Your example reminds me of a chapter from Yes Means Yes—the idea that women have actual lust is still so blanked out in the culture, that it’s quite possible to forget about it even when you’re trying to construct a sex-positive example.
Sally thinks sex is normal. Sally thinks Bob is cute. Bob makes the first move, and doesn’t seem to be abusive.
Does Sally want sex with Bob? Maybe. Maybe not. Her desires (as distinct from her concern about whether she’s doing the right thing) don’t seem to be part of the story.
This might get me downvoted due to the tribal dynamics on LW but I just wanted to share that I think my reason for missing your excellent point (upvoted) was perhaps some assumptions I made reading the following paragraph:
Bob is part of her crowd. Her friends like him; he respects women and treats Sally well and, like any healthy teenage boy, fairly horny. According to her belief system, that shouldn’t set off any alarm bells. She’s been warned about abusive relationships, but Bob is a nice guy.
This seems to hold true when dissected from a variety of perspectives, thought this is probably just the result of unfortunate signalling side effects of some words. Anyway I find it amusing some of the heuristics I’ve employed with such great confidence should happen to misfire on a LW article where I should have known better.
I’ve spoken in the past about Karma mining and dynamic analysis, I’ve been busy on that project. I’m not yet done by far and I’m not yet confident enough in the analysis to share any of my crazy (and conflicting!) hypothesis but lets just say I’ve found some interesting patterns.
I know I know I’m teasing, don’t worry if all goes well hopefully I will summarize in a article (share all my data too). :)
I don’t necessarily know a whole lot about what girls are attracted to...I only have my point of view and my sister’s point of view, and both of us like boys who respect girls and treat them, well, nicely. Maybe you’re right and the phrase ‘nice guy’ sets off non-sexy alarm bells...I’ll change it. But in any case, the description isn’t from Sally’s point of view. When I say that he’s a nice girl, what it means is that she doesn’t find him threatening.
I’d say rather that the description says nothing about Bob’s generally-perceived attractiveness nor his attractiveness to Sally in particular.
What if Sally had described Bob with words like:
“Bob has a little dimple on his left cheek which gives him a slightly asymmetrical smile. Those black pants he always wears have a tiny hole on the back of his left thigh. His hair looks brown at first, but it’s really a shade of red.”
Maybe Bob respects women and is an ardent feminist, maybe he’s gay, maybe he’s an abusive jerk—we don’t know. But we get an idea of how he seems subjectively to Sally.
I guess it depends on whose voice the quote was in. If that was Sally talking about Bob to herself in her own thoughts, she doesn’t seem truly interested in him. However, I took it instead that the quote was in the voice of the original poster, describing a hypothetical from a somewhat (but not entirely) detached viewpoint.
That is how I intended it. I also didn’t intend for Sally to be very strongly attracted to Bob...the problem in the story is that her being mildly attracted to him is enough, initially, for her to go along with having sex with him because her explicit beliefs say that sex is casual fun...and yes I’ve heard people express this explicit belief before.
Sally thinks sex is normal. Sally thinks Bob is cute.
I think it relevant to add that Bob also thinks Sally is cute. The word cute has sexual quite clear sexual connotations.
like any healthy teenage boy, fairly horny
Considering the context and common sense analysed through they eyes of someone a bit neurodiverse, this sentence dosen’t imply that he wants sex more than Sally does. It just implies he wants sex with Sally more than she does with him.
But this dosen’t mean Sally dosen’t want sex with him, thought this is what I first read into it (see my other post).
For the desires to be paired Bob would have to be much higher status than Sally due to the differences in hypergamy between the genders.
Does Sally want sex with Bob? Maybe. Maybe not. Her desires (as distinct from her concern about whether she’s doing the right thing) don’t seem to be part of the story.
On the other hand someone taking lust for granted sufficiently would take “Sally thinks Bob is cute” as enough of an indicator.
Yeah, this is almost a straight paraphrase of one of the stories in there, unless I’m misremembering the contents of the book. It seems that any sexual ideology, even one of sexual liberation, can lead to dissatisfaction.
The problem, I think, is that sex is an ambiguous, muddled and confusing thing, whether or not it’s got prudish cultural baggage attached to it. Whether we conform to the popular conception or seize upon alternative views, we need some kind of cognitive framework to help us simplify and deal with our sexuality. But, under the (I think) reasonable assumption that truly satisfying sexuality doesn’t boil down to any such simple framework, mistakes are bound to be made.
Like anything else, therefore, healthy sexuality requires practice and trial-and-error, and we’re unlikely to get it right the first time. I think one of the most dangerous cultural ideals is that sex should only happen when everything is just right (especially if you’re a woman, but that’s a whole other conversation). If we can learn not to beat ourselves up over sexual relations that turn out to be less than ideal, maybe this sort of thing will be less of a problem.
Missing the point a little. If I read NancyLebovitz right, she’s pointing out that Sally’s generally sexually liberated abstract ethic doesn’t imply that Sally herself is feeling any desire for sex right then with this one guy. And yet, women’s sexuality is so blanked out in the culture that her lack of active negativity to Bob’s desire for sex is read—even by herself—as a choice to go ahead.
The problem here is not that sex is ambiguous or confusing in itself. Rather, the culture is causing people’s eyes to slip past and over half the question. Naturally the answers make no sense!
Yes, I understand. It’s certainly a problem that women’s desires are glossed over in the popular view of sexuality (when they aren’t actively discouraged). I was simply proposing that the problem runs deeper than that: for men and women alike, one’s individual sexual desires have to be explored at length before they are fully understood. When you’ve never had sex before, it may seem like a fine idea in the abstract, but to actually recognize concrete and unambiguous sexual desire (or its absence) requires a certain amount of self-awareness and emotional sophistication that can only be gained through a learning process.
In no way does this undermine the fact that the dialectic needs to be reshaped to include the desires of women and transpeople in addition to those of men, I’m just not sure that’ll be enough to prevent awkward and emotionally confusing first sexual encounters. Maybe we should just accept those as OK (modulo prohibitions against sexual coercion, etc.).
I’m actually a little wary of assuming there are pre-existing “desires” which exist but wait to be understood. Rather than for example, a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.
Consider that you’d think the above description was quite sensible when applied to food preferences,
I mostly agree, but the existence of gay people who found out the hard way that heterosexual sex simply wasn’t satisfying for them looks to me like a strong counterexample.
I’m referring to the gay people who married someone of the other sex back when that was thought to be a cure for homosexuality.
Hmm, no I actually disagree. That assumes that “trying” ought to change it. On the contrary, I don’t see that a situational + cognitive origin implies a conscious toggle switch.
Consider food again. I watched my brother learn to hate honey—he liked it initially, until one day he was disgusted to find bee parts in it. Then we as kids teased him with it, building associations of disgust. As an adult he finds it nauseating. I have no expectation that he could will himself to like it.
I think that people have been pushing the “can’t change” aspect as a way to defend gay people from bigots, specifically to fight the religious charge of sin (because it undermines the idea of guilt), and to fight the quack science of willed change (“ex gays”). Culturally, when we hear “can’t change”, we go looking for it in the genes. Personally I haven’t heard strong evidence for genetic predetermination (versus a genetic preference rather like having a sweet tooth). I have heard evidence it can’t be willed to change. But why expect that it could? And I have also heard (anecdotal) evidence that it can change on its own or situationally, such as when trans people transition.
There probably aren’t genetic correlates per se (they’d get bred out of the population pretty quickly if so); but as I understand, there are fairly solid links between incidence of homosexuality and the hormonal environment in the womb during certain critical periods of pregnancy. That being said, sexuality is fluid to some extent, but not by a lot, and it doesn’t seem to be under conscious control.
The situation makes a lot more sense when you realize that “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”, etc., aren’t atomic properties of a human being, but rather statistical tendencies in the response of certain (largely unconscious) cognitive and biological functions to environmental stimuli. Even the straightest dude can get a bit of a man-crush once in awhile if the object of his attraction happens to trigger the right affective states, whether by having unusual pheremones, pleasing physical features, an especially compelling personality, or anything else which might activate some quirk of said straight dude’s brain.
To describe the process of sexually maturing as a process of discovering one’s innate desires, then, is perhaps somewhat misleading, as you pointed out, insomuch as we are at risk of reifying those desires; but the effect of (mostly) unchangeable physiology is still significant in this case. We can view the process of sexual self-discovery, then, as that of an inexperienced neocortex learning to maximize the reward signals it gets from the black box of its limbic system.
As for food, those preferences are actually easily changeable. There are a number of foods (falafel, grapefruit, mustard, pickles) that I couldn’t stand in the past, but kept occasionally trying anyway; as my body learned that these were sources of valuable nutrients, I eventually grew to like them. Similarly, a bout of food poisoning turned me off avocados for about a year and a half, but through repeated exposure I came to enjoy them once more. Extremely spicy foods are another good example. The stomach needs to learn what it can eat, in order to adapt to changing nutritional needs and environmental conditions. In contrast, there’s no particular selective pressure for a person to experiment with screwing different kinds of people, animals, objects, etc., so we should expect our attractions to remain largely autonomous of our efforts to change them.
I don’t see how that is a strong counterexample, actually.
I mean, it’s clear that in those cases there’s a sexual desire for men, and no sexual desire for women, but it’s not at all clear that either of those are the result of a “pre-existing desire” as opposed to “a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.”
Admittedly, it’s not clear to me what would be a counterexample, or more generally what I’d expect to experience differently if Julian were right or wrong.
So perhaps I’m merely misunderstanding altogether.
That is an interesting question. What would a strongly foreordained desire look like? (NB I am deliberately not saying inborn, with its genetic implications) And how would it look different to an accumulated desire?
Well, that’s basically my question to you, actually.
That is: you’re saying you don’t believe in pre-existing desires, and believe instead in desires that emerge from a variety of influences (inborn, cultural, situational, cognitive, and experiential).
I’m not really sure what the difference between those two things even is, in terms of anticipated experience, so I’m not sure there’s any meaningful difference to be discussed.
For my own part, when a pattern of desire is common across multiple cultures and situations and individuals, I’m not inclined to treat it as primarily an emergent property of cultural, situational, or experiential influences.
Your example reminds me of a chapter from Yes Means Yes—the idea that women have actual lust is still so blanked out in the culture, that it’s quite possible to forget about it even when you’re trying to construct a sex-positive example.
This view strikes me as absurd. Why have traditional cultures always had all those stringent checks on women’s behavior, if the general assumption was that there is no such thing as female lust? Not to even mention how frequent and all-pervasive the motive of female lust has always been in art.
I’m not talking about the history of the world, I’m talking about recent American culture.
Sally’s desire or lack of it really wasn’t present in the story. Try imagining a gender-reversed version of the story and see whether it looks odd to you.
I recommend reading Yes Means Yes—you will probably find the politics annoying and I don’t sign on to them myself, but the personal viewpoints could give you an additional angle on the world.
I find it interesting that there was a shift (Victorian?) from the stereotype of Woman the Temptress to Man the Pursuer. It makes me wonder if no one knows what they’re talking about in regards to sex in general—possibly the case, considering that no one has a large random sample of behavior and there’s a lot of shame on the subject.
It’s possible that we have a sufficiently strong norm of telling the truth on questionnaires to have found out a little bit—at least for people who are willing to answer questionnaires.
I’m not talking about the history of the world, I’m talking about recent American culture.
Sally’s desire or lack of it really wasn’t present in the story. Try imagining a gender-reversed version of the story and see whether it looks odd to you.
The gender-reversed version would have to look very different to be realistic because, among other reasons, there are very strong and very asymmetrical signaling and reputational issues involved. (I’m just noting this as the de facto state of affairs, separate from the discussion of why it might be so.) If these issues weigh more heavily than the considerations of lust for one of the parties, but less so for the other, it doesn’t mean that the former’s lust is being unrealistically neglected.
Now, I don’t know much about what American culture a few decades back really looked like, and I do have some reason to believe that the way it’s popularly imagined nowadays is heavily distorted. However, if this culture really was oblivious about female lust, this would lead to some odd predictions—for example, that people (or men at least) would lack the usual traditional inclination for chaperoning and strong reputational discipline of women, believing that they’d behave with saintly chastity if left uncontrolled. Was this really the case?
I recommend reading Yes Means Yes—you will probably find the politics annoying and I don’t sign on to them myself, but the personal viewpoints could give you an additional angle on the world.
Which one of the books under this title do you have in mind? Google Books lists at least two that look like they might be pertinent for this discussion. (I have no problem with annoying politics, no matter how extreme, if there is some insight to be found alongside it.)
Your example reminds me of a chapter from Yes Means Yes—the idea that women have actual lust is still so blanked out in the culture, that it’s quite possible to forget about it even when you’re trying to construct a sex-positive example.
Sally thinks sex is normal. Sally thinks Bob is cute. Bob makes the first move, and doesn’t seem to be abusive.
Does Sally want sex with Bob? Maybe. Maybe not. Her desires (as distinct from her concern about whether she’s doing the right thing) don’t seem to be part of the story.
This might get me downvoted due to the tribal dynamics on LW but I just wanted to share that I think my reason for missing your excellent point (upvoted) was perhaps some assumptions I made reading the following paragraph:
I’m sorry but Bob is a very unsexy sounding guy.
This seems to hold true when dissected from a variety of perspectives, thought this is probably just the result of unfortunate signalling side effects of some words. Anyway I find it amusing some of the heuristics I’ve employed with such great confidence should happen to misfire on a LW article where I should have known better.
Has that happened to you before? What exactly are the tribal dynamics on LW?
I’ve spoken in the past about Karma mining and dynamic analysis, I’ve been busy on that project. I’m not yet done by far and I’m not yet confident enough in the analysis to share any of my crazy (and conflicting!) hypothesis but lets just say I’ve found some interesting patterns.
I know I know I’m teasing, don’t worry if all goes well hopefully I will summarize in a article (share all my data too). :)
I don’t necessarily know a whole lot about what girls are attracted to...I only have my point of view and my sister’s point of view, and both of us like boys who respect girls and treat them, well, nicely. Maybe you’re right and the phrase ‘nice guy’ sets off non-sexy alarm bells...I’ll change it. But in any case, the description isn’t from Sally’s point of view. When I say that he’s a nice girl, what it means is that she doesn’t find him threatening.
I’d say rather that the description says nothing about Bob’s generally-perceived attractiveness nor his attractiveness to Sally in particular.
What if Sally had described Bob with words like:
“Bob has a little dimple on his left cheek which gives him a slightly asymmetrical smile. Those black pants he always wears have a tiny hole on the back of his left thigh. His hair looks brown at first, but it’s really a shade of red.”
Maybe Bob respects women and is an ardent feminist, maybe he’s gay, maybe he’s an abusive jerk—we don’t know. But we get an idea of how he seems subjectively to Sally.
But this was all I at first considered. How Sally perceives him. Hence:
I’m sorry but Bob is a very unsexy sounding guy.
I guess it depends on whose voice the quote was in. If that was Sally talking about Bob to herself in her own thoughts, she doesn’t seem truly interested in him. However, I took it instead that the quote was in the voice of the original poster, describing a hypothetical from a somewhat (but not entirely) detached viewpoint.
That is how I intended it. I also didn’t intend for Sally to be very strongly attracted to Bob...the problem in the story is that her being mildly attracted to him is enough, initially, for her to go along with having sex with him because her explicit beliefs say that sex is casual fun...and yes I’ve heard people express this explicit belief before.
I think it relevant to add that Bob also thinks Sally is cute. The word cute has sexual quite clear sexual connotations.
Considering the context and common sense analysed through they eyes of someone a bit neurodiverse, this sentence dosen’t imply that he wants sex more than Sally does. It just implies he wants sex with Sally more than she does with him.
But this dosen’t mean Sally dosen’t want sex with him, thought this is what I first read into it (see my other post).
For the desires to be paired Bob would have to be much higher status than Sally due to the differences in hypergamy between the genders.
On the other hand someone taking lust for granted sufficiently would take “Sally thinks Bob is cute” as enough of an indicator.
Yeah, this is almost a straight paraphrase of one of the stories in there, unless I’m misremembering the contents of the book. It seems that any sexual ideology, even one of sexual liberation, can lead to dissatisfaction.
The problem, I think, is that sex is an ambiguous, muddled and confusing thing, whether or not it’s got prudish cultural baggage attached to it. Whether we conform to the popular conception or seize upon alternative views, we need some kind of cognitive framework to help us simplify and deal with our sexuality. But, under the (I think) reasonable assumption that truly satisfying sexuality doesn’t boil down to any such simple framework, mistakes are bound to be made.
Like anything else, therefore, healthy sexuality requires practice and trial-and-error, and we’re unlikely to get it right the first time. I think one of the most dangerous cultural ideals is that sex should only happen when everything is just right (especially if you’re a woman, but that’s a whole other conversation). If we can learn not to beat ourselves up over sexual relations that turn out to be less than ideal, maybe this sort of thing will be less of a problem.
Missing the point a little. If I read NancyLebovitz right, she’s pointing out that Sally’s generally sexually liberated abstract ethic doesn’t imply that Sally herself is feeling any desire for sex right then with this one guy. And yet, women’s sexuality is so blanked out in the culture that her lack of active negativity to Bob’s desire for sex is read—even by herself—as a choice to go ahead.
The problem here is not that sex is ambiguous or confusing in itself. Rather, the culture is causing people’s eyes to slip past and over half the question. Naturally the answers make no sense!
Yes, I understand. It’s certainly a problem that women’s desires are glossed over in the popular view of sexuality (when they aren’t actively discouraged). I was simply proposing that the problem runs deeper than that: for men and women alike, one’s individual sexual desires have to be explored at length before they are fully understood. When you’ve never had sex before, it may seem like a fine idea in the abstract, but to actually recognize concrete and unambiguous sexual desire (or its absence) requires a certain amount of self-awareness and emotional sophistication that can only be gained through a learning process.
In no way does this undermine the fact that the dialectic needs to be reshaped to include the desires of women and transpeople in addition to those of men, I’m just not sure that’ll be enough to prevent awkward and emotionally confusing first sexual encounters. Maybe we should just accept those as OK (modulo prohibitions against sexual coercion, etc.).
I’m actually a little wary of assuming there are pre-existing “desires” which exist but wait to be understood. Rather than for example, a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.
Consider that you’d think the above description was quite sensible when applied to food preferences,
I mostly agree, but the existence of gay people who found out the hard way that heterosexual sex simply wasn’t satisfying for them looks to me like a strong counterexample.
I’m referring to the gay people who married someone of the other sex back when that was thought to be a cure for homosexuality.
Hmm, no I actually disagree. That assumes that “trying” ought to change it. On the contrary, I don’t see that a situational + cognitive origin implies a conscious toggle switch.
Consider food again. I watched my brother learn to hate honey—he liked it initially, until one day he was disgusted to find bee parts in it. Then we as kids teased him with it, building associations of disgust. As an adult he finds it nauseating. I have no expectation that he could will himself to like it.
I think that people have been pushing the “can’t change” aspect as a way to defend gay people from bigots, specifically to fight the religious charge of sin (because it undermines the idea of guilt), and to fight the quack science of willed change (“ex gays”). Culturally, when we hear “can’t change”, we go looking for it in the genes. Personally I haven’t heard strong evidence for genetic predetermination (versus a genetic preference rather like having a sweet tooth). I have heard evidence it can’t be willed to change. But why expect that it could? And I have also heard (anecdotal) evidence that it can change on its own or situationally, such as when trans people transition.
There probably aren’t genetic correlates per se (they’d get bred out of the population pretty quickly if so); but as I understand, there are fairly solid links between incidence of homosexuality and the hormonal environment in the womb during certain critical periods of pregnancy. That being said, sexuality is fluid to some extent, but not by a lot, and it doesn’t seem to be under conscious control.
The situation makes a lot more sense when you realize that “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”, etc., aren’t atomic properties of a human being, but rather statistical tendencies in the response of certain (largely unconscious) cognitive and biological functions to environmental stimuli. Even the straightest dude can get a bit of a man-crush once in awhile if the object of his attraction happens to trigger the right affective states, whether by having unusual pheremones, pleasing physical features, an especially compelling personality, or anything else which might activate some quirk of said straight dude’s brain.
To describe the process of sexually maturing as a process of discovering one’s innate desires, then, is perhaps somewhat misleading, as you pointed out, insomuch as we are at risk of reifying those desires; but the effect of (mostly) unchangeable physiology is still significant in this case. We can view the process of sexual self-discovery, then, as that of an inexperienced neocortex learning to maximize the reward signals it gets from the black box of its limbic system.
As for food, those preferences are actually easily changeable. There are a number of foods (falafel, grapefruit, mustard, pickles) that I couldn’t stand in the past, but kept occasionally trying anyway; as my body learned that these were sources of valuable nutrients, I eventually grew to like them. Similarly, a bout of food poisoning turned me off avocados for about a year and a half, but through repeated exposure I came to enjoy them once more. Extremely spicy foods are another good example. The stomach needs to learn what it can eat, in order to adapt to changing nutritional needs and environmental conditions. In contrast, there’s no particular selective pressure for a person to experiment with screwing different kinds of people, animals, objects, etc., so we should expect our attractions to remain largely autonomous of our efforts to change them.
I don’t see how that is a strong counterexample, actually.
I mean, it’s clear that in those cases there’s a sexual desire for men, and no sexual desire for women, but it’s not at all clear that either of those are the result of a “pre-existing desire” as opposed to “a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.”
Admittedly, it’s not clear to me what would be a counterexample, or more generally what I’d expect to experience differently if Julian were right or wrong.
So perhaps I’m merely misunderstanding altogether.
That is an interesting question. What would a strongly foreordained desire look like? (NB I am deliberately not saying inborn, with its genetic implications) And how would it look different to an accumulated desire?
Well, that’s basically my question to you, actually.
That is: you’re saying you don’t believe in pre-existing desires, and believe instead in desires that emerge from a variety of influences (inborn, cultural, situational, cognitive, and experiential).
I’m not really sure what the difference between those two things even is, in terms of anticipated experience, so I’m not sure there’s any meaningful difference to be discussed.
For my own part, when a pattern of desire is common across multiple cultures and situations and individuals, I’m not inclined to treat it as primarily an emergent property of cultural, situational, or experiential influences.
Er, good point; thanks for the reminder.
This view strikes me as absurd. Why have traditional cultures always had all those stringent checks on women’s behavior, if the general assumption was that there is no such thing as female lust? Not to even mention how frequent and all-pervasive the motive of female lust has always been in art.
I’m not talking about the history of the world, I’m talking about recent American culture.
Sally’s desire or lack of it really wasn’t present in the story. Try imagining a gender-reversed version of the story and see whether it looks odd to you.
I recommend reading Yes Means Yes—you will probably find the politics annoying and I don’t sign on to them myself, but the personal viewpoints could give you an additional angle on the world.
I find it interesting that there was a shift (Victorian?) from the stereotype of Woman the Temptress to Man the Pursuer. It makes me wonder if no one knows what they’re talking about in regards to sex in general—possibly the case, considering that no one has a large random sample of behavior and there’s a lot of shame on the subject.
It’s possible that we have a sufficiently strong norm of telling the truth on questionnaires to have found out a little bit—at least for people who are willing to answer questionnaires.
The gender-reversed version would have to look very different to be realistic because, among other reasons, there are very strong and very asymmetrical signaling and reputational issues involved. (I’m just noting this as the de facto state of affairs, separate from the discussion of why it might be so.) If these issues weigh more heavily than the considerations of lust for one of the parties, but less so for the other, it doesn’t mean that the former’s lust is being unrealistically neglected.
Now, I don’t know much about what American culture a few decades back really looked like, and I do have some reason to believe that the way it’s popularly imagined nowadays is heavily distorted. However, if this culture really was oblivious about female lust, this would lead to some odd predictions—for example, that people (or men at least) would lack the usual traditional inclination for chaperoning and strong reputational discipline of women, believing that they’d behave with saintly chastity if left uncontrolled. Was this really the case?
Which one of the books under this title do you have in mind? Google Books lists at least two that look like they might be pertinent for this discussion. (I have no problem with annoying politics, no matter how extreme, if there is some insight to be found alongside it.)
Yes Means Yes is the book I meant—I haven’t found another book with the same title.
As for the rest of your post, I want to think a little longer before I reply.
This one has the same title, and apparently deals with similar topics:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tZH5aRrxtgEC&dq