Datapoint: I’m female, and I’m paranoid about becoming status-oriented and competitive, so I try to cull any behaviors in myself that I’d classify as “showing off”. I feel like I brag too much and worry constantly about being or becoming arrogant.
I notice about equal proportions of my male and female acquaintances/friends showing this kind of fear of being seen as showing off. It seems like it’s perceived as a much more attractive trait in women, so people create two categories to describe it: shy, insecure, awkward girls, and beta, submissive, loser men. [Note that I think this kind of behavior is perceived as a subset of beta-malehood, not the whole thing.]
My shot-in-the-dark theory is that men nearly always prefer to be described as aggressive, competitive, forward &etc, while for women there are serious tradeoffs in being perceived as such. I have an intuition that’s not generally explicit that acting shy, nerdy and awkward is the best default behavior for me, and acting assertive and making strange claims is best for when I can reasonably expect to get away with it. So this intuition seems to categorize Spock Rationality as belonging in the first category (kind of like how hot girls memetically do countersignalling by saying they play video games) and actual rationality as belonging in the second.
I also notice that nearly everyone I know who’s referred to themselves as shy, awkward, or insecure behaves, well, not shy once you get to know them; this suggests that my intuition is pretty widespread. When it’s written out like this it’s an obvious simple utility calculation—which action will result in me winning most often if I take it every time in situations like these? - but I don’t have a good model of what the standard male version of this utility calculation is.
This is fascinating. I agree that it’s safer for a girl to act shy, awkward, and insecure, especially when first meeting people, and that agressive, competitive behavior is frowned upon. However, I feel like there’s a happy medium between these two poles. Is it possible for a girl to be confident, forthright, and assertive, while remaining respectful and cooperative? That is the ideal towards which I strive.
Actually, I’m quite meta-self-conscious about my lack of self-consciousness. I’m neither shy nor insecure, and I worry that I’m violating some unspoken social rule of girlhood with my excessive self-esteem. For instance, I’ve had multiple exchanges of the following variety with male friends:
Him: You’re very pretty.
Me: Thank you.
Him: What? You’re not going to argue with me? But all girls deny that they’re pretty.
I refuse to submit myself to this cultural meme of denying that I’m pretty. First of all, when a guy says “you’re very pretty”, I interpret it to mean “I find you very pretty”, and who am I to argue with his perceptions? Secondly, many of my male friends have complimented my appearance, and I’m too much of an empiricist to deny that I’m pretty in light of so much evidence to the contrary. Lastly, were I to deny my prettiness, I would be subjected to a long stream of compliments, all of which I’d have to refuse. “I’m not pretty.” “Yes you are. You have such nice .” “No I don’t.” “You do, and your is beautiful too.” I despise this kind of feelgoodism and refuse to fish for compliments.
Compared to… well, all the girls I know IRL, I guess… I have excessively high self-esteem. I used to read Roissy regularly, which made me terrified that my confidence was unwarranted and I would never find a mate on account of it. After realizing how much that blog had affected my behaviors, I stopped reading it, but still I worry that my confidence is offputting to potential friends and mates.
When it comes down to it, though, I’ll keep my self-confidence. I strive to base my self-esteem on purely internal measurements like the progress I’ve made towards my goals, not on external measurements like what my friends think. I don’t want to rely on their validation for my self-worth, and I don’t want to be crushed by rejection when it occurs. I don’t want to put my self-esteem at the mercy of society’s judgments. And that’s why I refuse to play this insecurity game that society has thrust upon girls. If people dislike me and potential mates me reject me on account of this, so be it; my self-esteem doesn’t rest on their acceptance or rejection anyway.
I agree with almost all of what you’ve said here, except for the idea that taking the middle way is correct in this instance.
Also, let it be stated in advance that anything I say about my behavior patterns, social strategies and so forth is noticed in hindsight. I am not actually a Machiavellian mastermind who plots every interaction to maximize for making you all my slaves. (Of course I am telling you the truth. I am your friend. )
My favorite approach to social tactics is taking the Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres route: I perceive that people are generally trying to box me into a social role, namely self-consciousness, and it feels from the inside like my options are to allow this and be shy and uncomfortable, or rebel against it and be angry and uncooperative. Usually noticing those two choices causes me to pick the first, then the second in frustration, then the first because I want to be conciliatory, &etc.
Or… I can weird their paradigm. I can do this in many ways, but there are two I seem to choose most:
Vacillating confusingly between acting shy, uncomfortable, innocent, stupid and generically cute, and acting energetic, forward, eccentric and Michael_Vassar-ish. Note that when doing this I don’t necessarily take hits to my well-being or attack that of others, because when performed ideally both social roles feel like fun games. This can be described as going the fae route and is only suitable for use in the short term and preferably in settings with several other people, because otherwise it’s just glorified gaslighting unless I know exactly what I’m doing.
Making goddamn everything explicit. If I don’t like a thing, I say, calmly, pleasantly, that I don’t, and offer solutions or ask the other person to help me come up with solutions. If I like a thing, I say I like it. This doesn’t mean telling everyone about all of my thoughts, but it does mean not stewing on a discomfort or distress, and trying to never subtly intimate things about my mental state.
My problem is that I’m too meta. Making the issue about my personal self-esteem leads me into a terrifying infinite conceptual loop of pleasure and displeasure with my characteristics. Noticing these characteristics and how I can best use them is much simpler for me—the issue of a self-worth feels like a wrong question when there are results to be got. This doesn’t mean that I think women and girls with low self-worth are being Insufficiently Meta and therefore deserve what they get; it means that the issue of what happens in their minds is totally separate from that which happens in my own.
I notice in hindsight that this comment might read like one big essay about one-upmanship (against you and your philosophy.) It’s not meant that way; the thing that happened is I noticed myself accepting your statements unquestioningly after reading them and not replying, and felt the need to fix that.
I hope you eventually found the Game blogs where women are people too!
I tend to find that confidence is fine if you can consciously signal “you are higher status than me, I respect you, I won’t upset your authority and hey look how mysterious and pursuable I am. Also I’m not at all annoying”, which is a large part of what being shy is good for. If you can game their System 1, then confidence is better than shyness for properly engaging with the actual person.
MMSL (for male-dominant LTRs) and Hooking Up Smart (for college dating) are fairly good in content and basically non-offensive. One of the authors is married to a reasonably rational woman and the other is a reasonably rational woman, so neither do the “assume women aren’t agents” thing.
It’s just as much general psychology, but I really like what I’ve read of The Rawness, especially this sequence (link to last post) that among other things harshly criticizes (one large high-profile memetic clade of) pickup (in part 4).
I have a pet theory that humans are attracted to generally autonomous behaviour, about which I’m no longer confident, but think is a cool theory anyway.
Autonomy is also in some ways dependent upon confidence.
I share this as I thought it would be a useful data-point to use in alleviating your self-consciousness self-consciousness.
I also just say thanks to compliments :). I remember being told years ago that it puts the other person at ease. Now I’m wondering if people prefer women to dispute compliments.
I used to be very argumentative, mostly about politics. At the time, I thought that my friends and the guys I dated found it appealing, but I don’t know now.
I’ve stopped being as argumentative, partly because having an aggressive, polarising debate where the aim is to win has been less appealing recently. But also, I made a new group of friends, and I think being argumentative was encouraged less in that group—at first some people disliked me for being argumentative. I think that had an influence.. I’ve often wondered if people would have reacted differently if I’d been male.
You must have high self-esteem if you could read Roissy at all! I tried looking at his blog yesterday—if I started reading it regularly it would have crushed my (reasonably high) self-confidence quite quickly.
Datapoint: I’m female, and I’m paranoid about becoming status-oriented and competitive, so I try to cull any behaviors in myself that I’d classify as “showing off”. I feel like I brag too much and worry constantly about being or becoming arrogant.
I notice about equal proportions of my male and female acquaintances/friends showing this kind of fear of being seen as showing off. It seems like it’s perceived as a much more attractive trait in women, so people create two categories to describe it: shy, insecure, awkward girls, and beta, submissive, loser men. [Note that I think this kind of behavior is perceived as a subset of beta-malehood, not the whole thing.]
My shot-in-the-dark theory is that men nearly always prefer to be described as aggressive, competitive, forward &etc, while for women there are serious tradeoffs in being perceived as such. I have an intuition that’s not generally explicit that acting shy, nerdy and awkward is the best default behavior for me, and acting assertive and making strange claims is best for when I can reasonably expect to get away with it. So this intuition seems to categorize Spock Rationality as belonging in the first category (kind of like how hot girls memetically do countersignalling by saying they play video games) and actual rationality as belonging in the second.
I also notice that nearly everyone I know who’s referred to themselves as shy, awkward, or insecure behaves, well, not shy once you get to know them; this suggests that my intuition is pretty widespread. When it’s written out like this it’s an obvious simple utility calculation—which action will result in me winning most often if I take it every time in situations like these? - but I don’t have a good model of what the standard male version of this utility calculation is.
This is fascinating. I agree that it’s safer for a girl to act shy, awkward, and insecure, especially when first meeting people, and that agressive, competitive behavior is frowned upon. However, I feel like there’s a happy medium between these two poles. Is it possible for a girl to be confident, forthright, and assertive, while remaining respectful and cooperative? That is the ideal towards which I strive.
Actually, I’m quite meta-self-conscious about my lack of self-consciousness. I’m neither shy nor insecure, and I worry that I’m violating some unspoken social rule of girlhood with my excessive self-esteem. For instance, I’ve had multiple exchanges of the following variety with male friends:
Him: You’re very pretty.
Me: Thank you.
Him: What? You’re not going to argue with me? But all girls deny that they’re pretty.
I refuse to submit myself to this cultural meme of denying that I’m pretty. First of all, when a guy says “you’re very pretty”, I interpret it to mean “I find you very pretty”, and who am I to argue with his perceptions? Secondly, many of my male friends have complimented my appearance, and I’m too much of an empiricist to deny that I’m pretty in light of so much evidence to the contrary. Lastly, were I to deny my prettiness, I would be subjected to a long stream of compliments, all of which I’d have to refuse. “I’m not pretty.” “Yes you are. You have such nice .” “No I don’t.” “You do, and your is beautiful too.” I despise this kind of feelgoodism and refuse to fish for compliments.
Compared to… well, all the girls I know IRL, I guess… I have excessively high self-esteem. I used to read Roissy regularly, which made me terrified that my confidence was unwarranted and I would never find a mate on account of it. After realizing how much that blog had affected my behaviors, I stopped reading it, but still I worry that my confidence is offputting to potential friends and mates.
When it comes down to it, though, I’ll keep my self-confidence. I strive to base my self-esteem on purely internal measurements like the progress I’ve made towards my goals, not on external measurements like what my friends think. I don’t want to rely on their validation for my self-worth, and I don’t want to be crushed by rejection when it occurs. I don’t want to put my self-esteem at the mercy of society’s judgments. And that’s why I refuse to play this insecurity game that society has thrust upon girls. If people dislike me and potential mates me reject me on account of this, so be it; my self-esteem doesn’t rest on their acceptance or rejection anyway.
I agree with almost all of what you’ve said here, except for the idea that taking the middle way is correct in this instance.
Also, let it be stated in advance that anything I say about my behavior patterns, social strategies and so forth is noticed in hindsight. I am not actually a Machiavellian mastermind who plots every interaction to maximize for making you all my slaves. (Of course I am telling you the truth. I am your friend. )
My favorite approach to social tactics is taking the Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres route: I perceive that people are generally trying to box me into a social role, namely self-consciousness, and it feels from the inside like my options are to allow this and be shy and uncomfortable, or rebel against it and be angry and uncooperative. Usually noticing those two choices causes me to pick the first, then the second in frustration, then the first because I want to be conciliatory, &etc.
Or… I can weird their paradigm. I can do this in many ways, but there are two I seem to choose most:
Vacillating confusingly between acting shy, uncomfortable, innocent, stupid and generically cute, and acting energetic, forward, eccentric and Michael_Vassar-ish. Note that when doing this I don’t necessarily take hits to my well-being or attack that of others, because when performed ideally both social roles feel like fun games. This can be described as going the fae route and is only suitable for use in the short term and preferably in settings with several other people, because otherwise it’s just glorified gaslighting unless I know exactly what I’m doing.
Making goddamn everything explicit. If I don’t like a thing, I say, calmly, pleasantly, that I don’t, and offer solutions or ask the other person to help me come up with solutions. If I like a thing, I say I like it. This doesn’t mean telling everyone about all of my thoughts, but it does mean not stewing on a discomfort or distress, and trying to never subtly intimate things about my mental state.
My problem is that I’m too meta. Making the issue about my personal self-esteem leads me into a terrifying infinite conceptual loop of pleasure and displeasure with my characteristics. Noticing these characteristics and how I can best use them is much simpler for me—the issue of a self-worth feels like a wrong question when there are results to be got. This doesn’t mean that I think women and girls with low self-worth are being Insufficiently Meta and therefore deserve what they get; it means that the issue of what happens in their minds is totally separate from that which happens in my own.
I notice in hindsight that this comment might read like one big essay about one-upmanship (against you and your philosophy.) It’s not meant that way; the thing that happened is I noticed myself accepting your statements unquestioningly after reading them and not replying, and felt the need to fix that.
I hope you eventually found the Game blogs where women are people too!
I tend to find that confidence is fine if you can consciously signal “you are higher status than me, I respect you, I won’t upset your authority and hey look how mysterious and pursuable I am. Also I’m not at all annoying”, which is a large part of what being shy is good for. If you can game their System 1, then confidence is better than shyness for properly engaging with the actual person.
I’d be interseted in Game blog recommendations. I’m trying to put a bit of time into researching it.
MMSL (for male-dominant LTRs) and Hooking Up Smart (for college dating) are fairly good in content and basically non-offensive. One of the authors is married to a reasonably rational woman and the other is a reasonably rational woman, so neither do the “assume women aren’t agents” thing.
It’s just as much general psychology, but I really like what I’ve read of The Rawness, especially this sequence (link to last post) that among other things harshly criticizes (one large high-profile memetic clade of) pickup (in part 4).
I have a pet theory that humans are attracted to generally autonomous behaviour, about which I’m no longer confident, but think is a cool theory anyway.
Autonomy is also in some ways dependent upon confidence.
I share this as I thought it would be a useful data-point to use in alleviating your self-consciousness self-consciousness.
I also just say thanks to compliments :). I remember being told years ago that it puts the other person at ease. Now I’m wondering if people prefer women to dispute compliments.
I used to be very argumentative, mostly about politics. At the time, I thought that my friends and the guys I dated found it appealing, but I don’t know now.
I’ve stopped being as argumentative, partly because having an aggressive, polarising debate where the aim is to win has been less appealing recently. But also, I made a new group of friends, and I think being argumentative was encouraged less in that group—at first some people disliked me for being argumentative. I think that had an influence.. I’ve often wondered if people would have reacted differently if I’d been male.
You must have high self-esteem if you could read Roissy at all! I tried looking at his blog yesterday—if I started reading it regularly it would have crushed my (reasonably high) self-confidence quite quickly.