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.
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.