s not different whether she takes the drink or not. It’s still a waste of money. If she didn’t forget, it’s likely she simply got a kick out of ordering some guy around. Not a situation I anticipated, but certainly deserving the same response as the selfish drinker.
This seems very odd to me. You seem to be suggesting that this is the typical way a socially successful NT responds to being asked for a drink, and that just seems truly, bizarrely wrong to me. Where did you learn this? Is it a PUA thing? I’m not necessarily saying it wouldn’t work—it might, in the same way that weird PUA crap like “peacocking” might work, but it definitely isn’t normal behavior, even for NTs
I’m confused why you think this is so bizarrely wrong. I mean, yes, some inexperienced guys are easily manipulated by attractive women, but I think that more successful and more experienced people would just make a joke of it, and not allow themselves to be manipulated easily.
And everyone “peacocks” every time they dress for an occasion or buy clothes because they like how they look. That’s not weird or bizarre either.
Roko explicitly wrote about using a status-lowering level of teasing.
Part of the problem may be that a lot of play is inhibited attack, and it can be hard to judge just how much of a verbal attack is either intended or received.
I think that the emphasis on status here is misplaced. Here’s an analogy:
Imagine that you, dear reader, are very smart, and when you get into conversations about intellectual topics, people almost always say “Wow, you’re smart,” based on superficial indicators, and seem impressed. Now imagine that you meet someone who reacts differently: they take it for granted that you’re smart, and actually try to engage with you intellectually, rather than being awed and amazed by your intellect.
Can you see that your reaction might be very different? You might be more likely to like and be interested in talking to this person, intrigued that they weren’t so easily won over, and possibly a little motivated to prove your intelligence to them.
That’s what’s going on in the example with attractive girls, except with looks and sexuality rather than intelligence. It’s less of a “Oh wow you have high status” reaction on the girl’s part, and more of “Hey, finally someone who isn’t a pushover just cause I’m hot. He might actually be fun to talk to.” This is communicated all the time with little things like body language, the way you turn to look at someone, the way you stand, and how you speak. It usually isn’t as direct as “Will you buy me a drink?”
Yes, I like this analogy between intellectual interaction and social (status) interaction. Both types of interaction have “I’ll push you until you stop me” behavior, that would be considered offensive or attacking if it was manifested in the other form of interaction.
A common mode of interaction for intellectuals is to argue for positions that you aren’t sure of in order to figure out if they believe in, or even to argue for positions that they don’t believe just to play devil’s advocate. These debate styles push against people, expecting them to push back, analogous to the social styles of many neurotypical extraverts.
Just as introverts on the autistic spectrum hate it when neurotypical extraverts try to turn everything into a status game, neurotypical extraverts hate it when autistic spectrum introverts try to turn everything into a debate.
In a group of neurotypical extraverts, saying something like “you’re such a dork” to someone else is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to handle it and fire back. Likewise, in a group of autistic spectrum introverts, saying something like “you’re wrong” is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to be able to handle it, and either defend or concede their position.
Both groups have different norms for showing assertiveness, and an assertiveness display in one group could be considered an attack if it was performed in the other group.
In intellectual circles, it often seems to be considered acceptable to communicate intellectual disagreement in an assertive way, the assumption being that everyone knows that disagreement isn’t personal. This communication style jars some intellectuals, and it enjoyed by others. Non-intellectual people universally hate this communication style.
It just runs counter to my own experience and observation. Deflecting the request with a joke would be an effective way to avoid getting played for free drinks, if you think that’s what’s going on, or of politely declining if you’re just not interested, but it doesn’t seem like a generally effective, or commonly practiced, method of actually parlaying the interaction into a “score”—not unless you happen to be dealing with the kind of person who’s attracted to assholes. My impression is that these kind of PUA style techniques are geared towards successfully picking up people with low self esteem. That may work, but I think it’s a mistake to draw conclusions from that about “normal” social interaction.
I am very confused by this comment. Who are you talking about as the “asshole” in this scenario? I think you may be misunderstanding it. The idea is that two people are talking and flirting, and the girl asks the guy for something (like a drink, but it could be anything: taking a picture, helping her with something) at which point the guy teases her about it. I’m not seeing anything about low self esteem here.
Who are you talking about as the “asshole” in this scenario?
The guy who says “no” when, in the middle of flirting, a girl asks for a drink. This just doesn’t happen IRL unless the guy is intentionally trying to shut down the interaction.
Just my own personal experience. I guess maybe I phrased that a little strongly for something based entirely on anecdotal evidence. And I guess I should have added a caveat like “This just doesn’t happen unless the guy is intentionally trying to shut down the interaction, or has studied PUA techniques, or is Richard Feynman”.
Decline, but the conversation would never have got that far anyway, and isn’t going to get any further. I’m not very good at maintaining a conversation, but when I deliberately put out the “please shut up and go away” vibes it has no chance. :-)
I’m not sure what this has to do with the original scenario, where the two people are still trying to assess each other. Or what status has to do with those examples.
I’m not sure what this has to do with the original scenario, where the two people are still trying to assess each other. Or what status has to do with those examples.
Ah, the confusing world of NT social games…
Basically, imagine each person P has a number X, called their “statusvalue”, and the way we respond to others is a function of the statusvalue difference between us and the person we respond to. Suppose that your number is, say, 5, and the person you are approaching is single, sought-after and attractive, and therefore has a statusvalue of 8. Therefore your body’s automatic response will be a “+3″ type response, i.e. you will defer to the person you are talking to, attempt to please them, etc.
In order to work out the correct response, you need to think what your response would be if the person asking you for the drink were a 2 on the statusvalue scale. This will be a “-3” type response, i.e. you will assert your desires over theirs, and interpret their behavior in terms of whether it meets your expectations. Then, you gradually condition yourself to always give “-3″ type responses, i.e. give off signals that you are three statusvalue points above everyone.
Imagine each person P has a number X, called their “statusvalue”, and the way we respond to others is a function of the statusvalue difference between us and the person we respond to.
The way we respond to others has a lot more to it than that. If I’m approached by someone of the wrong sexual orientation for me, then my declining their advances has nothing to do with status. The same with 15-year-old girls (the only example in the original version of your comment). My response to these people will be whatever is necessary to get them to give up on the sexual advances. This does not strike me as a useful response to someone that I would like to get together with.
Perhaps the idea you are trying to get across is that you should begin by trying to put the other person off, but (if you still want to get together with them) take care not to do so too effectively? I am familiar with the custom of ritually refusing a gift before accepting it—is this something similar?
Are you speaking from personal experience or is this something you have only worked out on paper?
If I’m approached by someone of the wrong sexual orientation for me, then my declining their advances has nothing to do with status.
That’s why I said statusvalue—i.e. something that is a combination of their overall status and their value to you.
you should begin by trying to put the other person off,
Not really—as I said, it is more abstract than that—the idea is to approach the interaction from a higher-statusvalue frame, because ultimately (in this case) that is what the other person is testing for.
Are you speaking from personal experience or is this something you have only worked out on paper?
This particular example is taken from the world of pick-up, which has been tested more extensively than you can imagine.
EDIT: though the idea of a “social coprocessor” is speculation.
You think it’s abnormal to ever show up at bars and clubs? Most young people go to either a bar or a club (or party, cafe, music gig, etc) at least, say, once a month.
I think a lot of people, when they first turn 21 (or whatever the legal drinking age is in their jurisdiction) go through a phase of going to meat-markety type places, but eventually become disillusioned with that ‘scene’ and grow out of it.
That’s why I said statusvalue—i.e. something that is a combination of their overall status and their value to you.
I would call that simply value. If their status matters to me, it is part of their value to me; if it does not, it is irrelevant.
This particular example is taken from the world of pick-up, which has been tested more extensively than you can imagine.
Tested by you? Ok, maybe that’s too personal a question, but I’m aware in general terms of the PUA stuff, and I have only a limited interest in soup of the soup.
On the first day, you have a delicious chicken. The next day you make soup with the bones and leftovers. On the third day you make soup from the leftover soup.
In other words, an exposition only indirectly connected with the source, unrefreshed by contact with real life.
I’m one of them. I’m not committed to the view that the rather crude theory Roko outlines is true, but acting as if it’s true indeed seems to be useful. I’m not a PUArtist, I’m a PUInstrumentalist.
I’ve never understood why people think that’s effective.
What good does it do to act like you’re higher status if you’re not? You can’t change your face or your income by signaling. Is everybody really so gullible?
And also—I’ve not spent a huge amount of time in bars, but I’ve never seen anyone ask a stranger for a drink.
What good does it do to act like you’re higher status if you’re not? You can’t change your face or your income by signaling. Is everybody really so gullible?
Income and looks are only one component of status. Other components are determined by signaling and other forms of implicit communication in actual interactions. So, merely acting like you are high status will go a long way to convince people that you are, as long as you aren’t giving off contradictory low status signals also.
One of the reason that people play status games (of which “buy me a drink” often is), is because there is a margin of error in status perception, and poking the other person with a status ploy is a way to confirm or disconfirm your initial impression of their status. If you believe that you are higher status that someone, and you attempt a successful status grab that they submit to, then it confirms that you are higher status.
As I’ve hypothesized, the way normal people tend to interact (or at least, a typical mode for certain types of extraverts to interact) is to constantly bump up against each other socially in mini-dominance battles and figure out the pecking order by seeing who can away with what against who.
This form of interaction used to be rather alien to me, and I would interpret it as an affront (which is how RichardKennaway seems to interpret it), but Ben Kovitz’s weird psychology wiki gave me some ideas to help understand it.
From an extraverted perspective, you see everything that someone does as an attempt to negotiate with others.
From an introverted perspective, negotiation has nothing to do with it. What is good is good, and that’s why you do it.
So, for example, extraverts (people for whom an extraverted perspective is their “home base”) typically interact by putting something on the table for others to react to, whether they like it or not.
Introverts (people for whom an introverted perspective is their “home base”) typically interact by first asking permission to enter another person’s space. You view each person as trying to understand and practice the good in his own way, and this process is not something to interfere with lightly.
A deep principle of negotiation is that it’s a process of discovery, not simply a process of getting your way. You can find out how much someone is willing to bend only by pushing them that far. You take what’s takable, not what you’ve decided is proper by some kind of a priori criteria.
Negotiation is forcing a choice. You take a position; the other party must accept, refuse, or counteroffer.
Status is partly a process of empirical discovery. It is decided through negotiation. People with different phenotypes approach this negotiation in different ways. Some people negotiate by acting lower in status to everyone. Some people negotiate by acting equal in status to everyone. Some people (such as neurotypical extraverts) negotiate by acting higher in status to everyone. Non-neurotypicals are simply unaware of this negotiation.
To people like us, neurotypical socially-dominant extraverts will seem annoying with their constant status grabs. But they aren’t necessarily trying to be jerks, they are just interacting the only way they know how. They are attempting to negotiate with you, they just begin the negotiation by driving a hard bargain. They may assume that you are like them, and expect you to stand up for yourself and give them a counter-offer back of a different status relationship, where instead of them being on top, you two are equals, or you are on top. They may even want you prove that you are higher status, and their test is an opportunity for you to do so. They will expect you to negotiate yourself, by either submitting, or attempting to fight back; what they won’t be able to understand is someone who doesn’t even participate in this sort of negotiation in the first place.
They will expect you to negotiate yourself, by either submitting, or attempting to fight back; what they won’t be able to understand is someone who doesn’t even participate in this sort of negotiation in the first place.
Yep. And depending on the way you opt out of the negotiation, you may be perceived as either very low self-esteem, or as an arrogant bastard.
The latter category (which I personally have been categorized as a lot) tends to happen when you assume that all people are supposed to be equal, dammit, and refuse to give ground to anything that isn’t Right with a capital R. This results in the problem of causing others to have to lose face when you win… and people don’t like it.
(Later in life, I’ve realized that it generally works better to arrange things so that other people can receive status strokes by siding with you, and they then tend to return the strokes.)
So, for example, extraverts (people for whom an extraverted perspective is their “home base”) typically interact by putting something on the table for others to react to, whether they like it or not.
Introverts (people for whom an introverted perspective is their “home base”) typically interact by first asking permission to enter another person’s space. You view each person as trying to understand and practice the good in his own way, and this process is not something to interfere with lightly.
To people like us, neurotypical socially-dominant extraverts will seem annoying with their constant status grabs. But they aren’t necessarily trying to be jerks, they are just interacting the only way they know how. They are attempting to negotiate with you, they just begin the negotiation by driving a hard bargain.
Yeah this is a good analysis. Important for more rational/AS people is to realize that more emotion-driven NTs run their social interaction in hardware ==> they do things like little status grabs almost without thinking about it.
As long as we’re piling on anecdotes, I’ve asked folks for drinks on numerous occasions. And the bartender at a club I frequented back in the day used to give me my drinks for free.
imagine each person P has a number X, called their “statusvalue”, and the way we respond to others is a function of the statusvalue difference between us
I completely understand the general idea here, I just think the drink-buying thing is a bad example. In my experience, refusal to buy a drink for someone who’s flirting with you doesn’t send the signal “you’re X statusvalue lower than me”, it sends the signal “I’m not interested in playing this game at all”
Indeed, this pattern seems totally strange to me. While on the dating scene, if a woman brazenly asked a man to get her a drink, I would consider it a test to see if he can handle assertiveness. That is, if he is fun and easy-going. If he said no, I would think she could consider him either not interested in her enough to part with a few dollars AND too cheap to satisfy a small request, or insecure about his status in the company of a woman. Hopefully, he would say yes, and they could enjoy a drink together.
Do men really say, ‘no, I won’t’ and find success with that??
[Apologies for the editing and then un-editing; I commented naively and then realized I’m kind of over my head here with the inferential distance; culture and values-wise. I think things have changed since I was dating, or I noticed different things.]
I would consider it a test to see if he can handle assertiveness. That is, if he is fun and easy-going.
The above is correct but this part would depend a lot on how the “no” is delivered:
If he said no, I would think she could consider him either not interested in her enough to part with a few dollars (and too cheap to satisfy a small request), or insecure about his status in the company of a woman.
The real status test is about whether he considers his company to be as valuable as hers. If he complies with the request (without any quid pro quo), then he’s ceded her the higher social status—which was what the question was testing (either intentionally or unintentionally), in the common case.
Declining the request, reversing it (you buy me one), or insisting on a quid pro quo, are the only ways to maintain equivalent or higher status in the interaction (absent an ongoing equal relationship wherein the quid pro quo is assumptive). Also, skillfully handling any of these options raises the observer’s estimate of your social coprocessor’s power rating as well. ;-)
There are a wide variety of context-sensitive ways to decline or redirect such a request, depending on the situation and level of rapport of the conversation… from the polite to the downright rude, all of which can be functional if delivered with confidence. But certainly, “fun and easygoing” no’s are possible.
(For example: pretending to misinterpret the request as an offer, eg. “Oh, yes please. That’s very kind of you. I’ll have a..”, a playful, “Oh? And what are you going to do for me?”, or even a humorous, mock-offended and effeminately-voiced, “Hmph! What kind of boy do you think I am? Are you trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me?”)
As thomblake points out, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”contains his story of finding out this counterintuitive fact—although the specific story involves calling a woman “worse than a whore” for getting him to buy $1.10 worth of sandwiches. She then proceeded to pay him back the $1.10… and then came over later to have sex with him.
In Feynman’s second story, he asks “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”—and gets a “yes”.
Amusingly, the “Player Guide” (an open-source guide for beginning PUAs) isn’t quite so bold—it only recommends asking for a french kiss as the quid pro quo. ;-)
Of course, all of these anecdotes and advice are subject to selection bias—i.e., to the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks. My guess is that most non-NT women don’t ask guys to buy them drinks unless there’s either an ongoing quid pro quo (i.e., “I’ll buy the next round”), or they’ve consciously chosen to exploit the social dynamic for financial/alcoholic gain.
tl;dr: a man is generally best-off treating a request for a drink as a test to determine whether he has low enough self-esteem to believe he needs to pay for female company, and an opportunity to display an unruffled and socially-skillful response.
Hang on half a second here. No more than 1% of Americans are autistic. (CDC estimates 1 in 110.) Autism is four times as common among males as females.
This whole “NT” vs “non-NT” thing you’re talking about is distinguishing 99.75% of women from 0.25%. I think this may be misguided. There are way more women who don’t ask to be bought drinks than that.
Hang on half a second here. No more than 1% of Americans are autistic. (CDC estimates 1 in 110.) Autism is four times as common among males as females. This whole “NT” vs “non-NT” thing you’re talking about is distinguishing 99.75% of women from 0.25%. I think this may be misguided. There are way more women who don’t ask to be bought drinks than that.
I didn’t say that (most NT women) (ask men for drinks), I said (most women who ask men for drinks) are NT.
Given your statistics, this would be expected even if half of all women asked men for drinks, because then you’d have half of 99.75% of women being NT+drink.asking and half of .25% being non-NT+drink.asking.
That being said, I do not assume that non-NT-ness requires actual autism or even diagnosable Asperger’s. High intelligence alone (IMO) qualifies one for being neurally “atypical” in my book.
Personality is a factor, not just attractiveness. Women who are some combination of the following don’t engage in testing like this, or are less likely to do so:
highly introverted (Big Five extraversion has a social dominance component)
high in Agreeableness (Big Five Agreeableness has a submissive component)
highly nerdy (though then we get into the question of how nerdy is non-neurotypical)
unsocialized
Sweet, sensitive, nerdy quiet types of both genders just don’t like status games very much, and they tend to be bad at them.
The standard PUA model focuses a lot on women who do engage in testing and status games, because they tend to disproportionately encounter women who play them. This is understandable, but flawed.
My confusion with this whole business is quantitative. The assumption in Roko’s drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That’s a statement of probability. It’s likely that you’ll be going to bars to meet women, it’s likely that any women you’re interested in engage in shit-testing, it’s likely that any women you’re interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I’m really not sure about that.
There are, as I mentioned, very, very few autistic women. So Roko and Nancy lump in the less attractive women. Fine, in principle. I’m still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won’t find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don’t behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable. I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don’t behave like that. We hit a lot of HughRistic’s bullet points. And we’ve stumbled into our fair share of good relationships.
In other words: I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn’t mind dating one.
The assumption in Roko’s drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That’s a statement of probability. It’s likely that you’ll be going to bars to meet women, it’s likely that any women you’re interested in engage in shit-testing, it’s likely that any women you’re interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I’m really not sure about that.
Actually, it’s a statement of conditional probability, conditioned on a woman asking a man for a drink in such a setting, often as a prelude to having any conversation at all.
(It’s not, however, a great example of a cacheable response. Really, the whole point of it as a status/social skill test is that it is hard to fake!)
Anyway, here’s the reasoning: if a man is asked for a drink, it may or may not be a test, conscious or unconscious. However, in all possible cases, the man is highly likely to improve the situation by skillfully declining or negotiating a quid pro quo, because the situation is still a signaling opportunity, even if the woman’s attraction wouldn’t have decreased upon acquiescence. (In other words, you either win, or don’t lose—a positive expected outcome over multiple trials.)
For example, let’s say it’s one of those “nerdy women”—she is not fishing for a drink, not consciously testing, and (probably) not unconsciously testing, but maybe has been taught that this is how you signal openness to being courted, or just doesn’t think about it at all.
Well, in that particular case, it’s an opportunity for a signal like, “Not a feminist, huh?”—probably leading to a thought-provoking conversation about feminism, chivalry, and the impact of social trends on dating behaviors...
A conversation that wouldn’t have happened if the response was a bland, “okay”. If he’d simply agreed without further comment, maybe he wouldn’t have lost any points, but he certainly wouldn’t have gained any either—he has simply failed to distinguish himself from any other man who lacks the social skill to finesse the situation. He is out a drink, and gets nothing except (maybe) the continuation of the conversation… assuming that her attraction doesn’t mysteriously evaporate shortly thereafter, due to her unconscious lowering of his status.
But the (extreme) case of a nerdy woman who’s both sincerely asking for a drink and won’t subconsciously decrease attraction upon compliance, is actually the worst case scenario for measuring the advantage of the “never buy a drink without quid pro quo” heuristic… and yet it still comes out well ahead of compliance in the best case, and only slightly better in worst-case!
And in all other scenarios, such as a woman using this to get rid of the guy or to get drinks, using it as a filter for non-interesting guys, or even a woman who thinks it’s normal but unconsciously feels less attracted to men who comply… the heuristic produces much better results on average than buying the drink does. (Assuming, again, the guy has developed the social skills to pull it off.)
Among other things, it’s also a counter-filter, since the woman who truly has no interest in the guy outside his ability to procure alcohol will immediately depart in search of another sucker, no matter how skillfully it’s done. For the rest, you still either win, or else you don’t lose.
Of course, this is all conditional on the man’s skill in making use of all the available information in the situation… for one thing, he’s got to be socially calibrated enough to be able to tell the difference between the woman who’ll respond to “Sure, bend over, you spoiled brat” vs. the one who’ll respond to “Not a feminist, eh?”… and preferably be able to tell that before even starting the conversation. (Oh, and let’s not forget that those two can be the same woman, in different moods!)
But that’s the “software” way of doing it… the “coprocessor” way is that the guy ideally just believes that it’d be silly to buy a woman a drink without a quid pro quo (like Feynman’s advisor) and lets their social hardware handle the details of responding.
Attempting to cache a specific behavioral response in “software” isn’t going to cut it, though; the PUA methods that revolve around “canned” material are necessarily probabilistic and essentially manipulative. So, if there’s a flaw in Roko’s example, that would be it: caching a specific response pretty much guarantees it’s not going to be done with a truly beneficial level of skill.
And yet, even in that case, it’s still probably positive-sum advice, as long as the man continues learning and improving over the long haul.
I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don’t behave like that.
Well, if “behave like that” is asking guys for drinks, then there’s no conflict with what Roko said, since the situation will never come up.
However, if “behave like that” is responding with increased attraction to a display of confidence, tact, humor, and/or other social skills, I’d be surprised. (It’s just that what you would personally consider to be such a display is going to depend on a lot of situational factors that a single canned response can’t possibly take into account.)
And yet, even in that case, it’s still probably positive-sum advice, as long as the man continues learning and improving over the long haul.
I think this needs to be emphasised a lot. Also the differences between types of women. While a nerdy girl may not ask for a drink, they may ask for help with a heavy box. Now from the canned advice given this can be seen as a shit test, will the guy demean himself by lugging a heavy box to try and get with someone of my level. If so they don’t want to be with a loser who lifts his own boxes. So a response like “Do I look like a shelf stacker?” said in a suitably amused tone, would be appropriate.
However the nerdy girl might just want the box moved and be interested in people who can just get stuff done with a minimal amount of prodding. The appropriate response in this case is to help. Grumbling (with a grin) while doing so, or making a light comment about being owed one might show you aren’t a complete push over and won’t put up with too much of that sort of thing without something in return, would be appropriate I think.
I’d have a lot less problem if advice were couched in term of normal human interaction rather than just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants.
Hauling a heavy box is not at all analogous to the drink example. When a woman asks a man for help with heavy physical work, this puts him in a much better initial position status-wise. She is the weaker party, asking for necessary assistance from his greater physical strength. Helping a weaker party from a position of greater power is a first-rank status-winning move. Therefore, it’s best for him to do it cheerfully with a “that’s nothing for a man like me” attitude; grumbling and saying “you owe me” is a bad idea since it suggests that he actually finds it hard, rather than an act of negligible difficulty from his superior position.
Of course, if a woman regularly exploits a man for such favors or makes him spend unreasonable time and effort helping her, that’s another story altogether. However, a random request for some small help with a hard physical task nearly always conforms to this pattern of status dynamics.
In contrast, when a woman asks a man to buy her a drink, she is asking him to satisfy a random and capricious whim, not help her as a weaker party from a superior position. Therefore, acceptance carries no positive status signals at all, but instead signals that he is willing to obey her whims for the mere privilege of her company. Compared to the box example, it’s like accepting to pay extortion money versus giving to charity. The former is an expression of weakness and submission, the latter a dispensation of benevolence.
My point was more that the situations could be confused by people with broken social coprocessors and inappropriate behaviour translated across from one domain to another. Without a lot of explanation of the appropriateness.
Buying drinks can also be seen as someone weaker (financially) asking someone stronger. Considering that men earn more on average than women, and if you are picking up college girls and have a real job that is likely to be even more the case. So I don’t see the way that these situations can be easily distinguished that way by someone without much social experience.
I agree about the grumbling, don’t grumble about the weight, grumble about the time taken.
Buying drinks can also be seen as someone weaker (financially) asking someone stronger. Considering that men earn more on average than women, and if you are picking up college girls and have a real job that is likely to be even more the case. So I don’t see the way that these situations can be easily distinguished that way by someone without much social experience
I have a few meta-rules of thumb in such matters:
Anything can mean anything.
Corollary: Never explain by malice that which is adequately explained by intelligence.
The rules are never what anyone says they are.
The rules may not even be what anyone thinks they are.
Nevertheless, there are rules.
It is your job to learn them, and nobody’s job to teach them to you.
All advice, however universally it may be expressed, is correct only in some specific context.
Application of the last to the whole is left as an exercise. :-)
My point was more that the situations could be confused by people with broken social coprocessors and inappropriate behaviour translated across from one domain to another. Without a lot of explanation of the appropriateness.
Well, yes, but that’s what explanations are for. Once you grasp the underlying principles, it’s not that complicated—and more importantly, you gradually start to make correct judgments instinctively.
I agree about the grumbling, don’t grumble about the weight, grumble about the time taken.
No, if you understand the status dynamic fully, you’ll realize that you shouldn’t grumble at all. Grumbling, of whatever sort, indicates that you assign a significant cost to the act, and in order to come off as high-status, you must make it look like it’s a negligible expense of effort from your lofty high-status position, a casual dispensation of benevolent grace. As soon as you make it seem like you perceive the act as costly in any way, it looks like you’re making the effort to fulfill her wishes, clearly displaying inferior status to hers.
Remember we are talking about nerdy girls, that is not the norm that the PUA deals with. I remember a recent post by someone saying that nerdy girls prefer men who dominate everything but them. I can’t remember who posted it, at the moment.
Getting back to an earlier discussion of whether more women are wanted at LW..… anyone who’s likely to show up here is nerdy. Perhaps it would be a good idea to remember, and keep remembering, and make it clear in your writing, that “women” are not a monolithic block and don’t all want the same thing.
Assuming that there are non-Anglospheric folks here, this is probably an unjustified generalization due to a cultural bias. The idea that smart people interested in the sorts of things discussed here have to conform to the stereotype of “nerdiness” is a historically recent North American cultural phenomenon, which doesn’t necessarily hold in other places. It’s actually a rather curious state of affairs by overall historical standards.
Your observation is probably accurate statistically, though.
People who appear socially low-status can end up in economically high-status knowledge-based professions in an industrial society, which upsets people’s intuitions of how the social hierarchy should work. Put-downs have evolved for making things look right again.
I still find American anti-intellectualism kind of shocking. Do you know if there are other cultures where children reliably punish each other for getting good grades?
I don’t really know how it’s distributed. There seems to be a generally stronger streak of anti-intellectualism in America than in Europe, and kids probably pick that up. A poor primary education system may make the problems worse by making education gaps wider and by leaving children with a poor grasp on how the wider society functions.
I’ve the impressions that things are somewhat more US-like in Britain and that studying science is more appreciated in the former Soviet bloc, but I don’t know how accurate these are. Education seems to be very highly valued in China and India. I’ve no idea about the rest of the world.
Yes, Britain has a similar culture to the US in terms of children punishing those who get good grades. My personal experience was that getting good grades was not in itself a major problem as long as you didn’t appear to be trying too hard or to care about the outcome.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to remember, and keep remembering, and make it clear in your writing, that “women” are not a monolithic block and don’t all want the same thing.
A woman who doesn’t want a generalization applied to them? :)
However the nerdy girl might just want the box moved and be interested in people who can just get stuff done with a minimal amount of prodding. The appropriate response in this case is to help.
You haven’t clarified the all-important context. Is this a friend? Stranger? Do they need boxes moved often? What are your goals? Friendship? Company? Just getting a good feeling from helping people out?
Certainly, the default response, assuming a member in good standing of your extended tribe, is to help. This doesn’t make it the “appropriate” response for all goals and contexts, however.
I’d have a lot less problem if advice were couched in term of normal human interaction rather than just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants.
Agreed. Don’t see anyone talking about “just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants,” though. The rough consensus I’m seeing lately from proponents of learning normal social interaction is that it is useful for improving interaction with people in general.
For example, let’s say it’s one of those “nerdy women”—she is not fishing for a drink, not consciously testing, and (probably) not unconsciously testing, but maybe has been taught that this is how you signal openness to being courted, or just doesn’t think about it at all.
Well, in that particular case, it’s an opportunity for a signal like, “Not a feminist, huh?”—probably leading to a thought-provoking conversation about feminism, chivalry, and the impact of social trends on dating behaviors...
Aaaaaaaugh.
As someone who is fairly good at predicting my own behavior in various counterfactual situations, I’d like to hereby offer to tell people how I’d react to lines about which they are curious. I don’t know to what extent I’m in the reference class anyone’s aiming for, but if the information would be useful, there it is.
I know it’s an act of terrorism for me talk about Alicorn, especially given this topic, but …
She’s really not someone whose reactions are characteristic of the NT, average intelligence women that men would approach in bars, so knowing what she would do is probably not going to be helpful.
Strongly agreed. Alicorn is not the kind of girl one has in mind when one thinks about shit testing behavior—finding alicorn shit testing a guy would be like finding Ghandi at a KKK rally.
I would not actually say “Aaaaaaaugh.” in that situation. I’d probably say “Excuse me?” and then there would need to be a rather excellent recovery or I’d stop interacting with the person. (I’m granting for the sake of the exercise that I’d ask for a drink in the first place, even though in real life I don’t consume alcohol.)
(I’m granting for the sake of the exercise that I’d ask for a drink in the first place, even though in real life I don’t consume alcohol.)
Which is precisely why the offered hypothetical is worse than useless in this case.
Bear in mind that in the circumstance being discussed, asking for a drink is like asking someone to hand you $5 -- for no reason at all other than than that you asked, and the fact that they are a male.
To presume that you would react in a certain way, conditional upon first having done something so utterly foreign to you in the first place, is like saying what you’d do if the moon were made of green cheese, only ISTM you’d have a better chance of being right in that case. ;-)
Well, pretend the bar serves something I’d drink. Say I’d get a virgin pina colada. I could imagine asking for one of those. I might also ask girls, if the environment gave me high enough priors on them being bi/gay.
So, your moral compass allows you to use other people’s sexual preferences as a money pump?
(And no, that’s not a line, although now that I’ve said it, I suppose it could be reworked into a LW-friendly response to a drink request. Needs more humor, less judgment, though! Hm, maybe “Are you trying to exploit my hardware preferences as a money pump?” A little too double-entrendreish, though. These things are really situational, and not at all suited to cached responses.)
I can’t actually think of any situation where asking a question seems to me to be immoral. It can’t be a denotative falsehood, so it’s clear on the “lying” front; there’s nothing else obvious it could be that would be wrong. I suppose it could be mean, or impolite, but this doesn’t even appear to be that to me. I wouldn’t badger anybody about buying me the beverage, which would be mean.
This is a request which is slightly different from a question. Some requests are considered immoral when there is a power or status differential. University lecturers and students provide an example where some requests are widely considered immoral.
Point. Questions/requests that predictably create a sense of obligation in the hearer to do something they ought not feel obligated to perform may be wrong. I don’t think I can, let alone do, project enough power in a casual setting to make anyone feel obliged to buy me the liquid of my choice, although I suppose it’s possible I’m mistaken.
There is also an implied contract with most requests. Many people if asked to buy a stranger a drink will assume that agreeing to the request will result in an opportunity for conversation at least. If someone makes the request with an understanding of the implied trade and no intention of fulfilling their half of the bargain then that seems at least dishonest if not actually immoral.
I wouldn’t request a favor like this from someone I didn’t plan to have at least a short conversation with. (I would ask smaller favors, like that they tell me the time, or more urgent favors, like that they loan me their cell phone so I can call my ride, but a drink is neither negligible nor particularly important.)
I don’t think I can, let alone do, project enough power in a casual setting to make anyone feel obliged to buy me the liquid of my choice, although I suppose it’s possible I’m mistaken.
Refusing makes the guy look bad, unless he has a particularly adept response. The request becomes “buy me a drink, or go through status shenanigans to not look bad.” That’s not exactly obligation, but it is a form of social pressure.
Asking for $5 (well, probably $7-8 if it’s not a beer) isn’t exactly obligation, either. Is that a request you would make of both men and women? If not, why not? And how it is different to a request from a drink, other than the latter being wrapped up in more social frills (and combined with more social pressure)?
If anyone is saying “excuse me?” shouldn’t it be the person being asked for the drink (aka $7)? The only problem is that if men make this response, they look bad, due to the context-specific social power differential.
I would not ask a stranger for money unless I had an urgent, immediate need for it and no other way to get it. Asking for a drink seems different in much the same way that asking my friends for books instead of money on my birthday seems different. The drink provides a context for some sort of interaction; the money doesn’t.
The drink provides a context for some sort of interaction; the money doesn’t.
Which is precisely why it’s a status move: you are placing an implicit pricetag on your continued interaction, and therefore implicitly asserting that your status/value is such that you can demand a payment of tribute for nothing more than the chance of remaining in your good graces.
Whether this were your intention or not, it’s the situation the man is placed in, unless he has the cojones (and possibly training) to be able to refuse with impunity.
Or they are just showing a sign of desiring social interaction and they have culturally ingrained that the way to do so is to ask for a drink (disclaimer: I’ve never actually seen this occur). One may be assuming a lot more about unconscious status inquiring that is more in the category of just silly cultural norms.
Or they are just showing a sign of desiring social interaction and they have culturally ingrained that the way to do so is to ask for a drink
As I said in an earlier comment, there is almost no benefit to treating this possibility as a special case, especially since it is so cheap for her to claim that this is what she’s doing, even when it’s not.
Many women who are actually status-testing no doubt sincerely believe in their conscious model of their actions, and you cannot inexpensively separate them from the ones who are also correct!
One reason, by the way, why this situation is so useful for women as a test of a man’s social skills, is that it requires considerable social calibration to pull off a declination or negotiation that also acknowledges and continues the “game” in progress, rather than simply refusing to play.
I think that the women who’ve been involved in this thread have actually been modeling Roko’s original statement as though it’s a refusal to interact, when in fact to be functional it has to actually take the interaction up a notch, by giving a nod to something you’ve noticed about her, or something she said, etc. (IOW, men who think women want them to be mind-readers are only partly correct; they just want to know you’ve been paying attention)
But if this is what they are doing then the ideal response may be to actually buy a drink since at least in pop culture depictions of this sort of scenario (at least in movies I’ve seen) seems to be that the male is actually supposed to do that. Failure to do so might be interpreted as a lack of interest.
Failure to do so might be interpreted as a lack of interest.
Not compared to refusing in a way that shows you’re paying attention. A drink without attention isn’t nearly as flattering as the attention without the drink. And giving too much of either or both is counterproductive at Byrnema’s hypothetical level 2.
I’m a little mystified by your analogy, and what you are intending to show with it. Being treated like the birthday girl (or boy) is a form of special treatment that happens once a year. It’s not your birthday every time you go out, right? Giving birthday presents between friends is generally mutual, yet you’ve made no mention of the drink buying being mutual. Furthermore, giving birthday presents happens when people know each other and already have an interaction, rather than being a precondition for an interaction occurring.
Since getting presents on one’s birthday is a form of special treatment, doesn’t your analogy suggest that expecting/requesting drinks to be bought for oneself is an expectation/request for year-round special treatment? And doesn’t asking for drinks look even worse when we remember that buying birthday presents among friends in mutual, while women asking for drinks aren’t expecting to reciprocate and buy the guy a drink the next night?
I actually receive a fair number of gifts on non-special occasions too, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.
I haven’t mentioned buying a reciprocal drink, but this is largely because I have idiosyncratic neuroses about money, not because it wouldn’t occur to me as something appropriate to do.
I haven’t mentioned buying a reciprocal drink, but this is largely because I have idiosyncratic neuroses about money, not because it wouldn’t occur to me as something appropriate to do.
I’ve noticed something interesting about your “social processing” in these posts—your reasoning does not appear to include anything about what other people think or feel; in fact, it barely seems to include them at all! (For example, how would anyone you ask know whether you intend to reciprocate, or not?)
And I would guess that this apparent lack of consequential modeling of others’ visceral experience of you, would lead to other sorts of situations in which your NT friends/co-workers find you “weird”.
NTs pay lip service to deontological rules, but are mostly consequentialists with respect to their social behavior. As others here have pointed out, one of the key rules of NT social interaction is that everyone must show loyalty to the rules, while not being so clueless as to actually follow them or expect others to do so, when the real rules are about status and its consequences.
IOW, it’s insanely irrational to treat NT social interactions as being truly rule-driven. (By which I mean it’s irrational to think you will accomplish anything besides driving the NT’s insane!)
Unfortunately, it’s also similarly irrational/insane to try to convince non-NTs of this, unless they have some relevant personal experience. Me, I learned a little from a mentor in the business world who taught me how to see the power and affiliation subtexts of business interactions, but I’ve consistently erred on the side of assuming that those situations were special cases, and that I didn’t need to think like that with some group of trusted allies.
And in pretty much every case, I’ve found it to be a tragic error to assume that people are NOT playing games, no matter how sincerely they themselves believe they “really aren’t”. (When that’s really just the game of “not playing games”. Ever wonder why everybody claims to hate office politics, and yet it still exists?)
Geeks, of course, just use a different rulebook for their game, where (among other things) we get status for valuing “what you know” and “what’s right” over “who you know” and “what’s cool/popular/socially calibrated”. (However, this doesn’t change the game itself, just what the points get awarded for.)
I don’t know why in general. In my case, I hate surprises, and am pretty good at getting my friends to indulge this hate by not getting me things that I haven’t pre-approved. Since I’m neurotic about money and tend to not spend it unless it’s really, really important, this means that the average gift I get from a friend is more useful to me than the equivalent amount of money (which I’d basically never spend), especially since when I use the gift I think of the friend and get some utility from that.
I would not actually say “Aaaaaaaugh.” in that situation. I’d probably say “Excuse me?” and then there would need to be a rather excellent recovery or I’d stop interacting with the person.
That’s quite princessy behavior—worthy of a cute 10/cheerleader type! Go Alicorn!
Okay, this has me curious—is there actually a subset of pickup that is designed to tell me what to do, instead of telling people what to do to me? That would be news to me.
And apparently a “Playette FAQ” as well. (It makes heavy use of PUA terminology like “one-itis” and “IOI”, though.)
I haven’t really read ASFin almost 20 years, so I didn’t know about the Playette stuff. Funny story, though: I can attest to the value of the “whiff” technique in the Playette FAQ, because my wife used it in our first email and phone conversations, back in 1992… and well, um, it worked out pretty well for both of us. ;-)
That depends on what exactly your goal is. Typical men can boost their sexual attractiveness to women by changing their behavior far more than vice versa, so it’s unsurprising that there is a much greater body of expertise aimed at men in this regard. Also, getting sex is pretty much trivial for women and requires no particular skill. However, commitment and long-term relationship strategies are important and nontrivial for women too, and on better game-oriented blogs, I’ve often seen good discussions about the mistakes women make in this regard. Trouble is, realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.
Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.
But since you’re asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man’s part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google “dark triad”), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationships with such men. Then there are also many wrong beliefs about what personality characteristics of women are truly attractive and pleasant to men and apt to attract their loyalty and commitment in the long run.
There are other examples too, many of which would probably sound more controversial. Even these I listed can provoke much worse reactions when put in less abstract and detached terms, which is typically necessary when forming concrete advice.
This is a general comment about the PUA material I’ve read.
It comes off as lonely. There’s no hint of enjoying someone’s company, or hope that a someone could enjoy the writer’s company if not manipulated into it.
Yes. Sometimes I get a sense of simmering resentment underneath it all, especially on the subject of “nice guys” vs. “jackasses”.
What the PUA people call “day game” (approaching women in everyday life, instead of bars and clubs) can verge on the concept of enjoyable company, but from my limited reading on the subject they don’t seem to cover day game nearly as much. They say it’s more difficult than “night game”.
It’s a little like something in a famous essay by Eric Raymond on “good porn” vs. “bad porn”. (Just google on those phrases to find a copy—I don’t care to do that search from a machine at work.) Following a personally conducted scientific examination of porn pictures on the web, he concluded that men looking for porn are not looking for depictions of attractive young women posed as if about to have enjoyable sex with the viewer. The porn industry knows what sells, and pictures of that sort, that Raymond called “good porn”, formed only a small minority. They are looking for what he classified as “bad porn”: pictures of an absolutely joyless activity, all hard faces, cold stares, and fetishistic trappings.
ETA: Eric Raymond’s essay is on his own blog here, and he’s updated some of the links that were broken when I first read it, so you can see some of his experimental samples.
I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it’s taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
an you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
You’re sympathizing with the men, which is natural—without speculating about details, your experience is more like theirs. Try imagining dating one of them, or being in a relationship with them—if that’s too much of a strain, try imagining reading a forum of women who are that hurt and angry about men.
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don’t think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)
First, women often don’t take into account that they’re observing men’s in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they’d perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that’s just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they’re caught off guard rambling, or when they’re writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.
Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulative PUA underneath, whose nasty nature will only later come to prominence. However, this fear is entirely out of proportion when you consider a similar, but much more prevalent and dangerous natural phenomenon. Namely, there are significant numbers of men around whose personalities are naturally fundamentally nasty but nevertheless wildly attractive to women—many of whom ruin their lives big time by pursuing relationships with such men. See, for example, the Dark Triad paper by Jonason et al. for a discussion along these lines, which is nowhere near a complete account of this entire phenomenon. This is realistically a far greater danger than encountering a PUA, who is anyway more likely to be just a regular guy who undertook some self-improvement than a monster lurking below a smooth surface.
From the PUAs I’ve known, they are unlikely to be wolves in sheep’s clothing… they are more likely to be sheep in wolves’ clothing. There are a few guys who are badly adjusted and have weird antisocial ideas in the local PUA group, and other guys make fun of them behind their backs.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
I would say yes. I have a hobby of sorts that consists of exploring obscure corners of the web where various sorts of fringe people with unconventional (and often disreputable) ideas gather, and attempting to understand their perspectives in a detached manner, as free of bias as possible. As an example relevant for your question, I have read radical feminist websites where the level of anger against men far surpasses any venting against women you’ll see on even the worst PUA forums.
Now, my conclusion is that out of all these fringe groups, most of them just form their own echo chambers where they vent and reinforce their peculiar biases, but a small minority actually manage to come up with non-trivial accurate insight that is nowhere to be found in more reputable and mainstream sources. The PUA community just happens to be one such example. In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it. (There are also communities full of angry venting men where, in contrast to PUAs, I’ve never seen any particularly interesting ideas.)
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
Trouble is, some very strong biases are present here, because the ugly and hard to admit truth is that some personalty types of this sort are attractive as such to many women—not all women, of course, and I won’t speculate on the percentage, but it’s certainly non-negligible. Note that I don’t mean the situations where such dark characteristics are hidden under a nice surface only to emerge later, but when they are truly attractive by themselves, causing irresistible urges in women to engage in dangerous, self-immolating adventures with such men. You can view it as a specifically female form of extreme akrasia, I guess. The prevailing bias, however, is to interpret all such situations as women having been manipulated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing, even when the wolf was howling and brandishing his fangs from day one, only to get an enthusiastic response.
In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it.
I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA. Looking back on past relationships I can see some patterns for behavior that ‘hooked’ me, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot of potentially valuable insights.
People often meet a person they like but can’t commit to romantically because of small ‘defects’ in the person’s behavior as it relates to the relationship. Personally, I’d be all in favor of my significant other using PUA equivalent methods on me, provided I was aware it and had studied the material myself (in the same way that I’m in favor of my significant other wearing certain clothing, etc).
So, two main upshots of wide dissemination of PUA style material: better understanding of myself, and heightened attraction to my partner.
You’re response in the subthread was more a list of biases exhibited by females (an interesting list though). What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
The Rules is probably the best known example. I haven’t read it and don’t know whether there is any validity to the claims. I suspect there’s some truth in there but that it is not terribly rigorous or accurate.
I haven’t read this book either, but a significant piece of evidence against it is that one of the authors divorced her husband only a few years after it was published. Otherwise, I’ve seen it get mixed to negative comments on game websites, the principal complaint being that a man who lets himself be played by those rules may easily ipso facto signal low status to the point where he’ll destroy her respect for (and thus attraction to) him. Some of the tactics allegedly advocated by the book indeed sound that way, but I won’t pass any definite judgments since I haven’t read it.
What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
Certainly such products exist (e.g. catchhimandkeephim.com, husbandscantresist.com) but I’m not familiar with any free online resources comparable to the vast assortment available for men. Catchhimandkeephim.com has some articles, but skimming through I found it difficult to judge how useful a woman would find this advice, as it sounded all very obvious and straightforward to me… but then, I’m a man, and the articles are about how men react and think. It’s possible that the information would be a revelation for someone who wasn’t a man. ;-)
There are many books giving that sort of advice, but I haven’t read any, so I can’t recommend them. Just from the titles and blurbs I’ve seen, it can be reliably concluded that many are very bad.
Anecdotally, I can say that in the best discussions of women’s relationship strategies and techniques I’ve ever read on game-related sites, I’ve never seen anyone point out a book or any other source of systematic advice whose message closely matches the best evidence-supported conclusions of these discussions. I see this as a strong piece of evidence against the whole existing literature. This is not that surprising considering that the best evidence-supported conclusions sound, to a large degree, highly un-PC and shattering lots of pleasant-sounding illusions.
Yes, it’s harder to do experiments on parts of the interaction that occur later down the line. I think that’s a lot of the reason that PUAs talk so much more about pickup than relationships (though PUA forums typically have active relationships boards): the conversion funnel of approaches to dating to relationships gets narrower and narrower. PUAs spend most of their time stuck at particular interaction points prior to relationships, such as getting numbers and women not calling them back, going on dates with women and not being able to kiss them, or only successfully attracting women who don’t quite meet their relationship criteria. I’ve noticed that once PUAs get all that stuff handled, they start talking about relationships more than the mechanics of pickup, and actually get really picky.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
As for the Dark Triad, I don’t know what’s going on there. I tentatively assume that some people like danger, and what attracts some to motorcycles and mountain-climbing can also attract people to mates who have TROUBLE written all over them.
Alternatively, some women choose men like their fathers—they’re imprinted on a bad idea of what a man is.
Also, I hope it’s less common in the culture, but some women believe that they can turn a bad guy into a good one by being a sufficiently good wife. I’m not going to say it never happens, but making the attempt can be a powerful emotional hook.
It’s clear that how reliable people’s survival instincts are (and about what parts of their lives) vary tremendously, and I’ve never seen a substantial discussion of how the “this is good for me, that is bad for me” sense works.
You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.
Yes, I am familiar with this particular community. They do discuss some common biases in an interesting way, but ultimately, my conclusion is that they generate their own more severe ones, without adding much clarity to anything overall.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
Well, that could be a topic for a whole book, not a mere blog comment. I’d rather not just drop concrete names and places I’ve found interesting, since without lots of painstaking explanations and disclaimers, it would send off a thunderous signal of affiliation with all kinds of disreputable people.
It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance
This would be extremely surprising to me if true. This sounds like something that was true in the 1950s, but does this really match your experience today? In my experience, at least among people under 30 or so, there is no difference between how guys and girls act in social situations when there are, or are not, members of the opposite sex around. (Business or formal situations are different.)
Well, I have no evidence except anecdotal to present, but yes, this does match my experience. It surely doesn’t apply to all individuals, social groups, and occasions, but I observe it regularly, and I have to personally plead guilty to a certain degree of such inconsistency. Especially when, for example, a guy gets dumped or rejected and wants to vent a bit by rambling about the evilness of the girl in question, or women in general, it definitely seems likely to me that much cruder rants can be produced in an exclusive company of close, trusted male friends than otherwise.
In any case, even if this is true only for a minority of men, my main point still holds, i.e. there are non-negligible numbers of men around who, despite being perfectly respectable by all other criteria, engage in crude language about women and male-female relations on some occasions when no women are around to hear it. For this reason, women are often biased in that they tend to interpret such language, when observed, as unrealistically strong evidence of serious character flaws in the man in question.
Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
I have often been bitterly amused at how the “Yes, but...” speeches on the misogyny often perpetrated by Western socially/sexually deprived men, on the one hand, and the crime often perpetrated by lower-class Afro-Americans, on the other hand, often end up disquietingly similar.
And with good reason; in both cases, we have angry, alienated young men who are least able to cope with the systemic oppression of their social group, least willing to play by the rules that treat them unfairly, spiral into hatred and evil, bringing even more scorn upon their group and the peaceful advocates in it, and inadverently creating good conditions for the “natural-born” antisocial/immoral assholes who wear their colors.
“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
-Martin Luther King
Sadly, for now the MRAs/gender egalitarians seem to be doing far worse than even American blacks—see the bitter split with feminism, and the inability of similarly-minded feminists and MRAs to leave behind the sectarianism. (This collective blog that HughRistik writes for is the kind of collaboration that I’d like to see way more of on the gender front.)
I think you have had your opinion coloured by encountering people in the anger phase of the denial, anger, acceptance progression of changing beliefs in the light of new evidence.
Depends where you look. Some of that stuff is indeed written in such tone, and it’s true that some of it advises sly and dishonest tactics. On the other hand, here’s the story of a man who saved his marriage by applying insights he gained on game websites (the blog might be NSFW for foul language, though it’s on the blogroll of Overcoming Bias): http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/relationship-game-week-a-readers-journey/
For me, that story seems awfully depressing. Nothing in the story suggested to me that the man loved his wife or that his wife loved him. Game may have permitted them to have a more harmonious marriage, and evidently better sex, but not a relationship that seemed based on mutual love and respect.
It may be that the marriage was just too flawed to begin with; it’s also possible, given that the writer was writing for Roissy’s blog, that he consciously left details and color about love out of his narrative. But from what he has actually written, he’s not describing the sort of marriage that I would want to be a part of.
Agreed. I also noticed that there was basically nothing about the wife’s individual personality. She could have been anybody, as long as she was gameable.
And the couple of tidbits that don’t sound dreadful and nasty to me, do sound like they are okay by accident—the theory sounds like bullshit, it’s just a stopped clock right twice a day. Example:
Panicking when one’s faithfulness is questioned is bad, but not because it’s “beta” and signifies fear of the wife or something—but because if the question causes panic, that might be because there’s cheating going on and he fears being caught. The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations. Presenting concrete evidence (unless asked for it!) might or might not hurt, but it probably won’t help, especially if you can come up with it too quickly—readily thought-of evidence could be planted, or might signify that you’ve already considered what to say if asked because there’s some reason to expect her to ask you wanted to be prepared for.
The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations.
The problem with this approach is that factual statements can be argued with, putting you back into the same place as before—i.e., having an argument where you’re being accused of something. The “agree and amplify” approach has the tactical advantage that it leaves the other person with no place to escalate to, and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.
(Note: I’m not commenting here on the (un)desirability of having an adversarial relationship like that to begin with, just pointing to a tactical advantage of the proposed “agree and amplify” over a flat assertion or denial. Another advantage, btw, is that it can actually make the accuser paradoxically feel listened to/accepted/validated in a way that disagreement does not. My wife has actually successfully used this tactic on me when I’ve been annoyed at some minor thing—the old, “yes, I did do that, and I did it just to annoy you” routine. ;-) )
I was generalizing. The examples of “before” conversations make it sound like he thinks he’s being accused of some sort of infidelity (however minor) and that he’s scared of being so accused.
As I mentioned once before but should mention again since you linked to his blog, Roissy is not representative of PUAs. He is like most of the worst things about PUAs, plus some other flaws of his own, all packed together. He’s attracted a lot of attention outside the seduction community, but virtually nobody inside it knows who he is or cares about him.
I think you’re making the mistake of judging him for his theatrics and shock-value approach. Once you get past the swaggering style, tune in to his sense of humor, and figure out which commenters are worth reading, I’d say his blog is by far the best place for all but the most technical discussions of all aspects of male-female interactions. This doesn’t mean I endorse all he has to say, of course, but the level of insight far surpasses the other game/PUA sites I’ve seen. (I don’t think it’s for nothing that Robin Hanson links to him.)
In particular, I’m struck by the quality of many commenters I’ve seen there through the years, though in this regard, the blog is past its prime (and even back in the past, you had to sift through the detritus of unmoderated comments to find the gems). What many people might find strange is that lots of the regulars there are women, some of them extremely smart and cultured, though it’s actually not surprising when you consider that it’s an environment where the usual rules-hypocrisy is thrown out the window.
All in all, there is certainly much there to be offended by, and in fact, for lots of that stuff, one is required to be offended by it according to the official respectable standards of our culture. Yet anyone striving to eliminate biases about these topics should find much of the insight offered there worthwhile.
Then it would probably depend on how much I wanted to talk to you in the first place (where this includes, factored in, how charming the happy smile is). If not much, I’d probably shrug and go back whence I came. If more than not much, I might say “Aw, why not?”—not to try particularly to extract a drink after all, but out of curiosity and to have something to have a conversation about.
I’ll be optimistic and assume the latter option happens! I’ve heard this reply several times, here’s what happens next:
Alicorn: Hey, wanna buy me a drink?
cousin_it: (smiles happily and shakes head)
Alicorn: Aw, why not?
cousin_it: (keeps smiling, almost laughing, eyes half closed, reaches with arm to catch her waist)
In fairness, you can’t give an informed reply to that because you can’t assess my physical attractiveness over the Internet, but I can just tell you the decision tree from this point. The girl either plays along or evades. If she plays along, I keep doing what makes sense. If she evades, I turn away to the bar without lingering even a second. You’d be surprised how many girls thus NEXT’ed later come back :-) Of course I don’t mean to imply anything about your behavior!
Yeah, going for the waist at that point would get a shriek even if you managed not to tickle me, and not in a good way. I don’t care if you look like Sean Maher. I’d escape (and it would feel like escaping, not like something more neutral like “disengaging” or whatever), and if I was with any female friends I’d warn them you were grabby. I might do an evaluation of how the bouncer would react if informed, but I have low priors on getting help for “socially acceptable” invasions of space.
Yeah, going for the waist at that point would get a shriek even if you managed not to tickle me, and not in a good way. I don’t care if you look like Sean Maher.
I think you misunderstand cousin_it’s reference to “physical attractiveness”. He’s filtering not for whether you think he’s good-looking, he’s filtering by whether you are physically attracted to him at that moment in time, and open to the possibility of doing something about it, preferably as soon as possible. (This doesn’t necessarily mean sex, btw, just being physically companionable and open to exploring the chemistry further.)
Anyway, if you’re someone who’s aversive to being touched by strangers, this will obviously filter you out.
I’ll be honest here—girls kino-ing me (i.e. touching to show interest in this way) used to freak me the fuck out. I wouldn’t shriek, but I would definitely respond in a negative, abused-cat kind of way.
And I used to rationalize this response as being not just different but better and more right(eous) somehow than the dog way of doing things.
Nowadays, though, I realize that it’s irrational to pretend I’m going to change everybody into cats or even that it’s necessarily a good idea! (If everyone’s a cat, who’s going to do the stroking?)
So, while a stranger rubbing me the wrong way might make my hair stand on end, I have learned not to hiss, scratch, or run when I’m pawed by a dog person of whichever sex. Tolerating the discomfort or politely disengaging or explaining my issues with touch produces a better long-term result than just freaking out.
I’ve endured a fair number of lectures from my parents about how it’s rude to freak out when strangers touch me. Here is why I go on doing it anyway:
It is always startling. I do not expect strangers to touch me, and I can’t read them well enough to come to expect it when it’s going to happen. This gives me little opportunity to prepare a response.
It often sets off sensory issues. I can tolerate accidental, very brief incursions into these issues by people who know about them and will stop instantly if they hear the relevant word, but anything prolonged may well have me curl up in a ball and scream. And it turns out that people are confused, or worse, think it’s funny, when I try to explain these issues. If they are confused enough, or think it’s funny enough, to go on touching me in a non-approved way while I try to explain in an increasingly hysterical fashion, I will wind up doing something far less socially acceptable than just freaking out and escaping.
I don’t think that every random person is a rapist, but I think some of them are, and if I’m later in a position of having to go to the cops, I want every witness who saw me with the accused to have noticed that I established a precedent from the start of not wanting to be touched, because sexual assault investigations are nightmarish enough as-is without the kinds of whispers a history of “kino” would create.
There are certain kinds of touch that are quite safe. I will shake hands. I love hugs. Backrubs are awesome. I often ask to pet people’s hair and am perfectly happy to permit the reverse. But the only context where I would be okay with someone grabbing me around the waist would be if I were in an ongoing relationship with them and they knew to stop on a dime if I utter the words “that tickles”.
I’ve endured a fair number of lectures from my parents about how it’s rude to freak out when strangers touch me.
To be clear, I am not saying that it’s “rude”… I’m just pointing out that in my case, it has been more useful to adapt. This should not be construed as an implication that you can or should do so.
Oh no, I look nothing like that. I look like a dork, not a movie star :-)
I feel bad that this behavior would scare you. Honestly I don’t know that I ever scared a single person in my life, man or woman. I mean, you could probably beat me up if you wanted to :-) Humorous shrieks are a common girl response; scared shrieks, no. But… okay. I’m playing a numbers game anyway, some form of evasion is the expected response.
I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn’t mind dating one.
There are many arguments that come to mind here, but above all: having to cut down your dating pool drastically because you can’t handle typical social behavior is not winning.
All other things equal, it is better to have more choice, and all other things are not equal: “nerdy” occupations and communities are not gender balanced.
I don’t see any necessary contradiction between Roko and SarahC’s perspectives in determining an optimal dating strategy for men with LW-reader phenotypes that doesn’t rely on luck.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology not correctly described by the standard PUA model? Yes. Should these guys go outside that model to understand these women? Yes.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology that is correctly described by the standard PUA model, in part or in whole? Yes. Would these guys benefit from attaining knowledge of neurotypical social behaviors (from PUAs or elsewhere) to be able to date these women, instead of arbitrarily cutting them out of their dating pool? Yes.
I take an empirical approach to romantic success. Being able to date many kinds of people gives you a lot of options. Sometimes, you can’t know whether you would be compatible with a certain type of person until you try dating someone like that. Saying “but I don’t want anyone like that anyway” about people out of one’s reach because of a lack of common social skills is a failure mode. Yet if you attain the skills to date someone like that, and you find it doesn’t work, then you know that you are not merely the fox calling the grapes sour in Aesop’s fable.
Yeah, that’s the thing. I’m all for learning helpful skills. Bar game might be a helpful skill; I’ve seen enough positive testimonials to make me believe it. And certainly it’s a failure mode to do the sour grapes thing. (I’ve tried dating outside my comfort zone; it’s quite possible.)
PUA is a model, though, and people who like it sometimes overstate its applicability. The other thing to keep in mind is that there’s a tension between learning new skills and playing to your strengths. Sometimes it’s in your best interest to do the latter.
Umm. The purpose of dating is to find someone you’re compatible with. “Expanding your dating pool” to include personality types you don’t like defeats the whole point.
Unless your current idea of what personality types you’re compatible with is too limited, or your judgment of other personality types that makes you not like them is prejudiced. The purpose of dating is also to find out what types of people you are compatible with empirically. See also my response to SarahC.
“Doesn’t play culturally-common status games socially-inexperienced people don’t know how to handle” is not a reasonable way for nerdy people to determine compatibility with potential mates (or friends). The filter is too broad, and it will exclude people they might actually be compatible with if they understood status games better and how to handle them.
A big part of the reason that nerdy people don’t like status games is because they don’t understand the psychology behind them, and consequently give the other person an unfairly negative assessment. Since they aren’t accustomed to status games, their hackles may go up, particularly if the status ploy triggers issues for them, like memories of past bullying by higher status people. Yet once one attains some understanding of status games and skill at playing them, then the hackles no longer go up, and there is no reason to ascribe such a negative judgment to the other person and exclude them as a potential mate or friend.
Of course, there are valid reasons for nerdy people to find certain types of status games annoying and undesirable, even after understanding them. Yet the best way to get a sense of what kinds of status games are fun, what kind are OK with you, and what kind are intolerable, and what kinds of people play these kinds of games, is to have experience playing them with people.
Except that you may find that you’re compatible with someone that you never expected would be compatible with you. Especially when you’re talking about stereotypes like “people who go to bars” or “nerdy women” or “people who engage in shit-testing,” which are broad enough to include many different types of people
Not to mention that there are many purposes of dating: not all relationships are about long-term compatibility.
Many kinds of educated guesses about compatibility increase the probablity of finding the right person or the right relationship, because time is finite, and time spent dating a born-again Christian fundamentalist is time not spent dating an atheist librarian (or not studying Pearl or Jaynes ;-) ).
I’ve never dated a religious fundamentalist; I almost certainly never will. And I think that is the rational choice, even though it seems “limiting” in a sense. In reality, though, I don’t think it is limiting at all, because time is not infinite, and dating opportunities are not fungible with respect to time. It’s only limiting if you ignore the probability of successful outcomes based on what you know of yourself and other people, but what is a decision theory worth that ignores the probabilities altogether (and differing payoffs too)?
Edit: what holds regarding religious fundamentalists also holds to a lesser degree regarding various subsets of the average, neurotypical women that are the subject of this thread.
On the other hand, cargo-cult free-thinking can be, at least for me, far more obnoxious than just plain religious close-mindedness. And in that regard, an atheist librarian may well be much worse than a regular churchy girl (or guy).
I agree with your underlying point, but you brutally twisted my message in order to make your point.
I said “religious fundamentalist”, not “close minded” or “regular churchy girl (or guy)”, so you’re talking about something other than what I was talking about. There is a world of difference between a fundamentalist who thinks (for example) that the Earth is 6,000 years old and the bible is the literal word of God, and the average church-going person.
time spent dating a born-again Christian fundamentalist is time not spent dating an atheist librarian (or not studying Pearl or Jaynes ;-) ).
There’s more to life than intellectual activity and rationality. What about occasionally enjoying light-hearted conversation or sex with a born-again fundamentalist, just as a form of recreation? I understand your point about not wanting a serious relationship with someone with very different values, but not everything has to be about a serious relationship.
Edit: what holds regarding religious fundamentalists also holds to a lesser degree regarding various subsets of the average, neurotypical women that are the subject of this thread.
A much lesser degree, especially for intelligent extraverted women who might enjoy socializing for fun sometimes in bars, as well as more abstract pleasures.
I agree with the point about everything not having to be about a serious relationship, but the reality is that many of us are looking for a serious relationship, and we need the other person to be somebody that we can have interesting conversations with and whom we can respect and be challenged by intellectually.
I also agree on the much lesser degree point, but I do think that somebody who is extremely introverted and intellectual is not necessarily making a big mistake by limiting their romantic pursuits to people who aren’t extreme extroverts, for example, or limiting themselves to people with the intellectual equivalent of a college education and an ongoing passion for learning.
. What about occasionally enjoying light-hearted conversation or sex with a born-again fundamentalist, just as a form of recreation?
Born-again fundamentalist light-hearted sex? That does not compute....
For me, the reason I don’t do casual relationships is because my personality type does not do casual very well. Either I’m really into someone or I don’t really care.
Born-again fundamentalist light-hearted sex? That does not compute....
Heh, I thought someone might ask about that. Believe it or not, there are fundamentalists out there who take the attitude that since they know they’re already saved, they can do whatever they want.
...because you can’t handle typical social behavior
I think a lot of what I’m disagreeing with you and blueberry about is this assumption that meat-market type bars and clubs, and the PUA style tactics that may work well in those environments, are a representative sample of “typical social behavior”
PUA style tactics are predominantly a reverse-engineering of naturalistic behaviors. PUAs didn’t invent status games, they just try to copy them.
On what population do you base your view of “typical social behavior”? I do think that bars and clubs are pretty representative of the behavior of extraverts of average IQ. This is just what extraverted 100 IQ homo sapiens do when you put them in a room with a little ethanol. Such behavior may not be representative of the average introvert who is lower in sensation-seeking, but average IQ extraverts are a pretty big slice of humanity.
Bars and clubs may contain a disproportionate amount of status behavior, but this is just on the higher end of the continuum of status behavior among typical homo sapiens.
People in relationships push each other all the time to see how the other person will react. Even friends not of each other’s preferred gender do this. You may be taking the “buy me a drink” example too literally.
I don’t think people have been talking about “PUA style tactics,” as much as about normal social relationships and interactions. You’re right that they may be more exaggerated at a bar scene.
People in relationships push each other all the time to see how the other person will react. Even friends not of each other’s preferred gender do this. You may be taking the “buy me a drink” example too literally.
Maybe it’s happening so subtly that I can’t see it, but I don’t think everyone is pushing that much all the time.
I think you’re defining yourself as normal, and rather subtly making a status claim that anyone who doesn’t fit in well with you is deficient.
You may be taking the “buy me a drink” example too literally.
But that example was the only thing I was ever disagreeing with. I honestly don’t even remember what this article was originally about any more, I just remember reading the “buy me a drink” example, and thinking “whaaaaaa?”. It just weirded me out that something was being cited as an example of a broader phenomenon, as if it was this universally known, obvious thing, when in reality I think it’s something that only people involved in the PUA “community” actually believe—which makes it, whether right or wrong, not a very good example.
It’s not universally known, but it it more widely known than the PUA circle.
It seems to be understood among the set of guys that have experience successfully attracting girls.
My friends that meet this criteria take it as an obvious rule with a few exceptions, and they didn’t learn it from anything “PUA” related- just from experience and observation
I’m still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won’t find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don’t behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable.
Well, the “buying a drink” story is an extreme example that’s been canonized to make a point. But I’m convinced that in general, human beings are always unconsciously “testing” each other, and that this applies to everyone, male or female, autistic or NT. It’s just part of how humans talk and joke around and communicate. For instance, saying hi to someone and smiling is “testing”: you’re seeing what kind of mood someone is in. Making a joke, or laughing at a joke, is “testing”: you’re seeing how other people react.
I don’t see the “PUA” stuff as about sex or dating or men and women. It’s about human social interaction in general.
I suggest there’s a difference between “testing” and “checking”. In a test, you’re trying to find out whether the other person will fail or (in the case of bullies) hoping they will, while in a check, you’ll hoping they’ll succeed. I gather there are some people who are pretty evenly balanced on the chack/test scale—if the other person passes, fine, it’s a potential friendship, and if the other person fails, the harassment commences.
I think that a lot of small talk is what I call “pinging”—“Hello, I’m here and friendly”.
Using your test/check distinction, I think in most cases, including the “buy me a drink” scenario, what’s going on is a check. After all, the attractive girl is in a bar talking to the guy; she’d prefer the guy be attractive to her, not a pushover.
Yes, status-testing is a general component of typical human interaction. I think this is the point that Roko was trying to make, even though his particular example was rather gendered. If you want to see status testing in a non-male-female context, watch the behavior of frat boys, for example.
The point is that for those unfamiliar with this behavior, they need to be able to identify it when it happens, to not take it personally or as a sign of hostility, and know how to respond. Roko’s advocation of “caching responses” is very helpful, until one gets a gut feeling and can be guided towards a satisfactory response merely by emotions.
If you want to see status testing in a non-male-female context, watch the behavior of frat boys, for example.
I understand your point: that is an extremely visible and easy to see example of a dominance hierarchy.
But I’m more thinking about testing in general, not necessarily status testing. I interpret most testing as learning about the other person’s responses, not necessarily testing their status. I don’t even know if I would interpret the “buying a drink” story as about status: it’s more about humor and confidence.
The frat boy example has extremely negative connotations, and I wouldn’t call it “typical human interaction”. How about “watch two people having a pleasant and friendly conversation, laughing together, and enjoying each other’s company”? That’s a more pleasant example of unconscious testing, in the sense of unconsciously doing things to see people’s reactions and learning about the other person.
With introversion, agreeableness, and sensitivity, I wouldn’t suspect any negative correlation with conventional attractiveness (agreeableness could even have a weak positive correlation). Nerdiness and lack of socialization may be related, and even if there is a negative correlation between them and attractiveness for whatever reason, that correlation may not be particularly strong.
I would hypothesize that personality traits are at least as big a factor as looks in explaining variance in female status testing behavior. As a result, I agree with SarahC’s view that neurotypical vs. non-neurotypical status does not adequately demarcate women who ask men to buy them drinks from women who don’t. And I also disagree with Roko’s suggestion that women who don’t engage in this behavior predominantly lie in the left tail of the attractiveness distribution for age.
If pjeby’s original intent, however, was to present NT women as those most likely to engage in this behavior, and non-NT women as least likely, then I would agree with him that such a correlation is plausible. If Roko wanted to hypothesize a weak-to-moderate correlation of attractiveness and status-testing behavior, than I would agree. I just consider certain personality traits that are probably uncorrelated with beauty as having a large effect on engaging in this kind of behavior.
If pjeby’s original intent, however, was to present NT women as those most likely to engage in this behavior, and non-NT women as least likely, then I would agree with him that such a correlation is plausible.
I actually didn’t state either of the things that people are attributing to me. I simply referred to “the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks”.
The mostly-NT is hyphenated because it is an attribute of “women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks”—and this attribution does not require any correlation. The simple fact that non-NT women are a minority, period, ensures that most of the women who do this showing up at bars and asking of drinks will be neurotypicals.
I was making a point about the selection bias effect of this on PUA models, not attempting to draw any conclusions about the likelihood of drink-asking behavior given neurotypicality. (I did suggest a negative correlation between neuro-atypicality and drink-asking behavior, however.)
People involuntarily/unconsciously test and asses others’ status all the time. Evidence of one’s status is embedded in every action, and therefore, all action can be used to determine status.
I’m curious what you mean by this. Do you mean you think they will have put less effort into clothing, hair, makeup, etc. (perhaps true, but perhaps less relevant to male attraction than you think) or do you mean that you expect some inverse correlation between physical attractiveness and the personality traits described?
Partly that they put less effort into their appearance (which, for many, also includes a non-trivial effort to be thin), but also that a desire to be noticed is more related to extroversion and dominance than their opposites, and skill at being noticed favorably is related to neurotypicallity.
sorry, Orthonormal, I don’t see what you’re getting at—I didn’t mean the above as being exhaustive—merely saying that at least those people are not likely to play these kinds of games
The PUA theory explains this in terms of a status interaction. The woman is testing, ‘is this man so low status he feels compelled or obligated to buy me a drink?’
I am wary of explanations based on status interactions. It is the kind of explanation that can explain anything and therefore nothing. Also, I am skeptical based on my sense of the woman’s subsequent disappointment and embarrassment if the man says no directly—this is not a test where the level 1 correct answer is ‘no’.
Alternatively, there’s the simplistic evolutionary explanation, that I present here as what I would use to explain the phenomenon to a true human-outsider. Asking a man for a drink at a bar covertly or overtly, and in general men buying drinks for women, is the first step in a courtship ritual in which the man is to display that he is a provider. Raising children is a big investment and a family will be successful if the man and the woman together provide for the family. The woman’s investment is largely guaranteed by other mechanisms, so it is the male’s investment that must be tested and assured.
When a woman asks a man for a drink, this is the modern equivalent of asking him to bring her an animal skin. Something of token value that is of some benefit to her. What happens next is variable and perhaps does depend upon status. The woman can signal that she is not a single-animal-skin female, perhaps because providing for a child is much bigger than a single-animal-skin investment. Alternatively, the female can signal loyalty (her test in the courtship game) and signal that in return for the drink, the man has secured her undivided attention (politely, for at least the length of time it takes her to consume the drink).
This is all level-1 interaction. Human beings are intelligent, and the interaction can go meta to level 2 or 3 or higher. A woman should have concerns about a man that will buy any woman a drink that asks him. If he is too nice (signals too generally that he is a provider) then you can predict he will be fixing Aunt Rosa’s faucet when he ought to be changing diapers. Also, he might not be very smart, or too low status in the tribe to provide much for the family. Thus a man that can deflect the request in a humorous/intelligent way will be very attractive—especially if it is early in the courtship (he will not provide indiscriminately to every female that asks!) and especially if he manipulates the situation to advance the courtship (he is intelligent and capable and interested!).
Level 3 or higher would be the man going meta about the courtship ritual itself. (Not feminist? Or commenting on how silly the norm is.) This can be very attractive because the man is signaling intelligence and a larger meaning-of-life potential value. This is someone you can talk to about whether you should have kids or not.
I would guess that if you are naturally successful with people of the opposite sex, you slide easily and naturally among these levels. PUA seems to recommend making it level 2 or higher. My preference in courtship would be level 1 and level 3 together: the drink and signaling at the meta level about intelligence and gender roles. Because real life is changing diapers, but it’s valuable to have a mutual awareness that life is—to some extent—a set of choices.
My hunch is that Feynman had success with his rogue tactics because he was meta, and this is what the intelligent women attracted to his intelligence were looking for. His behavior, if given at level 1 or level 2, would flop disastrously.
Also, I am skeptical based on my sense of the woman’s subsequent disappointment and embarrassment if the man says no directly—this is not a test where the level 1 correct answer is ‘no’.
This is true—but only because just answering “no” is a DLV—demonstration of lower value. It says that you’re not paying attention, or that you’re either stingy or you lack resources. (Also, the PUA model is basically if that the woman ends up feeling bad, you’re doing it wrong. Feynman’s “worse than a whore” story should not be considered a canonical example here.)
The big problem, though, with these hypothetical discussions is that they’re abstract, and what is actually a DHV or DLV is going to depend hugely on body language, voice tone, and numerous other elements of context that are impractical to talk about in text like this.
Likewise, on the flip side:
Level 3 or higher would be the man going meta about the courtship ritual itself. (Not feminist? Or commenting on how silly the norm is.) This can be very attractive because the man is signaling intelligence and a larger meaning-of-life potential value. This is someone you can talk to about whether you should have kids or not.
The exact same words can still be a DLV, if they’re uttered without social calibration. A guy who says these things while being in his head and not actually connecting with the woman in front of him, may well be seen as a self-centered jackass or a pompous twit.
It’s not just what you say or how you say it, but the degree to which both show that you are tuned in and present to what is going on around you… especially what’s going on with the person in front of you. Otherwise, it’s still not expensive enough of a signal! (Secondarily, the inherent riskiness of the act implies your authenticity and courage—more expensive, hard-to-fake signaling.)
Interestingly, I’ve seen that there is at least one PUA school (“Authentic Man Program”) that has focused their training efforts on precisely these hard-to-fake aspects of signaling, to the virtual exclusion of everything else.
That is, they appear to focus on training men to be present and responsive to what is going on, while maintaining the integrity of their own mission or principles. And they claim that it is these qualities of presence, awareness, and authenticity that female status/value testing is really trying to measure.
(Side note of possible interest: they may also be the only PUA school that employs more female teachers than male ones—some of their workshop samples show panels of three or four women working with two male teachers, or pairs of women giving students feedback on their presence qualities, while the male coaches then just tell the guy what to do (mentally and physically) with the feedback that’s been given. IOW, it seems like the women are used as experts on the female experience of the men, while the men focus on how those things are generated or experienced inside men.)
Anyway, their goal seems to be to train men to actually have these attractive qualities (and get rid of the beliefs and behaviors that interfere with them), rather than teaching all the ways the qualities can be signaled or faked, as other PUA schools do.
It is the kind of explanation that can explain anything and therefore nothing.
No, that’s not correct. It is falsifiable—it claims that you won’t get laid as much by failing shit tests as by passing them. And, indeed, it has been subjected to man-centuries of field testing, unlike many ideas we see on Less Wrong.
This is what I mean by status theories can explain anything: if buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. If not buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that not buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. In either case, you assume rather than establish that higher status corresponds to the more successful outcome.
How do you know if “status” is a real thing if you can’t measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes? The problem is that maybe higher status is redefined in each case as getting the good outcome, in which case “status” is just the property-of-resulting-in-successful-outcomes. Even if status is some external objective thing, if we don’t know how to objectively measure whether it has increased or not, this is missing in theories based on predicting what happens if it’s increased or not.
Later edit: I thought about it a little longer and my true argument isn’t that good outcomes aren’t correlated with higher status, I suspect they are. It’s that the theory is missing where you predict which things will raise status and which will lower status. If not buying the drink helps, you deduce that this raised your status. But why should it have been raised? This last part is just filling in the blanks.
How do you know if “status” is a real thing if you can’t measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes? The problem is that maybe higher status is redefined in each case as getting the good outcome, in which case “status” is just the property-of-resulting-in-successful-outcomes. Even if status is some external objective thing, if we don’t know how to objectively measure whether it has increased or not, this is missing in theories based on predicting what happens if it’s increased or not.
Some PUA theories use “value” and “compliance” as their currency rather than status. i.e., giving compliance implies the other person has value to you. This is at least marginally better, although as your previous comment points out, there are various levels and dimensions on which “value” can be measured.
There are PUA terms for value demonstration—“DHV” for demonstration of higher value, and “DLV” for demonstration of lower value. Self-deprecating behavior, deference, and compliance are DLVs, while confidence, humor, leadership, social proof (e.g. having friends or followers) are all DHV’s. PUA’s also attempt to tell stories that contain oblique references to things that imply value, by showing how you treat your friends and allies, protect your mates, and that you have other positive qualities such as openness to new experiences (implied bravery and resource/fitness surplus), etc.
Of course, at level 1 this is just boasting that you work out and have a fast car; so PUA’s select stories that show these qualities implicitly, rather than directly boasting about them, so that the inferences are drawn subconsciously, instead of being presented on the surface for conscious dismissal.
(Btw, as with so many things in PUA, these concepts apply to other social interactions as well. A marketing message (or really, any story) is more effective when it “shows” instead of “tells” the things it wants you to conclude.)
(Btw, as with so many things in PUA, these concepts apply to other social interactions as well. A marketing message (or really, any story) is more effective when it “shows” instead of “tells” the things it wants you to conclude.)
In either case, you assume rather than establish that higher status corresponds to the more successful outcome.
How do you know if “status” is a real thing if you can’t measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes?
Status is not just defined and determined by good outcomes; the drink example is one small piece of a larger puzzle.
How do you know if “status” is a real thing if you can’t measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes?
You could consider status to be rather like the magnetic field—it is a mathematical moving part of the theory, and has explanatory power only to the extent that the theory predicts objectively measurable events. Is the magnetic field real? Who cares—what matters is whether your radio works.
It is falsifiable—it claims that you won’t get laid as much by failing shit tests as by passing them.
The explanation is fitted to the observations of the custom. It is therefore not supported by the observations. Had the observations been different, the explanation would never have been invented.
Yes. Especially if success is partly defined by “not wasting money on other people”. But even if it isn’t. You have to be humorous about it but, yeah, the only time I would ever buy a woman I just met a drink is if it is her birthday. I’ll also buy second rounds if the girl buys the first.
On the other hand this tradition makes going out to bars with my girlfriend a lot cheaper since she can just walk away for a minute and someone will come up to her and buy her a drink. After which she comes back to me, drink in hand. (ETA: Though, I don’t think she’s ever asked for a drink. She’s much too nice for that. People just come up and offer.)
As a non-drinker, I often passed proffered drinks onto my friends, who could make use of them. Obviously I would never ask for a drink, except maybe a glass of water.
I can confirm that this does happen at least sometimes (USA). I was at a bar, and I approached a woman who is probably considered attractive by many (skinny, bottle blonde) and started talking to her. She soon asked me to buy her a drink. Being not well versed in such matters, I agreed, and asked her what she wanted. She named an expensive wine, which I agreed to get her a glass of. She largely ignored me thereafter, and didn’t even bother taking the drink!
(I did obtain some measure of revenge later that night by spanking her rear end hard, though I do not advise doing such things. She was not amused and her brother threatened me, though as I had apologized, that was the end of it. She did tell some other lies so I don’t know if she is neurotypical; my impression was that she was well below average in morality, being a spoiled brat.)
In European bars or nightclubs, if (relatively) attractive girls ask strangers for drinks or dishes, then it typically means they are doing it professionally.
There is even a special phrase “consume girl” meaning that the girl’s job is to lure clueless customers into buying expensive drinks for them for a cut of the profit. The surest sign of being a “consume girl” is that they typically don’t consume what they ask for.
It’s all about money, and has nothing to do with social games, whatsoever. They are not spoiled brats, but trained for this job.
I am not sure how common is this “profession” in the US, but in Europe it’s relatively common.
It’s common in Korea—they call them “juicy girls” (from the korean word for “please,” roughly “juseo”). I’ve never seen it here in the US. I don’t know why it doesn’t exist in the US, the only other slightly relevant and consistent difference I can think of is the cultural attitudes toward tipping.
I don’t like to go meta, but this comment and its upvotes (4 at the time I write) are among the more disturbing thing I’ve seen on this site. I have to assume that they reflect voters’ appreciation for a real-life story of a woman asking a man to buy a drink, rather than approval of the use of violence to express displeasure over someone else’s behavior and perceived morality in a social situation.
I’m also surprised that you’re telling this story without expressing any apparent remorse about your behavior, but I guess the upvotes show that you read the LW crowd better than I do.
Would people just let a man grabbing a woman and spanking her happen?
He didn’t say “grabbing”, and in context, I’d guess that by “spanking” he meant a single swat to the buttocks.
The story is so far off from my priors of how people behave that I think the possibility that it isn’t true should be considered.
It says more that you don’t get out much, or aren’t very observant when you do. I don’t get out much, and never got out much, even during the brief few years when I was both single and of age, and such a story as this one is so utterly mundane and commonplace in its elements as to seem scarcely worthy of comment in the first place.
Most guys that protest such behavior from women make some other form of scene than swatting, of course, and most simply whine to their buddies or suffer in silence rather than make a scene at all. But apart from that, it’s an utterly ordinary story, and observable many, many times a night in any “meet market” where the women go to dance and drink, funded by deluded potential suitors.
Hey, I never thought of that— having a designated person to come over and break up a fight is probably more valuable than a naive analysis would reckon, not even counting the other security benefits.
without expressing any apparent remorse about your behavior
huh?
I did obtain some measure of revenge later that night by spanking her rear end hard, though I do not advise doing such things. She was not amused and her brother threatened me, though as I had apologized, that was the end of it.
Read in the context of the entire thread, I take this as a non-apology apology, not an expression of remorse or contrition. In the thread, Mallah continued to take the position that the woman “deserved” the spanking, and it appears to me that the apology was made in order to avoid future confrontation/trouble, not remorse. Moreover, Mallah also commented:
It was a mistake. Why? It exposed me to more risk than was worthwhile, and while I might have hoped that (aside from simple punishment) it would teach her the lesson that she ought to follow the Golden Rule, or at least should not pull the same tricks on guys, in retrospect it was unlikely to do so.
Remorse involves some genuine feeling of regret that one’s actions had been wrong in some ethical or moral sense, not merely reconsideration because they had been ill-advised in a a practical sense.
It was a single swat to the buttocks, done in full sight of everyone. There was other ass-spanking going on, between people who knew each other—done as a joke - so in context it was not so unusual. I would not have done it outside of that context, nor would I have done it if my inhibitions had not been lowered by alcohol; nor would I do it again even if they are.
Yes, she deserved it!
It was a mistake. Why? It exposed me to more risk than was worthwhile, and while I might have hoped that (aside from simple punishment) it would teach her the lesson that she ought to follow the Golden Rule, or at least should not pull the same tricks on guys, in retrospect it was unlikely to do so.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
[Note: this is going to sound at first like PUA advice, but is actually about general differences between the socially-typical and atypical in the sending and receiving of “status play” signals, using the current situation as an example.]
I don’t know about “good”, but for it to be “useful” you would’ve needed to do it first. (E.g. Her: “Buy me a drink” You: “Sure, now bend over.” Her: “What?” “I said bend over, I’m going to spank your spoiled [add playful invective to taste].”)
Of course, that won’t work if you are actually offended. You have to be genuinely amused, and clearly speaking so as to amuse yourself, rather than being argumentative, judgmental, condescending, critical, or any other such thing.
This is a common failure mode for those of us with low-powered or faulty social coprocessors—we take offense to things that more-normal individuals interpret as playful status competition, and resist taking similar actions because we interpret them as things that we would only do if we were angry.
In a way, it’s like cats and dogs—the dog wags its tail to signal “I’m not really attacking you, I’m just playing”, while the cat waves its tail to mean, “you are about to die if you come any closer”. Normal people are dogs, geeks are cats, and if you want to play with the dogs, you have to learn to bark, wag, and play-bite. Otherwise, they think you’re a touchy psycho who needs to loosen up and not take everything so seriously. (Not unlike the way dogs may end up learning to avoid the cats in a shared household, if they interpret the cats as weirdly anti-social pack members.)
Genuine creeps and assholes are a third breed altogether: they’re the ones who verbally say they’re just playing, while in fact they are not playing or joking at all, and are often downright scary.
And their existence kept me from understanding how things worked more quickly, because normal people learn not to play-bite you if you bare your claws or hide under the couch in response ! So, it didn’t occur to me that all the normal people had just learned to leave me out of their status play, like a bunch of dogs learning to steer clear of the psycho family cat.
The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we’re easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the “dogs” just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn’t get any fun.)
So now, if you’re a “cat”, you learn that only jerks do these things.
And of course, you’re utterly and completely wrong, but have little opportunity to discover and correct the problem on your own. And even if you learn how to fake polite socialization, you won’t be entirely comfortable running with the dogs, nor they you, since the moment they actually try to “play” with you, you act all weird (for a dog, anyway).
That’s why, IMO, some PUA convversation is actually a good thing on LW; it’s a nice example of a shared bias to get over. The LWers who insist that people aren’t really like that, only low [self-esteem, intelligence] girls fall for that stuff, that even if it does work it’s “wrong”, etc., are in need of some more understanding of how their fellow humans [of either gender] actually operate. Even if their objective isn’t to attract dating partners, there are a lot of things in this world that are much harder to get if you can’t speak “dog”.
tl;dr: Normal people engage in playful dog-like status games with their actual friends and think you’re weird when you respond like a cat, figuratively hissing and spitting, or running away to hide under the bed. Yes, even your cool NT friends who tolerate your idiosyncracies—you’re not actually as close to them as you think, because they’re always more careful around you than they are around other NTs.
The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we’re easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the “dogs” just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn’t get any fun.)
So now, if you’re a “cat”, you learn that only jerks do these things.
Your cat/dog analogy is very good, but this requires some extra elaboration.
As you say, in regular socializing, this “cat-baiting” behavior is characteristic of jerks and bullies; regular people will typically leave “cats” alone rather than provoke them. However, in male-female interactions in which the woman deems (consciously or not) that the man might have some potential mating value but requires additional assessment, or if she perceives that the man is actively trying to win her favors, she’ll typically engage in some “cat-baiting” to test him for undesirable “catlike” traits.
There’s nothing surprising there once you really understand what’s going on; it’s simply a regular way of assessing a potential partner’s fitness. Sometimes this “cat-baiting” will be subtle and entirely unremarkable to the man, but sometimes it has the form of harsh and unpleasant shit-tests which can leave him angry and hurt, and which go far into the jerk territory by the standards of regular socializing. The latter will happen especially if the woman generally imposes high standards, or if the man looks like a poor prospect who could redeem himself only with some amazing bullet-dodging. (Hence guys who give off a “catlike” vibe often get the worst of it.)
For many guys, understanding this would, at the very least, save them a lot of pointless anger in situations like the one described above by Mallah.
Thank you, that was a very helpful explanation for me. It’s posts like these that make me thankful you contribute here, even as we’ve had our differences in the past.
Reading it, I thnk I can interpret a past experience in a new light, in which I was, long ago, asked to leave a large NT-dominated club, for (what seemed like) kafkaesque reasons which were criticisms of my behavior they couldn’t rationally justify. In particular, how I was told that far more people had a negative reaction to me than I had ever interacted with. I had heard third-hand (though from a trusted source) that it was because someone passed around a false, serious accusation that they never told me about.
But looking back, the explanation that there was a dog/cat expectation barrier makes a lot of sense of the way they treated me, which was not just vicious, but bizarre. (I think that NTs would agree that some my treatment was wrong, even from an NT perspective, but believe that the my reaction to it escalated the conflict, drawing out my different behavior.)
PS: Whoever voted the parent down, I request an explanation.
No. As I keep pointing out, there is a group of posters on LW strongly opposed to this frank discussion of the real governing factors behind sociality, such as those discovered by the PUA community. We need to have a similarly open discussion of what drives people who want to keep such helpful comments as pjeby’s above from being made.
Since I’m not out to punish the comment, or feel threatened by it, but just want to understand the various positions regarding this issue, it is not “cat like”.
It may be a moot point though, as I may have been mistaken in thinking that anyone downvoted pjeby’s comment; I had voted it up, then shortly after saw it at zero. I inferred that someone must have downvoted and canceled my vote, but given the quirks we’ve seen with the codebase, there’s a good chance it may have just been a case of the site briefly not reflecting my vote, meaning it’s still possible no one voted it down.
Really great post. I can definitely see some “cat” like tendencies in myself that I’d like to know how to change more, like getting irritated at things I see as rude. Any specific ideas on how to change that, or recognize when I’m overreacting, and when I need to speak up so as not to let people get away with treating me badly?
I would like to see more discussion of this on LW, as it applies across the board to all kinds of interactions, and I think it’d be very useful.
Interesting theory—as a catlike person, I’m passing it around to see if it makes sense to a range of people.
I suspect that a lot of social difficulty is caused by dog types who don’t know how to dial it down with cats, or are so in love with their usual behavior that they feel they shouldn’t have to. They aren’t jerks (those who enjoy tormenting cats), but they can look rather similar.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
It sure was one hell of a low status signal. The worst possible way you can fail a shit test is to get visibly hurt and angry.
As for whether she deserved it, well, if you want to work in the kitchen, better be prepared to stand the heat. Expecting women you hit on to follow the same norms of behavior as your regular buddies and colleagues, and then getting angry when they don’t, is like getting into a boxing match and then complaining you’ve been assaulted.
I don’t think I got visibly hurt or angry. In fact, when I did it, I was feeling more tempted than angry. I was in the middle of a conversation with another guy, and her rear appeared nearby, and I couldn’t resist.
It made me seem like a jerk, which is bad, but not necessarily low status. Acting without apparent fear of the consequences, even stupidly, is often respected as long as you get away with it.
Another factor is that this was a ‘high status’ woman. I’m not sure but she might be related to a celebrity. (I didn’t know that at the time.) Hence, any story linking me and her may be ‘bad publicity’ for me but there is the old saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’.
Acting without apparent fear of the consequences, even stupidly, is often respected as long as you get away with it.
That’s true only if you manage to maintain the absolute no-apologies attitude. If you had to apologize about it, it’s automatically a major fail. (Not trying to put you down, just giving you a realistic perspective.)
I still don’t understand how she “deserved” to have you escalate the encounter with a “hard” physical spanking; nor do I understand how, if you spanked her in a joking context, you would consider it punishment or “some measure of revenge.” From what you’ve said, it doesn’t seem like you were on sufficiently friendly terms with her that the spanking was in fact treated as teasing/joking action; you previously stated that she was not amused by the spanking, her brother threatened you, and you apologized.
I’m certainly not trying to say that her behavior wasn’t worthy of serious disapproval and verbal disparagement. But responding to her poor behavior with physical actions rather than words seems at least equally inappropriate.
I think this situation falls pretty squarely into “two wrongs don’t make a right” territory. The moral intuition is that a minor social infraction doesn’t justify a violent response, even extremely minor violence. Even though you don’t say so, perhaps that was a tacit reason for you to acknowledge it as a mistake.
I do sympathize with your frustration at encountering such naked privilege and entitlement on her part, and that you would want some sort of recourse. It’s possible that such brattiness would cause her trouble in her future relationships with men, but that isn’t even necessarily true. You can’t really get recourse for behavior like this; you just have to shut it down when it appears. I think you’ve learned that lesson.
I have never encountered or heard of this behaviour. I would be rather startled if someone I had just met asked me to buy them a drink. I’d guess they were too poor to get their own (and with all respect to poor people, my interest in pursuing a relationship with them would substantially diminish).
I can understand your explanation, but I would find an opposite explanation just as plausible (they are trying to determine if the cost of a drink is a mere trifle to you, hence buying them one = good).
Is this a culturally specific thing? Where is this action, with this meaning, a standard pattern of behaviour?
Lily Allen has. The relevant section:
Cut to the pub on our last night out,
Man at the bar cos it was his shout,
Clocks this bird and she looks OK,
Caught him looking and she walks his way,
“Alright darling, you gonna buy us a drink then?”
“Err no, but I was thinking of buying one for your friend.
It seems very weird to me that this seems unfamiliar to you. It’s a cliche in movies and the like.
It’s a cliche in movies but it’s actually rare in real life, in my experience, except as a joke.
I just realized that one person’s joke is another person’s status test, of course.
In bars and clubs in the UK, US and Canada at least.
How often do you approach attractive people of your preferred gender in, e.g. bars with the intention of having some kind of romantic interaction?
Never. That could explain it. I don’t watch romantic movies either, or any TV.
So, how does the script normally play out?
“No.”?
“No, we don’t know each other well enough yet?”
“snort Too poor to get your own, are you?”
Ignore or somehow deflect the request and talk about something else?
None of the above?
If I had to guess I’d go with the fourth, but I’m only guessing.
ETA: I don’t mind getting the karma, but I’m curious about why I’m getting several upvotes within minutes of posting this.
What you would do if one of your little sister’s sixteen year old-still has braces friends saw you in a bar and said “well, are you going to buy me a drink now?” (or substitute any other person who is obviously lower perceived statusvalue than you, e.g. gay man if you’re straight, fat/ugly/dumb/smelly person, anyone who you basically see as unworthy of you).
Take that, add some mocking humor/banter, and there’s your response.
Well hang on. It isn’t that simple. The man buying the woman a drink is more or less the courtship norm. They haven’t actually stepped that far out of line by asking for a drink so the way you respond has to be calibrated to their status. If their status isn’t that high and it was something of a gutsy move to ask for one, there is nothing wrong with letting them down softly with a “Nope. It isn’t anything personal, you seem cool. I just don’t buy drinks for women I just met” and you can segue into a conversation about how silly the norm is if you like. If the person has really high status then something more along the lines of lightly mocking them for being a spoiled brat who won’t buy their own drinks can go over fine.
Is this speculation or have you tried it?
Umm, only with someone with whom I was already acquainted and I think the way I phrased it sounds worse than I meant it to sound. Spoiled is a bit much, I meant it to describe the extreme end of the possible responses you were suggesting. My point was more (1) when someone asks you to buy them a drink while they are testing your status they’re also putting themselves at risk for rejection. So if your status is fairly equal already, be nice about it. And (2) the greater the initial status differential between you and the other person, the more confident you need to be (which, as I understand it has been well tested, I can anecdotally testify to and which is consistent with dominance hierarchy theory.)
This was not a particularly constructive example to use in the original post, for several reasons.
There are basically two situations that lead to this: First, the other person is interested in you, but is somewhat awkward and uses this as a rather blunt test to measure your interest in them. Second, if person is not interested in you, but sees you as a means of getting a free drink.
As the latter tends to be more likely, and in the former, there are still ways you can show interest without buying them a drink, you should not buy them a drink. However, buying them a drink is not wrong insofar as no unpleasant social consequences result from it (as they might result from, for example, an unflattering comment about a person’s weight or appearance). All that happens is you’re out $3-10, depending on the bar.
It’s also worth noting that with certain people and in certain circumstances, you may actually be seeking someone with the qualities indicated by this request. If I were a rich and not particularly attractive older man, and the subject were a much-younger and attractive woman, this comment may actually suggest we could establish a mutually beneficial relationship. Our response to the request is really a response to the person making the request, and your hypothetical assumes we should a negative response, which is generally but not invariably true. Your description of the
That doesn’t cover Mallah’s story. I think the free drinks explanation is largely a confabulation by girls who don’t know why they do it.
I believe that covers that story perfectly. he approached an attractive woman, who saw him as a sucker who’d buy her an expensive drink, which he did, whereupon she promptly ignored him. If that’s not exactly what I said, I don’t know what is.
It covers the story up to the point of her not taking the drink. Perhaps she just wanted to see if she could. I agree that getting him to buy the drink may be more significant than actually consuming it. Or it could simply be a way of chastising someone she didn’t believe should be talking to her. Or, perhaps, she simply forgot.
For practical purposes, she’s not different whether she takes the drink or not. It’s still a waste of money. If she didn’t forget, it’s likely she simply got a kick out of ordering some guy around. Not a situation I anticipated, but certainly deserving the same response as the selfish drinker.
This seems very odd to me. You seem to be suggesting that this is the typical way a socially successful NT responds to being asked for a drink, and that just seems truly, bizarrely wrong to me. Where did you learn this? Is it a PUA thing? I’m not necessarily saying it wouldn’t work—it might, in the same way that weird PUA crap like “peacocking” might work, but it definitely isn’t normal behavior, even for NTs
I’m confused why you think this is so bizarrely wrong. I mean, yes, some inexperienced guys are easily manipulated by attractive women, but I think that more successful and more experienced people would just make a joke of it, and not allow themselves to be manipulated easily.
And everyone “peacocks” every time they dress for an occasion or buy clothes because they like how they look. That’s not weird or bizarre either.
Roko explicitly wrote about using a status-lowering level of teasing.
Part of the problem may be that a lot of play is inhibited attack, and it can be hard to judge just how much of a verbal attack is either intended or received.
I think that the emphasis on status here is misplaced. Here’s an analogy:
Imagine that you, dear reader, are very smart, and when you get into conversations about intellectual topics, people almost always say “Wow, you’re smart,” based on superficial indicators, and seem impressed. Now imagine that you meet someone who reacts differently: they take it for granted that you’re smart, and actually try to engage with you intellectually, rather than being awed and amazed by your intellect.
Can you see that your reaction might be very different? You might be more likely to like and be interested in talking to this person, intrigued that they weren’t so easily won over, and possibly a little motivated to prove your intelligence to them.
That’s what’s going on in the example with attractive girls, except with looks and sexuality rather than intelligence. It’s less of a “Oh wow you have high status” reaction on the girl’s part, and more of “Hey, finally someone who isn’t a pushover just cause I’m hot. He might actually be fun to talk to.” This is communicated all the time with little things like body language, the way you turn to look at someone, the way you stand, and how you speak. It usually isn’t as direct as “Will you buy me a drink?”
Yes, I like this analogy between intellectual interaction and social (status) interaction. Both types of interaction have “I’ll push you until you stop me” behavior, that would be considered offensive or attacking if it was manifested in the other form of interaction.
A common mode of interaction for intellectuals is to argue for positions that you aren’t sure of in order to figure out if they believe in, or even to argue for positions that they don’t believe just to play devil’s advocate. These debate styles push against people, expecting them to push back, analogous to the social styles of many neurotypical extraverts.
Just as introverts on the autistic spectrum hate it when neurotypical extraverts try to turn everything into a status game, neurotypical extraverts hate it when autistic spectrum introverts try to turn everything into a debate.
In a group of neurotypical extraverts, saying something like “you’re such a dork” to someone else is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to handle it and fire back. Likewise, in a group of autistic spectrum introverts, saying something like “you’re wrong” is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to be able to handle it, and either defend or concede their position.
Both groups have different norms for showing assertiveness, and an assertiveness display in one group could be considered an attack if it was performed in the other group.
Good point about “you’re wrong,” which has unnerved me a few times. Also, especially on this site: “you’re unethical” or “that’s unethical.”
In intellectual circles, it often seems to be considered acceptable to communicate intellectual disagreement in an assertive way, the assumption being that everyone knows that disagreement isn’t personal. This communication style jars some intellectuals, and it enjoyed by others. Non-intellectual people universally hate this communication style.
It just runs counter to my own experience and observation. Deflecting the request with a joke would be an effective way to avoid getting played for free drinks, if you think that’s what’s going on, or of politely declining if you’re just not interested, but it doesn’t seem like a generally effective, or commonly practiced, method of actually parlaying the interaction into a “score”—not unless you happen to be dealing with the kind of person who’s attracted to assholes. My impression is that these kind of PUA style techniques are geared towards successfully picking up people with low self esteem. That may work, but I think it’s a mistake to draw conclusions from that about “normal” social interaction.
I am very confused by this comment. Who are you talking about as the “asshole” in this scenario? I think you may be misunderstanding it. The idea is that two people are talking and flirting, and the girl asks the guy for something (like a drink, but it could be anything: taking a picture, helping her with something) at which point the guy teases her about it. I’m not seeing anything about low self esteem here.
The guy who says “no” when, in the middle of flirting, a girl asks for a drink. This just doesn’t happen IRL unless the guy is intentionally trying to shut down the interaction.
Could you explain your basis for this claim a little more?
Just my own personal experience. I guess maybe I phrased that a little strongly for something based entirely on anecdotal evidence. And I guess I should have added a caveat like “This just doesn’t happen unless the guy is intentionally trying to shut down the interaction, or has studied PUA techniques, or is Richard Feynman”.
I guess the kind of person who is not attracted to assholes wouldn’t ask a stranger for a drink in the first place, would they?
Decline, but the conversation would never have got that far anyway, and isn’t going to get any further. I’m not very good at maintaining a conversation, but when I deliberately put out the “please shut up and go away” vibes it has no chance. :-)
I’m not sure what this has to do with the original scenario, where the two people are still trying to assess each other. Or what status has to do with those examples.
Ah, the confusing world of NT social games…
Basically, imagine each person P has a number X, called their “statusvalue”, and the way we respond to others is a function of the statusvalue difference between us and the person we respond to. Suppose that your number is, say, 5, and the person you are approaching is single, sought-after and attractive, and therefore has a statusvalue of 8. Therefore your body’s automatic response will be a “+3″ type response, i.e. you will defer to the person you are talking to, attempt to please them, etc.
In order to work out the correct response, you need to think what your response would be if the person asking you for the drink were a 2 on the statusvalue scale. This will be a “-3” type response, i.e. you will assert your desires over theirs, and interpret their behavior in terms of whether it meets your expectations. Then, you gradually condition yourself to always give “-3″ type responses, i.e. give off signals that you are three statusvalue points above everyone.
The way we respond to others has a lot more to it than that. If I’m approached by someone of the wrong sexual orientation for me, then my declining their advances has nothing to do with status. The same with 15-year-old girls (the only example in the original version of your comment). My response to these people will be whatever is necessary to get them to give up on the sexual advances. This does not strike me as a useful response to someone that I would like to get together with.
Perhaps the idea you are trying to get across is that you should begin by trying to put the other person off, but (if you still want to get together with them) take care not to do so too effectively? I am familiar with the custom of ritually refusing a gift before accepting it—is this something similar?
Are you speaking from personal experience or is this something you have only worked out on paper?
That’s why I said statusvalue—i.e. something that is a combination of their overall status and their value to you.
Not really—as I said, it is more abstract than that—the idea is to approach the interaction from a higher-statusvalue frame, because ultimately (in this case) that is what the other person is testing for.
This particular example is taken from the world of pick-up, which has been tested more extensively than you can imagine.
EDIT: though the idea of a “social coprocessor” is speculation.
On a very narrow and self-selecting sample, i.e. people who show up at bars and clubs with the express intention of getting “picked up”
You think it’s abnormal to ever show up at bars and clubs? Most young people go to either a bar or a club (or party, cafe, music gig, etc) at least, say, once a month.
I think a lot of people, when they first turn 21 (or whatever the legal drinking age is in their jurisdiction) go through a phase of going to meat-markety type places, but eventually become disillusioned with that ‘scene’ and grow out of it.
I would call that simply value. If their status matters to me, it is part of their value to me; if it does not, it is irrelevant.
Tested by you? Ok, maybe that’s too personal a question, but I’m aware in general terms of the PUA stuff, and I have only a limited interest in soup of the soup.
soup of the soup?
On the first day, you have a delicious chicken. The next day you make soup with the bones and leftovers. On the third day you make soup from the leftover soup.
In other words, an exposition only indirectly connected with the source, unrefreshed by contact with real life.
This is a legitimate concern—but there are plenty of people here who have used such methods successfully.
I’m one of them. I’m not committed to the view that the rather crude theory Roko outlines is true, but acting as if it’s true indeed seems to be useful. I’m not a PUArtist, I’m a PUInstrumentalist.
Indeed the instrumentality of certain worldviews is an interesting topic in rationality…
Sure—though the two are very strongly linked, value is really the key.
Sorry, what is “NT”? I read this blog often enough that I feel like I should know, but I don’t.
“Neurotypical”—in context, not being significantly autistic.
Thank you.
I’ve never understood why people think that’s effective.
What good does it do to act like you’re higher status if you’re not? You can’t change your face or your income by signaling. Is everybody really so gullible?
And also—I’ve not spent a huge amount of time in bars, but I’ve never seen anyone ask a stranger for a drink.
Income and looks are only one component of status. Other components are determined by signaling and other forms of implicit communication in actual interactions. So, merely acting like you are high status will go a long way to convince people that you are, as long as you aren’t giving off contradictory low status signals also.
One of the reason that people play status games (of which “buy me a drink” often is), is because there is a margin of error in status perception, and poking the other person with a status ploy is a way to confirm or disconfirm your initial impression of their status. If you believe that you are higher status that someone, and you attempt a successful status grab that they submit to, then it confirms that you are higher status.
As I’ve hypothesized, the way normal people tend to interact (or at least, a typical mode for certain types of extraverts to interact) is to constantly bump up against each other socially in mini-dominance battles and figure out the pecking order by seeing who can away with what against who.
This form of interaction used to be rather alien to me, and I would interpret it as an affront (which is how RichardKennaway seems to interpret it), but Ben Kovitz’s weird psychology wiki gave me some ideas to help understand it.
From an article on negotiation:
From another negotation article:
Status is partly a process of empirical discovery. It is decided through negotiation. People with different phenotypes approach this negotiation in different ways. Some people negotiate by acting lower in status to everyone. Some people negotiate by acting equal in status to everyone. Some people (such as neurotypical extraverts) negotiate by acting higher in status to everyone. Non-neurotypicals are simply unaware of this negotiation.
To people like us, neurotypical socially-dominant extraverts will seem annoying with their constant status grabs. But they aren’t necessarily trying to be jerks, they are just interacting the only way they know how. They are attempting to negotiate with you, they just begin the negotiation by driving a hard bargain. They may assume that you are like them, and expect you to stand up for yourself and give them a counter-offer back of a different status relationship, where instead of them being on top, you two are equals, or you are on top. They may even want you prove that you are higher status, and their test is an opportunity for you to do so. They will expect you to negotiate yourself, by either submitting, or attempting to fight back; what they won’t be able to understand is someone who doesn’t even participate in this sort of negotiation in the first place.
Yep. And depending on the way you opt out of the negotiation, you may be perceived as either very low self-esteem, or as an arrogant bastard.
The latter category (which I personally have been categorized as a lot) tends to happen when you assume that all people are supposed to be equal, dammit, and refuse to give ground to anything that isn’t Right with a capital R. This results in the problem of causing others to have to lose face when you win… and people don’t like it.
(Later in life, I’ve realized that it generally works better to arrange things so that other people can receive status strokes by siding with you, and they then tend to return the strokes.)
I’ve heard this before, but framed as ‘Ask Culture meets Guess Culture’.
Even guess cultures have that distinction; look up the etymology of otaku sometime.
Yeah this is a good analysis. Important for more rational/AS people is to realize that more emotion-driven NTs run their social interaction in hardware ==> they do things like little status grabs almost without thinking about it.
No, people are godshatter , they value signals of status in and of themselves.
Status isn’t something you have, it’s something you do.
As long as we’re piling on anecdotes, I’ve asked folks for drinks on numerous occasions. And the bartender at a club I frequented back in the day used to give me my drinks for free.
I completely understand the general idea here, I just think the drink-buying thing is a bad example. In my experience, refusal to buy a drink for someone who’s flirting with you doesn’t send the signal “you’re X statusvalue lower than me”, it sends the signal “I’m not interested in playing this game at all”
I think you’re misunderstanding the “refusal.” It’s not a “No, go away,” it’s more like “you buy me one first, I’m cuter” said playfully.
I voted you up because I wanted to attract attention to your comment, because I also wanted the questions contained within answered as well.
Indeed, this pattern seems totally strange to me. While on the dating scene, if a woman brazenly asked a man to get her a drink, I would consider it a test to see if he can handle assertiveness. That is, if he is fun and easy-going. If he said no, I would think she could consider him either not interested in her enough to part with a few dollars AND too cheap to satisfy a small request, or insecure about his status in the company of a woman. Hopefully, he would say yes, and they could enjoy a drink together.
Do men really say, ‘no, I won’t’ and find success with that??
[Apologies for the editing and then un-editing; I commented naively and then realized I’m kind of over my head here with the inferential distance; culture and values-wise. I think things have changed since I was dating, or I noticed different things.]
The above is correct but this part would depend a lot on how the “no” is delivered:
The real status test is about whether he considers his company to be as valuable as hers. If he complies with the request (without any quid pro quo), then he’s ceded her the higher social status—which was what the question was testing (either intentionally or unintentionally), in the common case.
Declining the request, reversing it (you buy me one), or insisting on a quid pro quo, are the only ways to maintain equivalent or higher status in the interaction (absent an ongoing equal relationship wherein the quid pro quo is assumptive). Also, skillfully handling any of these options raises the observer’s estimate of your social coprocessor’s power rating as well. ;-)
There are a wide variety of context-sensitive ways to decline or redirect such a request, depending on the situation and level of rapport of the conversation… from the polite to the downright rude, all of which can be functional if delivered with confidence. But certainly, “fun and easygoing” no’s are possible.
(For example: pretending to misinterpret the request as an offer, eg. “Oh, yes please. That’s very kind of you. I’ll have a..”, a playful, “Oh? And what are you going to do for me?”, or even a humorous, mock-offended and effeminately-voiced, “Hmph! What kind of boy do you think I am? Are you trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me?”)
As thomblake points out, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”contains his story of finding out this counterintuitive fact—although the specific story involves calling a woman “worse than a whore” for getting him to buy $1.10 worth of sandwiches. She then proceeded to pay him back the $1.10… and then came over later to have sex with him.
In Feynman’s second story, he asks “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”—and gets a “yes”.
Amusingly, the “Player Guide” (an open-source guide for beginning PUAs) isn’t quite so bold—it only recommends asking for a french kiss as the quid pro quo. ;-)
Of course, all of these anecdotes and advice are subject to selection bias—i.e., to the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks. My guess is that most non-NT women don’t ask guys to buy them drinks unless there’s either an ongoing quid pro quo (i.e., “I’ll buy the next round”), or they’ve consciously chosen to exploit the social dynamic for financial/alcoholic gain.
tl;dr: a man is generally best-off treating a request for a drink as a test to determine whether he has low enough self-esteem to believe he needs to pay for female company, and an opportunity to display an unruffled and socially-skillful response.
Hang on half a second here. No more than 1% of Americans are autistic. (CDC estimates 1 in 110.) Autism is four times as common among males as females. This whole “NT” vs “non-NT” thing you’re talking about is distinguishing 99.75% of women from 0.25%. I think this may be misguided. There are way more women who don’t ask to be bought drinks than that.
I didn’t say that (most NT women) (ask men for drinks), I said (most women who ask men for drinks) are NT.
Given your statistics, this would be expected even if half of all women asked men for drinks, because then you’d have half of 99.75% of women being NT+drink.asking and half of .25% being non-NT+drink.asking.
That being said, I do not assume that non-NT-ness requires actual autism or even diagnosable Asperger’s. High intelligence alone (IMO) qualifies one for being neurally “atypical” in my book.
Ah, I misunderstood (I’ve only ever heard “NT” to refer to “not autistic.”)
You’re quite right, technically; I perceived an implication the other way as well but you may not have meant that.
Sure, (the ~75% who are not in the right tail of the attractiveness distribution)union (those who are not in the appropriate age range)
Personality is a factor, not just attractiveness. Women who are some combination of the following don’t engage in testing like this, or are less likely to do so:
highly introverted (Big Five extraversion has a social dominance component)
high in Agreeableness (Big Five Agreeableness has a submissive component)
highly sensitive
highly nerdy (though then we get into the question of how nerdy is non-neurotypical)
unsocialized
Sweet, sensitive, nerdy quiet types of both genders just don’t like status games very much, and they tend to be bad at them.
The standard PUA model focuses a lot on women who do engage in testing and status games, because they tend to disproportionately encounter women who play them. This is understandable, but flawed.
I expect that women who match one or more of your bullet points are less likely to be the most eye-catching.
I suppose that’s true.
My confusion with this whole business is quantitative. The assumption in Roko’s drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That’s a statement of probability. It’s likely that you’ll be going to bars to meet women, it’s likely that any women you’re interested in engage in shit-testing, it’s likely that any women you’re interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I’m really not sure about that.
There are, as I mentioned, very, very few autistic women. So Roko and Nancy lump in the less attractive women. Fine, in principle. I’m still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won’t find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don’t behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable. I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don’t behave like that. We hit a lot of HughRistic’s bullet points. And we’ve stumbled into our fair share of good relationships.
In other words: I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn’t mind dating one.
Actually, it’s a statement of conditional probability, conditioned on a woman asking a man for a drink in such a setting, often as a prelude to having any conversation at all.
(It’s not, however, a great example of a cacheable response. Really, the whole point of it as a status/social skill test is that it is hard to fake!)
Anyway, here’s the reasoning: if a man is asked for a drink, it may or may not be a test, conscious or unconscious. However, in all possible cases, the man is highly likely to improve the situation by skillfully declining or negotiating a quid pro quo, because the situation is still a signaling opportunity, even if the woman’s attraction wouldn’t have decreased upon acquiescence. (In other words, you either win, or don’t lose—a positive expected outcome over multiple trials.)
For example, let’s say it’s one of those “nerdy women”—she is not fishing for a drink, not consciously testing, and (probably) not unconsciously testing, but maybe has been taught that this is how you signal openness to being courted, or just doesn’t think about it at all.
Well, in that particular case, it’s an opportunity for a signal like, “Not a feminist, huh?”—probably leading to a thought-provoking conversation about feminism, chivalry, and the impact of social trends on dating behaviors...
A conversation that wouldn’t have happened if the response was a bland, “okay”. If he’d simply agreed without further comment, maybe he wouldn’t have lost any points, but he certainly wouldn’t have gained any either—he has simply failed to distinguish himself from any other man who lacks the social skill to finesse the situation. He is out a drink, and gets nothing except (maybe) the continuation of the conversation… assuming that her attraction doesn’t mysteriously evaporate shortly thereafter, due to her unconscious lowering of his status.
But the (extreme) case of a nerdy woman who’s both sincerely asking for a drink and won’t subconsciously decrease attraction upon compliance, is actually the worst case scenario for measuring the advantage of the “never buy a drink without quid pro quo” heuristic… and yet it still comes out well ahead of compliance in the best case, and only slightly better in worst-case!
And in all other scenarios, such as a woman using this to get rid of the guy or to get drinks, using it as a filter for non-interesting guys, or even a woman who thinks it’s normal but unconsciously feels less attracted to men who comply… the heuristic produces much better results on average than buying the drink does. (Assuming, again, the guy has developed the social skills to pull it off.)
Among other things, it’s also a counter-filter, since the woman who truly has no interest in the guy outside his ability to procure alcohol will immediately depart in search of another sucker, no matter how skillfully it’s done. For the rest, you still either win, or else you don’t lose.
Of course, this is all conditional on the man’s skill in making use of all the available information in the situation… for one thing, he’s got to be socially calibrated enough to be able to tell the difference between the woman who’ll respond to “Sure, bend over, you spoiled brat” vs. the one who’ll respond to “Not a feminist, eh?”… and preferably be able to tell that before even starting the conversation. (Oh, and let’s not forget that those two can be the same woman, in different moods!)
But that’s the “software” way of doing it… the “coprocessor” way is that the guy ideally just believes that it’d be silly to buy a woman a drink without a quid pro quo (like Feynman’s advisor) and lets their social hardware handle the details of responding.
Attempting to cache a specific behavioral response in “software” isn’t going to cut it, though; the PUA methods that revolve around “canned” material are necessarily probabilistic and essentially manipulative. So, if there’s a flaw in Roko’s example, that would be it: caching a specific response pretty much guarantees it’s not going to be done with a truly beneficial level of skill.
And yet, even in that case, it’s still probably positive-sum advice, as long as the man continues learning and improving over the long haul.
Well, if “behave like that” is asking guys for drinks, then there’s no conflict with what Roko said, since the situation will never come up.
However, if “behave like that” is responding with increased attraction to a display of confidence, tact, humor, and/or other social skills, I’d be surprised. (It’s just that what you would personally consider to be such a display is going to depend on a lot of situational factors that a single canned response can’t possibly take into account.)
I think this needs to be emphasised a lot. Also the differences between types of women. While a nerdy girl may not ask for a drink, they may ask for help with a heavy box. Now from the canned advice given this can be seen as a shit test, will the guy demean himself by lugging a heavy box to try and get with someone of my level. If so they don’t want to be with a loser who lifts his own boxes. So a response like “Do I look like a shelf stacker?” said in a suitably amused tone, would be appropriate.
However the nerdy girl might just want the box moved and be interested in people who can just get stuff done with a minimal amount of prodding. The appropriate response in this case is to help. Grumbling (with a grin) while doing so, or making a light comment about being owed one might show you aren’t a complete push over and won’t put up with too much of that sort of thing without something in return, would be appropriate I think.
I’d have a lot less problem if advice were couched in term of normal human interaction rather than just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants.
Hauling a heavy box is not at all analogous to the drink example. When a woman asks a man for help with heavy physical work, this puts him in a much better initial position status-wise. She is the weaker party, asking for necessary assistance from his greater physical strength. Helping a weaker party from a position of greater power is a first-rank status-winning move. Therefore, it’s best for him to do it cheerfully with a “that’s nothing for a man like me” attitude; grumbling and saying “you owe me” is a bad idea since it suggests that he actually finds it hard, rather than an act of negligible difficulty from his superior position.
Of course, if a woman regularly exploits a man for such favors or makes him spend unreasonable time and effort helping her, that’s another story altogether. However, a random request for some small help with a hard physical task nearly always conforms to this pattern of status dynamics.
In contrast, when a woman asks a man to buy her a drink, she is asking him to satisfy a random and capricious whim, not help her as a weaker party from a superior position. Therefore, acceptance carries no positive status signals at all, but instead signals that he is willing to obey her whims for the mere privilege of her company. Compared to the box example, it’s like accepting to pay extortion money versus giving to charity. The former is an expression of weakness and submission, the latter a dispensation of benevolence.
My point was more that the situations could be confused by people with broken social coprocessors and inappropriate behaviour translated across from one domain to another. Without a lot of explanation of the appropriateness.
Buying drinks can also be seen as someone weaker (financially) asking someone stronger. Considering that men earn more on average than women, and if you are picking up college girls and have a real job that is likely to be even more the case. So I don’t see the way that these situations can be easily distinguished that way by someone without much social experience.
I agree about the grumbling, don’t grumble about the weight, grumble about the time taken.
I have a few meta-rules of thumb in such matters:
Anything can mean anything.
Corollary: Never explain by malice that which is adequately explained by intelligence.
The rules are never what anyone says they are.
The rules may not even be what anyone thinks they are.
Nevertheless, there are rules.
It is your job to learn them, and nobody’s job to teach them to you.
All advice, however universally it may be expressed, is correct only in some specific context.
Application of the last to the whole is left as an exercise. :-)
This whole list is brilliant. Particularly,
This makes “Never explain … stupidity” a special case of this rule!
whpearson:
Well, yes, but that’s what explanations are for. Once you grasp the underlying principles, it’s not that complicated—and more importantly, you gradually start to make correct judgments instinctively.
No, if you understand the status dynamic fully, you’ll realize that you shouldn’t grumble at all. Grumbling, of whatever sort, indicates that you assign a significant cost to the act, and in order to come off as high-status, you must make it look like it’s a negligible expense of effort from your lofty high-status position, a casual dispensation of benevolent grace. As soon as you make it seem like you perceive the act as costly in any way, it looks like you’re making the effort to fulfill her wishes, clearly displaying inferior status to hers.
Remember we are talking about nerdy girls, that is not the norm that the PUA deals with. I remember a recent post by someone saying that nerdy girls prefer men who dominate everything but them. I can’t remember who posted it, at the moment.
Getting back to an earlier discussion of whether more women are wanted at LW..… anyone who’s likely to show up here is nerdy. Perhaps it would be a good idea to remember, and keep remembering, and make it clear in your writing, that “women” are not a monolithic block and don’t all want the same thing.
NancyLebovitz:
Assuming that there are non-Anglospheric folks here, this is probably an unjustified generalization due to a cultural bias. The idea that smart people interested in the sorts of things discussed here have to conform to the stereotype of “nerdiness” is a historically recent North American cultural phenomenon, which doesn’t necessarily hold in other places. It’s actually a rather curious state of affairs by overall historical standards.
Your observation is probably accurate statistically, though.
That’s interesting. Any theories about what’s going on?
People who appear socially low-status can end up in economically high-status knowledge-based professions in an industrial society, which upsets people’s intuitions of how the social hierarchy should work. Put-downs have evolved for making things look right again.
Could be.
I still find American anti-intellectualism kind of shocking. Do you know if there are other cultures where children reliably punish each other for getting good grades?
I don’t really know how it’s distributed. There seems to be a generally stronger streak of anti-intellectualism in America than in Europe, and kids probably pick that up. A poor primary education system may make the problems worse by making education gaps wider and by leaving children with a poor grasp on how the wider society functions.
I’ve the impressions that things are somewhat more US-like in Britain and that studying science is more appreciated in the former Soviet bloc, but I don’t know how accurate these are. Education seems to be very highly valued in China and India. I’ve no idea about the rest of the world.
Yes, Britain has a similar culture to the US in terms of children punishing those who get good grades. My personal experience was that getting good grades was not in itself a major problem as long as you didn’t appear to be trying too hard or to care about the outcome.
A woman who doesn’t want a generalization applied to them? :)
But that is an extremely normal human interaction.
You haven’t clarified the all-important context. Is this a friend? Stranger? Do they need boxes moved often? What are your goals? Friendship? Company? Just getting a good feeling from helping people out?
Certainly, the default response, assuming a member in good standing of your extended tribe, is to help. This doesn’t make it the “appropriate” response for all goals and contexts, however.
Agreed. Don’t see anyone talking about “just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants,” though. The rough consensus I’m seeing lately from proponents of learning normal social interaction is that it is useful for improving interaction with people in general.
Aaaaaaaugh.
As someone who is fairly good at predicting my own behavior in various counterfactual situations, I’d like to hereby offer to tell people how I’d react to lines about which they are curious. I don’t know to what extent I’m in the reference class anyone’s aiming for, but if the information would be useful, there it is.
Alicorn: Hey, wanna buy me a drink?
pjeby: Not a feminist, huh?
Alicorn: Aaaaaaaugh.
Am I parsing you correctly?
I know it’s an act of terrorism for me talk about Alicorn, especially given this topic, but …
She’s really not someone whose reactions are characteristic of the NT, average intelligence women that men would approach in bars, so knowing what she would do is probably not going to be helpful.
Strongly agreed. Alicorn is not the kind of girl one has in mind when one thinks about shit testing behavior—finding alicorn shit testing a guy would be like finding Ghandi at a KKK rally.
Wait, you realize that Ghandi was a gigantic racist, who hated black people (as well as the minority groups in his own country), right?
LOL good catch. Still, the KKK advocates violence and hides their identity in protests, so they’re not quite kindred spirits.
I would not actually say “Aaaaaaaugh.” in that situation. I’d probably say “Excuse me?” and then there would need to be a rather excellent recovery or I’d stop interacting with the person. (I’m granting for the sake of the exercise that I’d ask for a drink in the first place, even though in real life I don’t consume alcohol.)
Which is precisely why the offered hypothetical is worse than useless in this case.
Bear in mind that in the circumstance being discussed, asking for a drink is like asking someone to hand you $5 -- for no reason at all other than than that you asked, and the fact that they are a male.
To presume that you would react in a certain way, conditional upon first having done something so utterly foreign to you in the first place, is like saying what you’d do if the moon were made of green cheese, only ISTM you’d have a better chance of being right in that case. ;-)
Well, pretend the bar serves something I’d drink. Say I’d get a virgin pina colada. I could imagine asking for one of those.
I might also ask girls, if the environment gave me high enough priors on them being bi/gay.
So, your moral compass allows you to use other people’s sexual preferences as a money pump?
(And no, that’s not a line, although now that I’ve said it, I suppose it could be reworked into a LW-friendly response to a drink request. Needs more humor, less judgment, though! Hm, maybe “Are you trying to exploit my hardware preferences as a money pump?” A little too double-entrendreish, though. These things are really situational, and not at all suited to cached responses.)
I can’t actually think of any situation where asking a question seems to me to be immoral. It can’t be a denotative falsehood, so it’s clear on the “lying” front; there’s nothing else obvious it could be that would be wrong. I suppose it could be mean, or impolite, but this doesn’t even appear to be that to me. I wouldn’t badger anybody about buying me the beverage, which would be mean.
This is a request which is slightly different from a question. Some requests are considered immoral when there is a power or status differential. University lecturers and students provide an example where some requests are widely considered immoral.
Point. Questions/requests that predictably create a sense of obligation in the hearer to do something they ought not feel obligated to perform may be wrong. I don’t think I can, let alone do, project enough power in a casual setting to make anyone feel obliged to buy me the liquid of my choice, although I suppose it’s possible I’m mistaken.
There is also an implied contract with most requests. Many people if asked to buy a stranger a drink will assume that agreeing to the request will result in an opportunity for conversation at least. If someone makes the request with an understanding of the implied trade and no intention of fulfilling their half of the bargain then that seems at least dishonest if not actually immoral.
I wouldn’t request a favor like this from someone I didn’t plan to have at least a short conversation with. (I would ask smaller favors, like that they tell me the time, or more urgent favors, like that they loan me their cell phone so I can call my ride, but a drink is neither negligible nor particularly important.)
Maybe you wouldn’t. I’m just giving an example of another way that a question/request could be seen to be immoral.
Refusing makes the guy look bad, unless he has a particularly adept response. The request becomes “buy me a drink, or go through status shenanigans to not look bad.” That’s not exactly obligation, but it is a form of social pressure.
Asking for $5 (well, probably $7-8 if it’s not a beer) isn’t exactly obligation, either. Is that a request you would make of both men and women? If not, why not? And how it is different to a request from a drink, other than the latter being wrapped up in more social frills (and combined with more social pressure)?
If anyone is saying “excuse me?” shouldn’t it be the person being asked for the drink (aka $7)? The only problem is that if men make this response, they look bad, due to the context-specific social power differential.
Yes, I said so elsewhere.
Right, my question here was whether you would ask both men and women for $7 on its own. I should have made that clearer.
And if not, how it asking for a $7 drink different?
I would not ask a stranger for money unless I had an urgent, immediate need for it and no other way to get it. Asking for a drink seems different in much the same way that asking my friends for books instead of money on my birthday seems different. The drink provides a context for some sort of interaction; the money doesn’t.
Which is precisely why it’s a status move: you are placing an implicit pricetag on your continued interaction, and therefore implicitly asserting that your status/value is such that you can demand a payment of tribute for nothing more than the chance of remaining in your good graces.
Whether this were your intention or not, it’s the situation the man is placed in, unless he has the cojones (and possibly training) to be able to refuse with impunity.
Or they are just showing a sign of desiring social interaction and they have culturally ingrained that the way to do so is to ask for a drink (disclaimer: I’ve never actually seen this occur). One may be assuming a lot more about unconscious status inquiring that is more in the category of just silly cultural norms.
As I said in an earlier comment, there is almost no benefit to treating this possibility as a special case, especially since it is so cheap for her to claim that this is what she’s doing, even when it’s not.
Many women who are actually status-testing no doubt sincerely believe in their conscious model of their actions, and you cannot inexpensively separate them from the ones who are also correct!
One reason, by the way, why this situation is so useful for women as a test of a man’s social skills, is that it requires considerable social calibration to pull off a declination or negotiation that also acknowledges and continues the “game” in progress, rather than simply refusing to play.
I think that the women who’ve been involved in this thread have actually been modeling Roko’s original statement as though it’s a refusal to interact, when in fact to be functional it has to actually take the interaction up a notch, by giving a nod to something you’ve noticed about her, or something she said, etc. (IOW, men who think women want them to be mind-readers are only partly correct; they just want to know you’ve been paying attention)
But if this is what they are doing then the ideal response may be to actually buy a drink since at least in pop culture depictions of this sort of scenario (at least in movies I’ve seen) seems to be that the male is actually supposed to do that. Failure to do so might be interpreted as a lack of interest.
Not compared to refusing in a way that shows you’re paying attention. A drink without attention isn’t nearly as flattering as the attention without the drink. And giving too much of either or both is counterproductive at Byrnema’s hypothetical level 2.
Sure, it may merely be unconscious entitlement, rather than a conscious status move.
I’m a little mystified by your analogy, and what you are intending to show with it. Being treated like the birthday girl (or boy) is a form of special treatment that happens once a year. It’s not your birthday every time you go out, right? Giving birthday presents between friends is generally mutual, yet you’ve made no mention of the drink buying being mutual. Furthermore, giving birthday presents happens when people know each other and already have an interaction, rather than being a precondition for an interaction occurring.
Since getting presents on one’s birthday is a form of special treatment, doesn’t your analogy suggest that expecting/requesting drinks to be bought for oneself is an expectation/request for year-round special treatment? And doesn’t asking for drinks look even worse when we remember that buying birthday presents among friends in mutual, while women asking for drinks aren’t expecting to reciprocate and buy the guy a drink the next night?
I actually receive a fair number of gifts on non-special occasions too, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.
I haven’t mentioned buying a reciprocal drink, but this is largely because I have idiosyncratic neuroses about money, not because it wouldn’t occur to me as something appropriate to do.
I’ve noticed something interesting about your “social processing” in these posts—your reasoning does not appear to include anything about what other people think or feel; in fact, it barely seems to include them at all! (For example, how would anyone you ask know whether you intend to reciprocate, or not?)
And I would guess that this apparent lack of consequential modeling of others’ visceral experience of you, would lead to other sorts of situations in which your NT friends/co-workers find you “weird”.
NTs pay lip service to deontological rules, but are mostly consequentialists with respect to their social behavior. As others here have pointed out, one of the key rules of NT social interaction is that everyone must show loyalty to the rules, while not being so clueless as to actually follow them or expect others to do so, when the real rules are about status and its consequences.
IOW, it’s insanely irrational to treat NT social interactions as being truly rule-driven. (By which I mean it’s irrational to think you will accomplish anything besides driving the NT’s insane!)
Unfortunately, it’s also similarly irrational/insane to try to convince non-NTs of this, unless they have some relevant personal experience. Me, I learned a little from a mentor in the business world who taught me how to see the power and affiliation subtexts of business interactions, but I’ve consistently erred on the side of assuming that those situations were special cases, and that I didn’t need to think like that with some group of trusted allies.
And in pretty much every case, I’ve found it to be a tragic error to assume that people are NOT playing games, no matter how sincerely they themselves believe they “really aren’t”. (When that’s really just the game of “not playing games”. Ever wonder why everybody claims to hate office politics, and yet it still exists?)
Geeks, of course, just use a different rulebook for their game, where (among other things) we get status for valuing “what you know” and “what’s right” over “who you know” and “what’s cool/popular/socially calibrated”. (However, this doesn’t change the game itself, just what the points get awarded for.)
Have you ever thought about why this is? The social dynamics of gift giving is a pretty interesting topic in itself.
I don’t know why in general. In my case, I hate surprises, and am pretty good at getting my friends to indulge this hate by not getting me things that I haven’t pre-approved. Since I’m neurotic about money and tend to not spend it unless it’s really, really important, this means that the average gift I get from a friend is more useful to me than the equivalent amount of money (which I’d basically never spend), especially since when I use the gift I think of the friend and get some utility from that.
That’s quite princessy behavior—worthy of a cute 10/cheerleader type! Go Alicorn!
Okay, this has me curious—is there actually a subset of pickup that is designed to tell me what to do, instead of telling people what to do to me? That would be news to me.
What, you mean girl game? Yeah, sure. It’s just not as big as guy game. ASF has a board for girls only.
*pokes around*
Meh. This reminds me of advice columns, only with worse punctuation.
And apparently a “Playette FAQ” as well. (It makes heavy use of PUA terminology like “one-itis” and “IOI”, though.)
I haven’t really read ASFin almost 20 years, so I didn’t know about the Playette stuff. Funny story, though: I can attest to the value of the “whiff” technique in the Playette FAQ, because my wife used it in our first email and phone conversations, back in 1992… and well, um, it worked out pretty well for both of us. ;-)
That depends on what exactly your goal is. Typical men can boost their sexual attractiveness to women by changing their behavior far more than vice versa, so it’s unsurprising that there is a much greater body of expertise aimed at men in this regard. Also, getting sex is pretty much trivial for women and requires no particular skill. However, commitment and long-term relationship strategies are important and nontrivial for women too, and on better game-oriented blogs, I’ve often seen good discussions about the mistakes women make in this regard. Trouble is, realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.
Can you give a couple examples?
Alicorn:
Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.
But since you’re asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man’s part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google “dark triad”), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationships with such men. Then there are also many wrong beliefs about what personality characteristics of women are truly attractive and pleasant to men and apt to attract their loyalty and commitment in the long run.
There are other examples too, many of which would probably sound more controversial. Even these I listed can provoke much worse reactions when put in less abstract and detached terms, which is typically necessary when forming concrete advice.
You’re bi, right? You could probably make use of much of the advice for straight men if you wanted.
I find it nasty to read. It’s not intended for me, even if I’d be interested in some of the people it’s about interacting with.
This is a general comment about the PUA material I’ve read.
It comes off as lonely. There’s no hint of enjoying someone’s company, or hope that a someone could enjoy the writer’s company if not manipulated into it.
Yes. Sometimes I get a sense of simmering resentment underneath it all, especially on the subject of “nice guys” vs. “jackasses”.
What the PUA people call “day game” (approaching women in everyday life, instead of bars and clubs) can verge on the concept of enjoyable company, but from my limited reading on the subject they don’t seem to cover day game nearly as much. They say it’s more difficult than “night game”.
It’s a little like something in a famous essay by Eric Raymond on “good porn” vs. “bad porn”. (Just google on those phrases to find a copy—I don’t care to do that search from a machine at work.) Following a personally conducted scientific examination of porn pictures on the web, he concluded that men looking for porn are not looking for depictions of attractive young women posed as if about to have enjoyable sex with the viewer. The porn industry knows what sells, and pictures of that sort, that Raymond called “good porn”, formed only a small minority. They are looking for what he classified as “bad porn”: pictures of an absolutely joyless activity, all hard faces, cold stares, and fetishistic trappings.
ETA: Eric Raymond’s essay is on his own blog here, and he’s updated some of the links that were broken when I first read it, so you can see some of his experimental samples.
Yes: It’s so bitter and so full of blame for the vast sea of women who didn’t respond as desired to “niceness”.
I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it’s taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
You’re sympathizing with the men, which is natural—without speculating about details, your experience is more like theirs. Try imagining dating one of them, or being in a relationship with them—if that’s too much of a strain, try imagining reading a forum of women who are that hurt and angry about men.
Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don’t think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)
First, women often don’t take into account that they’re observing men’s in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they’d perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that’s just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they’re caught off guard rambling, or when they’re writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.
Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulative PUA underneath, whose nasty nature will only later come to prominence. However, this fear is entirely out of proportion when you consider a similar, but much more prevalent and dangerous natural phenomenon. Namely, there are significant numbers of men around whose personalities are naturally fundamentally nasty but nevertheless wildly attractive to women—many of whom ruin their lives big time by pursuing relationships with such men. See, for example, the Dark Triad paper by Jonason et al. for a discussion along these lines, which is nowhere near a complete account of this entire phenomenon. This is realistically a far greater danger than encountering a PUA, who is anyway more likely to be just a regular guy who undertook some self-improvement than a monster lurking below a smooth surface.
From the PUAs I’ve known, they are unlikely to be wolves in sheep’s clothing… they are more likely to be sheep in wolves’ clothing. There are a few guys who are badly adjusted and have weird antisocial ideas in the local PUA group, and other guys make fun of them behind their backs.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
NancyLebovitz:
I would say yes. I have a hobby of sorts that consists of exploring obscure corners of the web where various sorts of fringe people with unconventional (and often disreputable) ideas gather, and attempting to understand their perspectives in a detached manner, as free of bias as possible. As an example relevant for your question, I have read radical feminist websites where the level of anger against men far surpasses any venting against women you’ll see on even the worst PUA forums.
Now, my conclusion is that out of all these fringe groups, most of them just form their own echo chambers where they vent and reinforce their peculiar biases, but a small minority actually manage to come up with non-trivial accurate insight that is nowhere to be found in more reputable and mainstream sources. The PUA community just happens to be one such example. In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it. (There are also communities full of angry venting men where, in contrast to PUAs, I’ve never seen any particularly interesting ideas.)
Trouble is, some very strong biases are present here, because the ugly and hard to admit truth is that some personalty types of this sort are attractive as such to many women—not all women, of course, and I won’t speculate on the percentage, but it’s certainly non-negligible. Note that I don’t mean the situations where such dark characteristics are hidden under a nice surface only to emerge later, but when they are truly attractive by themselves, causing irresistible urges in women to engage in dangerous, self-immolating adventures with such men. You can view it as a specifically female form of extreme akrasia, I guess. The prevailing bias, however, is to interpret all such situations as women having been manipulated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing, even when the wolf was howling and brandishing his fangs from day one, only to get an enthusiastic response.
I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA. Looking back on past relationships I can see some patterns for behavior that ‘hooked’ me, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot of potentially valuable insights.
People often meet a person they like but can’t commit to romantically because of small ‘defects’ in the person’s behavior as it relates to the relationship. Personally, I’d be all in favor of my significant other using PUA equivalent methods on me, provided I was aware it and had studied the material myself (in the same way that I’m in favor of my significant other wearing certain clothing, etc).
So, two main upshots of wide dissemination of PUA style material: better understanding of myself, and heightened attraction to my partner.
I replied to a similar question in this subthread.
You’re response in the subthread was more a list of biases exhibited by females (an interesting list though). What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
The Rules is probably the best known example. I haven’t read it and don’t know whether there is any validity to the claims. I suspect there’s some truth in there but that it is not terribly rigorous or accurate.
I haven’t read this book either, but a significant piece of evidence against it is that one of the authors divorced her husband only a few years after it was published. Otherwise, I’ve seen it get mixed to negative comments on game websites, the principal complaint being that a man who lets himself be played by those rules may easily ipso facto signal low status to the point where he’ll destroy her respect for (and thus attraction to) him. Some of the tactics allegedly advocated by the book indeed sound that way, but I won’t pass any definite judgments since I haven’t read it.
Manslations is pretty good.
Certainly such products exist (e.g. catchhimandkeephim.com, husbandscantresist.com) but I’m not familiar with any free online resources comparable to the vast assortment available for men. Catchhimandkeephim.com has some articles, but skimming through I found it difficult to judge how useful a woman would find this advice, as it sounded all very obvious and straightforward to me… but then, I’m a man, and the articles are about how men react and think. It’s possible that the information would be a revelation for someone who wasn’t a man. ;-)
There are many books giving that sort of advice, but I haven’t read any, so I can’t recommend them. Just from the titles and blurbs I’ve seen, it can be reliably concluded that many are very bad.
Anecdotally, I can say that in the best discussions of women’s relationship strategies and techniques I’ve ever read on game-related sites, I’ve never seen anyone point out a book or any other source of systematic advice whose message closely matches the best evidence-supported conclusions of these discussions. I see this as a strong piece of evidence against the whole existing literature. This is not that surprising considering that the best evidence-supported conclusions sound, to a large degree, highly un-PC and shattering lots of pleasant-sounding illusions.
Another piece is that, to the extent that the challenge for women is getting commitment, it’s simply harder to do experiments.
Yes, it’s harder to do experiments on parts of the interaction that occur later down the line. I think that’s a lot of the reason that PUAs talk so much more about pickup than relationships (though PUA forums typically have active relationships boards): the conversion funnel of approaches to dating to relationships gets narrower and narrower. PUAs spend most of their time stuck at particular interaction points prior to relationships, such as getting numbers and women not calling them back, going on dates with women and not being able to kiss them, or only successfully attracting women who don’t quite meet their relationship criteria. I’ve noticed that once PUAs get all that stuff handled, they start talking about relationships more than the mechanics of pickup, and actually get really picky.
You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
As for the Dark Triad, I don’t know what’s going on there. I tentatively assume that some people like danger, and what attracts some to motorcycles and mountain-climbing can also attract people to mates who have TROUBLE written all over them.
Alternatively, some women choose men like their fathers—they’re imprinted on a bad idea of what a man is.
Also, I hope it’s less common in the culture, but some women believe that they can turn a bad guy into a good one by being a sufficiently good wife. I’m not going to say it never happens, but making the attempt can be a powerful emotional hook.
It’s clear that how reliable people’s survival instincts are (and about what parts of their lives) vary tremendously, and I’ve never seen a substantial discussion of how the “this is good for me, that is bad for me” sense works.
Yes, I am familiar with this particular community. They do discuss some common biases in an interesting way, but ultimately, my conclusion is that they generate their own more severe ones, without adding much clarity to anything overall.
Well, that could be a topic for a whole book, not a mere blog comment. I’d rather not just drop concrete names and places I’ve found interesting, since without lots of painstaking explanations and disclaimers, it would send off a thunderous signal of affiliation with all kinds of disreputable people.
This would be extremely surprising to me if true. This sounds like something that was true in the 1950s, but does this really match your experience today? In my experience, at least among people under 30 or so, there is no difference between how guys and girls act in social situations when there are, or are not, members of the opposite sex around. (Business or formal situations are different.)
Well, I have no evidence except anecdotal to present, but yes, this does match my experience. It surely doesn’t apply to all individuals, social groups, and occasions, but I observe it regularly, and I have to personally plead guilty to a certain degree of such inconsistency. Especially when, for example, a guy gets dumped or rejected and wants to vent a bit by rambling about the evilness of the girl in question, or women in general, it definitely seems likely to me that much cruder rants can be produced in an exclusive company of close, trusted male friends than otherwise.
In any case, even if this is true only for a minority of men, my main point still holds, i.e. there are non-negligible numbers of men around who, despite being perfectly respectable by all other criteria, engage in crude language about women and male-female relations on some occasions when no women are around to hear it. For this reason, women are often biased in that they tend to interpret such language, when observed, as unrealistically strong evidence of serious character flaws in the man in question.
I have often been bitterly amused at how the “Yes, but...” speeches on the misogyny often perpetrated by Western socially/sexually deprived men, on the one hand, and the crime often perpetrated by lower-class Afro-Americans, on the other hand, often end up disquietingly similar.
And with good reason; in both cases, we have angry, alienated young men who are least able to cope with the systemic oppression of their social group, least willing to play by the rules that treat them unfairly, spiral into hatred and evil, bringing even more scorn upon their group and the peaceful advocates in it, and inadverently creating good conditions for the “natural-born” antisocial/immoral assholes who wear their colors.
-Martin Luther King
Sadly, for now the MRAs/gender egalitarians seem to be doing far worse than even American blacks—see the bitter split with feminism, and the inability of similarly-minded feminists and MRAs to leave behind the sectarianism. (This collective blog that HughRistik writes for is the kind of collaboration that I’d like to see way more of on the gender front.)
I think you have had your opinion coloured by encountering people in the anger phase of the denial, anger, acceptance progression of changing beliefs in the light of new evidence.
Depends where you look. Some of that stuff is indeed written in such tone, and it’s true that some of it advises sly and dishonest tactics. On the other hand, here’s the story of a man who saved his marriage by applying insights he gained on game websites (the blog might be NSFW for foul language, though it’s on the blogroll of Overcoming Bias):
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/relationship-game-week-a-readers-journey/
For me, that story seems awfully depressing. Nothing in the story suggested to me that the man loved his wife or that his wife loved him. Game may have permitted them to have a more harmonious marriage, and evidently better sex, but not a relationship that seemed based on mutual love and respect.
It may be that the marriage was just too flawed to begin with; it’s also possible, given that the writer was writing for Roissy’s blog, that he consciously left details and color about love out of his narrative. But from what he has actually written, he’s not describing the sort of marriage that I would want to be a part of.
Agreed. I also noticed that there was basically nothing about the wife’s individual personality. She could have been anybody, as long as she was gameable.
And the couple of tidbits that don’t sound dreadful and nasty to me, do sound like they are okay by accident—the theory sounds like bullshit, it’s just a stopped clock right twice a day. Example:
Panicking when one’s faithfulness is questioned is bad, but not because it’s “beta” and signifies fear of the wife or something—but because if the question causes panic, that might be because there’s cheating going on and he fears being caught. The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations. Presenting concrete evidence (unless asked for it!) might or might not hurt, but it probably won’t help, especially if you can come up with it too quickly—readily thought-of evidence could be planted, or might signify that you’ve already considered what to say if asked because there’s some reason to expect her to ask you wanted to be prepared for.
The problem with this approach is that factual statements can be argued with, putting you back into the same place as before—i.e., having an argument where you’re being accused of something. The “agree and amplify” approach has the tactical advantage that it leaves the other person with no place to escalate to, and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.
(Note: I’m not commenting here on the (un)desirability of having an adversarial relationship like that to begin with, just pointing to a tactical advantage of the proposed “agree and amplify” over a flat assertion or denial. Another advantage, btw, is that it can actually make the accuser paradoxically feel listened to/accepted/validated in a way that disagreement does not. My wife has actually successfully used this tactic on me when I’ve been annoyed at some minor thing—the old, “yes, I did do that, and I did it just to annoy you” routine. ;-) )
The incident described in the piece doesn’t involve the possibility of cheating at all.
I was generalizing. The examples of “before” conversations make it sound like he thinks he’s being accused of some sort of infidelity (however minor) and that he’s scared of being so accused.
As I mentioned once before but should mention again since you linked to his blog, Roissy is not representative of PUAs. He is like most of the worst things about PUAs, plus some other flaws of his own, all packed together. He’s attracted a lot of attention outside the seduction community, but virtually nobody inside it knows who he is or cares about him.
I think you’re making the mistake of judging him for his theatrics and shock-value approach. Once you get past the swaggering style, tune in to his sense of humor, and figure out which commenters are worth reading, I’d say his blog is by far the best place for all but the most technical discussions of all aspects of male-female interactions. This doesn’t mean I endorse all he has to say, of course, but the level of insight far surpasses the other game/PUA sites I’ve seen. (I don’t think it’s for nothing that Robin Hanson links to him.)
In particular, I’m struck by the quality of many commenters I’ve seen there through the years, though in this regard, the blog is past its prime (and even back in the past, you had to sift through the detritus of unmoderated comments to find the gems). What many people might find strange is that lots of the regulars there are women, some of them extremely smart and cultured, though it’s actually not surprising when you consider that it’s an environment where the usual rules-hypocrisy is thrown out the window.
All in all, there is certainly much there to be offended by, and in fact, for lots of that stuff, one is required to be offended by it according to the official respectable standards of our culture. Yet anyone striving to eliminate biases about these topics should find much of the insight offered there worthwhile.
What emotion or thought is this onomatopoeia intended to signify?
Frustration.
OK let’s try this. I’ve faced this situation maybe hundreds of times, and am curious as to how you compare to the girls I typically see.
Alicorn: Hey, wanna buy me a drink?
cousin_it: (smiles happily and shakes head)
Your response?
Then it would probably depend on how much I wanted to talk to you in the first place (where this includes, factored in, how charming the happy smile is). If not much, I’d probably shrug and go back whence I came. If more than not much, I might say “Aw, why not?”—not to try particularly to extract a drink after all, but out of curiosity and to have something to have a conversation about.
I’ll be optimistic and assume the latter option happens! I’ve heard this reply several times, here’s what happens next:
Alicorn: Hey, wanna buy me a drink?
cousin_it: (smiles happily and shakes head)
Alicorn: Aw, why not?
cousin_it: (keeps smiling, almost laughing, eyes half closed, reaches with arm to catch her waist)
In fairness, you can’t give an informed reply to that because you can’t assess my physical attractiveness over the Internet, but I can just tell you the decision tree from this point. The girl either plays along or evades. If she plays along, I keep doing what makes sense. If she evades, I turn away to the bar without lingering even a second. You’d be surprised how many girls thus NEXT’ed later come back :-) Of course I don’t mean to imply anything about your behavior!
Yeah, going for the waist at that point would get a shriek even if you managed not to tickle me, and not in a good way. I don’t care if you look like Sean Maher. I’d escape (and it would feel like escaping, not like something more neutral like “disengaging” or whatever), and if I was with any female friends I’d warn them you were grabby. I might do an evaluation of how the bouncer would react if informed, but I have low priors on getting help for “socially acceptable” invasions of space.
I think you misunderstand cousin_it’s reference to “physical attractiveness”. He’s filtering not for whether you think he’s good-looking, he’s filtering by whether you are physically attracted to him at that moment in time, and open to the possibility of doing something about it, preferably as soon as possible. (This doesn’t necessarily mean sex, btw, just being physically companionable and open to exploring the chemistry further.)
Anyway, if you’re someone who’s aversive to being touched by strangers, this will obviously filter you out.
I’ll be honest here—girls kino-ing me (i.e. touching to show interest in this way) used to freak me the fuck out. I wouldn’t shriek, but I would definitely respond in a negative, abused-cat kind of way.
And I used to rationalize this response as being not just different but better and more right(eous) somehow than the dog way of doing things.
Nowadays, though, I realize that it’s irrational to pretend I’m going to change everybody into cats or even that it’s necessarily a good idea! (If everyone’s a cat, who’s going to do the stroking?)
So, while a stranger rubbing me the wrong way might make my hair stand on end, I have learned not to hiss, scratch, or run when I’m pawed by a dog person of whichever sex. Tolerating the discomfort or politely disengaging or explaining my issues with touch produces a better long-term result than just freaking out.
I’ve endured a fair number of lectures from my parents about how it’s rude to freak out when strangers touch me. Here is why I go on doing it anyway:
It is always startling. I do not expect strangers to touch me, and I can’t read them well enough to come to expect it when it’s going to happen. This gives me little opportunity to prepare a response.
It often sets off sensory issues. I can tolerate accidental, very brief incursions into these issues by people who know about them and will stop instantly if they hear the relevant word, but anything prolonged may well have me curl up in a ball and scream. And it turns out that people are confused, or worse, think it’s funny, when I try to explain these issues. If they are confused enough, or think it’s funny enough, to go on touching me in a non-approved way while I try to explain in an increasingly hysterical fashion, I will wind up doing something far less socially acceptable than just freaking out and escaping.
I don’t think that every random person is a rapist, but I think some of them are, and if I’m later in a position of having to go to the cops, I want every witness who saw me with the accused to have noticed that I established a precedent from the start of not wanting to be touched, because sexual assault investigations are nightmarish enough as-is without the kinds of whispers a history of “kino” would create.
There are certain kinds of touch that are quite safe. I will shake hands. I love hugs. Backrubs are awesome. I often ask to pet people’s hair and am perfectly happy to permit the reverse. But the only context where I would be okay with someone grabbing me around the waist would be if I were in an ongoing relationship with them and they knew to stop on a dime if I utter the words “that tickles”.
To be clear, I am not saying that it’s “rude”… I’m just pointing out that in my case, it has been more useful to adapt. This should not be construed as an implication that you can or should do so.
(looks up Sean Maher)
Oh no, I look nothing like that. I look like a dork, not a movie star :-)
I feel bad that this behavior would scare you. Honestly I don’t know that I ever scared a single person in my life, man or woman. I mean, you could probably beat me up if you wanted to :-) Humorous shrieks are a common girl response; scared shrieks, no. But… okay. I’m playing a numbers game anyway, some form of evasion is the expected response.
There are many arguments that come to mind here, but above all: having to cut down your dating pool drastically because you can’t handle typical social behavior is not winning.
All other things equal, it is better to have more choice, and all other things are not equal: “nerdy” occupations and communities are not gender balanced.
I don’t see any necessary contradiction between Roko and SarahC’s perspectives in determining an optimal dating strategy for men with LW-reader phenotypes that doesn’t rely on luck.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology not correctly described by the standard PUA model? Yes. Should these guys go outside that model to understand these women? Yes.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology that is correctly described by the standard PUA model, in part or in whole? Yes. Would these guys benefit from attaining knowledge of neurotypical social behaviors (from PUAs or elsewhere) to be able to date these women, instead of arbitrarily cutting them out of their dating pool? Yes.
I take an empirical approach to romantic success. Being able to date many kinds of people gives you a lot of options. Sometimes, you can’t know whether you would be compatible with a certain type of person until you try dating someone like that. Saying “but I don’t want anyone like that anyway” about people out of one’s reach because of a lack of common social skills is a failure mode. Yet if you attain the skills to date someone like that, and you find it doesn’t work, then you know that you are not merely the fox calling the grapes sour in Aesop’s fable.
Yeah, that’s the thing. I’m all for learning helpful skills. Bar game might be a helpful skill; I’ve seen enough positive testimonials to make me believe it. And certainly it’s a failure mode to do the sour grapes thing. (I’ve tried dating outside my comfort zone; it’s quite possible.)
PUA is a model, though, and people who like it sometimes overstate its applicability. The other thing to keep in mind is that there’s a tension between learning new skills and playing to your strengths. Sometimes it’s in your best interest to do the latter.
Umm. The purpose of dating is to find someone you’re compatible with. “Expanding your dating pool” to include personality types you don’t like defeats the whole point.
Unless your current idea of what personality types you’re compatible with is too limited, or your judgment of other personality types that makes you not like them is prejudiced. The purpose of dating is also to find out what types of people you are compatible with empirically. See also my response to SarahC.
“Doesn’t play culturally-common status games socially-inexperienced people don’t know how to handle” is not a reasonable way for nerdy people to determine compatibility with potential mates (or friends). The filter is too broad, and it will exclude people they might actually be compatible with if they understood status games better and how to handle them.
A big part of the reason that nerdy people don’t like status games is because they don’t understand the psychology behind them, and consequently give the other person an unfairly negative assessment. Since they aren’t accustomed to status games, their hackles may go up, particularly if the status ploy triggers issues for them, like memories of past bullying by higher status people. Yet once one attains some understanding of status games and skill at playing them, then the hackles no longer go up, and there is no reason to ascribe such a negative judgment to the other person and exclude them as a potential mate or friend.
Of course, there are valid reasons for nerdy people to find certain types of status games annoying and undesirable, even after understanding them. Yet the best way to get a sense of what kinds of status games are fun, what kind are OK with you, and what kind are intolerable, and what kinds of people play these kinds of games, is to have experience playing them with people.
Except that you may find that you’re compatible with someone that you never expected would be compatible with you. Especially when you’re talking about stereotypes like “people who go to bars” or “nerdy women” or “people who engage in shit-testing,” which are broad enough to include many different types of people
Not to mention that there are many purposes of dating: not all relationships are about long-term compatibility.
Assuming you are incompatible with certain personality types without any experience of dating them seems unnecessarily limiting.
Many kinds of educated guesses about compatibility increase the probablity of finding the right person or the right relationship, because time is finite, and time spent dating a born-again Christian fundamentalist is time not spent dating an atheist librarian (or not studying Pearl or Jaynes ;-) ).
I’ve never dated a religious fundamentalist; I almost certainly never will. And I think that is the rational choice, even though it seems “limiting” in a sense. In reality, though, I don’t think it is limiting at all, because time is not infinite, and dating opportunities are not fungible with respect to time. It’s only limiting if you ignore the probability of successful outcomes based on what you know of yourself and other people, but what is a decision theory worth that ignores the probabilities altogether (and differing payoffs too)?
Edit: what holds regarding religious fundamentalists also holds to a lesser degree regarding various subsets of the average, neurotypical women that are the subject of this thread.
On the other hand, cargo-cult free-thinking can be, at least for me, far more obnoxious than just plain religious close-mindedness. And in that regard, an atheist librarian may well be much worse than a regular churchy girl (or guy).
I agree with your underlying point, but you brutally twisted my message in order to make your point.
I said “religious fundamentalist”, not “close minded” or “regular churchy girl (or guy)”, so you’re talking about something other than what I was talking about. There is a world of difference between a fundamentalist who thinks (for example) that the Earth is 6,000 years old and the bible is the literal word of God, and the average church-going person.
There’s more to life than intellectual activity and rationality. What about occasionally enjoying light-hearted conversation or sex with a born-again fundamentalist, just as a form of recreation? I understand your point about not wanting a serious relationship with someone with very different values, but not everything has to be about a serious relationship.
A much lesser degree, especially for intelligent extraverted women who might enjoy socializing for fun sometimes in bars, as well as more abstract pleasures.
I agree with the point about everything not having to be about a serious relationship, but the reality is that many of us are looking for a serious relationship, and we need the other person to be somebody that we can have interesting conversations with and whom we can respect and be challenged by intellectually.
I also agree on the much lesser degree point, but I do think that somebody who is extremely introverted and intellectual is not necessarily making a big mistake by limiting their romantic pursuits to people who aren’t extreme extroverts, for example, or limiting themselves to people with the intellectual equivalent of a college education and an ongoing passion for learning.
Born-again fundamentalist light-hearted sex? That does not compute....
For me, the reason I don’t do casual relationships is because my personality type does not do casual very well. Either I’m really into someone or I don’t really care.
Heh, I thought someone might ask about that. Believe it or not, there are fundamentalists out there who take the attitude that since they know they’re already saved, they can do whatever they want.
I think a lot of what I’m disagreeing with you and blueberry about is this assumption that meat-market type bars and clubs, and the PUA style tactics that may work well in those environments, are a representative sample of “typical social behavior”
PUA style tactics are predominantly a reverse-engineering of naturalistic behaviors. PUAs didn’t invent status games, they just try to copy them.
On what population do you base your view of “typical social behavior”? I do think that bars and clubs are pretty representative of the behavior of extraverts of average IQ. This is just what extraverted 100 IQ homo sapiens do when you put them in a room with a little ethanol. Such behavior may not be representative of the average introvert who is lower in sensation-seeking, but average IQ extraverts are a pretty big slice of humanity.
Bars and clubs may contain a disproportionate amount of status behavior, but this is just on the higher end of the continuum of status behavior among typical homo sapiens.
People in relationships push each other all the time to see how the other person will react. Even friends not of each other’s preferred gender do this. You may be taking the “buy me a drink” example too literally.
I don’t think people have been talking about “PUA style tactics,” as much as about normal social relationships and interactions. You’re right that they may be more exaggerated at a bar scene.
Maybe it’s happening so subtly that I can’t see it, but I don’t think everyone is pushing that much all the time.
I think you’re defining yourself as normal, and rather subtly making a status claim that anyone who doesn’t fit in well with you is deficient.
But that example was the only thing I was ever disagreeing with. I honestly don’t even remember what this article was originally about any more, I just remember reading the “buy me a drink” example, and thinking “whaaaaaa?”. It just weirded me out that something was being cited as an example of a broader phenomenon, as if it was this universally known, obvious thing, when in reality I think it’s something that only people involved in the PUA “community” actually believe—which makes it, whether right or wrong, not a very good example.
It’s not universally known, but it it more widely known than the PUA circle.
It seems to be understood among the set of guys that have experience successfully attracting girls.
My friends that meet this criteria take it as an obvious rule with a few exceptions, and they didn’t learn it from anything “PUA” related- just from experience and observation
Well, the “buying a drink” story is an extreme example that’s been canonized to make a point. But I’m convinced that in general, human beings are always unconsciously “testing” each other, and that this applies to everyone, male or female, autistic or NT. It’s just part of how humans talk and joke around and communicate. For instance, saying hi to someone and smiling is “testing”: you’re seeing what kind of mood someone is in. Making a joke, or laughing at a joke, is “testing”: you’re seeing how other people react.
I don’t see the “PUA” stuff as about sex or dating or men and women. It’s about human social interaction in general.
I suggest there’s a difference between “testing” and “checking”. In a test, you’re trying to find out whether the other person will fail or (in the case of bullies) hoping they will, while in a check, you’ll hoping they’ll succeed. I gather there are some people who are pretty evenly balanced on the chack/test scale—if the other person passes, fine, it’s a potential friendship, and if the other person fails, the harassment commences.
I think that a lot of small talk is what I call “pinging”—“Hello, I’m here and friendly”.
Good point about the pinging.
Using your test/check distinction, I think in most cases, including the “buy me a drink” scenario, what’s going on is a check. After all, the attractive girl is in a bar talking to the guy; she’d prefer the guy be attractive to her, not a pushover.
Yes, status-testing is a general component of typical human interaction. I think this is the point that Roko was trying to make, even though his particular example was rather gendered. If you want to see status testing in a non-male-female context, watch the behavior of frat boys, for example.
The point is that for those unfamiliar with this behavior, they need to be able to identify it when it happens, to not take it personally or as a sign of hostility, and know how to respond. Roko’s advocation of “caching responses” is very helpful, until one gets a gut feeling and can be guided towards a satisfactory response merely by emotions.
I understand your point: that is an extremely visible and easy to see example of a dominance hierarchy.
But I’m more thinking about testing in general, not necessarily status testing. I interpret most testing as learning about the other person’s responses, not necessarily testing their status. I don’t even know if I would interpret the “buying a drink” story as about status: it’s more about humor and confidence.
The frat boy example has extremely negative connotations, and I wouldn’t call it “typical human interaction”. How about “watch two people having a pleasant and friendly conversation, laughing together, and enjoying each other’s company”? That’s a more pleasant example of unconscious testing, in the sense of unconsciously doing things to see people’s reactions and learning about the other person.
---edit---
With introversion, agreeableness, and sensitivity, I wouldn’t suspect any negative correlation with conventional attractiveness (agreeableness could even have a weak positive correlation). Nerdiness and lack of socialization may be related, and even if there is a negative correlation between them and attractiveness for whatever reason, that correlation may not be particularly strong.
I would hypothesize that personality traits are at least as big a factor as looks in explaining variance in female status testing behavior. As a result, I agree with SarahC’s view that neurotypical vs. non-neurotypical status does not adequately demarcate women who ask men to buy them drinks from women who don’t. And I also disagree with Roko’s suggestion that women who don’t engage in this behavior predominantly lie in the left tail of the attractiveness distribution for age.
If pjeby’s original intent, however, was to present NT women as those most likely to engage in this behavior, and non-NT women as least likely, then I would agree with him that such a correlation is plausible. If Roko wanted to hypothesize a weak-to-moderate correlation of attractiveness and status-testing behavior, than I would agree. I just consider certain personality traits that are probably uncorrelated with beauty as having a large effect on engaging in this kind of behavior.
I actually didn’t state either of the things that people are attributing to me. I simply referred to “the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks”.
The mostly-NT is hyphenated because it is an attribute of “women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks”—and this attribution does not require any correlation. The simple fact that non-NT women are a minority, period, ensures that most of the women who do this showing up at bars and asking of drinks will be neurotypicals.
I was making a point about the selection bias effect of this on PUA models, not attempting to draw any conclusions about the likelihood of drink-asking behavior given neurotypicality. (I did suggest a negative correlation between neuro-atypicality and drink-asking behavior, however.)
FTFY
[citation needed]
People involuntarily/unconsciously test and asses others’ status all the time. Evidence of one’s status is embedded in every action, and therefore, all action can be used to determine status.
I’m curious what you mean by this. Do you mean you think they will have put less effort into clothing, hair, makeup, etc. (perhaps true, but perhaps less relevant to male attraction than you think) or do you mean that you expect some inverse correlation between physical attractiveness and the personality traits described?
Partly that they put less effort into their appearance (which, for many, also includes a non-trivial effort to be thin), but also that a desire to be noticed is more related to extroversion and dominance than their opposites, and skill at being noticed favorably is related to neurotypicallity.
To the extent that the personality traits described are learned, I would expect more innately-attractive women to be less likely to develop them. (More specifically, women who were more attractive at some relatively young age, like how men’s income is more strongly associated with adolescent than adult height [PDF].)
.
I think you’re letting an instrumental approach to psychology affect your epistemic rationality.
sorry, Orthonormal, I don’t see what you’re getting at—I didn’t mean the above as being exhaustive—merely saying that at least those people are not likely to play these kinds of games
Ah, then we have a miscommunication. I think it could have been worded better in order to avoid an unsavory misinterpretation.
A woman asks a man for a drink at a bar.
The PUA theory explains this in terms of a status interaction. The woman is testing, ‘is this man so low status he feels compelled or obligated to buy me a drink?’
I am wary of explanations based on status interactions. It is the kind of explanation that can explain anything and therefore nothing. Also, I am skeptical based on my sense of the woman’s subsequent disappointment and embarrassment if the man says no directly—this is not a test where the level 1 correct answer is ‘no’.
Alternatively, there’s the simplistic evolutionary explanation, that I present here as what I would use to explain the phenomenon to a true human-outsider. Asking a man for a drink at a bar covertly or overtly, and in general men buying drinks for women, is the first step in a courtship ritual in which the man is to display that he is a provider. Raising children is a big investment and a family will be successful if the man and the woman together provide for the family. The woman’s investment is largely guaranteed by other mechanisms, so it is the male’s investment that must be tested and assured.
When a woman asks a man for a drink, this is the modern equivalent of asking him to bring her an animal skin. Something of token value that is of some benefit to her. What happens next is variable and perhaps does depend upon status. The woman can signal that she is not a single-animal-skin female, perhaps because providing for a child is much bigger than a single-animal-skin investment. Alternatively, the female can signal loyalty (her test in the courtship game) and signal that in return for the drink, the man has secured her undivided attention (politely, for at least the length of time it takes her to consume the drink).
This is all level-1 interaction. Human beings are intelligent, and the interaction can go meta to level 2 or 3 or higher. A woman should have concerns about a man that will buy any woman a drink that asks him. If he is too nice (signals too generally that he is a provider) then you can predict he will be fixing Aunt Rosa’s faucet when he ought to be changing diapers. Also, he might not be very smart, or too low status in the tribe to provide much for the family. Thus a man that can deflect the request in a humorous/intelligent way will be very attractive—especially if it is early in the courtship (he will not provide indiscriminately to every female that asks!) and especially if he manipulates the situation to advance the courtship (he is intelligent and capable and interested!).
Level 3 or higher would be the man going meta about the courtship ritual itself. (Not feminist? Or commenting on how silly the norm is.) This can be very attractive because the man is signaling intelligence and a larger meaning-of-life potential value. This is someone you can talk to about whether you should have kids or not.
I would guess that if you are naturally successful with people of the opposite sex, you slide easily and naturally among these levels. PUA seems to recommend making it level 2 or higher. My preference in courtship would be level 1 and level 3 together: the drink and signaling at the meta level about intelligence and gender roles. Because real life is changing diapers, but it’s valuable to have a mutual awareness that life is—to some extent—a set of choices.
My hunch is that Feynman had success with his rogue tactics because he was meta, and this is what the intelligent women attracted to his intelligence were looking for. His behavior, if given at level 1 or level 2, would flop disastrously.
This is true—but only because just answering “no” is a DLV—demonstration of lower value. It says that you’re not paying attention, or that you’re either stingy or you lack resources. (Also, the PUA model is basically if that the woman ends up feeling bad, you’re doing it wrong. Feynman’s “worse than a whore” story should not be considered a canonical example here.)
The big problem, though, with these hypothetical discussions is that they’re abstract, and what is actually a DHV or DLV is going to depend hugely on body language, voice tone, and numerous other elements of context that are impractical to talk about in text like this.
Likewise, on the flip side:
The exact same words can still be a DLV, if they’re uttered without social calibration. A guy who says these things while being in his head and not actually connecting with the woman in front of him, may well be seen as a self-centered jackass or a pompous twit.
It’s not just what you say or how you say it, but the degree to which both show that you are tuned in and present to what is going on around you… especially what’s going on with the person in front of you. Otherwise, it’s still not expensive enough of a signal! (Secondarily, the inherent riskiness of the act implies your authenticity and courage—more expensive, hard-to-fake signaling.)
Interestingly, I’ve seen that there is at least one PUA school (“Authentic Man Program”) that has focused their training efforts on precisely these hard-to-fake aspects of signaling, to the virtual exclusion of everything else.
That is, they appear to focus on training men to be present and responsive to what is going on, while maintaining the integrity of their own mission or principles. And they claim that it is these qualities of presence, awareness, and authenticity that female status/value testing is really trying to measure.
(Side note of possible interest: they may also be the only PUA school that employs more female teachers than male ones—some of their workshop samples show panels of three or four women working with two male teachers, or pairs of women giving students feedback on their presence qualities, while the male coaches then just tell the guy what to do (mentally and physically) with the feedback that’s been given. IOW, it seems like the women are used as experts on the female experience of the men, while the men focus on how those things are generated or experienced inside men.)
Anyway, their goal seems to be to train men to actually have these attractive qualities (and get rid of the beliefs and behaviors that interfere with them), rather than teaching all the ways the qualities can be signaled or faked, as other PUA schools do.
No, that’s not correct. It is falsifiable—it claims that you won’t get laid as much by failing shit tests as by passing them. And, indeed, it has been subjected to man-centuries of field testing, unlike many ideas we see on Less Wrong.
This is what I mean by status theories can explain anything: if buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. If not buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that not buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. In either case, you assume rather than establish that higher status corresponds to the more successful outcome.
How do you know if “status” is a real thing if you can’t measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes? The problem is that maybe higher status is redefined in each case as getting the good outcome, in which case “status” is just the property-of-resulting-in-successful-outcomes. Even if status is some external objective thing, if we don’t know how to objectively measure whether it has increased or not, this is missing in theories based on predicting what happens if it’s increased or not.
Later edit: I thought about it a little longer and my true argument isn’t that good outcomes aren’t correlated with higher status, I suspect they are. It’s that the theory is missing where you predict which things will raise status and which will lower status. If not buying the drink helps, you deduce that this raised your status. But why should it have been raised? This last part is just filling in the blanks.
Some PUA theories use “value” and “compliance” as their currency rather than status. i.e., giving compliance implies the other person has value to you. This is at least marginally better, although as your previous comment points out, there are various levels and dimensions on which “value” can be measured.
There are PUA terms for value demonstration—“DHV” for demonstration of higher value, and “DLV” for demonstration of lower value. Self-deprecating behavior, deference, and compliance are DLVs, while confidence, humor, leadership, social proof (e.g. having friends or followers) are all DHV’s. PUA’s also attempt to tell stories that contain oblique references to things that imply value, by showing how you treat your friends and allies, protect your mates, and that you have other positive qualities such as openness to new experiences (implied bravery and resource/fitness surplus), etc.
Of course, at level 1 this is just boasting that you work out and have a fast car; so PUA’s select stories that show these qualities implicitly, rather than directly boasting about them, so that the inferences are drawn subconsciously, instead of being presented on the surface for conscious dismissal.
(Btw, as with so many things in PUA, these concepts apply to other social interactions as well. A marketing message (or really, any story) is more effective when it “shows” instead of “tells” the things it wants you to conclude.)
Related Less Wrong post.
Another proxy for measuring status is how attractive you are to attractive women—given that the fundamental attractor is reliable status signals.
Status is not just defined and determined by good outcomes; the drink example is one small piece of a larger puzzle.
You could consider status to be rather like the magnetic field—it is a mathematical moving part of the theory, and has explanatory power only to the extent that the theory predicts objectively measurable events. Is the magnetic field real? Who cares—what matters is whether your radio works.
The explanation is fitted to the observations of the custom. It is therefore not supported by the observations. Had the observations been different, the explanation would never have been invented.
Upvoted just for this. Flip the script, great.
Later that night...
“So… you wanna come in for a cup of tea?”
“Ummm… okay, but just a cup of tea then.”
“[mock relief] Phew, and here I was afraid you were trying to get into my pants!”
Feynman would end up with the woman buying him a drink.
Yes. Especially if success is partly defined by “not wasting money on other people”. But even if it isn’t. You have to be humorous about it but, yeah, the only time I would ever buy a woman I just met a drink is if it is her birthday. I’ll also buy second rounds if the girl buys the first.
On the other hand this tradition makes going out to bars with my girlfriend a lot cheaper since she can just walk away for a minute and someone will come up to her and buy her a drink. After which she comes back to me, drink in hand. (ETA: Though, I don’t think she’s ever asked for a drink. She’s much too nice for that. People just come up and offer.)
As a non-drinker, I often passed proffered drinks onto my friends, who could make use of them. Obviously I would never ask for a drink, except maybe a glass of water.
I’ll buy you an orange juice if you want. ;)
The point was partially made by the fact that water is free, at least everywhere I’ve lived. Thanks, though.
I can confirm that this does happen at least sometimes (USA). I was at a bar, and I approached a woman who is probably considered attractive by many (skinny, bottle blonde) and started talking to her. She soon asked me to buy her a drink. Being not well versed in such matters, I agreed, and asked her what she wanted. She named an expensive wine, which I agreed to get her a glass of. She largely ignored me thereafter, and didn’t even bother taking the drink!
(I did obtain some measure of revenge later that night by spanking her rear end hard, though I do not advise doing such things. She was not amused and her brother threatened me, though as I had apologized, that was the end of it. She did tell some other lies so I don’t know if she is neurotypical; my impression was that she was well below average in morality, being a spoiled brat.)
In European bars or nightclubs, if (relatively) attractive girls ask strangers for drinks or dishes, then it typically means they are doing it professionally.
There is even a special phrase “consume girl” meaning that the girl’s job is to lure clueless customers into buying expensive drinks for them for a cut of the profit. The surest sign of being a “consume girl” is that they typically don’t consume what they ask for.
It’s all about money, and has nothing to do with social games, whatsoever. They are not spoiled brats, but trained for this job.
I am not sure how common is this “profession” in the US, but in Europe it’s relatively common.
Sounds like Cabaret Hostesses in Japan. They have male counterparts, too, but the female variety is a lot more common.
It’s common in Korea—they call them “juicy girls” (from the korean word for “please,” roughly “juseo”). I’ve never seen it here in the US. I don’t know why it doesn’t exist in the US, the only other slightly relevant and consistent difference I can think of is the cultural attitudes toward tipping.
Well, there is this...
In the US the equivalent job is selling people VIP tables for bottle service.
I’ve heard of such in the US, too, but only in decades-old fiction. I don’t know whether it’s current practice.
I don’t like to go meta, but this comment and its upvotes (4 at the time I write) are among the more disturbing thing I’ve seen on this site. I have to assume that they reflect voters’ appreciation for a real-life story of a woman asking a man to buy a drink, rather than approval of the use of violence to express displeasure over someone else’s behavior and perceived morality in a social situation.
I’m also surprised that you’re telling this story without expressing any apparent remorse about your behavior, but I guess the upvotes show that you read the LW crowd better than I do.
Correct in my case.
I’m wondering if it’s a true story. The part about the drink is conceivable. I’d be surprised if the woman’s behavior is at all common,. though.
The violence..… where is there enough privacy at a bar to spank someone?
I didn’t get the impression that the spanking was done in privacy.
You think he lied about the story?
If it wasn’t done in privacy, then I understand my culture less than I thought.
Would people just let a man grabbing a woman and spanking her happen? No one calls the police? There’s no bouncer?
If the glass of wine was expensive, this isn’t an extremely sleazy bar, if that matters.
The story is so far off from my priors of how people behave that I think the possibility that it isn’t true should be considered.
He didn’t say “grabbing”, and in context, I’d guess that by “spanking” he meant a single swat to the buttocks.
It says more that you don’t get out much, or aren’t very observant when you do. I don’t get out much, and never got out much, even during the brief few years when I was both single and of age, and such a story as this one is so utterly mundane and commonplace in its elements as to seem scarcely worthy of comment in the first place.
Most guys that protest such behavior from women make some other form of scene than swatting, of course, and most simply whine to their buddies or suffer in silence rather than make a scene at all. But apart from that, it’s an utterly ordinary story, and observable many, many times a night in any “meet market” where the women go to dance and drink, funded by deluded potential suitors.
I agree that “spanking” is ambiguous, and a single hit would be plausible.
It’s true that I don’t get out much in that sense—I don’t like loud noise (as in really hate it) or drunk people.
Probably.
Bouncers are a way to get around the bystander effect.
Hey, I never thought of that— having a designated person to come over and break up a fight is probably more valuable than a naive analysis would reckon, not even counting the other security benefits.
huh?
(emphasis added)
Read in the context of the entire thread, I take this as a non-apology apology, not an expression of remorse or contrition. In the thread, Mallah continued to take the position that the woman “deserved” the spanking, and it appears to me that the apology was made in order to avoid future confrontation/trouble, not remorse. Moreover, Mallah also commented:
Remorse involves some genuine feeling of regret that one’s actions had been wrong in some ethical or moral sense, not merely reconsideration because they had been ill-advised in a a practical sense.
You assaulted her because she asked for an expensive drink, you gave her the drink, and then she ignored you?
You say you don’t recommend what you did, but I’m curious about why, considering that you seem to think she deserved it.
It was a single swat to the buttocks, done in full sight of everyone. There was other ass-spanking going on, between people who knew each other—done as a joke - so in context it was not so unusual. I would not have done it outside of that context, nor would I have done it if my inhibitions had not been lowered by alcohol; nor would I do it again even if they are.
Yes, she deserved it!
It was a mistake. Why? It exposed me to more risk than was worthwhile, and while I might have hoped that (aside from simple punishment) it would teach her the lesson that she ought to follow the Golden Rule, or at least should not pull the same tricks on guys, in retrospect it was unlikely to do so.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
[Note: this is going to sound at first like PUA advice, but is actually about general differences between the socially-typical and atypical in the sending and receiving of “status play” signals, using the current situation as an example.]
I don’t know about “good”, but for it to be “useful” you would’ve needed to do it first. (E.g. Her: “Buy me a drink” You: “Sure, now bend over.” Her: “What?” “I said bend over, I’m going to spank your spoiled [add playful invective to taste].”)
Of course, that won’t work if you are actually offended. You have to be genuinely amused, and clearly speaking so as to amuse yourself, rather than being argumentative, judgmental, condescending, critical, or any other such thing.
This is a common failure mode for those of us with low-powered or faulty social coprocessors—we take offense to things that more-normal individuals interpret as playful status competition, and resist taking similar actions because we interpret them as things that we would only do if we were angry.
In a way, it’s like cats and dogs—the dog wags its tail to signal “I’m not really attacking you, I’m just playing”, while the cat waves its tail to mean, “you are about to die if you come any closer”. Normal people are dogs, geeks are cats, and if you want to play with the dogs, you have to learn to bark, wag, and play-bite. Otherwise, they think you’re a touchy psycho who needs to loosen up and not take everything so seriously. (Not unlike the way dogs may end up learning to avoid the cats in a shared household, if they interpret the cats as weirdly anti-social pack members.)
Genuine creeps and assholes are a third breed altogether: they’re the ones who verbally say they’re just playing, while in fact they are not playing or joking at all, and are often downright scary.
And their existence kept me from understanding how things worked more quickly, because normal people learn not to play-bite you if you bare your claws or hide under the couch in response ! So, it didn’t occur to me that all the normal people had just learned to leave me out of their status play, like a bunch of dogs learning to steer clear of the psycho family cat.
The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we’re easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the “dogs” just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn’t get any fun.)
So now, if you’re a “cat”, you learn that only jerks do these things.
And of course, you’re utterly and completely wrong, but have little opportunity to discover and correct the problem on your own. And even if you learn how to fake polite socialization, you won’t be entirely comfortable running with the dogs, nor they you, since the moment they actually try to “play” with you, you act all weird (for a dog, anyway).
That’s why, IMO, some PUA convversation is actually a good thing on LW; it’s a nice example of a shared bias to get over. The LWers who insist that people aren’t really like that, only low [self-esteem, intelligence] girls fall for that stuff, that even if it does work it’s “wrong”, etc., are in need of some more understanding of how their fellow humans [of either gender] actually operate. Even if their objective isn’t to attract dating partners, there are a lot of things in this world that are much harder to get if you can’t speak “dog”.
tl;dr: Normal people engage in playful dog-like status games with their actual friends and think you’re weird when you respond like a cat, figuratively hissing and spitting, or running away to hide under the bed. Yes, even your cool NT friends who tolerate your idiosyncracies—you’re not actually as close to them as you think, because they’re always more careful around you than they are around other NTs.
pjeby:
Your cat/dog analogy is very good, but this requires some extra elaboration.
As you say, in regular socializing, this “cat-baiting” behavior is characteristic of jerks and bullies; regular people will typically leave “cats” alone rather than provoke them. However, in male-female interactions in which the woman deems (consciously or not) that the man might have some potential mating value but requires additional assessment, or if she perceives that the man is actively trying to win her favors, she’ll typically engage in some “cat-baiting” to test him for undesirable “catlike” traits.
There’s nothing surprising there once you really understand what’s going on; it’s simply a regular way of assessing a potential partner’s fitness. Sometimes this “cat-baiting” will be subtle and entirely unremarkable to the man, but sometimes it has the form of harsh and unpleasant shit-tests which can leave him angry and hurt, and which go far into the jerk territory by the standards of regular socializing. The latter will happen especially if the woman generally imposes high standards, or if the man looks like a poor prospect who could redeem himself only with some amazing bullet-dodging. (Hence guys who give off a “catlike” vibe often get the worst of it.)
For many guys, understanding this would, at the very least, save them a lot of pointless anger in situations like the one described above by Mallah.
Thank you, that was a very helpful explanation for me. It’s posts like these that make me thankful you contribute here, even as we’ve had our differences in the past.
Reading it, I thnk I can interpret a past experience in a new light, in which I was, long ago, asked to leave a large NT-dominated club, for (what seemed like) kafkaesque reasons which were criticisms of my behavior they couldn’t rationally justify. In particular, how I was told that far more people had a negative reaction to me than I had ever interacted with. I had heard third-hand (though from a trusted source) that it was because someone passed around a false, serious accusation that they never told me about.
But looking back, the explanation that there was a dog/cat expectation barrier makes a lot of sense of the way they treated me, which was not just vicious, but bizarre. (I think that NTs would agree that some my treatment was wrong, even from an NT perspective, but believe that the my reaction to it escalated the conflict, drawing out my different behavior.)
PS: Whoever voted the parent down, I request an explanation.
Am I correct in thinking that sensitivity to a downvote like this is “cat” like?
No. As I keep pointing out, there is a group of posters on LW strongly opposed to this frank discussion of the real governing factors behind sociality, such as those discovered by the PUA community. We need to have a similarly open discussion of what drives people who want to keep such helpful comments as pjeby’s above from being made.
Since I’m not out to punish the comment, or feel threatened by it, but just want to understand the various positions regarding this issue, it is not “cat like”.
It may be a moot point though, as I may have been mistaken in thinking that anyone downvoted pjeby’s comment; I had voted it up, then shortly after saw it at zero. I inferred that someone must have downvoted and canceled my vote, but given the quirks we’ve seen with the codebase, there’s a good chance it may have just been a case of the site briefly not reflecting my vote, meaning it’s still possible no one voted it down.
Really great post. I can definitely see some “cat” like tendencies in myself that I’d like to know how to change more, like getting irritated at things I see as rude. Any specific ideas on how to change that, or recognize when I’m overreacting, and when I need to speak up so as not to let people get away with treating me badly?
I would like to see more discussion of this on LW, as it applies across the board to all kinds of interactions, and I think it’d be very useful.
Interesting theory—as a catlike person, I’m passing it around to see if it makes sense to a range of people.
I suspect that a lot of social difficulty is caused by dog types who don’t know how to dial it down with cats, or are so in love with their usual behavior that they feel they shouldn’t have to. They aren’t jerks (those who enjoy tormenting cats), but they can look rather similar.
Interestingly, this metaphor ties in perfectly with another dog/cat metaphor that has geeks as the cats:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/06/on-seeing-like-a-cat/
It sure was one hell of a low status signal. The worst possible way you can fail a shit test is to get visibly hurt and angry.
As for whether she deserved it, well, if you want to work in the kitchen, better be prepared to stand the heat. Expecting women you hit on to follow the same norms of behavior as your regular buddies and colleagues, and then getting angry when they don’t, is like getting into a boxing match and then complaining you’ve been assaulted.
I don’t think I got visibly hurt or angry. In fact, when I did it, I was feeling more tempted than angry. I was in the middle of a conversation with another guy, and her rear appeared nearby, and I couldn’t resist.
It made me seem like a jerk, which is bad, but not necessarily low status. Acting without apparent fear of the consequences, even stupidly, is often respected as long as you get away with it.
Another factor is that this was a ‘high status’ woman. I’m not sure but she might be related to a celebrity. (I didn’t know that at the time.) Hence, any story linking me and her may be ‘bad publicity’ for me but there is the old saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’.
But you didn’t get away with it.
Also, technically, you acted like a creep, not a jerk. (A jerk acts boldly, a creep is sneaky and opportunistic.)
I wasn’t sneaky about it.
That’s true only if you manage to maintain the absolute no-apologies attitude. If you had to apologize about it, it’s automatically a major fail. (Not trying to put you down, just giving you a realistic perspective.)
I still don’t understand how she “deserved” to have you escalate the encounter with a “hard” physical spanking; nor do I understand how, if you spanked her in a joking context, you would consider it punishment or “some measure of revenge.” From what you’ve said, it doesn’t seem like you were on sufficiently friendly terms with her that the spanking was in fact treated as teasing/joking action; you previously stated that she was not amused by the spanking, her brother threatened you, and you apologized.
I’m certainly not trying to say that her behavior wasn’t worthy of serious disapproval and verbal disparagement. But responding to her poor behavior with physical actions rather than words seems at least equally inappropriate.
I think this situation falls pretty squarely into “two wrongs don’t make a right” territory. The moral intuition is that a minor social infraction doesn’t justify a violent response, even extremely minor violence. Even though you don’t say so, perhaps that was a tacit reason for you to acknowledge it as a mistake.
I do sympathize with your frustration at encountering such naked privilege and entitlement on her part, and that you would want some sort of recourse. It’s possible that such brattiness would cause her trouble in her future relationships with men, but that isn’t even necessarily true. You can’t really get recourse for behavior like this; you just have to shut it down when it appears. I think you’ve learned that lesson.
Thanks for the explanation.