“It’s true that we don’t want women to be driven off by a bunch of awkward men asking them out, but if we make everyone read a document that says ‘Don’t ask a woman out the first time you meet her’, then we’ll immediately give the impression that we have a problem with men awkwardly asking women out too much — which will put women off anyway.”
This seems a weak response to me, at best only defensible considering yourself to be on the margin and without thought for longterm growth and your ability to clarify intentions (you have more than 3 words when interacting with people irl).
To be clear explicitly writing “don’t ask women out the first time you meet her” would be terrible writing and if that’s the best writing members of that group can do for guidelines, then maybe nothing is better than that. Still, it reeks of “we’ve tried for 30 seconds and are all out of ideas” energy.
A guidelines document can give high level guidance to the vibe you want (eg. truth seeking, not too much aggressiveness, giving space when people feel uncomfortable, communicating around norms explicitly), all in the positive way (eg. you say what you want, not what you don’t want), and can refer to sub-documents to give examples and be quite concrete if you have socially impaired people around that need to learn this explicitly.
This seems a weak response to me, at best only defensible considering yourself to be on the margin and without thought for longterm growth and your ability to clarify intentions (you have more than 3 words when interacting with people irl).
To be clear explicitly writing “don’t ask women out the first time you meet her” would be terrible writing and if that’s the best writing members of that group can do for guidelines, then maybe nothing is better than that. Still, it reeks of “we’ve tried for 30 seconds and are all out of ideas” energy.
A guidelines document can give high level guidance to the vibe you want (eg. truth seeking, not too much aggressiveness, giving space when people feel uncomfortable, communicating around norms explicitly), all in the positive way (eg. you say what you want, not what you don’t want), and can refer to sub-documents to give examples and be quite concrete if you have socially impaired people around that need to learn this explicitly.
Yeah I agree a bit here. This document itself is a nice case study in how things can go wrong. There could be a similar one for “don’t ask women out”
Which document, and in what way?
This post. It gives some useful context around the bad outcomes of panels.