What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the “nasty” “exclusionary” mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.
The fuck it does. This is about creepiness. Actual attempts at unwelcome intimacy. Whoever from and whoever to.
It is not about status, except to the extent that high status can (this is a bad thing) protect the perpetrators of actual creepy behaviour from being called to account, and low status (this is also a bad thing) can prevent the target from being heard.
Actually, “unwelcome” means that the definition sometimes depends almost exclusively on status. In the extreme situation that a guy is so high status I wouldn’t mind anything he did and would always say yes, he couldn’t possibly be creepy.
In a less hypothetical case, my reaction to statements like “you’re beautiful” or “your hair looks amazing” depends entirely on who is saying it. It would be considered creepy only if the guy was sufficiently low status that my intuition doesn’t process the statement as sincere.
Similarly I mentally flinch violently when touched by males who are too low status for my intuition to classify as attractive, have no such reaction for moderately attractive guys, and get a jolt of pleasure if the guy is very attractive. This effect is consistent and something I have no conscious control over.
I think people dismissing status are underestimating either the degree to which people’s unconscious can control their conscious, or the degree to which status interactions controls the unconscious.
Status is not an extremely clear thing to begin with, the same criticism could probably be applied to most uses of the term on LessWrong. I just mentally reparse what you write as
In a less hypothetical case, my reaction to statements like “you’re beautiful” or “your hair looks amazing” depends entirely on who is saying it. It would be considered creepy only if the guy has certain negative characteristics so that my intuition doesn’t process the statement as sincere.
You’re basically talking about how attractive you find him, but using “status” adds the connotations that it’s not just about the looks, and that how others judge him comes into the equation; both those connotations seem true.
The fuck it does. This is about creepiness. Actual attempts at unwelcome intimacy. Whoever from and whoever to.
Like how starting a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you is unwelcome, and thus creepy?
Or did you think people would never get the C-word for doing just that?
For further enlightenment, see, for example, here.
I missed the enlightenment you were expecting me to get from learning of a case where a high-status person got surprisingly little punishment (and no effective loss to social life) from doing creep things.
Like how starting a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you is unwelcome, and thus creepy?
You seem to be underestimating how easy it is to guess beforehand whether or not a stranger would want to talk to you. See the comment thread to this. (Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger’s netbook is necessarily creepy, but...)
Though I don’t think its that simple because both sides are claiming that the other side is not reporting how they truly feel. One side claims that people are calling things creepy semi-arbitrarily to raise their own status, and the other claims that people are intentionally refusing to recognize creepy behavior as creepy so they don’t have to stop it (or being slightly more charitable, so they don’t take a status hit for being creepy).
You seem to be underestimating how easy it is to guess beforehand whether or not a stranger would want to talk to you. See the comment thread to this. (Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger’s netbook is necessarily creepy, but...)
Upvoted for an excellent link which caused me to update my intuition regarding the nature and frequency of various types of public harassment of women. I didn’t update so far as to regard the XKCD cartoon as “promoting rape culture” (which I still think is going overboard), but after reading the (very very long) comment thread with all the subway/public/other harassment stories, I can totally see where they’re coming from.
That thread gives an important overview of a sort. It’s got its limits because women who talk about not having it that bad from men are not kindly treated in the discussion.
I’m not denying any of those stories about behavior ranging from intrusive to seriously threatening and it’s obviously fairly common, just saying that it’s not a overview of the whole situation. I’ve never seen an overview of the whole situation for women.
People who frequently fall into patterns of behavior that others regard as “creepy” tend to be those who do not find this easy.
Could you create a set of instructions that can easily be followed by people with low levels of social fluency, which would allow them to make this judgment with low levels of false positives and false negatives? If so, you’d be doing a big favor both to people who’re frequently exposed to “creepy” behavior, and people who frequently engage in that behavior. It would also probably be unique in the world.
The arrogant vulgarity doesn’t fit well with the demonstration of naivety (come to think of it “The fuck it does” wouldn’t be be appropriate here even if well informed). Creepiness is significantly about status. Typically it refers to something along the lines of “low status male attempting interaction”.
This doesn’t mean I’m endorsing any particular instance of creepiness but it is useful to understand what it is that prompts the perception ‘creepy’.
It is not about status, except to the extent that high status can (this is a bad thing) protect the perpetrators of actual creepy behaviour from being called to account
High status can also make the identical behaviors not creepy in the first place. Even if unwelcome the perception of the high status ‘unwelcome’ will feel different to the creepy low-status ‘unwelcome’.
Well, yeah, someone you wouldn’t like to have sex with hitting on you is creepier than someone you would like to have sex with hitting on you (obviously—why the hell would the latter be creepy at all?), and (especially if “someone” is male and “you” are female), whether you would like to have sex with them correlates with their status. But would that still hold to the same extent if you could change the “status” variable while holding the “attractiveness” (broadly construed) variable constant?
Tabooing “status” might be necessary. I couldn’t compute your last sentence… Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status. (They might not be the same thing as far as hormones are concerned, but they arise from the same mechanisms.)
What you call a less “attractive”, higher “status” man, I call a lower “status” man who has motivating factors to have incorrect beliefs about his “status”.
Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status.
There’s your problem right there!
I’m usually not a big fan of the “look it up on Wikipedia” approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you’re viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status
I’m usually not a big fan of the “look it up on Wikipedia” approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you’re viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status
Synonymous—clearly not. “Largely so” is more of an exaggeration than a fundamental incomprehension.
Huh. Ok. What do you call the ape status-instinct then? That’s thing that you get by cleverly body-language and verbally sparring with people. I’ve managed to end up on top of a number of authority figures doing that.
Edit: the human version of the behaviour that Wikipedia describes as “dominance hierarchies”.
Double edit: would it make more sense to distinguish the terms as system-1-status and system-2-status?
I...think you’re confused. I didn’t say social status doesn’t exist; I also didn’t say that “social status” was a bad term for it. What I said was that you have an extremely nonstandard set of word associations here, such that what you mean when you’re saying “social status” is...well, not intuitive from the more usual use of that word.
I’m not saying instincts for status don’t exist; I’m saying that “attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status” is a baffling definition of “status” (reinforcing my point by linking to a general overview of the concept and the things the word applies to). It would be like meaning only “penguins” whenever you say “birds”, and then trying to generalize that use whenever someone else talks about ornithology.
I think you’re misinterpreting my point again, and I also think it’s more of a “what do you mean by “melon”″ issue (ever order a melon smoothie from a place without pictures on the menu and been surprised?) than a “penguin” issue, but the definitions themselves have been adequately dissolved in this thread so there’s no point in continuing to pursue something off-topic.
Consider interaction among heterosexual people of the same sex (men with men, women with women). This is probably a majority of all social interaction, and it strongly influences status in mixed-sex social groups. While attractiveness is generally helpful here too, it’s less important than other factors.
Imagine two men who have the same socio-economical position, the same amount of social skills, wear similar clothes, behave the same way, etc., etc., but one is 5′6″ (1.68 m) and one is 6′ (1.83 m). Most women will likely be more attracted to the latter; would you say he has higher status?
Yes, minorly: halo effect. Though given your example I see that status and attraction aren’t the same thing, they’re just intertwined in a ridiculous positive feedback loop, to the extent that it’s very easy to think of them as the same thing. Having more women be attracted to you usually leads to better social skills. Having more height usually means more self-confidence, etcetc.
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
ETA: I tried to think of a least convenient world, but couldn’t.
Though given your example I see that status and attraction aren’t the same thing, they’re just intertwined in a ridiculous positive feedback loop, to the extent that it’s very easy to think of them as the same thing.
Take it from someone with rather low basic social status (multiple forms of visible minority, many of which are still thought of mainly as “deviant” rather than just “other”, who can’t can’t hide it out and about in daily life): the fact that you see it this way has more to do with your own situation and your own unfulfilled preferences, than with it being a basic feature of how status works. Status is not primarily about your sexual attractiveness to people. Low-status people get laid all the time. Low-status people get into lasting relationships. Low-status people have children. Low-status people even make ethical nonmonogamy work for them. (Low status people who fit all of the above can even be sexually frustrated!)
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
ETA: I tried to think of a least convenient world, but couldn’t.
Suppose you’re standing on a staircase. The taller man stands on a step below you, while the shorter man stands on a step above you, and the steps are of such height that each would be looking you directly in the eye. Is that a sufficiently inconvenient world?
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
C’mon. There’s a difference between looking down (physically) because you’re shorter and looking down at you (physically) because I’m looking down (metaphorically). (I’m 1.87 m (6′2″) myself so I have to do the former all the time.) In the latter case, I will stand up straight with my shoulders back and only tilt my eyes and (to a lower extent) my head down. In the former case, I will (say) sit on a stool while you’re on a higher chair/walk on the edge of the carriageway while you’re walking on the sidewalk/stand on a lower step of a stairway than you, and/or bend my whole upper body downwards.
(Why does this comment looks to me as if there are unbalanced parentheses even though I know there aren’t?)
Of course, but it still has an effect. And also the tall guy standing a step below me is definitely not behaving the same as the short guy standing a step above me.
Anyway, the difference in this case is negligible and doesn’t help the situation at hand. As far as I can see, to have a guy who was more physically attractive score lower on status would require lowering some other type of attractiveness, like behaviour or signalling. The actions you describe are signalling.
Come to think of it, maybe we just mean different things when we say “attractiveness”.
Of course, but it still has an effect. And also the tall guy standing a step below me is definitely not behaving the same as the short guy standing a step above me.
Huh, yeah. He’s also wearing larger clothes, and curving spacetime by a larger amount. But “all other things” in “all other things being equal” doesn’t usually literally mean all other things—otherwise any counterfactual will involve logical inconsistencies.
By “attractiveness” I meant the set of all things about me that determine how likely you are to be attracted to me, not just handsomeness. It seems like you might be using “status” the same way I’m using “attractiveness”, whereas I’m using it only for “social” (FLOABW) features. IOW, as I’m using the words, I can have higher or lower status in a given social group but higher or lower attractiveness for a given person. Given that not all women in the same group will be attracted to exactly the same features in men, and given that one can be higher- or lower-status even in an all-straight-male group, the two are not synonymous.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. I agree that status has a wider social meaning, but I was specifically referring to status in the context of one man approaching one woman, and saying that in that case it is usually at least monotonic with attraction. A well-respected academic has status within his field, but is still low-status in male-female interaction terms if he is sufficiently uncharismatic.
Edit: oops. My earlier comments didn’t make this at all clear.
Fair enough. Guess I was arguing a completely different point then.
Now, where did that thread go which was about the better way to fix creepiness being how to teach people to get/signal more status, rather than what not to do… Pretty sure there they’re using this definition.
Well, yeah, someone you wouldn’t like to have sex with hitting on you is creepier than someone you would like to have sex with hitting on you (obviously—why the hell would the latter be creepy at all?)
In answer to the second question—If done so awkwardly, in a way that violates local norms or expectations or in a way that makes you look bad in public. (These are all things other than being low status that seem to play a part in the ‘creepiness’.)
I was about to answer “Well, if they behaved like that then you’d most likely not want to have sex with them (any longer)”, then I realised that if we interpret counterfactuals this way, my comment would be nearly tautological.
I was about to answer “Well, if they behaved like that then you’d most likely not want to have sex with them (any longer)”
Those are certainly unattractive traits and would often be sufficient to remove the desire. But no, the effect isn’t anywhere near strong enough to make the potential tautological definition valid.
Huh, yeah. I had in mind a sense of “creep” according to which it’d be logically contradictory to simultaneously be creeped out by someone and want to have sex with them, but now I realise i had no good reason to think that.
I guess I’ll tap out now (at least for a couple days), both because I feel like I’m borderline mind-killed and likely to get more so if I continue, and because I’ve already already procrastinated away way too much RL stuff.
attempts at (unwelcome intimacy) = naked aggression.
unwelcome (attempts at intimacy) = failure to anticipate rejection. both sides lost.
asking for harsher penalties for the second (which is already quite painful) is like asking cops to beat up panhandlers—the price you pay for a place you want to live.
That Readercon example points out an irrationality in the thinking of some creeps, rapists, or PUAs: “sex is a need.” Related to that fallacy is the sense of entitlement that sex with desired sex objects should be a reward for being “nice,” even though real nice persons avoid using sentient beings as tools and may avoid short-lived pleasures like sex altogether (e.g. Paul Erdos, Nikola Tesla). [And I can tell you from experience, women fawn over good guys. I even had a crush on Tesla. But being good guys, they focus on doing good and may not even notice women fawning over them.] Another fallacy in the minds of some creeps is that their behavior is good for their targets, e.g. “she needs a dicking.”
Basically, what we’re dealing with are persons who need some luminosity, or awareness and control, over their lusty wants, so they no longer act on those wants as “needs,” spending more resources on satisfying those wants over other wants (their own or others’) or other beings’ real needs, like humans’ need to feel safe enough to socialize.
High-status creeps are the worst because they’re allowed to be repeat offenders (e.g. Jerry Sandusky).
In my experience with a low-status creep, he excluded himself after not getting what he “needed” from his target. That is, he was welcome at meetings but didn’t want to go without the prospect of his “need” being met by his desired sex object. That was several years ago, with a freethought group, before I developed this understanding and ability to counteract that irrationality.
Simply saying “sex is not a need; you can live well without it” actually worked in one case. A case that’s been difficult for me to crack is where the person, somewhat high-status, is committed to irrationalities and harasses people (sexually harassing females, verbally harassing whomever does something he doesn’t like). I might break of his icon of Mercy, taking away his method for reducing his guilt, which he should feel to avoid harming others.
[Edit replacing backslashes with commas. Not that it changes the meaning to me, having known creeps, rapists, and literature by PUAs.]
See “Romance and Violence in Dating Relationships.” Apologetics or confabulations are part of the process of passion escalating into aggression or violence. A rational person would avoid the costs and risks of continuing interactions with someone interested in sex and who’s brain, like most brains, could rationalize or delude itself, with such fallacies as I noted above (another example: “blue balls”) or with thinking that the woman wants sexual relations with him when she doesn’t. Hence, avoidance of “creeps.” Women poor at detecting and avoiding such dynamics may be more likely to get abused (http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/12/2199.full.pdf+html).
Evidence of what I said about lack of illumination: “Results indicate that there is a considerable degree of overlap between victims of physical violence and offenders over time and that certain covariates including school commitment, parental monitoring, low self-control, and sex significantly discriminate victim and offender groups. Furthermore, low self-control appears to be the most salient risk factor for distinguishing both victimization and delinquency trajectories” 2010 Longitudinal Assessment of the Victim-Offender Overlap.
What do you know about them that makes them like apples and oranges in your mind? If you can’t give me a reason for why they’re not comparable in any way, I’m gonna have to give your a kick in the ass for being so dismissive of what another person knows.
What do you know about them [creeps, rapists, PUAs] that makes them like apples and oranges in your mind?
I was originally going to argue with wedrifid and say he was being uncharitable in interpreting your statement as considering all three groups to be basically the same: my interpretation was that you meant “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs”, and your statement could then be read in a meaningful light.
However, this new question suggests that you did in fact mean to lump all three groups of people together as a single category, so I’m now downvoting both comments.
If you can’t give me a reason for why they’re not comparable in any way, I’m gonna have to give your a kick in the ass for being so dismissive of what another person knows.
Ironically, you are threatening wedrifid with violence for doing something which you yourself are doing, i.e, dismissing others’ knowledge as irrelevant. I don’t think either the dismissal or the threat are appropriate discourse for LW.
Thank you for being able to not take words too literally.
pjeby, obviously I couldn’t possibly know all creeps, rapists & PUAs; so you were correct in your first interpretation that I meant: “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs.” Give me one example where I’ve dismissed others’ knowledge, rather than their knee-jerk reactions based on wrong interpretations of my words meaning what they couldn’t possibly mean. Apparently, there are some readers here who’ve identified with being a creep or PUA and some wouldn’t want them to be associated with rapists, hence your downvoting. But the fact is we’re talking about humans, not apples and oranges. (Are you gonna downvote this now because you think I’m “lumping”? What a BS excuse for downvoting.) Fallacious justifications of un-illuminated thoughts & behaviors is a problem we all have to face. I was pointing out specifics of this problem to address this thread, giving abstractions of cases I’ve known. Instead of offering counter-examples or counterarguments, some have written blunt rejections or simply downvoted. If I am wrong, why can’t someone make me less wrong? Instead, what I’m getting here is not unlike how abuse victims get dismissed when they accuse liked persons as abusers. How do I know this? Cuz I was abused and tried to make the truth known and got similar knee-jerk denials. Feeling rational, I think it’s appropriate discourse for LW to say: “Fuck you deniers.” Now do you get how my talking about ass-kicking was an expression of emotion [specifically, indignation], not an actual threat?
Even if by “Creeps/rapists/PUAs” you meant to point at points along a continuum, and the connotation that said points are close together was unintentional, you got the order wrong, as rapists ought to be at one extreme rather than in the middle.
Why assume I was using a continuum? Is a continuum necessary? Even if we must put them on a continuum, why assume the order you’ve assumed? We could, for example, base the continuum on how wrong their theories of humans are, in which case, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to lump the individuals into those three categories and place them on the continuum.
Any more excuses or unnecessary assumptions for me to dispel? I have yet to see a better theory or counter-evidence not accounted for by my theory. Instead, I see just-so theories pigeon-holing humans as just “fundamentally” sex-driven or creeps as just “desperate” or “low-status.” Now, given what I know about how brains work and assuming some readers’ brains here have absorbed evo psy terminology, it’s understandable why brains are spouting such overly-narrow views of humans. I took a course on evo psy with Gordon Gallup where he taught a little about our ancestors living in trees and moving onto land, but mostly the course was on mating. Even Eleizer’s article on evo psy has a story revolving around modern humans mating.
But one’s theory would have to include more than data on mating to be less wrong about humans. It would have to include a theory of fun, for example, to account for how persons could enjoy their lives without sex, like Tesla or Erdos did. Even the fact that you guys enjoy being on LessWrong, which isn’t the best activity for getting laid, says something about the inadequacy of some of the stupid theories posited on this thread, which started off being about how to improve “creepy” persons’ theories using information from the suggested articles.
Some of you guys have work to do for your brains to develop a theory of everything, with which you may be less likely to form ad hoc, just-so theories and discount data that don’t fit your theories.
(Disclosure & “help wanted ad:” My brain developed a theory of everything, which I’m working on sharing with others. I’m calling it the Enlightenment project, b/c I can’t simply tell people what the theory is—”Information won’t set you free by itself”. We have to help brains develop their own less wrong ToEs. I’m looking for brain-hackers who can help create a wiki, videos, and whatever other materials could be used to help most people. And I have some specific ideas that require a digital graphics artist to become something outside of my head for people to use. If you want to help, message me.)
Taboo “need”. Yes, it’s not necessary for survival; but homeless people can survive too, and still not many people say stuff like “shelter is not a need” or “stop acting like you’re entitled to shelter”. (But I still agree no-one is expected to give you a sleeping place solely because you think you are a decent person.)
I mean, Maslow put it in the bottom layer of his pyramid… (Though the fact that he separately lists “sexual intimacy” higher up means that by “sex” in the bottom layer he likely meant the kind of sex that even prostitutes can give.)
Off-topic: your model of prostitution is wrong. Social skills, putting people at ease, listening, and acting are big parts of the job. Look up “girlfriend experience”.
Given that Maslow listed it separately from “sex”, I guess he had in mind a narrower sense for “sexual intimacy” than you might have. (Unless he had in mind an extremely broad sense for “sex”, which would include e.g. self-masturbation.)
By looking at the pyramid, I think he meant for “sexual intimacy” to be to “sex” as friendship is to conversation, i.e. by the former he meant what people today would call “being in a relationship” or “romance”. But I’m not fully sure.
I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this line of thinking. Sexuality isn’t a physical need in the sense that, say, water is a physical need, but it is a pretty fundamental drive. It certainly doesn’t morally oblige any particular person to fulfill it for you (analogously, the human need for companionship doesn’t oblige random strangers to accept overtures of friendship), but it’s sufficiently potent that I’d be cautious about casually demoting it below other social considerations, let alone suggesting sexual asceticism as a viable solution in the average case; that seems like an easy way to come up with eudaemonically suboptimal prescriptions.
Nice Guy (tm) psychology is something else again. I’m not sure how much of the popular view of it is anywhere near accurate, but in isolation I’d hesitate to take it as suggesting anything more than one particular pathology of sexual politics and maybe some interesting facts about the surrounding culture.
I’m not arguing against the need to express sexuality in a moral way. But if we have good reason to think that sexuality (or status-seeking, the wish to redress grievances, or any of the psychology behind revenge, nepotism, etc.) is a low-level motivation, then from a eudaemonic standpoint it seems like a very bad move to prioritize denying or minimizing those motivations instead of looking for relatively benign ways to express them.
We have only a very limited ability to change our motivational structure, and even within those limits it’s easy to screw up our emotional equilibrium by doing so. It’s far better—if far harder—to come up with an incentive structure that rewards ethical pursuit of human drives than to build one which frustrates them.
I agree with the first paragraph and ADBOC with the second. Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
I don’t disagree, but I do think that the existing incentive structures surrounding sexuality are pretty damned dysfunctional. I chose the wording I did because I think there’ll need to be a lot of original thought going into a better incentive structure (and because I don’t think there currently exist any really good candidate solutions), but I’m not trying to imply that we need to throw out the existing culture completely.
It’s too specific/complicated to be low level/fundamental. Actually all of them are too specific/complicated to be low level. They’re just so widely and thoroughly internalised (to the point where not being that way will likely be bad for you just because other people will dislike you for it) very few people realise they are changable, or are motivated to change them. There’s little reason to change them for most people. Not having a desire for revenge or redress grievances is a quick way to become a target/victim, status seeking gets you status if you do it right which gets you power. nepotism makes you a more attractive ally.
I think it’s more accurate to say that changing motivational structure is hard and risky than the ability is limited. There’s no hard or soft cap afaik (which is what limited makes it sound like to me) it’s just really hard to do and most people don’t care to anyway.
Also wtf is a need. Is that like a right? It means you really really want something? really really really? really really really really? nonsense on stilts. Take your fucking stilts off bro.
edit: I can’t believe I put bro at the end of that post. Kinda ruins it.
We don’t have to “casually demote” anything. Like Fox News says, “we report—you decide.”
Generally, “need” is used to refer to something perceived to be necessary in an optimization process. There are cases where a human doesn’t need companionship, let alone sex (see recluses or transcendentalists’ recommendations that persons isolate themselves from society for a while to clear their heads of irrationalities).
If “the average case” involves little luminosity of sexuality and lots of sexualization of beings, then of course sexual abstinence wouldn’t be likely. Rape occurs in epidemic proportions in such places where people are also demoralized or decommissioned from doing much good work, like on reservations.
Nice Guy and Nice Gal are idealized gender roles for an optimal society. Some oppose gender roles to the extent that they limit persons from doing good, esp. when they make one gender subservient to the other or make a person of one gender subservient to another person of another gender (like the promulgated view that wife should serve husband). A person or AI caring only about one person or half the human population would not be optimal.
Nice Guy and Nice Gal are idealized gender roles for an optimal society.
I think we’re talking past each other here. The “Nice Guy (tm)” phenomenon I was referring to is categorically not an idealized gender role within an optimal or any other society, hence the sarcasm trademark, although it has its roots in (a misinterpretation of) one idealized masculinity. Instead, it’s a shorthand way of describing the pathology you described in the ancestor: the guy in question (there are women who do similar things, but the term as I’m using it is tied up in the male gender role) performs passive masculinity really hard and expects that sexual favors will follow. When this fails, usually due to poor socialization and poor understanding of sexual politics, bitterness and frustration ensue.
I actually think the terminology’s pretty toxic as such things go, since it tends to be treated as a static attribute of the people so described instead of suggesting solutions to the underlying problems. It’s common jargon in these sorts of discussions, though, and denotationally it does describe a real dysfunction, so I’m okay with using it as shorthand. Apologies for any bad assumptions on my part.
The fuck it does. This is about creepiness. Actual attempts at unwelcome intimacy. Whoever from and whoever to.
It is not about status, except to the extent that high status can (this is a bad thing) protect the perpetrators of actual creepy behaviour from being called to account, and low status (this is also a bad thing) can prevent the target from being heard.
For further enlightenment, see, for example, here.
Actually, “unwelcome” means that the definition sometimes depends almost exclusively on status. In the extreme situation that a guy is so high status I wouldn’t mind anything he did and would always say yes, he couldn’t possibly be creepy.
In a less hypothetical case, my reaction to statements like “you’re beautiful” or “your hair looks amazing” depends entirely on who is saying it. It would be considered creepy only if the guy was sufficiently low status that my intuition doesn’t process the statement as sincere.
Similarly I mentally flinch violently when touched by males who are too low status for my intuition to classify as attractive, have no such reaction for moderately attractive guys, and get a jolt of pleasure if the guy is very attractive. This effect is consistent and something I have no conscious control over.
I think people dismissing status are underestimating either the degree to which people’s unconscious can control their conscious, or the degree to which status interactions controls the unconscious.
Why am I getting karma for this when it’s been established that I’m using a highly unconventional definition of status? I mean, I like karma and all, but this confuses me...
Status is not an extremely clear thing to begin with, the same criticism could probably be applied to most uses of the term on LessWrong. I just mentally reparse what you write as
You’re basically talking about how attractive you find him, but using “status” adds the connotations that it’s not just about the looks, and that how others judge him comes into the equation; both those connotations seem true.
Like how starting a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you is unwelcome, and thus creepy?
Or did you think people would never get the C-word for doing just that?
I missed the enlightenment you were expecting me to get from learning of a case where a high-status person got surprisingly little punishment (and no effective loss to social life) from doing creep things.
You seem to be underestimating how easy it is to guess beforehand whether or not a stranger would want to talk to you. See the comment thread to this. (Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger’s netbook is necessarily creepy, but...)
This disagreement on what is creepy demonstrates precisely how hard it is to predict in advance if some behavior will be perceived as creepy or not.
I should have said/thought had said “is necessarily creepy”. (Fixed now.)
Though I don’t think its that simple because both sides are claiming that the other side is not reporting how they truly feel. One side claims that people are calling things creepy semi-arbitrarily to raise their own status, and the other claims that people are intentionally refusing to recognize creepy behavior as creepy so they don’t have to stop it (or being slightly more charitable, so they don’t take a status hit for being creepy).
Upvoted for an excellent link which caused me to update my intuition regarding the nature and frequency of various types of public harassment of women. I didn’t update so far as to regard the XKCD cartoon as “promoting rape culture” (which I still think is going overboard), but after reading the (very very long) comment thread with all the subway/public/other harassment stories, I can totally see where they’re coming from.
That thread gives an important overview of a sort. It’s got its limits because women who talk about not having it that bad from men are not kindly treated in the discussion.
I’m not denying any of those stories about behavior ranging from intrusive to seriously threatening and it’s obviously fairly common, just saying that it’s not a overview of the whole situation. I’ve never seen an overview of the whole situation for women.
People who frequently fall into patterns of behavior that others regard as “creepy” tend to be those who do not find this easy.
Could you create a set of instructions that can easily be followed by people with low levels of social fluency, which would allow them to make this judgment with low levels of false positives and false negatives? If so, you’d be doing a big favor both to people who’re frequently exposed to “creepy” behavior, and people who frequently engage in that behavior. It would also probably be unique in the world.
The arrogant vulgarity doesn’t fit well with the demonstration of naivety (come to think of it “The fuck it does” wouldn’t be be appropriate here even if well informed). Creepiness is significantly about status. Typically it refers to something along the lines of “low status male attempting interaction”.
This doesn’t mean I’m endorsing any particular instance of creepiness but it is useful to understand what it is that prompts the perception ‘creepy’.
High status can also make the identical behaviors not creepy in the first place. Even if unwelcome the perception of the high status ‘unwelcome’ will feel different to the creepy low-status ‘unwelcome’.
Well, yeah, someone you wouldn’t like to have sex with hitting on you is creepier than someone you would like to have sex with hitting on you (obviously—why the hell would the latter be creepy at all?), and (especially if “someone” is male and “you” are female), whether you would like to have sex with them correlates with their status. But would that still hold to the same extent if you could change the “status” variable while holding the “attractiveness” (broadly construed) variable constant?
Tabooing “status” might be necessary. I couldn’t compute your last sentence… Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status. (They might not be the same thing as far as hormones are concerned, but they arise from the same mechanisms.)
What you call a less “attractive”, higher “status” man, I call a lower “status” man who has motivating factors to have incorrect beliefs about his “status”.
Compare Bill Gates to Jose the charming tour guide.
There’s your problem right there!
I’m usually not a big fan of the “look it up on Wikipedia” approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you’re viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status
Synonymous—clearly not. “Largely so” is more of an exaggeration than a fundamental incomprehension.
Huh. Ok. What do you call the ape status-instinct then? That’s thing that you get by cleverly body-language and verbally sparring with people. I’ve managed to end up on top of a number of authority figures doing that.
Edit: the human version of the behaviour that Wikipedia describes as “dominance hierarchies”.
Double edit: would it make more sense to distinguish the terms as system-1-status and system-2-status?
I...think you’re confused. I didn’t say social status doesn’t exist; I also didn’t say that “social status” was a bad term for it. What I said was that you have an extremely nonstandard set of word associations here, such that what you mean when you’re saying “social status” is...well, not intuitive from the more usual use of that word.
I’m not saying instincts for status don’t exist; I’m saying that “attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status” is a baffling definition of “status” (reinforcing my point by linking to a general overview of the concept and the things the word applies to). It would be like meaning only “penguins” whenever you say “birds”, and then trying to generalize that use whenever someone else talks about ornithology.
I think you’re misinterpreting my point again, and I also think it’s more of a “what do you mean by “melon”″ issue (ever order a melon smoothie from a place without pictures on the menu and been surprised?) than a “penguin” issue, but the definitions themselves have been adequately dissolved in this thread so there’s no point in continuing to pursue something off-topic.
Consider interaction among heterosexual people of the same sex (men with men, women with women). This is probably a majority of all social interaction, and it strongly influences status in mixed-sex social groups. While attractiveness is generally helpful here too, it’s less important than other factors.
Imagine two men who have the same socio-economical position, the same amount of social skills, wear similar clothes, behave the same way, etc., etc., but one is 5′6″ (1.68 m) and one is 6′ (1.83 m). Most women will likely be more attracted to the latter; would you say he has higher status?
Yes, minorly: halo effect. Though given your example I see that status and attraction aren’t the same thing, they’re just intertwined in a ridiculous positive feedback loop, to the extent that it’s very easy to think of them as the same thing. Having more women be attracted to you usually leads to better social skills. Having more height usually means more self-confidence, etcetc.
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
ETA: I tried to think of a least convenient world, but couldn’t.
Take it from someone with rather low basic social status (multiple forms of visible minority, many of which are still thought of mainly as “deviant” rather than just “other”, who can’t can’t hide it out and about in daily life): the fact that you see it this way has more to do with your own situation and your own unfulfilled preferences, than with it being a basic feature of how status works. Status is not primarily about your sexual attractiveness to people. Low-status people get laid all the time. Low-status people get into lasting relationships. Low-status people have children. Low-status people even make ethical nonmonogamy work for them. (Low status people who fit all of the above can even be sexually frustrated!)
Suppose you’re standing on a staircase. The taller man stands on a step below you, while the shorter man stands on a step above you, and the steps are of such height that each would be looking you directly in the eye. Is that a sufficiently inconvenient world?
IAWYC but
C’mon. There’s a difference between looking down (physically) because you’re shorter and looking down at you (physically) because I’m looking down (metaphorically). (I’m 1.87 m (6′2″) myself so I have to do the former all the time.) In the latter case, I will stand up straight with my shoulders back and only tilt my eyes and (to a lower extent) my head down. In the former case, I will (say) sit on a stool while you’re on a higher chair/walk on the edge of the carriageway while you’re walking on the sidewalk/stand on a lower step of a stairway than you, and/or bend my whole upper body downwards.
(Why does this comment looks to me as if there are unbalanced parentheses even though I know there aren’t?)
Of course, but it still has an effect. And also the tall guy standing a step below me is definitely not behaving the same as the short guy standing a step above me.
Anyway, the difference in this case is negligible and doesn’t help the situation at hand. As far as I can see, to have a guy who was more physically attractive score lower on status would require lowering some other type of attractiveness, like behaviour or signalling. The actions you describe are signalling.
Come to think of it, maybe we just mean different things when we say “attractiveness”.
Huh, yeah. He’s also wearing larger clothes, and curving spacetime by a larger amount. But “all other things” in “all other things being equal” doesn’t usually literally mean all other things—otherwise any counterfactual will involve logical inconsistencies.
By “attractiveness” I meant the set of all things about me that determine how likely you are to be attracted to me, not just handsomeness. It seems like you might be using “status” the same way I’m using “attractiveness”, whereas I’m using it only for “social” (FLOABW) features. IOW, as I’m using the words, I can have higher or lower status in a given social group but higher or lower attractiveness for a given person. Given that not all women in the same group will be attracted to exactly the same features in men, and given that one can be higher- or lower-status even in an all-straight-male group, the two are not synonymous.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. I agree that status has a wider social meaning, but I was specifically referring to status in the context of one man approaching one woman, and saying that in that case it is usually at least monotonic with attraction. A well-respected academic has status within his field, but is still low-status in male-female interaction terms if he is sufficiently uncharismatic.
Edit: oops. My earlier comments didn’t make this at all clear.
I don’t think Athrelon in the comment that started this thread meant “status” in the latter sense.
Fair enough. Guess I was arguing a completely different point then.
Now, where did that thread go which was about the better way to fix creepiness being how to teach people to get/signal more status, rather than what not to do… Pretty sure there they’re using this definition.
(Gah, words are hard.)
In answer to the second question—If done so awkwardly, in a way that violates local norms or expectations or in a way that makes you look bad in public. (These are all things other than being low status that seem to play a part in the ‘creepiness’.)
I was about to answer “Well, if they behaved like that then you’d most likely not want to have sex with them (any longer)”, then I realised that if we interpret counterfactuals this way, my comment would be nearly tautological.
Those are certainly unattractive traits and would often be sufficient to remove the desire. But no, the effect isn’t anywhere near strong enough to make the potential tautological definition valid.
Huh, yeah. I had in mind a sense of “creep” according to which it’d be logically contradictory to simultaneously be creeped out by someone and want to have sex with them, but now I realise i had no good reason to think that.
I guess I’ll tap out now (at least for a couple days), both because I feel like I’m borderline mind-killed and likely to get more so if I continue, and because I’ve already already procrastinated away way too much RL stuff.
attempts at (unwelcome intimacy) = naked aggression.
unwelcome (attempts at intimacy) = failure to anticipate rejection. both sides lost.
asking for harsher penalties for the second (which is already quite painful) is like asking cops to beat up panhandlers—the price you pay for a place you want to live.
That Readercon example points out an irrationality in the thinking of some creeps, rapists, or PUAs: “sex is a need.” Related to that fallacy is the sense of entitlement that sex with desired sex objects should be a reward for being “nice,” even though real nice persons avoid using sentient beings as tools and may avoid short-lived pleasures like sex altogether (e.g. Paul Erdos, Nikola Tesla). [And I can tell you from experience, women fawn over good guys. I even had a crush on Tesla. But being good guys, they focus on doing good and may not even notice women fawning over them.] Another fallacy in the minds of some creeps is that their behavior is good for their targets, e.g. “she needs a dicking.”
Basically, what we’re dealing with are persons who need some luminosity, or awareness and control, over their lusty wants, so they no longer act on those wants as “needs,” spending more resources on satisfying those wants over other wants (their own or others’) or other beings’ real needs, like humans’ need to feel safe enough to socialize.
High-status creeps are the worst because they’re allowed to be repeat offenders (e.g. Jerry Sandusky). In my experience with a low-status creep, he excluded himself after not getting what he “needed” from his target. That is, he was welcome at meetings but didn’t want to go without the prospect of his “need” being met by his desired sex object. That was several years ago, with a freethought group, before I developed this understanding and ability to counteract that irrationality.
Simply saying “sex is not a need; you can live well without it” actually worked in one case. A case that’s been difficult for me to crack is where the person, somewhat high-status, is committed to irrationalities and harasses people (sexually harassing females, verbally harassing whomever does something he doesn’t like). I might break of his icon of Mercy, taking away his method for reducing his guilt, which he should feel to avoid harming others.
[Edit replacing backslashes with commas. Not that it changes the meaning to me, having known creeps, rapists, and literature by PUAs.]
See “Romance and Violence in Dating Relationships.” Apologetics or confabulations are part of the process of passion escalating into aggression or violence. A rational person would avoid the costs and risks of continuing interactions with someone interested in sex and who’s brain, like most brains, could rationalize or delude itself, with such fallacies as I noted above (another example: “blue balls”) or with thinking that the woman wants sexual relations with him when she doesn’t. Hence, avoidance of “creeps.” Women poor at detecting and avoiding such dynamics may be more likely to get abused (http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/12/2199.full.pdf+html).
Evidence of what I said about lack of illumination: “Results indicate that there is a considerable degree of overlap between victims of physical violence and offenders over time and that certain covariates including school commitment, parental monitoring, low self-control, and sex significantly discriminate victim and offender groups. Furthermore, low self-control appears to be the most salient risk factor for distinguishing both victimization and delinquency trajectories” 2010 Longitudinal Assessment of the Victim-Offender Overlap.
Seriously? Creeps/rapists/PUAs. People kept reading after that introduction?
What do you know about them that makes them like apples and oranges in your mind? If you can’t give me a reason for why they’re not comparable in any way, I’m gonna have to give your a kick in the ass for being so dismissive of what another person knows.
I was originally going to argue with wedrifid and say he was being uncharitable in interpreting your statement as considering all three groups to be basically the same: my interpretation was that you meant “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs”, and your statement could then be read in a meaningful light.
However, this new question suggests that you did in fact mean to lump all three groups of people together as a single category, so I’m now downvoting both comments.
Ironically, you are threatening wedrifid with violence for doing something which you yourself are doing, i.e, dismissing others’ knowledge as irrelevant. I don’t think either the dismissal or the threat are appropriate discourse for LW.
“Threatening with violence”? Seriously?
Thank you for being able to not take words too literally.
pjeby, obviously I couldn’t possibly know all creeps, rapists & PUAs; so you were correct in your first interpretation that I meant: “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs.” Give me one example where I’ve dismissed others’ knowledge, rather than their knee-jerk reactions based on wrong interpretations of my words meaning what they couldn’t possibly mean. Apparently, there are some readers here who’ve identified with being a creep or PUA and some wouldn’t want them to be associated with rapists, hence your downvoting. But the fact is we’re talking about humans, not apples and oranges. (Are you gonna downvote this now because you think I’m “lumping”? What a BS excuse for downvoting.) Fallacious justifications of un-illuminated thoughts & behaviors is a problem we all have to face. I was pointing out specifics of this problem to address this thread, giving abstractions of cases I’ve known. Instead of offering counter-examples or counterarguments, some have written blunt rejections or simply downvoted. If I am wrong, why can’t someone make me less wrong? Instead, what I’m getting here is not unlike how abuse victims get dismissed when they accuse liked persons as abusers. How do I know this? Cuz I was abused and tried to make the truth known and got similar knee-jerk denials. Feeling rational, I think it’s appropriate discourse for LW to say: “Fuck you deniers.” Now do you get how my talking about ass-kicking was an expression of emotion [specifically, indignation], not an actual threat?
Even if by “Creeps/rapists/PUAs” you meant to point at points along a continuum, and the connotation that said points are close together was unintentional, you got the order wrong, as rapists ought to be at one extreme rather than in the middle.
Why assume I was using a continuum? Is a continuum necessary? Even if we must put them on a continuum, why assume the order you’ve assumed? We could, for example, base the continuum on how wrong their theories of humans are, in which case, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to lump the individuals into those three categories and place them on the continuum.
Any more excuses or unnecessary assumptions for me to dispel? I have yet to see a better theory or counter-evidence not accounted for by my theory. Instead, I see just-so theories pigeon-holing humans as just “fundamentally” sex-driven or creeps as just “desperate” or “low-status.” Now, given what I know about how brains work and assuming some readers’ brains here have absorbed evo psy terminology, it’s understandable why brains are spouting such overly-narrow views of humans. I took a course on evo psy with Gordon Gallup where he taught a little about our ancestors living in trees and moving onto land, but mostly the course was on mating. Even Eleizer’s article on evo psy has a story revolving around modern humans mating.
But one’s theory would have to include more than data on mating to be less wrong about humans. It would have to include a theory of fun, for example, to account for how persons could enjoy their lives without sex, like Tesla or Erdos did. Even the fact that you guys enjoy being on LessWrong, which isn’t the best activity for getting laid, says something about the inadequacy of some of the stupid theories posited on this thread, which started off being about how to improve “creepy” persons’ theories using information from the suggested articles.
Some of you guys have work to do for your brains to develop a theory of everything, with which you may be less likely to form ad hoc, just-so theories and discount data that don’t fit your theories.
(Disclosure & “help wanted ad:” My brain developed a theory of everything, which I’m working on sharing with others. I’m calling it the Enlightenment project, b/c I can’t simply tell people what the theory is—”Information won’t set you free by itself”. We have to help brains develop their own less wrong ToEs. I’m looking for brain-hackers who can help create a wiki, videos, and whatever other materials could be used to help most people. And I have some specific ideas that require a digital graphics artist to become something outside of my head for people to use. If you want to help, message me.)
Taboo “need”. Yes, it’s not necessary for survival; but homeless people can survive too, and still not many people say stuff like “shelter is not a need” or “stop acting like you’re entitled to shelter”. (But I still agree no-one is expected to give you a sleeping place solely because you think you are a decent person.)
I mean, Maslow put it in the bottom layer of his pyramid… (Though the fact that he separately lists “sexual intimacy” higher up means that by “sex” in the bottom layer he likely meant the kind of sex that even prostitutes can give.)
Off-topic: your model of prostitution is wrong. Social skills, putting people at ease, listening, and acting are big parts of the job. Look up “girlfriend experience”.
Well, I was thinking more about street prostitutes than escorts, but what in my comment suggests anything about “my model of prostitution”, anyway?
“Sexual intimacy” is a thing prostitutes (including low-end ones) provide, which is why they’re more expensive than fleshlights.
Given that Maslow listed it separately from “sex”, I guess he had in mind a narrower sense for “sexual intimacy” than you might have. (Unless he had in mind an extremely broad sense for “sex”, which would include e.g. self-masturbation.)
Maybe he was just moralizing and wanted to label short or paid-for sexual intimacy as “mere sex”.
By looking at the pyramid, I think he meant for “sexual intimacy” to be to “sex” as friendship is to conversation, i.e. by the former he meant what people today would call “being in a relationship” or “romance”. But I’m not fully sure.
You mean the function of guaranteeing availability? Having friends provides good conversation. Being in a relationship provides good sex.
And being free from worry about having to provide conversation or sex for tomorrow satisfies a psychological need for security. That makes sense.
I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this line of thinking. Sexuality isn’t a physical need in the sense that, say, water is a physical need, but it is a pretty fundamental drive. It certainly doesn’t morally oblige any particular person to fulfill it for you (analogously, the human need for companionship doesn’t oblige random strangers to accept overtures of friendship), but it’s sufficiently potent that I’d be cautious about casually demoting it below other social considerations, let alone suggesting sexual asceticism as a viable solution in the average case; that seems like an easy way to come up with eudaemonically suboptimal prescriptions.
Nice Guy (tm) psychology is something else again. I’m not sure how much of the popular view of it is anywhere near accurate, but in isolation I’d hesitate to take it as suggesting anything more than one particular pathology of sexual politics and maybe some interesting facts about the surrounding culture.
Some have argued the same regarding revenge, nepotism, and various other “drives” that we might expect people to learn how to express in a moral way.
I’m not arguing against the need to express sexuality in a moral way. But if we have good reason to think that sexuality (or status-seeking, the wish to redress grievances, or any of the psychology behind revenge, nepotism, etc.) is a low-level motivation, then from a eudaemonic standpoint it seems like a very bad move to prioritize denying or minimizing those motivations instead of looking for relatively benign ways to express them.
We have only a very limited ability to change our motivational structure, and even within those limits it’s easy to screw up our emotional equilibrium by doing so. It’s far better—if far harder—to come up with an incentive structure that rewards ethical pursuit of human drives than to build one which frustrates them.
I agree with the first paragraph and ADBOC with the second. Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
I don’t disagree, but I do think that the existing incentive structures surrounding sexuality are pretty damned dysfunctional. I chose the wording I did because I think there’ll need to be a lot of original thought going into a better incentive structure (and because I don’t think there currently exist any really good candidate solutions), but I’m not trying to imply that we need to throw out the existing culture completely.
It’s too specific/complicated to be low level/fundamental. Actually all of them are too specific/complicated to be low level. They’re just so widely and thoroughly internalised (to the point where not being that way will likely be bad for you just because other people will dislike you for it) very few people realise they are changable, or are motivated to change them. There’s little reason to change them for most people. Not having a desire for revenge or redress grievances is a quick way to become a target/victim, status seeking gets you status if you do it right which gets you power. nepotism makes you a more attractive ally.
I think it’s more accurate to say that changing motivational structure is hard and risky than the ability is limited. There’s no hard or soft cap afaik (which is what limited makes it sound like to me) it’s just really hard to do and most people don’t care to anyway.
Also wtf is a need. Is that like a right? It means you really really want something? really really really? really really really really? nonsense on stilts. Take your fucking stilts off bro.
edit: I can’t believe I put bro at the end of that post. Kinda ruins it.
edit2: no it doesn’t, stop pandering.
I’m having trouble making sense of this in context. Did you mean to reply to this post?
i typed it out as a response to that post and copy pasted it to this post (adding the /fundamental) because it is higher up. So kinda.
We don’t have to “casually demote” anything. Like Fox News says, “we report—you decide.”
Generally, “need” is used to refer to something perceived to be necessary in an optimization process. There are cases where a human doesn’t need companionship, let alone sex (see recluses or transcendentalists’ recommendations that persons isolate themselves from society for a while to clear their heads of irrationalities).
If “the average case” involves little luminosity of sexuality and lots of sexualization of beings, then of course sexual abstinence wouldn’t be likely. Rape occurs in epidemic proportions in such places where people are also demoralized or decommissioned from doing much good work, like on reservations.
Nice Guy and Nice Gal are idealized gender roles for an optimal society. Some oppose gender roles to the extent that they limit persons from doing good, esp. when they make one gender subservient to the other or make a person of one gender subservient to another person of another gender (like the promulgated view that wife should serve husband). A person or AI caring only about one person or half the human population would not be optimal.
I think we’re talking past each other here. The “Nice Guy (tm)” phenomenon I was referring to is categorically not an idealized gender role within an optimal or any other society, hence the sarcasm trademark, although it has its roots in (a misinterpretation of) one idealized masculinity. Instead, it’s a shorthand way of describing the pathology you described in the ancestor: the guy in question (there are women who do similar things, but the term as I’m using it is tied up in the male gender role) performs passive masculinity really hard and expects that sexual favors will follow. When this fails, usually due to poor socialization and poor understanding of sexual politics, bitterness and frustration ensue.
I actually think the terminology’s pretty toxic as such things go, since it tends to be treated as a static attribute of the people so described instead of suggesting solutions to the underlying problems. It’s common jargon in these sorts of discussions, though, and denotationally it does describe a real dysfunction, so I’m okay with using it as shorthand. Apologies for any bad assumptions on my part.
You might want to link “Nice Guy (tm)” in the grandparent to, er..., somewhere.
I’m open to suggestions.
I found this on Google but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a way better one before.
This might be better.
Edited.
Do you want to taboo “want” and “need”?
This comment is the first that has ever made me want to build an army of sock puppets for downvoting purposes, not that I shall do so.